Preston sat in the office of a very worried Bertie Capstick and examined the ten photocopied sheets spread out on the desk, reading each carefully. “How many people have handled the envelope?” he inquired.
“The postman, obviously. God knows how many people in the sorting office. Inside the building, the front-office people, the messenger who brings the morning mail up to the offices, and myself. I can’t see you’ll get much joy out of the envelope.”
“And the papers inside?”
“Just myself, Johnny. Of course I didn’t know what they were until I had pulled them out.”
Preston thought for a while. “Apart from the person who mailed them they might, I suppose, contain the prints of someone else who removed them. I’ll have to ask Scotland Yard to check them out. Don’t have much hope, personally. Now for the contents. It looks like very high-level stuff”
“The tops,” said Capstick gloomily. “Nothing short of top secret, the lot. Some of it very sensitive, concerning our NATO allies; contingency plans for NATO to counter a variety of Soviet threats—that sort of stuff.”
“All right,” said Preston, “let’s just run through the possibilities. Bear with me. Supposing this was sent back by a public-spirited citizen who for one reason or another did not want to be identified. It happens; people don’t want to get involved. Where could such a person have got these papers? A briefcase left in a cloakroom, a taxi, a club?”
Capstick shook his head. “Not legally, Johnny. This stuff should never under any circumstances have left the building, except possibly in the sealed bag to go across to the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office. There have been no reports of a Registry bag being tampered with. Besides, they are not marked for a destination outside this building, as they would be if they had been taken legitimately. The people who would even begin to have access to this sort of stuff know the rules. No one—but no one—may carry this sort of stuff home to study. Answer your question?”
“More than somewhat,” said Preston. “It came back from outside the ministry. So it had to be taken outside. Illegally. Gross negligence? Or a deliberate attempt to leak?”
“Look at the dates of origin,” said Capstick. “These ten sheets cover a full month. There’s no chance they all arrived on a single desk in one day. They had to be collected over a period of time.”
Preston, using his handkerchief, eased the ten documents back into their envelope of arrival. “I’ll have to take them to Charles Street, Bertie. May I use your phone?”
He called Charles Street and asked to be put straight through to the office of Sir Bernard Hemmings. The Director-General was in, and after a delay and some insistence from Preston, took the call himself. Preston simply asked for an appointment within minutes and got it. He put down the phone and turned to Brigadier Capstick.
“Bertie, for the moment don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Just carry on as if this were just another routine day,” said Preston. “I’ll be in touch.”
It was out of the question to leave the ministry with these documents but without an escort. Brigadier Capstick loaned him one of the front-hall commissionaires, a burly former guardsman,
Preston left the ministry with the documents in his own briefcase and took a taxi to the Clarges Apartments; he watched the vehicle disappear down Clarges Street before walking the last two hundred yards to Charles and his head office, where he could dismiss his escort. Sir Bernard saw him ten minutes later.
The old spycatcher looked gray, as if he were in pain, which he frequently was. The disease that was growing deep inside him showed little to the observer, but the medical tests left no doubt. A year, they had said, and not operable. He was due to retire on September 1, which with terminal leave meant he could depart in mid-July, six weeks before his sixtieth birthday.
He would probably have gone already but for the personal responsibilities that bore upon him. He had a second wife who had brought to the marriage a stepdaughter on whom the childless man doted. The girl was still at school. Early retirement would severely curtail his pension, leaving his widow and the girl in straitened circumstances. Wisely or not, he sought to carry on until the statutory retirement date in order to leave them his full pension. After a lifetime in the job, he had virtually no other asset.
Preston explained briefly and concisely what had happened at the Ministry of Defense that morning, and the view of Capstick regarding the feasibility of the documents’ departure from the ministry’s being anything other than a deliberate act.
“Oh, my God, not another,” murmured Sir Bernard. The memory of Vassall and Prime still rankled, as did the acid reaction of the Americans when they had been apprised.
“Well, John, where do you want to start?”
