Blondie had not wanted to take the second contract, but the extra money the voice on the phone had guaranteed was too much to turn down. He and his mates were East Enders and hated to go south of the river. The animus between the gangs of the East End and the mobs of South London is legendary in the capital’s underworld, and for a southerner to go “up East” uninvited, or the reverse, can be a ticket to a lot of trouble. Still, Blondie reckoned that at three-thirty in the morning things should be quiet enough and he could be back in his own manor with the job done before he was spotted.
When Jim Rawlings opened his door, a heavy hand shoved him straight back down the hallway leading to his sitting room. The two slags came in first, with Blondie bringing up the rear. Rawlings backed fast down the hallway to let them all in. When Blondie slammed the door behind him, Ronnie came out of the kitchen and leveled the first slag with a pickax handle. Syd came out of the coat closet in a rush and used a nailbar on the cranium of the second man. Both went down like felled oxen.
Blondie was scrabbling at the doorknob, trying to get back out to the safety of the landing, when Rawlings, stepping over the bodies, caught him by the scruff and slammed him face-first into a glass-fronted portrait of the Madonna, ownership of which was the nearest the little man had ever come to organized religion. The glass broke and Blondie collected several small shards in his cheeks.
Ronnie and Syd tied up the two heavies while Rawlings hauled Blondie into the sitting room. Minutes later, held at the feet by Ronnie and around the waist by Syd, Blondie was protruding several feet out of the window, eight floors above the ground.
“See that parking lot down there?” Rawlings asked him. Even in the blackness of a winter night, the man could just make out the glint of streetlights on cars a long way down. He nodded.
“Well, in twenty minutes that parking lot’s going to be full of fuzz. Standing around a plastic sheet. And guess who’s going to be under it, all squashed and nasty?”
Blondie, aware that his life expectancy was now measurable in seconds, called from his extremity, “All right, I’ll cough.”
They brought him in and sat him down. He tried to be ingratiating. “Look, we know the score, squire. I was just ’ired to do a job, right? Recover something what got nicked. ...”
“That old man in Golders Green,” said Rawlings.
“Yeah, well, ’e said you’d got it, so I come ’ere.”
“He was a mate of mine. He’s dead.”
“Well, I’m sorry, squire. I didn’t know ’e ’ad an ’eart condition. The boys only tapped ’im a couple of times.”
“You crap-eater. His mouth was all over the parish and all his ribs cracked. So what did you come for?”
Blondie told him.
“The what?” asked Rawlings incredulously.
Blondie told him again. “Don’t ask me, squire. I was just paid to get it back. Or find out what ’appened to it.”
“Well,” said Rawlings, “I’m very close to having you and your mates in the Thames before sunup, wearing a nice new line in concrete underpants. Only I don’t need the aggro. So I’m letting you go. You tell your punter it was empty. Completely empty. And I burned it ... to a cinder. There’s nothing left of it. You don’t really think I’d keep something taken from a job? I’m not a complete fool. Now get out.”
At the doorway Rawlings called Ronnie back. “See them back across the river. And give the little rat a present from me, for the old man. Okay?”
Ronnie nodded. Minutes later, down in the parking lot, the more damaged of the East Enders went into the back of his own van, still trussed up. The half-conscious one was put behind the steering wheel with hands untied and told to drive. Blondie was thrown in the front passenger seat, his broken arms in his lap. Ronnie and Syd followed them to Waterloo Bridge, then turned back and went home.
Jim Rawlings was perplexed. He made himself a cup of espresso and thought things over.
He had indeed intended to burn the attaché case amid the rubble. But it was so beautifully hand-tooled; the dull, burnished leather glowed in the light of the flames like metal. He had examined it for any sign of an identification mark. There was none. Against his better judgment and despite Zablonsky’s warning, he had decided to risk keeping it.
He went to a closet and brought it down from a high shelf. This time he went over it like a professional cracksman. It took him ten minutes to find the stud on the hinge side of the case that slid sideways when pushed hard with the ball of the thumb. From inside the case he heard a sound. When he reopened the case the base had risen half an inch at one side. With a paper knife he eased up the base and glanced inside the flat compartment between the case’s real base and the false one. With tweezers he extracted the ten sheets of paper that lay within.
Rawlings was no expert on government documents, but he could understand the rubric of the Ministry of Defense, and the words TOP SECRET are understandable in any man’s language. He sat back and whistled softly.
Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone “trash” his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional “faces,” if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts.
Rawlings knew whose apartment he had burgled, but the robbery had not yet been reported, and he suspected, for reasons he could only now fathom, that it might never be. So he did not need to draw attention to it. On the other hand, with Zablonsky dead, the diamonds were probably gone forever, and his cut of their value with them. He began to hate the man who owned that apartment.
