No flights were called. Everywhere snowed up. Departures turned into a campsite, bad weather all over, a lot of it in his head, whole memory terrains cut off by the adverse conditions. What came to him was unbidden, cranked-out stuff over which he had no control: the flickers of a dying man, except he was dead already and awaiting departure.
What he had not appreciated was death’s variable offensive in life: how close it had been to attacking: it could have happened any time, not necessarily when it did. From his own life he could see road accidents missed by seconds, imminent river drowning from slipping while wading, at least two KGB plots that could have gone either way, and so on and so on, including nights when he could have died simply from his body packing up with the alcohol ingested, and, damn it, even now he missed cigarettes.
What to say of the gaunt young James Jesus Angleton, counter-espionage master in the making, and of his arrival in Rome in 1943 as head of American counter-intelligence at the age of twenty-seven? Alone at night in the office, thin and sleepless chain-smoker, the Ivy League aesthete read modern poetry on the job and projected a Romantic angst, convinced he was dying Keats’s death from consumption.
A wartime photograph shows him in London, outside the South Kensington Hotel, thin and anxious, the loner already used to keeping his distance. We see something of the man’s vanity. Photographs of his early mentor and Nemesis, the traitor Kim Philby, show a less specific sense of dress. London schooled Angleton in the art of deceptive appearance, taking things seriously while appearing not to, learning what was worth taking seriously. Angleton was keen to understand the nuances of such a highly coded society. It wasn’t cleverness the British taught but advanced deviousness. Espionage as the art of the lie: where the trick was not to make the lie a thing in itself but a shadow of the truth, so the telling was not an isolated fabrication but a comfortable variation of the truth. Truth was not an absolute but a commodity.
Angleton would state that William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity was a sufficient preparation and introduction for a career in counter-espionage.
During his London wartime training at Ryder Street (known fondly as the school for spies) he was assessed by familiar names: Kim Philby, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene.
The Yankee Angleton was schooled in British irony, thanks to his time at a British boarding establishment (Malvern College), and knew it was a protection of personal space as much as a literary conceit.
Greene’s verdict on Americans: insufficient geography.
In the Red Lion off Jermyn Street, Philby told Angleton that Greene had once suggested a roving brothel as an intelligence front in Sierra Leone.
Greene looked modest and said the proposal had been turned down. Greene’s new idea was to use an ex-pornographer named Scattolini with Vatican connections.
‘What a cherry that would be,’ Greene said. ‘Vatican security is as tight as the Virgin’s crack.’
He knew of an operation run in Lisbon by an agent code-named Garbo who with the help of a good map, a Blue Guide and a couple of standard military reference books had fooled the Germans into believing his detailed reports on Britain’s defences were the work of a national spy network.
‘Made the whole thing up from thousands of miles away and, bugger me, the Germans bought it hook, line and sinker.’
Angleton had lost count of how much they had drunk; God alone knew how many pints of watery English ale and at least five Scotches.
Philby asked if Angleton knew what a Chinaman was.
‘A left-handed googly.’
Greene looked irritated. ‘I thought Yanks weren’t supposed to know about cricket.’
Philby said, ‘All right, Mr Know-it-all. What’s a googly?’
Angleton told them it was an off-break delivery, disguised by sleight of hand to resemble a leg-break action, deceiving the batsman into thinking the ball would break the opposite way from the one it would really turn.
Philby said, ‘Youoffer the other fellow three googlies. He gets one chance to read it, one to play it and the third yougive him the real leg-break, which he misreads and doesn’t know where he is, if youget my drift.’
The stiletto of fiction was what Angleton learned to insert into any operation, by way of information and disinformation. The lie must embrace the truth. ‘Wild lies, gentlemen, are of no use to us,’ he would say. ‘Rectal thermometers would not be able to detect the heat being given off by a well-placed lie.’
A solitary light in the window of an otherwise dark street in Rome, 1944: Lieutenant Angleton’s office, two-thirty in the morning. He was familiar with Fitzgerald’s Sleeping and Waking and Hemingway’s Now I Lay Me, referred to by Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up: ‘In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.’
He kept files on everyone, including himself.