“I’ve told Bertie Capstick to stay silent for the moment,” said Preston. “If we have a genuine traitor inside the ministry, there’s a second mystery: Who sent the stuff back to us? Passerby? Sneak thief? Wife with feelings of remorse? We don’t know. But if we could find that person, we might find where he got the stuff. That would short-circuit a lot of inquiry. I don’t hold out much hope for the envelope—standard brown paper sold in thousands of outlets, normal stamps, address in block capitals written with felt-tip pen, and already handled by a score of anonymous people. But the papers inside might have retained prints. I’d like Scotland Yard to test them all—under supervision, of course. After that, we may know where we go next.”
“Good thinking. You handle that side of it,” said Sir Bernard. “I’ll have to tell Tony Plumb and probably Perry Jones. I’ll try to set up a meeting over lunch with them both. It depends on what Perry Jones thinks, of course, but we have to set up the JIC on this one. You get on with your side, John, and stay in touch with me. If the Yard comes up with anything, I shall want to know.”
Down at Scotland Yard, they were very helpful, putting one of their best lab men at Preston’s disposal. Preston stood by the civilian technician as he carefully dusted every sheet. The man could not help reading the TOP SECRET heading on each page.
“Someone been naughty down in Whitehall?” the technician asked archly.
Preston shook his head. “Stupid and lazy,” he lied. “That stuff should have been in the shredder, not a wastepaper basket. It’ll be a hell of a rap on the knuckles for the clerk responsible if we can identify the knuckles.”
The technician lost interest. When he had finished he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Clean as a whistle. But I’ll tell you one thing. They’ve been wiped. There’s one clear set of prints, of course, probably your own.”
Preston nodded. There was no need to reveal that the single set of prints belonged to Brigadier Capstick.
“That’s the point,” said the technician. “This paper will take prints beautifully, and keep them for weeks, maybe months. There ought to be at least one other set, probably more. The clerk who touched them before you, for example. But nothing. Before they went in the wastepaper basket, they were wiped with a cloth. I can see the fibers. But no prints. Sorry.”
Preston had not even offered him the envelope. Whoever had erased the prints from the documents was not going to leave them on the envelope. Moreover, the envelope would give the lie to his cover story about the negligent clerk. He took the ten secret papers and left. Capstick’s right, he thought. It’s a leak, and a bad one. It was three in the afternoon; he went back to Charles Street and waited for Sir Bernard.
Sir Bernard, with some urging, got his lunch with Sir Anthony Plumb, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Sir Peregrine Jones, Permanent Under Secretary at the Defense Ministry. They met in a private room at a St. James’s club. Both the other senior civil servants were perturbed by the urgency of the request from the Director-General of Five and ordered their lunch rather pensively. When the waiter had left, Sir Bernard told them what had happened. It ruined both men’s appetites.
“I wish Capstick had spoken to me,” said Sir Perry Jones with some annoyance. “Damned unsettling to be told like this.”
“I think,” said Sir Bernard, “my man Preston asked him to stay silent awhile longer because if we have a leak high in the ministry, he mustn’t be tipped off we got the documents back.”
Sir Peregrine grunted, slightly mollified.
“What do you think, Perry?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb. “Any innocent, or simply negligent, way that stuff could have left the ministry in photocopy form?”
The top civil servant in Defense shook his head. “The leak needn’t be all that high,” he said. “All the top men have personal staffs. Copies have to be made—sometimes three or four men have to see an original document. But copies are listed as they are made, and later they are destroyed. Three copies taken, three copies shredded after use. Trouble is, a senior man can’t shred all his own stuff. He’ll give it to one of his staff to be done. They’re vetted, of course, but no system is completely perfect. The thing is, those copies, spanning a whole month between them, being taken outside the ministry. That can’t be accidental or even negligent. That has to be deliberate. Dammit ...” He put down his knife and fork on an almost untouched meal. “I’m sorry, Tony, but I think we’ve got a bad one.”
Sir Tony Plumb looked grave. “I think I’m going to have to call into being a restricted subcommittee of the JIC,” he said. “At this stage, very restricted. Just Home Office, Foreign Office, Defense, the Cabinet Secretary, heads of Five and Six, and someone from GCHQ. I can’t get it smaller.”
It was agreed he would set up the subcommittee for a meeting the next morning and Hemmings would inform them if Preston had any luck at Scotland Yard. On that note they parted.
The full JIC is a rather large committee. Apart from half a dozen ministries and several agencies, the three armed forces, and the two intelligence services, it would also include the London-based representatives of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, America’s CIA.
