The Other Side of Silence

“By an agent of the HVA. One of Blunt’s students in London, I believe. At the Courtauld Institute. I’m afraid I don’t know his name. He gave the picture to Berlin, who passed it on to Hennig, and when Hennig arrived down here, he contacted Robin Maugham, who rightly identified the photograph as the one he himself had used to blackmail Blunt. Consequently, it was a relatively simple task for Hennig to pressure Robin Maugham, first to invite Gunther to the Villa Mauresque, and then for Somerset Maugham to use Gunther as a reliable courier between himself and Hennig. The plan was that Gunther should ingratiate himself with Somerset Maugham by obtaining the photograph for no money, at which point Hennig would reveal the new material with which he was going to blackmail Maugham, and by extension the British secret service. Carrying out the blackmail down here was perceived to be a lot safer than attempting such a thing in London, where almost certainly everyone involved would have been arrested.”

“Tell us about the new material,” said the monk. “It was a tape recording, was it not?”

“Yes, a tape recording of the Soviet agent Guy Burgess explaining how he came to work for the KGB. General Mielke believed that as soon as Somerset Maugham heard what Burgess had to say he would understand the vital importance of the tape to his old friends in MI6. Also, it was believed that Somerset Maugham had the financial means to buy the tape himself on behalf of the British secret service. Of course, the Burgess tape-which is perfectly genuine, it is indeed Guy Burgess speaking, although the tape was recorded in Moscow, not at sea-contained a small, almost insignificant detail that was to be the equivalent of Desdemona’s handkerchief, I suppose; something small and almost insignificant. It was this: that Burgess had met someone in Paris in nineteen thirty-seven who had recently worked for British American Tobacco in Shanghai, and that this same person had been recruited by the Soviet GRU. Mielke hoped that someone in British intelligence would eventually make the connection between the tobacco salesman and Roger Hollis. After which MI6 and MI5-already feeling deeply paranoid after the recent defections of Burgess and Maclean-would do all the heavy lifting work of discrediting Roger Hollis themselves. He was quite convinced that just to plant the seed of doubt about Hollis would be more than enough to scupper the man. In the same way that Iago lets Othello do most of the hard work of distrusting Desdemona by himself.”

“Did Mielke have to take the Othello plan to the KGB for operational approval?”

“I believe so, yes. It was to be the HVA’s first big operation to prove it had come of age as an intelligence service to Moscow, as it were. You see, the HVA is a comparatively new service still trying to win the trust of the Soviets.”

“Did the KGB give the tapes directly to the HVA?”

“No. For the purposes of establishing some sort of provenance they were first given to the BBC’s Berlin office on Savignyplatz. I believe one of the BBC’s local correspondents works for the HVA and he was ordered to sell them to Hennig, as if he’d considered using them for broadcast and then decided to make money from them instead.”

Anne paused and asked for a glass of water, which was duly provided, before she continued with her bravura performance.

“My job was to meet with Gunther and Hennig and to report their operational progress to my controllers in the HVA by coded messages on a shortwave radio. Gunther and Hennig were to extract a large sum of money from Maugham and by extension the British secret service, and to hand over yet more tapes containing other false and misleading information about other secret service personnel. I believe there are other tiny details on the other tape recordings that might also help to discredit Hollis. I’m afraid I don’t know what those are. Any money they made from the blackmail operation was to be split between the three of us as a reward for loyal service and to fund future operations in this theater.”

“And these are the tapes you’ve provided for us. The ones you were keeping in your office at your rented villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer.”

“That’s right.”

Anne lied so smoothly, so expertly, that I almost believed her myself. She never hesitated, not for a moment, and I wondered if she had ever considered the possibility that the British might actually shoot me or Harold Hennig. Her voice was even and, it has to be said, sexy, too; a couple of times there was even a quaver in it, as if what she had to say was upsetting. She was very good. Mielke had chosen his Judas very well indeed. I doubt if Jean Simmons or Deborah Kerr could have given a better performance in that room than Anne French. But the hardest part of listening to all that was knowing that I loved her.