Nocturnal Angleton greeted the dawn with a mixture of relief and dread: the exhaustion of another day. Dawn over Rome rooftops never failed to remind him of Murnau’s Nosferatu.
In 1956 Angleton was in London. He had heard stories about Philby: that he had been more or less down and out, drinking harder and hanging on. He had applied for jobs and been turned down. His wife, Aileen, had been abandoned in Sussex while Philby stayed in London, either alone or with a woman, and scrounged a living at the lowest end of Fleet Street while Aileen underwent a series of breakdowns.
Several times over the years when passing through London Angleton had found his finger poised to dial Philby and each time he had gently replaced the receiver.
By the summer of 1956 the situation had changed. Philby had been offered a proper job as a correspondent with the Observer newspaper and was shortly to go abroad. Angleton presumed this signalled his return from the cold and re-employment by the secret service. He let his finger complete the dialling, nervous about what to say.
He had only the Sussex number. It was a Saturday. Philby would be at home because it was the children’s school holidays. The phone rang a long time and Angleton was about to hang up when it was picked up rather than answered because he was greeted by silence. He thought he must have woken Philby from a drunken stupor. He could hear breathing. Angleton repeated his name several times and asked if that was Adrian. Formally, and formerly, he had called Philby Adrian not Kim.
‘I was hoping to meet up again, come down and see you all.’ He struggled on, wondering if Philby was punishing him by refusing to talk.
Aileen eventually spoke, sounding dismal. Angleton wasn’t sure if she even remembered who he was. She told him her husband would be there the next day but seemed unable to extend any invitation. Out of morbid curiosity, and cursing himself as he said it, Angleton invited himself to lunch, which he immediately regretted, knowing he would spend the time between dreading the encounter. He had been reading Jean Rhys, copies of whose books he had found secondhand in Charing Cross Road for a shilling, in the cheap boxes out in the street, and he had been reluctantly captivated by her gloom and depression, and he couldn’t help wondering if his telephone call had fallen under her spell. Rhys was obscure, a lost writer, whom Angleton remembered from before the war. She was a dipso and neurotic and a lover once of Ford Madox Ford; but she wrote like an angel and didn’t deserve to be forgotten. Philby had better be there, he thought.
He changed his mind several times but took an old train that rattled its way through dreary suburbs, stopping at every station. There was a heatwave. On one platform he saw a man wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head. When the weather was too hot for the old city, London was like burned toast. Brightness made its buildings appear naked and ugly. He could see into the backs of terraced houses and their gardens, some fanatically neat. People were indoors and a torpor hung everywhere.
He carried on with Jean Rhys. What he read struck him as intensely un-English because so unironic. She seemed particularly in tune with emotional short-changing, and, by extension, the humiliation and excitement of masochism. There was nothing conventionally realistic about her except her ennui. Her startling, surreal juxtapositions reminded him sometimes of Buñuel: collisions of dreams, weather, ghostly eroticism and bourgeois reality, represented by the financial transaction and the cold geometry of British architecture. As the train drew into his station at Crowborough he read: ‘One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out. One day. One day.’
The taxi, an ordinary saloon with a sign on its roof, lacked the loud, knocking diesel engine of London cabs, the driver a young man with a DA haircut. Previously, in a moment of mild hilarity, Angleton had been forced to explain to Allen Dulles that DA in England didn’t stand for District Attorney but duck’s ass, or arse in the case of his driver. Angleton was so nervous he could see the tremor in his hand as he lit his cigarette. It had been over five years.
The house was at the end of a lane that looked like it would usually be muddy, and was surrounded by rhododendrons grown out of control. It was a large Edwardian affair, not pretty, gloomy even in bright weather. Angleton sweated uncomfortably into his suit. The gravel drive, also neglected, was rubbed bare in parts and full of weeds. The tiny stones crunched under his soles. He worried he had given the taxi driver too large a tip.
He endured a long wait before anyone answered. The electric bell didn’t work so he used the knocker, in the end rapping loud enough to wake the dead.
At last Aileen opened the door and recoiled as though she were expecting Angleton to attack her.
