A film producer, unlisted in any of the department’s reference books, announced that he was preparing what the advert described as ‘A major motion picture with a budget of fifteen million plus!’ It was a Second World War story about plundering German gold in the final days of the fighting. The cutting bore the rubber stamp of ‘Desk 32 Research’ and was signed by the clerk who had found it. ‘What is the final secret of the Kaiseroda mine?’ asked the advertisement. Kaiseroda had been underlined in red pencil to show the word which had alerted the Secret Intelligence Service clerk to the advert’s possible importance.
Normally the space the blue rubber-stamp mark provided for reference would have been filled with a file number but, to his considerable surprise, the research clerk had been referred to no file under the Kaiseroda reference. Instead the Kaiseroda card was marked, ‘To director general only. IMMEDIATE.’
The Prime Minister read carefully through Sir Sydney Ryden’s note, baffled more than once by the handwriting. Then she picked up the telephone and changed her day’s appointments to make a time to see him.
The elderly police constable on duty that afternoon inside the entrance lobby of 10 Downing Street recognized that the man accompanying Sir Sydney was the senior archivist from the Foreign Office documents centre. He was puzzled that he should be here at a time when the PM was so busy settling in but he soon forgot about it. During the installation of a newly elected government there are many such surprises.
The Foreign Office archivist did not attend the meeting between the PM and Sir Sydney, but remained downstairs in the waiting room in case he was required. In the event, he was not.
This was the new Prime Minister’s first official meeting with the chief of the espionage service. She found him uncommonly difficult to talk to: he was distant in manner and overpowering in appearance, a tall man with overlong hair and bushy eyebrows. At the end of the briefing she stood up to indicate that the meeting must end, but Sir Sydney seemed in no hurry to depart. ‘I’m quite certain that there is no truth in these terrible allegations, Prime Minister,’ he said.
He wondered if madam would be a more suitable form of address or perhaps ma’am, as one called the Queen. She looked at him hard and he shifted uncomfortably. Sir Sydney was not an addicted smoker, in the way that his predecessor had been, but now he found the new Prime Minister’s strictures about smoking something of a strain, and longed for a cigarette. In the old days, with Callaghan and before him Wilson, these rooms had seldom been without clouds of tobacco smoke.
‘We’ll discover that,’ said the Prime Minister curtly.
‘I’ll get one of my people out to California within twenty-four hours.’
‘You’ll not inform the Americans?’
‘It would not be wise, Prime Minister.’ He pressed a hand against his ear and flicked back errant strands of his long hair.
‘I quite agree,’ she said. She picked up the newspaper cutting again. ‘For the time being all we need is a straight, simple answer from this film producer man.’
‘That might be rather a difficult task, if my experience of Hollywood film producers is anything to go by.’
The PM looked up from the cutting to see if Sir Sydney was making a joke to which she should respond. She decided not to smile. Sir Sydney did not appear to be a man much given to jesting.
The exact details of the way in which the Soviet Union’s intelligence services were alerted to the activities which had so troubled Britain’s Prime Minister is more difficult to piece together. Soviet involvement had begun many weeks earlier and certainly it was the reason behind a long two-part radio message beamed in the early evening of Easter Sunday, 15 April 1979, to the USSR embassy main building on the east side of 16th Street, Washington DC. This unexpected radio transmission required the services of the senior Russian cipher clerk who was enjoying an Easter dinner with Russian friends in a private room at the Pier 7 restaurant on Maine Avenue waterfront near the Capital Yacht Club. He was collected from there by an embassy car.
Intercepted by the National Security Agency, and decoded by its ATLAS computer at Fort George Meade, Maryland, that Sunday evening radio traffic provided the first recorded use of the code name that Moscow had given this operation – Task Pogoni. The written instructions issued in 1962 by the GRU, and later given to the KGB and armed forces, order that the choice of such code names must be such that they do not reveal either the assignment or the government’s intention or attitude, and add a supplementary warning that the code names must not be trivial or of such grandeur that they would attract ridicule should the operation go wrong. And yet, as the NSA translators pointed out in their ‘pink flimsy’ supplementary, Moscow’s choice of code word was revealing.
Literally pogoni means epaulette, but for a citizen of the USSR its implications go deeper than that. Not only can it be used to mean a senior personage or ‘top brass’; it is a symbol of the hated reactionary. ‘Smert zolotopogonnikam!’ cried the revolutionaries, ‘Death to the men who wear gold epaulettes!’ And yet the possible overtones in this choice of the KGB code name can be taken further than that; for nowadays the senior Russian military men who control one of the USSR’s rival intelligence organizations (the GRU) again wear gold epaulettes.
How Yuriy Grechko interpreted the code name assigned to this new operation is not recorded. Grechko – a senior KGB officer – was at the time the USSR’s ‘legal resident’. Using diplomatic cover, it was his job to keep himself, and Moscow, informed on all Soviet espionage activities in the USA. In seniority Grechko ranked a close second to the ambassador himself, and he was there solely to keep all the covert operations and ‘dirty tricks’ entirely separated from official diplomatic business. This made it easier for the ambassador to deny all knowledge of such activities when they were detected by the US authorities.
Grechko was shown in the diplomatic listings as a naval captain third rank, working in the capacity of assistant naval attaché. He was a short man with dry curly hair, blue shiny eyes and a large mouth. His only memorable feature was a gold front tooth which was revealed whenever he smiled. But Grechko did not smile frequently enough for this to compromise his clandestine operations. Grechko was a man who exemplified the Russians’ infinite capacity for melancholy.
It was difficult to reconcile Grechko’s diplomatic listing with his appearance and life-style. His expensive handmade suits, his gold watch, pearl tie-pin, the roll of paper money in his hip pocket, the availability of sports cars and his casual working day all suggested to those men in Washington who are employed to study such details that Grechko was a KGB man, but at this date it was not realized that he was the ‘legal’ – the senior espionage administrator in the embassy.
Since Grechko’s movements were restricted, he summoned his senior secret agent to Washington. It was contrary to the normal procedures, but his radioed instructions had stressed the urgency of his task. Grechko therefore took a trip that morning to the Botanic Gardens on the other side of the Anacostia River. He took his time and made quite sure that he was not being followed when he returned downtown to keep his appointment at the prestigious Hay-Adams Hotel which commands a view across Lafayette Square to the White House.
Mr and Mrs Edward Parker met Grechko at the 16th Street entrance to the hotel where Grechko had booked a table in the name of Green. Edward Parker was a thick-set, bear-like man, with Slavic features: a squarish jaw, wavy grey hair fast becoming white, and bushy eyebrows. He towered over his Japanese wife and Grechko, whose hand he shook with smiling determination. Parker, prepared for Chicago weather, was wearing a heavy tweed overcoat, although Washington that day had temperatures in the high fifties with some sunshine.
Grechko gave Fusako Parker a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and smiled briefly. She was in her middle thirties, a beautiful woman who made the most of her flawless complexion