A Covenant of Spies Read online

  File coded FlyHiTwo: First Write 01/05/1981. Updated 01/03/1982.

  Starts: Personal Life: Heavily built, but surprisingly deft and agile for his size and slight disability: six foot three inches and sixteen stone, plus a bit. Studied judo, achieving a blue belt before other things took his interest. Black hair, black eyes with a permanent sad expression, which is probably caused by his addiction to alcohol. His face carries no distinguishing marks, is unremarkable and of a dull pale colour. He walks with a limp for no medical reason that we could find, nor do we know of any other cause.

  We have no information of his formative years, other than like his sister, he was raised in the family home at number 34 Sámova, Praha 10. It's a beautifully appointed three-storey home on the banks of the River Vitava befitting the offices his father once held. Subject no longer resides at that address. There is no criminal activity recorded against his name. Although he was only fifteen years old when Khrushchev visited, we do know he made quite a noise at the Aero Vodochody factory the next day following his father's, the general's, non-appearance at home. He was called to appear before the local commissar committee of junior party officials to explain his behaviour. He offered no defence and was severely reprimanded, having his junior party membership suspended for three months; however, after an intervention on his behalf by his senior chemical tutor at the Prague pre-University school he attended, that punishment was rescinded and nothing was recorded against his name. We have reason to believe it was Dalek who discovered his father's body. That was on the morning of the twelfth of January, the day after Khrushchev left the country and the committee was convened that evening. The official reason given for the lapse of time between the general's disappearance and discovery, was that he'd died from a heart attack in a part of the complex seldom used by anyone.

  Dalek was educated to a higher level than normal. He left the Czechoslovakian university at the age of twenty-one with the equivalent of five first-class honours degrees. One was in chemical analysis. He has occupied the same employment position since leaving the country's education system—Premier Analyst at Bok's Chemicals, Prague. A very prestigious position. He is overall second in charge at the chemical plant and considered to be one of the rising stars in the fledgling Czech scientific industry. We would like that ascendency to be accelerated and we want to know the progression boundaries in the development of your core subject: fuel from waste products.

  Sexual orientation: What intelligence we do have on this aspect comes from a source no longer available to us. It suggests both subjects are of a heterosexual persuasion. However, caution must be used with this information as we have no evidence on the ground available to substantiate or repudiate what is in the file.

  To Sum Up: We want Jana's signature on our books by close of play. Time is not of essence. Extend your stay at your discretion. What we do want is her alliance detached from her brother. Security is our utmost concern. If, in achieving the compliance of FlyHi One, FlyHi Two signature can also be scribbled in our ledger, then that's an acceptable bonus, but on no account can he be offered the same signing-on fee as his sister. You must make him earn whatever bonus you see fit—within reason. Jana gets premier-class remuneration and five-star handling all the way. One other thing: discretion is of the utmost importance, Douglas. No going off script.

  * * *

  “That roughly covered the extent of my briefing two days before I departed for Prague, from a Miles Faversham who told me he was the file's compiler and deputy head of the Soviet Satellite desk at Century House. For reasons I'll get to, I couldn't see him on the ground in Prague, so I assumed he'd come by the file information by way of an undisclosed third party. When I left Faversham, my thoughts were centred on the difficulty of the operation. To get one of them to turn against their country was going to be hard enough, but to get two, well, I'll be honest, I doubted I'd be able to do it.

  “I hadn't been trained in the persuasive arts. My limited experience at that time was more theoretical than practice. I had no knowledge of operational stuff before I was with Jack Price in New York. That operation was successful as far as Jack was concerned, but it did involve Dickie and Fraser flying out to New York where I'd killed someone and had been previously shot. They got Jack, me and another guy named Job home. Later, after Jack had passed away, I was in on a snatch assignment in Hamburg, which involved the death of an opposing agent in a messy firefight. Then came the other 'look and listen one' in Moscow where I had nothing to do. So I wasn't James Bond by a long way!

