Witchfinder Read online

  Contents

  Also by Andrew Williams

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Author’s Note

  1963

  Chapter 1: 6 March 1963

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5: May 1963

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7: June 1963

  Chapter 8: 1 July 1963

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10: 12 August 1963

  Chapter 11: 19 August 1963

  Chapter 12: 27 August 1963

  Chapter 13: 1 September 1963

  Chapter 14: 11 October 1963

  Chapter 15: 12 October 1963

  Chapter 16: 14 October 1963

  1964

  Chapter 17: 6 March 1964

  Chapter 18: 10 March 1964

  Chapter 19: 16 March 1964

  Chapter 20: 24 March 1964

  Chapter 21: 23 April 1964

  Chapter 22: 23 May 1964

  Chapter 23: 25 May 1964

  Chapter 24: 16 June 1964

  Chapter 25: 20 August 1964

  Chapter 26: 16 September 1964

  Chapter 27: 24 October 1964

  Chapter 28: 5 November 1964

  Chapter 29

  1965

  Chapter 30: 6 March 1965

  Chapter 31: 7 June 1965

  Chapter 32: 21 June 1965

  Chapter 33: 10 July 1965

  Chapter 34: 13 July 1965

  Chapter 35: 29 July 1965

  Chapter 36: 16 August 1965

  Chapter 37: 30 August 1965

  Chapter 38: 1 November 1965

  1966

  Chapter 39: 3 January 1966

  Chapter 40: 17 January 1966

  Chapter 41: 3 February 1966

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44: 14 February 1966

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46: 14 March 1966

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48: 22 March 1966

  Chapter 49: 30 March 1966

  Chapter 50: 31 March 1966

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54: 15 July 1966

  Chapter 55

  1976

  Epilogue

  A Chronology

  Sources

  Also by Andrew Williams

  FICTION

  The Interrogator

  To Kill a Tsar

  The Poison Tide

  The Suicide Club

  NON-FICTION

  The Battle of the Atlantic

  D-Day to Berlin

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Andrew Williams 2019

  The right of Andrew Williams to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 473 63177 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Things said or done long years ago,

  Or things I did not do or say

  But thought that I might say or do,

  Weigh me down, and not a day

  But something is recalled,

  My conscience or my vanity appalled.

  From ‘Vacillation’, W. B. Yeats

  For Kate, Lachlan and Finn.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  THE SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE [MI6]

  Sir Dick White, chief of SIS, known as C, formerly director general of MI5

  Harry Vaughan, fictional officer assigned to the PETERS investigation, then a member of the joint MI5 and MI6 FLUENCY working party on the penetration of both services; former head of station, Vienna

  Maurice Oldfield, chief liaison officer in Washington, then deputy chief of SIS

  Nicholas Elliott, director for Africa based in London, then director for Requirements, former head of station in Berne, London, Beirut

  Terence Lecky, counter-intelligence officer and a member of the joint MI5 and MI6 FLUENCY working party on the penetration of both services

  Christopher Phillpotts, Oldfield’s successor in Washington then director of Counter-intelligence and Security

  Stephen de Mowbray, officer assigned to the PETERS investigation

  Clive Johnson, fictional ‘watcher’, then A Branch MI5, formerly Special Branch

  THE SECURITY SERVICE [MI5]

  Sir Roger Hollis, director general of MI5

  Graham Mitchell, deputy director general

  Martin Furnival Jones, director D Branch, assistant director general and from 1965 director general of MI5

  Arthur Martin, head of D1 (Investigations), then MI6 Counter-intelligence

  Peter Wright, scientific officer, then head of D3 (Research) and chair of joint MI5 and MI6 FLUENCY working party on the penetration of both services

  Evelyn McBarnet, D1 research officer, then D3 (Research) and a member of joint MI5 and MI6 FLUENCY working party

  Patrick Stewart, acting head of D3 (Research), then D1 (Investigations) and a member of joint MI5 and MI6 FLUENCY working party

  Jane Archer, formerly MI5’s principal Soviet expert and MI6 Section IX Soviet and Communist Counter-intelligence

  THE CIVIL SERVANTS

  Elsa Frankl Spears, fictional permanent under-secretary at the War Office, formerly of MI5 and MI6

  Sir Burke Trend, cabinet secretary

  THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA)

  James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counter-intelligence

  Raymond Rocca, deputy chief of Counter-intelligence

  William ‘Bill’ Harvey, CIA clandestine operations specialist

  Jack Ellis, a fictional officer in Soviet Division

  Anatoli Golitsyn, formerly KGB major, defected 1961

  THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI)

  J. Edgar Hoover, director of FBI

  ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE

  James Bennett, assistant chief of Counter-intelligence

  THE ACADEMICS

  Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, formerly MI5 officer

  Sir Isaiah Berlin, professor of social and political theory and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

  Goronwy Rees, journalist and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, formerly the principal of Aberystwyth University and an MI6 officer

  THE POLITICIAN

  Tom Driberg, a Member of Parliament and of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee

  THE JOURNALIST

  Huw Watkins, a fictional Daily Mirror reporter and friend of the poet, Dylan Thomas

  THE DOCTORS

  Sir John Nicolson, senior resident surgeon at Manor House Hospital, London

  Dr Walter Somerville, consultant at the Middlesex Hospital, London

  Author’s Note

  Witchfinder is an imaginary account of the turbulent years in the British intelligence services that followed the defection of master spy Kim Philby to the Soviet Union. The story is based o
n real events and the role played in them by prominent figures in British and American intelligence. A brief chronology of significant dates leading to the defection of Philby can be found here.

