The Sixth Directorate Read online

  The Sixth Directorate

  JOSEPH HONE

  For

  SMB

  and

  HMB

  I sent a letter to my love

  and on the way I dropped it.

  And one of you has picked it up

  and put it in your pocket.

  It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you,

  it wasn’t you,

  But it was YOU! …

  Child’s game

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  First published in 1975, The Sixth Directorate is the second of Joseph Hone’s spy novels featuring British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. In the last few decades Hone’s standing in the field has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. In 1972, Newsweek called the first novel in the series, The Private Sector, the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while in 1984 the New York Times’ Anatole Broyard singled out The Sixth Directorate as being ‘one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years’, and added:

  It has elegance, wit, sympathy, irony, surprise, action, a rueful love affair and a melancholy Decline of the West mood. Only the crimes in its pages separate the book from what is known as serious novels.

  The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre – rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent – we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters – George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).

  I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless – and sick with envy.

  Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.

  Hone’s protagonist – ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself – is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains – all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.

  Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic – he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.

  We first meet him in The Private Sector, where he is an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. In The Sixth Directorate Marlow has become just a little wiser. MI5 has caught a Soviet sleeper red-handed, and locked him away. But they need to know more. Marlow looks enough like the sleeper that he is sent on a mission to Manhattan to impersonate him. Before long, he finds himself fending off the advances of a beautiful African princess who works for the United Nations. Yes, only in spy novels, but Hone somehow manages to make the whole thing seem real, and has fun with the genre while he’s at it:

  ‘Having coffee with a spy.’ She said it in a deep, funny voice. ‘Do you carry a revolver?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.’

  ‘No vodka martinis either – very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?’

  I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.

  ‘Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I’m a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Let’s have a drink then.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘God, no. Upstairs.’

  I looked at her blankly.

  ‘Women are out too, are they? Not even “sometimes”? What a very dull book you are.’

  ‘I disappoint you.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.’

  It’s not that seedy a thriller, of course. At one point, Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, intended to film The Sixth Directorate, taking an option on it and commissioning a script, but the project fell through. That’s a real shame, as it could have made a terrific film, and introduced Hone to a wider audience.

  Hone went on to write two further Marlow novels – The Flowers of the Forest (published as The Oxford Gambit in the US) and The Valley of the Fox – as well as a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap. All of these novels have now been reissued as Faber Finds. All of them are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that makes Hone so special – makes him, I think, one of the greats.

  Jeremy Duns

  Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Book One

  1

  2

  Book Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Book Three

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Book Four

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Also by Joseph Hone in Faber Finds

  Copyright

  Book One

  1

  The comedian left the stage, the long applause died, and a balalaika ensemble took over, starting on a softly held high chord, a minute vivid fingering on all the dozen instruments, which rose gradually in volume into a long, trembling vibrato before the key was released suddenly, the tune emerged, and a sad and restless music spread over the hall.

  In one of
the boxes where two couples sat above the audience Mrs Andropov turned to her husband with an uncertain smile. ‘He’s good, Yuri, isn’t he?’

  The two families had come that evening for the gala opening of Arkadi Raikin’s new show at the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow.

  ‘Yes, maybe.’ Her husband spoke without looking round at her. ‘The disguises certainly are good.’ Yuri Andropov was gazing intently at the stage where a few minutes before the comedian had undergone one of his instant character transformations and he seemed to be still trying to fathom the trick, the mechanics behind the comedian’s sudden and complete changes of identity.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘Arkadi Raikin – he’s not bad at all. But doesn’t he sometimes overdo it a bit? No? What the Americans would call an “old Vaudeville Ham”?’

  Yuri Andropov took off his spectacles, blinked, rubbed the corners of his eyes vigorously between thumb and forefinger. He was a tall, heavily built man with a generous flow of lightly silvered hair going straight back from his forehead, an equally straight and forceful nose, a perfectly bowed upper lip matched by a lower one that turned outwards gently, invitingly, like a sensualist’s. Only his eyes betrayed his substantial bearing: they were very small, the lids narrowed together – almost a deformity in the generally expansive context. There was nothing generous here: care and suspicion were the only spectators at these windows of the soul.

