Tim Glister: Red Corona

After Knox had completed his report and compiled a list of ongoing operations that should be closely monitored just in case the KGB knew about them, Holland insisted that he take a holiday.

Knox decided to go back to Sweden. He flew to Stockholm, and spent a couple of days exploring the city and, inevitably, having some conversations with the Swedish security service. Their representative was a very tall, straight-talking man called Alve. Knox liked him immediately.

Alve filled in some of the details about Valera’s long, hard journey from Russia to Sweden, and Knox reassured Alve that sending illicit extraction teams into foreign capitals was not standard MI5 procedure. Learning more about Valera and her life gave Knox a greater appreciation for what she’d gone through, but he still wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive her for shooting him.

He then spent another week driving a rented Saab along the southern Swedish coast, on Alve’s recommendation. A fortnight after he’d returned to London several crates of teak furniture and Scandinavian art arrived at Kemp House.

Since the new year, most of Knox’s time had been taken up with monitoring the Committee of 100, the direct-action wing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It had spent 1961 committing increasingly bold acts of civil disobedience, staging protests across London and at military bases all over the country. But the wheels were now starting to come off, and Knox was in charge of making sure they didn’t cause any damage when they did. MI5 had braced itself for a long summer of watching the Committee implode. But, after the CND’s annual Easter march, things had gone quiet. It turned out the Committee and the CND were both almost broke.

Knox’s last few months had been fairly subdued, consisting mainly of reviewing reports, catching up on training, and waiting for the events of the previous summer to come back and haunt him.

It had taken Finney two weeks to arrange for Bennett to be accepted into CIA field agent training and be sent back to America. Given the events around the OECD conference he couldn’t deny that she was talented, but she also needed some of her rougher edges smoothed, and ideally somewhere far away from him. He didn’t enjoy being accused of treason by his junior staff.

‘Are you sure it’s what you want?’ Knox had asked when she told him. ‘You’re still more than welcome at Leconfield House.’

‘I will miss this city,’ she’d replied. ‘But I hate to walk away from a challenge. Especially one I made for myself,’ she added with a smirk.

On her last day in London, Knox had taken her to Bar Italia. After they’d both finished their espressos, she pulled two photographs out of her bag and slid them over the counter.

‘Who are we after now?’ he asked.

‘A going-away present,’ she replied, smiling.

‘I think I’m supposed to get you one, not the other way round.’

She split the two photographs, revealing both faces, and pointed at them in turn. ‘That’s Patrick Dixon, the NASA scientist, and that’s Phinneus Murphy, his CIA liaison.’

After saying goodbye to Bennett, Knox had taken the photos straight to Leconfield House. A single phone call by Holland to MI6 had established Dixon’s role in the Corona spy satellite programme, and a conversation with White had revealed why the Americans had been so suddenly interested in Valera. Knox was fascinated and terrified by what he’d learned about both. Pipistrelle and Atlas paled in comparison to the potential of Corona, and Valera might just be the greatest intelligence asset ever to slip through MI5’s fingers. It was some consolation that she was now in the hands of an ally, but not much.

For the last year, people at the top of MI5 and MI6 had been anxiously speculating about what Valera and the CIA might cook up together. Now, at long last, Knox thought, they were about to find out.

Knox crossed the secretarial pool on his way to the lifts. For once, discipline had completely broken down and no one minded at all. Desks had been cleared and a small television set in a wooden box had been set up in the middle of the room. A large group of people were already huddled around it. Knox checked his watch. He still had three minutes – plenty of time to reach Holland’s office.

Five floors up he found another group of people gathered in front of a considerably bigger television screen. The director general’s private sanctum was normally reserved for one-on-one meetings, but today the heads of all MI5’s various departments swarmed it en masse. Holland didn’t like this, which explained his hectoring of White, who was still adjusting the television as Knox made his way to the space that had been left for him next to Holland.

‘Perhaps we should adjourn downstairs,’ Holland said as he rubbed his glasses with a small square of chamois.

White ignored the thinly veiled criticism and continued tinkering with the set. A moment later the static on the screen cleared, revealing a baseball game in mid-play. Jokes rippled round the room. Had so much effort gone into the first-ever live transatlantic broadcast just to subject Europe to America’s bastardised version of cricket?

After a full minute of play and accompanying witticisms, the screen switched to reveal Richard Dimbleby, the BBC journalist, in crisp black and white. He explained that most of the historic broadcast between America and Europe that was about to begin would be taken up by President Kennedy’s weekly press conference, transmitted live outside America for the first time.

‘But, before that remarkable event,’ he said in his clipped, received-pronunciation voice, ‘viewers on both sides of the Atlantic will be given a glimpse inside the control room that is in charge of transmitting the president’s words to the Telstar 1 satellite, which is travelling high above the ocean in its orbit as I speak, and which will in turn relay the broadcast signal to antenna stations in Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall and Pleumeur-Bodou in France.’

Telstar 1 had been launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral ten days earlier. It was the result of a joint initiative that involved AT&T, Bell Labs and NASA in America, the Post Office in Britain, and its French equivalent, PTT. It was a revolutionary piece of technology, and the kind of potent statement that many in the West were keen to make about the power of cooperation between governments and private industry.

At the heart of the satellite was a unique transponder that could capture and retransmit television and phone signals from one point on the planet to another. It took two and a half hours for Telstar 1 to orbit the planet, and for twenty minutes of every cycle it came within range of the American and European antenna stations. For that short window it could relay real-time signals between the two continents.

The camera began to pan across the control room in Cape Canaveral. Walter Cronkite, the CBS journalist who had taken over presenting duties from Dimbleby when the live feed switched to America, listed some of the more notable members of the NASA team who were appearing on screen.

‘There we can see John Robinson Pierce, the leader of the project,’ Cronkite said in his sonorous, southern drawl, as a tall, thin man in heavy glasses stalked across the frame, flanked by people carrying clipboards.

Then the camera settled on two more middle-aged men talking to each other. ‘And I believe that’s James M. Early, the man who designed the satellite’s transistors and solar panels, and Rudy Kompfner, the physicist who invented the travelling wave tube amplifier on which Telstar 1 ’s advanced transponder is based.’

Several of the people watching in Holland’s office started to lose interest and chat among themselves. They wanted to see Kennedy, not a bunch of technicians. Knox, White, and Holland, however, kept their attention firmly on the screen.