The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (10 page)

“Peter Guillam, Brian de
Grey and George Smiley.
Smiley left us in early
fifty-one and went over to Counterintelligence. In May
fifty-one I was posted to
Berlin
as D.C.A.—Deputy
Controller of Area. That meant all the operational work.”

“Who did you have under you?” Peters was
writing swiftly. Leamas guessed he had some homemade shorthand.

“Hackett, Sarrow and de
long.
De long was killed in a traffic accident in
Fifty-nine. We thought he was murdered but we could never prove
it. They all ran networks and I was in charge. Do you want details?” he asked
drily.

“Of course, but later.
Go on.”

“It was late fifty-four when we landed our
first big fish in
Berlin
:
Fritz Feger, second man in the D.D.R. Defense Ministry. Up till then it had
been heavy going—but in November fifty-four we got on to Fritz. He lasted
almost exactly two years,
then
one day we never heard
any more. I hear he died in prison. It was
another three years before we found anyone to touch him. Then, in 1959,
Karl
Riemeck turned up. Karl was
on the Präsidium of the East German Communist Party.
He was the best agent I ever knew.”

“He is now dead,” Peters observed.

A look of something like shame passed across
Leamas’ face.

“I was there when he was shot,” he
muttered. “He had a mistress who came over just before he died. He’d told
her everything—she knew the whole damned network. No wonder he was blown.”

“We’ll return to
Berlin
later. Tell me this. When Karl died
you flew back to
London
.
Did you remain in
London
for the rest of your service?”

“What there was of it,
yes.
”

“What job did you have in
London
?”

“Banking section;
supervision of agents’ salaries, overseas payments for clandestine purposes.
A child could have managed it. We got our orders and we signed
the drafts. Occasionally there was a
security headache.”

“Did you deal with agents direct?”

“How could we? The Resident in a particular
country would make a requisition. Authority would put a hoof-mark on it and
pass it to us to make the payment. In most cases we had the money transferred
to a convenient foreign bank where the Resident could draw it himself and hand
it to the agent.”

“How were agents described?
By cover names?”

“By figures.
The
Circus calls them combinations. Every network was given a
combination: every agent was
described by a suffix attached to the combination. Karl’s
combination was eight A stroke
one.”

Leamas was sweating. Peters watched him coolly,
appraising him like a professional gambler across the table. What was Leamas
worth? What would break him, what attract or frighten him? What did he hate;
above all, what did he know? Would he keep his best card to the end and sell it
dear? Peters didn’t think so:
Leamas
was too much off balance to monkey about. He was a man at odds with himself, a
man who knew one life, one confession, and had betrayed them. Peters had
seen it before. He had seen it, even
in men who had undergone a complete ideological
reversal, who in the secret hours of the night had found a new
creed, and alone, compelled by the internal power of their convictions, had
betrayed their calling, their
families,
their countries. Even they, filled as they were with new zeal and new hope, had
had to struggle against the stigma of treachery; even they wrestled with the al
most physical anguish of saying that which they had been trained never, never
to reveal. Like apostates who feared to bum the Cross, they hesitated between
the instinctive and the material; and Peters, caught in the same polarity, must
give them’
comfort and destroy
their pride. It was a situation of which they were both aware; thus Leamas had
fiercely rejecte4 a human relationship with Peters, for his pride precluded it.
Peters knew that for those reasons Leamas would lie; lie perhaps only by
omission, but lie all the same, for
pride, from defiance or through the sheer perversity of his profession; and he,
Peters, would have to nail the lies. He knew, too, that the very fact that
Leamas was a professional could militate against his interests, for Leamas
would select where Peters wanted no selection; Leamas would anticipate the
type of intelligence which Peters
required—and in doing so might pass by some
casual scrap which could be of vital interest to the
evaluators.
To all that, Peters added the capricious vanity
of an alcoholic wreck.

“I think,”
he
said, “we will now take your
Berlin
service in some detail. That would be from May 1951 to March 1961. Have another
drink.”

Leamas watched him take a cigarette from the box on
the table and light it. He noticed two things: that Peters was left-handed, and
that once again he had put the cigarette in his mouth with the maker’s name
away from him, so that it burned first. It was a gesture Leamas liked: it
indicated that Peters, like himself, had been on
the run.

Peters had an odd face, expressionless and gray.
The color must have left it long ago—perhaps in some prison in the early days
of the Revolution—and now his features were formed and Peters would look like
that till he died. Only the stiff gray hair might turn to white, but his face
would not change. Leamas wondered vaguely what Peters’ real name was, whether
he was married. There was something very orthodox about him which Leamas liked.
It was the orthodoxy of strength, of confidence. If Peters lied there would be
a reason. The lie would be a calculated, necessary lie, far removed from the
fumbling dishonesty of Ashe.

Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in
quality, in authority, which to
Leamas
was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he
suspected, a progression in ideology.
Ashe, the mercenary,
Kiever the fellow traveler,
and
now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical.

Leamas began to talk about
Berlin
. Peters seldom interrupted, seldom
asked a
question or made a
comment, but when he did, he displayed a technical curiosity and
expertise
which entirely accorded
with Leamas’ own temperament. Leamas even seemed to respond to the
dispassionate professionalism of his interrogator—it was something they had in
common.

