The Seeds of Fiction (41 page)

Two decades later, during the heady days of the Cuban revolution in 1959, Margot and her husband gave the British Embassy in Panama an unseemly headache with their putative participation in what the media dubbed the ‘Aquatic Ballet'. Arias and Fonteyn were accused of providing arms for a failed comic-opera invasion of Panama from Cuba. The invaders' goal had been to unseat Panamanian President Ernesto de la Guardia. Fidel Castro was temporarily absent from Cuba at the time and was described as furious when he heard the news that Panama had been invaded from Cuba. The adventure did not, he protested, have his backing or blessing. Tito's yacht was allegedly involved. Margot was detained and then unceremoniously deported to Great Britain, while Arias took refuge in the Brazilian Embassy.

Even more tragic for Tito Arias was the night five years later in 1964 when, having just won election to Panama's legislative assembly, he was shot at close range by a friend and political party associate. The attempted assassination left him paralysed and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Dame Margot cared for him until his death in 1989, often taking him along on tour with her. The British Embassy in Panama closed its book on Dame Margot Fonteyn in February 1991 when, at the age of seventy-one, having been permitted back into Panama with her husband many years earlier, she died in Panama City's Paitilla Hospital. It was only much later that I learned of Graham's friendship with Dame Margot, and it was ironic that they had both been so close to Panama. Strangely, he hadn't mentioned her, perhaps because he was so caught up in our daily activity and preoccupied by thoughts of Yvonne.

For one terrible moment I wondered whether Graham was going to write another book poking fun at the British Secret Service and had spotted Reece
Smith as a protagonist. Admittedly, Reece could have made a great model for Our Man in Panama'. However, the difference between Smith and Wormold of
Our Man in Havana,
I hazarded to suggest to Graham, was Smith's extraordinary capacity for beer, far above even his New Zealand countrymen's considerable average intake. ‘Surely MI6 wouldn't employ such a heavy drinker,' I suggested.

Graham chuckled, then he realized my
faux pas.
MI6, I remembered from my own reading, had a record for harbouring some of the thirstiest barstool elbow-benders in the spy business. Graham's one-time superior Kim Philby, the world's most famous spy after Mata Hari, was a notorious alcoholic. The late David Holden of
The Times
had confirmed to me the reports of Philby's drinking, as had a number of other colleagues who had known him in Beirut and Turkey.

None the less, Reece Smith did have some habits which, viewed from a cloak-and-dagger perspective, might have been deemed suspicious. He never seemed to take day-to-day things around him seriously. Among friends he had a witty, irreverent sense of humour, but he didn't always display it in front of strangers. He ordered milk delivered daily in the morning to his Panama City flat, as he had done when he lived for a time in Bogotá, Colombia. Then in ritual fashion he would pour the milk down the drain and drink beer for the rest of the day, even in his parked aeroplane (he was an accomplished pilot). His Latino neighbours believed the red-nosed gentleman wearing floral shirts was a good, decent man because he drank milk. He would send mail with the most outlandish postmarks — giving letters to friends travelling abroad to mail — and he had often asked me to post letters for him from faraway places. Like an Australian Aborigine he sometimes went walkabout, disappearing for days; none of his acquaintances knew where he was.

Reece was British-born, had grown up in New Zealand and served as a bombardier in the Burma theatre during the Second World War. He returned to New Zealand to become a top reporter for the Wellington
Evening Post
but left abruptly and appeared in Panama in 1950, lured there by a job offer from a fellow New Zealander, Edward (Ted) Scott, editor of
El Panamá América.
When I finally told Smith about Graham's suspicions, he spluttered into his beer, his belly shaking, ‘What a bloody honour!' Graham's suspicions about him were erroneous, he said. ‘If I worked for them,' he said when he eventually controlled his laughter, ‘it was without my knowledge. Who knows where our reporting ends up.'

