Young Philby

Author:Robert Littell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

7: BIARRITZ, APRIL 1938

Where Alexander Orlov, Cryptonym the Swede, Discovers That the Englishman Is Armed

I have heard it bandied about that, as a matter of tradecraft, the reasonably professional British Secret Intelligence Service, along with their American cousins, the embarrassingly amateurish Office of Strategic Service, use safe houses or safe apartments or safe hotel rooms for clandestine meetings, while we Russians are thought to favor public places on the theory that the more public the place, the easier it is to go unnoticed in the crowd. You will be amused to learn that tradecraft has nothing to do with these preferences. In my experience, which consists of two decades of clandestine activities, the British and the Americans rent safe houses because money is burning a hole in their trouser pockets. Our NKVD, hostage to its proletarian roots, counts kopeks. A Russian controller, which happens to be my current job description, would leap at the chance to debrief his agents under a roof, if only to keep out of the rain. For shit’s sake don’t quote me, but the problem is Moscow Centre. The problem is the fuckers on the fifth floor of the Lubyanka who pore over our expense notes like chimpanzees hunting for lice in the hair of their offspring—these budget commissars refuse to authorize the rental of safe houses or safe apartments or safe hotel rooms when, without spending a ruble, we are, so they argue, perfectly able to meet agents outdoors. In parks, in cafés, at motorbus or train stations and the like. The one time I rented a room in Paris to debrief a secretary to the chef de cabinet in the office of French prime minister Daladier (she had flatly refused to meet me at the Gare de Lyon), the Soviet Embassy’s code clerk wound up being rousted from his bed at two in the morning to deal with a blistering telegram (tagged Priority Immediate, which meant it had to be deciphered the moment it came in) addressed to me. The son of a bitch of a code clerk passed it on, pasted in strips across a blank page in his steel-covered message book, with a graceless smirk. “To the attention of Alexander Orlov,” the plain text memorandum began. “The 5000 French francs you squandered on a room at the Hotel Meurice last month, along with the 100 franc gratuity to the concierge, have been deducted from your wages. Be so kind as to follow Centre guidelines to the letter. We direct your attention to Standard Agent Operating Procedure Rule 7 subparagraph Kh: Meetings with undercover agents are to be conducted in public Areas.”

Kopek-pinching pricks!

All of which explains what I was doing on the terrace of a seedy workers’ café outside the train station in the French resort town of Biarritz, my Panama hat with the turned-down brim shading my eyes from the midday sun, drinking cheap anisette while pretending to read a copy of the American magazine Newsweek (purchased at a papeterie in Bordeaux with my own money) in which I’d concealed new codes and cash.

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