Behind him as Chairman of the KGB he had left his own man, General Fedorchuk. From inside the Party, the present General Secretary had consolidated his position with the Central Committee and then bided his time through the brief Andropov and Chernenko eras until his eventual succession. Within months of that accession, he had sewn up the power sources: Party, armed forces, KGB, Interior Ministry, MVD. With all the aces in his hands, no one dared oppose or conspire against him.
“We have devised a plan, Comrade General Secretary,” said Dr. Rogov, using, as they were among others, the formal term of address. “It is a concrete plan, an active measure, a proposal to cause a destabilization among the British people that would make the Sarajevo affair and the Berlin Reichstag fire pale into insignificance. We have called it Plan Aurora.”
It took him an hour to read the full details. He glanced up occasionally to see if there was any reaction, but the General Secretary was a grand master in a much bigger game of chess and his face remained blank. At last Dr. Rogov had finished. There was silence while they waited.
“It has risks,” said the General Secretary quietly. “What guarantees are there that it will not backfire like certain ... other operations?”
They all knew what he meant. He had been badly shaken by the dismal failure of the Wojtyla Affair. It had taken three years for the rumbles and accusations to die away, and it had caused the sort of global publicity the USSR definitely did not need.
In the early spring of 1981, the Bulgarian Secret Service had reported that their people among the Turkish community in West Germany had trawled a strange fish. For ethnic, cultural, and historical reasons, the Bulgars, most loyal and subservient of Russia’s satellites, were deeply involved in Turkey and the Turks. The man they had picked up was a dedicated terrorist killer who had been trained by the Ultra Left in Lebanon, had killed for the Ultra-Right Gray Wolves in Turkey, escaped from prison, and fled to West Germany.
The odd thing about him was that he had expressed a personal obsession to kill the Pope. Should they throw Mehmet Ali Agca back to the ocean or give him funds and false papers, along with a gun, and let him run?
In normal circumstances the KGB response would have been the cautious one: Kill him. But circumstances were not normal. Karol Wojtyla, the world’s first Polish Pope, was a major menace. Poland was in an uproar; Communist rule there could soon be blown apart by the dissident Solidarity movement.
The dissident Wojtyla had already visited Poland once, with disastrous results from the Soviet point of view. He had to be stopped or discredited. The KGB replied to the Bulgars: Go ahead, but we don’t want to know. In May 1981, with money, false papers, and a gun, Agca was escorted to Rome, pointed in the right direction, and given his head. As a result, a lot of people had lost theirs.
“With respect, I do not believe the two can be compared,” said Dr. Rogov, who had been the principal architect of Plan Aurora and was prepared to defend it. “The Wojtyla Affair was a disaster for three reasons: the target did not die; the assassin was caught alive; and, worst of all, there was no highly developed, in-place disinformation conspiracy to blame—for example, the Italian or American Extreme Right. There should have been a tidal wave of believable evidence available for release, proving to the world it was the Right that put Agca up to it.”
The General Secretary nodded like an old lizard.
“Here,” proceeded Rogov, “the situation is different. There are fallbacks and cutouts at every stage. The executant would be a top professional who would end his own life before capture. The physical artifacts are mostly harmless to look at, and none can be traced back to the USSR. The executant officer cannot survive the execution of the plan. And there are subsequent subplans to place the blame firmly and convincingly on the Americans.”
The General Secretary turned to General Marchenko. “Would it work?” he asked.
The three committee members were uncomfortable. It would be easier if they could grasp the General Secretary’s reaction, then simply agree with it. But he had given nothing away.
Marchenko took a deep breath and nodded. “It is feasible,” he agreed. “I believe it would take from ten to sixteen months to put into operation.”
“Comrade Colonel?” asked the General Secretary of Philby.
Philby’s stutter increased as he spoke. It always did when he was under stress. “As to the risks, I am not best able to judge them. Nor the question of technical feasibility. As to effect—it would, beyond any doubt, swing over ten percent of the British ‘floating’ vote into a hasty decision to vote Labour.”
“Comrade Professor Krilov?”
“I have to oppose it, Comrade General Secretary. I regard it as extremely hazardous, in execution and in its possible consequences. It is completely contrary to the terms of the Fourth Protocol. If that is ever breached, we may all suffer.”
The General Secretary seemed lost in meditation, which no one was about to disturb. The hooded eyes brooded behind the glittering glasses for five minutes. At length he raised his head.
“There are no notes, no tape recordings, no shreds of this plan outside this room?”
“None,” agreed the four committeemen.
“Gather up the files and folders and pass them to me,” said the General Secretary. When this was done, he went on, in his habitual monotone.
“It is reckless, crazy, adventurist, and dangerous beyond belief,” he intoned. “The Committee is disbanded. You are to return to your professions and never mention either the Albion Committee or Plan Aurora again.”
He was still sitting there, staring at the table, when the four subdued and humbled men trooped out. They put on their coats and hats in silence, hardly meeting one another’s eyes, and were led downstairs to their cars.
