“When can I go shopping?” he asked abruptly. “I want to go to Spencers and Marks.”
“Other way round, Yuri,” Mrs Hogan replied patiently.
“What?
“Other way round,” she repeated, still facing the tape machine. “It’s Marks and Spencer, and you can’t go there until we’re finished and Mr Bellamy says you can.”
David Bellamy was in charge of the de-brief team and, at that moment, was in the town shopping to alleviate the monotony of the diet. The cook had spent twenty years cooking in a boarding school and Bellamy said everything tasted steamed.
“He doesn’t like me,” Simonov muttered.
“Of course he likes you,” she said placatingly, then turned back to the table. “Now then, where were we, mmm?”
She knew very well where they were but adopted the almost maternal manner because that seemed to work the best with this particular individual.
“Ah yes, we were going over the early 80s again…”
“We have gone over this all before!” he exclaimed, waving the cigarette theatrically.
“Let’s do it again, shall we? Just make sure we haven’t forgotten anything?” She paused and smiled at him before continuing, “1982 Yuri, February. You moved across to the Fourth Directorate for six weeks...”
And so, Yuri Simonov began to talk.
Occasionally, Mrs Hogan interrupted him with open questions, leading him astray with red herrings to see if he would return to track again, constantly checking his story. Her tactics moved with the mood – sometimes cajoling, other times sympathetic, sometimes bullying and, at other moments, playing on the vanity that most defectors displayed. They had been aware for some time that a structural change within the KGB had begun moving specialists between directorates. Yuri Simonov was an analyst, a political scientist who specialised in extremism and terrorist groups. As such, he had nothing that MI6 wanted, but he had moved about the separate directorates enough that he could fill many holes in the files. He could put names to pictures, cover policy issues and possibly even isolate the latest concerns of the Komitet Gestabetvich Bedresknay.
So far, the seven weeks of his interrogation had been a waste of time. He had offered nothing substantial – barely, Bellamy considered, covering his room and board.
It was after lunch that day, pate and cheeses and a strictly rationed can of John Smiths Yorkshire Bitter, that things began to change.
“Then I moved back to First at the Sverdlov office.” He belched softly, smiling with embarrassment. “Back on routine material. PLO, Hezbollah. They never let me develop anything fully – always change to this, change to that, Mujahedin one week, Serbs the next, never anything interesting like the Knives group. One of your people was on that in ‘82 as well. Mismanaged, I was. Totally mismanaged!”
He seemed to be enjoying the word.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Mrs Hogan said, leaning forward imperceptibly in her seat. “What was that about one of our people? Knives, was it?”
“Yes, interesting group! Long Knives.”
“Long Knives… as in Reichstag?”
“Yes,” he said quickly.
“What about them?” she replied, goading him. “It’s ancient history.”
“History repeats itself,” he replied smugly, reaching for the cigarettes. “Your Churchill said that.”
“What about them then? Who are they and what are they?”
“Ask your man who was on it,” he replied.
Gotcha-you-little-shit, she thought, trying not to seem too interested.
“Who was that?” she asked in the same tone of voice, praying that the tape machine was working properly.
“Don’t you know?” he snapped back. He was suddenly fidgeting now, in obvious discomfort.
“No and neither do you,” she fired back.
“Yes I do!”
“How could you know that?”
“I do!”
“BULLSHIT!” she snarled. “How would you know? What are you? The big shot spy master?”
He leant forward angrily, the challenge thrown down. “I do… I do, I do!” Childishly now. “There’s someone in your...” He stopped suddenly, sitting back and going visibly pale before her eyes. “My God they will kill us. I am a dead man.”
Oh goody, she thought, the gossip has gone down and dirty. This is what I’m paid for, this is what I’m good at.
She pressed the button on the chair leg beside her left knee. Seven weeks.
“Yuri, who told you we had someone on this Reichstag group?”
“Not Reichstag,” he replied almost automatically. “Long Knives.”
“Who told you? Come on Yuri, we can go shopping later if you like…”
Next door, David Bellamy leapt for the spare headphones, his eyes glancing at the secondary logging recorder as its spools turned slowly, recording the conversation next door.
That evening, as Yuri sat morosely sipping his second can of John Smiths, his evening meal uneaten on the table, a courier drove the day’s tapes up to London where David Bellamy – in his capacity as head of the wringer team – had telephoned the Milburn office of no less a personage than the Deputy Director General of MI6, Sir Martin Callows.
Callows was not only DDG. He was the last in a long string of knee jerk reactions that began in Downing Street and, steam-rollering over the Minister, ended up at the feet of the Director General of the service Sir Gordon Tansey-Williams. Milburn – or more correctly, Department E – had long been a thorn in the side of Whitehall.
Moved into a building of that name in the late’60s, the move was that of a street fighter slipping a white glove over the fist that wore the brass knuckles hoping the latest bruised victim would forget it was there. Theirs was the nasty end of the business, to be kept firmly away from the Embassy parties and military attachés, away from the legitimate Foreign Office types.
They handled the dirty work, the jobs no-one else would do, either because they were inherently dangerous, or likely to fail, or both. They provided couriers and bag-men, protection for their parent MI6 people, resourceful people to fulfil tasks given up as lost – and, when things got really bad, they provided what was called the ‘forward pack’, a team that consisted of a controller, an operator – and a group