  “For the job, London gave me a substantial budget to use, but as I say, I wasn't trained to talk people into swapping sides in the Cold War. I wasn't nervous in the sense of not being able to do it, but I was nervous about doing it wrong. I told myself that everyone started somewhere and this was to be my somewhere. Beaulieu was a great institution for teaching trade-craft and being able to look after yourself well enough, so I wasn't frightened by the thought of going, but I can't say I had no reservations.

  “The only reason I could think of why they'd picked me for the job was my chemical industrial experience. If Dalek Kava had made such a loud commotion within the higher echelons of the Communist Party when only fifteen, then without question his name was high up on the StB's list and the Russians would have as much interest in him as them. From what I'd read of Czechoslovakia, it wouldn't be a surprise if the StB had Dalek under permanent observation; however, this was my assignment and before I left for Prague I decided to play it as it developed and if need be: ignore Faversham's instructions of getting them both.

  “That wasn't my only concern. The briefing I'd been given on the exposé of Jana's affair with a leading politician was too abridged for my liking. For example, why wasn't Jozef Lenárt already 'on our books' and thereby making Jana Kava superfluous to our needs? Also, who was it who found this information and how was it all verified? I asked those question, but got the standard answer to do with pay grades and mine being below what was required. I'm not telling you any of this with the benefit of hindsight, but other things bothered me. Like the fact that Jana, although listed first and made to appear the main target to turn, would in fact be compromised irreparably by her brother's defection. If I turned him then, his sister stood no chance of escaping anyone's radar and would need no inducement to jump ship.

  “Dalek held opposing views to his superiors in both the idealistic claims of Sovietism and, as I discovered more as time went on when I was out there, the functionality of Czechoslovakian industrial practices. He was an outspoken individual, owing his freedom more to his father's reputation and his sister's influence than to his own circumspection. On the paper records at the MI6 archives held on five floors of 140 Gower Street, and mysteriously not included in Faversham's briefing notes, Dalek Kava was named as a possible American StB plant. Which could explain why he was still at large. But in other files I looked in, the CIA was said to have no presence in Czechoslovakia. The Director General heading up the seventh floor at Century House Soviet Satellite counter-intelligence would surely not have withheld this information from Faversham's desk, so why would Faversham not show Dalek's status to me? The only answer I came up with was that he and his boss wanted someone flushed out and I would be ham-fisted enough to do it without making it look deliberate. Without asking, I decided to send a gun to the British Embassy in Prague by the diplomatic bag.

  “Despite my misgivings with the overall evaluation, I was not going to turn down the opportunity this assignment presented and as you are well aware by now, I've never been shy in putting forward my own spin on things. Especially when it comes to following my heart rather than connecting it to whatever should be inside my brain when it mattered. That particular trait of mine was in some ways my undeniable moral undoing, but also it created a distinct success for the service, or so I thought.”

  Chapter Three: The Meetings

  “My cover for Operation Donor was as a legitimate part of a British delegation attending an internat
ional trade fair held in Prague for the month of May in 1982. My branch of science was included alongside a geological surveying exhibition presented by the London Institute of Mining, which in a lot of ways my chemical presentation was linked to. Altogether we were to showcase the scientific excellence Britain was achieving in a variety of ways. One excellence was in the mining of the phosphates and arsenates this country was so rich in. I was to give a speech about our combined efforts and then, at the end of its opening day, I was to be introduced to the Czechoslovakian Minister of Trade.

  “Professor Mitchell and I were to be accommodated in the British Embassy and I was assigned to the less classified working laboratories at the Bok's chemical factory as a goodwill gesture. It was an elaborate cover, one I was thoroughly engrossed in. At Bok's, I was to be under the head of research, a man who had studied with Professor Mitchell and knew him well. As per the plan, Mitchell and I arrived the day before the conference and it was at the evening reception held at the Czechoslovakian Ministry of the Interior that I was introduced to Dalek Kava.