Plenary meetings tend to be rare and rather formal. Restricted subcommittees are more the rule, because those present, concerned with a specific issue, tend to know each other personally and can get through more work in less time.
The subcommittee Sir Anthony Plumb, as Chairman of the JIC and as the Prime Minister’s personal coordinator of intelligence, had convened on the morning of January 21 was code-named Paragon. It met at 10:00 a.m. in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, known as COBRA, two floors below ground level in the Cabinet Office on Whitehall, a conference room that is air-conditioned, soundproof, and swept daily for listening devices.
Technically their host was the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Martin Flannery, but he deferred to Sir Anthony, who took the chair. Sir Perry Jones was there from Defense, Sir Patrick (Paddy) Strickland from the Foreign Office, and Sir Hubert Villiers from the Home Office, which politically commands MI5.
GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, the country’s listening service down in Gloucestershire, so important for surveillance in a highly technical age that it is almost an intelligence service in its own right, had sent its Deputy Director-General, the DG being away on vacation.
Sir Bernard Hemmings came from Charles Street, bringing with him Brian Harcourt-Smith. “I thought it would be better if Brian were fully in the picture,” Hemmings had explained to Sir Anthony, Everyone understood he meant “in case I cannot attend on a future occasion.”
The last man present, sitting impassively at the end of the long table opposite Sir Anthony Plumb, was Sir Nigel Irvine, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.
Oddly, although MI5 has a Director-General, MI6 does not. It has a Chief, known throughout the intelligence world and Whitehall simply as “C,” whatever his name may be. Nor, even more oddly, does “C” stand for Chief. The first head of MI6 was named Mansfield-Cummings, and the “C” is the initial of the second half of that name. Ian Fleming, ever tongue-in-cheek, took the other initial, “M,” for the Chief in his James Bond novels.
All in all, there were nine men around the table; seven of them were knights of the realm who among them represented more power and influence than any other seven men in the kingdom. They all knew each other well and were on first-name terms. Each could call the two deputy directors-general by their first names, but the DDGs would refer to the senior men as “sir.” It was understood.
Sir Anthony Plumb opened the meeting with a brief description of the previous day’s discovery, which evoked mutters of consternation, and passed the narrative to Sir Bernard Hemmings. The head of Five filled in more details, including the dead end on the fingerprints from Scotland Yard. Sir Perry Jones concluded with his insistence that there could have been no accidental or merely negligent departure of those photocopies from inside the ministry. It would have been deliberate and clandestine.
When he had finished, there was silence around the table. Two single words hung like a specter above them all: damage assessment. How long had it been going on? How many documents had gone missing? To what destination? (Though that seemed fairly obvious.) What kinds of documents had gone? How much damage had been done to Britain and the NATO alliance? And how the devil do we tell our allies?
“Who have you got handling it?” Sir Martin Flannery asked Hemmings.
“His name’s John Preston,” said Hemmings. “He’s C1(A). The ministry’s man, Brigadier Capstick, called him when the package arrived in the mail.”
“We could ... er ... allocate someone more ... experienced,” suggested Brian Harcourt-Smith.
Sir Bernard Hemmings frowned. “John Preston is a late entrant,” he explained. “Been with us six years. I’ve every confidence in him. There is another reason. We have to assume there is a deliberate leak.”
Sir Perry Jones nodded glumly.
“We can also assume,” continued Hemmings, “that the person responsible—I’ll call him ‘Chummy’—is aware of the loss of those documents from his possession. We can hope Chummy does not know they have been anonymously returned to the ministry. Still, Chummy is likely to be worried and lying low. If I put in a whole team of ferrets, Chummy will know it’s over. The last thing we need is a moonlight flit and a starring role at an international press conference in Moscow. I suggest for the moment we try to keep it low-profile and see if we can get an early lead. As newly appointed C1(A), Preston can reasonably make a tour of the ministries and check, in an apparently routine fashion, on procedures. It’s as good a cover as we’ll get. With a bit of luck, Chummy will think nothing of it.”
From his end of the table Sir Nigel Irvine nodded. “Makes sense,” he said.
“Any chance of a lead through one of your sources, Nigel?” asked Anthony Plumb.