In the courtyard, each climbed into his own car. In his Volga, Philby waited for Gregoriev to start the engine, but the man just sat there. The three other limousines swept out of the square, under the arch, and into the boulevard. There was a tap on Philby’s window. He wound it down to see the face of Major Pavlov.
“Would you come with me, please, Comrade Colonel?”
Philby’s heart sank. He understood now that he knew too much; he was the one foreigner in the group. The General Secretary had a reputation for tying up loose ends rather permanently. He followed Major Pavlov back into the building. Two minutes later he was shown into the General Secretary’s sitting room. The old man was still in his wheelchair at the low coffee table. He gestured Philby to a seat. In trepidation the British traitor took it.
“What did you really think of it?” asked the General Secretary softly.
Philby swallowed hard. “Ingenious, audacious, hazardous, but, if it worked, effective,” he said.
“It’s brilliant,” murmured the General Secretary. “And it is going ahead. But under my personal auspices. This is to be no one else’s operation, just mine. And you will be closely involved in it.”
“May I ask one thing?” Philby ventured. “Why me? I am a foreigner. Even though I have served the Soviet Union all my life and have lived here for a third of it, I am still a foreigner.”
“Precisely,” replied the General Secretary, “and you have no patronage except mine. You could not begin to conspire against me.
“You will take leave of your wife and family and dismiss your driver. You will take up residence in the guest suite at my dacha at Usovo. There you will put together the team that will undertake Plan Aurora. You will have any authority you need—it will come from my office at the Central Committee. You, personally, will not show yourself.” He pressed a buzzer under the table. “You will work at all times under the eye of this man. I believe you already know him.”
The door had opened. In it stood the impassive, cold Major Pavlov.
“He is highly intelligent and extremely suspicious,” said the General Secretary with approval. “He is also totally loyal. He happens to be my nephew.”
As Philby rose to accompany the major, t
he General Secretary held out a slip of paper to him. It was a flimsy from the First Chief Directorate marked for the personal attention of the General Secretary of the CPSU. Philby read it with disbelief.
“Yes,” said the General Secretary, “it reached me yesterday. You will not have General Marchenko’s ten to sixteen months. It appears that Mrs. Thatcher is going to make her move in June. We must make ours one week before that.”
Philby let out his breath slowly. In 1917 it had taken ten days to complete the Russian Revolution. Britain’s greatest turncoat of them all was being given just ninety days to guarantee the British one.
PART TWO
Chapter 8
When John Preston landed at Jan Smuts Airport on the morning of March 13, the local head of station, a tall, thin, blond man named Dennis Grey, was there to meet him. From the observation terrace two South African NIS men watched his arrival but made no move to come closer.
Customs and immigration were a formality, and within thirty minutes of touchdown the two Englishmen were speeding north to Pretoria. Preston looked at the landscape of the highveld with curiosity; it did not look much like his impression of Africa—just a modern six-lane blacktop highway running across a bare plain and flanked by modern, European-style farms and factories.
“I’ve booked you into the Burgerspark,” said Grey. “In central Pretoria. I was told you wanted to stay in a hotel rather than at the residency.”
“Yes,” said Preston. “Thank you.”
“We’ll go and check in first. We have an appointment to meet ‘the Beast’ at eleven.” The not-too-affectionate title had originally been bestowed upon General Van Den Berg, a police general and head of the former Bureau of State Security, or BOSS. After the so-called Muldergate scandal of 1979, the unhappy marriage of the South African state’s intelligence arm and its security police had been dissolved, to the great relief of the professional intelligence officers and the foreign service, some of whom had been consistently embarrassed by the BOSS’s brass-knuckle tactics.
The intelligence arm had been reconstituted under the title National Intelligence Service (NIS), and General Henry Pienaar had moved across from1 his post as head of Military Intelligence. He was not a police general, but a military one, and while he was not a life-long intelligence officer like Sir Nigel Irvine, his years garnering military intelligence had taught him there were more ways to kill a cat than by thumping it with blunt objects. General Van Den Berg had passed into retirement, still prepared to tell anyone who would listen that “the hand of God” was upon him. Unkindly, the British had passed his nickname onto the shoulders of General Pienaar.
Preston registered at the hotel on Van Der Walt Street, dumped his bags, had a quick wash and shave, and joined Grey in the lobby at half past ten. From there they drove to Union Building.
The seat of most of the South African government is a huge, long, ocher-brown sandstone block, three stories high, its four-hundred-yard frontage studded by four colonnaded projections. It stands in central Pretoria on a hill gazing south across a valley along whose bed runs Kerk Straat, and the esplanade at the front of the building commands a panoramic view across the valley to the brown hills of the highveld to the south, topped by the squat, square mass of the Voortrekker Monument.
Dennis Grey presented his identification at the reception desk and mentioned his appointment with the chief of Intelligence. In minutes a young official had appeared, to lead them to the office of General Pienaar. The headquarters of the NIS chief is on the top floor at the western end of the building. Grey and Preston were led down interminable corridors decorated in what appeared to be a standard South African civil service brown-and-cream motif with a heavy accent on dark wood paneling. The general’s office, at the end of the last corridor on the third floor, is flanked on the right by an office containing two secretaries and on the left by another containing two staff officers.
