Young Philby (16 page)

English and I got into more spats than usual over ridiculously minor matters such as who had first suggested this or that restaurant, why he always came to my room (after Teruel, the German pilots were getting up at the same hour as the Italian pilots, and in any case we were so tired we never heard them stirring in the corridor), and why I was never invited down to his. All of these small increments of a disintegrating relationship came to a head when English’s
pelota
partner, the chief of military censorship Pablo del Val, telephoned one Saturday morning not long after English’s return from Teruel. (Talk about being taken for granted, he rang
my
room and without so much as a
buenos dias
demanded to speak to English.) As English held the telephone away from his ear, I caught the conversation. “Philby, I’m coming round to get you at six tonight.” “But we aren’t supposed to be playing
pelota
until Tuesday,” English remarked sleepily. Del Val’s hysterical laughter crackled over the telephone line. “It has nothing to do with
pelota
, which in any case you are miserable at. Generalissimo Franco is going to decorate you for your heroic actions on the battlefield in the struggle against Godless Communism.”

English and I had a spat over whether I should accompany him, he insisting, me desisting, but I gave in if only to shake the hand of the great leader whom I expected would restore the monarchy to Spain. That evening we found del Val waiting impatiently in the hotel’s elliptical driveway, his black Mercedes-Benz motorcar at the head of an imposing convoy of vehicles filled with journalists. He was a bit flustered to see me on English’s arm, but I ducked into the backseat before he could utter a word. Shaking his head grumpily, del Val took his place next to the driver. We had a police escort all the way to the palace in Burgos that Franco used as a home and a headquarters. We wound up practically running through a series of enormous rooms filled with army and air force officers sitting like schoolchildren at small desks, and a grand ballroom with artists on a scaffolding restoring frescoes on the ceiling, until we arrived at an antechamber where rough-looking men in identical shiny black suits searched English, and a female wearing a badge that identified her as a sanitary officer searched me. (She didn’t shilly-shally, in full view of all the men, about patting down my breasts.) We were ushered into a windowless round room with military maps tacked to the walls. A gaggle of journalists crowded in behind us. Three men in uniform were leaning over a map spread across a large table. I realized the short one was Generalissimo Franco in the flesh. Del Val coughed into his cuff. Franco looked up, unsure of what was expected of him. A young officer with the gold braid of an aide-de-camp approached and whispered in his ear.
“Pensé que iba a venire mañana,”
Franco said in a loud voice. Del Val said,
“Hoy en dia, excelencia.”
Franco shrugged.
“Vamos a harcerlo.”
The young officer handed Franco a small wooden box. He opened it and removed what turned out to be the Red Cross of Military Merit. The Generalissimo made his way across the room to English, stood on tiptoes and, with some difficulty, succeeded in pinning the medal onto the breast pocket of his corduroy jacket. Flashbulbs exploded. Franco mumbled his way through a short speech, which I didn’t catch a word of. English thanked the Generalissimo in English. Del Val translated it phrase by phrase into Spanish. Franco nodded and reached to pump English’s hand. Flashbulbs popped again. English started to introduce me—“Please meet my friend, the Canadian film actress Frances—” But Franco had already turned back to the map on the table.

There was an impromptu bash at the Grand Hotel basement bar the next night. Correspondents from a dozen or so countries clustered around English, each waving his copy of a local or regional newspaper with a photograph of English, a decidedly sheepish grin on his face, being decorated by
El Caudillo
splashed across the front page. Bill Carney of
The New York Times
asked English for his impressions of Franco. “Tell the truth, the whole thing was over in the b-bat of an eye,” he replied. “Didn’t have a chance to form an impression.” Randy Churchill clapped English on the back. “Well done, old boy. You’re bound to get a raise from your masters at the British Secret Intelligence Service—they will be elated to have one of their operatives seen shaking Franco’s hand. Doors will open that have heretofore remained shut. Nationalist generals will usher you into their map rooms and point out the disposition of their troops. By Jove, any intelligence service in the world would consider this a major coup.”

English laughed off the suggestion that he was employed by the SIS. “I don’t work for any intelligence service, much less the B-Brits. So none of them can claim a coup.”

