The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Read online

  ‘And it’s a good book,’ he complained. ‘It’s a damned good book. And that’s the whole trouble.’

  I combed the newspapers for news of Greene’s arrest, but he remained at large. Perhaps MI5’s barons had decided after all that it was better to laugh than cry. For their act of clemency, Greene rewarded them twenty years later with The Human Factor, which portrayed them not merely as boobies but as murderers. But MI6 must have sent a warning shot across his bows. In the foreword to The Human Factor he is careful to assure us that he has not infringed the Official Secrets Act. Dig out an early copy of Our Man in Havana and you will find a similar disclaimer.

  But history suggests that our sins are eventually forgotten. Mackenzie ended his days with a knighthood, Greene with the Order of Merit.

  ‘In your new novel, sir,’ an earnest American journalist asks me, ‘you have a man saying of your central character that he would not have become a traitor if he had been able to write. Can you tell me, please, what would have become of you, if you had not been able to write?’

  Searching for a safe answer to this dangerous question, I wonder whether our secret services should not be grateful to their literary defectors after all. Compared with the hell we might have raised by other means, writing was as harmless as playing with our bricks. How much our poor beleaguered spies must be wishing that Edward Snowden had done the novel instead.

  So what should I have replied to my enraged ex-colleague at the diplomatic party who looked as if he was about to knock me down? No good pointing out that in some books I have painted British Intelligence as a more competent organization than I had ever known it to be in real life. Or that one of its most senior officers described The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as ‘the only bloody double-agent operation that ever worked’. Or that, in describing the nostalgic war games of an isolated British department in the novel that so angered him, I might have been attempting something a bit more ambitious than a crude assault on his Service. And Heaven help me were I to maintain that if you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche, its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look. I would be flat on my back before I came to the main verb.

  As to his Service being unable to answer back, well I would guess there is not a spy agency anywhere in the Western world that has enjoyed more mollycoddling from its domestic media than ours. Embedded scarcely covers it. Our systems of censorship, whether voluntary or imposed by vague and draconian legislation, our skills in artful befriending and the British public’s collective submission to wholesale surveillance of dubious legality are the envy of every spook in the free and unfree world.

  No good either my pointing to the many ‘approved’ memoirs of former members that portray the Service in the clothes in which it likes to be admired; or to the ‘official histories’ that draw such a forgiving veil over its more heinous misdeeds; or to the numberless cooked-up articles in our national newspapers that result from much cosier luncheons than the one I enjoyed with Maurice Oldfield.

  Or how about suggesting to my furious friend that a writer who treats professional spies as fallible human beings like the rest of us is performing a modest social service – even, God help us, a democratic function, since in Britain our secret services are still, for better or worse, the spiritual home of our political, social and industrial elite?

  For that, dear former colleague, is the limit of my disloyalty. And that, dear departed Lord Healey, is the limit of my communism which, come to think of it, can’t be said of you in your younger days.

  It’s hard to convey, half a century on, the atmosphere of mistrust that pervaded Whitehall’s corridors of secret power in the late fifties and early sixties. I was twenty-five when, in 1956, I was formally inducted into MI5 as a junior officer. Any younger, they told me, and I wouldn’t have been eligible. Five, as we called it, prided itself on its maturity. Alas, no amount of maturity protected it from recruiting such luminaries as Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt and the other sad traitors of that period whose names linger like half-forgotten football stars in the British public memory.

  I had entered the Service with high expectations. My intelligence exploits to date, trivial as they were, had left me with an appetite for more. My case officers had been uniformly agreeable, efficient and considerate. They had spoken to my sense of calling and revived my lapsed public schoolboy’s duty of pain. As a National Service intelligence officer in Austria, I had lived in awe of the shadowy civilians who periodically descended on our humdrum encampment in Graz and invested it with a mystique it otherwise sadly lacked. It was only when I entered their citadel that I came smartly to earth.

  Spying on a decaying British Communist Party twenty-five thousand strong that had to be held together by MI5 informants did not meet my aspirations. Neither did the double standards by which the Service nurtured its own. MI5, for better or worse, was the moral arbiter of the private lives of Britain’s civil servants and scientists. Under the vetting procedures of the day, homosexuals and other perceived deviants were held to be vulnerable to blackmail, and consequently debarred from secret work. But the Service seemed quite content to ignore the homosexuals in its own ranks, and its Director General openly cohabiting with his secretary during the week and his wife at weekends, even to the point of leaving written instructions for the night duty officer in case his wife called up wanting to know where he was. Yet God help the registry typist whose skirt was deemed too short or too tight, or the married desk officer who gave her the eye.

  While the upper echelons of the Service were staffed by ageing survivors of the glory days of 1939–45, its middle order comprised former colonial police and district officers left over from Britain’s dwindling empire. Experienced as they might be in quelling unruly natives who had the temerity to want their countries back, they were less at ease when it came to guarding the mother country they barely knew. The British working classes were as volatile and unknowable to them as were once the rioting Dervishes. Trade unions in their eyes were nothing but communist front organizations.