“I’ll put out some feelers,” he said noncommittally. Andreyev, he was thinking; he would have to set up a meet with Andreyev. “What about our gallant allies?”
“Informing them, or some of them, will probably come to you,” Plumb reminded Irvine, “so what do you think?”
Sir Nigel had been in his office for seven years and was in his last year. Subtle, experienced, and impassive, he was held in high regard by the allied intelligence services of Europe and North America. Still, being the bearer of these tidings was going to be no joke. Not a good note on which to leave the game. He was thinking of Alan Fox, the CIA’s acerbic and occasionally sarcastic senior liaison man in London. Alan was going to make a five-course dinner out of this. Sir Nigel shrugged and smiled. “I agree with Bernard. Chummy must be a worried man. I think we can assume he will not rush to purloin another bunch of top-secret material in the next few days. It would be nice to be able to go to our allies with some sort of progress, some kind of damage assessment. I’d like to wait and see what this man Preston can do. At least for a few days.”
Sir Anthony nodded. “Damage assessment is of the essence. And that seems almost impossible until we can find Chummy and persuade him to answer a few questions. So for the moment we seem to depend on Preston’s progress.”
“Sounds like the title of a book,” muttered one of the group as they broke up, the permanent under secretaries heading to brief their ministers in closest confidence, and Sir Martin Flannery knowing he was going to have an uncomfortable few moments with the redoubtable Mrs. Margaret Thatcher.
* * *
The next day, in Moscow, another committee had its inaugural meeting.
Major Pavlov had called Philby just after lunch to say that he would collect the Comrade Colonel at six; the Comrade General Secretary of the CPSU wished to see him. Philby supposed (rightly) that the five-hour warning was so that he could be sober and properly dressed.
The roads at that hour, in driving snow, had been clogged with crawling traffic, but the Chaika with the MOC license plates had sped down the center lane reserved for the vlasti, the elite, the fat cats in what Marx had dreamed would be a classless society—it had become a society rigidly structured, layered, and class-ridden as only a vast bureaucratic hierarchy can be.
When they passed the Ukraina Hotel, Philby had thought they might be going all the way to the dacha at Usovo, but after half a mile they swung toward the barred entrance to the huge eight-story building at Kutuzovsky Prospekt 26. Philby was amazed; to enter the private living quarters of the Politburo was a rare honor.
There were plainclothes Ninth Directorate men up and down the pavement, but at the steel entrance gate they were in uniform, thick gray coats, fur shapkas with the earflaps down, and the blue insignia of the Kremlin Guards. Major Pavlov identified himself and the steel gates swung open. The Chaika crept into the courtyard of the hollow square and parked.
Without a word the major led Philby into the building, through two more identity checks, a hidden metal-detector and X-ray scanner, and into the elevator. At the third floor they stepped out; this entire floor belonged to the General Secretary. Major Pavlov knocked on a door; it opened to reveal a majordomo in white, who gestured Philby inside. The silent major stepped back and the door closed behind Philby. Stewards took his coat and hat and he was ushered into a large sitting room, very warm since old men feel the cold, but surprisingly simply furnished.
Unlike Leonid Brezhnev, who had loved the ornate, the rococo, and the luxurious, the General Secretary was known to be an ascetic man in his private tastes. The furniture was Swedish or Finnish whitewood, spare, clean cut, and functional. Apart from two no-doubt-priceless Bokhara rugs, there was nothing antique. There was a low coffee table and four chairs arranged around it, the grouping being open at one end to permit a fifth absent chair. Still standing—no one was about to sit without permission—were three men. Philby knew them all, and they nodded greetings.
One was Vladimir Ilich Krilov. He was a professor of modern history at Moscow University. His real importance was as a walking encyclopedia on the subject of the Socialist and Communist parties of Western Europe; he specialized in Britain. More important, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s rubber-stamp, one-party parliament; a member of the Academy of Sciences; and a frequent consultant for the International Department of the Central Committee of which the General Secretary had once been the head.
The man in civilian clothes but with a soldierly bearing was General Pyotr Sergeivitch Marchenko. Philby knew him only vaguely, but was aware that he was a senior officer in the GRU, the Soviet armed forces’ own military intelligence arm. Marchenko was an expert on the techniques of internal security and of its counterpart, destabilization, and his particular area of interest had always been the democracies of Western Europe, whose police and internal-security forces he had studied half his life.