“If you swallow that,” Randy told Carney with a knowing wink, “I have some prime fen for sale in County Galway that will be of interest to you.”

Long about midnight I tugged at English’s elbow. “Don’t be too awfully long,” I told him. “I’m fagged out.”

“Shouldn’t think I shall be coming by tonight,” he said. “Bit b-bushed myself.”

“You could always come round simply to sleep.”

He managed one of his delicious smiles, the kind that can thaw out the iciest grudge when you first experience it. “I’ll take a rain check,” he said.

I am afraid irritation got the better of me. I snapped, “Tough luck, English—I haven’t been reduced to giving rain checks to my bed.”

7: BIARRITZ, APRIL 1938

Where Alexander Orlov, Cryptonym the
Swede,
Discovers That the Englishman Is Armed

I have heard it bandied about that, as a matter of tradecraft, the reasonably professional British Secret Intelligence Service, along with their American cousins, the embarrassingly amateurish Office of Strategic Service, use safe houses or safe apartments or safe hotel rooms for clandestine meetings, while we Russians are thought to favor public places on the theory that the more public the place, the easier it is to go unnoticed in the crowd. You will be amused to learn that tradecraft has nothing to do with these preferences. In my experience, which consists of two decades of clandestine activities, the British and the Americans rent safe houses because money is burning a hole in their trouser pockets. Our NKVD, hostage to its proletarian roots, counts kopeks. A Russian controller, which happens to be my current job description, would leap at the chance to debrief his agents under a roof, if only to keep out of the rain. For shit’s sake don’t quote me, but the problem is Moscow Centre. The problem is the fuckers on the fifth floor of the Lubyanka who pore over our expense notes like chimpanzees hunting for lice in the hair of their offspring—these budget commissars refuse to authorize the rental of safe houses or safe apartments or safe hotel rooms when, without spending a ruble, we are, so they argue, perfectly able to meet agents outdoors. In parks, in cafés, at motorbus or train stations and the like. The one time I rented a room in Paris to debrief a secretary to the
chef de cabinet
in the office of French prime minister Daladier (she had flatly refused to meet me at the Gare de Lyon), the Soviet Embassy’s code clerk wound up being rousted from his bed at two in the morning to deal with a blistering telegram (tagged
Priority Immediate,
which meant it had to be deciphered the moment it came in) addressed to me. The son of a bitch of a code clerk passed it on, pasted in strips across a blank page in his steel-covered message book, with a graceless smirk. “To the attention of Alexander Orlov,” the plain text memorandum began. “The 5000 French francs you squandered on a room at the Hotel Meurice last month, along with the 100 franc gratuity to the concierge, have been deducted from your wages. Be so kind as to follow Centre guidelines to the letter. We direct your attention to Standard Agent Operating Procedure Rule 7 subparagraph Kh: Meetings with undercover agents are to be conducted in public Areas.”

Kopek-pinching pricks!

All of which explains what I was doing on the terrace of a seedy workers’ café outside the train station in the French resort town of Biarritz, my Panama hat with the turned-down brim shading my eyes from the midday sun, drinking cheap anisette while pretending to read a copy of the American magazine
Newsweek
(purchased at a
papeterie
in Bordeaux with my own money) in which I’d concealed new codes and cash. The Englishman was as usual maddeningly punctual. The bell in the church tower across the square was announcing the noon hour as he settled onto the chair across the table from me. He was wearing worn corduroys, a khaki desert jacket, and a threadbare silk scarf knotted loosely around his neck. A gauze field dressing protected the gash in his scalp from the fine sand dust rising off the pavement with each gust of air. His face appeared thinner, his eyes more heavy-lidded than I remembered. He looked as if he was coming off an all-night binge. He looked as if he could use a vacation, which is something spies never get to take. I made a mental note to pass on to my superiors: The agent Moscow Centre knew as Sonny was paying the piper for leading a double life.

“Good morning to you, Alexander,” he said. He waved a palm to catch the eye of the waitress and ordered American coffee. “Or should one say g-good afternoon now that it is
after
noon?”