Graham seemed to enjoy talking about Philby. At first I thought, as a writer, he wanted to get inside his one-time spy boss's head. Graham was happy to have re-established contact with Philby, who by then had retired in Moscow, and seemed to relish their correspondence. It had begun a year earlier, with a
postcard from Philby in Havana. It evidently represented a curious challenge of sorts for Graham. He wanted to know more about how his former boss had fared, and he seemed to treat their communication as a game of chess. Was his old chief feeding him misinformation on world trouble spots? Graham wondered. ‘There was nothing really secret about it,' Graham said. ‘They know about it.'

Gradually I learned that Graham had a genuine fondness for his old boss. They had spent many hours together at a pub near their office in St James's during the war. His feelings for Kim were real. Kim was a charmer and born to be a spy. Even though he was an ordinary-looking individual, he had charisma and was cultured. They had plenty to talk about besides the service, and they shared the same sense of humour. With his 1968 introduction to Philby's book
My Silent War,
in which Philby explains his work as a Soviet ‘Master Agent', Graham admitted he won no friends at home in England. (My American edition of Philby's book didn't contain his introduction, and he promised to send me the English edition.)

Graham and Philby had worked together in 1943—4 in MI6's V section, which was counter-espionage on the Iberian peninsula. Graham said he knew Philby had been a leftist, but at the time they worked together he didn't know he was a spy for Moscow. If he had had proof that Philby was a Soviet agent he stressed that he would have given him twenty-four hours, a sporting chance to run, then reported him. In what appeared to many as somewhat strained logic Graham said he still respected Philby because he had worked for the Soviets not for money but because of genuine belief in his leftist ideology.

‘Did I send you a copy of
The Virtue of Disloyalty?.'
Graham asked me and then quoted from the privately printed speech of that title which he had delivered in 1969 on being awarded the Shakespeare prize in Hamburg: ‘“for if there is a virtue in disloyalty it can only be that the disloyalty is committed in the service of what a man believes to be a greater loyalty”. It's a game after a while, and the spy plays with both sides,' Graham reflected. I believed he would have welcomed me writing a story on him making contact with Philby. But my story was on Graham and the Salvadorean guerrillas.

Graham also described his own visit to the USSR in 1961, how it was winter and he had caught a ‘terrible flu' and ‘thoroughly hated having to address a group there'. His flu had turned to pneumonia, he said, and on his return doctors even suspected he might have cancer.

He spoke of his son Francis, explaining that he had been posted to the USSR in the British diplomatic service. Graham had frozen his own relations with the Soviet Union over the imprisonment of two Soviet writers. His boycott was to last until 1986; he explained that he had refused to go there again until the two dissident writers, Daniel and Sinyavsky, had been released
from detention. He said he had asked his Russian publisher to give royalties from his books sold there to the wives of the two writers. The publisher declined, not wishing to get involved. Daniel and Sinyavsky were eventually released and went to live in the West. Sinyavsky later died in France.

There have been allegations since Graham's death that during all those postwar years he continued to work for MI6. In my opinion this is a ridiculous charge. Graham would have found it amusing. There was, for example, little of interest to MI6 in the areas we travelled together. If Graham at times appeared to be playing the part of a latter-day Wormold, it was just an act, spurred by his intrinsic fascination with the world of espionage. He did say, however, that he had occasionally, over the years, had a drink with an old friend whose name I have forgotten who had risen in the ranks of MI6. And Graham was very much looking forward to one day having another drink with Philby. As it turned out that reunion was just around the corner.

The day we were lunching at the American Legion in Balboa in the Panama Canal Zone, an American friend of Reece Smith, a Greene fan whom we met casually, came over to our table and praised not only the prophetic quality of
The Quiet American
but also
Our Man in Havana.
He actually thought Graham had predicted that the Russians would establish offensive missiles in Cuba. Graham gave the man a generous smile as he returned to his table. It was not the first time people had said this to him, he said. They overlooked the fact that the book was published in 1958, even before Fidel Castro came to power and four years before President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev locked horns in October 1962 in a crisis that shook the world. The crisis over the installation of offensive Russian ballistic missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from the US mainland, exposed weaknesses in both the US and Soviet intelligence services that brought the world close to nuclear cataclysm. Neither side knew what the other was up to.

