13: LONDON, JANUARY 1941

Where the Soviet Rezident Gorsky Proves He Is a Spy After All

My comrades in the Rezidentura at the Soviet Embassy could not remember a colder winter. Several had taken to joking about having been posted east to Siberia instead of west to Great Britain. The iciness gripping London City had frozen the Gentlemen’s Bathing Pond on the Highgate side of Hampstead Heath. Young men in gymnasium costumes and their lady friends in woolen leggings and flaring thigh-length skirts were spending Sunday afternoon ice-skating. “Do they skate in Russia?” Sonny inquired. He was sitting on the crabgrass, his back against an old oak, his overcoat, its collar up, buttoned to the scarf around his neck, his hat balanced on a knee, his head angled toward the arctic sun.

“They do,” I said, settling onto the ground next to him, my back against the same tree. I leaned toward him and lit a cigarette on the embers of the one in his mouth. For a moment our faces were quite close. I detected alcohol on his breath. “We have a park named after the late Maxim Gorky,” I said. “Muskovites skate when the pond in the park freezes over. At night some hold flaming torches. The police light fires in trash cans on the pond’s edge so the skaters can warm their hands. Old babushkas peddle hot wine from thermos bottles. You would like it.”

“The wine?”

“The scene.”

“I hope I never get to see it,” Sonny said. “It would mean my cover had been blown and I’d run for it.”

“It will not come to that if we are all careful,” I said.

Sonny took a swig from a flask. Wiping the mouthpiece on his palm, he offered me a drink. I sniffed at it before I pushed away his hand. “Smells like real whiskey,” I remarked.

“Whiskey it is,” he confirmed. “The good stuff. B-bonded. Aged in wood kegs for ten years, so they allege on the label.”

“Where do you get it? At the Soviet Embassy all we have is Russian vodka.”

“State secret,” he said with a humorless laugh.

“You should be careful about your consumption of alcohol,” I said.

“I told you last time you raised the subject, I need my ration. Steadies my nerves. Everyone at Caxton House stashes a b-bottle in the b-bottom drawer of his desk. Nobody notices whiskey on your breath because they have whiskey on their breath. I should think they would notice if I didn’t drink.”

“Black market whiskey is expensive. Surely you have trouble making ends meet if you’re drinking most of your salary.”

“My sainted father, who has taken up residence in Great Britain for the duration despite the everlasting rain that affects his gout, slips me a hundred quid every so often.”

“Might I suggest you switch to vodka? It’s cheaper. And it can’t be detected on your breath.”

“You do take a personal interest in your agents. Can you suggest a diet to help me lose a bit of the inner tube round my waist?” Turning toward me, Sonny smirked in embarrassment. “Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate your concern, not to mention your tradecraft. Tell me something, Anatoly, is Gorsky really your name? Guy Burgess supposed it to be a pseudonym.”

“State secret,” I said. “But I will share it with you. Gorsky was my grandfather’s family name, but not my father’s and not mine. Under the tsars, the second son was always conscripted into the army, so families with a second son farmed him out to a family without sons and the name was changed. That’s how grandfather Gorsky avoided military service under the Tsar Alexander Three.”

The blade of one of the skaters broke through thin ice and his left foot sank into water up to his ankle, eliciting a howl of laughter from the other skaters. In the bare branches over our heads jackdaws cawed as if in derision. I studied Sonny as he took another swig of whiskey. At twenty-nine, he cut a fine figure—lean despite his claim to have an inner tube round his waist, suntanned even in winter, the livid trace of a war wound on his forehead immediately above his sunglasses. “What are you reading?” I asked, nodding at the book in his lap.

“Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk in the Garnett translation,” he said.

“I know his Otzi i Deti. You don’t speak Russian, do you? You should learn. It’s a rich language. Otzi i Deti means Fathers and Sons. Turgenev invented the term nihilism in that novel. I fail to comprehend how someone who believes in nothing can look himself in the mirror when he shaves. I understand a Fascist better than I understand a nihilist—at least a Fascist believes in something.”

“I was told you’d been b-back to Moscow.”

“Whoever told you that should have minded his tongue. I was visiting family.”

“Didn’t know you had one.”

“Many things you don’t know. Better that way. Compartmentalization.”

“When you were in Moscow, did you see Otto?”

“No. Our paths didn’t cross.”

“What happened to Otto? Why was he suddenly recalled to Moscow?”

“Nothing happened to Otto. I heard he’d been promoted to captain and posted to the Second Chief Directorate. It’s what Rezidenti dream about. Someone mentioned he was living in a village near Moscow and commuting.”

“So he’s in good health?”

I nodded. “Why wouldn’t he be in good health?”

“I liked Otto.”

“He liked you.” I cleared my throat. “What do you have for me today?”

“Something quite important, I should think. The date of the German invasion of Soviet Russia. It’s scheduled for dawn on the twenty-second of June.”

I always made it a point not to react when I debriefed agents. But I am afraid in this instance a whistle seeped from my lips. “Twenty-two June! That’s an incredible nugget. How do you know it?”

“Guy Burgess got it from a chap who works with the code breakers at Bletchley Park. They are reading Germany’s top-secret Ultra traffic.”

“Be sure to convey our appreciation to Mr. Burgess. This will be enciphered and sent to Moscow before the day is out. I expect it will be brought to Comrade Stalin’s attention immediately.”

“There’s more. They circulated an eyes-only memorandum to department heads at Caxton House. Mine let me see it. It confirmed the June date that Guy passed on to me. It mentioned the German order of battle: 4.5 million troops from the several Axis powers, 600,000 motorized vehicles and 750,000 horses are being massed along a 2,900-kilometer front for the invasion.”

