Len Deighton - XPD

The new importance that the project had now been given, and the need to tackle it on a worldwide basis, meant moving it out of the Domestic Operations Division and giving it a new file number. However, the project chairman and Sam Seymour, the file editor, retained their roles. So did Melvin Kalkhoven, the field agent.

It was Kalkhoven who planned the seizure of Wilhelm Hans Kleiber. Kalkhoven flew from Washington to Frankfurt on the night of Wednesday, August 1, in order to obtain the full cooperation of the German security service. The BND’s officer in Hamburg (who was responsible for direct contact with London and liaison with the British Secret Intelligence Service) was not told of this development. Neither was the British SIS informed. As with all such high-priority matters, it was dealt with on a strict ‘need-to-know’ basis.

Melvin Kalkhoven made urgent contact with a well-known German business man-Helmut Krebs-and asked him if his name might be used in connection with a security operation. Krebs, a man of impeccable credentials, well known in Washington, readily gave his consent. Together Krebs and Kalkhoven arranged how phone calls should be placed to discover the whereabouts of Wilhelm Kleiber. Repeated urgent messages left with Kleiber’s office and at his home finally produced results.

There are thirty-six telephone links between Germany and Switzerland. Each link has 500 telephone lines. Thus it was necessary to tap-or at least monitor calls on-some 18,000 separate phone lines during the period when Kleiber’s office staff or family would be expected to pass on to him the fictitious message from Krebs.

The telephone call that Kleiber received from his Munich office enabled the telephone monitoring department-Amt 3-of the federal intelligence service of West Germany to give CIA field agent Kalkhoven a transcript of Kleiber’s conversation and the address of the lakeside house near Geneva where he took the call. It confirmed that Kleiber had swallowed the story about Krebs. The CIA office in Frankfurt, having already secured a luxuriously fitted Jet Commander, now had it flown to Geneva and put a CIA crew on standby there.

Kalkhoven’s brief included a strict instruction that the final phase of the operation must have top-level approval. So, at five a.m., Friday, August 3, the duty officer on the Operations floor at Langley received Kalkhoven’s coded telex marked NIACT (to get action before the following morning). Decoded, the message read, ‘He whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.’

The seriousness of abducting a German national from Switzerland and the repercussions it could bring, meant another long meeting with the deputy director and the project chairman. The reply did not reach Geneva until the following day. It was 2.25 p.m. on Saturday, not much more than two hours before Kleiber phoned asking for an immediate meeting, when Washington ’s reply got to Kalkhoven. The text of the cable from Langley approved of the Kleiber kidnap plan and revealed a new dimension of the project chairman. ‘Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.’ But, as Kalkhoven pointed out, that is New Testament.

By the time the prostrate body of Wilhelm Kleiber was loaded into the Military Air Transport Service Boeing C-135 at Frankfurt, Melvin Kalkhoven was holding a handful of messages and instructions. The CIA knew about the raid that the Swiss police had made upon Kleiber’s lakeside house, and their contact inside the Swiss intelligence service office in Berne believed that the tip-off had come from London.

Kalkhoven sat at the purser’s desk at the rear of the big Boeing transport. The cabin ahead of him was dark, except for the dim red safety bulbs and a crack of yellow light round the crew-compartment door at the very front. He had a small reading light by which to read the documentation. His assistant came back from checking that Kleiber was still unconscious. They had administered an anaesthetic that would have to be renewed before they got to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

‘What will they do with this guy, Melvin?’

‘Looks like there’ll be enough evidence to hang that California murder on him.’

‘Don’t kid me, Melvin. We didn’t snatch this guy in order to deliver him to the Justice Department. And if he goes into court on a murder rap, he’s going to complain mightily about the travel arrangements we made for him. The agency would end up with a lot of egg on its face, Melvin, so why not level with me?’

‘I don’t run the company,’ said Kalkhoven. ‘I just work for it. This operation has become very high powered. I have to get written permission from Langley every time I defecate.’

‘You think they’re going to turn him round?’

‘Give him a job with us, you mean? I sure as hell hope not, Todd. I don’t want to be working next to a murderous bastard like that guy out there.’

‘New policies mean new allies, new allies mean new friends. That’s the name of the game, Melvin, you only have to read your newspapers to see that.’ Todd looked round to see Melvin Kalkhoven’s face. It was underlit by the low-voltage desk light; hunched over the sloping desk, he looked more than ever like some nineteenth-century Bible-puncher, thought Wynn.

‘ “Forsake not an old friend for the new is not comparable to him; a new friend is as new wine; when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure.” ’

Todd Wynn smiled nervously and wondered if Melvin Kalkhoven knew that people called him ‘the Bible-basher’. Probably he did; he always seemed to know more than he revealed.

London ’s man in Geneva was a desiccated-looking ex-policeman named Hugo Koch. He had made a name for himself in the Zurich police force until, in 1965, a scandal involved him with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a senior police official. Koch resigned from the force. Now, aged forty-nine, he lived and worked in a small apartment in suburban Geneva, collecting debts, serving legal papers on reluctant defendants and following errant wives. It was not work that Hugo Koch enjoyed very much, but then he had never enjoyed any work very much; Koch was by nature gloomy. He did not drink, he did not smoke and, since that ignominious affair in Zurich, his relationships with women had been dispassionate.

Koch had been pleased when, in 1969, a man describing himself as an agent of the CIA offered him a retainer. Koch agreed and served his masters well. They had never called upon him to do more than collect or deliver packets, observe and report on selected individuals, or provide postal addresses. No task had given him the slightest moral qualm or compromised his allegiance to Switzerland, which he loved with a constancy that many of the women in his life had yearned for and failed to get. Sometimes he wondered whether he earned his keep for his foreign masters, but payments went regularly into his bank account and there were no complaints. Over the years, Koch had come to realize that he was employed not by the Americans but by the British Secret Intelligence Service; but that was the sort of discretion that Koch’s Swiss soul found easy to understand.

Once told to follow and report the movements of Colonel Pitman, Hugo Koch was worth every penny of his payments from London. Whatever shortcoming he might have shown in scientific criminal investigation were more than compensated for by his skill on the streets. He was an instinctive cop who could shake a stolen purse out of a football crowd, or guess his way to a confession by looking at the suspects. But he had never enjoyed being a police driver and the Mini he had rented for this surveillance was not to his liking. Koch saw Colonel Pitman indicate a right turn and moved his own car into the filter lane. The two cars turned the corner at the Rue de Monthoux in close succession, and turned again at the quay to follow the lake.