A Spy's Life (17 page)

‘Mr Vigo will be along at some stage, I expect,’ one of them said. He was in his fifties, dapperly dressed in a Windsor check suit, a cream shirt and a red tie which was embroidered with tiny fishing flies. Old MI5, thought Harland, no doubt brought up from some Home Counties village for the occasion.

‘He’d better be. As far as I’m concerned, I’m here to talk to Vigo. I make it plain now that when I wish to leave, I will. If you attempt to prevent me from doing so, you will be breaking the law and, furthermore, you will find yourselves explaining your actions to the Foreign Secretary and the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’

‘Yes,’ replied the man quietly. ‘We’ll see how things go, shall we?’

The other man was vaguely familiar to Harland. He was heavier than his companion and wore large square-framed spectacles, behind which lay rather dead eyes. His mouth closed in an unattractive pout and he was less fastidious in his appearance – a sagging charcoal grey suit, a coffee stain on the cuff of his white shirt and a tie which showed its lining. Harland took him for a bit of a thug, an observation which helped him to remember his name. It was Blanchard – Derek Blanchard – and he had seen him in the eighties at meetings about the Soviet efforts to infiltrate the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Blanchard was also MI5. Not top flight by any means and within five or six years of retirement, Harland guessed.

‘I know your name,’ he said to Blanchard, then looked at the other man. ‘But what’s yours?’

‘Rivers,’ he said. ‘Anthony Rivers. Shall we proceed? This is not what I would call a normal interview, Mr Harland. We find we have very little to ask you, except in order to satisfy our curiosity about your motives. So I will come straight to the point. We know categorically that you have betrayed your country and are in contravention of the Official Secrets Act. Between 1975 and 1990 you worked under the code name
Lamplighter
for the StB, which I don’t have to tell you was the Czechoslovak Security and Intelligence Service.’

Harland said nothing. He had been prepared for this moment and knew exactly how he was going to handle it. But why had it come now? And why had these two time-servers been fielded for the interrogation? He had the impression that this operation did not have the full weight of SIS behind it. There was something cobbled together about the whole thing.

Rivers produced a file from the chair beside him and opened it.

‘You are Robert Cope Harland. After standard interviews and enhanced positive vetting procedures you were accepted as a trainee for SIS. At your first interview you were required to read and sign the Official Secrets Act.’ Without looking up he flashed some papers, each of which bore Harland’s signature, and continued speaking. ‘Having completed your initial training in London and Portsmouth you were sent in 1974 for your first operational experience. This was intended as a purely observational role, a period of learning at the front, if you like. In those days it was customary to throw people in at the deep end a little earlier than we do today. You performed your duties with moderate flare and became involved in the operation to determine the extent of Eastern Bloc influence in a number of international institutions. We were also at that time concerned with the communist action against dissident groups that were based in Rome, principally those involved in the dissemination of anti-Czechoslovak propaganda following the Prague Spring. Is this all correct?’

Harland nodded wearily.

‘At some point in your tour of duty in Rome – we believe it to be September or October of 1974 – you were introduced to a woman whom you discovered was an agent working for the StB. She was living in Rome under the name of Eva Houresh and her code name was
Lapis
. You initiated an affair with
Lapis
, knowing that she was a member of a hostile foreign intelligence service. Is that correct?’

Harland did not react. Rivers waited a second or two longer and pursed his lips, as if to indicate that he had had the misfortune to face many liars across an official table and Harland was no different.

‘You returned to London and took up a number of posts, working in East European Controllerate. You joined the Intelligence Branch and worked in Berlin, Vienna and – briefly – in the embassy in the Soviet Union. You also spent short periods in the Middle East – the Lebanon and Turkey. I do not need to rehearse the details of your career; we all know it well enough. Suffice to say that you were approached by a man named Josef Kapek, an agent for the StB who was attached to the trade mission in London. He showed you a photograph of yourself in bed with
Lapis
which was taken in 1975. This we believe was in 1980, by which time you were regarded by your colleagues as reliable, even promising material.’ He unclipped a photograph of Kapek taken in the street and showed it to Harland. This time he searched Harland’s face for reaction. When he got none he gave a bleak, knowing smile and returned it to the file.

