Every spy a traitor, p.13
Every Spy a Traitor, page 13
Compared to Eduard – who he saw occasionally – Nikolai was charming and friendly and did his best to be reassuring. Each day Cooper would be picked up at the Lux and driven in a car with curtained windows to a building around a quarter of an hour’s drive away and from the basement garage taken up in a lift to a floor apparently high up in the building and into a room which always had its curtains drawn and there Nikolai Vasilyevich would brief him on how to operate as an OMS agent.
‘You will return to London and by all means write your novel; apart from anything else it will explain your travels around Europe. But you are not to mention the Soviet Union in it and try to avoid anything that could be construed as political. Do you understand?’
‘But what about Goslitizdat and everything that Misha said about wanting to publish me?’
Nikolai Vasilyevich moved his hand as if swatting away a fly. ‘Forget about that, Cooper: the State Publishing House of Fiction has no intention of publishing your novel. Under no circumstances should there be even the slightest trace of a connection with us, do you understand? Write your book, by all means, and try and find a publisher in London, should you wish. But your priority in London is to start a new career. You are to apply for jobs in government departments which are of interest to the Soviet Union, those connected with foreign affairs or defence. You should also consider the possibility of applying for training as an officer in one of your armed forces.
‘But the important thing is not to rush: it takes time to be recruited to the right post and once you’re there you need to allow yourself time to become established – and also to be beyond suspicion. We view agents like yourself as long-term prospects: it could be a few months before we start to call on your services.
‘We’ve been thinking of a codename for you: we’ve decided you’ll be Agent Bertie. From now on, we refer to you by that name. Do you like it?’
Actually, Cooper didn’t like Bertie one bit: it reminded him of Wodehouse’s eponymous character, which he struggled to think of as anything other than stupid. But he knew now that it was best not to dissent.
After that, Nikolai Vasilyevich conducted a series of briefings: a few hours in the morning, a short break for lunch and then another session in the afternoon before he’d be driven back to the Lux on Gorky Street.
Nikolai explained in detail the kind of information they were after. He’d give him lengthy documents and tell him to go through them and write a summary of the salient points and he was to do this in a short space of time and at first Cooper was hopeless, but under Nikolai’s guidance soon learnt what kind of information to look for and how to summarise it.
There were sessions on encoding the information and how to leave it at a dead letter box and how to contact the person in London who’d be collecting the information and providing him with instructions.
At least three days were spent on what to do if he came under suspicion or was in danger. Nikolai was surprisingly reassuring.
‘If they have evidence against you then they’ll arrest you, but that only happens when an agent is careless, and we are training you not to be careless. But if they suspect you, that means that they have general suspicions maybe about your department or about a group of people, but they have no evidence. Are you following me?’
‘I hope so.’
‘No evidence means no arrest and you must therefore exploit that. If you are ever questioned, you need to act offended – angry, even – that your loyalty is being questioned. That is how an innocent man behaves. We will train you on that, don’t worry.’
There were days of interrogations and he learnt how to come over as offended but innocent and how to cope when confronted by seeming contradictions in his story.
He was taken to an area on the outskirts of Moscow and given training on how to ensure he wasn’t being followed and to get from A to B in the least suspicious manner.
Then there were sessions on what Nikolai described as perhaps the most important part of information gathering, which was the nurturing of unwitting contacts within an organisation – people who had access to secret information and how to get them to unwittingly share that information with him.
‘Find out about their lives: find out what problems they have, what worries them, what makes them happy – anything that can get you closer to them and encourage them to trust you. Maybe do them a favour, tickets for the theatre, money you’re happy to lend, an offer to pick up a piece of work for them if they’re overwhelmed. Become their friend, and possibly a confidante, and remain a friend, possibly for years before you try and prise intelligence out of them. May I make an observation about you, Bertie?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘You possess certain innate qualities I consider to be essential in an agent. You’re clearly intelligent and intuitive, and while those are essential qualities, they’re not unique ones. But what you do have is a certain charm and charisma, I think you’re the kind of person who people like and, more to the point, who they don’t find threatening. And at the same time, you’re somewhat enigmatic: it’s hard to know what to make of you, the kind of person who fits more naturally into the background rather than the foreground. You cannot train people to be like that, they’re rare and innate qualities. It’s what alerted us to you in the first place. My advice is to exploit your charm, Bertie, always be confident in the knowledge that people will be well disposed towards you. Keep that in mind with the sources you cultivate, the ones I was talking about earlier.’
* * *
Cooper left Rita’s apartment on Vorovsky Street at seven fifteen and walked to Arbat Square on the Boulevard Ring. He hoped he’d pass as a local; he was wearing the ushanka fur hat and a long overcoat he’d bought the previous week when there was a notable chill in the air and Nikolai told him he could get a special discount at the state store reserved for senior party members and their families.
