And Is There Honey Still For Tea? (26 page)

* * *

In the middle weeks of April, in a comfortable safe house in Moscow, with limitless supplies of vodka, black bread, and caviar to sustain us, Viktor and I met nightly after the tournament had ended for the day; and worked out a system for conveying information securely back and forth between London, Washington, and Moscow. It was simplicity itself.

44

I do not know what I had expected life as a spy to be like. It was not a life I had ever planned for myself. For some years, all went smoothly. I duly received an invitation to attend the Soviet Chess Championship in Moscow in November 1948, and I was invited to the championship each year thereafter up to, and including, 1960. I was invited to send my passport to the Soviet Embassy for my visa to be renewed; in fact it was upgraded to a five-year visa with almost no restrictions. The Soviet championship is an event like no other. No other national championship can boast anything like the number of grandmasters competing. Previous form is no guarantee of success, and even world champions cannot assume that they will win their country's title. The 1948 championship was won jointly by David Bronstein and Alexander Kotov. It was not until 1952 that Botvinnik took the title again, and by that time both Smyslov and Keres had put their names on it. Each year I was provided with a press pass and afforded every facility to prepare my reports, including personal interviews with the leading contenders. And when I returned to London, I picked up my practice where I had left off, and visited the Manor with Bridget whenever we could. It was during this period that I made my only trip to the United States, where I saw New York and Boston, and Paul Morphy's house in Rue des Ursulines in New Orleans.

Viktor also arranged for me to give simultaneous exhibitions at the Moscow Chess Academy, during which I played against some thirty ten- to fourteen-year-olds, some of whom were terrifyingly good. The first time I did this, I had thirty-two opponents, and lost to two thirteen-year-olds. Needless to say, their victories were loudly hailed as a triumph of the Marxist-Leninist method over capitalism and the bourgeois life-style – disregarding the overall result of the match, which was that out of thirty-two games, I won twenty-eight and drew two, a statistic which should have suggested that the bourgeois cause was not entirely hopeless. I did not mind in the least. I was quite ready to put up with a little joshing. The truth was that I was overwhelmed by my first experience of the Academy. I was lost in admiration of the scale and excellence of its teaching régime, and envious of the opportunities which would open up for these gifted young players. I could only imagine, with an ache in my heart, what might have happened if such an academy had been available in England for players such as Hugh Alexander and myself.

Whenever I was in Moscow, they put me up at the Peking Hotel, an absurdly grandiose neo-classical building on Ulitsa Bolshoya Sadovaya. It was pretentious and decidedly mediocre by western standards; not even its most enthusiastic patron could describe it as luxurious. It had all the usual failings of the Soviet hotel. There were periodic power failures and the phones never worked properly when you needed them to. But by Moscow standards it was well above average. The accommodation and food were acceptable and the hotel has a pleasant view over Triumfalnaya Ploschchad, one of the city's better squares. I must admit that once I got used to it, I felt very comfortable there. The staff never seemed to change and, after several stays when I was welcomed by the same familiar faces, it became something of a home from home. I actually began to fall in love with it in a strange kind of way. I was also acutely aware of its convenience from the point of view of my hosts. The Peking was a favourite haunt of KGB officers, and at times the entire place resembled one gigantic safe house. Viktor and I never had any difficulty in finding a secure venue for our meetings. When the Soviet championship was held away from Moscow, I always spent time in the capital once it had ended. I always assumed, without even troubling to verify the fact, that the KGB had bugged every phone in the hotel and kept me under constant surveillance. Once or twice I actually caught them at it, to my pleasure, but I would never have dreamed of complaining.

Initially, work was brisk. With Kim in Turkey, with Guy and Donald in the United States, I brought a good deal of information with me which I had encrypted, and which Viktor and I decrypted together when I arrived. Towards the end of my stay we would encrypt information destined for London and Washington, which I would decrypt for my contact at the Embassy when I returned home. The method Viktor and I had devised was virtually risk-free; as long as the final meeting in London went smoothly – and my contact and I were obsessively careful about our tradecraft – my work was undetectable.

