The Other Side of Silence

TWENTY-NINE

The two thugs took me back to the red room with the green ceiling and handcuffed me to a cast-iron radiator that looked like a giant silver anaconda. Unlike the lightbulb on the ceiling, it wasn’t switched on, fortunately. They gave me a pint glass of water and another cigarette and I felt as if life was almost worth living. Almost. I had a bad headache, but that was hardly surprising given two bottles of schnapps and two equally powerful punches. On the whole, I’d preferred the schnapps. It’s a much more effective means of cauterizing raw feelings, although when the stuff wears off it does leave you a little depressed. When the effect of two bottles finally draws to a close you just want to find a nice shallow grave and crawl inside. The way things were shaping up with the British, they’d probably find one for me or even dig it themselves. I had little faith in the fairness of British justice when it was just a kangaroo court convened in some disused villa on the Riviera, and I had no doubt that my life was at stake. I’d seen enough evidence of the brutality of the British army during the first war to know that these people were more than equal to the task of killing me in cold blood. The Tommies thought themselves fair, but they were just like Germans in that respect. Nearly every man I’d known in the trenches could tell stories of killing prisoners he could not be bothered to escort back to his own lines. That was just as true of the Tommies as it was of the Germans. I was a prisoner now, and I could hardly see how these particular Englishmen were going to transport me safely to a cozy jail in England without risking some sort of diplomatic incident with the French. Murder is a lot easier when the alternative is a lot of very time-consuming paperwork. I tried to sleep but without much success. It’s only the guilty man who can sleep when he’s wearing manacles.

They fetched me back to the room with the chandelier a couple of hours later. I figured something was wrong because Harold Hennig was already there and wearing handcuffs, like me; there was a large bruise below his eye and his shirt was torn. It seemed like a strange way to treat your star witness. They made us sit at opposite ends of the room. I tried to ignore him and he paid me the same compliment. There were now three men behind the desk, including the monk. One of the other men looked like a duchess who was aware of a bad smell under the floorboards. In that house, there probably was. The other man was an avuncular type with large ears and irregular teeth. Around his neck was a striped tie that matched the monk’s and I wondered if it meant they’d been to the same school, or if they just went to the same boring tie shop in London. The two thugs from Portsmouth were also there, but now they were accompanied by others of similarly anthropoid stature. And once again I had a strong sense that there were yet more people listening to these proceedings through the open door in the next room. From time to time I could hear matches being lit and chairs creaking.

“Well, we all know why we’re here,” said the monk.

“I wish I did,” I remarked.

“So let’s get started, shall we?” He nodded at one of the thugs who was standing by one of the other doors. “Would you fetch the witness in here, please?”

“So this is a trial,” I said.

The thug went out, and when he came back in he was followed by Anne French. I felt my stomach turn. And while I wasn’t yet able to understand why she was there, I was increasingly certain that I was facing something calamitous. Not least because she avoided my eye. That wasn’t so surprising, I suppose; it was what Harold Hennig said that really caught me unawares.

“Anne, my love. What are you doing here?”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said, already wondering just how intimate they might have been while I was on duty at the Grand Hôtel.

She didn’t answer Hennig any more than she looked my way. Me, I don’t believe in the devil but I’m still scared of him, and I was now possessed of an uncomfortable feeling deep in my guts that he’d arranged for something doubly unpleasant to come my way.

Anne French sat down on a chair beside the table and stared straight ahead of her. She was wearing a sober-looking sleeveless blue dress. Her hair was gathered at the back of her head in a knot. She looked like an innocent schoolgirl. By now I could smell the cloying scent of her perfume, and I suddenly remembered where the red wallet file I had seen on the table in front of the monk must have come from. It was one of her research files from the cabinet in her office in Villefranche.

“What is your name?” asked the monk.

“Anne French.”

“Would you please tell us why you’re here?”

Imperfect and partial evidence that she was about to betray me swiftly became something much more concrete.

“I’m an author by profession.” She smiled a rueful smile. “Not a very successful one, I’m afraid. It’s a job that enables me to travel to lots of different places and provides excellent cover for a spy. Like Somerset Maugham himself, you might say. Until recently I was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an agent of the HVA—the East German Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung.”

