In the courtyard, each climbed into his own car. In his Volga, Philby waited for Gregoriev to start the engine, but the man just sat there. The three other limousines swept out of the square, under the arch, and into the boulevard. There was a tap on Philby’s window. He wound it down to see the face of Major Pavlov.
“Would you come with me, please, Comrade Colonel?”
Philby’s heart sank. He understood now that he knew too much; he was the one foreigner in the group. The General Secretary had a reputation for tying up loose ends rather permanently. He followed Major Pavlov back into the building. Two minutes later he was shown into the General Secretary’s sitting room. The old man was still in his wheelchair at the low coffee table. He gestured Philby to a seat. In trepidation the British traitor took it.
“What did you really think of it?” asked the General Secretary softly.
Philby swallowed hard. “Ingenious, audacious, hazardous, but, if it worked, effective,” he said.
“It’s brilliant,” murmured the General Secretary. “And it is going ahead. But under my personal auspices. This is to be no one else’s operation, just mine. And you will be closely involved in it.”
“May I ask one thing?” Philby ventured. “Why me? I am a foreigner. Even though I have served the Soviet Union all my life and have lived here for a third of it, I am still a foreigner.”
“Precisely,” replied the General Secretary, “and you have no patronage except mine. You could not begin to conspire against me.
“You will take leave of your wife and family and dismiss your driver. You will take up residence in the guest suite at my dacha at Usovo. There you will put together the team that will undertake Plan Aurora. You will have any authority you need—it will come from my office at the Central Committee. You, personally, will not show yourself.” He pressed a buzzer under the table. “You will work at all times under the eye of this man. I believe you already know him.”
The door had opened. In it stood the impassive, cold Major Pavlov.
“He is highly intelligent and extremely suspicious,” said the General Secretary with approval. “He is also totally loyal. He happens to be my nephew.”
As Philby rose to accompany the major, t
he General Secretary held out a slip of paper to him. It was a flimsy from the First Chief Directorate marked for the personal attention of the General Secretary of the CPSU. Philby read it with disbelief.
“Yes,” said the General Secretary, “it reached me yesterday. You will not have General Marchenko’s ten to sixteen months. It appears that Mrs. Thatcher is going to make her move in June. We must make ours one week before that.”
Philby let out his breath slowly. In 1917 it had taken ten days to complete the Russian Revolution. Britain’s greatest turncoat of them all was being given just ninety days to guarantee the British one.
PART TWO
Chapter 8
When John Preston landed at Jan Smuts Airport on the morning of March 13, the local head of station, a tall, thin, blond man named Dennis Grey, was there to meet him. From the observation terrace two South African NIS men watched his arrival but made no move to come closer.
Customs and immigration were a formality, and within thirty minutes of touchdown the two Englishmen were speeding north to Pretoria. Preston looked at the landscape of the highveld with curiosity; it did not look much like his impression of Africa—just a modern six-lane blacktop highway running across a bare plain and flanked by modern, European-style farms and factories.
“I’ve booked you into the Burgerspark,” said Grey. “In central Pretoria. I was told you wanted to stay in a hotel rather than at the residency.”
“Yes,” said Preston. “Thank you.”
“We’ll go and check in first. We have an appointment to meet ‘the Beast’ at eleven.” The not-too-affectionate title had originally been bestowed upon General Van Den Berg, a police general and head of the former Bureau of State Security, or BOSS. After the so-called Muldergate scandal of 1979, the unhappy marriage of the South African state’s intelligence arm and its security police had been dissolved, to the great relief of the professional intelligence officers and the foreign service, some of whom had been consistently embarrassed by the BOSS’s brass-knuckle tactics.
The intelligence arm had been reconstituted under the title National Intelligence Service (NIS), and General Henry Pienaar had moved across from1 his post as head of Military Intelligence. He was not a police general, but a military one, and while he was not a life-long intelligence officer like Sir Nigel Irvine, his years garnering military intelligence had taught him there were more ways to kill a cat than by thumping it with blunt objects. General Van Den Berg had passed into retirement, still prepared to tell anyone who would listen that “the hand of God” was upon him. Unkindly, the British had passed his nickname onto the shoulders of General Pienaar.
Preston registered at the hotel on Van Der Walt Street, dumped his bags, had a quick wash and shave, and joined Grey in the lobby at half past ten. From there they drove to Union Building.
The seat of most of the South African government is a huge, long, ocher-brown sandstone block, three stories high, its four-hundred-yard frontage studded by four colonnaded projections. It stands in central Pretoria on a hill gazing south across a valley along whose bed runs Kerk Straat, and the esplanade at the front of the building commands a panoramic view across the valley to the brown hills of the highveld to the south, topped by the squat, square mass of the Voortrekker Monument.
Dennis Grey presented his identification at the reception desk and mentioned his appointment with the chief of Intelligence. In minutes a young official had appeared, to lead them to the office of General Pienaar. The headquarters of the NIS chief is on the top floor at the western end of the building. Grey and Preston were led down interminable corridors decorated in what appeared to be a standard South African civil service brown-and-cream motif with a heavy accent on dark wood paneling. The general’s office, at the end of the last corridor on the third floor, is flanked on the right by an office containing two secretaries and on the left by another containing two staff officers.
The official knocked on the last door, waited for the gruff command to enter, and showed the British visitors in. It was a fairly somber, formal office, containing a large and obviously cleared desk facing the door and with four leather club chairs grouped around a low table near the windows, which looked down toward Kerk Straat and across the valley to the hills. There were a number of apparently operational maps coyly covered by green curtains around the walls.
General Pienaar was a big, heavy man who rose as they entered, and walked forward to shake hands. Grey made the introductions and the general gestured them to the club chairs. Coffee was served, but the conversation remained at the level of small talk. Grey took the hint, made his farewells, and left. General Pienaar stared at Preston for some time.
“So, Mr. Preston,” he said in almost unaccented English, “the subject of our diplomat Jan Marais. I have already told Sir Nigel, and now I tell you: he does not work for me or my government, at least not as a controller of agents in Britain. You are here to try to find out who he does work for?”
“That’s my job, General, if I can.”