Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

Meanwhile, another small operation was taking its inspired course in the basement at Sentinel House. The photos of Winkler taken by the Special Branch men in Heathrow Airport, together with others taken on the street in Bayswater, had been developed and were being placed reverentially before the gaze of the legendary Miss Blodwyn.

Identification of foreign agents, or of foreigners who might possibly be agents, forms a major part of any intelligence organization. To assist in this task, every year hundreds of thousands of pictures are taken by all the services of people who may, or may not, be working for their rivals. Even allies are not excluded from the snapshot albums. Foreign diplomats, members of trade, scientific, and cultural delegations: all are photographed as a matter of course—particularly, but not always, if they come from Communist or sympathizer countries. The archives grow and grow. The portraits often include twenty shots of the same man or woman, taken at different times and in different places. They are never thrown away. What they are used for is to get a “make.”

If a Russian with the name of Ivanov shows up accompanying a Soviet trade delegation to Canada, his photographed face will almost certainly be passed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to their colleagues in Washington, London, and the other NATO capitals.

It may well be that the same face, calling itself Kozlov, was snapped five years earlier as a visiting journalist covering the independence celebrations of an African republic. If there is any question as to Ivanov’s real profession as he takes in the beauties of Ottawa, a make like that will dispel all doubts. It tags him as a full-time KGB hood.

The exchange of such photos among the allied intelligence arms—and these include the brilliant Israeli Mossad—is continuous and comprehensive. Very few Sovbloc visitors to the West, or even to the Third World, do not end up gazing from an album of photographs in at least twenty different democratic capitals. Of course, no one enters the Soviet Union without winding up in the Center’s own master gallery of happy snaps.

It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA “cousins” use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of facial features to try to match up the incoming daily flow of photographs, Britain uses Blodwyn.

An elderly and often ill-used lady, forever harassed by her younger male colleagues for a quick identification, Blodwyn has been in the job forty years and works underneath Sentinel House, where she presides over the huge archive of pictures that make up MI6’s

“mug book.” Not a book at all, it is in fact a cavernous vault where are stored rows and rows of volumes of photographs, of which Blodwyn alone possesses an encyclopedic knowledge.

Her mind is something like the CIA’s computer bank, which she can occasionally defeat. In her memory is stored not the tiniest detail of the Thirty Years’ War or even the Wall Street stock prices; her mind stores faces. Shapes of noses, lines of jaws, casts of eyes; the sag of a cheek, the curve of a lip, the way a glass or cigarette is held, the glint of a capped tooth in a smile taken in an Australian pub and showing up years later in a London supermarket—all are grist to the mill of her remarkable memory.

That night, while Bayswater slept and Burkinshaw’s men hugged the shadows, Blodwyn sat and stared at the face of Franz Winkler. Two silent younger men from Six waited. After an hour she simply said, “Far East,” and went off along the rows of her albums. She had her make in the small hours of Tuesday, May 26.

It wasn’t a good photograph and it was five years old. The hair had been darker then, the waist slimmer. The man was attending a reception at the Indian Embassy, standing beside his own ambassador and smiling deferentially.

One of the younger men stared at the two photographs doubtfully. “Are you sure, Blodwyn?”

If looks could cripple, he would have needed to invest in a wheelchair. He backed away hastily and made for a telephone. “There’s a make,” he said. “He’s a Czech. Five years ago he was a low-level gofer in the Czech Embassy in Tokyo. Name: Jiri Hayek,”

Preston was woken by the telephone at three in the morning. He listened, thanked the caller, and replaced the phone. He smiled happily. “Gotcha,” he said.

At ten in the morning, Winkler was still inside his hotel. Control of the operation at Cork Street had been taken over by Simon Margery, from K2(B), the Soviet Satellites/Czechoslovakia (Operations) desk. After all, a Czech was their affair. Barry Banks, who had slept in the office, was with him, passing developments down the line to Sentinel House.

At the same hour, John Preston made a call to the legal counselor at the American Embassy, a personal contact. The legal counselor at Grosvenor Square is always the London representative of the FBI. Preston made his request and was told he would be called back as soon as the answer came from Washington, probably in five to six hours, bearing in mind the time difference.

At eleven, Winkler emerged from the boardinghouse. He walked to Edgware Road again, hailed a cab, and set off toward Park Lane. At Hyde Park Corner, the cab, tailed by two cars containing the watcher team, went down Piccadilly. Winkler dismissed it in Piccadilly, close to the Circus end, and tried another few basic maneuvers to throw off a tail he had not even spotted.

“Here we go again,” Len Stewart muttered into his lapel. He had read Burkinshaw’s log and expected something similar. Suddenly Winkler shot down an arcade at a near-run, emerged at the other end, scuttled down the sidewalk, and turned to watch the entrance to the arcade from which he had just emerged. No one came out. No one needed to. There was already a watcher at the southern end of the arcade, anyway.

The watchers know London better than any policeman or cabdriver. They know how many exits every major building has, where the arcades and underpasses go, where the narrow passageways are located and where they lead to. Wherever a Joe tries to scuttle, there will always be one man there ahead of him, one coming slowly behind, and two flankers. The “box” never shatters, and it is a very clever Joe who can spot it.

Satisfied he had no tail, Winkler entered the British Rail Travel Center on Lower Regent Street. There he inquired as to the times of trains to Sheffield. The scarved Scottish football fan standing a few feet away and trying to get back to Motherwell was one of the watchers. Winkler paid cash for a second-class round-trip ticket to Sheffield, noted that the last train of the night left St. Paneras Station at nine-twenty-five, thanked the clerk, and left. He had lunch at a café nearby, returned to Sussex Gardens, and stayed there all afternoon.

Preston received the news about the train ticket to Sheffield at just after one o’clock.

He caught Sir Nigel Irvine just as C was about to leave for lunch at his club.

“It may be a blind, but it looks as if he’s going out of town,” Preston reported. “He may be heading for his rendezvous. It could be on the train or in Sheffield. Maybe he’s delayed so long because he was early. The point is, sir, if he leaves London we will need a field controller to go with the watcher team. I want to be that controller.”

“Yes, see what you mean. Not easy. Still, I’ll see what I can do.”

Sir Nigel sighed. Bang goes lunch, he thought. He summoned his aide. “Cancel my lunch at White’s. Get my car ready. And take a cable. In that order.”

While the aide tackled the first two tasks, C called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home number near Farnham, in Surrey. “Sorry to trouble you, Bernard. Something’s cropped up that I’d like your advice on. ... No, better face-to-face. Would you mind if I came down? Lovely day, after all. ... Yes, right, about three, then.”