“What’s your connection with East Germany?”

“Originally my mother was German. From Leipzig.”

“Do you speak German?”

“Fluently.”

All of this was news to me. Not once had she ever given me to suspect that she could speak my own language.

“And for how long have you been an agent for the East Germans?”

“I joined what was later to become the HVA on a trip to Leipzig in nineteen fifty; since then I have been involved in a number of clandestine operations here on the Riviera. Most recently I was asked to befriend the French minister of defense, Monsieur Bourgès-Maunoury, who was staying at the Grand Hôtel Cap Ferrat. I was to become his mistress so that I might spy on him for the HVA. This, however, was not successful. He’s a happily married man with two sons. Not long after this I received new orders from Berlin to—”

“Did you receive any special training for your work?” asked the monk.

“Some. I attended a few classes at an espionage school in Tschaikowskistrasse, in Berlin-Pankow. But to be honest it was mostly teaching table manners and social behavior to young East Germans who lacked social niceties. That wasn’t much good to me since I already had those manners. I was trained to use a radio transmitter, however. And a gun.”

“How did you receive your orders from Berlin?”

“Mostly by radio.”

Suddenly Anne’s devotion to her Hallicrafters and the BBC World Service took on a different meaning.

“I’m sorry, my dear. Do go on with your story.”

The “my dear” was nice; it helped me understand that they already believed whatever it was she had to tell them now, and told me to prepare for the worst.

“Not long after my abortive attempt to become the mistress of Monsieur Bourgès-Maunoury I received new orders to join an operation with two agents of the HVA I’d met in Berlin. Bernhard Gunther and Harold Hennig.”

“Bullshit,” muttered Hennig. “What is this?”

“Can you identify these men?”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “There they are.”

Anne duly pointed us out, just in case there was any doubt about who we were. This was one of the few times in the proceedings that she ever looked at me, but she might as well have been looking at the postman.

“Can you describe the HVA operation, please?”

“Yes. It had been something that was planned at the highest level in the HVA by Comrade General Mielke himself. In short, it was a covert black operation designed to entice MI5 into eliminating or at the very least neutralizing the deputy director general of MI5, Roger Hollis. To persuade the British secret service that one of their most efficient and loyal spymasters was in fact a long-term spy working for Soviet military intelligence—the GRU. Gunther was already working in a deep cover position as the concierge at the Grand Hôtel where, originally, it had been hoped he would help me carry through the honey trap for the French minister. But when this plan failed, the plan to discredit Roger Hollis—code-named Othello—went into immediate effect.”

“Can you explain how the plan was to work in detail?” said the monk.

“This is all a lie,” said Hennig.

“You’ll have a chance to speak,” said the monk. “Please allow Miss French to finish.”

Anne nodded patiently. “Thank you. Well, Comrade General Mielke’s idea was inspired by Shakespeare’s play Othello, he said. Iago sets about blackening the name and reputation of Desdemona, with a great show of reluctance and almost incrementally. Which was what was supposed to happen here. So, Harold Hennig arrived at the hotel posing as a businessman. His job was to blackmail Somerset Maugham with a compromising photograph featuring Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Maugham himself. The photo had been sold to Anthony Blunt by the author’s nephew, Robin, and then stolen from Mr. Blunt’s flat in London, and sold to Hennig.”

“Stolen by whom?” asked the avuncular man with bad teeth.

“By an agent of the HVA. One of Blunt’s students in London, I believe. At the Courtauld Institute. I’m afraid I don’t know his name. He gave the picture to Berlin, who passed it on to Hennig, and when Hennig arrived down here, he contacted Robin Maugham, who rightly identified the photograph as the one he himself had used to blackmail Blunt. Consequently, it was a relatively simple task for Hennig to pressure Robin Maugham, first to invite Gunther to the Villa Mauresque, and then for Somerset Maugham to use Gunther as a reliable courier between himself and Hennig. The plan was that Gunther should ingratiate himself with Somerset Maugham by obtaining the photograph for no money, at which point Hennig would reveal the new material with which he was going to blackmail Maugham, and by extension the British secret service. Carrying out the blackmail down here was perceived to be a lot safer than attempting such a thing in London, where almost certainly everyone involved would have been arrested.”