He had bought flowers from a stall outside the station in London. They had wilted in the heat and from the state of Aileen he could see there was no point in presenting them.
‘Are you all right?’ It was a stupid question. She was dressed, but barely, wearing only a heavy winter skirt and a blouse with the buttons done up wrong, no shoes or stockings, and her hair was wild and sticking out. She wore no make-up and looked miserably thin. One hand was grubbily bandaged.
‘It’s Jim Angleton,’ he said. He could have been Father Christmas for all she knew. ‘We spoke yesterday. I’ve come to see Kim.’
Lunch was out of the question; that was obvious. And so, he feared, was Philby. Aileen was alone. Philby, it turned out, had taken all the children off on an outing. Angleton couldn’t decide whether Aileen had failed to pass on his message or if Philby was snubbing him.
He suggested a cup of tea, which he offered to make. She reluctantly stepped back. As he crossed the threshold Angleton had the feeling of stepping into a tomb. The hall was dark and cheerless, the decorations institutional, the carpets thin. They went into a large kitchen at the back of the house, which overlooked a huge, wild and neglected garden, hemmed in by oppressive cypress trees. In the middle of a lawn a tent had been pitched.
Aileen stood with her arms folded, staring at a square of sunlight on quarry tiles. They drank their tea black. The only milk had long turned rancid.
‘Whose is the tent?’ he asked in a desperate attempt to strike up conversation. Aileen always had been difficult and Angleton suspected she disapproved of him because he belonged to her husband’s drinking chums and, as such, was an excuse for him not to come home.
The tent belonged to her husband, she said. She called Philby her husband, not by his name. Angleton was slow to grasp that Philby slept in the tent and not in the house when he was staying.
She was quite mad, Angleton decided. He laboured to establish the facts of her life, which were hard to extract apart from Aileen bitterly hating where she was. Her mother had bought the place, trying to help, but Aileen was cut off and alone when the children were away at school, and the neighbours, most of them retired civil servants from India, were unfriendly or depressed to be home.
Aileen used the word ‘depressed’ and Angleton feared she had no idea what a state she was in. She was a woman of forty-five, no more, who looked like she had accelerated ahead a couple of decades. She was already living out the old age Angleton dreaded was waiting, alone in surroundings that manifested her madness.
He wanted to leave but fell captive to Aileen’s dangerous eyes and her damaged, animal smell. He feared her frustration and sexuality and experienced the unwelcome temptation of a Burgess-style bacchanalia following his response to her pass. Whatever impulses were usually hidden in decorum and ritual seemed close enough to scratch.
Angleton counted the cigarettes he had left while Aileen fretted about money and how it slipped through her fingers. The school fees and her housekeeping kept disappearing, she had no idea where until she decided Philby was stealing it to support his fancy woman in London.
It was theft, Aileen said, because most of the money came not from him but her mother. Her mother had a private detective on Philby’s tail to see how much he was spending on this other woman. Christ! thought Angleton. It sounded like a terrible and twisted version of The End of the Affair. What a desperate situation, with Aileen and her mother paying someone to spy on Philby! The irony wasn’t lost on Aileen, who said it was about time her husband received a dose of his own medicine.
They drank and Aileen asked, ‘Do youfind me attractive?’
Angleton lied and talked about his family.
Aileen said, ‘I don’t care if I drink myself to death, I really don’t.’
She sounded almost happy about it and for a while talked lucidly about her isolation, which had increased since crashing her car through a shop window in Crowborough. The abscess on her thumb meant she could no longer drive, which had been greeted with some relief in town. Angleton recalled Aileen in the early days of Washington and her brittle vivacity, always on the border of being neurotic but attractive, and her friendly bickering with Philby as he cooked supper for the children and they drank their gin. He had envied their casual domesticity.
She told Angleton how Philby had always made out she couldn’t cope and now he was telling everyone she was mad.
‘He wants to destroy me because I know the truth,’ she said.
‘That’s why he has abandoned me. Because I know.’
Angleton the fox sniffed the scent. A deep animal impulse made him want to put Aileen out of her misery to spare her from further shame and demoralization. She was a burden and a victim and he understood why Philby found it impossible to be around her. He had destroyed her for everyone else. Logic demanded that he, Angleton, should extract her confession and leave after killing her.
