In the intensive care ward, Berthier had become a vegetable, with red, green blue pipes sticking out of him everywhere; a stroke, cause unknown, recovery ruled out.
Berthier’s eyes were blank and staring, this did not prevent some investigators detecting in them the dejection of a man who, after he’d taken everyone else in, had himself been suckered. Others saw something quite different: the elation of a man who had made the ultimate sacrifice.
A traitor. But Berthier had a cast-iron CV, had only his salary coming in and not a penny more, never played politics, parents Catholic, not rich, graduated from military college, just one blot on his school record, he once got a nought in maths, it was when he was studying for the Saint-Cyr entrance exam, he handed in a blank script because he knew the whole class was cheating, wife a Catholic, no mistress, not even a mild flirtation, his sons were Boy Scouts.
They went back and looked some more. Nothing.
Served in a commando unit in Algeria, never had to take prisoners into the woods, never did any of those things that sicken a man and make him want to atone by doing something, anything.
A Gaullist, he’d opposed the putsch in Algeria but hadn’t shopped anyone. After Algeria, he’d gone into counter-espionage, got interested in techniques of transmitting information, he had sailed through every stage of the very thorough vetting process each year, the man was a paragon.
Since his clean-up in Rome, he had been given full authority to sweep diplomatic premises abroad, the only thing they’d come up with was an uncle who admired Maurras and had been saved from the chimneys of Buchenwald by the camp’s communist network, that’s where analysts in the barracks at Mortier reckoned it all started, all his holidays as a boy and a teenager were spent with this uncle in Normandy, no doubt in hearing all about Stalingrad and the great struggle against barbarism in between fishing for trout, collecting mushrooms and setting a few snares, not everyone agreed that what followed started there.
Berthier will never speak again, and the uncle died in 1970, a poor man.
In the end, they’d had to face it: it was Berthier himself who had installed the bugs he claimed he’d discovered.
Why? Because the Russians had needed to make the French think that the leaks were coming from their own Embassy in Moscow, and to do that they’d risked blowing the cover of a specialist plumber it had taken them almost fifteen years to plant there.
The conclusion of the first security flatfoot on the scene: the aim was to protect someone they believed was even more important to them than Berthier, someone who’d been there for a long time. The most plausible hypothesis: a mole, operational since the mid-sixties, so the whole damn thing must have been set up nearly fifteen years ago.
When de Vèze was told, it struck him that this more or less coincided with the period he’d spent in Asia, when he’d been Ambassador in Rangoon, those were good times too, he pictures himself once more during a trip to Singapore playing croquet one evening on a lawn on some island which would still belong for a few months longer to the British Empire, he was waiting for someone he admired to arrive, killing time talking to an elderly man with big ears and a young woman in a yellow dress who wasn’t wearing a slip.
In the world of counter-espionage, the Berthier affair at least produced one certainty: the mole was not a rumour.
Then began a new round of break-ins, they’d try anything, at the DST, the Ministry of Internal Security one of the senior managers decided to go to extreme lengths in the use of the ultimate capacities of the human mind: he imported a dowser, who waved his bent twig over lists of names of top civil servants, with a view to coming up with an astral link, the results were interesting.
They had another go at the veterans of the Second World War, especially the ones who had got on in life, next thing you knew ministers’ offices were full of enraged people, throwing their Liberation medals on the floor, a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse, then the Gaullists kicking up a stink again, followed by a second visit by their leader and his colleagues to the Élysée, and one of them, with strong Corsican accent, told the President stories about patriots ‘and not the puppets of international finance’.
The President remained firm, the investigations went on, everyone felt naked.
Then small newspapers, the kind which are delivered in sealed envelopes, began carrying stories dating from the time of rumour, fury, and reports from the far-right nationalist OAS of attempts on de Gaulle’s life.
And of how young junior ministers had very probably handed the would-be killers the timetable of the movements of the man they called the Great Zohra, the specifics weren’t easy to check but they were detailed and looked accurate, but what on the other hand was checkable were the photocopies of the founder of the OAS, General Salan as presented to the Special Court, it contained minutes of Cabinet meetings and had been discovered among General Salan’s papers the day he was arrested, no comment was added, readers were allowed to work it out for themselves: who could have passed on to the head of the OAS details of what went on in Cabinet meetings? A hot potato, a dangerous dossier for everybody, it couldn’t be checked out, the President cooled things down.
Actually, the whole thing eventually settled down, the President started saying and ordering officials to say niet to the Russians at every turn, a section of the Soviet Embassy was expelled, Pravda described France as ‘jittery’, then the Russians suddenly seemed less well-informed, the Americans seemed less aggressive, France’s external intelligence agency the SDECE and military security went on turning up nothing, and the DST kept waving dowsers’ twigs.
And de Vèze was made to pay for the Berthier business and the electronic listening devices, there are such things as counter-espionage procedures, you don’t give a man like Berthier, even if he has full authority, a free run of the most sensitive areas of an embassy, with a soldering iron up his jumper.
De Vèze had taken Berthier to Moscow, de Vèze was responsible for him, reservations were expressed about the way he had handled the matter, but the Minister had defended him, with all the inflated eloquence of a junior counsel, the occasion was used as an excuse for recalling de Vèze to Paris, a spell in central administration before another ambassadorial posting, but de Vèze knows there’ll be no other embassy for him, he won’t be thrown on the scrap heap of course, he’ll be offered unacceptable postings and get saddled with a reputation for being picky whereas we are all servants of France, he is no longer untouchable, at last they can forget all about Bir Hakeim, the minefield, the discreet green ribbon with black edging, draw a line under three decades of being upstaged.
One day in the Quai d’Orsay, de Vèze pens a note for the Minister, he tells him he feels that he has been the victim of a plot, his embassy could not have been selected at random, the investigators should have gone further back in time, they should have allowed him to remain in his post and prowled around him, waiting and watching. If he gets shunted into touch, whoever set him up will drop him and target somebody else, we need to start again from the beginning, he is ready to collaborate, to trawl through his past with the investigators, he’s sure he must have crossed the path of the mole at some point in his career, everything would have to be cross-checked, meticulously, he is thinking of Singapore.
In his letter, he also tries to tell the Minister he has seen through his little game, he knows that in politics the biggest bastard is the man who speaks out warmly in defence of an opponent thus giving himself a clean bill of health so that he can shift the blame elsewhere when it suits him, you defended me like a lightning conductor, you directed the thunderbolts down on me as a way of covering the fact that it was you who saddled me with Berthier, you are a minister, you drop bricks so you can pick them up again later, it gives you a feeling of power, you ride on the backs of others.