A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) (26 page)

‘It did go in,’ said Catesby.

‘No, it didn’t,’ said his stepson, ‘it landed flat splat on the line. Maybe, Will, you need glasses. Most people do when they get to your age.’

‘I’m only forty-three.’

‘I thought you were fifty.’

‘What difference does it make if the ball does land on the line?’ said the stepdaugther. ‘It still counts in tennis.’

Catesby decided it best not to comment. The game was back on and the Germans were desperate to score another equaliser. Unfortunately for them, Germany putting so many players forward helped Hurst get his hat trick.

At the end, Wembley was so loud with cheering that Catesby found it difficult to hear what his stepson was saying. He ended up having to shout in Catesby’s ear, ‘Actually, I’m glad England won – and, Will, thank you for bringing us.’

It wasn’t much, but it made Catesby’s eyes wet with tears.

Kensington, London:
August 1966

RADKO started with
czernina
, duck blood soup. He didn’t know whether to go on to roast goose, meat loaf or
pierogi
stuffed dumplings, but in the end he chose
pierogi
because it was the speciality of the house. It was a small restaurant near the South Kensington tube station.

JJ had been there before – and always picked up the bill. The restaurant wasn’t far from the Brompton Oratory, which Sov agents, pretending to be devout Catholics, used as a giant dead letter box. The usual method was to tape the info under a pew.

RADKO had started with vodka, but shifted to wine when the meat- and mushroom-filled
pierogi
arrived. RADKO looked up at JJ. ‘I tell you it going to happen. You no remember?’

‘Please remind me.’

‘The deal with Moscow – made year ago.’

JJ often found RADKO gnomic, but this evening was particularly difficult. ‘Which deal?’

RADKO chewed a
pierogi
and closed his eyes with delight. ‘Good, yeah?’

‘Excellent.’

RADKO sipped the wine and made a face. It was a rough Bulgarian red. ‘I no like this.’

‘There’s some French wine on the list.’

‘No, that piss too. Let’s have more vodka.’

JJ signalled the waiter and a bottle arrived.

‘You find out why Heath no go Prague? Everything was all ready.’

JJ shook his head. He did know, but he wasn’t going to share it with RADKO. ‘Let’s just say,’ said JJ, ‘that Heath did go to Prague and that everything went as planned. Okay?’

‘You want me lie, I lie. No problem.’

‘Can we get back to the Moscow deal?’

RADKO gave JJ a sly look. ‘I can’t believe you not remember. I tell you so many time.’

‘Remind me again.’

‘Khrushchev say to Wilson, “You send no British soldiers to Vietnam, I help England win World Cup.” Wilson say, “Yes.” Then KGB order Tofiq Bahramov help England. Everyone call him Russian linesman, but he Azerbaijan. KGB say to Bahramov, “You help England or you go Siberia.”’

KK smiled. ‘Yes, I do remember.’

‘Hey, listen.’ RADKO leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘I met Bahramov after game. We speak Russian together. I say,
“Tofiq, why you give that goal? Ball never cross line.” You know what Tofiq say?’

JJ shook his head.

‘Stalingrad.’

Somehow, thought JJ, that explanation sounded more likely than a deal with Moscow about Vietnam. But both were good. Verifiable factual details weren’t important; they were often boring and distracting. The important thing was a wider truth; that the UK was in thrall to a Communist conspiracy. Sometimes you needed to use lies to expose the truth.

Pimlico, London:
18 November 1967

Catesby had inherited Frances’s old television, but only used it to watch football and the news. The thing that most depressed Catesby about television news – and news in general – was the economic scaremongering. Catesby sat slumped in a chintz-covered armchair, another of Frances’s castoffs, with his 9mm Browning cradled in his lap on a greasy rag. He wasn’t feeling threatened, but needed to clean the pistol prior to his annual marksmanship qualification session at a shooting range in Aldershot. He stared blankly at the TV with his hand on the pistol butt.

Downing Street has just announced that it is lowering the exchange rate from $2.80 to $2.40. This means that the value of the pound has been cut by just over 14%…

The voice of the presenter was momentarily blocked out by the klaxon of an ambulance rushing down Tachbrook Street. Too late, thought Catesby, to save the pound.

…decision followed weeks of feverish speculation about the future of sterling and frantic last-minute efforts by the Bank of England to shore up the pound from its gold and dollar reserves.

The image on the television screen switched from the newsroom to Downing Street. Catesby thought that Wilson looked tired and fed up as he stared at the camera.

‘It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.’

Catesby smiled bleakly. The most interesting things about the PM’s speech were the implied messages and the words unsaid.

‘The only alternative was to borrow heavily from governments abroad – but the only loans on offer were short-term ones.’

By ‘governments abroad’, Wilson meant the Americans, who were obviously trying to punish the UK for not sending troops to Vietnam.

‘…the war in the Middle East, the closure of the Suez Canal owing to hostilities and the disruption to exports caused by the dock strikes had all contributed to the pressure on the pound.’

None of what Catesby was hearing came as a complete surprise. As a Whitehall insider he had his ear to the ground, but there was one more rumour – a very important one – that still hadn’t revealed itself in the Prime Minister’s speech. Wilson paused and stared at the camera as if he was finished, but he began again. Catesby waited and it finally came.

‘We’re making further sharp cuts in defence spending…’

Catesby had heard that the cuts were massive, £100 million – and would also affect SIS and the Security Service. The MoD were already furious – and the Americans wouldn’t like it either.

Catesby turned the television off and continued to disassemble his Browning automatic for cleaning. He remembered to make sure the safety was locked back to make sure the slide didn’t fly across the room when he withdrew the retaining pin. If he damaged the pistol, it didn’t look like SIS would be able to afford to buy him another one. On the other hand, they could melt it down to be part of a ploughshare.

