The Fourth Protocol

One was Vladimir Ilich Krilov. He was a professor of modern history at Moscow University. His real importance was as a walking encyclopedia on the subject of the Socialist and Communist parties of Western Europe; he specialized in Britain. More important, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s rubber- stamp, one-party parliament; a member of the Academy of Sciences; and a frequent consultant for the International Department of the Central Committee of which the General Secretary had once been the head.

The man in civilian clothes but with a soldierly bearing was General Pyotr Sergeivitch Marchenko. Philby knew him only vaguely, but was aware that he was a senior officer in the GRU, the Soviet armed forces’ own military intelligence arm. Marchenko was an expert on the techniques of internal security and of its counterpart, destabilization, and his particular area of interest had always been the democracies of Western Europe, whose police and internal-security forces he had studied half his life.

The third man was Dr. Josef Viktorovitch Rogov, also an academician, a physicist by discipline. But his fame lay in another title—chess grand master. He was known to be one of the General Secretary’s few personal friends, a man on whom the Soviet leader had called several times in the past when he felt he needed to use that remarkable brain in the planning stages of certain operations.

The four men had been there two minutes when the double doors at the end of the room opened and the undisputed master of Soviet Russia, her dominions, satellites, and colonies, entered.

He was in a wheelchair, pushed by a tall steward in a white jacket. The chair was propelled to the vacant space left for it.

“Please be seated,” said the General Secretary.

Philby was surprised by the changes in the man. He was seventy-five, and his face and the backs of his hands were blotched and mottled in the manner of very old men. The open-heart surgery of 1985 seemed to have worked, and the pacemaker appeared to be doing the job. And yet he looked frail. The white hair, thick and lustrous in the May Day portraits, making him look like every family’s favorite doctor, had almost vanished.

There were brown smudges around both eyes.

A mile up the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the old village of Kuntsevo, set in a huge territory inside a two- meter timber palisade fence in the heart of a birch forest, stood the hyperexclusive Central Committee Hospital. It was a modernization and extension of the old Kuntsevo Clinic. In the grounds of the hospital stood Stalin’s old dacha, the surprisingly modest bungalow in which the tyrant had spent so much of his time and where he had finally died. The whole of this dacha had been converted into the country’s most modern intensive-care medical unit for the benefit of this man who now sat in his wheelchair studying them one by one. Six top specialists were on permanent call at the dacha at Kuntsevo, and to them each week went the General Secretary for treatment. It was evident they were keeping him alive—just. But the brain was still there, behind the chilly eyes that looked through the gold-rimmed glasses. He blinked rarely, and then slowly, like a bird of prey.

He wasted no time with preamble. Philby knew he never did. Nodding to the other three, he said, “You Comrades have read the memorandum of our friend, Comrade Colonel Philby.”

It was not a question, but the other three nodded their assent.

“Then you will experience no surprise to learn that I regard the victory of Britain’s Labour Party, and thence of the ultra-left wing of that Party, as a priority of Soviet interest. I wish you four to form a very discreet committee to advise me on any method that might occur to you that would enable us to assist—completely covertly, of course—in that victory.

“You will discuss this with no one. Documents, if any, will be prepared by you alone.

Notes will be burned. Meetings will be held in personal residences. You will not associate in public. You will consult no one else. And you will report to me by telephoning here and speaking to Major Pavlov. I will then arrange a meeting at which you can report your proposals.”

It was clear to Philby that the Soviet leader was taking the issue of confidentiality extremely seriously. He could have held this meeting at his suite of offices in the Central Committee building, the big gray block on Novaya Ploshed where all Soviet leaders have worked since Stalin’s time. But other Politburo members might have seen them arriving or leaving, or heard about their meeting. The General Secretary was evidently establishing a committee that was so totally private that no one else was to be allowed to know of it.

There was another odd thing. Apart from the General Secretary himself—and he was no longer its head— there was no one from the KGB present; yet the First Chief Directorate had massive files on Britain and experts to match. For reasons of his own, the wily leader had chosen to keep the matter outside the service of which he had once been Chairman.

“Are there any points of query?”

Philby raised a tentative hand. The General Secretary nodded.

“Comrade General Secretary, I used to drive myself around in my own Volga. Since my stroke last year, the doctors have prohibited this. Now my wife drives me. But in this instance, for the sake of confidentiality ...”

“I will assign a KGB driver to you for the duration,” said the General Secretary softly.

They all knew the other three men already had drivers, as of right.

There were no other points. At the General Secretary’s nod, the steward propelled the wheelchair and its occupant back through the double doors. The four advisers rose and prepared to leave.

Two days later, in the country dacha of one of the two academics, the Albion Committee went into intensive session.

Book title or not, Preston was making some progress. Even while the inaugural session of Paragon was going on, he was ensconced in the Registry, deep under the Ministry of Defense.

“Bertie,” he had told Brigadier Capstick, “so far as the staff here are concerned, I’m a new broom making a bloody nuisance of myself. Put it about that I’m only trying to make a mark with my own superiors. Routine checking of procedures, nothing to worry about, just a pain in the arse.”

Capstick had done his bit, trumpeting that the new head of C1(A) was going through all the ministries showing what an eager beaver he was. The Registry clerks rolled their eyes to heaven and cooperated with thinly veiled exasperation. But Preston was given access to the files— the withdrawals and the returns, who had seen the documents and, most important, over what dates.

He had one early break. All the papers but one would have been available at the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office, since they all touched upon Britain’s NATO allies and the areas of joint NATO response to a variety of possible Soviet initiatives.

But one document had not gone outside the Defense Ministry. The Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Peregrine Jones, had recently returned from talks in Washington at the Pentagon; the subject had been joint patrolling by British and American nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean, Central and South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. He had prepared a draft paper on his talks and circulated it to a score of senior mandarins inside the ministry. The fact that it was among the stolen papers, in photocopy form, meant at least that the leak was inside the one ministry.

Preston began an analysis, going back for months, of the distribution of top-secret documents. It became clear the papers in the returned package covered a period, first to last, of four weeks. It was also plain that every mandarin who had had all those documents on his desk had also had more than these. So the thief was being selective.

There were twenty-four men who could have had access to all ten, Preston established at the end of his second day. Then he began checking absences from offices, trips abroad, incidences of flu—eliminating those who could not have had access within the period of theft.

He was hampered by two things: He had to pretend to examine a host of other withdrawals in order not to draw attention to those particular ten documents. Even Registry clerks gossip, and the source of the leak could have been a low-level staffer, a secretary or typist, capable of exchanging coffee-break gossip with a clerk. Second, he could not penetrate to the floors above to check on the number of photocopies made of originals. He knew it was common for one man to have a top-secret document officially out to him by name, but that man might wish to take the advice of a colleague. So a photocopy would be run off, numbered, and given to the colleague. On its return it would be shredded—or, in this case, not. The master document would then go back to Registry.

But several pairs of eyes could have seen the photocopy.

To solve the second problem Preston returned to the ministry with Capstick after dark and spent two nights on the upper floors—empty apart from the incurious cleaning ladies—checking the number of copies run off. More