Petrofsky drank in the details. He was excited and amazed by the audacity of it.
“You will spend the next few days with a team of four men only. They will brief you on a whole range of names, places, dates, transmission times, rendezvous, and backup rendezvous. You will memorize them all. The only thing you will have to take in with you will be a block of one-time pads. Well, that’s it.”
Petrofsky sat nodding at what he had been told. “I have promised the Comrade General Secretary that I will not fail,” he said. “It will be done, as required and on time. If the components arrive, it will be done.”
Philby rose. “Good, then I will have you driven back to Moscow to the place where you will spend the time remaining until your departure.”
As Philby crossed the room to the house phone, Petrofsky was startled by a loud
Petrofsky crossed to the cage and scratched the bars with a fingernail. But the pigeon waddled away to the far side. The door opened to admit Major Pavlov. As usual he said nothing, but gestured Petrofsky to follow him.
“Until we meet again, good luck,” said Philby.
On Monday, March 23, the members of the Paragon Committee assembled to read Preston’s report.
“So,” said Sir Anthony Plumb, opening the discussion, “now at least we know what, where, when, and who. We still don’t know why.”
“Nor how much,” interposed Sir Patrick Strickland. “The damage assessment is still unattempted and we simply have got to inform our allies. Even though nothing sensitive—save for one fictitious paper—has gone on its way to Moscow since January.”
“Agreed,” said Sir Anthony. “All right, gentlemen, I think we must concur that the time for further investigation is over. How do we handle this man? Any ideas? Brian?”
Brian Harcourt-Smith was without his Director-General, and represented MI5 alone.
He chose his words carefully. “We take the view that with Berenson, Marais, and the cutout Benotti the ring is complete. It seems to the Security Service that it is unlikely there were more agents being run by this one ring. Berenson would have been so important, it seems to us likely the entire ring was set up to handle him alone.”
There were nods of agreement around the table.
“And your recommendation?” asked Sir Anthony.
“That we pick them all up, roll up the whole ring,” said Harcourt-Smith.
“There’s a foreign diplomat involved,” objected Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office.
“I think Pretoria may be prepared to waive immunity in this case,” said Sir Patrick Strickland. “General Pienaar must have reported all this to Mr. Botha by now. They’ll no doubt want Marais when we have had a chat with him.”
“Well, that seems decisive enough,” said Sir Anthony. “How about you, Nigel?”
Sir Nigel Irvine had been staring at the ceiling as if lost in thought. At the question he seemed to wake up. “I was just wondering,” he said quietly. “We pick them up. Then what?”
“Interrogation,” said Harcourt-Smith crisply. “We can begin damage assessment and inform our allies of the roundup of the entire ring to sweeten the pill a bit.”
“Yes,” said Sir Nigel, “it’s good. But what after that?” He began to address the secretaries of the three ministries and the Cabinet. “It seems to me we have four choices.
We can pick up Berenson and formally charge him under the Official Secrets Act, which we’ll have to do if we arrest him. But do we actually have a case that will stand up in court? We know we are right, but can we prove it against a first-class legal defense?
Apart from anything else, a formal arrest and charge would cause a major scandal, which would be certain to rebound against the government.”
Sir Martin Flannery, the Cabinet Secretary, took the point. Unlike anyone else in the room, he knew of the intention to hold a snap summer election, because the Prime Minister had told him in strictest confidence. A lifelong civil servant of the old school, Sir Martin had offered his total loyalty to the present government, as he had to three previous governments, two of them Labour. He would offer that same loyalty to any democratically elected successor government. He pursed his lips.
“Then,” resumed Sir Nigel, “we could leave Berenson and Marais in place, but seek to feed Berenson doctored documents to pass on to Moscow. But that wouldn’t work for long. Berenson is too highly placed and knowledgeable to be fooled by that.”
Sir Peregrine Jones nodded. He knew that on that point Sir Nigel was right.
“Or we could pick Berenson up and try to get his complete cooperation in damage assessment by offering him immunity from prosecution. Personally, I hate immunity for traitors. You never know whether they have told you the whole truth or have tricked you, as Blunt did. And it always gets out eventually, with an even worse scandal.”
Sir Hubert Villiers, whose ministry contained the law officers to the crown, frowned in agreement. He, too, hated immunity deals, and they all knew the Prime Minister felt the same.
“That seems to leave,” continued the Chief of the SIS smoothly, “the question of detention without trail, and rigorous interrogation. In a word, third degree. I suppose I’m just old-fashioned, but I’ve never had much confidence in it. He might admit to fifty documents, but we’d none of us know to the day we died if there weren’t another fifty.”
There was silence for a while.
“They’re all pretty unpleasant,” agreed Sir Anthony Plumb, “but it looks as if we’ll have to go with Brian’s suggestion if there aren’t any others.”
“There might just be one,” said Sir Nigel gently. “It could be, you know, that Berenson’s recruitment was a genuine false-flag approach.”
Most of those present knew what a false-flag recruitment was, but Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office and Sir Martin Flannery of the Cabinet frowned in puzzlement. Sir Nigel explained.
“It involves the recruitment of a source by men who pretend to be working for one country, with whom the subject is sympathetic, while in reality they are working for another. The Israeli Mossad are particular experts at this technique. Being able to produce agents who can pass for just about any nationality under the sun, the Israelis have worked some remarkable ‘stings’ with false flags.
“For example: A loyal West German working in the Middle East is approached while on furlough at home by two fellow Germans who, with impeccable supporting evidence, prove to him that they represent the BND, the West German intelligence arm. They spin him a tale to the effect that a Frenchman working on the same project as he is passing technology secrets that are patently forbidden by NATO. Would the German help his own country by reporting back on what is going on? As a loyal German he agrees, and spends years working for Mossad. Such things have happened many times.
“It makes sense, you know,” pursued Sir Nigel. “We’ve all been through Berenson’s file until we are no doubt sick of it. But with what we now know, the false-flag technique could be the answer.”
There were several nods as they recalled the contents of Berenson’s file. He had started his career, straight out of the university, in the Foreign Office. He had progressed quite well, serving abroad on three occasions and rising steadily, if not spectacularly, in the diplomatic corps.
In the mid-1960s he had married Lady Fiona Glen and shortly afterward had been posted to Pretoria, where he was accompanied by his new wife. It was probably there, confronted by the traditional and almost limitless South African hospitality, that he had developed his deep sympathy and admiration for that country. With a Labour government in power in Britain and Rhodesia in rebellion, Berenson’s increasingly outspoken admiration of Pretoria had not gone down very well at home.
On his return to Britain in 1969, word had apparently reached him that his next posting was likely to be somewhere less controversial—say, to Bolivia. The men around the table could only surmise, but it was perfectly likely that Lady Fiona, while prepared to take Pretoria in her stride, had put her foot down flatly at the idea of leaving her beloved horses and social life to spend three years halfway up the Andes.
Whatever had been the reason, George Berenson had applied for a transfer to the Ministry of Defense,
