The Ability to Kill (21 page)

Beirut is only an hour or two by air from Istanbul, yet how
different it is in feeling. In Istanbul the stones of Byzantium lie beneath your feet. Beirut is on the coast of what was once the land of Canaan, home of the greatest sea power and trading nation of the ancient world, the worshippers of Moloch—the Phoenicians. In Beirut, after nearly four thousand years, trading is still the mainspring of existence, and the spotter is advised to be careful. The
boîtes de nuit
there can always be relied upon to yield fascinating Levantine material; but to spot is to look and, in Beirut, to look generally means that you wish to possess. Unwary spotting can lead to both embarrassment and expense. It can also lead, I must admit, in pleasanter directions. If it does, you will not care whether you see any spies or not. Beirut is for the dilettante.

My own view is that for serious spy-spotting you have to go still farther east.

On no account should you miss Bangkok. For one thing it is the only capital city that I know of which is entitled to a
louche
-rating of its own. It is quite a satisfactory shock to discover that nearly all those glittering pagodas which give the place such a fine flavour of the mysterious East were built in the nineteenth century by Italian architects. Another distinct advantage is that, as Thailand is in the forward area of the Asian cold war, there are quite a lot of real spies and undercover agents operating there; a great help to the spotter, this. The Bamboo Bar of the Oriental Hotel and the foyer of the Trocadero Hotel are splendid hunting grounds. Late at night there is a place called ‘Eve’ which has much to recommend it.

The people of Bangkok are small, gay and sophisticated. However, they have a somewhat scatological sense of humour which the occidental may find disconcerting. Avoid people who know the language. Your personal dignity will be safer if you do not understand what the Thais are saying. Remember, too, that Bangkok is generally acknowledged to be the headquarters
of the Asiatic ‘blue’ film producing industry, and high
louche
-ratings may be registered on all sides. There are, in addition, numbers of sinister looking Europeans. Do not be deceived by appearances. Many of them really
are
sinister.

It is unwise to stay too long in Bangkok. For one thing, so much good spotting will spoil you for other places. More serious, you may contract the Bangkok neurosis. The symptoms are unmistakable. A slight fever is followed by mild dysentery. Then, after a few days, you find yourself adopting a sort of Dali-esque attitude to life that is not far removed from whimsicality. This is the tertiary stage. Not only occidentals become infected.

In the Garden of the British Embassy in Bangkok there is a life-sized statue of Queen Victoria. When the Japanese army entered the city in 1942, they took over the Embassy as a military headquarters, and the local Japanese Commander gave orders for the statue to be boarded up. But after a few days in Bangkok, he found that something was troubling him. It was the statue. Queen Victoria it had been who, at the turn of the century, had recognised Japan as a great power. Japanese history books approved of her. No disrespect ought to be shown to her effigy. And yet, the political situation made it difficult. In the end he compromised. The boarding would remain, but in order to cause Her late Majesty the minimum of inconvenience, he gave orders for two small eye-holes to be cut in the boarding so that she could look out.

After Bangkok you had better go to Penang or Singapore for a day or two to recover your sense of proportion. And while you are doing that it may be as well if we have a spotter-to-spotter talk about Indonesia.

Theoretically
, Djakarta, the capital, should have four stars in any spotters’ handbook. It is in the right part of the world, the political situation is pure ‘powder barrel,’ while the number
and diversity of the armed revolutionary groups operating there makes Central America seem like Sussex.

In practice, things are different. For a professional spy, Djakarta must be just about the most discouraging place in the world today. To begin with the business of getting in and out of the island of Java is made really difficult. I have already mentioned the visa problem. You get a visa for Djakarta in, say, London, and think you are cleared to enter. You are not. In Singapore, you have to get the visa visa’d at the Indonesian consulate. Then, when you get to Djakarta, the visa’d visa has to be visa’d again by three different immigration authorities before you are permitted to land. On the way out it is very much the same. For a stay of one week, my own passport collected two and half pages of visas involving the use of ten separate rubber stamps. How can a working spy be expected to find the time to forge all that stuff?

And that is not the worst he has to face. In the thirties, when Djakarta was Batavia and Dutch, the population was less than half a million. It has grown to approximately three million. Unfortunately, the housing and hotel situation has not grown with it. ‘You can’t sleep alone in Djakarta,’ is the joke that greets you. And it is perfectly true. You can’t. If you have plenty of pull with a member of the government you may get a bed in a hotel room, but it will have up to five other beds alongside it. All very well for a spotter perhaps, but one cannot seriously expect a professional spy to make his headquarters in a dormitory. Let him take a house or apartment, you say? But where? Even the Soviet Embassy has had to settle for a few rooms in the Hotel des Indes compound, and the first Ambassador to arrive from Ceylon had to go back to Colombo again until the Indonesian Government found him somewhere to live. Of course, one expects a good spy to be more resourceful than an ambassador, but when he has to
apply his fine skills to the mundane business of flat hunting before he can even think of stealing a plan, who can blame him for becoming demoralised?

Bandung in West Java is only a little better. There, you can, if you work hard, get a hotel room to yourself for a couple of nights, but I cannot pretend that the spotting is worth it. While the Afro-Asian Conference was in session there, I have no doubt that the place was swarming with spies. When I was there, the only thoroughly
louche
characters were the
betchak
boys, who looked like government freedom-propaganda posters and muttered lewd advertisements for the local brothel in your ear as they pedalled you along the muddy streets. Even for a dedicated spotter, Indonesia is unrewarding.

