Opening Moves

The obvious breach in protocol was ignored.

Stalin stood up and spoke forcefully.

“I want this plan included in Kingdom39 by Friday and I want these bastards dead.”

Chapter 13 – THE MISTAKE

I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.

Robert McCloskey

1140 hrs Tuesday, 10th July 1945, The Khavane Erbil, Istanbul, Turkey.

Konstantin Volkov was an unassuming man of indeterminate age, which made him perfect for his role. He was deputy Vice-Consul in the Soviet Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey or at least that was his official title. What actually consumed most of his time was being Deputy Head of NKVD in the country, although he had simply had enough of that post and was looking for a way out.

For some time he had been gathering intelligence from messages that passed through his hands, steadily building up a portfolio of information from agents across the globe for his ‘insurance policy’, a stock of restricted information with which to attract foreign intelligence agencies to ‘look after’ him.

A secret meeting had been arranged on 5th July with a member of the US mission, in order for Volkov to make his play. The two men secreted themselves deep in the rear of a modest coffee shop and, once the identity of the American had been established, immediately got down to details. Wreathed in thick tobacco smoke, Volkov gave his starting position. In exchange for $27,000 and political asylum, he would hand over the details of numerous Soviet agents in Turkey and Britain. The American, actually a very out of his depth young Marine Captain, offered nothing but promised to report back to his superiors and then bring Volkov the reply.

To be frank, the offer was not taken seriously and, in any case, Turkey and Britain being riddled with Soviet agents was not a huge concern for the Marine’s boss, an ageing US Army Lieutenant Colonel, soon to retire on health grounds.

None the less, the man was still professional enough to send the young Captain out for another clandestine meet five days later, this time with a request for proof, and more to the point, proof that was of value to the United States.

The Captain arrived first and Volkov arrived shortly afterwards. Expecting an answer to his question, he was extremely surprised and very upset to discover that he would not be offered what he wanted during this meeting.

There was nothing he could do except try and satisfy the requests put to him.

Fresh in his mind was a message he had encoded for sending via his Turkish contacts, and so he spoke of it. He assumed this eventually went to the Turkish Embassy in Washington but knew no more. The contents were also unknown to him but he was conscious of the fact that it was an extremely important agent for whose messages, incoming or outgoing, he was to be brought into the embassy no matter what time of day or night a message arrived. The young Captain made written notes, which made Volkov very uncomfortable.

“Enough!” he hissed. “Remember what I tell you. No writing.”

“OK sir.” He made a point of dramatically finishing the sentence he was writing. “Anything else I can pass on to my boss?”

“Just that there is much concern that you may have broken our NKVD, diplomatic and trade ciphers and so we are moving to a new code system in the next two months.”

“Well there is not a lot there for my boss to sell this idea sir.”

The more Volkov thought about it, the more he agreed. The Turks would fall over themselves for his info. The British would wet their pants when he revealed what he knew. Why on earth had he gone to the Amerikanisti? The answer to that lay with British Military Intelligence. He could not trust them, for they were infiltrated by the NKVD.

His mind wandered back to finding something of import for the moment.

Once, when the route had first been established, he had partially decoded the NKGB version of a message, from an agent AKONHOST. It had made little sense to him but he did remember one word.

“Manhattan, my Directorate knows about Manhattan.”

The Captain looked amused.

“Sir, everyone knows about Manhattan. It’s on all the maps.”

Both men stood up, one to go and one to remonstrate but who then thought better of it. One resolved to file a relatively useless report with his boss and the other resigned to the fact that he had made an error approaching the Amerikanisti and would carefully approach the British instead. Very carefully obviously, with conditions of who was to know what and how communications should be managed, but he was sure they would like to know what he knew about the depths to which Soviet Intelligence had them penetrated!

They went their own ways with neither a shake of the hand nor another word.

Chapter 14 – THE REPORT