Young Philby Read online

  I decided to provoke the prisoner in the hope of making him depart from what was clearly a carefully prepared narrative. “From the point of view of the Centre, the recruitment of the Englishman must be seen in a more sinister light. How can he possibly be a bona fide agent when the person who recruited him is a convicted German spy?”

  He retorted, “You are in much the same frame of mind as a dog chasing its tail.”

  “How dare you insult a Chekist!”

  My outburst seemed to amuse him. “Someone minutes away from having a large-caliber bullet shot into the nape of his neck doesn’t lose sleep over the insulting of a Chekist.”

  I concede I saw his point and decided there was nothing to be gained by taking offense. “You don’t answer my question,” I observed evenly. “Not only were you, the London NKVD Rezident and the Englishman’s controller, a traitor to the motherland, your predecessor in the London Residentura, Ignaty Reif, cryptonym Marr, who also vouched for the Englishman, betrayed the motherland, and suffered execution. Still another of the Englishman’s Soviet controllers”—I shuffled through my index cards until I came across the one I wanted—“Alexander Orlov, cryptonym the Swede, defected to the West last month—”

  “The Swede defected!”

  “His real name was Leon Lazarevich Feldbin—he is an Israelite. He vanished from his post in the south of France.”

  “Orlov was an honest Bolshevik. He fought in the revolution. He was with the Twelfth Red Army on the Polish front after the revolution. Feliks Dzerzhinsky himself brought Alexander into the intelligence apparatus. If he appears to have defected, consider the possibility that he is part of a Centre operation to deceive the enemy services with disinformation.”

  “Needless to say, I have consulted my superiors. Orlov’s defection was not an operation. He knew that the Englishman had been recruited by our NKVD—many of his reports from the field passed through Orlov’s hands. Yet even as we speak, the Englishman has not been arrested. The facts speak for themselves.”

  The condemned prisoner slumped on his stool, shaking his head in disbelief. “You don’t take into account the success of the Englishman’s mission in Spain during the civil war.”

  “While he was supposedly working undercover in Spain as a British journalist, he was instructed to assassinate the Fascist leader Franco. Not surprisingly, he did not make the slightest attempt to carry out this order. Not surprisingly, given that you have been exposed as a German agent, given that Germany supported Franco and his Nationalist armies, you dispatched telegrams to the Centre defending the Englishman’s failure to carry out the order.”

  “The order was preposterous. The Englishman was trained only in intelligence gathering. The instincts, the talents that are required for classic espionage do not prepare an agent for wet jobs. Beyond that there would have been no way for an armed foreigner to get close to Franco, no way to kill him and escape. The assassin, once caught, would have confessed to being a Soviet agent. It would have caused an international incident. Germany and Italy, both zealous supporters of Franco, might well have declared war on the Soviet Union. Only someone completely detached from reality could have issued such an order.”

  I had the appropriate index card in my hand but was able to quote the contents without looking at it. “The order originated with Comrade Stalin, who reasoned that the Nationalist armies and their Roman Catholic supporters would collapse and the Republicans triumph if the Fascist leader Franco could be eliminated.”

  By now the narrow room was filled with daylight. I could see the prisoner’s lips trembling. After a moment he said, “In the years since he was recruited, the Englishman has provided us with a wealth of true information.”

  “Obviously he sent true information. Penetration agents are obliged to supply true information in order to establish their credibility and make you swallow the false information that they slip into their reports. You, an Abwehr agent, supplied the Centre with true information on the German order of battle and its armament priorities in order to make us swallow a certain amount of false information.”

  “I defy you to cite a single example of false information I provided.”

  I shrugged. The conversation was going nowhere. “You stood surety for the Englishman and passed on as true information what he wrote in his reports to you.”

  I gathered up the index cards on which I had written out questions. The prisoner noticed the gesture. “Don’t go, for God’s sake,” he rasped. “I must talk to you as long as possible.”

  “I was given half an hour—”

  He produced a book of matches from the pocket of his suit jacket. “I have written out a short note to Comrade Stalin on the inside cover. It is not too late for me if you can get this to him. He will surely remember Teodor Stepanovich Maly, he will recall my loyal service to the party during the revolution, my devotion to the state since. He will instruct the judges to reconsider their verdict.”

