Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Life was disciplined into sections, footnotes, references, mostly suggested by Mr Tortoise, who wagged delightedly at my own discoveries. The Miscellany was nearing completion, helped by grants from the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, and the European Broadcasting Union. One poem, ‘Sad Carrion’, derived from a girl buried alive by militia, 1898. Another nagged at me for days:

My head in the ages, I felt words, now brilliant as a carillon, now sombre as an undertaker’s parlour, but leaping over frontiers. They hauled me from doubt, Verwirrung , and the sticky cobweb of half-truths, whispers, insinuations, the mannered hypocrisies and gloved elegancies of professional diplomacy, for I was now allowed to attend minor official receptions. At these I heard discreet clucks about Pentagon and Ministry of Defence still employing trusted colleagues of Herr Adolf Eichmann.

As further fillip, the BBC World Service invited me to broadcast, during slack periods, on Baltic affairs. Censorship, no less drastic by being unofficial, forbade mention of Operation Cock-Up, British submarines’ attempt at undercover conveyance of Estonian partisans for training in East Anglia. Throughout, it had been divulged to Moscow, British officers had been amongst the victims.

All embassies must secrete shadow regions, doctored histories, desperate options, careers carefully left ambiguous. One such was Evai Miksa, Police Chief in Nazi-occupied Estonia, now an Icelandic citizen but, in his London Bishop’s Avenue millionaire stockade, entertaining newspaper owners and high-ups of all parties. We had been sent, anonymously, data of a recently dead physician who had punctiliously assisted the elimination of Estonian ‘sub-humans’. He had contrived peacetime employment in an Argentinian clinic, before retiring to Leicester, a dignified gentleman eating cakes in the Kardomah café, regular at church and charity dinners, lifting his hat to old ladies. Included, was his prospectus for culling ‘racially deficient offspring’.

MI6 had requested information of a Nazi fugitive murdered in Prague, the Nobel physicist who had reviled Einstein as a Jewish fraud.

The First Secretary, on my pledge of secrecy, showed me a stolen diagram of bunkers secretly built in nine British cities against atomic attack. A handwritten postscript detailed underground bases in London, Birmingham, Manchester, their concrete two yards thick and with electronically maintained stores, radio communication, hundreds of miles of cable.

True? His Excellency only shrugged while I, as Holmes, as Maigret, as Perry Mason, burrowed for more of the Herr General. Before the war, he owed large sums to the Estonian Treasury; at this, Mr Tortoise gave a tragedian’s sigh. ‘He was blatnoi . A thief who could sometimes be trusted.’

I had to reconsider tales of him commanding Whites in 1919, his contacts with the British Navy and the future Field-Marshal, Harold Alexander, his negotiating with the Reds. Multilingual reports, cuttings, clandestine letters, featured him on a commission supplying them with guns, tractors, grain, his ability to extract British loans, his signature amongst dozens on the Tartu Treaty by which Lenin recognized ‘for Perpetuity’ the independence of the Baltic States. He had been with Bernadotte, Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, helping draft the telegram to the frantic Himmler, that the Allies rejected him as Guarantor of Order in a post-Hitler Reich. A text unenviable to deliver to der Treue Heinrich.

Much was supposition, notably an FBI note of the Herr General’s covert meeting with the Duke of Windsor in Lisbon after the capture of Paris.

Such a man joins no White Rose or July Plot. He flickers in shadow play, a dim hand poised above ciphered missives, to demolish, dispossess, bargain, condemn; a blur, passing in an armoured car with obscure number plates.

Father, rather apologetically, once said that though the Herr General never lied; he enjoyed truth indirect. I myself was to find that, if three say identical words, two are untruthful. Mother reproached him, then, seeing me escaping to bed, murmured in very different voice, ‘Good night, my pet. Sleep with angels.’ Yet it was from the Herr General that I craved denial that the Manor, like all Big Houses, contained a scaffold, explaining business once done in the Rose Room.