He adopted the demeanour he’d observed among Moscow’s residents: tired and resigned, slightly stooped and in a hurry. At Arbat Square he caught a cream-and-dark-brown-coloured tram and remembered his training:
Never go straight to your destination… travel to a point beyond it and then walk back, perhaps taking a circuitous route.
He took the tram to Red Square and then headed north, pausing outside the Moskva Hotel to ensure he wasn’t being followed and onto Mokhovaya Street, past the Lenin library and as far as the United States Embassy, at which point his plans went wrong.
Rita had pleaded with him to go there and get help, but the embassy was closely guarded by Soviet police. There was a checkpoint on the pavement before the entrance and people were being searched. It would be impossible to get into the embassy. He walked past it and down a side street running along it, just in time to see a side gate open and a tall man hurry out. From the way he was dressed, he hoped he was an American diplomat.
He followed him as far as the Pushkin Museum, when the man stopped on the pavement to cross the road and Cooper stood next to him.
‘I need your help.’
The man looked surprised but acted calmly, a brief nod and a discreet look around.
‘A lady I know – an American lady living here in Moscow – she was arrested last night – well this morning. A few hours ago. She needs your embassy to help her.’
They were crossing the road now and Cooper had to hurry to keep up with the man. When he spoke, he was looking ahead of him.
‘Not here, it’s dangerous. Go to the embassy.’
‘I can’t. Look, take this.’ With that he slipped Rita’s American passport into the man’s coat pocket and hurried off.
He felt guilty after that, though he was not sure what else he could have done.
When he returned to the Lux, he had just enough time to get changed before the car came to collect him. It was only when he was putting his jacket back on that he realised the envelope Rita had given him was still in his jacket pocket.
…get the envelope to my folks in New York City, though they probably won’t want to know about me either.
He opened the envelope and tore its contents into tiny shreds, feeling even more guilty but he knew he had to be ruthless. If he was caught with it, he’d be in trouble. He promised himself that he’d do something to help her when he was back in London.
That assuaged his guilt, but not very much.
* * *
At the end of September Nikolai took him to a dacha outside Moscow for the weekend and it was clear that his training was coming to an end.
It was a peaceful, bucolic setting and there were just the two of them there, apart from a housekeeper and two guards.
For two days, the Russian said little as they walked along the lanes and he explained the names of the different trees and plants and they ate well and Nikolai told him how impressed he was with him because he recognised that there had been some subterfuge involved in his recruitment but his attitude had been commendably positive.
‘We have another agent in London, someone in a similar position to you, though he has been with us longer. We cannot tell you much about him, other than that he is already very highly placed and we believe he is on course to go to the top of his organisation. In time your role will be to support him.
‘At some point in the future you will be approached by our main contact in London. You will know it is them because they will approach you and ask where is the best place in London to see a collection of plants, and you are to reply that it is Kew Gardens and then they will ask which is the best entrance to use and you say the Lion Gate and then they will thank you. The next day you should enter Kew Gardens through the Lion Gate at the same time of the day as when this person approached you on. They will find you there, do you follow me?’
Cooper said he did and thought it was all rather ironic because he’d always intended to visit Kew Gardens but had never got round to it and now here was the opportunity, though not in the circumstances he’d envisaged.
At dinner that evening Nikolai told him they’d be returning to Moscow the following day and the day after that he’d begin his journey back to Berlin. He gave him his instructions for the journey and how to retrieve his passport in Berlin.
‘May I mention something to you, please?’
The Russian stared hard at him, his eyes narrowing. ‘I know what it is, Bertie, and I advise you not to: no good will come of it. It is about the American woman, is it not?’
‘How did you know?’
Nikolai Vasilyevich laughed. ‘Do you think we’re fools? Of course we knew, but we decided it would be a good way to see how you behaved when acting in a clandestine manner, visiting her apartment and so forth. You were good, we were pleased: you took precautions and I have to admit that on one or two occasions we almost lost track of you.’
‘Is that why she was arrested, because of me?’
‘The NKVD arrested her because her lover, Aleksei Matveyevich, was arrested the night before she was and has been declared an enemy of the people, assuming he is still alive. If not, he’s a former enemy of the people.’
‘And Rita, what can I do to help her?’
‘There’s nothing whatsoever you can do to help Comrade Rita Marks. Forget about her. Let her fate be a warning of the consequences for those who fall out of favour with the Soviet Union, no matter how loyal and obedient they may have been. It is worth keeping that in mind, Bertie.’
Chapter 12
Berlin
October 1937
Cooper left Moscow on a bitterly cold morning, the first Monday in October.
His last night at the Lux Hotel had been a sleepless one. He’d convinced himself that raising Rita’s fate with Nikolai had been a fatal error and he’d never leave the Soviet Union. He’d shown he wasn’t to be trusted, that he too was an enemy of the people: unreliable and therefore disposable. He thought of the knock-on effect of one arrest: Rita’s lover from the Central Committee was deemed a traitor, therefore Rita was too through her association with him and – inevitably, it seemed – he too through his links with Rita.