  “Pencils are forbidden to prisoners,” I felt it was necessary to remind him. “This is a grave breach of rules and could have serious consequences for you.”

  I saw the condemned man holding out the book of matches as he shuffled toward me in his ankle irons. “You are my only hope,” he whispered.

  I am embarrassed to say I found myself stumbling across the room toward the door. I have a vague memory of rapping my knuckles on it. With relief I heard the key turn in the lock. The door opened. I filled my lungs with the stale air of the corridor. Senior Lieutenant Gusakov stood there with the comrades who had come up from the crypt, thickset men wearing stained leather aprons over their NKVD uniforms and smoking fat hand-rolled cigarettes. The sight of a female emerging from the room took them by surprise.

  “Take her away,” one of them muttered. “This is no place for a woman.”

  Another comrade, a short man with a shaven skull, said with a snicker, “Unless of course she is the one sentenced to the highest measure of punishment.” The other comrades looked away in discomfiture.

  Senior Lieutenant Gusakov gestured with a snap of his head and started toward the elevator. “Was Maly able to shed light on the inconsistencies in your predecessor’s précis?” he demanded as I fell in alongside him. He stopped in his tracks. “The Englishman—whose side is he on?”

  “The evidence I have seen so far points to his being a British agent,” I replied. “The condemned prisoner Maly said nothing to persuade me otherwise.”

  1: VIENNA, LATE SUMMER 1933

  Where an Englishman Wanders into the Wrong Century

  The Englishman came from another planet looking, no doubt, for adventure, a cause to believe in, comradeship, affection, love, sex. His luck, he found someone who dyed her hair so often she was no longer sure of the original color: me. We were roughly the same age—he was twenty-one and fresh from university when he made his way to my flat in the center of the city—but any resemblance between our life lines ended there. I was half Jewess and half not, with the two parts of my identity in constant conflict; I’d been a Zionist fighting for a distant Jewish homeland before I joined the Communists fighting for Austrian workers nearer to hand. I’d been married and divorced (when I discovered that my husband preferred to sleep in Palestine than with me). Once I’d even been thrown into an Austrian jail for two weeks for my Communist activities that came to the attention of the police; I’d been caught letting my spare room to a certain Josip Broz, who turned out to be a Croatian Communist wanted in half a dozen Balkan countries. (He would hold party meetings in my apartment, pointing to one or another of the comrades and giving them assignments with the words Ti, to—You, that. He did this so regularly we nicknamed him Tito.) My stint in prison wasn’t wasted; I discovered that, for want of a mirror, a girl could see her reflection in a cup of coffee well enough to apply lipstick, without which I feel unprotected. Despite my arrest, my clandestine work for Moscow Centre had fortunately gone undetected. You could make the case that I was at the opposite end of the spectrum from a
vestal virgin. I had taken lovers when it pleased me to take lovers but I was careful to keep an emotional distance between us, which is why they invariably ended up becoming former lovers. The truth is, I’d never really been intimate with a male of the species before the Englishman. Intimate in the sense of taking pleasure from giving pleasure. Intimate in the sense of feeling that waking up mornings next to a stark naked Homo erectus was an excellent way to begin the day.

  Ah, the Englishman … You won’t believe how innocent he was when he appeared on my doorstep: handsome in a timid sort of way, painfully unsure of himself, suffering (I later learned) from chronic indigestion, talking with an endearing stammer that became more pronounced when the subject turned to social or sexual intercourse. I could tell right off—girls are born with a sixth sense for body language—he’d never gotten laid, at least not by a female. Whether by a male is another matter entirely. Late one night, when we could hear artillery shells exploding in the workers’ quarter across town, the Englishman downed a schnapps too many and told me he’d been b-b-b-b-b-buggered, as he put it. I never did discover if this initiation took place at one of those posh British boarding schools that don’t light grate fires until water freezes in the faucets or later at Cambridge. I happened to have had enough intercourse with the King’s English, not to mention the King’s Englishmen, to know what buggered meant. Forgive me if I don’t share the details. I’m rambling. Oh dear, I do ramble when I talk about the Englishman. Yes, I was saying that, sexually speaking, he was green behind the ears when he fell into my life. I would have been surprised to learn he’d ever set eyes on a young woman’s breast, much less touched one. He certainly didn’t know how to unfasten a brassiere. When we finally got around to sharing a bed, which was ten days after he moved into my spare room, it quickly became apparent he had only a theoretical notion of feminine anatomy. But, to his credit, in sex as in espionage, he was a quick study.