It had taken a long time to build a decent East
Zone network from
Berlin
,
Leamas explained. In the earlier days the city had been thronging with
second-rate agents: intelligence was discredited and so much a part of the
daily life of
Berlin
that
you could recruit a man at
a cocktail party, brief him over dinner and he would be blown by breakfast. For
a professional it was a nightmare: dozens of agencies, half of
them penetrated by the opposition,
thousands of loose ends; too many leads, too few
sources, too little space to operate. They had their break with
Feger in 1954, true enough. But by ‘56 when every Service department was
screaming for high-grade intelligence, they were becalmed. Feger had spoiled
them for second-rate stuff that was only one jump ahead of the news. They
needed the real thing—and they had to wait another three years before they got
it.

Then one day de long went for a picnic in the
woods on the edge of
East Berlin
. He had a
British military number plate on his car, which he parked, locked, on a gravel
road beside the canal. After the picnic his children ran on ahead, carrying the
basket. When they reached the car
they stopped, hesitated, dropped the basket and ran
back. Somebody had forced the car door—the handle was broken
and the door was slightly open. De long swore, remembering that he had left his
camera in the glove
compartment.
He went and examined the car. The handle had been forced; de Jong
reckoned it had been done with a
piece of steel tubing, the kind of thing you can carry in your sleeve. But the
camera was still there, so was his coat, so were some parcels belonging to his
wife. On the driving seat was a tobacco tin, and in the tin was a small nickel
cartridge. De Jong knew exactly what it contained: it was the film cartridge of
a subminiature camera, probably a Minox.

De Jong drove home and developed the film. It
contained the minutes of the last meeting of the Präsidium of the East German
Communist Party, the S.E.D. By an
odd
coincidence there was collateral from another source; the photographs were
genuine.

Leamas took the case over then. He was badly in
need of a success. He’d produced virtually nothing since arriving in
Berlin
, and he was
getting past the usual age limit for full-time operational work. Exactly a week
later he took de Jong’s car to the same place and went for a walk.

It was a desolate spot that de Jong had chosen for
his picnic: a strip of canal
with
a couple of shell-torn piliboxes, some parched, sandy fields, and on the East
Berlin side a sparse pinewood lying about two hundred yards from the gravel
road which
bordered the canal.
But it had the virtue of solitude—something that was hard to find in
Berlin
—and surveillance
was impossible. Leamas walked in the woods. He made no
attempt to watch the car because he did not know from which
direction the approach might be made. If he was seen watching the car from the
woods, the chances of retaining his informant’s confidence were ruined. He need
not have worried.

When he returned there was nothing in the car so
he drove back to
West Berlin
, kicking himself
for being a damned fool; the Präsidium was not due to meet for another
fortnight. Three weeks later he borrowed de Long’s car and took a thousand
dollars in twenties in a picnic case. Ho left the car unlocked for two hours
and when he returned there was a tobacco tin in the glove compartment. The picnic
case was gone.

The films were packed with first-grade documentary
stuff. In the next six weeks he did it twice more, and the same thing happened.

Leamas knew he had hit a gold mine. He gave the
source the cover name of
“
Mayfair
” and sent a pessimistic letter to
London
. Leamas knew that
if he gave
London
half an opening they would control the case direct, which he was desperately
anxious to avoid. This was probably
the only kind of operation which could save him from superannuation, and it was
just the kind of thing that was big enough for
London
to want to take over for itself. Even
if he kept them at arm’s length there was still
the danger that the Circus would have theories, make
suggestions, urge caution, demand action. They would want him to give only new
dollar bills in the hope of
tracing
them, they would want the film cartridges sent home for examination, they would
plan clumsy tailing operations and tell the Departments. Most of all they would
want to tell the Departments; and that, said Leamas, would blow the thing
sky-high. He worked like a madman for three weeks. He combed the personality
files of each member of the Präsidium. He drew up a list of all the clerical
staff
who
might have had access to the minutes. From
the distribution list on the last page of the facsimiles he extended the total
of possible informants to thirty-one, including clerks and
secretarial staff.

Confronted with the almost impossible task of
identifying an informant from the incomplete records of thirty-one candidates,
Leamas returned to the original material, which, he said, was something he
should have done earlier. It puzzled him that in none of the photostat minutes
he had so far received were the pages
numbered,
that none was stamped with a security classification, and that in the second
and fourth copies words were crossed
out in pencil or crayon. He came finally to an
important conclusion: that the photo copies related not to the
minutes themselves, but to the
draft
minutes. This placed the source in
the Secretariat and the Secretariat was very small. The draft minutes had been
well and carefully photographed: that suggested that the photographer had had
time and a room to himself.

Leamas returned to the personality index. There
was a man called Karl
Riemeck in
the Secretariat, a former corporal in the Medical Corps, who had served three
years as a prisoner of war in
England
.
His sister had been living in
Pomerania
when
the Russians overran it, and he had never heard of her since. He was married
and had one daughter named Carla.

Leamas decided to take a chance. He found out from
London Riemeck’s prisoner of war number, which was 29012, and the date of his
release which was
December
10, 1945
. He bought an East German children’s book of science
fiction and
wrote in the fly
leaf in German in an adolescent hand:

This book belongs to Carla Riemeck, born
December 10, 1945
, in Bideford,
North Devon
. Signed Moonspacewoman
29012
,
and underneath he added,
Applicants wishing to make space flights should
present themselves
for instruction to C. Riemeck in person. An application form is enclosed. Long
Live the People’s Republic of Democratic Space!