Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“In nineteen thirty-eight, I got back to London from Paris and joined Section D of MI6, before joining MI5, who sent me back to the BBC and while there, I interviewed Mr. Winston Churchill, in September nineteen thirty-eight. This was, of course, the time of the Munich crisis, which upset me greatly and resulted in my subsequent resignation from the BBC. Anyway, I had a Ford V8 of which I was inordinately fond, and one morning I drove down to Westerham and Churchill’s house at Chartwell. I told him I was in some despair about what had happened and he showed me a letter from Prague, signed by Edvard Benes, which ran as follows: ‘My dear Mr. Churchill, I am writing to you for your advice and perhaps your assistance regarding my unhappy country.’ Churchill looked at me and said, what advice, what assistance should I offer, Mr. Burgess? I am an old man, without power, and without party; what help can I give? And I said, don’t be so downhearted, sir, offer him your eloquence; awaken people in this country with your speeches. He was rather pleased by that, I think. We then shared a bit of mutual hatred about Neville Chamberlain. Having finished discussing Munich, he then presented me with a book of his speeches, which he inscribed for me and which I still have. You and I know that war is inevitable, he added; if I am returned to power-and it seems likely that I shall be-and you need a job, come and see me, present this book, and I will make sure that you are suitably employed. I then went outside to my car and drove home. But it’s an interesting story, I think-certainly of interest to listeners to The Week in Westminster , which is the show I used to produce for the BBC. The point of me telling this story now is to demonstrate to any listeners I might have that while I may be a Communist and allegedly a traitor, I am still enough of a patriotic Englishman to admire an old Tory grandee like Winston Churchill.

“From the BBC I went to the news department of the Foreign Office, and after the war I became an assistant to Hector McNeil, the current secretary of state for Scotland, who was then a junior minister in the F.O. and who sometimes stood in for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, which meant there were lots of MI6 papers that came my way.

“I was handing over top secret stuff to the Russians on a weekly basis after that. Looking back on this time, I think he made it easy for me since he was always disappearing up north to his Glasgow constituency. Greenock, I think. Somewhere ghastly like that. I went with him on more than one occasion and felt like a foreigner since I could understand nothing at all of what was said to me. I’m not for a minute suggesting Hector McNeil knew what I was up to. But frankly, my work couldn’t have been easier. People always imagine that spies live lives of derring-do and intrigue. It wasn’t like that at all. No guns, no invisible ink, no disguises. I just lifted the files out of poor old Hector’s filing cabinet, or the yellow boxes that arrived from MI6, took them home in the car, and a chap from the KGB spent all night in my bathroom photographing them; I then placed them back in poor old McNeil’s filing cabinet the following morning. I even had my own key so that I didn’t have to bother him when I needed access to his papers. Once, I accompanied McNeil to the United Nations in New York and I pinched some papers from his ministerial box and had them photographed during his liquid lunch hour. These were mostly cabinet papers, government policy documents-Britain’s position on this, Britain’s position on that, and, rather horribly, which major Russian cities we might bomb if we decided on a first strike against the Soviet Union. The point is that nobody got hurt by what I was doing. Nobody.

“The last thing I want to say is this, and it’s important. What I did really didn’t require much nerve or ingenuity; nor was I required to take any great risks. In the beginning I was nervous, but after a while it became routine. Frankly, if someone such as I could get away with spying on His Majesty’s Government for almost fifteen years, then anyone could. And in my considered opinion Britain is not well served by its security and intelligence services. Not well served at all. It’s small wonder that the FBI doesn’t trust MI6 and MI5. Which is hardly surprising as MI5 and MI6 don’t trust each other one inch. They’re great rivals. Not only that but our security services are riddled with so-called traitors and . . .”

Burgess stopped speaking at this point as someone else said something, possibly in Russian, and a few seconds later the tape ended. I turned off the machine and perched on the edge of the refectory table to await the old man’s considered verdict.

“He’s got a bloody nerve,” said Somerset Maugham. “It’s largely thanks to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean that the Americans don’t trust us anymore.”

“So you do think it’s him?” I said. “The real Guy Burgess.”

“It’s been a few years since I saw him, and many others would know better than me, but it certainly sounds like him, yes. As to whether it was actually recorded on that Russian ship, as he and Maclean fled London for Leningrad, I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Hot stuff, some of it,” muttered Robin. “Don’t you think? All that stuff about Trimalchio’s house. You wouldn’t want that to come out, Uncle Willie.”

“I suppose not,” said Maugham unhappily.

“Though some of it was really quite amusing, what? All that stuff about Clarissa Churchill?”

“The urgent question is, of course,” insisted Maugham, “where the fuck did this tape come from? And how did Harold Heinz Hebel come by it? Did the KGB send a copy to the BBC? If they did, it was obviously never used. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which they would have broadcast the whole thing. I think we’d have heard about that by now, even down here. If it was sent to the BBC, then has the BBC already shared the tape with the intelligence services? And if not, why not? Is it possible that the tape was stolen from the BBC? On the other hand, was the tape given to Hebel by someone in the KGB-someone who is intent on making more mischief in our security services? Or is it someone who just wants to make a ton of money from our security services, as Walter here suggested before? Is it worth two hundred thousand dollars to the British government to stop that tape from being sent to an American radio station?” Maugham relit his pipe and puffed it thoughtfully. “And even more importantly, is it worth two hundred thousand dollars to me? When you buy a tape recording, how do you know there isn’t a copy?”

“To that extent, it’s no different from buying a photograph,” I said. “Even if you buy the negative there’s no way of knowing how many more prints there are.”

“Those are all good questions,” said Robin. “And I wonder how on earth we can answer them?”

“I don’t know,” said Maugham. “But I do know someone who might.”

I went to the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat, slipped on my black morning coat, and immediately I felt as if proper order had been restored to the world. It was as if I’d become a decent man again; polished and humanized, civil and courteous, and without any time for the darker shadows of feelings that pass for thoughts. Helping guests with their trivial problems, finding room keys, exchanging money, organizing porters, answering the telephone, fixing staff rotas-it was all a reassuringly long way from the tawdry world of homosexual blackmail and Soviet spies. It’s easy to believe civilization still has a bright future when you’re behind the front desk of an expensive hotel. I think I may even have managed a smile. Through the tall French windows at the far end of the lobby the cloudless sky lined the sea like a blue-edged invitation to be calm and collected. I took a deep breath and smiled again. What did I care what Guy Burgess had said to anyone about anything? None of these people mattered to me. Not even me particularly mattered to me.