The Hit List (43 page)

When Ridley came out of his office Slater was staring out of the window with the framed photograph in his lap.

Looking the younger man in the eye, Ridley smiled philosophically and slowly nodded. Behind him was Eve, expressionless.

440

Chris Ryan

|'You're a good man, Neil. A clever man. We're

to have you.' [;Slater placed the photograph and the magnifying

on the side table. i'Where did you go to school, Mr Ridley?' iRidley laughed. 'Dogs sniff each other's bottoms. Jishmen ask each other where they went to school, fttigratulations, Neil.'

|Slater nodded at Eve. 'She told you I saw the Etures?'

fc'She told me.'

f'And you admit that you're Dietrich Wegner?' 1'I concede that many lifetimes ago I was a man led Dietrich Wegner. But we reinvent ourselves,

We reinvent ourselves.' jjfSo everyone keeps telling me. Yesterday I was ing to a woman who said that when she was a l^en-year-old concentration camp prisoner your fyashe friends cut her ears off. Not much chance of

reinventing herself, I'd have said.' I'Needs must, Neil. There is reason and logic to the

I have led.'

|Slater felt a cold rage expanding within him.

jrgetting for the moment that the five of us who

re here today have risked our lives for a lie, and that

artnight ago a brave soldier died for that lie, can you

pe me one good reason why I shouldn't go straight

the newspapers and tell them that there is an ex

azi at the heart of British Intelligence?'

Lidley looked him straight in the eye. 'Yes. The

441

The Hit List

short answer is that I can. Give me an hour, and if at the end of that I haven't convinced you then you are welcome to walk out of here and tell whomsoever you please. If you want money, you can go to Max Clifford. If you want revenge, I'd recommend Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian. I've got both of their home numbers.'

Slater stared back at him, speechless at the man's nerve.

'Well, what about it?'

Slowly, Slater nodded. 'OK, you're on. Sixty minutes.' Undoing his watch, he placed it on the table next to the photograph.

'Eve, my dear,' said Ridley, his eyes still on Slater. 'Would it be Very un-PC to ask you to go into the kitchen and make us all a pot of tea? The Lapsang would be nice.'

'I joined the SS in 1939 when I was eighteen. I came from Gotha, in the Thiiringer Wald. And believe me, Neil, if you had been that age, and in that place at that time, you would have done the same. What did Wordsworth say? "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven"!

'At the time of the invasion of France I was attached to an SS Panzer division in the Ardennes - the Totenkopf. Real soldiering, Neil, against a determined and honourable enemy -- I remember an engagement against the Algerian Dismounted Light Cavalry which . . . Anyway, having been wounded in the arm and

442

Chris Ryan

>riefly hospitalised - my left arm, you'll be glad to lear, rather than my fly-casting arm -- I was recalled to erlin late in 1940 and sent on an intelligence course. Speaking good French as I did, I had had some success |with the interrogation of prisoners -- a complicit smile, found, tended to accomplish more than a Schmeisser ?utt to the base of the skull -- and the fact had been noticed.

'In the summer of the next year I was reassigned to ay Group E, stationed in the Balkans. My task, I told, was to secure intelligence concerning the ctivities of partisans.

'The counter-partisan system I found in place was aconian. Reprisals for attacks on German troops and property were immediate, with a hundred Yugoslav les rounded up and machine-gunned for every ierman killed.

'Up to a point this policy was working. The main lorns in our side were a Serbian royalist named Dreza lihailovic, whose followers were called Chetniks, and half-Slovene, half-Croatian communist called Josip iroz. Mihailovic, who realised that public opinion rould turn against him if his Chetniks' exploits caused le execution of thousands of civilians, decided to find down his resistance activities and wait for the lies to invade. Effectively, he was brought to heel by ic reprisals policy, and by 1943 many of his Chetniks rere openly collaborating with their German hosts.

'Broz, who used the alias Tito, was a different proposition altogether. Rightly or wrongly he

443

The Hit List

considered that the reprisals policy would simply make loyal Yugoslavs hate the Germans even more. He resisted, and resisted hard. His orders came from Stalin, and his followers -- quarter of a million strong by the end -- came from all sections of Yugoslav society. He was a much tougher nut than Mihailovic, and ultimately we never cracked him.