The third man was Dr. Josef Viktorovitch Rogov, also an academician, a physicist by discipline. But his fame lay in another title—chess grand master. He was known to be one of the General Secretary’s few personal friends, a man on whom the Soviet leader had called several times in the past when he felt he needed to use that remarkable brain in the planning stages of certain operations.
The four men had been there two minutes when the double doors at the end of the room opened and the undisputed master of Soviet Russia, her dominions, satellites, and colonies, entered.
He was in a wheelchair, pushed by a tall steward in a white jacket. The chair was propelled to the vacant space left for it.
“Please be seated,” said the General Secretary.
Philby was surprised by the changes in the man. He was seventy-five, and his face and the backs of his hands were blotched and mottled in the manner of very old men. The open-heart surgery of 1985 seemed to have worked, and the pacemaker appeared to be doing the job. And yet he looked frail. The white hair, thick and lustrous in the May Day portraits, making him look like every family’s favorite doctor, had almost vanished. There were brown smudges around both eyes.
A mile up the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the old village of Kuntsevo, set in a huge territory inside a two-meter timber palisade fence in the heart of a birch forest, stood the hyperexclusive Central Committee Hospital. It was a modernization and extension of the old Kuntsevo Clinic. In the grounds of the hospital stood Stalin’s old dacha, the surprisingly modest bungalow in which the tyrant had spent so much of his time and where he had finally died. The whole of this dacha had been converted into the country’s most modern intensive-care medical unit for the benefit of this man who now sat in his wheelchair studying them one by one. Six top specialists were on permanent call at the dacha at Kuntsevo, and to them each week went the General Secretary for treatment. It was evident they were keeping him alive—just. But the brain was still there, behind the chilly eyes that looked through the gold-rimmed glasses. He blinked rarely, and then slowly, like a bird of prey.
He wasted no time with preamble. Philby knew he never did. Nodding to the other three, he said, “You Comrades have read the memorandum of our friend, Comrade Colonel Philby.”
It was not a question, but the other three nodded their assent.
“Then you will experience no surprise to learn that I regard the victory of Britain’s Labour Party, and thence of the ultra-left wing of that Party, as a priority of Soviet interest. I wish you four to form a very discreet committee to advise me on any method that might occur to you that would enable us to assist—completely covertly, of course—in that victory.
“You will discuss this with no one. Documents, if any, will be prepared by you alone. Notes will be burned. Meetings will be held in personal residences. You will not associate in public. You will consult no one else. And you will report to me by telephoning here and speaking to Major Pavlov. I will then arrange a meeting at which you can report your proposals.”
It was clear to Philby that the Soviet leader was taking the issue of confidentiality extremely seriously. He could have held this meeting at his suite of offices in the Central Committee building, the big gray block on Novaya Ploshed where all Soviet leaders have worked since Stalin’s time. But other Politburo members might have seen them arriving or leaving, or heard about their meeting. The General Secretary was evidently establishing a committee that was so totally private that no one else was to be allowed to know of it.
There was another odd thing. Apart from the General Secretary himself—and he was no longer its head—there was no one from the KGB present; yet the First Chief Directorate had massive files on Britain and experts to match. For reasons of his own, the wily leader had chosen to keep the matter outside the service of which he had once been Chairman.
“Are there any points of query?”
Philby raised a tentative hand. The General Secretary nodded.
“Comrade General Secretary, I used to drive myself around in my own Volga. Since my stroke last year, the doctors have prohibited this. Now my wife drives me. But in this instance, for the sake of confidentiality ...”
“I will assign a KGB driver to you for the duration,” said the General Secretary softly. They all knew the other three men already had drivers, as of right.
There were no other points. At the General Secretary’s nod, the steward propelled the wheelchair and its occupant back through the double doors. The four advisers rose and prepared to leave.
Two days later, in the country dacha of one of the two academics, the Albion Committee went into intensive session.
Book title or not, Preston was making some progress. Even while the inaugural session of Paragon was going on, he was ensconced in the Registry, deep under the Ministry of Defense.