South Vietnam has much to recommend it, and should have more. Unfortunately, Saigon seems to have contracted a mutation of the Bangkok neurosis.

It began with Graham Greene’s novel
The Quiet American
, which was set in and near Saigon. Some of the action of the novel centres around a bomb explosion in a crowded café. It seems that there was just such an incident in Saigon during the troubles which Mr Greene used as the background of his story. Many were killed. The terrorists who caused the real explosion are unknown; but in the novel, an American undercover agent is responsible.

Now it is understandable that the Vietnamese should have liked this explanation of the incident; and they might reasonably have wondered if Mr Greene, who had been in their country, knew something that they did not; but their firm, happy insistence that the book is not fiction at all, but fact, is quite bewildering.

You cannot go anywhere in Saigon without the driver pointing out some landmark of
The Quiet American.
There is the café where the bomb explosion was made, this is the bridge by
which the agent Pyle was found dead, that is where stood the restaurant at which Fowler and Granger talked (now it is destroyed), that is where the plastic bomb was prepared. In the torrid interior of a baby Renault taxi, the fantasy becomes infectious. Serious spotting is impossible.

Hong Kong is overrated in my opinion, and Macao only a little better. Smuggling, unless arms and ammunition are involved, rarely attracts the true professional.

Indeed, we have to face the facts that good spotting is getting harder to find every day, and that the situation is going to deteriorate still further unless something is done about it. Admittedly some professional spies still seem able to carry on, but I do not think it is generally realised that many of these are by now professionals in name only, mere part-time workers. If that trend continues we shall soon have nothing but amateurs.

I have said: ‘Unless something is done about it.’ What
can
be done?

My answer is simple. What was done about the American buffalo herds when they seemed to be approaching extinction? What was done about the elephants in Africa when the ivory hunters threatened to exterminate them? What was done about the golden plover when the English took to eating too many of its eggs?

Exactly! Men of goodwill got together, took the matter up at government level, had protective laws passed and established natural reserves in which the creatures could live and breed without further molestation.

The same can be done for spies.

What I propose is nothing less than the setting up of an International Spy Reserve, to be called ‘The E. Phillips Oppenheim Memorial Park.’

Now it must be immediately apparent to everyone that
a project of this kind cannot be undertaken by a single government. Unilateral action in such a field would naturally give rise to all sorts of frustrating suspicions. The matter is obviously one for the United Nations. The appropriate agency would seem to be UNESCO, and, in fact, a small committee of spotters has been formed to draw up a preliminary plan for submission to that organisation.

A provisional site for the Park was the first item to be discussed and various suggestions were made. The final choice (which, however, had not yet received the approval of the French Government) was the Ile du Levant, off the coast of southern France near Marseille.

Splendidly situated in the Rade d’Hyeres, this charming Mediterranean island is about five miles long, its width varying between a half and three quarters of a mile. It has a small port, Grand Avis. The nearest mainland port is Le Lavandou, fifty minutes away by ferryboat. It is separated from the neighbouring island of Port Cros by a strait about half a mile wide. The climate is, on the whole, excellent; a little mistral, perhaps, but nothing serious. At the western end near the small village of Heliopolis, there is at present a large nudist colony. The important thing about the Ile du Levant, however, is that it is full of ruined buildings, old houses, chapels, an abbey, a missile testing ground, and, above all, a magnificent collection of
disused forts.

Originally, the island was fortified, as part of an eighteenth-century coastal defence system, by Louis XIV’s great engineer, Vauban. The forts were later modernised by Napoleon, and are still in reasonably good condition. Their appearance is superb. It would be a pleasure to spy on them.

It was these forts that decided the committee. With them, the Ile du Levant has everything spies need. Garrisons of disabled army veterans could easily be provided for the spies to
outwit. Escapes by boat to the mainland could be made at dead of night without risk to neighbouring shipping (the main shipping lanes run outside the islands) and, more important, in absolute safety for the spies themselves. The French missile testing area seemed at first to present a security problem; but it was soon pointed out that, as the spies would not be rocket scientists, this could be disregarded. The only real drawback is the nudist colony. This would have to go. In the view of the committee it is absolutely essential that spies of impeccable quality are introduced for breeding purposes, and there must be no undesirable distractions. Besides, spies thrive on secrecy and the need for covering-up. The island is warm in summer, and the risk of the females being tempted out of their traditional black satin into bikinis, or worse, could not be accepted.

Among other proposals before the committee at the moment is one for classifying the spy population by vintages, and another for improving the breed by means of education. Under this latter scheme it might be possible at a later date to provide a small atomic pile for the advanced student groups to spy on.

But it is useless to go into too much detail at this stage. The main thing is to get the principle accepted, so that the work of collecting can begin. Some qualified spotters are convinced that if the present trend is allowed to continue, another ten years will see professional espionage practically extinct; that even now it might be difficult to assemble more than fifty really first-rate pairs.

If this is true, then we are facing a cultural disaster for which our children will not readily forgive us. The responsibility is ours, now.

There is not a moment to lose.

He was on a Messageries Maritimes boat going from Marseille to the Far East.

It was winter and the Mediterranean was rough. For the first two days Monsieur Gaumont and his wife stayed in their cabin. On the third day I saw them on deck. She was in a long chair and he was tucking a rug round her.

She was young, dark, pretty, and very shy. He was in his late thirties, tall, thick-set and fair-haired with a small moustache. He exuded well-being; she looked a little wan and frail. He fussed over her, rearranging cushions, and she looked up at him with an adoring smile.