The homicidal moment passed as had the earlier one of lust. Both left him shaken. He wasn’t used to being exposed to his darkest innermost feelings. He took stock and told himself to be careful or at the very least he would find himself arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
He corralled his feelings knowing they had nothing really to do with Aileen. They were about him finally confronting his old friend’s treachery, the man on whom in so many respects he had modelled himself, which raised the question what unexamined treacheries might lurk in his own heart. If Philby was susceptible who wasn’t?
Aileen gabbled on, slopping drink into their glasses; she was not a careful drunk. Gin would be licked off the table before the end of the day. Her husband was a bad man, she said, and a bad father. At first Angleton thought Aileen’s accusations would be restricted to Philby bagging the best room in the house for his study and his squeamishness when having to dress the children’s cuts. Philby had her seeing a psychiatrist, she said in a matter-of-fact tone: one of his Russian agents.
‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve said it.’
Angleton looked at her, in the oasis of post-confessional calm.
‘Everyone was so in thrall to Kim they never saw the obvious. Kim lies. He lies all the time. He lies about his women. He lied about Burgess. Don’t you see? It’s because he lies he had to be a spy, and turning traitor was another excuse to lie. My husband is a born liar.’
She gave a sharp bark of laughter as though she had delivered the punchline to a long and painful joke.
‘Can’t any of youmen see that?’ she accused Angleton. ‘Do you lie to your wife?’
‘My wife is not someone youlie to.’
Aileen stared at him with barely repressed fury. He waited for her invective but what came out was very different from what he was expecting.
‘I couldn’t bear the children to go to Russia!’
Angleton thought she was hiccuping but she was crying, inasmuch as someone so desiccated could produce tears. He took her hand and said, ‘Tell me.’
She had sent a telegram to the Foreign Office telling them her husband was the Third Man, she said. It was all-out war between them now and she wished he had never told her.
‘Told you?’
Aileen looked at him levelly, not drunk for the moment. ‘Yes. He told me everything and now he thinks he has been weak and has to destroy me.’
It had made all the difference, for a while. Philby was desperate and had nowhere to turn, least of all to her, having ruined her life as much as his. They were both at the end of their tethers and one night he had got drunk and instead of keeping the stopper in, as he always did, he came out with the simple announcement that it was all true.
‘As soon as he had said it I could see he regretted it. He put on a brave face and we pretended everything was better for being clearer, but Kim has forgotten how to trust. He said what he’d told me wasn’t true. He said he had been having a nervous breakdown. Then, seeing what he had done, he turned against me once and for all.’
Aileen descended into incoherence as the afternoon wore on. She was so far gone Philby would have no trouble persuading everyone that her accusations were the ravings of a lunatic, yet Angleton was in no doubt. In Philby’s betrayal and abandonment of Aileen he saw the larger truth. He thought Aileen in her derangement knew what he suspected: that Philby had confessed to her secure in the knowledge he could destroy her afterwards.
It was the start of his slow vendetta against Philby. He had him watched by Miles Copeland in Beirut, waiting for the right moment. Whether Philby picked up his scent Angleton never knew, but he defected only days before Angleton meant to close the trap. He had reckoned on conducting Philby’s debriefing in person.
Aileen showed no signs of waking. Angleton called a taxi and spent the time waiting in Philby’s room at the top of the house. Aileen was right. It was the only pleasant spot, a high window with views of the forest. In the garden, Angleton could make out the lines of an abandoned tennis court among the grass, like archaeological markings from another civilization. There was a stand-up Victorian desk and Kim’s books, looking well read as always. He noticed an identical copy of Good Morning, Midnight, surprised less by the coincidence than its being there at all. Kim had always confessed to never reading fiction. There was plenty to choose from on the shelves. Oh well, thought Angleton, another lie, one of those simple lies that kept one’s hand in. He doubted Aileen would tell Philby about his visit (or even remember it) and, if she did, whether Philby would make contact. After their drunken three-day bender in Rome all those years ago he remembered them deciding if they weren’t friends they would have to be enemies. So be it.