“Bertie,” he had told Brigadier Capstick, “so far as the staff here are concerned, I’m a new broom making a bloody nuisance of myself. Put it about that I’m only trying to make a mark with my own superiors. Routine checking of procedures, nothing to worry about, just a pain in the arse.”
Capstick had done his bit, trumpeting that the new head of C1(A) was going through all the ministries showing what an eager beaver he was. The Registry clerks rolled their eyes to heaven and cooperated with thinly veiled exasperation. But Preston was given access to the files— the withdrawals and the returns, who had seen the documents and, most important, over what dates.
He had one early break. All the papers but one would have been available at the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office, since they all touched upon Britain’s NATO allies and the areas of joint NATO response to a variety of possible Soviet initiatives.
But one document had not gone outside the Defense Ministry. The Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Peregrine Jones, had recently returned from talks in Washington at the Pentagon; the subject had been joint patrolling by British and American nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean, Central and South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. He had prepared a draft paper on his talks and circulated it to a score of senior mandarins inside the ministry. The fact that it was among the stolen papers, in photocopy form, meant at least that the leak was inside the one ministry.
Preston began an analysis, going back for months, of the distribution of top-secret documents. It became clear the papers in the returned package covered a period, first to last, of four weeks. It was also plain that every mandarin who had had all those documents on his desk had also had more than these. So the thief was being selective.
There were twenty-four men who could have had access to all ten, Preston established at the end of his second day. Then he began checking absences from offices, trips abroad, incidences of flu—eliminating those who could not have had access within the period of theft.
He was hampered by two things: He had to pretend to examine a host of other withdrawals in order not to draw attention to those particular ten documents. Even Registry clerks gossip, and the source of the leak could have been a low-level staffer, a secretary or typist, capable of exchanging coffee-break gossip with a clerk. Second, he could not penetrate to the floors above to check on the number of photocopies made of originals. He knew it was common for one man to have a top-secret document officially out to him by name, but that man might wish to take the advice of a colleague. So a photocopy would be run off, numbered, and given to the colleague. On its return it would be shredded—or, in this case, not. The master document would then go back to Registry. But several pairs of eyes could have seen the photocopy.
To solve the second problem Preston returned to the ministry with Capstick after dark and spent two nights on the upper floors—empty apart from the incurious cleaning ladies—checking the number of copies run off. More eliminations were made possible where a document had gone to a senior civil servant who made no copies at all before returning it to Registry. On January 27 Preston reported back to Charles Street with an interim progress sheet.
It was Brian Harcourt-Smith who received him. Sir Bernard was away from the office again.
“Glad you’ve got something for us, John,” said Harcourt-Smith. “I’ve had two calls from Sir Anthony Plumb. It seems the Paragon people are pressing. Shoot.”
“First,” said Preston, “the documents. They were carefully selected, as if our thief were taking the sort of stuff he had been asked for. That requires expertise. I think that counts out really low-level staffers. They would operate according to the magpie syndrome, grabbing what came by. It’s tentative but it cuts down the numbers. I think it’s somebody of experience and with an awareness of content. Which counts out clerks and messengers. In any case, the leak isn’t in Registry. No broken bag seals, no illicit withdrawals or unauthorized copying.”
Harcourt-Smith nodded. “So you think it’s upstairs?”
“Yes, Brian, I do. Here’s the second reason why. I spent two nights checking every single copy made. There are no discrepancies. So that leaves only one thing. The shredding of copies. Someone has had three copies to shred and destroyed only two, smuggling the third out of the building. Now to numbers of senior men who could have done that.
“There were twenty-four who could have had access to all ten documents. I think I can count out twelve because they got only copies—one each—on a give-me-your-advice basis. The rules are quite clear. A man receiving a photocopy on that basis must return it to the man who sent it to him. To retain one would be irregular and arouse suspicion. To retain ten would be unheard of. So we come to the twelve men who had the originals out from Registry.
“Of these, three were away for varying reasons on the days shown as the withdrawal dates on the photocopies returned by the anonymous sender. Those men made their withdrawals on other days and must be counted out. That leaves nine.
“Of these nine, four never had any copies made for advisory purposes at all, and of course unauthorized copying without logging is not possible.
“And then there were five,” murmured Harcourt-Smith.