  1963

  1

  6 March 1963

  MY NEIGHBOUR SAYS his name is Roger and he works for Jaguar Cars. I think he’s telling the truth.

  ‘I’m Vienna,’ he says, ‘I used to be Rome.’ Planting his forearm on the rest between us, he leans close enough for me to smell the in-flight brandy on his breath. ‘Ah, Rome, what a city,’ and he gives me a man-to-man smile.

  To be sure he’s the off-the-peg salesman he appears to be, I ask him about his business. Growth at last, he says. Jaguar didn’t sell with the Soviets occupying the city, but Austria has been independent for seven years now and people are ready to spend: the new model E-type is proving a sensation.

  ‘Have you driven one?’ He pauses for my name.

  ‘Harry. Harry Vaughan. I’ve seen pictures.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t she, Harry?’

  Then he asks what I drive. He would love to take me for the price of a car in the two hours we’re obliged to spend together flying from Vienna to London. I don’t mind. I’m relieved, because Roger is Roger. He isn’t a policeman, he isn’t a spy: he’s a burly car salesman in his late forties.

  ‘What do I drive? Nothing special,’ I say, which is his opportunity to convince me that I’d like to. Then he asks me what I do, how long I’ve lived in Vienna, and if I’m Welsh. I don’t want to answer his questions. Roger, it’s over and out. I fold away my table, settle my chair back and pretend to take forty winks. I won’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I can only teeter at the edge. When I feel I’m falling, a shadow thought of what may await me when we land in London is enough to set my heart racing. The cause I date precisely to ten minutes to nine on 30 January.

  I was shaking snow from my coat when the station duty officer scuttled from the cipher room with a MOST IMMEDIATE message.

  ‘It’s in two parts,’ he said, and thrust the first at me. THE FOLLOWING NAME IS A TRAITOR. Printed out carefully in bold on the second were the letters P-H-I-L-B-Y. ‘Did you know Kim Philby?’ he said, consigning him to the past already.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone in the Service?’ I replied. ‘His name was all over the papers a few years ago.’

  Roger touches my arm. ‘Are you all right, Harry?’

  ‘Fine, Roger. Why?’

  He shrugs. ‘You must be pleased to be home,’ and he leans across me to gaze down at the countryside shrouded in snow. ‘It’s colder than Vienna. Colder than Moscow, I shouldn’t wonder. Worst winter for two hundred years, the weathermen say. How can they tell?’

  Windsor Castle is at the tip of the wing and the air hostesses are preparing the cabin for landing. We’re dropping over the skirts of London, over a chequer-board of black villages and frozen reservoirs, ahead of us the runway lights and a thick coil of yellow smoke rising from somewhere in the suburbs.

  ‘The big freeze must end soon. It’s March, for God’s sake.’ The plane’s engines roar and Roger slumps back in his chair. ‘I hate flying,’ he says. ‘Please, please me, Mr Pilot, a soft landing, please.’

  So, I’m back in London to face the music. Briefcase from the overhead and Roger twittering at my shoulder, I shuffle towards a hostess with an airline smile. ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘The steps are slippery.’ This hazard I manage without difficulty, but in the luggage hall there’s a young man in a Marks & Spencer raincoat who may be one of London’s finest – until he rescues his luggage from the carousel and leaves. I have time as I wait for mine to reflect that the word paranoia comes from the Greek for madness. I remember Kim Philby used to say, ‘Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get me.’ He stole the joke from his friend Guy Burgess, who stole it from Marx – Groucho, not Karl. I expect it will go down well in Russia.

  From the luggage hall I push my trolley to a newsstand on the concourse where I buy a copy of The Times. I know it’s foolish but while I’m there I run through an old routine just to be sure no one is following me. It doesn’t make sense. I’m home and on my way to see the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, but after twenty years of looking over my shoulder I can’t stop.

  ‘The Reform Club.’

  ‘In Pall Mall?’ the cabbie enquires.

  ‘Is there another?’

  The verge is hard packed with ice, the road awash with melt-water. Winter is retreating at last. Filthy London, this is my birthday. The date on the front page of The Times is 6 March 1963. I am just a year short of grisly five zero. There are no felicitations from my ex-wife and our children in the paper’s notices, but Philby is on page ten. ‘He isn’t missing,’ says Mrs Philby, ‘he’s on an assignment for a newspaper,’ and there’s a photograph of her showing a cable to jackals from the press. ‘All going well,’ imaginary Kim writes. ‘I promise to send a letter and explain soon.’ No one is ready for the truth.