  ‘What do you know about American Vaudeville, Tata?’ his daughter Yelena said. ‘Why should there be anything American about Arkadi Raikin?’ She laughed. Yet Yuri Andropov did know about such things. Long before he had hoped for a theatrical career and then something technical with Mosfilm. But neither idea had borne fruit. Instead, at 57, he had done well elsewhere.

  He was head of the KGB.

  He was therefore one of the very few people in Moscow who could afford to openly criticise Arkadi Raikin by comparing him to an ‘old Vaudeville Ham’. If Arkadi Raikin had put himself beyond reproach through laughter, so too had Yuri Andropov through fear.

  ‘What do you think?’ Yuri Andropov turned to his son-in-law. ‘Do you really think he’s as good as all that? You ought to know in your job. You were in America too last year. Of course you’re aware of his background, aren’t you?’

  It was a leading question, among a million others that had come from the same source over the years. The wrong answer could mean nothing more than a delayed promotion, a drop in salary, a change of job, a smaller apartment, a move to a provincial town. But it could lead to worse: a labour camp, a hospital ward, an asylum for the sane; the wrong grammar here could make you a non-person overnight. All this change of fortune lay within Yuri Andropov’s gift, and he was a generous man. His son-in-law knew these things well and he was relieved in the end that he did not have to give any full reply for just then an aide came in behind them, reminding Yuri Andropov of some pressing business elsewhere in the huge hotel.

  ‘My appointment. You’ll forgive me.’ Andropov stood up and bowed round at his family as though he were a courtier and not a father. ‘I’ll probably be back late. Don’t wait up.’

  *

  Accompanied by two aides, his personal assistant and a bodyguard, Yuri Andropov walked briskly along a deserted corridor leading from the hall towards the central courtyard of the hotel. It was a few minutes to nine. For the moment everyone in the hotel was either trying to eat or watching Arkadi Raikin. There must have been more than 5000 people in the huge building. But here in this long corridor there was nobody and no sound.

  At the end of the passageway one of the many KGB men permanently attached to the hotel opened the door out into the courtyard for them like a dumb waiter. The group passed through into the chilling April cold, the air lying brutally about their faces for a moment before they entered the Presidential Wing, the twenty-three storey tower that rose from the middle of the hotel. This building had been made to accommodate important state guests in a number of exclusively furnished suites. But even now, nearly twenty years after the construction of the Rossiya had begun, not all of these luxurious boltholes had been finally completed.

  The suite on the 19th floor where they met that night was one such. It had never been completed at all. The rooms were nude: the walls and ceilings were completely bare; the central conference table was enclosed by a membrane of soundproofing material, like a huge barrage balloon. There were no telephones, light fixtures or power points – illumination being supplied by a series of freestanding battery lamps. The floor had never been laid and was raised up now, on open joists, in a series of wooden duckboards a foot above its true level. The furnishings were minimal and spartan, without drawers or any other appendages, and cast in solid steel. Nothing could be concealed here anywhere.

  This suite – one of two in the tower (the other was for guests, when they had such) – was permanently reserved by the KGB as office space outside their various official headquarters where unacknowledged business might be conducted. And tonight was just such a case – a meeting between Andropov and the heads of his five Chief Directorates. They were the only two areas in the hotel where no electronic eavesdropping equipment had been installed and, just as importantly, where it could, literally, be seen that none ever was.

  The reasons for this isolated choice were several. Here the five KGB Directorates, each intensely jealous of the others’ place and power in the overall hierarchy of the organisation, could meet secretly and speak openly; for there were no minutes kept, no records of any sort. The suite was a clearing-house for misunderstandings, budding antagonisms, bureaucratic rivalries – far from the centres of that bureaucracy in Dzerzhinsky Square and elsewhere. It was also a place to discuss future policy and for Andropov to try and glean some true measure of past mistakes from his five chiefs. It was a think-tank, completely isolated, lurking high in the freezing weather above Red Square, where the behaviour of more than 300,000 KGB employees could be studied in the long term, without any one of those people having an opportunity to study their masters in return.