'But we tried. We tried very hard indeed. I was attached to a unit simply known as Ic, based at a place named Kostajnica, and my brief ultimately contracted to one essential task: I had to insert Yugoslavian informers into Tito's partisan army. We had to know what his intentions were because, to be frank, he was getting the better of us. By 1942 it was clear that the reprisals policy, while discouraging Mihailovic, had failed. We were imprisoning the partisans, we were shooting them, there were corpses hanging at every roadside ... It was a nightmare, frankly, and a very unpleasant atmosphere in which to work. Ah, this looks like our tea. And crumpets! Eve, you're a miracle-worker. Shall I be mother?'

'Now, where was I?' he asked two minutes later. 'Yes, in Kostajnica, where I had an inspired idea. An idea which became Operation Senfsamen, or Mustard Seed. A few miles down the road was the Ustashe-run concentration camp of Jasenovac. It was a disgrace, frankly - a complete butcher's shop -- and we and the Italians complained about it constantly. Having said that, there was an element of real-politik. The Ustashe were animals, but they were our animals, and we

444

1

Chris Ryan

couldn't afford to be too choosy about whom we used. 'I took to visiting Jasenovac, ostensibly for obser | vation purposes. The place was run by a series of ^maniacal sadists and psychopaths - the most extreme j being a Catholic priest named Filipovic. Now I ... ' "befriended" is not the right word, but I made a point I of getting to know Filipovic and his successor, whose rname was Sakic. They were both terrifyingly un i balanced and clearly took a deep pleasure in the pain land suffering that they caused, but for my plan to work |l had to have them on my side.

'I got them there, basically, by pretending to be like Ithem. I visited that hell-on-earth with a regularity that limplied I couldn't keep away. And after a time no one ftook any notice of me.

'Now the camp was on a river -- the Sava river - and lopposite was a place called Gradina. Gradina was Iwhere the executions were carried out. Not the mdom killings that were a feature of everyday life at Jasenovac but the planned, systematic shootings and roat-cuttings which were carried out in groups. 'What I used to do was to monitor the execution parties when they were led off the ferry that had Drought them over the river to Gradina. If I thought lat any of the condemned men might pass muster as a sldier and a partisan - and not many did, most had the lull-eyed look of men who have given up all hope - I lad him unchained and brought over to me. Was he prepared to spit on the face of Tito, I asked him? Was ic, in return for his life, prepared to throw in his lot

445

The Hit List

with the conquering armies of the Fatherland?

'Well, sometimes he was and sometimes he wasn't, and to this day I am amazed by the courage shown by those who refused. They knew why they had been brought across the river and as often as not they could hear the shots from the execution field. But still they said no, and I informed them that I considered them to be brave men and returned them to the guards.

'Others, for a combination of reasons, said yes. They were Chetniks, they hated Tito, they hated communists, they thought that Germany would win the war - I heard every possible reason. But mostly they were frightened for their lives and would have said anything- to be allowed to leave that grim procession.

'I took them back to Kostajnica, trained them in espionage procedures and fieldcraft, and turned them loose. Some of my mustard-seeds fell on stony ground, and I never heard from them again. Some were identified as spies by the partisans and killed. But others had their cover-stories accepted and were integrated into Tito's organisation - they took root, you might say -- and slowly the network grew to the point where an entire Ic department was devoted to the collating and assessment of "Mustard-Seed" data. It was, if I say so myself, an operation of some elegance.

'Unfortunately, despite some spectacular intelligence coups, it did not win us the battle for Yugoslavia, let alone the war, but by 1945 the ground was already being cleared for a much more important

446

Chris Ryan

struggle - the struggle of the free world against communism.

'By the end of the war I was no longer the idealistic young SS lieutenant who had marched into France with the Totenkopf division. I was twenty-four years old, but I felt twice that age. For more than three years I had quite literally walked in the Valley of Death, and I had played a key role in one of the most savage and brutal guerrilla campaigns ever waged. When Army Group E was finally forced to retreat from Yugoslavia

-- the alternative being to surrender to the communists

-- a colleague and I were sent to contact the British Army, which was on the outskirts of Trieste. We both ' spoke reasonable Serbo-Croat, so it was thought that I we had a good chance of getting through.

