Young Philby Read Free

that first meeting in Regent’s Park, it came as no surprise to me to find the Englishman nodding eagerly.”
    I decided to provoke the prisoner in the hope of making him depart from what was clearly a carefully prepared narrative. “From the point of view of the Centre, the recruitment of the Englishman must be seen in a more sinister light. How can he possibly be a bona fide agent when the person who recruited him is a convicted German spy?”
    He retorted, “You are in much the same frame of mind as a dog chasing its tail.”
    “How dare you insult a Chekist!”
    My outburst seemed to amuse him. “Someone minutes away from having a large-caliber bullet shot into the nape of his neck doesn’t lose sleep over the insulting of a Chekist.”
    I concede I saw his point and decided there was nothing to be gained by taking offense. “You don’t answer my question,” I observed evenly. “Not only were you, the London NKVD Rezident and the Englishman’s controller, a traitor to the motherland, your predecessor in the London Residentura , Ignaty Reif, cryptonym Marr, who also vouched for the Englishman, betrayed the motherland, and suffered execution. Still another of the Englishman’s Soviet controllers”—I shuffled through my index cards until I came across the one I wanted—“Alexander Orlov, cryptonym the Swede, defected to the West last month—”
    “The Swede defected !”
    “His real name was Leon Lazarevich Feldbin—he is an Israelite. He vanished from his post in the south of France.”
    “Orlov was an honest Bolshevik. He fought in the revolution. He was with the Twelfth Red Army on the Polish front after the revolution. Feliks Dzerzhinsky himself brought Alexander into the intelligence apparatus. If he appears to have defected, consider the possibility that he is part of a Centre operation to deceive the enemy services with disinformation.”
    “Needless to say, I have consulted my superiors. Orlov’s defection was not an operation. He knew that the Englishman had been recruited by our NKVD—many of his reports from the field passed through Orlov’s hands. Yet even as we speak, the Englishman has not been arrested. The facts speak for themselves.”
    The condemned prisoner slumped on his stool, shaking his head in disbelief. “You don’t take into account the success of the Englishman’s mission in Spain during the civil war.”
    “While he was supposedly working undercover in Spain as a British journalist, he was instructed to assassinate the Fascist leader Franco. Not surprisingly, he did not make the slightest attempt to carry out this order. Not surprisingly, given that you have been exposed as a German agent, given that Germany supported Franco and his Nationalist armies, you dispatched telegrams to the Centre defending the Englishman’s failure to carry out the order.”
    “The order was preposterous. The Englishman was trained only in intelligence gathering. The instincts, the talents that are required for classic espionage do not prepare an agent for wet jobs. Beyond that there would have been no way for an armed foreigner to get close to Franco, no way to kill him and escape. The assassin, once caught, would have confessed to being a Soviet agent. It would have caused an international incident. Germany and Italy, both zealous supporters of Franco, might well have declared war on the Soviet Union. Only someone completely detached from reality could have issued such an order.”
    I had the appropriate index card in my hand but was able to quote the contents without looking at it. “The order originated with Comrade Stalin, who reasoned that the Nationalist armies and their Roman Catholic supporters would collapse and the Republicans triumph if the Fascist leader Franco could be eliminated.”
    By now the narrow room was filled with daylight. I could see the prisoner’s lips trembling. After a moment he said, “In the years since he was recruited, the Englishman has provided us with