He had already handled the papers without gloves, and he knew his own prints were on file. He dared not identify himself, so he had to wipe the papers clean with a cloth, erasing the traitor’s fingerprints as well.
The next afternoon, Sunday, he mailed a plain brown envelope, well sealed and with an excess of stamps, from a post box in the Elephant and Castle. There was no collection until Monday morning and the package did not arrive at its destination until Tuesday.
That day, January 20, Brigadier Bertie Capstick called John Preston at Gordon. The bluff geniality was gone from his voice. “Johnny, remember what we were talking about the other day? If anything cropped up ...? Well, it has. And it’s not the Christmas fund. It’s big, Johnny. Someone has mailed me something in the post. ... No, not a bomb, though it might turn out worse. It looks as if we have a leak here, Johnny. And he has to be very, very high. That means it comes under your department. I think you’d better come down and take a look.”
That morning also, in the owner’s absence, but by appointment and letting themselves in with provided keys, two workmen arrived at an eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House. During the day they chipped the damaged Hamber safe out of the masonry of the wall and replaced it with an identical model. By nightfall they had redecorated that wall as it had been before. Then they left.
Chapter 4
Moscow
Wednesday, January 7, 1987
FROM: H. A. R. Philby
TO: The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Permit me to begin, Comrade General Secretary, with the briefest description of the background of the British Labour Party and of its steady penetration and successful eventual domination by the Hard Left over the past fourteen years.
The Party was originally founded by the trade union movement as the political arm of the recently organized British working class. From the outset it espoused the cause of moderate bourgeois socialism—of reform rather than revolution. The home of the true Marxist-Leninist was then in the Communist Party.
Even though the bedrock of Marxism-Leninism in Britain has always been in the trade union movement, true believers were excluded from the Labour Party itself. From the 1930s onward, a few of our pro-Soviet Hard Left friends in Britain managed to infiltrate the Parry by subterfuge, but they had, once inside it
, to maintain an extremely low profile. Other friends of Moscow, perceived as they sought to enter the Labour Party, were refused admission or, if spotted inside the Party, were expelled.
The reason our true friends in Britain were for so many years excluded from the mass-support Labour Party can be described in two words: “proscribed list.”
This was a list of banned organizations; it prohibited all fraternal contact between the Labour Party and those much-smaller groups inhabited by the true revolutionary socialists—that is, the Marxist-Leninists. Further, no member of a Hard Left group was permitted membership in the Labour Party under the terms of the proscribed list, which were staunchly maintained by successive Labour Party leaders for fifty years.
As the Labour Party was the only mass-support party of the Left with a hope of acceding to government of Britain, infiltration and domination of it by our friends, following the classic Leninist teaching of “entryism,” was for all those years an elusive dream. Nevertheless, our friends within the Party, few though they were, worked tirelessly and covertly; in 1973 their efforts were finally crowned with success.
In that year, when the Party was under the weak and vacillating leadership of Harold Wilson, they achieved a wafer-thin majority on the all-important Party National Executive Committee, and used it to pass a resolution abolishing the proscribed list. The outcome was beyond their dreams.
With the floodgates open, shoals of Hard Left young activists of the post-1945 generation swarmed into the Labour Party and were at once able to offer themselves for office at every level of the Party organization. The road to entryism, influence, and eventual takeover was open, and that takeover has now been achieved.
Since 1973 the absolutely vital National Executive Committee has seldom been out of the hands of a Hard Left majority, and it has been through the skillful use of this tool that the constitution of the Party and its composition at the higher levels have been changed out of all recognition.
A brief word of digression, Comrade General Secretary, to explain precisely whom I mean by “our friends” within the British Labour Party and trade union movement. They fall into two categories: the deliberate and the unwilling. With the first category I am referring to people not of the so-called Soft Left or of the Trotskyite aberration, both of whom abhor Moscow, albeit for different reasons. I refer to those of the Hard Left with, at their core, the Ultra-Hard Left. These are dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninists, who would not appreciate being called Communists since this implies membership in the quite useless British Communist Party. They are, nevertheless, staunch friends of Moscow and in nine cases out often will act in accordance with Moscow’s wishes, even though those wishes may remain unexpressed and even though the person concerned would stoutly claim he was acting for “conscientious” or “British” reasons.
The second group of friends inside, and now dominating, the British Labour Party can be characterized as follows: those persons with a deep political and emotional commitment to a form of socialism so far left as to qualify as Marxism-Leninism; persons who will, in any given set of circumstances or in any contingency, almost invariably react quite spontaneously in a manner completely parallel to, or convergent with, the desires of Soviet foreign policy vis-à-vis Britain and/or the Western Alliance; persons who need no briefing or instructions whatsoever, and who would probably be offended if such were proposed; persons who, wittingly or unwittingly, whether impelled by personal conviction, a warped patriotism, a desire to destroy, a craving for self-advancement, a fear of intimidatory pressure, a sense of their own self-importance, or a desire to move with the herd, will conduct themselves in a manner that suits our Soviet interests perfectly. They all constitute agents of influence to our benefit.