“Right. Now, it’s only tentative, but it’s the best I can do for the moment. Three of those five, during the period, had other documents on their desks that fall well within the type of the stolen papers, and which were much more interesting, but which were not stolen. By rights they ought to have been stolen. So I come down to two men. Nothing certain, just prime suspects.”
He pushed two files across the desk to Harcourt-Smith, who looked at them with curiosity.
“Sir Richard Peters and Mr. George Berenson,” Harcourt-Smith read. “The first being the Assistant Under Secretary responsible for International and Industrial Policy, and the second the Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement. Both men would have personal staffs, of course.”
“Yes.”
“But you are not listing their staffers as suspects? May I ask why?”
“They are suspects,” said Preston. “Those two men would probably rely on their assistants to make the copies and later shred them. But that widens the net to a dozen people. If one could clear the two top men, trapping the underling with the department head’s cooperation would be child’s play. I’d like to start with the top two.”
“What are you asking for?” said Harcourt-Smith.
“Total covert surveillance on both men for a limited period, with postal intercept and telephone tap,” said Preston.
“I’ll ask the Paragon Committee,” said Harcourt-Smith. “But these are senior men. You’d better be right.”
The second meeting of Paragon took place in the COBRA late that afternoon. Harcourt-Smith deputized for Sir Bernard Hemmings. He had a transcript of Preston’s report for everyone present. The senior men read the report in silence. When all had finished, Sir Anthony Plumb asked, “Well?”
“Seems logical,” said Sir Hubert Villiers.
“I think Mr. Preston has done well in the time,” said Sir Nigel Irvine.
Harcourt-Smith smiled thinly. “Of course, it could be neither of these two very senior men,” he said. “A clerk, given the copies to shred, could just as easily have taken ten documents.”
Brian Harcourt-Smith was the product of a very minor private school and carried on his shoulder a sizable and quite unnecessary chip. Beneath his polished veneer he had a considerable capacity for ill will. All his life he had resented the seemingly effortless ease that the men around him could bring to the business of life. He resented their endless and interwoven network of contacts and friendships, often forged long ago in schools, universities, or fighting regiments, on which they could draw when they wished. It was called the “old boy network,” or the “magic circle,” and he was annoyed most of all that he was not a member of it. One day, he had told himself many times, when he had the director-generalship and his knighthood, he would sit among these men as an equal, and they would listen, really listen to him.
Down the table, Sir Nigel Irvine, a perceptive man, caught the look in Harcourt-Smith’s eyes and was troubled. There was a capacity for anger in that man, he mused. Irvine was a contemporary of Sir Bernard Hemmings and they went back a long way. He wondered about the DG’s successor in the autumn. He wondered about the anger in Harcourt-Smith, the hidden ambition, and where they might both lead or, perhaps, already had led.
“Well, we’ve heard what Mr. Preston wants,” said Sir Anthony Plumb. “Total surveillance. Does he get it?”
The hands went up.
Every Friday in MI5 is held what they call the “bidding” conference. The director of K Branch, he of the joint sections, is in the chair. At the bidding conference the other directors put in their requests for what they think they need—finance, technical services, and surveillance of their pet suspects. The pressure is always on the director of A Branch, who controls the watchers. That week the conference was preempted as far as the watchers were concerned. Those attending on Friday, January 30, found the cupboard was bare. Two days earlier Harcourt-Smith, at the requirement of Paragon, had allocated to Preston the watchers he wanted. At six watchers to a team (four forming the “box” and two in parked cars) and four teams in every twenty-four hours, and with two men to survey, he had taken forty-eight watchers off other duties. There was some outrage, but nobody could do anything about it.
“There are two targets,” the briefing officers in Cork told the teams. “One is married but his wife is away in the country. They live in a West End apartment and he usually walks to the ministry every morning, about a mile and a half. The other is a bachelor and lives outside Edenbridge, in Kent. He commutes by train every day. We start tomorrow.”
Technical Support took care of the telephone tap and the mail intercept, and both Sir Richard Peters and Mr. George Berenson went under the microscope.
The A team was just too late to observe the delivery by hand of a package at Fontenoy House. It was collected from the hall porter by the addressee on his return from work. It contained a replica, using zirconium stones, of the Glen Suite, which was deposited with Coutts Bank the following day.