Now, would-be Londoner, pamphleteer, editor, with newcomer’s zest, I was a counter-Marat, an anti-McCarthy, exposing crimes, denouncing the unclean, in territory without barriers, where the dead stalked the living. With sudden optimism, I judged that my pamphlets, and the lyrics and sub-epics of the Miscellany , would fortify the Forest Brothers.

Easily indictable was Alexander Seroff, of Soviet State Security, Moscow’s henchman in destroying the last of the Estonian intelligentsia, responsible to Khrushchev.

My mail swelled, mostly supportive, though one scrawl complained that I was a lackey of General Motors, another that, as a gentile, I would never see God, a third denouncing me as a police spy.

I was permitted a broadcast on Independent Estonia, Mr Tortoise supplying notes on Nationel no Trudovay, National Unity Society, dissolved by the Pact. Many survivors joined the Forest Brothers, though several were communists, their loyalties equivocal.

A few sentences tapped from Estonia revealed that a former National Unity member, Georgi Okolovitch, fleeing to West Germany, had been trailed by Nikolai Khokhloff of SMERSH, the Bloodhound. At Frankfurt, confronting each other, they made friends, recklessly held press conference, then vanished.

Other reports were less highly coloured, more like muffled bleats from a submerged and wrecked submarine. A twilit scenario of dubious allegiances, currency fraud, pornography, bugged rooms and telephones, supra-national linkages. A known KGB officer sat in the Bonn government, another was a UNESCO prominente . Yet another, protégé of U. Thant, UN Secretary-General, spoke regularly on Radio Free World. CIA was tussling with KGB, to finance aspects of the World Council of Churches and the Congress of Cultural Freedom. CIA money was said to underpin Mr Spender’s influential monthly. Moscow maintained that mafiosi had secured the recent election of the young, vivid JFK, who then shared a girl with a Midwest godfather.

A Himalayan guru, revered and overpaid by Western youth, to reduce fears of the Bomb, denied the existence of Existence.

Mr Tortoise found me a photostat of a 1940 Foreign Office map of Brazil, some provinces coloured, denoting Nazi plans for occupation, in another forgery, to induce US entry into the war. Eesti Hääl accepted an appeal from Manifeste des 121 to French soldiers to desert rather than use torture in Algeria, where Estonians served as Foreign Legionaries. We designed a European chart, reducing hallowed cities to strokes, circles, initials, synonyms of pharmaceutical laboratories, armament and toxic gas fortresses, airfields disguised as colleges, real estate offices, undeveloped areas. Italicized dots co-ordinated a Belfast rifle club, Amsterdam bookshop, Milan Masonic lodge, Marseilles insurance company.

Tiny incidents I remembered from Paris were now magnified, loaded with meaning. The soft-spoken philanthropist enquiring whether Wilfrid travelled by air, a royalist’s anxiety to discover Malraux’s telephone number. Next week, ‘for kicks’, wealthy teenagers had placed a plastic bomb near his flat. ‘I can offer you perfect style,’ an elderly German had promised, ‘also, absolute protection’, mistaking my importance.

Such massed information was fatiguing, but the Miscellany revived me, presenting friendship with the unseen, some alive, others dead. Maria Under, the poet, Bernard Kangro, authority on Estonian folk traditions, sent me new work. With Mr Tortoise, I persuaded UNESCO to publish Karl Bistikvi’s Hohenstaufen Trilogy . From Oslo exile, Ivar Günthal sent extracts from his polemical journal Mana . We edited translations from Gerd Hetbemäe’s periodicals. Estonian humour became more understandable, akin to its landscapes, often bleak and sunless, then revealing subtleties: it had the sardonic slyness of the subjected, the dumb-insolence grin of Good Soldier Svejk . A moving resistance story, ‘Partisans’, arrived from Arved Viirlaid, of Toronto.