A Covenant of Spies

Chapter Three: The Meetings

Chapter Three: The Meetings“My cover for Operation Donor was as a legitimate part of a British delegation attending an international trade fair held in Prague for the month of May in 1982. My branch of science was included alongside a geological surveying exhibition presented by the London Institute of Mining, which in a lot of ways my chemical presentation was linked to. Altogether we were to showcase the scientific excellence Britain was achieving in a variety of ways. One excellence was in the mining of the phosphates and arsenates this country was so rich in. I was to give a speech about our combined efforts and then, at the end of its opening day, I was to be introduced to the Czechoslovakian Minister of Trade.

“Professor Mitchell and I were to be accommodated in the British Embassy and I was assigned to the less classified working laboratories at the Bok's chemical factory as a goodwill gesture. It was an elaborate cover, one I was thoroughly engrossed in. At Bok's, I was to be under the head of research, a man who had studied with Professor Mitchell and knew him well. As per the plan, Mitchell and I arrived the day before the conference and it was at the evening reception held at the Czechoslovakian Ministry of the Interior that I was introduced to Dalek Kava.

“He was an effervescent young man when our conversation turned to the subject matter I was to speak of. My referral to him being young must sound somewhat strange, as we were only a month or two apart in age, but in those far off days I never once considered myself anything but a fully mature man, and those that I came across of similar years were nothing but youngsters with a long way to go in life to catch me up. But with Kava perhaps my estimation was oversimplified as I found his questions refreshingly original and a long way from the insane stupidity of the juveniles I often came across. However, despite his enthusiasm, his overall demeanour was brusque and abrasive.

“The file had him to a tee. I soon discovered his liking for a drink. Those black eyes of his were worrying me as we each enjoyed a beer, and then the customary whisky for me and his favoured choice of vodka. They were so deeply embedded into his smooth forehead, they successfully disguised any emotion I could spot. His facial skin and hands carried no signs of an outdoor life, although there was what appeared to be a sizeable burn above the line of the shirt cuff he had buttoned down on his left arm. I did not ask about that, but I did ask about his limp. He told me it was due to a fall he had when he was twelve years of age. Despite what he'd said, I thought that to be a lie, and sometime after this initial encounter I found out that it wasn't a fall as much a push that had caused it.

“His father, the general, had a violent temper which was exacerbated by his liking for the vodka. Drinking vodka was a family trait, as Jana too enjoyed the stuff, but not in excess like her brother and father before him. The family house had a cellar in which both Dalek and his sister, Jana, were regularly incarcerated when their drunken father was so intoxicated and depressed, that was what he decided. Dalek had, like me, lost three toes on his right foot, except his loss was not caused by a bullet fired in New York. His happened when he was pushed down the stairs to the basement and his foot caught a nail that ripped his toes so badly, three had to be amputated.

“He was a great lover of mottos, was General Kava—introspection being good for the soul was his favourite, and used especially for Jana. She was locked in that cellar more often than her brother, and so Dalek's story continued one night when we were in a sleepy bar in the centre of Prague; she became used to killing rats down there with her bare hands. Jana had lost consciousness one particularly violent night when pushed down the wooden stairs into the cellar by the general and awoke only when a rat was nibbling at one of her fingers. She picked it up and repeatedly smashed it against the concrete floor until her hands were covered in its blood. She then sat motionless and silent, watching as other rats ate its body.

“I shall be completely open with you and admit that it took me a few months to discover why exactly Dalek's comments about the 'West' being decadent and leaderless were so caustic and disapproving, yet carried an air of reverence attached to them. For example, he would quote the record number of unemployed in the UK of that year compared to the full employment of his home country, then go on to deride the jobs his countrymen undertook. He called us murderers when a few days before one of our first scheduled meets, the Czechoslovakian newspaper, Lidové Noviny, reported the number of dead aboard the Argentinian cruiser, the General Belgrano, which was sunk by a Royal Navy submarine in the Falklands conflict. He then went on to say, rather reluctantly after I pressed the point, that if the Islanders wished to remain British, then the Argentinians had no right to invade.