“Did it list the divisions by name? Did it say which were armored?”

“I’m afraid it did, but I had all to do to memorize the numbers I gave you without the division names. I do remember the Das Reich division, if that’s any help.”

“If you had had that Minox camera I offered, you might have been able to photograph the page.”

“I absolutely refuse to carry a spy camera into Caxton House. I won’t take the risk. I don’t intend to wind up watching ice-skaters in Gorky Park. Look, the security people do random body searches on p-people entering and leaving. They found one of the aerial photo analysts carrying a rolled-up nudist camp magazine the other day, the ones where the genitals are airbrushed out. The colonels who run His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service are rather puritanical and their attitude filters down—the nudist magazine was shredded into a burn bag and the poor bastard was p-packed off to a photo recon unit in Iceland, so I heard.”

“With or without the division names, this is vital information. You and your friends will have the satisfaction of knowing you are contributing to the defeat of Hitlerism in Europe.”

“Will Hitler be defeated in Europe? Will the Soviet Union survive the German blitzkrieg, or will Russia get knocked off the way Belgium and France and Holland got knocked off?”

I couldn’t believe he was asking the question. “Kim, Kim, we will do more than survive. We will gather our strength—the masses of tanks and planes being produced, the hordes of soldiers being prepared for battle behind the Ural Mountains. We will unleash a withering attack that will sweep the Nazi invaders back to Berlin. We will capture Hitler and parade him in chains through Red Square.”

“As my dear mother would say, from your lips to God’s ear.”

I was rather taken aback. “I don’t believe in God,” I snapped. “I believe in the Red Army. I believe in Stalin.”

“I have another nugget,” he said. “Remember that American I told you about? The one OSS sent round to learn the ropes from us?”

“Angleton?”

“That’s the one. Jim Angleton. Rather charmless chap, actually. But to give him his due, not born yesterday. Fast learner. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him running their OSS in twenty years. We have become chums. We’ve taken to climbing to the roof to watch the German b-bombers attacking London. It’s one hell of a show. Our giant search beams crisscross the night sky. Every now and then one of them p-pins a German moth to the underside of a cloud. Then our ack-ack goes to work. Small explosions, each blazing with the intensity of an igniting match head, walk their way up the beam until one bursts immediately under the fuselage. A wing snaps off, the moth tilts clumsily onto its side and slips out of the spotlight. I don’t like the Hun, but all the same I couldn’t help imagining desperate men clawing their way to hatches to escape the hull falling deadweight like a shot bird.”

“Your sympathies are misplaced.”

“Quite. Curiously, that’s what Angleton said. He and I got to talking about the war. I told him I thought it would last ten years. He said no way. He said it would end in forty-four, forty-five at the latest. I asked what made him think so. When he didn’t answer, I could see he wasn’t going to tell me anything unless he thought I already knew it, so I took a stab in the dark—I asked him if he was talking about that new atomic d-device.”

“What did he say?”

“Angleton looked at me sharply. ‘How do you know about that?’ he demanded. I told him it was common knowledge in my shop that our scientists had been seconded to the Americans to help them construct an atomic bomb.”

“And?” I insisted.

Sonny shrugged. “Angleton appeared surprised to discover I was party to that information. He said the Germans were working on one, too. He said something about a race to use uranium-235 to trigger a chain reaction. He said the Americans were on the case and would get there first. He said they already had people identifying targets. He said the war would be over the day after the first bomb was dropped. He said the atomic bomb would give Joe Stalin second thoughts about conquering Italy and France after the European war ended.”

“He actually said the bomb would give Joe Stalin second thoughts?” After a moment I murmured, “This ought to convince the doubters—”

“What doubters?”

I had spoken out of turn. When I didn’t respond Sonny repeated the question. “What doubters are we talking about?”

“There are a very few comrades in Moscow who think you are too good to be true. They worry whether you are a sincere Communist and a loyal agent of the Centre. Are you, Kim? Loyal to Moscow, to Stalin, to Communism?”

“That’s the last thing I expected to hear from you, Anatoly. Not after the risks I’ve taken. Not after all the information I’ve passed along to Otto and now to you.”

“What made you become a Communist?”

“I read Marx. Any reading of Marx leads one to Socialism. Socialism is half the hog. I turned to Communism because it was whole hog. It armed me for the struggle against the inequalities which have always revolted me.”

“Sorry we went down this road. I don’t doubt your loyalty. Others…”

Sonny was clearly annoyed. “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody,” he announced. He laughed to himself. “Except my sainted father, of course.”

I laughed, too. “St John Philby. Of course.”

A young man in a faded yellow duffle coat approached us. He carried a skate by its blade in one hand and an unlighted cigarette in the other. “Trouble one of you gents for a light?”

“What happened to the other skate?” Sonny asked.

“Only have one skate,” he said. He looked from one to the other. Both Sonny and I were smoking. “Match?”

“Only had one match,” I said.

“Beg pardon? Are you gents refusing to give a bloke a light?”

“We are,” I said.

“Well, not to overegg the pudding but fuck the both of you,” the young man said. He walked off shaking his head. I could see him leaning toward a lighted match held by a skater standing on dry land.

“Why did you do that?” Sonny asked.

“He works for me,” I said. “He was holding one skate, and not two, to let me know he hadn’t spotted anyone suspicious at the pond. He was telling me the coast was clear.”

“B-bloody hell!” Sonny said. “You really are a spy, Anatoly!”

“What did you think this was, a game?”

“A game. Yes, I suppose I did.”