They all, of course, claim to be seekers after democracy. Happily, the overwhelming majority of Britishers today still understand by the word democracy a pluralist (multiparty) state, whose governing body shall be chosen at periodic intervals by universal adult suffrage based upon the secret ballot. Obviously, our Hard Left friends over there, being people who eat, drink, breathe, sleep, dream, and work at left-wing politics every waking hour of every day, mean by the word democracy a “democracy of the committed,” with its controlling roles performed by themselves and like-thinkers. Fortunately, the British press takes few steps to correct this misapprehension.
Thus, from 1973 onward, our Marxist-Leninist friends in the Labour Party were able to devote themselves single-mindedly to the struggle to capture the Party covertly, a program made possible only by the abolition of the proscribed list. This is how it was done.
The Labour Party has always stood like a tripod on three legs: the trade unions, the constituency Labour parties (one each in the constituencies that make up the British electoral pattern), and the Parliamentary Labour Party, the group of Labour MPs who were elected at the previous general election. The Party leader is always drawn from among these.
The trade unions are the most powerful of the three and exercise this power in two ways. One, they are the Party’s paymasters, funding the coffers from political levies deducted from millions of workers’ pay packets. Two, at Party conferences they dispose of huge “block votes,” cast by the Union National Executive on behalf of millions of uncanvassed members. These block votes can ensure the passage of any resolution and elect up to a third of the Party’s all-important National Executive Committee.
These vote-casting union executive committees are absolutely vital; they comprise the full-time union activists and officials who decide union policy. They stand at the peak of the pyramid of which the middle ranks are the area officials and the lower ranks are the branch officials. Thus the effective takeover by Hard Left activists of great swaths of trade union officialdom was clearly essential, and has in fact been achieved.
The great ally of our friends in this task has always been the apathy of the largely moderate rank-and-file union members, who cannot be bothered to attend union branch meetings. Thus the activists, who attend everything, have been able to take over thousands of branches, hundreds of areas, and the cream of the executive committees. At present the biggest ten of the eighty unions affiliated to the Labour Party control half the union movement’s votes; nine of those ten have Hard Left control at the top, as against two in the early 1970s. All this has been achieved over the heads of millions of British workers by no more than ten thousand dedicated men.
The importance of this Hard Left-dominated union vote will become plain when I describe the electoral college that chooses the new Party leader; the unions hold forty percent of the votes in this so-called college.
Next, the constituency Labour parties, or CLPs. At the core of these lie the general management committees, which, apart from running the day-to-day business of the Party within the constituency, have one other vital function: they choose the Labour candidate for Parliament. Over the decade 1973 to 1983, hard-line activist young people of the extreme Left began to move into the constituencies, and by assiduous attendance at dull and sparsely filled CLP meetings ousted the old-time officials to gain control of one general management committee after another.
As each successive constituency fell to the new Hard Left activist control, the position of the largely centrist MPs representing those constituencies became tougher and tougher. Still, they could not be easily ousted. For the true triumph of the Hard Left it was necessary to weaken, indeed emasculate, the independence of conscience of a member of Parliament; to transform him from the trustee of all his constituents’ interests into a mere legate of his general management committee.
This was brilliantly achieved by the Hard Left at Brighton in 1979 with the passage of the new rule requiring the annual reselection (or deselection) of MPs by their management committees. The rule caused a massive switch of power. A whole group of centrists quit to form the Social Democratic Party; others were deselected and left politics; some of the ablest centrists were harassed into resignation. Still, the Parliamentary Labour
Party, though emasculated and humiliated, was left with one vital function: the MPs, and they alone, could elect the Labour Party leader. It was crucial, to complete the three-pronged capture, to take that power away from them. This was achieved, again at the urging of the Hard Left, in 1981 with the creation of the electoral college, in which thirty percent of the votes are held by the Parliamentary Party, thirty percent by the constituency parties, and forty percent by the trade unions. The college will elect each new leader as and when needed, and reconfirm him annually. This last function is crucial to the plans now afoot, and which I will explain.
The struggle for control that I have described brings the story to the general election of 1983. The takeover was almost complete, but our friends had made two errors, aberrations from the Leninist doctrine of caution and dissimulation. They had come out too openly, too visibly, to win those titanic struggles, and the premature call for a general election caught them on the hop. The Hard Left needed one extra year to consolidate, mollify, unify. They did not get it. The Party, saddled too early with the most extreme Hard Left manifesto in history, was in complete disarray. Worse, the British public had seen the real face of the Hard Left.