The official knocked on the last door, waited for the gruff command to enter, and showed the British visitors in. It was a fairly somber, formal office, containing a large and obviously cleared desk facing the door and with four leather club chairs grouped around a low table near the windows, which looked down toward Kerk Straat and across the valley to the hills. There were a number of apparently operational maps coyly covered by green curtains around the walls.
General Pienaar was a big, heavy man who rose as they entered, and walked forward to shake hands. Grey made the introductions and the general gestured them to the club chairs. Coffee was served, but the conversation remained at the level of small talk. Grey took the hint, made his farewells, and left. General Pienaar stared at Preston for some time.
“So, Mr. Preston,” he said in almost unaccented English, “the subject of our diplomat Jan Marais. I have already told Sir Nigel, and now I tell you: he does not work for me or my government, at least not as a controller of agents in Britain. You are here to try to find out who he does work for?”
“That’s my job, General, if I can.”
General Pienaar nodded several times. “I have given Sir Nigel my word that you will have our complete cooperation here. And I will abide by my word.”
“Thank you, General.”
“I am going to attach to you one of my two personal staff officers. He will help you in anything you need: obtain files that you may wish to examine, interpret if necessary. You speak any Afrikaans?”
“No, General, not a word.”
“Then there will be some translating to be done. Perhaps some interpreting.”
He pressed a buzzer on the table and in seconds the door opened to admit a man of the same physical size as the general but much younger. Preston put him in his early thirties. He had ginger hair and sandy eyebrows.
“Let me introduce Captain Andries Viljoen. Andy, this is Mr. John Preston from London, the man you will be working with.”
Preston rose to shake hands. He sensed a thinly veiled hostility in the young Afrikaner, perhaps a mirror of his superior’s better-masked feelings.
“I have put at your disposal a room down the corridor,” said General Pienaar. “Well, let’s waste no more time, gentlemen. Please get on with it.”
When they were alone in the office set aside for them, Viljoen asked, “What would you like to start with, Mr. Preston?”
Preston sighed inwardly. The casual first-name informality back at Charles and Gordon was a lot easier to get along with. “The file on Jan Marais, if you please, Captain Viljoen.”
The captain’s triumph was evident as he produced it from a desk drawer. “We have, of course, been through it already,” he said. “I took it out of Foreign Ministry Personnel Registry myself some days ago.” He placed a fat file in a buff cover in front of Preston. “Let me summarize what we have been able to glean from it, if this will help you. Marais entered the South African foreign service in Cape Town in the spring of 1946. He has been in the service for forty years—a bit more—and is due to retire in December. He comes from a perfect Afrikaner background and has never come under the slightest suspicion. That is why his behavior in London appears such a mystery.”
Preston nodded. He did not need it spelled out any more clearly. The view here was that London had made a mistake. He opened the file. Among the top documents was a sheaf of papers handwritten in English.
“That,” said Viljoen, “is his autobiography, a requirement of candidates for the foreign service. In those days, when the United Party under Jan Smuts was in power, there was a much greater use of English than today. Now such a document would be written in Afrikaans. Of course, candidates must be fluent in both languages.”
“Then I suppose we had better start with it,” said Preston. “While I read it, could you please make a synopsis of his career while in the service? Especially foreign postings—where, when, and for how long.”
“All right”—Viljoen nodded—“if he did go rotten, if he was turned, it probably happened somewhere abroad.” Viljoen’s stress on the word if was j
ust enough to imply his doubt, and the corrosive effect of foreigners upon good Afrikaners came out in the word abroad. Preston began to read.
I was born in August 1925 in the small farming town of Duiwelskloof in the northern Transvaal, the only son of a farmer in the Mootseki Valley just outside the town. My father, Laurens Marais, was a pure Afrikaner, but my mother, Mary, was an Anglo. It was an unusual marriage in those days, but because of it I was brought up fluent in both English and Afrikaans.
My father was considerably older than my mother, who was of frail disposition and died when I was ten in one of the typhoid epidemics that in those days swept that region from time to time. My father was forty-six when I was born, and my mother only twenty-five. He farmed potatoes and tobacco mainly, and also some chickens, geese, turkeys, cattle, sheep, and wheat. All his life he was a strong supporter of the United Party, and I was named after Marshal Jan Smuts.
Preston broke off. “I suppose all this would not have done his candidature any harm,” he suggested.
“No harm at all,” said Viljoen, looking over the passages. “The United Party was still in power then. The National Party won the country only in 1948.” Preston read on.
When I was seven I went to the local farm school in Duiwelskloof, and at the age of twelve went on to Merensky High, which had been founded five years earlier. After the outbreak of war in 1939, my father, who was a keen admirer of Britain and the empire, followed every item of news about the war in Europe on his wireless set, sitting on the stoep in the evenings after work. After my mother died we had become even closer, and I, too, soon began to yearn to take part in the war.