The Fourth Protocol

It was clear to Philby that the Soviet leader was taking the issue of confidentiality extremely seriously. He could have held this meeting at his suite of offices in the Central Committee building, the big gray block on Novaya Ploshed where all Soviet leaders have worked since Stalin’s time. But other Politburo members might have seen them arriving or leaving, or heard about their meeting. The General Secretary was evidently establishing a committee that was so totally private that no one else was to be allowed to know of it.

There was another odd thing. Apart from the General Secretary himself—and he was no longer its head—there was no one from the KGB present; yet the First Chief Directorate had massive files on Britain and experts to match. For reasons of his own, the wily leader had chosen to keep the matter outside the service of which he had once been Chairman.

“Are there any points of query?”

Philby raised a tentative hand. The General Secretary nodded.

“Comrade General Secretary, I used to drive myself around in my own Volga. Since my stroke last year, the doctors have prohibited this. Now my wife drives me. But in this instance, for the sake of confidentiality ...”

“I will assign a KGB driver to you for the duration,” said the General Secretary softly.

They all knew the other three men already had drivers, as of right.

There were no other points. At the General Secretary’s nod, the steward propelled the wheelchair and its occupant back through the double doors. The four advisers rose and prepared to leave.

Two days later, in the country dacha of one of the two academics, the Albion Committee went into intensive session.

Book title or not, Preston was making some progress. Even while the inaugural session of Paragon was going on, he was ensconced in the Registry, deep under the Ministry of Defense.

“Bertie,” he had told Brigadier Capstick, “so far as the staff here are concerned, I’m a new broom making a bloody nuisance of myself. Put it about that I’m only trying to make a mark with my own superiors. Routine checking of procedures, nothing to worry about, just a pain in the arse.”

Capstick had done his bit, trumpeting that the new head of C1(A) was going through all the ministries showing what an eager beaver he was. The Registry clerks rolled their eyes to heaven and cooperated with thinly veiled exasperation. But Preston was given access to the files— the withdrawals and the returns, who had seen the documents and, most important, over what dates.

He had one early break. All the papers but one would have been available at the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office, since they all touched upon Britain’s NATO allies and the areas of joint NATO response to a variety of possible Soviet initiatives.

But one document had not gone outside the Defense Ministry. The Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Peregrine Jones, had recently returned from talks in Washington at the Pentagon; the subject had been joint patrolling by British and American nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean, Central and South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. He had prepared a draft paper on his talks and circulated it to a score of senior mandarins inside the ministry. The fact that it was among the stolen papers, in photocopy form, meant at least that the leak was inside the one ministry.

Preston began an analysis, going back for months, of the distribution of top-secret documents. It became clear the papers in the returned package covered a period, first to last, of four weeks. It was also plain that every mandarin who had had all those documents on his desk had also had more than these. So the thief was being selective.

There were twenty-four men who could have had access to all ten, Preston established at the end of his second day. Then he began checking absences from offices, trips abroad, incidences of flu—eliminating those who could not have had access within the period of theft.

He was hampered by two things: He had to pretend to examine a host of other withdrawals in order not to draw attention to those particular ten documents. Even Registry clerks gossip, and the source of the leak could have been a low-level staffer, a secretary or typist, capable of exchanging coffee-break gossip with a clerk. Second, he could not penetrate to the floors above to check on the number of photocopies made of originals. He knew it was common for one man to have a top-secret document officially out to him by name, but that man might wish to take the advice of a colleague. So a photocopy would be run off, numbered, and given to the colleague. On its return it would be shredded—or, in this case, not. The master document would then go back to Registry.

But several pairs of eyes could have seen the photocopy.