  My cab sweeps round Piccadilly into Haymarket and pauses in the matronly shadow of Honour, her bronze arms outstretched to garland the fallen. Ahead of us, the white granite column of the grand old duke who marched men up and down a hill in another war. We turn on to Pall Mall and pass the classical front of the Athenaeum Club. St James’s Square is on the right – the home of the Army and Navy – the Carlton Club a few hundred yards further. Buck’s, Brooks’s and Boodle’s are in the streets to the north, White’s, Pratt’s, and the Oxford and Cambridge Club, too. Princes and grand old dukes are dozing in their libraries, soldiers, sailors and the civil servants of a decaying Empire sip tea or gin, while in their smoking rooms businessmen are twisting the arms of clients-to-be. In an hour or so chaps from Parliament will show their guests to tables for dinner, and in the course of the evening any one of these clubbable gentlemen may rub shoulders with a spy, because we belong here, too. In a country of circles this is the one closest to the centre. Philby loved this circle, it was just the temptation to belong to an even smaller and more exclusive one was too great.

  ‘Here we are, sir.’ The cabbie has my suitcase on the pavement. ‘The Reform.’

  I pay him and climb the steps to the door where the porter takes my bag and follows me into the atrium.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, Mr Vaughan,’ he says. ‘Still refusing to wear a tie, sir?’

  ‘Only at the club. It’s been six months, Mason. The Cuban crisis, remember? The world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.’

  ‘Was it, sir?’ he says. ‘Well, glad to have you back.’

  Mason disappears to fetch a key and my post. I take a few steps across the mosaic floor to stand inside the Reform’s famous ring of marble statesmen. The atrium is like the courtyard of an Italian palazzo. Above me there’s a gallery and a lead crystal pavilion that, on a bright day, refracts light into even the darkest corners of the club. Today is not a bright day but gazing up at the gallery I see Philby and Burgess step from the shadows to lean over the rail. Guy Burgess is drunk, of course, and fills the atrium with noise. Philby is trying to quieten him: members don’t mind a chap blowing off a little steam but there are limits. Only Burgess doesn’t give a fig for rules. He stands shoulder to shoulder with Philby in that secret circle within the country’s inner circle, sneering and yet relishing its pretensions. Fitting that Burgess chose to spend his last day in London here at the Reform. It was poor Mason he asked to rent the car for him: the police recovered it from the docks at Southampton a day later. By then he was well on his way to Moscow.

  Mason returns with my letters. I can tell from the envelopes that there’s one from the bank and three from my ex-wife. I thank him, ask him to keep them for me, and, no, I won’t require a table for dinner.

  I walk to ‘the office’. The cold helps clear my mind: why did I work myself into a state? But turning into Broadway my chest tightens again and I have to stand in the doorway of the Old Star pub to smoke a cigarette. Six o’clock. There’s a ste
ady stream of office workers pouring into the Underground station opposite. Most of them have come from the vast art-deco headquarters of London buses and trains – it dominates the Broadway – but I recognise some Service faces, too. The cigarette isn’t helping; I drop it into a drain. Best get this over.

  From the pavement, number 54 Broadway Buildings looks like the smart headquarters of an international corporation; inside it’s a dirty burrow. Stevenson is still behind the security glass in the lobby. He peers at me through National Health spectacles, then asks me to take a seat while he rings the fourth floor. I choose the bench against the wall, opposite the security barrier. I scratched my initials on the arm twenty-three years ago and they’re still there. Same cheap furniture, same dirty cream paint on the walls, same closed and dusty blinds through which daylight struggles to penetrate. Friends can’t imagine it any other way. It’s a hole-in-the-corner sort of business, after all. From the lobby a single iron lift squeaks and grinds to the fourth and seventh floors; friends must climb the staircase to the rest. Office wags say the stair is white-tiled like a urinal because only shits would think to work here.

  Stevenson beckons – ‘Miss Edwards’ – and hands me an in-house phone. ‘How are you, Mr Vaughan?’ she says, with a warmth she reserves for only a few.

  It is written that no man can approach the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – except through Dora Edwards. Twinset and pearls, precise, private, and rich, they say.

  ‘Noswaith dda, Dora.’

  ‘I’m afraid C can’t see you, Mr Vaughan.’

  ‘Now or ever?’

  ‘If you don’t mind waiting … I believe there’s a little do for Mr Fulton in the basement. I’ll ring down and let you know when C is free.’

  Stevenson has already written a chit for me. Stated purpose of my visit: security check.

  The basement bar is crowded. Most evenings it’s haunted by the small self-regarding circle of old-school-ties and scraped-a-university-third officers, who think of themselves as the Service’s ‘robber barons’, and entry is by invitation only. But tonight they’re hosting a farewell bash for ‘Soapy’ Sid Fulton and his chums. He’s standing at the bar with a couple of secretaries.