The Fourth Protocol

It was nearly midnight that first day of January 1987 when Harold Philby sat down at the sitting-room table in his Moscow flat. He had had his bender the previous evening at the Blakes’ party, but had not even enjoyed it. His thoughts were too locked into what he would have to write. During the morning he had recovered from the inevitable hangover and now, with Erita and the boys asleep in bed, he had the peace and quiet to try to think things out.

There was a coo from across the room; Philby rose and went over to the large cage in the corner and gazed through the bars at a pigeon with one leg in splints. Philby had always adored pets, from his vixen in Beirut through a range of canaries and parakeets in this very apartment. The pigeon waddled across the floor of its cage, the splinted leg impeding its passage.

“All right, old fellow,” said Philby through the bars, “we’ll have them off soon and you will be able to fly again.”

He returned to the table. It had better be good, he told himself for the hundredth time.

The General Secretary was a bad man to cross and a hard one to deceive. Some of those senior Air Force men who had made such a dog’s breakfast of the tracking and downing of the Korean jetliner back in 1983 had on his personal recommendation ended up in cold graves beneath the permafrost of the Kamchatka. Racked by ill health, confined to a wheelchair part of the time he might be, but the General Secretary was still the undisputed master of the USSR. His word was law, his brain was still razor-sharp, and his pale eyes missed nothing. Taking paper and pencil, Philby began to rough out the first draft of his reply.

At just before midnight of January 1, the owner of the apartment in Fontenoy House returned alone to London. A tall, graying, distinguished man in his mid-fifties, he drove straight into the basement parking area, using his own plastic admission card, and, carrying his suitcase, rode up in the elevator to the eighth floor. He was in a foul mood.

He had driven for six hours, having left his brother-in-law’s stately home three days prematurely, following a blazing row with his wife. She, angular and horsey, adored the countryside as much as he loathed it. Content to stride the bleak Yorkshire moors in midwinter, she had left him miserably cooped up indoors with her brother, the tenth Duke. Which was in a way worse, for the apartment owner, who prided himself on his appreciation of the manly virtues, was convinced the wretched fellow was gay.

The New Year’s Eve dinner had been appalling for him, surrounded as he was by his wife’s cronies, who talked hunting, shooting, and fishing the entire time, the whole being punctuated by the high, twittering laugh of the Duke and his too-handsome pals. That morning he had made some remark to his wife and she had gone off the deep end. The result was that it had been agreed he would drive south alone after tea; she would remain as long as she wished, which might be a month.

He entered the hall of his apartment and paused; the alarm system should be emitting a loud, repeated peep that should last for thirty seconds before the full alarm sounded, during which time he could reach the master control box and turn it off. Damn thing, he thought, probably out of order. He went into the coat closet and turned the whole system off with his personal key. Then he entered the sitting room and threw on the light.

He stood, with his bag behind him in the hall, and stared at the scene in openmouthed horror. The damp patches had evaporated in the warmth, and the television was not on.

What caught his eye at once was the scorched wall and cloven safe door right ahead of him. He crossed the room in several strides and peered into the safe. There was no doubt—the diamonds were gone. He looked around again, saw his possessions scattered in the armchair by the fireplace and the carpet lifted from its smooth edge against the wall. He sank into the other fireside armchair, as white as a sheet.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed. He seemed stunned by the nature of the disaster and remained in the chair for ten minutes, breathing heavily and staring at the disarray.

Finally he rose and went to the telephone. With a trembling forefinger he dialed a number. At the other end it rang and rang, but there was no reply.

The following morning, at just before eleven, John Preston walked down Curzon Street toward the headquarters of the department he worked for, around the corner from the Mirabelle restaurant, in which few of the department’s employees could afford to dine.

Most of the civil service that Friday morning was being allowed to bridge over from Thursday, New Year’s Day, which was a public holiday anyway, into the weekend. But Brian Harcourt-Smith had asked Preston to come in especially, so he had come. He suspected he knew what the Deputy Director-General of MI5 wanted to talk about.

For three years, more than half the time he had spent with MI5 since joining as a late entrant in the summer of 1981, John Preston had been in F Branch of the service, which dealt with surveillance of extremist political organizations of the Left and the Right; with research into these bodies, and with the running of agents within them. For two of those years he had been in F1, heading up D Section, which was concerned with the penetration of extreme left-wing elements into Britain’s Labour Party. His report, the result of his investigations, had been submitted two weeks earlier, just before Christmas. He was surprised it had been read and digested so quickly.

He presented himself at the front desk, proffered his card, was vetted, checked out with the DDG’s office as an expected visitor, and allowed to proceed to the top of the building.

