Making Enemies by Francis Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

subversive activity by the Soviets,’ Maitland says. (‘So what’s new?’ Adrian Gardner whispers in my ear.) ‘Peter tells us that Soviet connections in this country have identified a leading British nuclear scientist in Cambridge from whom they are confident (Peter’s words) that they will receive secret information.’
    There is a stunned silence around the table.
    ‘If Peter is correct, gentlemen, and we must assume he is until proven otherwise, then there is only one possible interpretation. Within our academic community we harbour a man or woman who either is already working with the Soviets or intends very soon to do so. Put more simply, it would seem that we have a traitor in our midst.’
    *
    Rupert Corless’s relationship with Peter the Great was one of intimacy though the two had never met. We all knew the importance of each to the other. Without Peter, Corless’s career would never have risen above the mundane level he had achieved before Martineau’s gift fell into his lap. To be fair, he understood Peter’s importance and his good fortune the moment it arrived. Without Corless’s persistence against the shameful doubts and rejection of the early Peter intelligence by his superiors, the information we had from inside the Soviet Union might never have attained its present level of importance.
    Corless’s second coming was due to an extraordinary piece of luck. Intelligence about Soviet intentions, always light on the ground, was at a premium in the last months of the war when some of us began to fear the consequences if the Soviets increased their sphere of influence in the post-war world at the expense of their allies. If getting our own people to understand this possibility was difficult, getting the Americans to change their view of how this last campaign should be conducted was impossible. The Soviets were our allies, Zhukov a trusted comrade; we would all meet up soon in Germany, wouldn’t we?
    The difficulty was, we had no hard evidence to support our fears that Zhukov was working against us, only deductions, opinion, surmise. It is hard to believe how little we knew about the Soviet Union in the last months of the war. The Soviets put the lid on everything and screwed it down tight. Hard fact, naturally, was what the Americans wanted before they’d listen to our concerns, in the certain knowledge that we couldn’t lay our hands on any Soviet intelligence worth twopence.
    Then, one morning in February 1945, Corless got a coded message from Bobby Martineau, an SIS man in Moscow. He had been approached by, and was now running (bona fides, such as they are in our business, having been established), a major source of Soviet intelligence, code-named Peter the Great. Its importance was such that he wanted (in Bobby’s version he ‘demanded’, but opinion is divided as to the veracity of a number of points in Bobby’s account) Peter intelligence to be given the highest level of secrecy, and that in Moscow he alone was to run Peter.
    A morning’s work on the samples he sent us was enough to convince even the cynics in Horseferry Road (by this time Adrian Gardner was already well established as faction leader) that Peter was an impeccable source within the military planning section of Soviet High Command. We were now able to read Zhukov’s mind. It was an astonishing reversal. We knew what the Russians were going to do because Peter told us their plans, and what we learned confirmed our deepest fears. The Russians planned to get to Berlin before the Americans and the British, and to use their arrival for their own political ends. We took the evidence to our military, only to have it rebuffed.
    ‘Won’t wash, old boy. Boris and Ivan are good eggs, they’re sticking it to Jerry like nobody’s business, and we’ve all got a dateunder the Brandenberg Gate before long. What a night we’ll have then, what a party!’
    That was when Corless’s hard training in adversity, his ability to absorb