I, Said the Spy

Not that Danby ever looked worried. He was a man of medium height, fifty-eight years-old; his greying hair with a suspicion of a quiff, a relic from his youth, was neatly barbered; his pale blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses were calm, and his features were barely lined.

Imperturbable, was how his staff described Danby. An automaton with a computer for a brain. A man who, when he removed his spectacles and stared at you with those pale eyes, withered the lies on your tongue.

Nevertheless Danby worried. If you were the head of the largest – or, arguably the second largest intelligence organisation in the world then you lived with worry. The trick was to discipline the worry, regard it merely as an occupational hazard, and never, never show it.

William Danby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, subordinated his worry and for the first time savoured his coffee. It tasted like cardboard. He put the plastic cup to rest between the intercom and two telephones, swung round in his swivel chair and gazed over the countryside surrounding his $46 million castle close to the highway encircling Washington.

He observed the thin sunlight rekindling spring among the trees. He stared beyond the limits of his vision. From coast to coast, from north to south. The vision awed him as it always did, because he was responsible for the security of the land and the 203 million people inhabiting it.

Which was why the dossiers, two blue and one green, and the report lying on the desk worried him. He was investigating the very people responsible for the prosperity of the United States.

In a way he was guilty of the same suicidal introspection that was racking the CIA (He had just prepared a report on accusations of CIA involvement in the 1970 Chilean elections – despite the fact that the Marxist Salvador Allende had won them.)

But whereas the campaign being waged against the CIA was destructive – instigated by misguided crusaders manipulated by America’s enemies – Danby believed that surveillance of the power elite of America was, however unwholesome, necessary and constructive.

Bilderbergers had to be protected against themselves.

He swivelled back to his desk and surveyed the dossiers and the typewritten report stamped PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. The blue dossiers contained summaries of all that was known about Bilderberg and its participants; the green dossier contained all that was known about Owen Charles Anderson; the report was Anderson’s preliminary observations about the 1971 conference brought by courier from Woodstock.

If Anderson was correct, the Russians had infiltrated Bilderberg.

If he was correct …. If he wasn’t, and his investigations led to his own exposure, then the furore would equal the uproar after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. AMERICAN POWER ELITE PROBED BY CIA. Danby read the headlines of the future. It was difficult even for him to subordinate his worry.

The intercom buzzed. He pressed a button and a woman’s voice said: ‘Mr Anderson for you, sir.’

‘Send him in.’

Danby picked up the green dossier. Anderson had been his personal choice for Bilderberg. Like Danby himself, Anderson represented change.

Danby wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer like so many of his predecessors: he was a non-political professional who had learned his trade posing as a diplomat in Guatemala, Moscow and Saigon.

Anderson’s claim to represent change was his colour. He had risen meteorically through the ranks since the CIA had been accused of racial prejudice. (In 1967 fewer than twenty blacks had been employed in intelligence work for the Agency.)

A knock at the door.

‘Come in.’

Anderson, big, black and handsome, loomed in front of him.

‘Sit down.’ Anderson sat in the chair opposite Danby: occupied it, Danby thought. ‘So they all survived, huh?’

‘No casualties, sir,’ Anderson said.

Ostensibly Anderson worked for the Secret Service. He had been put in charge of Bilderberg security. The perfect cover, thought Danby, who had arranged it.

‘Any trouble?’

‘Only what I expected. Other agencies tripping over each other’s big feet. British, French, German, Feds ….’

‘Anything personal?’

‘How do you mean, sir?’

They both knew that Danby meant his colour.

‘Any resentment?’ forcing Anderson to concede.

‘You’ll always find prejudice, sir,’ smiling at Danby. There was about Anderson the faintest suspicion of cynical amusement: it had gone against him when he had been put up for the job, but Danby’s views had prevailed. They always did.

‘Your colour’s your greatest ally,’ Danby said. ‘Coffee?’ as he pressed the button on the intercom and, as Anderson nodded, ‘Two coffees, please …. With milk?’ to Anderson. ‘Yes, and sugar,’ Anderson told him.

Danby released the button. ‘Who the hell would suspect that a black security officer worked for the Company?’

‘I guess you’re right, sir, I’m too conspicuous in all-white company.’

‘Precisely.’ Danby picked up one of the blue Bilderberg dossiers and extracted the guest list. ‘You were in exalted company.’ He ran a finger down the list. ‘Chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands ….’

‘Riding for a fall,’ Anderson interrupted him.

‘Lockheed?’

‘It’s got to come out,’ Anderson said.

Danby took off his spectacles and stared at Anderson. If Danby had a weakness, it was his admiration for American big business. He had been on intimate terms with corruption for most of his professional life, but he still found it difficult to distinguish between business practice and bribery. It didn’t bother him that the smiling extrovert husband of the Queen of Holland might take a fall, as Anderson put it; it bothered him that those who had paid him money might be hurt. And the American image with them.