‘Kapek threatened to send this item to the head of your department, together with details of the woman’s background. In consequence you agreed to his request to supply biographical sketches of the people you worked with in Century House and various embassies. He also revealed that there was a tape recording in existence. He told you that Eva Houresh is heard admitting to you her role in the StB and that you in turn reveal your own status in SIS.’

He paused. Rivers held up a cellophane envelope and withdrew a photograph with some flourish. It showed Harland and Eva making love, well, at least lying in bed together. Both faces were clearly visible. Harland didn’t look at the picture closely. He remembered the image well enough, although he’d never been sure exactly where it was taken. He did notice, however, that the print was new, which was interesting because it might indicate that Rivers’s dossier had only recently been assembled. He wondered whether they would produce even newer pictures of him speaking to Tomas Rath in New York. Was the boy part of this too? Was he an attempt to ascertain for certain his relationship with Eva Houresh? If that was so, what could possibly explain his call an hour before? Harland found no answers, but deep down he was convinced that Rivers and Blanchard were, despite their self-assuredness, somehow uncertain of what they were doing. He returned to focus on Rivers.

‘Over the ten years between 1980 and 1990 you are known to have cooperated with Kapek and his associate Milos Hense, a diplomat working in the Czechoslovak embassy in Vienna. Contacts in this period between you and Kapek and his intermediary were frequent and helped to build incremental understanding in the StB of Western signals and human intelligence. There is every reason to conclude that in your role as
Lamplighter
you served the KGB in the same way.

‘In May 1981, for example, you reported to Hense on your part in Operation Stormdrain, an exercise in feeding the KGB a number of false impressions about the defence capabilities of Britain and her allies. Two years later you confirmed the identities of foreign journalists in Poland who were members of Western intelligence agencies. There are numerous documented examples of your disclosure of Western efforts to penetrate political institutions among Warsaw Pact member states. One particular instance that catches the eye is your contact with Kapek in Ankara, Turkey in 1987 during which you alerted the Czechs to the presence of a woman named Ana Tollund in the Secretariat of the Praesidium. Ana Tollund was subsequently tried and executed as an American agent. I do not have to explain to you that her death was the direct result of the information you gave Kapek.’

For several minutes longer, Rivers continued to read out a litany of betrayal. Harland sat back in his chair taking care to cover the slight bulge in his trousers with his jacket. He remembered a word that Griswald used when confronted with weak material. ‘Scuttlebuck,’ he would say. ‘It’s all damn scuttlebuck, Bob.’ The dossier was exactly what Harland would expect from an investigation that drew on secondary sources, not his original file in the StB archives. And they could never get hold of that because Alan Griswald had burned it in front of him in 1990 – a late Christmas present, he called it.

Even if by some fluke there was a copy of the StB file, Harland had always known that he would be able to defend himself against allegations of spying for the East. In every instance he could demonstrate that he fed them misleading information or intelligence, which he was certain had already reached them from other sources. As to Ana Tollund, he knew Kapek had simply cited her as a source because he was anxious to claim a part of what was deemed to be a famous StB coup against the West. Kapek was a lousy, gullible second-rater. When he didn’t know something he made it up. Harland could account for everything – every sleight of hand, dodge and manoeuvre which enabled him to keep the Czechs at arm’s length while at the same time maintaining loyalty to SIS.

He concluded that Rivers’s dossier had been assembled from brief references to him in other files. He’d always known that he was bound to appear in Kapek’s own file, in Eva’s and in a few others. Destroying his own file hadn’t eliminated the problem, but it made it a lot less acute. It was obvious now that SIS had gained access to the StB archive which he knew still existed in Prague with orders to get as much as they could on him and as quickly as possible. The photograph must have been located in Eva’s file or some other part of the archive. Its existence was embarrassing and Harland had dreaded it being found. But now the moment had arrived he knew he could handle it.

‘There you have it,’ Rivers concluded after a few more sentences. ‘The A to Z of your betrayal.’