  Meanwhile, young spy hunters such as myself, thirsting for stronger fare, were ordered not to waste their time looking for Soviet-controlled ‘illegals’, since it was known on unassailable authority that no such spies were operating on British soil. Known to whom, by whom, I never learned. Four years were enough. In 1960 I applied for a transfer to MI6 or, as my disgruntled employers had it, to ‘those shits across the park’.

  But let me in parting acknowledge one debt of gratitude to MI5 that I can never sufficiently repay. The most rigorous instruction in prose writing that I ever received came, not from any schoolteacher or university tutor, least of all from a writing school. It came from the classically educated senior officers on the top floor of MI5’s headquarters in Curzon Street, Mayfair, who seized on my reports with gleeful pedantry, heaping contempt on my dangling clauses and gratuitous adverbs, scoring the margins of my deathless prose with such comments as redundant – omit – justify – sloppy – do you really mean this? No editor I have since encountered was so exacting, or so right.

  By the spring of 1961 I had completed the MI6 initiation course, which equipped me with skills I never needed and quickly forgot. At the concluding ceremony the Service’s head of training, a rugged, pink-faced veteran in tweeds, told us with tears in his eyes that we were to go home and await orders. They might take some time. The reason – which he vowed he had never dreamed he would have to utter – was that a longstanding officer of the Service, who had enjoyed its unstinted trust, had been unmasked as a Soviet double agent. His name was George Blake.

  The scale of Blake’s betrayal remains, even by the standards of the period, monumental: literally hundreds of British agents – Blake himself could no longer calculate how many – betrayed; covert audio operations deemed vital to the national security, such as, but not exclusively, the Berlin audio tunnel, blown before they were launched; and the entire break
down of MI6’s personnel, safe houses, order of battle and outstations across the globe. Blake, a most capable field agent in both interests, was also a God-seeker, who by the time of his unmasking had espoused Christianity, Judaism and communism in that order. Imprisoned at Wormwood Scrubs, from which he later famously escaped, he gave lessons to his fellow inmates in the Holy Koran.

  Two years after receiving the unsettling news of George Blake’s treachery, I was serving as a Second Secretary (Political) at the British Embassy in Bonn. Summoning me to his office late one evening, my Head of Station informed me, strictly for my own information, of what every Englishman would be reading in his evening newspaper the next day: that Kim Philby, MI6’s brilliant former head of counter-intelligence, once tipped to become Chief of the Service, was also a Russian spy and, as we were only gradually allowed to know, had been one since 1937.

  Later in this book you will read an account by Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s friend, confidant and colleague in war and peace, of their final encounter in Beirut that led to Philby’s partial confession. And it may cross your mind that Elliott’s account is mysteriously short on outrage or even indignation. The reason is very simple. Spies are not policemen, neither are they quite the moral realists they like to think they are. If your mission in life is to win over traitors to your cause, you can hardly complain when one of your own, even if you loved him as a brother and cherished colleague, and shared every aspect of your secret work with him, turns out to have been obtained by someone else. It was a lesson I had taken to heart by the time I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. And when I came to write Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it was Kim Philby’s murky lamp that lit my path.

  Spying and novel writing are made for each other. Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it. If we didn’t share its habits before we entered it, we will share them ever after. For proof of this we need look no further than Graham Greene, and the anecdotal account of his self-imposed game of foxes with the FBI. Perhaps it is recorded by one of his disobliging biographers, but better not to look.

  All through his later life, Greene, the novelist and former spy, was convinced that he was on the FBI blacklist of subversive pro-communists. And he had good reason, given his numerous visits to the Soviet Union, his continuing and outspoken loyalty to his friend and fellow spy Kim Philby, and his futile exertions to reconcile the Roman Catholic and communist causes. When the Berlin Wall went up, Greene had himself photographed posing on the wrong side of it, while telling the world he’d rather be there than here. Indeed, Greene’s aversion to the United States and his fear of the consequences of his radical pronouncements reached such heights that he insisted that any meeting with his US publisher be conducted on the Canadian side of the border.

  Came a day, then, when he was at last able to demand sight of his FBI file. It contained one entry only: that he had kept company with the politically erratic British ballerina Margot Fonteyn, when she was fighting the doomed cause of her paralysed and faithless husband, Roberto Arias.

  Spying did not introduce me to secrecy. Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood. In adolescence we are all spies of a sort, but I was a veteran. When the secret world came to claim me, it felt like a coming home. Why this was so is best left to the later chapter called ‘Son of the author’s father’.

  2

  Dr Globke’s laws

  Bloody Bonn was what we young British diplomats called the place in the early sixties, not out of any particular disrespect for the sleepy Rhineland spa, seat of the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire and birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven, but as a sceptical doffing of the cap to our hosts’ absurd dreams of moving the German capital up the road to Berlin, which we happily shared with them in the certainty it would never happen.

  In 1961 the British Embassy, a sprawling industrial eyesore on the dual carriageway between Bonn and Bad Godesberg, boasted three hundred souls, the majority of them home-based rather than locally engaged. To this day I can’t imagine what the rest of us got up to in the fuggy Rhineland air. Yet for me the three years in Bonn contain such seismic shifts in my life that today I think of it as the place where my past life entered its unstoppable demise, and my writing life began.