“Tell us about the new material,” said the monk. “It was a tape recording, was it not?”

“Yes, a tape recording of the Soviet agent Guy Burgess explaining how he came to work for the KGB. General Mielke believed that as soon as Somerset Maugham heard what Burgess had to say he would understand the vital importance of the tape to his old friends in MI6. Also, it was believed that Somerset Maugham had the financial means to buy the tape himself on behalf of the British secret service. Of course, the Burgess tape—which is perfectly genuine, it is indeed Guy Burgess speaking, although the tape was recorded in Moscow, not at sea—contained a small, almost insignificant detail that was to be the equivalent of Desdemona’s handkerchief, I suppose; something small and almost insignificant. It was this: that Burgess had met someone in Paris in nineteen thirty-seven who had recently worked for British American Tobacco in Shanghai, and that this same person had been recruited by the Soviet GRU. Mielke hoped that someone in British intelligence would eventually make the connection between the tobacco salesman and Roger Hollis. After which MI6 and MI5—already feeling deeply paranoid after the recent defections of Burgess and Maclean—would do all the heavy lifting work of discrediting Roger Hollis themselves. He was quite convinced that just to plant the seed of doubt about Hollis would be more than enough to scupper the man. In the same way that Iago lets Othello do most of the hard work of distrusting Desdemona by himself.”

“Did Mielke have to take the Othello plan to the KGB for operational approval?”

“I believe so, yes. It was to be the HVA’s first big operation to prove it had come of age as an intelligence service to Moscow, as it were. You see, the HVA is a comparatively new service still trying to win the trust of the Soviets.”

“Did the KGB give the tapes directly to the HVA?”

“No. For the purposes of establishing some sort of provenance they were first given to the BBC’s Berlin office on Savignyplatz. I believe one of the BBC’s local correspondents works for the HVA and he was ordered to sell them to Hennig, as if he’d considered using them for broadcast and then decided to make money from them instead.”

Anne paused and asked for a glass of water, which was duly provided, before she continued with her bravura performance.

“My job was to meet with Gunther and Hennig and to report their operational progress to my controllers in the HVA by coded messages on a shortwave radio. Gunther and Hennig were to extract a large sum of money from Maugham and by extension the British secret service, and to hand over yet more tapes containing other false and misleading information about other secret service personnel. I believe there are other tiny details on the other tape recordings that might also help to discredit Hollis. I’m afraid I don’t know what those are. Any money they made from the blackmail operation was to be split between the three of us as a reward for loyal service and to fund future operations in this theater.”

“And these are the tapes you’ve provided for us. The ones you were keeping in your office at your rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer.”

“That’s right.”

Anne lied so smoothly, so expertly, that I almost believed her myself. She never hesitated, not for a moment, and I wondered if she had ever considered the possibility that the British might actually shoot me or Harold Hennig. Her voice was even and, it has to be said, sexy, too; a couple of times there was even a quaver in it, as if what she had to say was upsetting. She was very good. Mielke had chosen his Judas very well indeed. I doubt if Jean Simmons or Deborah Kerr could have given a better performance in that room than Anne French. But the hardest part of listening to all that was knowing that I loved her.

“And what was it persuaded you to change your mind about your involvement in this elaborate plot?” The monk was smiling kindly at her now, as if he pitied her for being used so egregiously by such unscrupulous people as Erich Mielke, Harold Hennig, and me.

Anne sighed.

“Take your time, my dear. There’s no rush. We don’t want to make any mistakes here.” The monk’s tone was solicitous, as if Anne was finding it difficult to betray me and, it had to be faced, Harold Hennig, too.

“Yes, take your time,” I said. “But if it helps you can kiss me on the cheek.”

She didn’t flinch.

“I joined the Communist Party because I believed in the absence of social classes and the state, but more particularly because I believed it was the best way of opposing British and French imperialism of the kind we can see happening now at Suez.”

“Let’s not get into that, shall we?” said the man with irregular teeth.

