A combination of circumstances and events enabled the KGB to suborne Henry Blackstone. There was a great deal of intelligence expertise. Some carelessness by someone who should not have been careless. Audacity verging upon recklessness from a very ambitious Soviet espionage officer named Vitali Losev. And some good fortune because they got away with the audacity and approached the impoverished and aggrieved Blackstone at a moment when he was particularly susceptible, at the depth of a depression.
The identity of the British firm participating in the Star Wars missile development, including the limited correspondence that had passed between them, was the information demanded by Alexandr Petrin at that first San Francisco meeting with the now hopelessly enmeshed Emil Krogh. From the covering letter accompanying outline drawing specifications came the name of the project engineer in England, Robert Springley.
That one name – and the comparative smallness of the Isle of Wight with its county capital at Newport – was more than sufficient for Losev, the balding, fussily neat KGB head of station at the Soviet embassy in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens. Losev assigned five operatives to Newport, two to hunt the name Robert Springley through the listings at the telephone headquarters there, the other three to search the entries in the Voters’ Register, which is a publicly available record of all adults qualified to vote in parliamentary elections and held at every county library. There were five Robert Springleys and it only took thirty-six hours to find them all.
By the early morning of the third day KGB observers were positioned to follow the occupants of each discovered address to their workplace. The Robert Springley they wanted turned out to be a prematurely white- haired man of forty-two who was contentedly married to a part-time teacher, with two school-age children of his own and who drove, badly, a three-year-old Rover car from a terraced Victorian house at Ryde. He also suffered from the absentminded carelessness of a scientific engineer whose thoughts were more often upon esoteric theory than upon practical reality.
The London posting was the first position of command for Losev, who was an intensely ambitious Ukrainian determined to fulfil absolutely an assignment to which, from the priority coding of his instructions, he knew Dzerzhinsky Square attached the highest importance. From that first day Springley’s every move and habit were charted by unseen observers and his carelessness instantly established because such failings are the sort of advantages constantly sought by intelligence personnel. There also appeared to be a habit associated with that carelessness.
The aerospace factory was a sprawl of buildings added to the town-centre original as the company expanded with its success. The obviously fenced and permanently guarded secure area was easily isolated by Springley’s daily parked Rover, the convenient marker for the man’s movements. Which were invariably not straight home at the end of each day. Instead the man’s routine, minutely documented by the watching Russians, was to stow his coat and briefcase and whatever else he was carrying in the locked boot of his vehicle the moment he left the protected secure section. But then to drive from that section the five hundred yards to an expansive, unrestricted car park fronting the firm’s sports and social club, of which Springley was that year’s honorary chairman. And into which, for the hour he customarily spent inside, he never carried the briefcase.
Losev and his team waited in readiness for two evenings but could move on neither because Springley parked his car too near and too obviously close to the clubhouse. But there was no such convenient space the third night and the locked boot of Springley’s car was sprung within seconds of the man entering the building. Losev’s hire car moved off at once, the
Springley was not, however, so careless as to carry in his briefcase classified and therefore prohibited material. What there was proved enough, although it was not at first identified as such. At that stage the intent was still to find something manipulative about the project manager himself, so the concentration was upon the credit-card dockets and bills – some receipted, some not but none overdue – and bank statements. The only discovery was an easily manageable overdraft facility of ?3,000, which certainly wasn’t manipulative. Losev did not properly appreciate the significance of the one-way correspondence file until he reached the third letter. And then fell back satisfied in his chair, immediately and correctly appreciating what he held in his hand to be the internal applications from company employees seeking secondment to the Star Wars development.
And an information goldmine.
Each application necessarily itemized the qualificational background – up to and including security clearance ratings – of every applicant. Each listed the current pay scale of the writer, by so doing showing that the secret project carried a higher-than-normal salary structure and therefore hinting at a possible, money-related reason for such application. Each set out family background and circumstances, complete with home addresses. And two thirds gave their banks – again complete with addresses – with permission for them to be approached for character references.
All of which were approached, immediately, with the request for a credit guarantee by a finance company registered and provably functioning in the Channel island of Jersey, its public operation an impenetrable cover for its proper KGB purpose of probing the financial weaknesses of potential victims. From the same Jersey company requests were also made through the Central Credit Register and to all the major credit-card companies for assurances of the credit worthiness of everyone whose name emerged from Springley’s briefcase.
The inquiry – specifically for finance guidance and not character assessment – threw up the first clue to Henry Blackstone’s problems. There was a clearly ambiguous reply from the man’s bank from which it was easy to infer that Blackstone’s income only just met his outgoings and frequently failed. And from two credit-card companies came the information of applications received but refused. These alone were enough to mark Blackstone out from the rest. And then came another public record check, initially begun upon each application.
Over the course of many years in the relentless pursuit of blackmail the KGB has become expert in the use of Britain’s national repository of births, death and marriages at St Catherine’s House, in London’s Kingsway, and it was automatic for a search to be made there upon target groups.
The marriage of Henry George Blackstone, a tracer, to Ruth Emerson, a spinster of the parish of Emsworth, in Hampshire, was recorded at Portsmouth Register Office on 6 May 1975. The marriage of Henry George Blackstone, a tracer, to Ann Crouch, a computer operator of the parish of Freshwater, Isle of Wight, was shown to have taken place at Newport Register Office on 9 January 1976. The KGB researcher had only two floors to go to complete his investigation, idly reflecting as he went from one section of the building to the other on the shortness of grief in the event of Ruth Blackstone, nee Emerson, genuinely having died after such a tragically brief union. It took him less than an hour in the department listing the country’s deaths to establish, however, that Ruth hadn’t died. And that Blackstone was the bigamist he already suspected the man to be.
Although the evidence looked conclusive, Losev did not immediately try to use it, displaying unusual restraint by instead concentrating all the KGB surveillance solely upon Blackstone. The Russian was becoming disappointed by the discovery of a mundane existence of Monday-night cinema and Thursday-night darts at the pub nearest to Blackstone’s Newport home, but on the Friday was glad that he’d waited. Because that night, instead of going from the East Cowes factory to the home he’d made with Ann, Blackstone caught the Portsmouthbound ferry, bought a cheap spray of flowers from a street stall and was with Ruth in Anglesea Terrace by six thirty. And from there, the following Monday, began commuting to the island for the period he was allowing himself to be with his first wife.
Losev was never completely to know the fortunate coincidence of his actual approach to Blackstone: not how the fingers-crossed five-horse accumulator upon which Blackstone’s weekend outing with Ruth depended had failed on the same day that the man had been officially informed he was not getting the hoped-for transfer to the better- paying Star Wars project as part of Springley’s team. Losev learned soon enough about the work rejection, though: a lot of tight-lipped complaints about lack of appreciation and years of service given for bugger all and how some people didn’t deserve loyalty.
Losev had manouevred the conversation on the ferry going to Portsmouth and timed the inquiry about what