  And that was the most important point in the present circumstances. Yuri Andropov and his five directors had come to this place at the start of 1971 in order to discuss, and be able to continue to discuss in the utmost privacy, the most serious ideological threat to the Soviet Union since Trotsky’s deviations nearly fifty years before.

  In November of the previous year, the KGB Resident at the Embassy in London had given Andropov a confidential report on the matter – mere outlines, but with some quite conclusive, though impersonal, evidence. The Resident had returned to London charged with pursuing the matter but the few trails had by then gone quite cold: a hotel porter had disappeared, the address on a piece of paper had become an empty apartment, the tenants so far untraced. The real trail, through which the whole thing had come to light, was impossible to resuscitate: crossed lines on the Resident’s home telephone one evening in Highgate when he had broken in on a long conversation in Russian. Through an astounding electronic and professional error, he had found himself listening to the technical staff of a British counter-espionage section, incarcerated in some basement telephone exchange, reflecting on the strange dialogue they had all of them just heard: the British had been monitoring the same mysterious source.

  But the Resident had clearly established one fact, given actual foundation at last to rumours that had come and, thankfully, gone over the years. He had confirmed now, without question, one of the worst and oldest fears of the KGB, and before that the NKVD and GPU, something which went back, indeed, to the earliest days of the revolution in 1917: there was within their organisation another and far more secret group; the nucleus of an alternative KGB, and therefore, potentially, of alternative government in the Soviet Union – a clandestine Directorate as Yuri Andropov had come to see it, which must logically then be complete with its own Chief, deputies, foreign Residents, couriers, counter-intelligence and internal security operatives: its own impenetrable cells and communication arrangements, its own fana
tical loyalties and carefully prepared objectives. And this was the worst thing to emerge from the evidence: although they had no precise knowledge of what its objectives were it was quite clear from the overheard telephone conversation in London that the group was politically orientated towards democratic rather than dictatorial socialism. Thus further supposition was not difficult: ‘Communism with a human face’, as the journalists had it. Yuri Andropov could almost exactly visualise Time magazine’s description of this counter-revolution if it ever came to light: ‘… It was a move in the direction of a more human brand of Marxism, towards one of its happier variants, that had in the past found favour among so many deviants in the movement, from Rosa Luxemburg to those who perished in the Prague Spring.’

  There had been a hundred different interpretations of the true faith over the years, Andropov thought, and none of them had really mattered; they could be identified, isolated and crushed – as had happened so many times before: with Trotsky, with Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia twelve years later. But here was one Marxist deviation that mattered a great deal, for it had taken root in the heart of the Citadel; a flower that had bloomed ferociously in secret, a drug of liberal dissidence that had seeded itself who knew how far about the organisation: a belief that could not be identified and isolated, and therefore could not be crushed. It was a threat that could only, as yet, be smelt, elusive and frightening as the sweet smell of a ghost passing from room to room in a charnel house.

  When and where would it rise up and take form?

  Somewhere, hidden in the vast ramifications of the KGB, totally integrated in the huge secret machine, trained from youth, and now paid by the organisation, was a group of people – ten, a hundred or a thousand, who could say? – more dangerous to the Soviet Union than any outside threat. For what might come from east or west had for long been a known quantity; the KGB had been responsible for the information. But the nature of this force was quite unknown. It fed and had its being at the magnetic centre of the State and to look for it was to reverse the whole natural process of the KGB, to turn the organisation in upon itself, towards an unmapped territory of vast treason where they had no guides. Here the compasses, which before had led unerringly to secret dissension everywhere else, spun wildly. So it was that these men had set themselves and this suite aside to take new bearings, to identify this disease at the heart of their lives, isolate the canker and cut it out.