Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

“Anyway,” I continued, warming to my Munchhausen task, “Wolf had the bright idea of using Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to blackmail the British secret service almost as soon as they defected to the Soviet Union in nineteen fifty-one. But he needed Mielke to help him sell the whole idea to the GKO-the State Defense Committee-in Moscow. One thing you can say about Erich Mielke is that he’s a seasoned old party hand and knows his way around the Kremlin. Well enough to escape the big purge of nineteen thirty-seven, when a lot of those old German Communists were killed or sent to labor camps. Of course, Mielke was lucky enough to be out of the way in Spain then. He was a party commissar with the Republican faction.

“It was three or four years ago when he and Markus Wolf went to Moscow. The two Englishmen were already under suspicion. Moscow thought they’d been allowed to escape to Russia and that, in return for allowing Burgess and Maclean back in to England at some time in the future, the British planned to use them to supply all sorts of disinformation to the Soviets. Stalin even considered having them both liquidated just to be on the safe side, or sent to some far-flung corner of Siberia where they could do no harm. Gratitude was never Uncle Joe’s strong suit. Anyway, kinder, wiser counsels in the GKO prevailed and they remain alive and almost at large. But consequently neither of them has ever been given much more than a nominal role in the KGB or GRU. Markus, however-he showed the GKO that Burgess and Maclean were still an important and valuable intelligence resource, and that the British continued to be just as afraid of them as perhaps the Russians were. He showed them how that fear could be turned into paranoia and exploited to our advantage.

“The tape recording was made at the main studio of Moscow Radio. It was quite a production. Sound effects, everything. Maclean made one or two tapes, I think, but it was Guy Burgess who revealed that he had a real talent for the microphone. Of course, having been a radio producer with the BBC may have made it easy for him, especially with the help of a bottle of good whiskey. And it was Burgess who had the idea of the tapes being designed for submission to the BBC. According to him, there were lots of lefties at the BBC who thought the same way as he did-especially in Berlin. One or two of them are even on the Stasi payroll.”

“You’re saying that there are BBC employees in Berlin who are the agents of the Abteilung?” This was the man with the irregular teeth speaking now; while he spoke he nervously adjusted the cuff links on his shirt. Meanwhile Anne gave a loud sigh and reached for her handbag, from which she took out a packet of cigarettes and then lit one impatiently.

“That’s right,” I said. “Guy Burgess told Wolf that if ever they’d had the same opportunity as he’d had-to spy, that is-they’d have done exactly the same as he did.”

“So why did they choose Roger Hollis to target and not someone else? Someone in MI6 perhaps.”

“As a matter of fact, in the beginning the KGB weren’t convinced that Roger Hollis was the right man to go after. But Wolf convinced them that it was the apparent ordinariness of Hollis that made him so effective in counterintelligence; that and the fact that as number two in MI5 he was also Wolf’s principal opponent, so to speak. Wolf liked things like this. It appealed to his sense of spying as a game of chess, I think. The whole thing was a bit of a game, really. To have some fun embarrassing the British secret service. Also, Guy Burgess really had met Hollis in Paris in nineteen thirty-seven, although purely by chance. Anyway, that was to be the key to the whole operation. Of course, Hollis never was approached by anyone from the GRU. He was quite beneath the radar, having no foreign languages nor any interest in socialism, and not even having been to university. Later on, when Guy Burgess saw that Hollis had joined MI5 and risen quickly through the ranks, he came to regard Hollis with a new respect and to believe that his complete lack of ego made him probably the most effective man in the whole of British counterintelligence. That was also the opinion of Major General Markus Wolf. According to General Wolf, it was Hollis being so unremarkable that made him so remarkable. You see, Wolf believes that spies are like works of art that have been painted by master forgers. It’s usually the smallest things that give them away, but only to another expert. A careless brushstroke here, an initial letter on a signature improperly formed, a dealer’s number incorrectly sequenced on the back of a picture frame. You had to treat Hollis in the same way and imagine some art expert looking at the man’s life as if he were investigating a priceless work of art. Which meant finding some tiny bogus detail that most ordinary people would overlook-something so small that someone else might very well miss it-and inserting it into the man’s whole historical narrative, retrospectively. Like using cobalt blue instead of Prussian blue, he said. And it was clever to have Burgess snobbishly dismiss the man he’d met in Paris as a no-account little tobacco salesman.”

“But why involve Somerset Maugham in this whole scheme?” asked the monk.

His tone was completely neutral and gave me no clue as to whether I was on the right track or not. Like one who was trying to focus on what was true and what was not, I took a long pull on my cigarette, narrowed my eyes, and stared into some amorphous, intellectual space above Anne’s brunette head where deep thoughts and ideas were floating around in her cigarette smoke.

“Again that was Wolf’s idea. He decided to use Maugham because Maugham was rich and, in spite of his age, perceived to be extremely well connected, albeit historically, to the British secret services. Many of the men who worked with him in Russia were still involved with the service. He was the soft underbelly into MI6 and, of course, easily compromised because of his homosexuality. Wolf spent a long time looking for that photograph of Maugham and Burgess, which Guy Burgess had told him about. Yes, I forgot to mention: Wolf spent several weeks talking to Burgess at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, noting hundreds of details like that. And as soon as he found the photograph, the plan went into action. By then I was living down here and working at the Grand Hotel, where a number of French ministers are fond of taking their holidays and mistresses. Anne’s wrong about the minister, however. Operation Othello was always accorded a much greater operational importance than entrapping one French minister of defense. Almost the minute Wolf had the photograph in his possession we knew we were finally in business. The photograph was perceived to be the best way for me to secure the old man’s trust and confidence. And the whole scheme would have worked, too, but for the girl’s crisis of conscience. I told Wolf we should have used a native German, someone with family still in East Germany whom we could have pressured if she’d even thought of defecting. That’s how the Stasi works, see? You don’t ever have a choice. You work for them or something bad happens to someone you care for. They lose their job, or worse, they get sent to a camp. Or in my case, they threaten not just to keep you in a camp, but to put you on hard labor. At the camp I was in at Johanngeorgenstadt, they put me onto a detail mining pitchblende rock, for their uranium enrichment program. I’d have been dead within a few weeks of that if I hadn’t agreed to join the Stasi. But Wolf was convinced that Anne’s background as a writer made her perfect for his plan. Frankly, I think he was sleeping with her.”

“Nonsense,” said Anne. “You bloody liar. That’s just not true.”

“Isn’t it? You seem to have slept with almost everyone else-me, Harold Hennig, an American millionaire at the hotel, your gardener, and for all I know that French minister. If I’d suspected the bar had been set so low, I would have avoided your bed and kept things between us entirely professional.”