The Other Side of Silence

“The tape was mostly Markus Wolf’s idea, I think. Unlike him, Mielke is not a man of great subtlety. More of a bully boy, really. A man of action. You want someone beaten up, intimidated, interrogated, killed, tossed into a labor camp, and forgotten, then Erich Mielke’s your man. He’s what you might call the blunt instrument of German Communism. But if you want an intellectually sharper approach to a problem, then you speak to Markus Wolf. Wolf’s the chess player. I met him only twice, in Berlin, before that business with the Americans in nineteen fifty-four, and we actually sat down and played a game together. He’s Jewish, and of course you know what they’re like. Scheming, clever, bookish-I swear he thinks everything out several moves ahead like a grandmaster. Brought up in Moscow, of course, where a lot of those German emigres were weaned on chess and spying. Not for nothing is he known as ‘The Admiral’ around Stasi HQ in Karlshorst-after Canaris, of course, who was Hitler’s famous spymaster and whom I also met, but only once.”

By now I was lying so fluently I was starting to feel as if I might have missed my vocation. Maybe I could have been the German Somerset Maugham. Anne French must certainly have thought so, and, to me at least, she couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable knowing that mostly I was still agreeing with her entirely fictitious version of events. But like all good lies, this one had a reasonably substantial basis in fact. The best lies are always partly true.

“Anyway,” I continued, warming to my Munchhausen task, “Wolf had the bright idea of using Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to blackmail the British secret service almost as soon as they defected to the Soviet Union in nineteen fifty-one. But he needed Mielke to help him sell the whole idea to the GKO-the State Defense Committee-in Moscow. One thing you can say about Erich Mielke is that he’s a seasoned old party hand and knows his way around the Kremlin. Well enough to escape the big purge of nineteen thirty-seven, when a lot of those old German Communists were killed or sent to labor camps. Of course, Mielke was lucky enough to be out of the way in Spain then. He was a party commissar with the Republican faction.

“It was three or four years ago when he and Markus Wolf went to Moscow. The two Englishmen were already under suspicion. Moscow thought they’d been allowed to escape to Russia and that, in return for allowing Burgess and Maclean back in to England at some time in the future, the British planned to use them to supply all sorts of disinformation to the Soviets. Stalin even considered having them both liquidated just to be on the safe side, or sent to some far-flung corner of Siberia where they could do no harm. Gratitude was never Uncle Joe’s strong suit. Anyway, kinder, wiser counsels in the GKO prevailed and they remain alive and almost at large. But consequently neither of them has ever been given much more than a nominal role in the KGB or GRU. Markus, however-he showed the GKO that Burgess and Maclean were still an important and valuable intelligence resource, and that the British continued to be just as afraid of them as perhaps the Russians were. He showed them how that fear could be turned into paranoia and exploited to our advantage.

“The tape recording was made at the main studio of Moscow Radio. It was quite a production. Sound effects, everything. Maclean made one or two tapes, I think, but it was Guy Burgess who revealed that he had a real talent for the microphone. Of course, having been a radio producer with the BBC may have made it easy for him, especially with the help of a bottle of good whiskey. And it was Burgess who had the idea of the tapes being designed for submission to the BBC. According to him, there were lots of lefties at the BBC who thought the same way as he did-especially in Berlin. One or two of them are even on the Stasi payroll.”

“You’re saying that there are BBC employees in Berlin who are the agents of the Abteilung?” This was the man with the irregular teeth speaking now; while he spoke he nervously adjusted the cuff links on his shirt. Meanwhile Anne gave a loud sigh and reached for her handbag, from which she took out a packet of cigarettes and then lit one impatiently.

“That’s right,” I said. “Guy Burgess told Wolf that if ever they’d had the same opportunity as he’d had-to spy, that is-they’d have done exactly the same as he did.”

“So why did they choose Roger Hollis to target and not someone else? Someone in MI6 perhaps.”