The Fourth Protocol (18 page)

“Both men are under discreet surveillance, but no moves have been made to close in. No break-in to either man’s apartment. Just mail intercept, phone tap, and the watchers around the clock,” replied Harcourt-Smith.

“How long do you want, Nigel?” asked Plumb.

“Ten days.”

“All right, but that’s the limit. In ten days we have to move against Berenson with whatever we have got and start into damage assessment, with his willing or unwilling cooperation.”

The next day, Sir Nigel Irvine called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home outside Farnham, where the ailing man was confined.

“Bernard, that man of yours, Preston. I know it’s unusual—could send one of my own people, and all that—but I like his style. Could I borrow him for the South African Trip?”

Sir Bernard agreed. Preston flew to Johannesburg on the overnight flight of March 12-13. It was not until he was airborne that the information reached the desk of Brian Harcourt-Smith. He was icily angry, but knew he had been outranked.

The Albion Committee reported to the General Secretary on the evening of the twelfth, and was received in his apartment on Kutuzovsky
Prospekt.

“And what, pray, have you got for me?” the Soviet leader asked quietly.

Professor Krilov, as chairman of the committee, gestured toward Grand Master Rogov, who opened the file in front of him and began to read.

As always in the presence of the General Secretary, Philby was impressed, even awed, by the sheer untrammeled power of the man. During the committee’s researches the mere mention of his name as the overriding authority could have secured them anything they wanted in the USSR and no questions asked. As a student of power and its application, Philby admired the ruthless and cunning way in which the General Secretary had secured absolute control over every tendril of life in the Soviet Union.

Years earlier, when he had been given the powerful chairmanship of the KGB, it had not been as an appointee of Brezhnev, but of the unpublicized kingmaker of the Politburo, the Party ideologue Mikhail Suslov. With this residual independence from Brezhnev and his personal “Mafia,” he had ensured that the KGB never became Brezhnev’s unquestioning poodle. When, in May 1982, with Suslov dead and Brezhnev dying, he had quit the KGB to return to the Central Committee, he had not made the same mistake.

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
conspira
cy 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, the 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.

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 from
¹
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.