'I got through. It was a nightmare journey, and I was [ almost starving by the time I reached the British lines. My colleague didn't make it, and ended up in |Klagenfurt in southern Austria, which by then had I been appropriated by Tito.

'At Trieste, after being badly beaten by the patrol to |which I had given myself up, I had the great good fortune to be interrogated by a British Field Security officer who immediately saw the value of the names id the knowledge that I carried in my head, and sent ic on to the Intelligence Corps HQ at Bad Sulzuflen, autside Iserlohn. There, I met the man who was to be instrument of my renaissance. His name was "aptain Robert Maxwell, ME. 'Maxwell, who was born in Czechoslovakia and

447

The Hit List

spoke perfect German as well as Russian and half a dozen other languages, debriefed me over the course of several days in November 1945. In May, six months earlier, the CROWCASS list had been published. This was the Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects - and I, along with several of my colleagues from Ic, wa$ on it. My crime, or my so-called crime, was murder of partisans -- an accusation relating to my having ordered the execution of Yugoslavian citizens. This was not in fact strictly accurate. My responsibility as an intelligence officer had been to identify and arrest partisans, and it fell to others to process those found guilty. That said, of course, history is always written by the victors, and the victors in this case were Tito's communists.

'Maxwell and I spent several days together, and without naming names I told him about Operation Mustard-Seed. I had a dozen agents within Tito's organisation, I told him, and a couple in his inner circle. These agents, I continued, could be persuaded into providing information on the regime almost indefinitely by the threat of exposure as former Nazi informers.

'Like all sensible men at that time, Maxwell was looking forwards rather than backwards. In comttion with the rest of his colleagues in the intelligence services, he was convinced that Europe should be bracing itself against communist invasion, and that Yugoslavia was Stalin's probable launch-pad into Europe. The offer of raw intelligence from a source as

448

Chris Ryan

sensitive as the "Mustard-Seed" network was too good to pass up.

'And of course he was also looking forwards at his own future. He was already planning the publishing empire that would make him a vast fortune, but he needed a helping hand, both financially and in terms of contacts. A major catch such as I represented at the time would strongly predispose MI6 to come to his aid. As indeed they did. And I ... let's just say that I was in a position to point him towards some sources of funds too.

'Robert and I understood each other perfectly. By the end of that week there was an unspoken agreement {between us that we would, let us say, keep an eye on each other's careers.'

'And you did,' said Slater.

'And we did,' agreed Ridley. 'Although it would be home years before we saw each other again. I was | officially arrested as a CROWCASS suspect, then sent I to a military hospital at Magdeburg, where I was I admitted as an isolation patient before "dying" of I tuberculosis. I was certified dead, carried out feet first I beneath a sheet, and driven to Berlin, from where I was flown to Croydon Airport.

'The rest, if you like, is history. I spent nine months |being debriefed at a service safe-house in |Hertfordshire, where a "legend" was prepared for me [and I assumed my new identity as John Ridley. I have I the advantage of a near-perfect photographic memory, land was able to reproduce intact every detail of the

449

The Hit List

"Mustard-Seed" files I kept at Kostajnica. The information was relayed to the MI6 station in Vienna, and used to mount a major intelligence operation against Tito. It was superbly effective. MI6 was warned in advance about Tito's break from Stalin, and was able to take advantage of this knowledge to help lever Austria into declaring its support for the West.'

Ridley smiled. 'And that's about it, really. The rest of my career is a matter of service record. The bare bones of it are that I served in Hong Kong, Oslo, Sofia and Moscow, came home to the Russia desk, and set up the Cadre. Rather than marry -- a security risk I could not afford -- I have dedicated my life to the service. In short, I have been a loyal and tireless servant of my adopted country.'

He spread his hands and reached for Slater's wristwatch. 'And that's about it. I've been talking to you for forty-five minutes. Do I have a stay of execution?'