  True, back in London I had had my first novel accepted by a publisher. But it wasn’t till I’d been in Bonn several months that it made its modest appearance. I remember driving to Cologne airport on a damp Sunday afternoon, buying copies of the British newspapers, then parking the car and sitting down on a sheltered garden bench in Bonn and reading them alone. Reviewers were benign, if not quite as ecstatic as I had hoped. They approved of George Smiley. And suddenly that was all there was.

  Probably all writers, at any stage in their lives, tend to feel that way: the weeks and months of anguish and wrong turnings; the precious finished typescript; the ritual enthusiasm of agent and publisher; the proof editing; the great expectations; the angst as the Big Day approaches; the reviews, and suddenly it’s over. You wrote the book a year ago, so what are you sitting around for, instead of writing something new?

  Well, in fact, I was writing something new.

  I had begun a novel set in a public school. For background I was using Sherborne, where I had been a pupil, and Eton, where I had been a schoolmaster. There is a suggestion that I started preparing the novel while I was still teaching at Eton, but I have no memory of doing so. Rising at an unearthly hour before setting off for the Embassy, I completed the novel in short order, and sent it in. So once again, job done – except that next time round I was determined to do something grittier. I would write about the world on my doorstep.

  By the time I had been en poste for a year, my remit covered all of West Germany and gave me unlimited freedom of movement and access. As one of the Embassy’s travelling evangelists for Britain’s entry into the Common Market, I could invite myself to town halls, political societies and mayoral parlours anywhere in West Germany. In the young West Germany’s determination to appear an open, democratic society, all doors were open to the inquisitive young diplomat. I could sit all day in the Bundestag’s diplomatic gallery, lunch with parliamentary journalists and advisers. I could knock on ministerial doors, attend protest rallies and lofty weekend seminars on culture and the German soul, all the while trying to fathom, fifteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, where the old Germany ended and the new one began. In 1961 this wasn’t at all easy. Or it wasn’t to me.

  A dictum attributed to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, nicknamed ‘The Old Man’, who held the post from West Germany’s foundation in 1949 until 1963, neatly summed up the problem: ‘You don’t throw away dirty water for as long as you haven’t got any clean.’ It is widely assumed that this was a veiled reference to Dr Hans Josef Maria Globke, his grey eminence on matters of national security and much else. Globke’s record was impressive even by Nazi standards. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, he had distinguished himself by drafting anti-Semitic laws for the Prussian government.

  Two years later under his new Führer he drafted the Nuremberg Law, revoking German citizenship for all Jews and, for purposes of identification, requiring them to insert the word Sara or Israel into their names. Non-Jews who were married to Jews were ordered to get rid of their spouses. Serving under Adolf Eichmann in the Nazi Office of Jewish Affairs, he drafted a new law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which sounded the signal for the Holocaust.

  Simultaneously, I presume by virtue of his ardent Catholicism, Globke contrived to reinsure himself with right-wing anti-Nazi resistance groups: so much so that he was earmarked for high office should the plotters succeed in getting rid of Hitler. And perhaps this was how, when the war ended, he eluded half-hearted Allied attempts to prosecute him. Adenauer was determined to have his Globke at his side. The British did not stand in
Globke’s way.

  Thus it happened that in 1951, a mere six years after the end of the war, and two years after the creation of West Germany as a state, Dr Hans Globke achieved a stroke of legislation on behalf of his former and present Nazi colleagues that today remains barely conceivable. Under Globke’s New Law, as I shall call it, civil servants of the Hitler regime whose careers had been curtailed by circumstances beyond their control would henceforth receive full restitution of such pay, back-pay and pension rights as they would have enjoyed if the Second World War hadn’t taken place, or if Germany had won it. In a word, they would be entitled to whatever promotion would have come their way had their careers proceeded without the inconvenience of an Allied victory.

  The effect was immediate. The old Nazi guard clung to the plum jobs. A younger, less tarnished generation was consigned to life below stairs.

  Now enter Dr Johannes Ullrich, scholar, archivist and lover of Bach, good red burgundy and Prussian military history. In April 1945, a few days before Berlin’s military commander unconditionally surrendered to the Russians, Ullrich was doing what he had been doing for the last ten years: beavering away as curator and junior archivist of the Prussian Imperial Archive at the German Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse. As the Kingdom of Prussia was dissolved in 1918, no document that passed through his hands was less than twenty-seven years old.

  I have seen no pictures of Johannes, as I came to know him, in his youth, but I imagine him a quite athletic fellow, sternly dressed in the suits and stiff collars of the bygone age that was his spiritual habitat. With Hitler’s rise to power he was three times urged by his superiors to join the Nazi Party, and three times he refused. Junior archivist was therefore what he remained when, in the spring of 1945, General Zhukov’s Red Army advanced on the Wilhelmstrasse. Soviet troops entering Berlin had little interest in taking prisoners, but the German Foreign Office promised prisoners of high value, as well as incriminating Nazi documents.