When Catesby had finished taking the pistol apart, he stared at the wall. He suddenly felt a Kafkaesque chill of alienation run down his spine. He wanted out, but realised that he was part of a thin protecting veil. He needed to protect the Prime Minister and those like him who were prey for the dark elements of the Secret State.

CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia:
21 November 1967

Angleton was pleased at the news from London: the socialist British economy was foundering as chickens flocked home to roost. Although Johnson was too timid to use outright financial blackmail to force Britain to send troops to Vietnam, he certainly wasn’t going out of his way to save the pound. But how long would it be, thought Angleton, before Moscow intervened to save their agents in Downing Street from the economic catastrophe for which Britain was steaming at full-speed? If the Soviet Union was propping up Castro, they would soon be propping up Wilson as well. And what favours would Moscow demand in return? Naval bases? Military and nuclear technology? The secrets that others in Washington were stupid enough to share with London? The UK was rapidly approaching a crisis scenario. But Angleton found it impossible to make his voice heard. The power players in Washington wore blinkers devised by America’s own liberal left-wing press and intelligentsia. And, of course, his own agency – the CIA itself – had been penetrated by agents from Moscow. Angleton whispered the motto that had so endeared him to Allen Dulles: ‘If you don’t always –
always
– fear the worst, you shouldn’t be a counter-intelligence officer.’

Sliding into FURIOSO mode, the Director of Counter-intelligence lit another cigarette and opened his well-thumbed copy of the collected poems of Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…

He stared again at the words as the swirling haze of smoke turned Yeats’s poem into an Expressionist painting shouting ‘fuck you’ at the world.

A letter fell out of the book. The book was bulging with yellowing letters that Angleton had exchanged with poets and writers in the 1930s. There were several about and from Yeats. He opened one and read the handwriting, which in itself was aesthetic:
It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is satisfied with thought … The chance of being shot is raising everybody’s spirits enormously.
He then turned back to the poems.

Once when midnight smote the air

Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

On every crowded street to stare

Upon great Juan riding by…

James Angleton felt a sense of existential despair as he stared out the window towards Washington. He couldn’t actually see the capital because the view was blocked by the trees and gently rolling countryside of northern Virginia. And that was just as well, for Washington was a shabby town. The rulers of Washington were not noblemen with the fine faces of Bronzino’s Medici princes, but anonymous millionaires, fat-assed, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and sleazy lobbyists offering cheaply scented call girls. Worse than Yeats’s eunuchs, for they would be oblivious to the ‘great Juan’.

He carefully opened another letter. The years had turned the paper into diaphanous parchment. He felt warmed by the dead embrace of a fellow soul.
Even violence and tyranny are not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become perfectly acquiescent to tyranny. Everything must come from the top. Nothing can come from the masses.

Angleton folded up the letters and put the book away. He opened up his daily copy of the Director’s Log. Once again, he wondered if there were reports that had been deleted, censored, from the copy circulated to him. There certainly were things that Angleton, as Director of Counter-intelligence, found necessary to keep away from the eyes of the DCI. They went by the daily diplomatic bag rather than cable. It was too easy to monitor cable. But how could he be certain that someone wasn’t opening and reading
his handwritten communications via the supposedly secure diplomatic bag? In one of his first letters he told his man in London – who was only third in the London station hierarchy – that he would include a hair in each correspondence to verify that there had been no tampering and the London man would do the same. Later, when Angleton met his London man face to face, he told him they would
not
place hairs in their letters. Ergo, a hair would be evidence of tampering. But could he really trust the young Dep Asst OSO? Counter-intelligence was ‘a wilderness of mirrors’. And how dare anyone insinuate that he was becoming paranoid?

‘I am not paranoid,’ whispered James Angleton as he opened the Director’s Log. ‘Otherwise, I would be suspicious of this log which I know – at least for now – is unaltered.’

OSO London to DCI. SM/OATSHEAF has handled the devaluation badly, but the fall of his government doesn’t seem imminent. His majority in Parliament is too large. Unrest, however, among the British Security Services, military, financial establishment and press continue to bubble. Will closely monitor and assist when necessary.

SM/REVEAL, our most valuable friend in the press, appears to have been targeted by the KGB. The murder of a number of London prostitutes remains unsolved. An anonymous informer contacted the police reporting a suspicious automobile that was allegedly parked near where the body of one of the prostitutes was found. The automobile it turned out belonged to SM/REVEAL. When the police investigated, they found bloodstains in the trunk of the auto. SM/REVEAL told the police that the stains were the blood of a couple of pheasants that he had recently shot. The police forensic lab later backed up SM/REVEAL’s story. There is obviously a conspiracy to smear and discredit SM/REVEAL. And whoever reported him must know he hunts pheasants. We’re checking to see if anyone from the Soviet embassy has also been hunting in the same place.

SM/HOUND reports that England winning the World Soccer Championship was entirely because of the help of the
KGB. One of the referees was a KGB agent who gave England a goal that never came near to crossing the goal line. It turned out to be the winning goal. Moscow helped England win as a thank you to OATSHEAF for not sending troops to Vietnam and also to prop up OATSHEAF’s regime.

Agency News:
London, 17 March 1968

Anti-Vietnam Protest Turns Violent

The trouble began after a rally in Trafalgar Square where an estimated 20,000 demonstrated against the American war in Vietnam. At first, the anti-war rally appeared to be good-humoured. The violence broke out when the protesters marched to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.

The American embassy was cordoned off by hundreds of police. The police stood shoulder to shoulder to block access to the part of the square closest to the embassy. The protesters refused to back off and then pushed against the police cordon. The violence began when mounted police charged the demonstrators.