Young Philby (2 page)

The condemned prisoner finished the phrase. “… unless his ultimate goal was to penetrate
our
organs of state in order to feed us disinformation.” He tried to cross his legs but the ankle irons restrained him. “The comrades at the London central committee informed him they had to check him out before he could become a member of the British Communist Party. They told him to come back in six weeks’ time. A report with the Englishman’s name on it reached my desk. I ran a background check on him. At Cambridge he’d been a member of the infamous Socialist Society. His closest friends, his acquaintances were all, like him, fervent leftists. No sooner had he pocketed his diploma then he went off to Vienna to participate in the Communist-inspired uprising against the dictator Dollfuss. Surely you are aware that it was one of Moscow Centre’s trusted agents in Vienna, Litzi Friedman, who first proposed his name to our organs. Her original report described him as a Marxist who considered the Soviet Union to be the inner fortress of the world liberation movement, who idolized
Homo Sovieticus
, who believed international Communism would lead to a healthier Britain, a better world. The Centre sent me to Vienna to sit in on one of the Friedman woman’s semimonthly meetings with her Soviet controller. I personally heard her put forward his candidacy, I heard her suggest that he would make an excellent agent. I interviewed her in London after she fled Dollfuss and Vienna. Again she insisted on the Englishman’s anti-Fascism, on his eagerness to join the Communist
internationale
. Moscow Centre weighed all of these particulars when it agreed the London
Rezidentura
should attempt to recruit him.”

“According to the documentation in case file number 5581, you personally recruited the Englishman.”

He nodded despairingly. “I organized a meeting on a bench in Regent’s Park in broad daylight. The Friedman woman brought him to me after taking precautions to be sure they were not being followed.”

“Then what?”

The prisoner managed a contorted smile. “At first he assumed it concerned his joining the Communist Party. The night before I’d written out what I would say as if it were a script for a radio drama. I played the role I had given myself to perfection. ‘If you want to join the Party, of course they will accept you into its ranks with open arms,’ I told him. ‘You can spend your days selling the
Daily Worker
in working-class neighborhoods. But it would be a waste of your time and talents.’ He appeared startled by my words. ‘What are my talents?’ he asked. ‘You are, by background, by education, by appearance and manners, an intellectual. You are able to blend in with the bourgeoisie and pass yourself off as one. If you really want to make a significant contribution to the anti-Fascist movement, simple membership in the British Communist Party is not the ticket. The clandestine alternative I am proposing will not be without difficulty, without danger even. But the rewards in terms of personal achievement, in terms of actually bettering the lot of the world’s working classes, will be immense. You came down from Cambridge—this alone will open doors for you in journalism, in the foreign service, even in His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. Will you join us in the struggle against Hitlerism and international Fascism?’”

Outside the Lubyanka, laborers had begun using pneumatic hammers to dig up the macadam roadway. I recalled a lecturer at training academy talking about the efficacy of long silences in an interrogation. At the time I hadn’t been quite sure what he meant. Now I understood. Silences could be especially useful in the current situation, where the prisoner would be taken for execution once the interview terminated. It was in his interest to keep the conversation going. With this in mind, I held my tongue, my eyes fixed on the reels of the tape recording machine next to my chair. As the silence dragged on, he became anxious. He squirmed on the stool and raised his manacled wrists to thread the fingers of one hand through his hair. When I finally broke the silence, I could see he was grateful to me for resuming intercourse and impatient to respond.

“Did the Englishman know who you were when you made your proposition?” I asked.

“I told him only that he could call me Otto.”

“Did he know for whom you worked? Let me rephrase the question: Did he know for whom you
pretended
to work?”

The prisoner winced at the word
pretended
. “I was not a novice at the delicate business of recruiting agents. I was appropriately vague—I talked about the anti-Fascist front, I talked about the workers of the world uniting against their exploiters. But the Englishman had brain cells between his ears. Although he was too discreet to say so, there can have been little doubt in his mind that I represented Moscow Centre and the Soviet Union.”

