Making Enemies (4 page)

Corless takes his seat in the only armchair in the room. Cups of tea are hastily drained and pushed into the centre of the table. Crumbs from Rich Tea biscuits are surreptitiously swept on to the floor. We stop talking.

‘All present and correct, Arthur?’

‘All present and correct, Rupert. Yes.’

Arthur Gurney looks round the table to double-check. The weekly ritual has begun.

‘Shall we take the minutes then?’

The minutes of the last meeting are solemnly read in silence to ensure they are a true record of a meeting none of us can be bothered to remember. Arthur Gurney hands the top copy to Corless who asks, ‘May I sign?’ To which none of us ever answers, so Corless signs, Arthur dates and then blots ostentatiously as if his life depended upon it.

‘Any matters arising not covered?’

No one says anything as Corless knows they won’t, and so on we go to what Corless cheerfully describes as ‘the work of the morning’. He glances down at the agenda that he has set himself and feigns surprise. ‘Three items, I see.’

None of us is ever taken in by this element in the ritual. The agenda seldom changes. It would be a shock if it did.

‘Sweet, but not, I suspect, short.’

That is the signal for the business to begin.

Colin Maitland hands Corless the Peter file. There has been a bitter scrap over this, Arthur Gurney demanding the right of first access to what he insists on calling ‘source Peter’ but Maitland, an old hand at departmental politics, has got to Corless first and put Gurney’s nose seriously out of joint. Maitland is the guardian of the
Peter file. Dislike seethes between them like electric static between two poles.

‘The decrypt of the latest message from Peter was only completed at six this morning,’ he informs us (‘A problem with the teleprinter from Moscow,’ we are told), so none of us has seen it yet.

Whatever attitude we may adopt, each of us is secretly excited by every new piece of intelligence from Peter. There is nothing like an association with a major secret to give you an enhanced sense of your own importance.

‘You’ll receive your copies in the usual way after the meeting. Will you summarize its contents, Colin?’

This request underlines Maitland’s role as Rupert’s deputy. He, alone of all of us, has already seen the decrypt, a privilege that separates him from his rivals in the room. He opens the folder slowly and surveys the papers, making the most of the moment.

‘We are the target of renewed subversive activity by the Soviets,’ Maitland says. (‘So what’s new?’ Adrian Gardner whispers in my ear.) ‘Peter tells us that Soviet connections in this country have identified a leading British nuclear scientist in Cambridge from whom they are confident (Peter’s words) that they will receive secret information.’

There is a stunned silence around the table.

‘If Peter is correct, gentlemen, and we must assume he is until proven otherwise, then there is only one possible interpretation. Within our academic community we harbour a man or woman who either is already working with the Soviets or intends very soon to do so. Put more simply, it would seem that we have a traitor in our midst.’

*

Rupert Corless’s relationship with Peter the Great was one of intimacy though the two had never met. We all knew the importance of each to the other. Without Peter, Corless’s career would never have risen above the mundane level he had achieved before Martineau’s gift fell into his lap. To be fair, he understood Peter’s importance and his good fortune the moment it arrived. Without Corless’s persistence against the shameful doubts and rejection of the early Peter intelligence by his superiors, the information we had from inside the Soviet Union might never have attained its present level of importance.

Corless’s second coming was due to an extraordinary piece of luck. Intelligence about Soviet intentions, always light on the ground, was at a premium in the last months of the war when some of us began to fear the consequences if the Soviets increased their sphere of influence in the post-war world at the expense of their allies. If getting our own people to understand this possibility was difficult, getting the Americans to change their view of how this last campaign should be conducted was impossible. The Soviets were our allies, Zhukov a trusted comrade; we would all meet up soon in Germany, wouldn’t we?

The difficulty was, we had no hard evidence to support our fears that Zhukov was working against us, only deductions, opinion, surmise. It is hard to believe how little we knew about the Soviet Union in the last months of the war. The Soviets put the lid on everything and screwed it down tight. Hard fact, naturally, was what the Americans wanted before they’d listen to our concerns, in the certain knowledge that we couldn’t lay our hands on any Soviet intelligence worth twopence.

