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"We need all the help we can get, Victor!"

"Ted won't like it," he told me, for the moment assuming the GRAVITAS of a senior civil servant. Then he cast the somehow inappropriate mantle aside, and fell into his more natural conspiratorial manner.

"Let's see what we can do," he muttered, and asked me to arrange for him to meet Hanley as soon as possible.

By this time Hanley and I had established a reasonable working relationship. HARRIET was always a block to any warmth, but he dealt with me in a straightforward manner, and I tried to be as much help as I could, guiding him around the previous twenty years of counterintelligence rather like an accomplished chauffeur, pointing out the sights to admire, and the potholes to avoid. I knew he would bridle when I told him of my meeting with F.J. and Victor. There was just a trace of socialism about Hanley, which showed itself in utterances about achieving the job on his merits, not through the old boy network. But in the end ambition was the better master, and he agreed to go with me one evening to Victor's elegant flat in St. James's Place. I had one drink and made a tactical withdrawal to my club to allow them to talk freely. The next day Victor rang me up.

"He's a very good choice," he said "We must meet tonight and make our plans."

That night, over a particularly fine claret, we drew up our campaign. Dick White had obviously failed to impress his choice either on his mandarin colleagues or on Ted Heath. Dick was always diffident when it came to staff matters, and had not been able to summon up the gumption to bang the table. Of course, that was never his style. Undoubtedly his one failure in his career was his inability to make good appointments. Too often he was betrayed by sentiment or orthodoxy. He overpromoted Hollis and Cumming in MI5, and he failed to order the decisive purge necessary in the Philby infected MI6 until much too late. It was the same with Hanley. He knew what was best for the Service, but he seemed unable to grasp the nettle and act.

To be fair, he never enjoyed good relations with Edward Heath. Their styles were so dissimilar. Dick worshipped Harold Macmillan, and the grand old man had a very high regard for his Chief of Intelligence. Similarly, he got on well with Harold Wilson. They shared a suppleness of mind, and Wilson appreciated Dick's reassuring and comforting manner on vexed issues such as Rhodesia. But Heath was a thrusting, hectoring man, quite alien to anything Dick had encountered before, and he found himself increasingly unable to stamp his personality on the Prime Minister.

Victor and I went through all the options, even at one point considering whether we could run Victor himself as an alternative candidate. I knew he had secretly hankered after the job for years, but although his appointment would have been a brilliant and popular one, he knew he was too old, and in any case, the Think Tank was the real challenge for a man of his intellectual horizons.

We discussed casting around for support in the scientific community, and we decided that Victor would approach people like Sir William Cook to gain their support for Hanley. Victor also told me he would contrive a safe meeting with Heath.

"It's no good bringing it up formally at No 10," he told me. "As soon as Robert Armstrong sees it, or hears of it, word will get back to the bloody Permanent Under Secretaries!"

Robert Armstrong, Heath's Principal Private Secretary (today Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service), was a key figure in the power struggle, since no one else had closer or more continuous access to Heath. Any hint of special pleading by Victor would certainly be reported by him to the Permanent Secretaries' Committee. Victor decided that the best plan was to get to Heath in an unguarded moment when Armstrong was not there. The best opportunity was the next Think Tank weekend conference, scheduled for Chequers in a few weeks' time.

"I'll take Ted out for a walk in the garden, where Robert can't hear, and I'll bend his ear."

As it happened, I was beginning to see a good deal of Robert Armstrong myself. I had recently been reviewing the American VENONA, and one unidentified cryptonym in participial had begun to interest me. It appeared in the traffic as "Agent Number 19." Agent 19 was clearly a very important Soviet asset, who passed over details of a succession of significant wartime discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt during the Trident Talks in June 1943.

The Americans had assumed the identity of Agent 19 was Eduard Benes, the former Czechoslovakian President, whose reward for a lifetime's work as a Soviet stooge was to be toppled from power ignominiously in 1948. Benes attended the Trident Talks, and was well known as a conduit of intelligence to the Russians. However, when I looked at the text of the messages themselves, I became distinctly skeptical about this explanation. The conversations Agent 19 was reporting were clearly informal discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt about plans for the Second Front, and in particular naval and shipping dispositions. It struck me as improbable that Benes would have been permitted into these discussions, especially since Czechoslovakia had no ships at all, being a landlocked country.

I began to wonder if Agent 19 were perhaps someone closer to home. The first task was to locate any available British records of the meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill at the Trident Talks to see if I could find a record of the particular meeting referred to by Agent 19 and, if possible, a list of who attended it.

The search for the phantom Trident discussion was quite the most bizarre experience of my career. Victor arranged for me to meet Robert Armstrong. He was keen to help. He was a fast-rising mandarin, already tipped as a future Cabinet Secretary, and since he would need the support of the intelligence community to obtain the job, he was anxious to build up friendly relations. He threw himself boyishly into the task of searching No. 10 Downing Street for any available records. But after several weeks we drew a blank.

Armstrong suggested I call on Lord Ismay, Churchill's former Chief of Staff, and Sir John Colville, his former Private Secretary, but although both men remembered the Trident Talks, they had not been present at these particular discussions. I tried Mary Churchill, but she had no records either. Lastly, Armstrong arranged for me to see Martin Gilbert, Churchill's historian. For each day Churchill was Prime Minister, one of his private secretaries kept a record of his engagements and Gilbert had all the volumes. Perhaps here there would be a record. I gave Gilbert the relevant date, and he searched through the indexed diaries.

"Good God," he said, "the diary for that date is blank!"

The search for Agent 19 had run into the sand, and it remains unsolved to this day.

The row over the succession to F.J. fell at the height of my search for Agent 19, so I suggested to Victor that I, rather than he, sound out Robert Armstrong. It was important to maintain Victor's position of neutrality, but no one could blame me for partisanship in the matter of the succession. On my next visit to No. 10 I made a light reference to the fears inside MI5. He smiled.

"The cards are stacked against you," he said. "I don't think it's worth pushing on this one."

I told him that if the wise men were intent on Waddell, they were making a mistake.

"We aren't being civil servants," I told him, "and Waddell will be out of his depth in the job... he'll play it too much by the rules."