“What happened after you invited him to work for you?”

“What happened was he agreed on the spot.”

“Without hesitation?”

“Without hesitation, yes.”

“Didn’t it strike you as odd that he would not be uncertain, that he would not claim to need time to weigh the risks, to consider the consequences of his decision?”

“I appealed to the adventurer as well as the idealist in him. I invited him to hitch his star to the Bolshevik project of imposing proletarian order on capitalist chaos. I offered him a meaningful existence, which was one of the things that motivated me when I agreed to work for the Centre. Perhaps you signed on for similar reasons. Looking back on that first meeting in Regent’s Park, it came as no surprise to me to find the Englishman nodding eagerly.”

I decided to provoke the prisoner in the hope of making him depart from what was clearly a carefully prepared narrative. “From the point of view of the Centre, the recruitment of the Englishman must be seen in a more sinister light. How can he possibly be a bona fide agent when the person who recruited him is a convicted German spy?”

He retorted, “You are in much the same frame of mind as a dog chasing its tail.”

“How dare you insult a Chekist!”

My outburst seemed to amuse him. “Someone minutes away from having a large-caliber bullet shot into the nape of his neck doesn’t lose sleep over the insulting of a Chekist.”

I concede I saw his point and decided there was nothing to be gained by taking offense. “You don’t answer my question,” I observed evenly. “Not only were you, the London NKVD
Rezident
and the Englishman’s controller, a traitor to the motherland, your predecessor in the London
Residentura
, Ignaty Reif, cryptonym Marr, who also vouched for the Englishman, betrayed the motherland, and suffered execution. Still another of the Englishman’s Soviet controllers”—I shuffled through my index cards until I came across the one I wanted—“Alexander Orlov, cryptonym the Swede, defected to the West last month—”

“The Swede
defected
!”

“His real name was Leon Lazarevich Feldbin—he is an Israelite. He vanished from his post in the south of France.”

“Orlov was an honest Bolshevik. He fought in the revolution. He was with the Twelfth Red Army on the Polish front after the revolution. Feliks Dzerzhinsky himself brought Alexander into the intelligence apparatus. If he appears to have defected, consider the possibility that he is part of a Centre operation to deceive the enemy services with disinformation.”

“Needless to say, I have consulted my superiors. Orlov’s defection was not an operation. He knew that the Englishman had been recruited by our NKVD—many of his reports from the field passed through Orlov’s hands. Yet even as we speak, the Englishman has not been arrested. The facts speak for themselves.”

The condemned prisoner slumped on his stool, shaking his head in disbelief. “You don’t take into account the success of the Englishman’s mission in Spain during the civil war.”

“While he was supposedly working undercover in Spain as a British journalist, he was instructed to assassinate the Fascist leader Franco. Not surprisingly, he did not make the slightest attempt to carry out this order. Not surprisingly, given that you have been exposed as a German agent, given that Germany supported Franco and his Nationalist armies, you dispatched telegrams to the Centre defending the Englishman’s failure to carry out the order.”

“The order was preposterous. The Englishman was trained only in intelligence gathering. The instincts, the talents that are required for classic espionage do not prepare an agent for wet jobs. Beyond that there would have been no way for an armed foreigner to get close to Franco, no way to kill him and escape. The assassin, once caught, would have confessed to being a Soviet agent. It would have caused an international incident. Germany and Italy, both zealous supporters of Franco, might well have declared war on the Soviet Union. Only someone completely detached from reality could have issued such an order.”

I had the appropriate index card in my hand but was able to quote the contents without looking at it. “The order originated with Comrade Stalin, who reasoned that the Nationalist armies and their Roman Catholic supporters would collapse and the Republicans triumph if the Fascist leader Franco could be eliminated.”

By now the narrow room was filled with daylight. I could see the prisoner’s lips trembling. After a moment he said, “In the years since he was recruited, the Englishman has provided us with a wealth of true information.”