“In June '82 he was scathing in his attack on the alleged American support for Israel in its invasion of Lebanon that was heavily reported in the press in Prague, but then amusingly added that he hated all Arabs with a vengeance. This professed disapproval of democracy was, I decided, a defence mechanism he'd constructed to deflect his admiration of the 'West' which he could not openly declare, even to his lover, Alexandr Radoslav. The s****l orientation report on Dalek was incorrect. He favoured male company, not female. However, those first few weeks spent in assimilating what I could about him, led to a disclosure that rocked more boats than just mine and also landed me with the prize London said they wanted.

“That outstanding revelation required my immediate contact with Faversham at Century House. According to Dalek, his sister had told him of a Geoffrey Prime, an Englishman, who she said had served in the Royal Airforce Force and worked at the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ. She said he spent all that time spying for the Soviet Union. No reference of the highly damaging treason Prime had committed, nor his widespread s****l predatory, paedophilic disorder had been allowed to be published anywhere in the world, but here was a Czechoslovakian telling me about how Prime was to stand trial for treason later this year in November, in London.

“This was the first time he had mentioned his sister, so I played it dumb and told him that I didn't know he had one. He replied she had an important job where she heard things. He went on to tell me she also told him of an experimental site in the Nevada desert where the Americans built and tested specialist spy planes. He was drunk and said he hoped the Russians would bomb it, but thought that wouldn't happen because their bombers would probably not be able to fly that far. It was my estimation that the reason he'd told me these things was to appear more important than he was and, perhaps, get closer sexually.

“I asked how he thought his sister had come by the information about Geoffrey Prime and if he thought the intelligence regarding the site in Nevada had come the same way. He told me this was the first time she had said anything to him more specific about her work or any secrets she had heard. I pressed him on the point of how he was certain she had heard these rumours at work and he just said he was certain. He knew. I then asked him what work she did.

“He was vague, adding nothing more than what I'd read in Faversham's brief assessment and for some unexplainable reason I believed him when he said he had no idea how Jana had come by the knowledge she'd passed on to him. But I wanted him to go further and it was then that he opened up a little bit about what happened to his father following Khrushchev's visit to the aircraft factory where the general was in charge of security. At that stage, all I could get was that the Russian Premier fell from the highest step on an inspection ladder, hitting his arm heavily against a guardrail and breaking his ankle as he lost his footing. His father, General Anotoly Vladislav Kava, was among the party escorting Khrushchev and according to Dalek, shouted all kinds of obscenities at Khrushchev as he lay on the ground, trying to regain his composure before his minders could get to him.

“Apparently, Khrushchev and General Kava had history. Jana and Dalek's father had been in Stalingrad when Khrushchev arrived in August 1942. The battle for that city had already begun and although Khrushchev's role was not major, he and General Kava met several times to discuss strategy and logistics in the company of the city's commander, General Chuikov. The three generals were together a year later in March 1943 when Khrushchev was told of his son, Leonid, a fighter pilot, being shot down and killed in action. Khrushchev, as you would expect, was inconsolable and, in his rage, he ordered the purging of all the senior officers in his son's fighter squadron. Thirty-eight were executed on Khrushchev's orders.

“Early in 1944, as the Russians forced the Germans into a hurried retreat towards Berlin, word reached General Kava that Leonid Khrushchev had not died in combat, but had been liberated from the Nazis who had imprisoned him and where he had collaborated with his fascist captors. Being no friend of Khrushchev, General Kava made sure the news was passed along the correct channels to his friend Stalin, the autocratic ruler of all Russia and of all the Russian military. It is thought that the two friends of many years discussed the penalty to be meted out on Khrushchev's son. Despite pleas from Nikita Sergeyovitch Khrushchev for clemency, Stalin had Leonid shot for treason. General Kava's involvement with that decision was not known to any person other than Joseph Stalin.

“When the Second World War finally ended, Josef Stalin, who held General Kava in the highest regard, posted him to the Soviet political territory of Czechoslovakia to restore the country's military and to take part in overseeing the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure. It was General Kava's reward for his loyalty, but it was there in 1956, three years after Stalin had died, that the faithful general heard Khrushchev denounce his beloved Stalin in a speech he gave when assuming the Presidency of Russia, and the festering hatred grew stronger leading up to the incident that cost General Kava his life.

