‘Why does it keep doing that?’ my wife demanded when the bedside phone yet again let off a single ring just after we had fallen asleep, jolting us both back to wakefulness.
I had no sensible explanation to give her. I had tried explaining the problem to the phone company, but after coming out to check the physical line they were perplexed, only able to suggest that it was a fault with the handset. I’d tried replacing the handset but it had made no difference. The obvious answer would have been to take the phone out of the bedroom, but with elderly parents and young children who were starting to stay away quite frequently, that didn’t seem like a helpful option.
‘Rudi says it means they’re bugging the phones,’ I said.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Are you seriously suggesting that the government has time to listen in to all our conversations? You’re becoming as paranoid as he is.’
The logical part of my brain agreed with her, but on the other hand it did seem a bit of a coincidence that our phone had been behaving like this ever since I started having meetings with Rudi, a man who had just been let off a life sentence for spying for the Russians, having been caught and convicted at the height of the Cold War. By the time he was named by a KGB defector, Rudi had been active for 20 years and was probably the best placed agent the Russians had ever managed to recruit, with virtually unlimited access to information on projects like Exocet and Polaris. The country where he was caught was politically volatile and still practised the death penalty, so throughout the period of his imprisonment he had never been sure whether he would be executed or not. Changes in the political climate and in a number of regimes around the world, and an intervention from the Russian President, had led to him being pardoned and released after serving 10 years, at which point he went into hiding.
It was easy to imagine that the timing of these rings on our home phone fitted the picture he painted, as the eavesdroppers gave up listening for the night, assuming they would hear nothing interesting again until the morning.
If it was true they must have been disappointed because Rudi was adamant that we should never talk about anything over the phone, just as he always changed the venues for our meetings at the last minute to fox anyone who might be hoping to listen in. Interviewing him was never a restful business as his eyes darted around rooms, scrutinising everyone near us, noting when people came and went. If anyone got too close he would immediately stop talking and we would move on to a new venue. If we walked anywhere together he would take roundabout routes, often more than doubling the distance we needed to travel.
‘Why would they still be interested?’ I asked him one day. ‘The Cold War is over now.’
He shook his head in despair at my naivety. ‘It’s never over.’
Revelations in 2013 about levels of surveillance from Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee, suggest that Rudi might have been right.
The publishing world was not interested in Rudi’s memoirs, believing that people had now moved on from the Cold War and were no longer excited by the idea of spies. Once we had abandoned the project our phone found itself able to rest peacefully once more.
It’s always hard to know if you are being paranoid in these matters. Conspiracy theories are so tempting but can so easily be punctured with mockery. I was approached by a whistleblower who was in a position to cause considerable embarrassment to senior government officials. The man’s name had become a byword for injustice in the media and was scrawled on motorway bridges at the time by supporters armed with aerosols. Publishers were keen to buy what he had to say.
A sturdy advance was negotiated by the agent involved and the day the first cheque arrived on the agent’s desk the whistleblower was summoned in to talk to his government employers. They assured him they had no objection to him writing a book, in fact they thought it extremely ‘brave’ of him, but they felt they did have to warn him that if he went ahead with publication they wouldn’t be able to ‘guarantee his safety’, or that of his family.
Since he had small children he had to take the warning seriously and we instructed the agent to return the money. He then asked me to return the diaries which he had given me to work from. Wanting to be sure that they arrived safely I went to the local village post office and asked the Postmistress to send them the most secure way possible. She advised sending them as registered documents.
Several days later the package had not arrived at its destination and I went back to the Postmistress and asked her to track it. She was happy to oblige, embarrassed to think that the service had let us down, but when she started to make enquiries she found that the parcel’s trail ended abruptly at Gatwick Airport, never to be resumed.
But perhaps I am being paranoid again.