  “He was an effervescent young man when our conversation turned to the subject matter I was to speak of. My referral to him being young must sound somewhat strange, as we were only a month or two apart in age, but in those far off days I never once considered myself anything but a fully mature man, and those that I came across of similar years were nothing but youngsters with a long way to go in life to catch me up. But with Kava perhaps my estimation was oversimplified as I found his questions refreshingly original and a long way from the insane stupidity of the juveniles I often came across. However, despite his enthusiasm, his overall demeanour was brusque and abrasive.

  “The file had him to a tee. I soon discovered his liking for a drink. Those black eyes of his were worrying me as we each enjoyed a beer, and then the customary whisky for me and his favoured choice of vodka. They were so deeply embedded into his smooth forehead, they successfully disguised any emotion I could spot. His facial skin and hands carried no signs of an outdoor life, although there was what appeared to be a sizeable burn above the line of the shirt cuff he had buttoned down on his left arm. I did not ask about that, but I did ask about his limp. He told me it was due to a fall he had when he was twelve years of age. Despite what he'd said, I thought that to be a lie, and sometime after this initial encounter I found out that it wasn't a fall as much a push that had caused it.

  “His father, the general, had a violent temper which was exacerbated by his liking for the vodka. Drinking vodka was a family trait, as Jana too enjoyed the stuff, but not in excess like her brother and father before him. The family house had a cellar in which both Dalek and his sister, Jana, were regularly incarcerated when their drunken father was so intoxicated and depressed, that was what he decided. Dalek had, like me, lost three toes on his right foot, except his loss was not caused by a bullet fired in New York. His happened when he was pushed down the stairs to the basement and his foot caught a nail that ripped his toes so badly, three had to be amputated.

  “He was a great lover of mottos, was General Kava—introspection being good for the soul was his favourite, and used especially for Jana. She was locked in that cellar more often than her brother, and so Dalek's story continued one night when we were in a sleepy bar in the centre of Prague; she became used to killing rats down there with her bare hands. Jana had lost consciousness one particularly violent night when pushed down the wooden stairs into the cellar by the general and awoke only when a rat was nibbling at one of her fingers. She picked it up and repeatedly smashed it against the concrete floor until her hands were covered in its blood. She then sat motionless and silent, watching as other rats ate its body.

  “I shall be completely open with you and admit that it took me a few months to discover why exactly Dalek's comments about the 'West' being decadent and leaderless were so caustic and disapproving, yet carried an air of reverence attached to them. For example, he would quote the record number of unemployed in the UK of that year compared to the full employment of his home country, then go on to deride the jobs his countrymen undertook. He called us murderers when a few days before one of our first scheduled meets, the Czechoslovakian newspaper, Lidové Noviny, reported the number of dead aboard the Argentinian cruiser, the General Belgrano, which was sunk by a Royal Navy submarine in the Falklands conflict. He then went on to say, rather reluctantly after I pressed the point, that if the Islanders wished to remain British, then the Argentinians had no right to invade.

  “In June '82 he was scathing in his attack on the alleged American support for Israel in its invasion of Lebanon that was heavily reported in the press in Prague, but then amusingly added that he hated all Arabs with a vengeance. This professed disapproval of democracy was, I decided, a defence mechanism he'd constructed to deflect his admiration of the 'West' which he could not openly declare, even to his lover, Alexandr Radoslav. The sexual orientation report on Dalek was incorrect. He favoured male company, not female. However, those first few weeks spent in assimilating what I could about him, led to a disclosure that rocked more boats than just mine and also landed me with the prize London said they wanted.

  “That outstanding revelation required my immediate contact with Faversham at Century House. According to Dalek, his sister had told him of a Geoffrey Prime, an Englishman, who she said had served in the Royal Airforce Force and worked at the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ. She said he spent all that time spying for the Soviet Union. No reference of the highly damaging treason Prime had committed, nor his widespread sexual predatory, paedophilic disorder had been allowed to be published anywhere in the world, but here was a Czechoslovakian telling me about how Prime was to stand trial for treason later this year in November, in London.