“The anger the general felt was overtaken by the death of his wife and the care his children needed. Dalek's mother, Tereza, had apparently passed some minor classified information on to the West Germans. Dalek was unresponsive in this matter, as was Jana when I asked her. It seemed as though espionage and subversive politics were never far from this family. It crossed my mind that Jana could be trying to draw me into the open with the information about Prime and the Nevada desert for the StB to pounce and grab me, but that was part of the excitement of being on foreign soil on active service.

“Miles Faversham was as much in the dark about Geoffrey Prime as I was. We, like most in the service, had heard of him, but whatever information there was had soon been stamped upon and the subject banished from the corridors of gossip. The claim regarding spy planes being tested in the Nevada desert stunned Faversham into silence. From the little I knew of him, that was not normal. With due diligence, he passed both items of intelligence sideways until eventually they landed on the Russian desk in the room adjoining his on the seventh floor. Demarcation lines were of paramount importance in the secret intelligence service in those far off days. The custodians of that bejewelled throne asked for Faversham's immediate appearance. When he contacted me the next day, it was all hands to the pumps and a change of course plotted. I was billeted in an old brick-built outbuilding at the British Embassy, but however old it might have looked on the outside, the interior was as modern and secure as anything we had in London, or Berlin. It was on a telephone in the radio room inside that building that Faversham and I communicated.

“My circle of work associates in those days were not influenced by my decisions as they are today, and as much as I tried not to disappoint many of them by suggesting remedies to whatever we were at odds with, I had no idea who or what had persuaded Faversham to come round to my thinking, but I was thankful he had.”

“We need to leave Jana where she is at present and we will assess the situation in due time. We do still want her. As for her brother, get as close as you can without spooking him. Inducements to come over are now our second consideration. You must do all you can to discover how this information came into Jana Kava's possession. We want you to encourage more of the same from her. Concentrate on the American Nevada desert end if possible; however, if you unnerve her or her brother, I'll have your head. Is that quite clear, Frank?” That was Faversham's closing statement before replacing the telephone receiver in London.

“Of course, as you know, this was and still is the SIS core dictum—leave them where they are and play them—and to be fair to everyone concerned, leaving them where they were was far easier for me than trying to turn them and then get them out of the country. Nevertheless, London still expressed an interest in Jana Kava and to incite anyone against their mother country is never a simple walk-in-the-park exercise. It carried immense risks to those on the ground; i.e. me. But as another of the secret intelligence service sayings goes, everything leads to everything else; I saw it as the most exhilarating and rewarding operation I'd ever been party to. It held huge opportunities for me and as soon it was the settled policy, I set about ensuring its execution; in more ways than one.

“In the commercial world, I was supposed to be in as the British representative on all things to do with energy production and conservation. I was invited a few times to meet with members of the Czechoslovakian government to explain our Foreign Office policy in regard to helping develop non-fossil fuels for the United Kingdom's commitment in preserving the environment. But nobody I spoke with in the Czech government, nor the Russian spokesman, was the slightest bit interested in the natural world. Monetary profit was the only consideration. That also was Dalek's weakness.

“Whenever possible, I championed democracy and all things Western to Dalek's fertile ears and, on the occasions she was there, to Jana as well. I did not need to arraign Communism as Dalek did a fine job of that himself. Despite knowing her brother's hostility, Jana never rebuked him, which I found odd considering her elevated position within the party, as one indiscreet moment from him could ruin her. One warm evening, when I was at Jana's home with Dalek present, enjoying a few drinks, discussing the world's problems and listening to the gentle lapping sounds of the river outside, I was asked a direct question that ended our flirtation with the truth.”

“Are you a British spy?” Jana asked aggressively from nowhere.

“Why do you ask?” I replied, but in retrospect maybe a bit too quickly and not assertively enough.

“Because of what you asked my fool of a brother. I think only a spy would want to know where the information I told him came from. In any case, Dalek thinks you are a spy. Don't you, brother dear?”

* * *

“As much as I hate to stop you in mid-stream with this tale, Patrick, you have a 4.30 meeting this afternoon. After that, your presence is expected at the Cabinet Office at 5 p.m. I'm sorry to say the rest of it will have to wait until dinner.” The look of affection on Hannah's face when she reminded me of my commitments only served to make me want to share more of my history with her, and starting in the middle as it were, in Prague in '82, was as good a place as anywhere.