“Obviously he sent true information. Penetration agents are obliged to supply true information in order to establish their credibility and make you swallow the false information that they slip into their reports. You, an Abwehr agent, supplied the Centre with true information on the German order of battle and its armament priorities in order to make us swallow a certain amount of false information.”

“I defy you to cite a single example of false information I provided.”

I shrugged. The conversation was going nowhere. “You stood surety for the Englishman and passed on as true information what he wrote in his reports to you.”

I gathered up the index cards on which I had written out questions. The prisoner noticed the gesture. “Don’t go, for God’s sake,” he rasped. “I must talk to you as long as possible.”

“I was given half an hour—”

He produced a book of matches from the pocket of his suit jacket. “I have written out a short note to Comrade Stalin on the inside cover. It is not too late for me if you can get this to him. He will surely remember Teodor Stepanovich Maly, he will recall my loyal service to the party during the revolution, my devotion to the state since. He will instruct the judges to reconsider their verdict.”

“Pencils are forbidden to prisoners,” I felt it was necessary to remind him. “This is a grave breach of rules and could have serious consequences for you.”

I saw the condemned man holding out the book of matches as he shuffled toward me in his ankle irons. “You are my only hope,” he whispered.

I am embarrassed to say I found myself stumbling across the room toward the door. I have a vague memory of rapping my knuckles on it. With relief I heard the key turn in the lock. The door opened. I filled my lungs with the stale air of the corridor. Senior Lieutenant Gusakov stood there with the comrades who had come up from the crypt, thickset men wearing stained leather aprons over their NKVD uniforms and smoking fat hand-rolled cigarettes. The sight of a female emerging from the room took them by surprise.

“Take her away,” one of them muttered. “This is no place for a woman.”

Another comrade, a short man with a shaven skull, said with a snicker, “Unless of course she is the one sentenced to the highest measure of punishment.” The other comrades looked away in discomfiture.

Senior Lieutenant Gusakov gestured with a snap of his head and started toward the elevator. “Was Maly able to shed light on the inconsistencies in your predecessor’s précis?” he demanded as I fell in alongside him. He stopped in his tracks. “The Englishman—whose side is he on?”

“The evidence I have seen so far points to his being a British agent,” I replied. “The condemned prisoner Maly said nothing to persuade me otherwise.”

1: VIENNA, LATE SUMMER 1933

Where an Englishman Wanders into the Wrong Century

The Englishman came from another planet looking, no doubt, for adventure, a cause to believe in, comradeship, affection, love, sex. His luck, he found someone who dyed her hair so often she was no longer sure of the original color: me. We were roughly the same age—he was twenty-one and fresh from university when he made his way to my flat in the center of the city—but any resemblance between our life lines ended there. I was half Jewess and half not, with the two parts of my identity in constant conflict; I’d been a Zionist fighting for a distant Jewish homeland before I joined the Communists fighting for Austrian workers nearer to hand. I’d been married and divorced (when I discovered that my husband preferred to sleep
in
Palestine than
with
me). Once I’d even been thrown into an Austrian jail for two weeks for my Communist activities that came to the attention of the police; I’d been caught letting my spare room to a certain Josip Broz, who turned out to be a Croatian Communist wanted in half a dozen Balkan countries. (He would hold party meetings in my apartment, pointing to one or another of the comrades and giving them assignments with the words
Ti, to—You, that
. He did this so regularly we nicknamed him
Tito
.) My stint in prison wasn’t wasted; I discovered that, for want of a mirror, a girl could see her reflection in a cup of coffee well enough to apply lipstick, without which I feel unprotected. Despite my arrest, my clandestine work for Moscow Centre had fortunately gone undetected. You could make the case that I was at the opposite end of the spectrum from a vestal virgin. I had taken lovers when it pleased me to take lovers but I was careful to keep an emotional distance between us, which is why they invariably ended up becoming former lovers. The truth is, I’d never really been
intimate
with a male of the species before the Englishman. Intimate in the sense of taking pleasure from giving pleasure. Intimate in the sense of feeling that waking up mornings next to a stark naked
Homo erectus
was an excellent way to begin the day.