"They don't freelance, Bill," I told him. "You could try to pick them up retired, but you'd have to see Six about that."
Harvey looked irritated, as if I were being deliberately unhelpful.
"Have you thought of approaching Stephenson?" I asked. "A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of thing in New York during the war. Used some Italian, apparently, when there was no other way of sorting a German shipping spy. Probably the Mafia, for all I know..."
Angleton scribbled in his notebook, and looked up impassively.
"The French!" I said brightly. "Have you tried them? It's more their type of thing, you know, Algiers, and so on."
Another scribble in the notebook.
"What about technically - did you have any special equipment?" asked Harvey.
I told him that after the gas canisters plan fell through, MI6 looked at some new weapons. On one occasion I went down to Porton to see a demonstration of a cigarette packet which had been modified by the Explosives Research and Development Establishment to fire a dart tipped with poison. We solemnly put on white coats and were taken out to one of the animal compounds behind Porton by Dr. Ladell, the scientist there who handled all MI5 and MI6 work. A sheep on a lead was led into the center of the ring. One flank had been shaved to reveal the coarse pink skin. Ladell's assistant pulled out the cigarette packet and stepped forward. The sheep started, and was restrained by the lead, and I thought perhaps the device had misfired. But then the sheep's knees began to buckle, and it started rolling its eyes and frothing at the mouth. Slowly the animal sank to the ground, life draining away, as the white-coated professionals discussed the advantages of the modern new toxin around the corpse. It was the only time in my life when my two passions, for animals and for intelligence, collided, and I knew at that instant that the first was by far the greater love. I knew also, then, that assassination was no policy for peacetime.
Beyond that, there was little help I could offer Harvey and Angleton, and I began to feel I had told them more than enough. The sight of Angleton's notebook was beginning to unnerve me. They seemed so determined, so convinced that this was the way to handle Castro, and slightly put out that I could not help them more.
"Speak to John Henry, or Dixon - they'll probably know more than me," I said when we were out on the street making our farewells. I was due to fly back to Britain the next day.
"You're not holding out on us over this, are you?" asked Harvey suddenly. The shape of his pistol was visible again under his jacket, I could tell he was thinking about RAFTER.
I hailed a taxi.
"I've told you, Bilclass="underline" We're out of that game. We're the junior partner in the alliance, remember? It's your responsibility now."
Harvey was not the kind of man to laugh at a joke. Come to that, neither was Angleton.
1961. Outside in the streets of London, people were still saying they had "never had it so good," while in Washington a new young President was busy creating a mythical Camelot of culture and excellence. But in the subterranean world of secret intelligence, the shape of the turbulent decade was already becoming clear. Throughout the 1950s American and British services pursued the Cold War with clarity of purpose and single-minded dedication. It was not a subtle war, and there were precious few complications. But in the early 1960s a rash of defectors began to arrive in the West from the heart of the Russian intelligence machine, each carrying tales of the penetration of Western security. Their stories were often contradictory and confusing, and their effect was to begin the slow paralysis of British and American intelligence as doubt and suspicion seeped through the system.
The first defector arrived in December 1961. I was in my office a few weeks after returning from my trip to Washington when Arthur strolled in, cigarette in one hand, clutching a copy of THE TIMES in the other. He passed the paper to me neatly folded across the spine.
"Sounds interesting..." he said, pointing to a small paragraph which referred to a Soviet Major, named Klimov, who had presented himself to the American Embassy in Helsinki with his wife and child and asked for asylum.
It was not long before we heard on the grapevine that Klimov was, in fact, a KGB Major, and that he was singing like a bird. In March 1962, a frisson of excitement went around the D Branch offices. Arthur smoked more energetically than usual, his baby face flushed with enthusiasm as he strode up and down the corridors. I knew Klimov's information had finally arrived.
"It's the defector, isn't it?" I asked him one day.
He ushered me into his office, closed the door, and told me a little of the story. "Klimov," he said, was in reality Anatoli Golitsin, a high-ranking KGB officer who had worked inside the First Chief Directorate, responsible for operations against the UK and the USA, and the Information Department in Moscow, before taking a posting in Helsinki. In fact, Golitsin had been on a previous CIA watch list during an earlier overseas tour, but he was not recognized under the cover of his new identity until he presented himself in Helsinki.
After the initial debriefing, the CIA sent to MI5 a list of ten "serials," each one itemizing an allegation Golitsin had made about a penetration of British Security. Arthur initially held the complete list. Patrick Stewart, the acting head of D3 (Research), conducted a preliminary analysis of the serials, and drew up a list of suspects to fit each one. Then individual serials were apportioned to different officers in the D1 (Investigations) section for detailed investigation, and I was asked to provide technical advice as the investigations required.
Three of the first ten serials immediately struck a chord. Golitsin said that he knew of a famous "Ring of Five" spies, recruited in Britain in the 1930s. They all knew each other, he said, and all knew the others were spies. But Golitsin could identify none of them, other than the fact that one had the code name Stanley, and was connected with recent KGB operations in the Middle East. The lead perfectly fitted Kim Philby, who was currently working in Beirut for the OBSERVER newspaper. He said that two of the other five were obviously Burgess and Maclean. We thought that a fourth might be Sir Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and a former wartime MI5 officer who fell under suspicion after the Burgess and Maclean defections in 1951. But the identity of the fifth was a complete mystery. As a result of Golitsin's three serials concerning the Ring of Five, the Philby and Blunt cases were exhumed, and a reassessment ordered.
The two most current and precise leads in those first ten serials were numbers 3 and 8, which referred to Naval spies, indicating, as with Houghton, the importance the Russians attached to obtaining details of the British and NATO submarine and antisubmarine capability. Serial 3 was a recruitment allegedly made in the British Naval Attache's office in the Embassy in Moscow, under the personal supervision of General Gribanov, Head of the Second Chief Directorate, responsible for internal intelligence operations in the Soviet Union. A Russian employee of the British Embassy named Mikhailski had been involved in the operation, and the spy provided handwritten notes of the secret documents which passed across his desk. Then, in 1956, said Golitsin, the spy returned to London to work in the Naval Intelligence Department, and his KGB control passed to the Foreign Operations Department.