It was a long wait for Omar's Falcon jet to be made ready for our trip to Managua. Chuchu had gone off to see what had happened to the plane. Now, facing a new adventure in visiting war-torn Nicaragua, if the plane ever arrived, Graham overcame his characteristic distress at having to wait by talking about writing and the importance of privacy to a writer. ‘A writer must be alone to be able to work,' he explained. ‘And one has to appreciate that, and I do find it very easy to be alone. It's one of the reasons I travel a great deal.' He went on to say how it was a great way to get away from family and friends, albeit those he loved. ‘Loneliness,' he added, ‘has never been a problem for me.' A novelist makes a rotten husband, he said.

Yet there was something more to his need to escape. He was continually searching. A writer, he said, must continue to search and observe life. He went on to recommend that I read Henry James and discussed James's influence on him. He had written essays on James, he noted in
The Lost Childhood.
(Years later, in reading one of those essays, ‘Henry James: The Private Universe', I recognized the similarity in Graham's musing that day while waiting for the General's jet. In the essay Graham had written: ‘There was no victory for human beings, that was his [James's] conclusion; you were punished in your own way, whether you were of God's or the devil's party. James believed in the supernatural, but he saw evil as an equal force with good. Humanity was cannon fodder in a war too balanced ever to be concluded.')

The Falcon jet finally arrived, and we boarded. Chuchu spent most of the trip to Managua in the cockpit learning to fly the hot little private jet. Sighting his first Nicaraguan volcano, Graham, acting like a headmaster giving an oral examination, asked question after question. He was intrigued by the similarities among autocratic Latin American regimes, especially Nicaragua's 42 -yearlong Somoza dynasty that was born out of the US Marine occupation and the thirty-year reign of Rafael Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic, likewise an offspring of the Marines.

Graham already knew much of Nicaragua's sad history. This was a country that appeared rich only in poets. Graham thought the quote attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt describing Anastasio Somoza García (Tacho I), the founder of the dynasty, as ‘a son-of-a-bitch but our son-of-a bitch'
was probably applied by US foreign policy-makers to characterize Trujillo and other dictators as well. They had all had obviously survived with Washington's support.

Of course their rule was facilitated by their images as bulwarks against Communism. More concerned about their own virility and that of their horses and bulls than their own people (Somoza the elder used to invite visiting VIPs to his ranch to witness his prize bull servicing cows), they gave their countries back virtually nothing. The Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua had been prototypical. Despite its considerable natural resources, the country remained among the world's poorest and least developed. Malnutrition and disease saw to it that it maintained a relatively small population of 3 million. The Somozas invested most of their resources abroad while leaving Nicaragua with over $1 billion in foreign debt, an empty treasury and a country wrecked by war.

The war had now been over for more than a year. The euphoria that had greeted the end of the tyranny had dissipated as the Sandinistas struggled to get their act together. After two decades as guerrilla fighters, the Sandinistas had entered Managua to find Somoza's forces had evaporated with the morning mist. That day they moved from running a guerrilla war to running a government, and they soon found out that being guerrilla fighters was not the same as being skilled bureaucrats.

When we arrived in Managua we were greeted by María Isabel, the attractive Panamanian who had been our hostess at the Panama City guerrilla party. She had been appointed special assistant to Minister Tomás Borge and looked chic in her Interior Ministry uniform. We were whisked away to a VIP villa outside Managua. A skinny youth sat before the door cradling a Thompson submachine-gun. After we had been shown our respective rooms and María Isabel had departed, Graham looked at me. ‘Have we been kidnapped?'

Perhaps, I thought.

Being left alone in isolation, even with a well-stocked bar, was not Graham's idea of seeing Nicaragua.

Chuchu had left us at the airport. He had gone off to see Borge and his own son, who was a member of Borge's personal security detail and who had recently recovered from shooting himself in the leg accidentally. At one point Graham had commented that this was a sign that the young man was in the wrong profession.