He was sorry he would not be seeing the Director-General personally. He liked Sir Bernard Hemmings, but it was an open secret inside “Five” that the old man was ill and spending less and less time in the office. In his absences, the day-to-day running of the department was passing more and more into the hands of his ambitious deputy, a fact that did not please some of the older veterans of the service.

Sir Bernard was a Five man from way back, and had done his fieldwork once. He could establish empathy with the men who went out on the streets, staked out suspects, tailed hostile couriers, and penetrated subversive organizations. Harcourt-Smith was of the university intake, with a first-class degree, and had been mainly a head-office man, moving smoothly between the departments and steadily up the promotion ladder.

Immaculately dressed, as ever, Harcourt-Smith received Preston warmly in his office.

Preston was wary of the warmth. Others had been received just as warmly, so went the stories, and had been out of the service a week later. Harcourt-Smith seated Preston in front of his desk and himself behind it. Preston’s report lay on the blotter.

“Now, John, this report of yours. You’ll understand, of course, that I take it, along with all your work, extremely seriously.”

“Thank you,” said Preston.

“So much so,” Harcourt-Smith went on, “that I’ve spent a good part of the festivities break right here in this office to reread and consider it.”

Preston thought it wiser to remain silent.

“It is, how shall I put it, pretty radical ... no holds barred, eh? The question is—and this is the question I have to ask myself before this department proposes any kind of policy based upon it—is it all absolutely true? Can it be verified? This is what I should be asked.”

“Look, Brian, I’ve spent two years on that investigation. My people went deep, very deep. The facts, where I’ve stated them as facts, are true.”

“Ah, John. I’d never dispute any facts presented by you. But the conclusions drawn from them—”

“Are based on logic, I think,” said Preston.

“A great discipline. I used to study it,” resumed Harcourt-Smith. “But not always supported by hard evidence, wouldn’t you agree? Let’s take this thing here—” He found the place in the report and his finger ran along one line. “The MBR. Pretty extreme, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, yes, Brian, it’s extreme. These are pretty extreme people.”

“No doubt about it. But wouldn’t it have been helpful to have a copy of the MBR attached to your report?”

“So far as I could discover, it hasn’t been written down. It’s a series of intentions—

albeit very firm intentions—in the minds of certain people.”

Harcourt-Smith sucked regretfully at a tooth. “Intentions,” he said, as though the word intrigued him, “yes, intentions. But you see, John, there are a lot of intentions in the minds of a lot of people vis-à-vis this country, not all of them friendly. But we can’t propose policy, measures, or countermeasures on the basis of these intentions.”

Preston was about to speak, but Harcourt-Smith swept on, rising to indicate that the interview was over.

“Look, John, leave this with me awhile longer. I’ll have to think on it and perhaps take a few soundings before I decide where I can best place it. By the by, how do you like F1(D)?”

“I like it fine,” said Preston, rising also.

“I may have something for you that you’ll like even more,” said Harcourt-Smith.

When Preston had gone, Harcourt-Smith stared at the door through which he had passed for several minutes. He seemed lost in thought.

Simply to shred the file, which he privately regarded as embarrassing and which might one day prove dangerous, was not possible. It had been formally presented by a section head. It had a file number. He thought long and hard. Then took his red-ink pen and wrote carefully on the cover of the Preston report. He pressed his buzzer for his secretary.

“Mabel,” he said when she entered, “take this down to Registry yourself, please. Right now.”

The girl glanced at the cover of the file. Across it were written the letters NFA and Brian Harcourt-Smith’s initials. In the service, NFA stands for “no further action.” The report was to be buried.

Chapter 2

It was not until Sunday, January 4, that the apartment owner at Fontenoy House was able to get an answer from the number he had been ringing every hour for three days. It was a brief conversation when it took place, but it resulted in his meeting with another man just before the hour of luncheon in a recessed alcove of one of the public rooms in a very discreet West End hotel.

The newcomer was about sixty, with iron-gray hair, soberly dressed, and with the air of a kind of civil servant, which in a way he was. He was the second to arrive, and seated himself with an immediate apology. “I’m terribly sorry I wasn’t available these past three days,” he said. “Being a single man, I was invited by some kind friends to spend the New Year period with them out of town. Now, what seems to be the problem?”

The apartment owner told him in short, clear sentences. He had had time to think exactly how he would convey the enormity of what had happened and he chose his phrases well. The other man considered the narrative with deepening gravity.

“You’re quite right, of course,” he said at length. “It could be very serious. When you returned on Thursday night, did you call the police? Or have you, at any time since?”

“No, I thought it better to talk to you first.”

