Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

Suddenly Anne’s devotion to her Hallicrafters and the BBC World Service took on a different meaning.

“I’m sorry, my dear. Do go on with your story.”

The “my dear” was nice; it helped me understand that they already believed whatever it was she had to tell them now, and told me to prepare for the worst.

“Not long after my abortive attempt to become the mistress of Monsieur Bourges-Maunoury I received new orders to join an operation with two agents of the HVA I’d met in Berlin. Bernhard Gunther and Harold Hennig.”

“Bullshit,” muttered Hennig. “What is this?”

“Can you identify these men?”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “There they are.”

Anne duly pointed us out, just in case there was any doubt about who we were. This was one of the few times in the proceedings that she ever looked at me, but she might as well have been looking at the postman.

“Can you describe the HVA operation, please?”

“Yes. It had been something that was planned at the highest level in the HVA by Comrade General Mielke himself. In short, it was a covert black operation designed to entice MI5 into eliminating or at the very least neutralizing the deputy director general of MI5, Roger Hollis. To persuade the British secret service that one of their most efficient and loyal spymasters was in fact a long-term spy working for Soviet military intelligence-the GRU. Gunther was already working in a deep cover position as the concierge at the Grand Hotel where, originally, it had been hoped he would help me carry through the honey trap for the French minister. But when this plan failed, the plan to discredit Roger Hollis-code-named Othello-went into immediate effect.”

“Can you explain how the plan was to work in detail?” said the monk.

“This is all a lie,” said Hennig.

“You’ll have a chance to speak,” said the monk. “Please allow Miss French to finish.”

Anne nodded patiently. “Thank you. Well, Comrade General Mielke’s idea was inspired by Shakespeare’s play Othello , he said. Iago sets about blackening the name and reputation of Desdemona, with a great show of reluctance and almost incrementally. Which was what was supposed to happen here. So, Harold Hennig arrived at the hotel posing as a businessman. His job was to blackmail Somerset Maugham with a compromising photograph featuring Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Maugham himself. The photo had been sold to Anthony Blunt by the author’s nephew, Robin, and then stolen from Mr. Blunt’s flat in London, and sold to Hennig.”

“Stolen by whom?” asked the avuncular man with bad teeth.

“By an agent of the HVA. One of Blunt’s students in London, I believe. At the Courtauld Institute. I’m afraid I don’t know his name. He gave the picture to Berlin, who passed it on to Hennig, and when Hennig arrived down here, he contacted Robin Maugham, who rightly identified the photograph as the one he himself had used to blackmail Blunt. Consequently, it was a relatively simple task for Hennig to pressure Robin Maugham, first to invite Gunther to the Villa Mauresque, and then for Somerset Maugham to use Gunther as a reliable courier between himself and Hennig. The plan was that Gunther should ingratiate himself with Somerset Maugham by obtaining the photograph for no money, at which point Hennig would reveal the new material with which he was going to blackmail Maugham, and by extension the British secret service. Carrying out the blackmail down here was perceived to be a lot safer than attempting such a thing in London, where almost certainly everyone involved would have been arrested.”

“Tell us about the new material,” said the monk. “It was a tape recording, was it not?”

“Yes, a tape recording of the Soviet agent Guy Burgess explaining how he came to work for the KGB. General Mielke believed that as soon as Somerset Maugham heard what Burgess had to say he would understand the vital importance of the tape to his old friends in MI6. Also, it was believed that Somerset Maugham had the financial means to buy the tape himself on behalf of the British secret service. Of course, the Burgess tape-which is perfectly genuine, it is indeed Guy Burgess speaking, although the tape was recorded in Moscow, not at sea-contained a small, almost insignificant detail that was to be the equivalent of Desdemona’s handkerchief, I suppose; something small and almost insignificant. It was this: that Burgess had met someone in Paris in nineteen thirty-seven who had recently worked for British American Tobacco in Shanghai, and that this same person had been recruited by the Soviet GRU. Mielke hoped that someone in British intelligence would eventually make the connection between the tobacco salesman and Roger Hollis. After which MI6 and MI5-already feeling deeply paranoid after the recent defections of Burgess and Maclean-would do all the heavy lifting work of discrediting Roger Hollis themselves. He was quite convinced that just to plant the seed of doubt about Hollis would be more than enough to scupper the man. In the same way that Iago lets Othello do most of the hard work of distrusting Desdemona by himself.”

“Did Mielke have to take the Othello plan to the KGB for operational approval?”

“I believe so, yes. It was to be the HVA’s first big operation to prove it had come of age as an intelligence service to Moscow, as it were. You see, the HVA is a comparatively new service still trying to win the trust of the Soviets.”

“Did the KGB give the tapes directly to the HVA?”

“No. For the purposes of establishing some sort of provenance they were first given to the BBC’s Berlin office on Savignyplatz. I believe one of the BBC’s local correspondents works for the HVA and he was ordered to sell them to Hennig, as if he’d considered using them for broadcast and then decided to make money from them instead.”

Anne paused and asked for a glass of water, which was duly provided, before she continued with her bravura performance.

“My job was to meet with Gunther and Hennig and to report their operational progress to my controllers in the HVA by coded messages on a shortwave radio. Gunther and Hennig were to extract a large sum of money from Maugham and by extension the British secret service, and to hand over yet more tapes containing other false and misleading information about other secret service personnel. I believe there are other tiny details on the other tape recordings that might also help to discredit Hollis. I’m afraid I don’t know what those are. Any money they made from the blackmail operation was to be split between the three of us as a reward for loyal service and to fund future operations in this theater.”

“And these are the tapes you’ve provided for us. The ones you were keeping in your office at your rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer.”

“That’s right.”

Anne lied so smoothly, so expertly, that I almost believed her myself. She never hesitated, not for a moment, and I wondered if she had ever considered the possibility that the British might actually shoot me or Harold Hennig. Her voice was even and, it has to be said, sexy, too; a couple of times there was even a quaver in it, as if what she had to say was upsetting. She was very good. Mielke had chosen his Judas very well indeed. I doubt if Jean Simmons or Deborah Kerr could have given a better performance in that room than Anne French. But the hardest part of listening to all that was knowing that I loved her.

“And what was it persuaded you to change your mind about your involvement in this elaborate plot?” The monk was smiling kindly at her now, as if he pitied her for being used so egregiously by such unscrupulous people as Erich Mielke, Harold Hennig, and me.

Anne sighed.

“Take your time, my dear. There’s no rush. We don’t want to make any mistakes here.” The monk’s tone was solicitous, as if Anne was finding it difficult to betray me and, it had to be faced, Harold Hennig, too.