Hale nodded. This looked like prelude to a big Communist takeover in the Arab states; bad enough, certainly, but where precisely did Declare come in? Why had White consulted the Pope?
“This government won’t be able to weather it,” growled Macmillan, leaning on the chair across from Hale. “The wage-freezes in ’61 hurt us politically, and it looks too likely that de Gaulle will veto Britain ’s entry into the European Economic Community within the month, because we’ve agreed to take American nuclear missiles on our submarines; but since the Suez Canal fiasco the Americans won’t support us very far. And if our Conservative government falls, and the Liberals do step into power in Whitehall, the Soviets will have no substantial difficulty in taking what they’ve wanted to get ever since the Versailles Treaty-the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and thus free passage of shipping from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean-and all the most oil-rich countries in the world!-in fact, the Ottoman Empire, all of Moslem Asia as it existed before the First World War.” He stared at Dick White, and then, alarmingly, straight at Hale. “I wasn’t in the government in 1948, when this unsanctioned Declare operation was somehow…exercised, in eastern Turkey; I’ve simply inherited it. You commanded it, I think.”
And saw the five men in my charge driven mad or killed, thought Hale; along with some number of Russians. “That 1948 operation, yes.” Not for the first time, he wondered what had become of the two members of his party whom he had briefly seen on the road down out of the Ahora Gorge, on that night. Beds in British military mental asylums? Begging bowls, or unmarked graves, in the Kurdish villages around Lake Van?
“ Britain needs you to end the damned misbegotten thing now,” said Macmillan, with a sweeping gesture that took in all three of his listeners. “Silently and invisibly, and taking your Soviet opposite numbers and their filthy agenda with you.”
“We do have a sort of agent-in-place,” said Theodora, “closely involved in this Soviet enterprise. A somewhat shaky agent, but…” He looked around at Macmillan and the other two. “Quis?”
Macmillan just scowled.
“Ego,” said the red-haired man. He leaned back in his chair and smiled at Hale. “I was Head of Station in Turkey in ’51-summers in the old consulate building in Constantinople, but winters up in Ankara. Kim Philby had been gone for three years, but his old jeep was still in the Ankara embassy motor pool, and there was still a yard-long length of rope tied to a hook on the dashboard; everybody said Philby put it there so his drunk Foreign Office chum Burgess could hang on, when the two of them went surveying in the mountains out beyond Erzurum. Being mere SIS, of course, we didn’t know about Declare.”
He had paused, so Hale shifted in his chair. “I remember the rope,” he said cautiously. He was disoriented by the incongruous public school Quis? and Ego exchange, which roughly meant Who wants this? and I’ll take it. A cigarette would have been a godsend, but there were no ashtrays in sight.
Theodora raised a lean finger. “And several of us don’t want to hear about it,” he said.
The red-haired man nodded, conceding the point. “I’m told,” he went on, still speaking to Hale, “that after the bash in ’48 you reported Philby as a double agent, one secretly working for Moscow.”
“His suspicions were, of course, not reported to my predecessor,” said White to the room at large, staring at the high plaster ceiling.
As if he were being cross-examined in a courtroom, Hale waited for an objection. When no one spoke, he said, “I filed a report to…my superior officer, stating my reasons for suspecting that. But,” he went on, forcing himself not to glance at the glowering Macmillan, “Philby has been exonerated since.”
Just from having read the newspapers Hale knew that Kim Philby had been working in Washington under some diplomatic cover until 1951, and that after his friend Guy Burgess and another Foreign Office diplomat named Maclean had fled to Moscow, Philby had been suspected of having been a spy himself, and of having warned Maclean that MI5 was about to arrest him for espionage. Philby had apparently been relieved of his SIS duties after that, though not formally charged with anything, and in 1955 an MP in the House of Commons had challenged Macmillan, Foreign Secretary at the time, to answer the accusation that Philby had been the “third man” in the alleged Soviet spy ring. Macmillan had subsequently read a prepared statement saying that the British government had no reason to suspect Philby of any collusion or wrongdoing.
At the moment Macmillan’s hands were clenched on the green leather chair back; Hale didn’t dare look up into the man’s face. “As far as SIS knew to advise,” said White stiffly, “that exoneration seven years ago was valid. No one in Broadway knew that the old wartime Special Operations Executive had covertly survived its official dissolution and was still doing intelligence work.”
White’s face was stiff with obvious suppressed anger, but the red-headed onetime Head of Station in Turkey flashed his brief grin again.
Hale blinked and didn’t change his expression-he had certainly known that a core group in SOE had ignored its shutdown order at the end of the war; he himself had gone on working for the divergent branch of the service for another three years-but he was chilled to hear his suspicion about Kim Philby apparently confirmed, after all this time. It had been one thing to be convinced, but it was quite another to virtually hear it from the Prime Minister.
“Declare wasn’t finished yet,” said Theodora mildly, “and it needed an independent, secure agency to run it. A number of the overseas wartime agencies didn’t actually close down when the war ended, but stayed on the rolls under ambiguous categories.” He paused, languidly waving his rattling ivory fan, and Hale knew White must be wondering what other splinter secret services might still be hidden in his trackless payroll.
“We took the warning about Philby seriously,” Theodora went on. “We investigated and concluded that in fact he was, and had for some time been, a KGB agent.”
Hale felt sick all over again, remembering the ambush into which he had led the men in his command. What were you all doing up there? Philby had blandly asked him, afterward. A thousand rounds of ammunition fired off in the Ahora Gorge!
“And,” Theodora went on, “late in ’52 we braced him-confronted him with facts and threats-and turned him double.” He smiled at Hale. “We even called you up then with the old signal-now didn’t we?-but it all happened too fast: he was in Turkey, on the Soviet border, and it turned out that Burgess was waiting for him right there on the red side of the Aras River, and they were on the verge of…trying it again. We managed to abort it and at the same time save Philby’s face with the Russians, but I’m afraid we did leave you rather at loose ends in Green Park, that day.”
Hale gave a tense flip of his fingers; the job interview he had missed ten years ago-even his current position at the University College of Weybridge-seemed like inconsequential pastimes now that he was again an active player in the deadly Great Game.