“Ah, a pity in a way. It’s too late now, anyway. Their forensic people would establish the blowing of the safe as three or four days old. Hard to explain that. Unless—”

“Yes?” asked the apartment owner eagerly. “Unless you could maintain that the mirror was back in its place and everything in such apple-pie order that you could live there for three days and not know you had been burgled?”

“Hardly,” said the apartment owner. “The carpet had been taken up all around the edges. The bastard must have walked around the walls to avoid the pressure pads.”

“Yes,” mused the other. “They’d hardly credit a burglar so neat he even replaced the carpet as well as the mirror. So that won’t work. Nor, I fear, could one pretend you had spent the intervening three days somewhere else?”

“But where? I would have been seen. But I haven’t. Club? Hotel? I would have had to check in.”

“Precisely,” said the confidant. “No, it won’t work. For better or worse, the die is cast.

It’s too late to call in the police now.”

“Then what the hell do I do?” asked the apartment owner. “They have simply got to be recovered.”

“How long will your wife remain away from London?” asked the other.

“Who knows? She enjoys it up in Yorkshire. Some weeks, I hope.”

“Then we shall have to effect a replacement of the damaged safe with a new and identical model. Also a replica set of the Glen Diamonds. It will take time to arrange.”

“But how about what has been stolen?” asked the apartment owner desperately. “They can’t just be left somewhere out there on the loose. I’ve got to have them back.”

“True,” the other answered, nodding. “Look, as you may imagine, my people have some contacts in the world of diamonds. I’ll cause inquiries to be made. The gems will almost certainly be passed to one of the main centers for reshaping. They could not be marketed as they are. Too identifiable. I’ll see if the burglar can be traced and the things recovered.”

The man rose and prepared to leave. His friend remained seated, evidently deeply worried. The sober-suited man was equally dismayed but he hid it better.

“Do nothing and say nothing untoward,” he advised. “Keep your wife in the country as long as possible. Behave perfectly normally. Rest assured, I shall be in touch.”

The following morning, John Preston was one of those who joined the great throng of people surging back into central London after the five-day, too-long New Year break. As he lived in South Kensington, it suited him to come to work on the Underground. He disembarked at Goodge Street and made his way the remaining five hundred yards on foot, an unnoticeable man of medium height and build, aged forty-six, in a gray raincoat and hatless despite the chill.

Near the top of Gordon Street he turned into the entrance of an equally unnoticeable building that could have been an office block like any other; it was solid, but not modern, and purported to house an insurance enterprise. Only when one had entered it were the differences from other office buildings in the neighborhood discernible.

For one thing, there were three men in the lobby—one at the door, one behind the reception desk, and one by the elevator doors. All were of a size and a muscularity not normally associated with the underwriting of insurance policies. Any stray citizen seeking to do business with this particular company, and declining to be directed elsewhere, would have learned the hard way that only those presenting identification that could pass the scrutiny of the small computer terminal beneath the reception desk were permitted beyond the lobby.

The British Security Service, better known as MI5, does not live in one single place.

Discreetly, but inconveniently, it is split up into four office buildings. The headquarters are on Charles Street (and no longer at the old HQ, Leconfield House, so habitually mentioned in the newspapers).

The next-biggest establishment, on Gordon Street, is known simply as “Gordon” and nothing else, just as the head office is known as “Charles.” The other two premises are on Cork Street (known as “Cork”) and a humble annex on Marlborough Street, again known simply by the street name.

The department is divided into six branches, scattered throughout the buildings. Again, discreetly but confusingly, some of the branches have sections in different buildings. In order to avoid an inordinate use of shoe leather, all are linked by extremely secure telephone lines, with a flawless system for identification of the credentials of the caller.

“A” Branch handles in its various sections policy, technical support, property establishment, registry data processing, the office of the legal adviser, and the watcher service. The last-named is the home of that idiosyncratic group of men and (some) women, of all ages and types, streetwise and ingenious, who can mount the finest personal surveillance teams in the world. Even “hostiles” have had to concede that on their own ground MI5’s watchers are just about unbeatable.

Unlike the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which handles foreign intelligence and has absorbed a number of Americanisms into its in-house jargon, the Security Service (MI5), which covers internal counterintelligence, bases most of its jargon on former police phrases. It avoids terms like “surveillance operative” and still calls its tracker teams simply “the watchers.”

“B” Branch handles recruitment, personnel, vetting, promotions, pensions, and finance (meaning salaries and operational expenses).

“C” Branch concerns itself with the security of the civil service (its staffers and its buildings), the security of contractors (mainly those civilian firms handling defense and communications work), military security (in close liaison with the armed forces’ own internal-security staffs), and sabotage (in reality or in prospect).