But there were already clouds on the horizon. They were clouds I could do nothing about, but they made me anxious. I saw Anthony every so often at Apostolic meetings – I had taken my wings after the War and so was no longer obliged to attend meetings, but I still went up to Cambridge occasionally, simply because I love the place, and attended meetings whenever I could. I never failed to attend the annual dinner in London. Anthony hinted that both Guy and Donald were drinking far too much and there had been a number of unpleasant public incidents which were causing ripples, if not yet waves, within the Foreign Office. In Guy's case that hardly came as a surprise, but the same could not be said for Donald. Anthony surmised that his marriage was not going well. Sure enough, before the end of 1948, Guy had been transferred to the Far East section; while Donald was posted to Cairo as First Secretary. Neither move caused the work to dry up, but my contact told me that the information was harder to come by and, in some instances, of inferior quality. Things improved again in 1949 when Kim was appointed Washington representative of the Security Services, and so began to have access to much of the same kind of information as Guy and Donald had previously. And in 1950 Guy returned to the United States as Second Secretary at the British Embassy. But in the same year, Donald was ordered back to England after a particularly bad episode of binge drinking turned violent and a colleague was seriously injured in his own home. I took Donald for dinner at the Reform once or twice after his return. He had been ordered to undergo intensive counselling, but he seemed distant and withdrawn. I did my best to reach out to him, but other than confirming Anthony's speculation about his marriage, he gave me no real clue about what had happened to him. Then, on 25th May 1951, disaster struck.

* * *

For weeks after Guy and Donald disappeared, having ostensibly left for a short leisure break on the Continent, the press and Parliament had a field day, speculating about what might have happened to them, and whether they were truly Soviet spies. I could have answered both questions for them immediately. But for some reason, the authorities never quite put all the pieces together; it was not until February 1956 that Guy and Donald gave a press conference in Moscow and removed all doubt on the subject.

Donald had resumed work in November of the previous year, having apparently convinced the Foreign Office that he had recovered from whatever was ailing him and was no longer liable to engage in embarrassing public acts of drunkenness and violence. In all likelihood, he was allowed to resume work mainly to ensure that the authorities could keep an eye on him and tighten the noose which had already been placed around his neck. It seems likely now that he and Guy had finally attracted too much attention. Despite mounting evidence, the CIA's anglophile James Jesus Angleton, who had trained under Kim in England as his relatively new agency was still in the throes of being established, had steadfastly refused to believe that officers of the Secret Intelligence Service or the Foreign Office were capable of the treachery of betraying their country. Ironically, it was a state of mind that exactly mirrored that of the Service itself. The FBI, on the other hand, had no such illusions and no such loyalty. J Edgar Hoover had kept up a steady barrage of pressure against both Angleton and the White House, demanding a full inquiry into the possibility that British officers were giving away American secrets to the Soviets. He was winning the argument.

Guy had gone from bad to worse. His public conduct grew so egregious, culminating in an attempt to claim diplomatic immunity for several speeding offences in a single day, that Ambassador Franks was left with no alternative but to remove him from his post and return him to England. Worse, when Guy had arrived in the United States in September 1950, he had stayed with Kim at his house on Nebraska Avenue, on what Kim assured his reluctant wife would be a temporary basis. In fact it turned into a lasting arrangement and, as a result, Kim was implicated in some of Guy's drunken escapades and, eventually, in the suspicion that had grown up about him in Washington. He was too close to the target. Shortly after Guy and Donald disappeared, Kim was recalled to London. During 1952, he was closely interrogated in a so-called ‘secret trial' in a frantic effort to incriminate him. I heard from Anthony that the interrogation had been conducted by a Silk, Helenus Milmo, and I realised with horror that there would have been nothing illogical if the Service had asked me to do it, given my wartime experience. Miraculously, the case against Kim for being the ‘Third Man' was never quite proved. In 1955 a Government White Paper conceded as much. Kim was dismissed from the Service, notwithstanding, but almost immediately started work as a foreign correspondent for
The Observer
, based in Beirut, and there were persistent rumours that he continued to work for the Service using that cover. For me, these were terrible times.

