The Fourth Protocol (25 page)

“And if it
was
a false-flag approach?” asked Sir Perry Jones.

“Then I think we’ll get his complete and unstinted cooperation in damage assessment. More, I think he could be persuaded to ‘turn’ voluntarily, enabling us to mount a major disinformation operation against Moscow. Now
that
we could take to our allies as a big plus.”

Sir Paddy Strickland of the Foreign Office was won over. It was agreed to pursue Sir Nigel’s tactic.

“One last thing: who goes to see him?” asked Sir Anthony.

Sir Nigel coughed delicately. “Well, of course, it’s really up to Five,” he said, “but a disinformation operation against the Center would be for Six to handle. Then again, I happen to know the man. Actually, we were at school together.”

“Good Lord,” exclaimed Plumb. “He’s a bit younger than you, isn’t he?”

“Five years, actually. He used to clean my boots.”

“All right. Are we agreed? Anyone against? You’ve got it, Nigel. You take him, he’s yours. Tell us how you get on.”

On Tuesday, March 24, a South African tourist from Johannesburg arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport, where he passed through the formalities without difficulty. As he emerged from the customs hall carrying his suitcase, a young man moved forward and murmured a question in his ear. The burly South African nodded in confirmation. The younger man took his bag and led him outside to a waiting car.

Instead of heading toward London, the driver took the M25 ring road and then the M3 toward Hampshire. An hour later they drew up in front of a handsome country house outside Basingstoke. The South African, relieved of his coat, was ushered into the library. From a seat by the fire an Englishman in country tweeds and of the same age rose to greet him.

“Henry Pienaar, how good to see you again. It’s been too long. Welcome to England.”

“Nigel, how have you been keeping?”

The heads of the two intelligence services had an hour before lunch was called, so after the usual preliminaries they settled down to discuss the problem that had brought General Pienaar to the country house maintained by the SIS for the hospitality of notable but clandestine guests.

By evening Sir Nigel Irvine had secured the agreement he sought. The South Africans would agree to leave Jan
Marais
in place to give Irvine a chance to mount a major disinformation exercise through George Berenson, assuming he would play ball.

The British would keep
Marais
under total surveillance; it was their responsibility to ensure that
Marais
would have no chance to do a moonlight flit to Moscow, since the South Africans now had their own damage assessment to face—forty years’ worth of it.

It was further agreed that when the disinformation exercise had run its course, Irvine would inform Pienaar that
Marais
was no longer needed. The South African would be called home, the British would “house” him aboard the South African jet, and Pienaar’s men would make the arrest when the jet was airborne—that is, on South African sovereign territory.

After dinner, Sir Nigel excused himself; his car was waiting. Pienaar would spend the night, do some shopping in London’s West End the next day, and take the evening flight home.

“Just don’t let him go,” said General Pienaar as he saw Sir Nigel off at the door. “I want that bastard back home by the end of the year.”

“You’ll have him,” promised Sir Nigel. “Just don’t spook him in the meantime.”

While the head of the NIS was trying to find something on Bond Street for Mrs. Pienaar, John Preston was at Charles Street for a meeting with Brian Harcourt-Smith. The Deputy Director-General was in his most eager-to-please mood.

“Well, John, I gather congratulations are in order. The committee was most impressed by your revelations from South Africa.”

“Thanks, Brian.”

“Yes, indeed. It’ll all be handled by the committee from now on. Can’t say exactly what’s to be done, but Tony Plumb asked me to pass on his personal sentiments. Now”—he spread his hands flat and placed them on his blotter—“to the future.”

“The future?”

“You see, I’m in a bit of a dilemma. You’ve been on this case for eight weeks, some of the time out on the streets with the watchers, most of it in the basement at Cork, and then South Africa. During all this time young March, your number two, has been running C1(A), and doing very well into the bargain.

“Now, I ask myself, what am I supposed to do with him? I don’t think it would be quite fair to bang him back to the two slot—after all, he’s been around to all the ministries, made some extremely useful suggestions and a couple of very positive changes.”

