The Devil's Alternative

Beaconsfield, being in the Home County of Buckingham­shire—which is to say, within easy reach of central Lon­don—was years ago a favored area for the elegant country homes of those who enjoyed high and wealthy status in the capital. By the early seventies, most of the buildings played host to seminars, retreats, executive courses in management and marketing, or even religious observation. One of them housed the Joint Services School of Russian and was quite open about it; another, smaller house, contained the training school of the SIS and was not open about it at all.

Adam Munro’s course in tradecraft was popular, not the least because it broke the wearisome routine of enciphering and deciphering. He had his class’s attention, and he knew it.

“Right,” said Munro that morning in the last week of the month. “Now for some snags and how to get out of them.”

The class was still with expectancy. Routine procedures were one thing; a sniff of some real Opposition was more in­teresting.

“You have to pick up a package from a contact,” said Munro. “But you are being tailed by the local fuzz. You have diplomatic cover in case of arrest, but your contact does not. He’s right out in the cold, a local man. He’s coming to a meet, and you can’t stop him. He knows that if he hangs about too long, he could attract attention, so he’ll wait ten minutes. What do you do?”

“Shake the tail,” suggested someone.

Munro shook his head.

“For one thing, you’re supposed to be an innocent diplo­mat, not a Houdini. Lose the tail and you give yourself away as a trained agent. Secondly, you might not succeed. If it’s the KGB and they’re using the first team, you won’t do it, short of dodging back into the embassy. Try again.”

“Abort,” said another trainee. “Don’t show. The safety of the unprotected contributor is paramount.”

“Right,” said Munro. “But that leaves your man with a package he can’t hold onto forever, and no procedure for an alternative meet.” He paused for several seconds. “Or does he ...?”

“There’s a second procedure established in the event of an abort,” suggested a third student.

“Good,” said Munro. “When you had him alone in the good old days before the routine surveillance was switched to yourself, you briefed him on a whole range of alternative meets in the event of an abort. So he waits ten minutes; you don’t show up; he goes off nice and innocently to the second meeting point. What is this procedure called?”

“Fallback,” ventured the bright spark who wanted to shake off the tail.

“First fallback,” corrected Munro. “We’ll be doing all this on the streets of London in a couple of months, so get it right.” They scribbled hard. “Okay. You have a second loca­tion in the city, but you’re still tailed. You haven’t got any­where. What happens at the first-fallback location?”

There was a general silence. Munro gave them thirty sec­onds.

“You don’t meet at this location,” he instructed. “Under the procedures you have taught your contact, the second lo­cation is always a place where he can observe you but you can stay well away from him. When you know he is watching you, from a terrace perhaps, from a cafe, but always well away from you, you give him a signal. Can be anything: scratch an ear, blow your nose, drop a newspaper and pick it up again. What does that mean to the contact?”

“That you’re setting up the third meet, according to your prearranged procedures,” said Bright Spark.

“Precisely. But you’re still being tailed. Where does the third meet happen? What kind of place?”

This time there were no takers.

“It’s a building—a bar, club, restaurant, or what you like—that has a closed front, so that once the door is closed, no one can see through any plate-glass windows from the street into the ground floor. Now, why is that the place for the exchange?”

There was a brief knock, and the head of Student Program poked his face through the doorway. He beckoned to Munro, who left his desk and went across to the door. His superior officer drew him outside into the corridor.

“You’ve been summoned,” he said quietly. “The Master wants to see you. In his office at three. Leave here at the lunch break. Bailey will take over afternoon classes.”

Munro returned to his desk, somewhat puzzled. “The Mas­ter” was the half-affectionate and half-respectful nickname for any holder of the post of Director General of the Firm.

One of the class had a suggestion to make. “So that you can walk to the contact’s table and pick up the package unobserved.”

Munro shook his head. “Not quite. When you leave the place, the tailing Opposition might leave one man behind to question the waiters. If you approached your man directly, the face of a contact could be observed and the contributor identified, even by description. Anyone else?”

“Use a drop inside the restaurant,” proposed Bright Spark. Another shake from Munro.

“You won’t have time,” he advised. “The tails will be tum­bling into the place a few seconds after you. Maybe the con­tact, who by arrangement was there before you, will not have found the right toilet cubicle free. Or the right table unoccu­pied. It’s too hit-or-miss. No, this time we’ll use the brush-pass. Note it; it goes like this.

“When your contact received your signal at the first-fallback location that you were under surveillance, he moved into the agreed procedure. He synchronized his watch to the nearest second with a reliable public clock or, preferably, with the telephone time service. In another place, you did ex­actly the same.

“At an agreed hour, he is already sitting in the agreed bar, or whatever. Outside the door, you are approaching at exactly the same time, to the nearest second. If you’re ahead of time, delay a bit by adjusting your shoelace, pausing at a shopwindow. Do not consult your watch in an obvious man­ner.

“To the second, you enter the bar and the door closes be­hind you. At the same second, the contact is on his feet, bill paid, moving toward the door. At a minimum, five seconds will elapse before the door opens again and the fuzz come in. You brush past your contact a couple of feet inside the door, making sure it is closed to block off vision. As you brush past, you pass the package or collect it. Part company and proceed to a vacant table or barstool. The Opposition will come in seconds later. As they move past him, the contact steps out and vanishes. Later the bar staff will confirm you spoke to nobody, contacted nobody. You paused at nobody’s table, nor anyone at yours. You have the package in an in­side pocket, and you finish your drink and go back to the em­bassy. The Opposition will, hopefully, report that you contacted nobody throughout the entire stroll.

“That is the brush-pass ... and that is the lunch bell. All right, we’ll scrub it for now.”

By midafternoon, Adam Munro was closeted in the secure library beneath the Firm’s headquarters, beginning to bore through a pile of buff folders. He had just five days to master and commit to memory enough background material to en­able him to take over from Harold Lessing at the Firm’s “le­gal resident” in Moscow.

On May 31 he flew from London to Moscow to take up his new appointment.

Munro spent the first week settling in. To all the embassy staff but an informed few he was just a professional diplomat and the hurried replacement for Harold Lessing. The Ambas­sador, head of Chancery, chief cipher clerk, and commercial counselor knew what his real job was. The fact of his rela­tively advanced age at forty-six years to be only a First Secretary in the Commercial Section was explained by his late entrance into the diplomatic corps.

The commercial counselor ensured that the commercial files placed before him were as unburdensome as possible. He had a brief and formal reception by the Ambassador in the latter’s private office, and a more informal drink with the head of Chancery. He met most of the staff and was taken to a round of diplomatic parties to meet many of the other dip­lomats from Western embassies. He also had a face-to-face and more businesslike conference with his opposite number at the American Embassy. “Business,” as the CIA man con­firmed to him, was quiet.

Though it would have made any staffer at the British Em­bassy in Moscow stand out like a sore thumb to speak no Russian, Munro kept his use of the language to a formal and accented version both in front of his colleagues and when talking to official Russians during the introduction process. At one party, two Soviet Foreign Ministry personnel had had a brief exchange in rapid, colloquial Russian a few feet away. He had understood it