He continued with Rhys on the train to London, relieved after Aileen to get back to fiction.
Long after came the insight he lacked. He had often been struck by the fact of his reading Rhys that day yet had made no direct connection to the similarity between her world and Aileen’s. Had he read The Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966 as her fortunes revived, he would have better appreciated Aileen as one of Rhys’s haunted figures, and as such unreasoning, and seen how he was part of that world of dubious masculine patronage which he congratulated Rhys for writing about so well.
That night at his hotel he slept early from exhaustion and had a vivid dream of Philby at his most persuasive and charming, but with another dimension. Philby was transparent. Angleton could see right through him. He woke sweating and lay awake a long time thinking he had betrayed Aileen, not only by sneaking away like a thief. The day’s events lingered with a strange clarity and hardly a day after passed without him thinking of her. She was gone little more than a year later, worn away.
Lying there, smoking in the dark, cleansed of any illusion and feeling the first not unpleasant stirrings of a cold anger of vindictiveness, Angleton finally read Philby’s ploy, understood for the first time what he referred to afterwards as Philby’s Washington feint. Philby knew the Americans were spy hunting and another investigation was underway for British moles, not least because Angleton had told him, indiscreetly, over lunch. Fearing exposure, or perhaps as a defensive reflex action, Philby had deliberately let Burgess loose on him, knowing Angleton was secretly jealous because Burgess represented fun, which he, Angleton, most certainly didn’t. Burgess was uncensored, Angleton the censor, offering dull companionship, erudition, good shop and table talk but never the smut and the giggles, boisterous scrapes and breathlessness. Distracted by the appalling Guy, Angleton had overlooked the evidence mounting against Philby, allowing himself instead to be blinded by his dislike of Burgess, refusing to see Philby in the equation of treachery.
In terms of Philby’s previous parlance, Burgess was the Chinaman. Philby had played Burgess as his Chinaman and Angleton had never read it.
[Chris Petit]
Time to wake up again. The usual bears at the window. Could the daylight too be growing?
A solemn morning.
The monster goats
stir, in the out-fields.
And in the day again
Past the window, warm, and in
the light plant-down shifts and stirs.
I am thinking of small things as I take breakfast, like any other day. Suddenly to stop. As tho I had forgotten why I should be uneasy. Or what sorts of foolery are afoot, with the smell of discord.
On the hills
the wolves and foxes lie down and discuss
what more the government can possibly do for them
It is as tho something is taken away from you, and the thief returns to punish you for carelessly losing it. What can you say? Yet there is something more than just grotesque about this day; it is self-defeating:
The mouth of the dragon
twists
to bite its own tail.
For today, the government will make a city disappear. No more London, not even a shire to take its place! I open the windows of my friends’ flat to watch the transformation, uncertain what is happening.
Exhilarating?
over the plants,
the mountain range.
In the width of windows
viewing the warm brick
the sides of the mountains.
There the houses
are folded and waved
in a complex of mountains.
The wall that is faces of houses
is plain and square: such brick
in new mountain-building.
Curves keystoned,
brick arches in roman threes
like mountains, ancient, again.
present as a curtain wall
that are cliffs
and ridges
And at night
the lights are here then there
in the caves of the face.
[Bill Griffiths]
Upon the site of the women-only Augustinian priory of St John the Baptist (built in the 1130s, close to a spring; dissolved in the 1540s), Parliamentarians constructed, in 1642, an earthwork from which to defend London against Royalist troops entering the capital from the east. The Mount was just west of where Curtain Road crosses Great Eastern Street. Another version of the Mount’s origins has it that during the 1665 plague the driver of a cartload of corpses accidentally overturned his vehicle, and no one was willing to handle and dispose of the bodies. The pile remained, was soon scattered over with earth on which weeds began to grow; before long, the people of Shoreditch were using it as a general refuse dump. The Mount was levelled in 1787 and became a private burial ground, until being cleared for housing and manufactories.