He would, thought Preston. March was a young eager beaver, very much one of Harcourt-Smith’s
protégés.

“Anyway, I know you’ve only been at C1(A) for eleven weeks, and that’s pretty short, but seeing as you’ve covered yourself with glory, it might be a well-judged moment to move on. I’ve had a word with Personnel, and as luck would have it, Cranley at C5(C) is taking early retirement at the end of the week. His wife, you know, has not been well for a long time and he wants to take her off to the Lake District. So he’s taking his pension and leaving. I thought it would suit you.”

Preston pondered. “C5(C)? Ports and airports?” he queried.

It was another liaison job. Immigration, Customs, Special Branch, Serious Crimes Squad, Narcotics Squad—all monitored ports and airports, checking on various kinds of unsavory characters seeking to bring themselves or their illicit cargoes into the country. Preston suspected that C5(C) would have to try to pick up whatever did not fall into anyone else’s category.

Harcourt-Smith raised an admonitory finger. “It’s important, John. The special responsibility, of course, is to keep a weather eye open for Sovbloc illegals and couriers—and so forth. It gets one out and about—the sort of thing you like.”

And away from the head office while the struggle for the succession to the director-generalship of Five goes on, thought Preston. Preston was a Hemmings man down the line, and he was aware that Harcourt-Smith knew it. He thought of protesting, of demanding a meeting with Sir Bernard to put his case for staying where he was.

“Anyway, I want you to give it a try,” said Harcourt-Smith. “It’s still in Gordon, so you won’t have to move.”

Preston knew he was outmaneuvered. Harcourt-Smith had spent half a lifetime working the head-office system. At least, Preston thought, he could be a field man again, even if it was what he termed another “policeman’s job.”

“I’ll expect you to start on the first of the month, then,” concluded Harcourt-Smith.

That Friday, March 27, Major Valeri Petrofsky slipped quietly into Britain.

He had flown from Moscow to Zurich with Swedish identity papers, dropped them into a sealed envelope addressed to a KGB safe house in that city, and adopted the papers identifying him as a Swiss engineer that were waiting for him in another envelope deposited with the post office in the airport concourse. From Zurich he had flown to Dublin.

On the same flight was his escort, who neither knew nor cared what his charge was doing. The escort was simply carrying out his orders. In a room at Dublin’s International Airport Hotel, the two men came together. Petrofsky stripped to the skin and handed back his European-style clothes. He put on what the escort had brought in his own suitcase—British clothes from top to toe, plus an overnight case filled with the usual medley of pajamas, toilet articles, half-read novel, and change of clothes.

The escort had already plucked an envelope from the airport’s messages board that had been prepared by the Line
N man
at the Dublin embassy and pinned to the notice board four hours earlier. It contained a ticket stub for the previous evening’s performance at the Eblana Theatre, a receipt for an overnight stay at the New Jury’s Hotel for the previous evening in the appropriate name, and the return half of a London-Dublin round-trip ticket on Aer Lingus.

Finally, Petrofsky was handed his new passport. When he went back to the airport concourse and checked in, not an eyebrow was raised. He was an Englishman returning home from a one-day business trip to Dublin. There are no passport checks between Dublin and London; at the London end, arriving passengers must produce their boarding pass or ticket stub as identification. They are also scrutinized by two blank-eyed Special Branch men who affect to see nothing but miss very, very little. Neither had ever seen Petrofsky
’s
face because he had never before entered Britain through Heathrow Airport. Had they asked, he could have produced a perfect British passport in the name of James Duncan Ross. It was a document that could not have been faulted by the Passport Office itself, for the good and simple reason that the Passport Office itself had issued it.

Having passed through customs without a check, the Russian took a taxi to King’s Cross Station. There he went to a luggage locker for which he already had the key. The locker was one of several around the British capital maintained permanently by the Line
N man
in the embassy. From the locker the Russian withdrew a package, sealed exactly as when it had arrived in the diplomatic bag at the embassy two days earlier. The Line
N man
had not seen its contents, nor had he wanted to. He had not asked why the package had to be left in a locker in a train station either. It was not his job to question orders.