“No, well, I’m an idealist, you see,” continued Anne. “Like my father. Or at least I was. But during my association with these two men, Gunther’s wife, Elisabeth, told me that during the war he and Hennig had both been Fascists working for the SD and the Gestapo. It was she who gave me the photographs you’ve seen. And it was this that caused me finally to question my loyalty to the party and to the HVA. The notion that the German Communist Party could use former Nazis like these two men to further its ends still seems abhorrent to me. I asked Gunther about it once and instead of denying it or feeling any shame about it, he actually boasted about his Nazi past. He said that there was no difference between the Gestapo and the Stasi. That Fascism and Communism were coterminous. That their uniforms were still made by the same tailors and that even the same concentration camps were in use for today’s political prisoners. When I protested about this he seemed to think that was very funny and told me he thought I was extraordinarily naïve. Well, maybe I was. In fact, I’m sure I was.”

I tried to will her to catch my eye, but it was no good, and she carried on giving her deceitful evidence in a flat, steady voice.

“By the time he told me that some British spymasters had arrived on the Cap and were staying at the Belle Aurore Hotel, I’d already decided I didn’t believe in the party anymore—I mean, I couldn’t anymore, you do see that, don’t you? I felt completely disillusioned. As if the scales had fallen from my eyes.”

“Was it always the aim of the operation to have Maugham summon some friends from MI6 down here?”

“Yes. It seemed unlikely that he would buy the tape without some expectation that the British would underwrite its purchase. Nor that at his age he would wish to travel to London. Comrade Mielke always believed that the British would come here. And listen to the tape themselves.”

“And when Gunther told you that these spymasters were coming, what did you think?”

“I thought this was my chance to switch sides. To redeem myself. So I went to see them in person, threw myself on their mercy, and told them absolutely everything I knew about the plot to discredit this man Roger Hollis.” She sighed again. “Look, I won’t go to prison, will I?”

“That’s not up to me. But under the circumstances, no. I don’t think so. Provided you continue to cooperate, Miss French.”

“Thank you.”

“Is the HVA yet aware that you’ve told us all about Othello?’

“No, not yet. I made my last scheduled transmission two nights ago.”

“And your next scheduled transmission is tonight, I believe.”

“That’s correct.”

“At which point you will be required to report on the progress or lack of it on Othello? Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Thus the urgency of these proceedings,” said the monk. “But you’re quite happy to resume contact with the HVA and assure your controllers that the operation is still progressing. Is that correct?”

“Yes. Of course.”

There were many more questions like this, but it was already agonizingly clear to me that as soon as Elisabeth had returned home to Berlin, Erich Mielke must have squeezed her for as much information about my life on the Cap as she was able to provide. Probably she wouldn’t have even known he was asking the questions in pursuit of an HVA operation. At the same time, any pictures and files on me would have been easy to find for a man like Mielke. Nearly all of the police records at the presidium on Berlin Alexanderplatz had been captured by the Russians and were now the property of the Stasi. But I still couldn’t bring myself to believe that Elisabeth could ever have worked for the Stasi, although of course that was rumored to be their greatest skill—they were much better than the Gestapo at blackmailing people to spy on their nearest and dearest. By comparison the Gestapo had been amateurs. Possibly they had something on Elisabeth I didn’t even know about.

As for Anne French, I could see clearly now that I had no one to blame for what had happened but myself. I’d walked straight into Gethsemane as if a taxi had driven me there from an upper room on Mount Zion. She must have known how easy I’d be to snare after Elisabeth had left me. From the first minute Anne French had spoken to me at the hotel she’d been acting on Mielke’s orders and had used me with not much more thought than she’d used the swimming pool at the Grand Hôtel.

At the same time, I now understood the whole ghastly little trick that was being perpetrated by Mielke. And I had to admit it was a nice operation. The point of the whole scheme must have been to bolster Hollis’s reputation in MI5. What better way of doing that than to expose an ingenious scheme to discredit him? And just listening to all that Anne had said, the conclusion I’d come to was that Roger Hollis was indeed a spy, and a spy who must have been under a cloud of suspicion, too. After this operation, however, Hollis was surely in the clear. No one would ever suspect him now. Which was a lot more than I could say for myself. The case against Bernhard Gunther already looked watertight. Denying everything seemed pointless. I had no illusions about the probable fate that now awaited me. Thanks to Anne, I was as good as dead.