I wasn’t comfortable with small talk. “Either, or,” I remarked.

The Englishman pulled a small metal tin filled with tablets from a jacket pocket. He offered me one and when I wagged a finger, he carefully selected a tablet and popped it into his mouth. “Chronic indigestion,” he said. “Spanish use too much olive oil when they cook. In B-Basque country you can smell a kitchen for kilometers. Imagine the havoc that p-produces in your average British digestive tract.”

“Imagine,” I agreed. “How is your head wound?”

“The gash became infected. Spanish surgeons had to open it up and clean it out before drowning it in tincture of iodine and stitching it back up. The red on the gauze is iodine, not blood. I get the occasional migraine which I treat with aspirin and alcohol.”

A thin teenage girl almost lost in an ankle-length white apron set a glass of coffee and a second glass of water on the table in front of Philby. He helped himself to two cubes of sugar, then glanced around as he absently stirred the coffee. A double line of schoolchildren, each of them dressed in identical blue smocks and clutching the shoulder of the child in front, was being led diagonally across the square by a very short priest holding a wooden crucifix high over his head. Philby regarded them so intently I wondered if it reminded him of a scene from his own childhood.

Inspired by the sight of the crucifix, I asked, “How is Catholic Spain treating you?”

“Like the heretic I am. The awful truth, which doesn’t endear me to my Spanish friends, is I miss the Moors—I am sorry they were hounded back to North Africa. Their poets, their architects, their scholars enlightened Catholic Spain.” He leaned toward me and, lowering his voice to a thick whisper, said, “Alexander, Franco’s newspapers are filled with stories of p-purge trials, of executions, in Moscow. They gloat that the revolution is devouring its children—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, even B-Bukharin, the man Lenin himself called the darling of the p-party. What’s going on? How do you explain this? Can there be a grain of truth to the charges that these giants of the revolution were foreign agents?”

I had, over time, given this matter of life or death not a little thought. The purge of the party that began in the early part of the decade had in due course reached into the ranks of our NKVD. Quite a few of my colleagues in the field had been recalled to Moscow; some had been found guilty of being foreign agents and suffered the consequences—a bullet in the nape of the neck. Others had simply disappeared. What would I do if I were to suddenly receive a telegram summoning me home for
consultations
? I would shit in my pants—it would be every bit as dangerous not to go as to go. The NKVD has a long arm—on more than one occasion I had been that long arm. I suppose I could always solve the dilemma by defecting to the West, but that would leave my family—my wife and daughter, my parents, my brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts—exposed to punishment. (In the eyes of the Peoples’ Prosecutor, a relative of an enemy of the people is also an enemy of the people.) If it ever came to that, I would have to come up with a scheme to protect my family. The Englishman was watching me intently, waiting for an answer to his question. “From an operational point of view,” I told him, “everyone must be seen as a potential foreign agent.”

“What about me? Do you think I could b-be a foreign agent?”

“I keep the possibility on file in one lobe of my brain.”

“Why on earth do you meet with me, then?”

I could see my answers were making him uncomfortable. This Cambridge fellow who stammered his way through a conversation was visibly pushing himself to the edge to spy for the Soviet Union. And yet … and yet one could perceive in him the faintest suggestion of deeper currents, of loyalties beyond the surface loyalty to us. To family perhaps? To friends? To his privileged class? To England? “I meet with you,” I finally told him, “because you are our principal agent in Spain. Moscow Centre trusts you. So do I.”

“You took your sweet time replying.”

“I take my sweet time all the time. Like a good night’s sleep, it’s a habit that contributes to longevity.”

“Yes, well, but you avoided my questions about the p-purge trials. Were Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin agents of a foreign p-power plotting against Stalin?”

“I am not in a position to know if they actually plotted against Comrade Stalin or simply intended to,” I said. “But I believe they would have if they could have—the struggle for power in the Kremlin that began with Lenin’s death in 1924 is unfortunately still going on. Comrade Stalin anticipates there will be a war with the German Fascists by 1943 at the latest. He is wisely securing his rear to avoid being stabbed in the back when war comes.”