  “This was the first time he had mentioned his sister, so I played it dumb and told him that I didn't know he had one. He replied she had an important job where she heard things. He went on to tell me she also told him of an experimental site in the Nevada desert where the Americans built and tested specialist spy planes. He was drunk and said he hoped the Russians would bomb it, but thought that wouldn't happen because their bombers would probably not be able to fly that far. It was my estimation that the reason he'd told me these things was to appear more important than he was and, perhaps, get closer sexually.

  “I asked how he thought his sister had come by the information about Geoffrey Prime and if he thought the intelligence regarding the site in Nevada had come the same way. He told me this was the first time she had said anything to him more specific about her work or any secrets she had heard. I pressed him on the point of how he was certain she had heard these rumours at work and he just said he was certain. He knew. I then asked him what work she did.

  “He was vague, adding nothing more than what I'd read in Faversham's brief assessment and for some unexplainable reason I believed him when he said he had no idea how Jana had come by the knowledge she'd passed on to him. But I wanted him to go further and it was then that he opened up a little bit about what happened to his father following Khrushchev's visit to the aircraft factory where the general was in charge of security. At that stage, all I could get was that the Russian Premier fell from the highest step on an inspection ladder, hitting his arm heavily against a guardrail and breaking his ankle as he lost his footing. His father, General Anotoly Vladislav Kava, was among the party escorting Khrushchev and according to Dalek, shouted all kinds of obscenities at Khrushchev as he lay on the ground, trying to regain his composure before his minders could get to him.

  “Apparently, Khrushchev and General Kava had history. Jana and Dalek's father had been in Stalingrad when Khrushchev arrived in August 1942. The battle for that city had already begun and although Khrushchev's role was not major, he and General Kava met several times to discuss strategy and logistics in the company of the city's commander, General Chuikov. The three generals were together a year later in March 1943 when Khrushchev was told of his son, Leonid, a fighter pilot, be
ing shot down and killed in action. Khrushchev, as you would expect, was inconsolable and, in his rage, he ordered the purging of all the senior officers in his son's fighter squadron. Thirty-eight were executed on Khrushchev's orders.

  “Early in 1944, as the Russians forced the Germans into a hurried retreat towards Berlin, word reached General Kava that Leonid Khrushchev had not died in combat, but had been liberated from the Nazis who had imprisoned him and where he had collaborated with his fascist captors. Being no friend of Khrushchev, General Kava made sure the news was passed along the correct channels to his friend Stalin, the autocratic ruler of all Russia and of all the Russian military. It is thought that the two friends of many years discussed the penalty to be meted out on Khrushchev's son. Despite pleas from Nikita Sergeyovitch Khrushchev for clemency, Stalin had Leonid shot for treason. General Kava's involvement with that decision was not known to any person other than Joseph Stalin.

  “When the Second World War finally ended, Josef Stalin, who held General Kava in the highest regard, posted him to the Soviet political territory of Czechoslovakia to restore the country's military and to take part in overseeing the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure. It was General Kava's reward for his loyalty, but it was there in 1956, three years after Stalin had died, that the faithful general heard Khrushchev denounce his beloved Stalin in a speech he gave when assuming the Presidency of Russia, and the festering hatred grew stronger leading up to the incident that cost General Kava his life.

  “The anger the general felt was overtaken by the death of his wife and the care his children needed. Dalek's mother, Tereza, had apparently passed some minor classified information on to the West Germans. Dalek was unresponsive in this matter, as was Jana when I asked her. It seemed as though espionage and subversive politics were never far from this family. It crossed my mind that Jana could be trying to draw me into the open with the information about Prime and the Nevada desert for the StB to pounce and grab me, but that was part of the excitement of being on foreign soil on active service.