Then, one morning in February 1945, Corless got a coded message from Bobby Martineau, an SIS man in Moscow. He had been approached by, and was now running (bona fides, such as they are in our business, having been established), a major source of Soviet intelligence, code-named Peter the Great. Its importance was such that he wanted (in Bobby’s version he ‘demanded’, but opinion is divided as to the veracity of a number of points in Bobby’s account) Peter intelligence to be given the highest level of secrecy, and that in Moscow he alone was to run Peter.

A morning’s work on the samples he sent us was enough to convince even the cynics in Horseferry Road (by this time Adrian Gardner was already well established as faction leader) that Peter was an impeccable source within the military planning section of Soviet High Command. We were now able to read Zhukov’s mind. It was an astonishing reversal. We knew what the Russians were going to do because Peter told us their plans, and what we learned confirmed our deepest fears. The Russians planned to get to Berlin before the Americans and the British, and to use their arrival for their own political ends. We took the evidence to our military, only to have it rebuffed.

‘Won’t wash, old boy. Boris and Ivan are good eggs, they’re sticking it to Jerry like nobody’s business, and we’ve all got a date
under the Brandenberg Gate before long. What a night we’ll have then, what a party!’

That was when Corless’s hard training in adversity, his ability to absorb knocks and carry on fighting, came into its own. He refused to be brushed aside, refused, as he put it, to break faith with Peter’s courage.

‘If Peter risks his life for what he believes is right,’ he said, ‘then we have to fight his corner with him.’

What Peter told us of the Red Army’s plans proved startlingly accurate. By the time Corless’s advocacy of the Peter intelligence was taken seriously the Russians were in the outskirts of Berlin. It was then too late to make use of what we’d learned, but Corless had won his own personal battle. The final score sheet showed a walkover for Corless and a whitewash for his and Peter’s detractors, from which we doubted they would ever recover. Corless’s star was in the ascendant. From then on it was a brave man who challenged Peter’s authority, and after VE Day no one sought the accolade.

Then, within a few weeks of the end of the war, there came the fallow period of ‘Peter’s silence’, the immediate post-war months when no intelligence came out of Moscow and Corless’s reputation as wunderkind began to suffer. ‘Source’ Peter dried up. A number of theories were swapped in the corridors and committee rooms of Horseferry Road. Peter had been betrayed and shot; he had been seriously injured in the race to Berlin; he was languishing in prison. All guesswork, because none of us, Corless included, had any idea who Peter the Great actually was and Martineau couldn’t or wouldn’t help. All we had was the past evidence of his secret messages and the proof of their accuracy, just as we now had his silence.

‘Keep faith,’ Martineau wired from Moscow. ‘Peter not dead. Will rise again.’ It all sounded barmy, typical Martineau.

During those uncomfortable weeks, the Peter cynics, nursing their wounds after Corless’s rise, regained lost ground.

‘Peter’s lost his tongue,’ Adrian Gardner said with malicious pleasure. ‘And Rupert’s lost his balls.’

An anti-Corless whisper campaign spread like a bush fire. A number of us were sure Adrian Gardner was behind it. If he was, he concealed his involvement skilfully. Corless’s people advised a show of force. Corless had to fight his corner again and he showed great determination to do so. Over the years, steel had entered his soul and now he was a match for anyone.

Whatever the reason for Peter’s loss of voice, he said, he had no doubt the ailment was temporary, patience would prompt his recovery and before long Peter would be returned to us.

Corless was gambling his career on Peter’s return. We thought it was madness. All he had to go on was Martineau’s dotty telegram, and none of us would have staked sixpence on that. But Rupert was adamant. Peter was missing, not lost. He would return. It was just a matter of time.

His courage and obduracy stemmed the tide. Rupert must know something no one else did, the whisperers said. How else could he make such a stand? Miraculously, in the face of such apparent certainty, the tide of hostility receded.

A week later, without warning or explanation, Peter suddenly reappeared and once more the intelligence flowed. Somehow the lid on the Soviet Union had been prised open again and we could look in. The light was bad and we couldn’t see far, but Peter’s silence had shown us that without his connection we were totally in the dark. We had lived on a diet of surmise and prediction, which are never good for the decision-making process.

‘Peter risen,’ Martineau wired, ‘halleluja.’