  “Where did you learn to fuck like that?” I drowsily asked him the morning after that first night.

  “You b-bloody well taught me,” he said. “Your org-gasm is on my lips. I can taste it.”

  This, friends, turned out to be quintessential Philby, Kim to his mates, Harold Adrian Russell to the upper-crust English swells who happened by our table to sponge cigarettes when we took tea, as we did almost every afternoon, even in winter, on the terrace of the Café Herenhoff.

  But I skip ahead—the tale is best told chronologically. Try to imagine my stupefaction when, responding to a knock so tentative it was almost inaudible, thinking it was the Negro come to deliver coal, I opened the door of my three-room flat to find a young gentleman shifting his weight from foot to foot in excruciating uncertainty, a rucksack hanging off one lean shoulder, a small but elegant leather valise on the floor next to his swanky albeit scuffed hiking boots. My first fleeting thought was that I was in the presence of someone who had wandered into the wrong century. He had the soft pink cheeks of an adolescent who almost never needed to shave; disheveled hair with the remnant of a part in the middle; wrinkled flannel trousers with a suggestion of a crease; frayed trouser cuffs pinched by metal bicycle clips; a belted double-breasted leather motorcycle jacket with an oversized collar turned up; a beige silk scarf knotted around his throat; motorcycle goggles down around his neck; a worn leather motorcycle bonnet, the kind someone might have worn when motorcycles were first invented, hanging from a wrist. “There is no number on your door,” he said, “but as you are b-between six and eight, I decided you must be seven.”

  I worked my fingers through my freshly minted blond pageboy to see if the chemist’s peroxide was still damp. “What were you hoping to find at number seven?” I demanded, laying the foundation for the emotional wall I meant to raise between us.

  My visitor, speaking English with the barest curl to his upper lip, said, “I was led to b-believe I might be able to let a room at Latschgasse 9, ap-partment number seven.”

  The more he stammered, the more I saw my emotional wall crumble. “And who led you to believe that?”

  “One of the comrades at the Rote Hilfe Alliance that assists p-persecuted refugees.”

  “What brought you to Vienna?”

  “My motorcycle brought me to Vienna. I took the liberty of p-parking it in your courtyard next to the rubbish b-bins.”

  “I am not inquiring about your mode of transportation. I am inquiring about your motivation.”

  “Ahhh. Motivation.” I remember him shrugging in confusion. I was to discover that clichés irritated him, the more so when they spilled from his own lips. “Vienna is where the action is,” he said. “Or will b-be. I came to do my p-part.”

  I thought about this. “Are you saying you rode a motorcycle all the way from England to do your part?”

  “Not counting the channel, it’s only nine hundred miles, give or take.” He favored me with a shy smile. “If I may be so b-bold, what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Why are you in Vienna?”

  “I have a rendezvous with history.” In those days, like these days, one couldn’t be too vigilant. “Don’t change the subject. How did you know about Rote Hilfe?”

  “One of my professors at Cambridge is a wheel in the B-British Communist P-Party—he gave me a letter of introduction to the Austrian Committee for Relief from German Fascism. I can show you the letter.”

  He started to reach into his rucksack but I waved him off. Anyone could produce a letter. “What is the address of Rote Hilfe? Which comrade gave you my address?” I stood ready to slam the door in his perplexed face if he answered incorrectly.