[Sarah Wise]
RESURRECTION MEN
A specialist trade, now defunct. Until the 1780s, London anatomists and their students, for the most part, dug their own dissecting material from the grave. But as the medical profession’s desire to be viewed as respectable gentlemen grew, so body-snatching became increasingly outsourced to Resurrectionists, or Resurrection Men – commonly regarded as low-life by the surgeons they supplied, and pariahs by the working men and women they lived among. The ‘Guildhalls’ of the Resurrection Men were such disappeared pubs as the Fortune of War, in Giltspur Street, opposite St Bartholomew’s Hospital (destroyed by redevelopment, 1910); the Bricklayers Arms, where New Kent Road became Old Kent Road (Bricklayers’ Roundabout is near the spot); and the Rockingham Arms off Newington Causeway (long gone). 1832 saw the beginning of the end of the profession, with the passing of the Anatomy Act, which made available to surgeons the bodies of those who died in the workhouse (or other public institutions) unclaimed by relatives or friends.
[Sarah Wise]
THE PORCHESTER TOWER, WESTBOURNE GROVE, WII
This Gothic folly was built in 1820 by Sir Hector Reed, who owned large tracts of land on both sides of the West Bourne River. The tower’s most famous resident was Paul Black, known as the ‘London Spymaster’. Operating from an antique shop in Kensington Old Church Street, Black ran a complex intelligence operation for his Soviet pay-masters, but was also a double agent working for MI6. He sold limited editions of Ezra Pound to James Jesus Angleton and Victorian detective fiction and pornography to Graham Greene. An affable man of ambiguous sexuality, Black was implicated in the IRA bombing of the Kensington Café in 1971. The restaurant, he later revealed, was never the intended target. A runner, dealing in fantastically inventive and obscene drawings of 1940s film divas, had left his shop with the wrong parcel. Black wrote his memoirs in 1982 and returned to Kiev in 1996, where he still runs a successful business, trading in icons. His house, in some disrepair, was given to the National Trust shortly before he left England for the last time. Fully restored, the Tower is once more in private ownership, rented by the Trust to Prince Omar bin Faud.
[Michael Moorcock]
THE ZODIAC HOUSE, ORMINGTON PLACE, SWI
Residence of the variety, stage and cabaret performer known as ‘Monsieur’ (sometimes ‘Count’) Zodiac. This illusionist and conjuror was an albino, unusual among human beings for his crimson eyes and his bone-white hair. He was said to be an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat who lost his estates after the First World War; or perhaps a Serb whose lands were divided in the formation of Yugoslavia. Another rumour associated him with ‘Crimson Eyes’ (the ‘Mirenburg Ripper’). Known for his elegance and courtesy, Zodiac was fictionalized by Anthony Skene as ‘Monsieur Zenith’, an opponent of his ‘metatemporal detective’, Sir Seaton Begg. He is thought to have died in a direct hit during a London air raid in September 1941, at the Kennington Empire, while performing his famous Bronze Basilisk illusion. The police became suspicious and searched the house in Ormington Place, near Victoria Station, finding a considerable quantity of opium and arresting Zodiac’s Japanese manservant, who was subsequently interned on the Isle of Man.
The house is now a museum of things occult, magical and illusory. It can be visited in the summer months between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. and during the winter months between 10.30 a.m. and 4 p.m. The museum displays some of Zodiac’s illusions, as well as a full set of his evening clothes.
[Michael Moorcock]
DERRY & TOMS ROOF GARDEN, W8
This elaborate roof garden was created in 1938 when the department store was first opened. Consisting of an aviary and themed gardens – such as the Tudor garden, the Spanish garden, the Old English garden and the Japanese garden – it also featured a large tearoom, on whose terrace customers frequently arranged to meet. Lady Shapiro was said to have favoured the roof garden for her assignations with Sir Frank Cornelius, the post-war property developer. A liaison which was brought to light in the 1950 divorce case with its lurid testimonies from valets and maidservants, its torn photographs of headless men in hotel rooms. The episode marked the beginning, some media scholars assert, of tabloid journalism and the cult of celebrity exposure.
Mary Quant and Sir Richard Branson are among the better-known custodians of the garden in recent times. Now the property of a private club, the roof gardens are occasionally opened to the public. Times and details of visits are announced on the relevant website.
[Michael Moorcock]