Petrofsky slipped the package unopened into his bag. He could open it later, at leisure. He already knew what it contained. From King’s Cross he took another taxi across London to Liverpool Street Station, and there boarded an early-evening train for Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, where, just in time for dinner, he checked into the Great White Horse hotel.

Had any curious policeman insisted on looking inside the package stowed in the hand luggage of the young Englishman on the Ipswich train, he would have been amazed. In part, it contained a Finnish Sako automatic pistol with a full magazine and the nose cone of each round carefully cut in the form of an X. The cuts had been filled with a mixture of gelatin and potassium cyanide concentrate. Not only would the rounds expand on impact with the human body, but recovery from the venom would be out of the question.

The other part of the contents consisted of the rest of the legend of James Duncan Ross. A “legend,” in term-of-art parlance, is the fictitious life story of a nonexistent man, supported by a host of perfectly real documents of every kind and description. Usually, the person on whom the legend is built did exist once, but died under circumstances that left no trace and caused no stir. The identity is then taken over and fleshed out, as the skeleton of the dead man can never be, by supportive documentation going backward and forward over the life span.

The real James Duncan Ross, or what little was left of him, had been rotting for years in the deep bush bordering the Zambezi River. He had been born in 1950, the son of Angus and Kirstie Ross of Kilbride, Scotland. In 1951 Angus Ross, tired of the cheerless rationing of postwar Britain, had emigrated with his wife and baby son to Southern Rhodesia. An engineer, he had got a job designing agricultural implements and machinery and by 1960 was able to found his own business.

He prospered, being able to send the young James to a good preparatory school and then on to Michaelhouse. By 1971 the boy, with his national service behind him, was able to join his father in the company. But this was Ian Smith’s Rhodesia now, and the war against the guerrillas of Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA and Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA was getting more vicious.

Every able-bodied male was in the reserve, and periods spent in the Army became longer and longer. In 1976, serving with the Rhodesian Light Infantry, James Ross was caught in a ZIPRA ambush on the southern bank of the Zambezi and was killed. The ZIPRA guerrillas closed in, stripped the body, and vanished back to their bases in Zambia.

Ross should not have been carrying any identification at all, but just before his patrol set off he had received a letter from his girlfriend and had stuffed it into his combat jacket pocket. It came back to Zambia and fell into the hands of the KGB.

A very senior KGB officer, Vassili Solodovnikov, was then ambassador to Lusaka, and he ran various networks across all southern Africa. One of them picked up the letter addressed to James Ross, care of his parents’ home. The first checks into the deceased young officer produced a bonus: British-born, Angus Ross and his son, James, had never abandoned their British passports. So the KGB caused James Duncan Ross to live again.

When, after Rhodesian independence as Zimbabwe, Angus and Kirstie Ross left for South Africa, James apparently decided to return to Britain. Unseen hands withdrew a copy of his birth certificate from Somerset House, in London; other hands filled out and sent in the postal application for a new passport. Checks were made, and it was granted.

In the making of a good legend, scores of people and thousands of hours are expended. The KGB has never lacked the staff or the patience. Bank accounts are opened and closed; driver’s licenses are carefully renewed before expiration; cars are bought and sold, so that the name shows up on the Vehicle Licensing Center computer. Jobs are taken and promotions earned; references are prepared, company pension funds added to. One of the chores of junior intelligence staff is to keep this mass of documentation up to date.

Other teams go back into the past. What was the child’s nickname? Where did he go to school? What did the boys call the science teacher behind his back? What was the family dog’s name?

By the time the legend is complete—and it can take years—and by the time it has been memorized by its new bearer, it would need weeks of investigation to crack it, if it could be done at all. This was what Petrofsky carried in his head and suitcase. He was—and could prove he was—James Duncan Ross, who was moving from the West Country to take over the East Anglian representation of a Swiss-based corporation marketing computer software. He had a handsome bank balance at Barclays Bank, Dorchester, Dorset, which he was about to transfer to nearby Colchester. He had mastered the scrawled Ross signature to perfection.