  He produced a small spiral notebook from an inside breast pocket and, moistening the ball of a thumb on his tongue, started to leaf through the pages. I could see they were chock-filled with neat, almost microscopic, handwriting. “Right. Rote Hilfe is situated at Lerchengasse 13, up three flights, right as you come off a very seedy stairwell indeed, down four doors and B-Bob’s your uncle.” He looked up. “Oh dear, I don’t suppose you’re familiar with B-Bob’s your uncle.”

  “I am able to figure it out,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Yes. Right. The Rote Hilfe office consists of four rooms, one of them with used clothing spilling from cartons p-piled to the ceiling, another crawling with shabby soaks whom I took for Communists hounded out of Germany by Herr Hitler after the Reichstag fire. The ones who weren’t p-playing sixty-six were sleeping in their overcoats on mattresses set on the floor. The whole apartment stank of cooked cabbage, though I never saw a stove where cabbage might be cooked. As for the comrade who gave me your address, I only know his nom de guerre. His friends called him Axel Heiberg. They had a good laugh at my expense when they got around to explaining that Axel Heiberg was the name of an island in the Arctic Ocean.”

  “Do you always do that?”

  “D-do what?”

  “Mark down everything you see in a notebook?”

  “Actually, yes. When I was eleven my sainted father dragged me off on a grand tour of the Levant—Damascus, B-Baalbek, B-Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Tiberias, Nazareth, Acre, Haifa, Jerusalem, you name it, I’ve been to the souk. He ob-bliged me to keep a journal. I’ve been more or less at it since.” He held out a pale palm. “Philby,” he said. “Harold Philby. Kim to my very few friends.”

  “Why very few?”

  “In my experience Homo sapien usually disappoints. Only Homo Sovieticus rises to the historical occasion—challenging industrial Capitalism, National Socialism and its fuehrer, and your dreadful Dollfuss here in Vienna.”

  I remember being so moved by this declaration that I clasped his hand in both of mine. “Litzi,” I said, perhaps a bit more eagerly than I would have liked. “Litzi Friedman, Latschgasse 9, apartment number seven. I pried away the seven to throw off the police if they should come around looking for me again. Tickled.”

  “Tickled?”

  “Tickled to make your acquaintance, of course. Do come in.”

  * * *

/>   “Money.”

  “Money?”

  “Zahlungsmittel in German. Fizetőeszköz in Hungarian. Valuta in Italian. Argent in French. Money in the King’s English, which is a language you speak more or less fluently.”

  It will have been early in the evening of Kim’s second day in Vienna; I’d been too tactful to raise the subject the first day. We’d just gotten back to Latschgasse 9 after picking up packets of leaflets at a secret albeit primitive underground printing press and delivering them to workers’ militia headquarters in the great housing projects off the rim road. I will confess it was exhilarating to ride on the back of Kim’s Daimler motorcycle. I became a bit giddy looking up at the church steeples and what the Americans call skyscrapers (some of them ten or twelve stories high) soaring over my head as we sped through the narrow streets of the Innere Stadt. A light rain had begun falling when we turned onto Latschgasse, plastering my shirt to my skin. I noticed that my Englishman (as I’d begun to think of him) didn’t notice. Food for thought: Was the problem with his eyes or what our Viennese Doktor Sigismund Freud calls the libido? Back at my flat, I changed into a dry shirt and dried my hair on a towel, then set out sandwiches and some flat beer and raised the delicate matter of rent. “Yes, money. British pounds. Austrian schillings. German Reichmarks. How much do you have?”

  “Are we talking c-cash?”

  “We are not talking IOUs. Of course we’re talking cash.”

  “Ahhh. Yes. Well. My sainted father paid me for typing up the manuscript of his b-book—he rode a bloody camel across the Arabian desert from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea in forty-four d-days. Hell of an exploit—T. E. Lawrence thought only an airship could cross what the Saudis call the empty quarter. Make d-damn good reading if father could find a p-publisher who didn’t think our Lawrence of Arabia owned the copyright to desert sagas. Didn’t help that the footnotes were in Urdu, which my father speaks fluently. Or was that Persian? Hmm. About the money, I have loose change left over from that odd job, plus the hundred quid he gave me for my b-birthday.”