* * *

There is no way to describe the terror of waiting, day by day, for the knock on the door which will bring your life, as you know it, to an end. Everything seemed so clear to me that I could not easily imagine how the trail could fail to lead the authorities to me. In my mind, my links to Guy, Donald and Kim were obvious and compelling, and at first I did not comprehend why the police were not on my doorstep within hours of their disappearance. As I understand it now, even the Americans, for all Hoover's bluster, were not fully convinced of the treachery until April 1954, when Vladimir Petrov, a Third Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, defected and identified Guy and Donald as important Soviet agents. Apparently, he made no reference to me. But at the time, I was expecting to be exposed on a daily basis. I felt helpless.

The feeling of imminent exposure is one which has never left me, and it is one almost too terrible to describe. The instant fluctuations in body temperature from sweltering to freezing; the knot in the pit of the stomach so tight that it is hardly possible to hold yourself upright; the nausea; the shaking hands; the insomnia; the waning of all enthusiasm for life; the distraction and inability to concentrate for more than a second or two on the most routine task. There are moments when you feel you have to end it, even if it means going to the police yourself and making a full confession.

For me, exposure would mean, not only the possibility of a long term of imprisonment, but also the most profound and public humiliation before my peers: the Bar; the members of the Reform; the Service; those in the world of chess. Beyond that, it meant that I would have to face up to the possibility that I had betrayed Roger, not only in the material sense of disgracing the family and forfeiting the Baronetcy, but also in the sense that I might have behaved dishonourably, a vice of which I thought him incapable. It was only now, with the threat of exposure hanging over my head, that I asked myself what Roger would have thought, what he would have said, about what I had done. I had convinced myself that I was doing it, at least in part, for him; that I was serving the country which had stood alone to combat fascism in Spain and had tried to provide support to the forces for which he had fought and died. But Roger had fought fascism on the front line, openly and heroically. If he had killed, he had killed a known enemy by direct action in battle. I had, I assumed, killed also: but indirectly; by betrayal and subterfuge; by the transfer of information. I had killed others about whom I knew nothing at all; all without ever setting foot on a front line or seeing the consequences of my betrayal with my own eyes. In many ways, this was the most terrible of the nightmares which haunted me. Roger's life had been about truth. My life as a spy has required me to lie routinely, and although I convinced myself early on that it was necessary to lie for a good cause, I have never quite been able to reconcile my life with Roger's.

I know that Bridget sensed that something was very wrong. On the face of it, we were a well-to-do couple leading a varied and interesting life. Practice had gone well. In 1955, I took Silk. As the man at the Ministry had promised, my application sailed through at the first time of asking, and I began to be instructed in more serious and complex cases. We could have moved to a bigger house, but our home in Chelsea remained all we wanted. We spent time at the Manor, particularly during the summers, and as the economy gradually recovered after the War, the estate regained much of what had been lost, and started to prosper. With each visit I paid to the Soviet championships, my stock in the chess world continued to grow. I was invited to contribute articles to the major chess magazines. I continued to do well in the British championship, though I have never won it, and I was invited to play in various tournaments in this country, and abroad. But even before the disappearance, I have to think that she sensed the stress I experienced each year when the time grew near for me to leave for the Soviet Union. Once Guy and Donald disappeared, she must have sensed my near panic, though she would not have known, or even suspected the reason for it. I have never spoken to her about my work for the Soviets.

This was partly because of my desire to protect her. But there was a deeper reason. Despite our social ease, with each other and with others, and despite our easy sexual intimacy, which has never dissipated, there is between us an inexplicable barrier to a deeper level of emotional intimacy. I do not know why I have never been able to open up to her with full honesty about my support for socialism; about my feelings for Roger; or about my passion for chess. She is aware of all those things on an intellectual level, of course, but I have never allowed her to see into my soul, to know how much they really mean to me. I think it is connected to our inability to talk about the subject of children. Our lack of children had driven a wedge between us which neither of us wanted. I do not understand why we could not have spoken of it once the worst of the emotional distress had subsided. It was important to both of us, but it had become a taboo subject, and in due course the wedge blocked off other areas of ourselves also. Perhaps I feared that she might reject me, but I do not truly believe that to be true. I believe that, even if she knew everything I have done, Bridget would continue to support me as my partner and as my friend. That has always been the nature of our relationship. Yet I never found the courage to tell her. Instead I have allowed her to suffer, as I know she must have, knowing that something was terribly wrong with me, but unable to fathom what it could be. In many ways it might have been easier for both of us if the police had knocked on the door one morning; for then there would have been no further need for any pretence.