There used to be a “D” Branch, but with the arcane logic known only to its practitioners in the intelligence world, it was long ago renamed “K” Branch. It is one of the biggest, and its largest section, called Soviet, is subdivided into operations, field investigations, and order of battle. Next in K comes Soviet satellites, also divided into the same three subsections, then research, and finally agents.

As may be imagined, K devotes its not inconsiderable labors to keeping track of the huge number of Soviet and satellite agents who operate, or try to, out of the various embassies, consulates, legations, trade missions, banks, news agencies, and commercial enterprises that a lenient British government has allowed to be scattered all over the capital and (in the case of consulates) the provinces.

Also inside K Branch is a modest office inhabited by the officer whose job it is to liaise between MI5 and its sister service, MI6. This officer is in fact a “Six” man, on assignment to Charles Street in order to carry out his liaison duties. The section is known simply as K7.

“E” Branch (the alphabetical sequence resumes with E) covers international Communism and its adherents who may wish to visit Britain for nefarious reasons, or the homegrown variety who may wish to go abroad for the same purposes. Also inside E, the Far East section maintains liaison officers in Hong Kong, New Delhi, Canberra, and Wellington, while the section called All Regions does the same in Washington, Ottawa, the West Indies, and other friendly capitals.

Finally, “F” Branch, to which John Presten belonged, at least until that morning, covers political parties (extreme left and right wings), research, and agents.

F Branch lives at Gordon, on the fourth floor, and it was to his office there that John Preston made his way that January morning. He might not have thought his report of three weeks earlier would establish him as Brian Harcourt-Smith’s flavor of the month, but he still believed his report would go to the desk of the Director-General, Sir Bernard Hemmings.

Sir Bernard, Preston was confident, would feel able to impart its information—and, admittedly, partly conjectural findings—to the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee or to the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, the political ministry commanding MI5. A good PUS would probably feel his minister should glance at it, and the Home Secretary could have drawn the attention of the Prime Minister to it.

The memorandum on Preston’s desk when he arrived indicated this was not going to happen. After reading the sheet he sat back, lost in thought. He was prepared to stand by that report, and if it had gone higher there would have been questions to answer. He could have answered them—would have answered them, for he was convinced he was right. He could have answered them, that is, as head of F1(D), but not after being transferred to another department.

After his transfer, it would be the new head of F1(D) who would be the one to raise the issue of the Preston report, and Preston was satisfied the man appointed to succeed him, almost certain to be one of Harcourt-Smith’s most loyal protégés, would do no such thing.

He made one call to Registry. Yes, the report had been filed. He noted the file number, just for future reference, if any. Then: “What do you mean, NFA?” he asked incredulously. “All right. ... Sorry. ... Yes, I know it’s not up to you, Charlie. I was just asking. A bit surprised, that’s all.”

He replaced the receiver and sat back, thinking deeply. Thoughts a man should not think about his superior officer, even if there was no personal empathy between them.

But the thoughts would not go away. It was possible, he conceded, that if his report had gone higher, its general burden might eventually have been imparted to Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party opposition in Parliament, who might not have been pleased.

It was also possible that at the next election, due within seventeen months at the outside, Labour could win and that Brian Harcourt-Smith was entertaining the hope that one of the new government’s first acts would be to confirm him as Director-General of MI5. His not offending powerful politicians in office, or those who might come to office, was nothing new. For a man of weak and tremulous disposition or of vaulting ambition, refusal to impart bad news could be a powerful motive for inertia.

Everyone in the service recalled the affair of a former Director-General, Sir Roger Hollis. Even to this day, the mystery had never been completely solved, though partisans on both sides had their convinced opinions.

Back in 1962 and 1963, Roger Hollis had known almost from the outset of the business the full details of the Christine Keeler affair, as it came to be known. He had had on his desk, weeks if not months before the scandal blew open, reports of the Cliveden parties, of Stephen Ward, who provided the girls and who was in any case reporting back, of Soviet attaché Ivanov’s sharing the favors of the same girl as Britain’s own War Minister.

Yet he had sat back as the evidence mounted, and never sought, as was his duty, a personal meeting with his own Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

Without that warning, Macmillan had walked into the scandal, leading with his jaw.

The affair had festered and suppurated through the summer of 1963, hurting Britain at home and abroad, for all the world as if it had been scripted in Moscow.

Years later, the argument still raged: had Roger Hollis been a supine incompetent, or had he been much, much worse ...?

“Bollocks,” said Preston to himself, and banished his thoughts. He reread the memorandum.