Cooper couldn’t deny he was unreliable, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned: once back in London he had no intention whatsoever of spying for them or indeed for anyone else.
If he ever got back to London, that was – which, in the sleepless hours in the Lux Hotel, felt quite unlikely.
It would be so easy to make him disappear. There was no record of a Charles Christopher Cooper ever having been in the Soviet Union or indeed anywhere near it. His British passport was, as far as he knew, somewhere in Berlin.
When he nervously went down to the hotel lobby at six o’clock a guard from the dacha was waiting and took his case and when he got to the car Nikolai was sitting there and asked if he was all right.
‘Fine, thank you, why do you ask?’
‘You look pale, as if you’ve not slept all night.’
‘I never sleep well before a journey.’
‘Don’t worry, Bertie, you’ll have plenty of time to sleep on the train. Let me go through the details.’
* * *
When the car pulled up outside Belorussky station on Tverskaya Zastava Square Nikolai said he wouldn’t come into the station because he always got tearful at railway stations and he laughed and Cooper now began to relax.
A man built like a boxer carried his case and Cooper followed him through the crowded station and towards the platform where the six-thirty train for Minsk was waiting impatiently, already noisy with bursts of white steam coming from the front and rolling across the carriages towards the concourse.
His escort pushed through the ticket barrier and took him as far as a carriage at the front, at which point he handed him his case and gestured to the open door. He was travelling in a ‘special’ carriage reserved for Party officials and those on state business, which of course wasn’t to be confused with first class, because the Soviet Union no longer had a class system.
* * *
The train pulled out of Belorussky at a quarter to seven and crossed the Dnieper River and pulled into Smolensk station just after one o’clock. Six and a half hours later they arrived at Vilenski vakzal station in Minsk.
‘You’ll stay overnight at the Livadney Hotel on Koydanovskaya Street, which is close to the station. I’ve written it all here on this piece of paper: if you show this to someone, they’ll point you in the right direction. Your room there is reserved and paid for. The train will leave Minsk at five tomorrow morning.’
He re-joined the train half an hour before its departure and dozed for much of that morning. They arrived at Tsentralny station in Brest and soon after that crossed the Bug River, where the train pulled to a noisy halt. The next station was Terespol, Poland.
The Polish officials – there were three of them, all in different uniforms – were polite but clearly in a hurry and passed the Irish Free State passport among themselves and seemed relieved when he asked in German if everything was in order and one of them replied that it was and stamped his passport.
* * *
The Deutsche Reichsbahn train left Warszawa Główna at eight thirty that Tuesday evening.
The border crossing at Frankfurt an der Oder was surprisingly straightforward; the German officials seemed more preoccupied with checking the papers of the Polish passengers.
First light had broken as the train entered Berlin and with it Cooper felt once again the sense of fear he associated with the German capital, the feeling that he must be under suspicion, the all-pervasive menace in the air.
At the platform at Zoologischer Garten station he paused, recalling the instructions Nikolai had given him: out of the station and across Kant Strasse, down Ranke Strasse and then Achenbach Strasse and into a cafe, up the flight of stairs at the back and Eduard was waiting there, framed in the doorway, glancing at his watch as if to indicate he was late and he briefly nodded by way of a greeting and said ‘Bertie’.
* * *
There was no small talk from Eduard. Instead, he pointed to one of the two chairs in the sparsely furnished room and when they’d sat down, he said he didn’t have long.
‘You need to leave Berlin as soon as possible. Ernst and Ida Maurer were arrested at the weekend – we only found out yesterday and had we known earlier, you wouldn’t have come on this route. Your British passport is here.’
He passed a brown envelope to Cooper. Inside it was his British passport and twenty-five pounds and around ten pounds’ worth of Reichsmarks.
‘That will be more than sufficient money to get you back to England and to cover the money you were required to exchange in Moscow. Give me the Irish passport.’
Eduard checked it and slipped it into his jacket pocket and then stood up and walked over to the window, making sure the blinds were drawn properly.
‘It is fortunate they weren’t looking for a George William Hobson, but even so you must act as if you’re in danger, who knows what the Maurers will reveal in their interrogation. You’ll travel to Hamburg this morning and then to Rotterdam and from there to London.’
Cooper noticed that Eduard was no longer as composed and in control as before. He seemed tense and as he lit a cigarette his hands weren’t quite trembling but they certainly weren’t steady. He ran his hand through his hair and glared at Cooper, waiting for an answer.
‘You follow me?’
‘I think so, I—’
‘Think so? That’s not good enough, Bertie. In your new life in the service of the Soviet Union you need to be more decisive: never hesitate. I will explain once more. Walk to Lehrter station through the Tiergarten. Take the first train to Hamburg, the journey takes around three hours. When you arrive in Hamburg, do not leave the station: take the next train from there to Rotterdam. Are you still with me?’