Once more the cynics retreated, Adrian Gardner among them. Corless’s star was on the move again but not quite with the heady speed he had experienced previously. The damage may have been limited by Peter’s Lazarus-like return, but damage there was. Seeds of doubt about the credibility of Peter the Great had been sown. The period of silence would not go away. Why had Peter vanished? What had happened? Was Peter still kosher? Explanations were asked for but none was forthcoming. Corless ignored the questions and got on with the business in hand.

‘Peter has come back to us’, he said. ‘We should rejoice.’

That was his way of closing the door on an unhappy episode that he wanted to forget. The only test, he said, was the quality of Peter’s intelligence. If the early reports were anything to go by, it was proving to be better than ever. We had an inside view of the rapid expansion of the Soviet sphere of interest as communism engulfed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia and Albania. It was a progress we could do nothing to halt.

Corless held centre stage once more, but there were assassins waiting in the wings, and Adrian Gardner was one of them. Corless had only to slip up once and his enemies on his own side would
get him. He delighted in this new circumstance. That he was now a major player in departmental politics and a target of so much jealousy proved he had arrived where he wanted to be.

By his own terms, Corless had made it.

*

The Soviet Intelligence Group, or SOVINT, was an ad hoc collection of working committees made up of intelligence officers, civil servants, seconded military and academics (economists, historians, specialists in politics, Russian speakers) whose task was to interpret any information coming out of the Soviet Union. The aim was to build up a picture of what was going on in Russia by pulling together all the available evidence and submitting it to a critical and high-level analysis.

SOVINT’s findings were then passed to the appropriate authority in Whitehall (nuclear issues to the Ministry of Supply, politics to the Foreign Office and so on, with copies of every report to a special Committee of the Cabinet), in the belief that this continuous stream of information would assist the decision-making process in the difficult post-war years when no one was sure which way the Soviets would jump. In the eyes of its progenitors in the Cabinet Office, this loose association of experts was SOVINT’s strength. The ability to call in experts when they were needed while otherwise leaving them undisturbed was seen as a time-and money-saving device, and satisfactorily progressive.

‘A structure to fit these hard-pressed times,’ was Rupert Corless’s verdict.

Quite deliberately, and in our view, very properly, the Cabinet Office decreed that the precise nature of our work was to be kept secret. In any civil service, there is nothing like a hint of secrecy to arouse intense speculative interest, not to say suspicion, and SOVINT became the focus of wide attention within days of the creation of our strange, unshapely federation of talents, ‘our archipelago of specialists’ as Corless once described it to me.

Those of us who were seconded to SOVINT from the Intelligence Service (Corless, Colin Maitland, Adrian Gardner, Arthur Gurney and myself) found it difficult to adjust to the broadness of our role until the arrival of Peter information, when Corless successfully forced through his plan for the Peter Committee. Our definition was now much tighter: we were the guardians of this rare seam of
Soviet information, its richness and the accompanying secrecy being the cause of so much of the jealousy against Corless. In this role our group concentrated solely on Peter, its purpose being to decrypt and interpret Peter intelligence.

We were a small and disparate group, some long-standing players in the intelligence game (Maitland, Gardner, Gurney all ex-SOE and SIS), others like myself with only our wartime experience. We had what Adrian Gardner always described as our two minders, Guy Benton from the Foreign Office (‘too effete to sit with foot soldiers like us,’ Adrian Gardner used to say) and Gordon Boys-Allen, a serving naval officer now seconded to the Ministry of Defence, whom even the gentle Arthur Gurney dismissed as ‘nice but dreadfully dim’.

An unlikely collection with an unusual purpose, yet under Rupert Corless’s chairmanship, and with his dogged protection of our sphere of interest, we flourished. Painstakingly we built up a picture of tyranny, its people crushed into servility, its economy remorselessly directed towards the creation of a gigantic war machine on which the success of its political policy rested. Our central concern was the Soviets’ progress on their nuclear bomb. How close were they to emulating the Americans’ nuclear achievement? One year? Two? More? Any activity that speeded up the process was seen as strengthening the threat posed by the huge Soviet army which already cast its dark shadow westwards, a vast bird of prey. Slowly but inexorably we imagined it coming our way. Greece. Italy. France. Sometimes in my nightmares I heard tanks and the crunch of marching boots.