Harland paused, then allowed a smile to spread across his face.

‘I suppose you expect me to roll over now and throw myself on your mercy. But, of course, you know this is all crap. For a start, not one of those accusations is backed up by independent evidence gathered by SIS or the Security Service. I don’t deny that I was enticed into an affair – a young man’s mistake that I regretted for its lack of professionalism, rather than any threat it posed. But I can show that instead of leading me to betray the service, I used it to our advantage. I even told Jimmy Kinloch at the time, so you can see it wasn’t any big secret.’

Blanchard let out an exasperated wheeze, but Harland continued, holding Rivers’s eyes.

‘What you have there is a lot of gossip from a couple of bottom-feeders who were desperate to impress their masters. They had to produce fortnightly reports and because they were mediocrities they filled them with bollocks. We all knew that and moreover we used that need for a constant supply of information against them. Walter Vigo even knew about Kapek. It was he who told me how and when to use him and I distinctly remember filing reports of my contact with both Kapek and Hense, which doubtless you have got tucked away somewhere. Men like Kapek were the interface of the time. It was how we engaged the enemy. We used them while they thought they were using us.’

‘Yes, but few of our people were stupid enough to have their pictures taken with a known agent,’ said Rivers, rallying to regain control over the proceedings. ‘You compromised yourself and then your loyalty, Harland. I don’t think you have grasped the seriousness of your situation. You are facing a very lengthy jail sentence.’

Harland regarded him with a combination of wonder and disdain. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Any public prosecutor would laugh at this pile of shit. Where are the covert pictures of my meetings with Kapek and Hense, eh? Where are the copies of bank statements showing that I received payments? Where’s evidence of my ideological conviction? The men and women that I have suborned in the course of working for the Czechs? The transcripts of telephone conversations? The grainy pictures of dead letter boxes?’ Harland stopped and looked at Blanchard and Rivers in turn. ‘You don’t have a thing, except a lot of fantasy scraped from the bottom of a few files in Prague. I doubt whether you can even prove that Kapek and Hense exist.’

Blanchard blew air from one cheek into the other and revolved his wedding ring with a thumb and one chubby finger.

‘Oh, I assure you we have all we need,’ said Rivers. ‘We can produce Josef Kapek and Milos Hense any time we choose. You are forgetting that when Vasily Mitrokhin’s archive was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to the West, it was taken as evidence of de facto guilt. We wouldn’t have any problem gaining a conviction, Harland.’

‘The Mitrokhin material led to no prosecutions – a bit of cheap sensationalism in the newspapers, that’s all.’

‘But those people weren’t serving SIS officers. It’s an entirely different matter to unearth evidence of this behaviour in a member of SIS. We know everything, you see, and frankly we are unable to ignore such a serious crime. We even know that you attempted to destroy your own files during or after the Velvet Revolution.’

‘For heaven’s sake, I was in hospital. I’d been beaten up by the Czechs – the very people you say I was working for! Doesn’t that strike you as utterly illogical? I mean, why would they beat me up if I had been serving them all those years? Did it not occur to you that I was held and tortured for the very reason that I had misled them? Tortured, you understand. How many SIS officers go through that?’ He was shouting now. ‘Almost immediately after being freed I received treatment for cancer – surgery and chemotherapy. So you see I was hardly in a condition to run around chasing bloody files. By the way, how do you think that’s going to look in court?’

‘We know about your problems, Harland,’ said Blanchard. ‘But the fact remains that you did try to destroy the evidence. Luckily, you didn’t get everything.’

‘Well, if you’re so bloody confident, why don’t you have me arrested and charged?’

‘In due course, we will. You may take that as a certainty,’ said Blanchard.

Harland rose. ‘I’m going to leave, this is getting ridiculous.’

‘I am afraid that won’t be possible,’ said Rivers, also getting up. ‘We will speak in the morning when I’m sure you will view your situation more sensibly. What we want from you is a statement, an admission of your role with StB. Then we will decide what to do with you. But we do need this from you, Harland, and I would advise you to cooperate as fully as you can.’