His finger moved on down the list. ‘Rockefellers, Rothschilds … British members of Parliament … financiers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland …. You seem to have concentrated your attentions on the Swiss, Mr Anderson.’

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A grey-haired woman wearing a pink knitted cardigan placed two plastic cups of coffee on the desk and retired. Danby and Anderson sipped their coffee and regarded each other through the steam.

Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘Have you anything to substantiate your suspicions about Herr Danzer? If you’re right, it’s a considerable coup considering it was your first Bilderberg.’

Anderson put his cup down on the desk. He opened his jacket and stuck his thumbs in the pocket of his waistcoat, where the gold watch and the cigar-cutter resided. An assertive gesture, Danby decided. Or was it defensive?

Anderson said: ‘We put a tail on him in New York.’

‘And?’

‘He made a drop. A Soviet agent picked up his briefcase.’

‘I see. How —’

‘The agent was followed to the Soviet Mission at 136, East 67th Street.’

‘Then there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I’m glad for your sake,’ Danby remarked. ‘The coffee,’ he said, ‘gets worse,’ but he finished it.

Danby stood up and walked round the spacious office. He ran his fingers along the bookshelves of weighty volumes, spun the globe in the corner – the world in which his 12,000-strong army fought daily for American interests. Against enemies outside and inside the States. Danby envied Anderson’s lack of appreciation of the canker within.

As the world spun beneath his fingers he said: ‘You may smoke if you wish.’

‘I don’t smoke, sir.’

‘Of course, I forgot.’

Danby moved to the desk and picked up the green dossier on Anderson. ‘One of your economies to enable you to live in the style to which you are accustomed.’

Danby opened the dossier.

Here we go, Anderson thought.

By style he knew that Danby referred to his apartment. It wasn’t the first time the apartment had cropped up during interrogation.

And what was about to follow would be a form of interrogation. A tactic to quell over-confidence, to hone the blade of Anderson’s perception. A man such as Danby was incapable of conducting an analytical conversation without employing psychological stratagem.

Anderson admired him for it. And it worked! He felt the assurance ebb from him as Danby turned the pages of the dossier. There in between green cardboard covers is my life.

The adolescent years in the hovel in Harlem when he was a runner in a numbers racket. (A lot of question marks there, a lot of heavy underlining.)

The street brawls re-directed by an unusually enlightened social worker into the boxing ring. Showed promise …. But who wants to make money with his fists when he has brain?

Night school resented by his parents, ridiculed by his friends. Long solitary hours with a second-hand speech-training course on a phonograph – ‘Now repeat after me ….’ the invisible tutor’s plummy voice scratched by a score of needles.

Danby said: ‘I see you play chess.’

‘Sir?’

‘I see you’re a chess-player.’

‘Pretty low grade, sir.’

‘It’s good training,’ Danby said, turning a couple of years of Anderson’s life.

And then a scholarship to Columbia. (Exclamation marks here probably. Black, street-fighter, ambitious, educated. Possibilities.)

Perhaps he had been ear-marked as early as that.

The Army. Military Intelligence. Vietnam with the U.S. Military Assistance Command in 1962. And then the approach (names, assessments, cross references here) by the CIA, followed by another two years in Vietnam, two years in Washington and then New York in a sub-division of the Secret Service.

‘Do you know what finally swayed us in your favour for the Bilderberg job?’ Danby asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘French,’ Danby said. ‘You speak excellent French.’

‘I learned it in Vietnam. I believe I have a slight colonial accent.’

‘And I see you shoot straight’ (Anderson was Army Reserve pistol champion, having scored 2581 points in the 1970 championships.)

‘I’m not popular in amusement parks.’ Instinctively Anderson felt for the gun he normally wore in a shoulder-holster; but it wasn’t there; you didn’t arm yourself to meet the DCI.

‘How do you manage to live, Mr Anderson?’

Anderson sighed. ‘I believe it’s all there, sir,’ pointing at the dossier.

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘You mean the apartment?’

‘And that suit you’re wearing.’

Blue with a silky sheen to it, lapels beautifully rolled.

‘I buy one suit a year,’ Anderson told him, ‘The apartment is mine. I didn’t blow my money in Saigon.’

‘But the apartment is not quite paid for, I gather.’

‘Not quite,’ Anderson said, the anger that was his weakness (all there in the dossier) beginning to rise.

‘I admire you.’

The anger evaporated. Danby was a professional.

‘So the question is,’ Danby remarked, ‘what did Danzer get away with?’

‘Not a great deal,’ Anderson said. ‘He was too busy being accepted. Meeting the right people to make damn sure he’s invited again. Herr Danzer,’ Anderson said, ‘would like to be a regular.’

‘He must have picked up something.’

‘Maybe a line on Lockheed and Bernhard. Maybe the fact that Nixon is going to woo the Chinese. Maybe a few leads on the economic squeeze that’s on its way. … A few financial killings could be made there if it leaked out,’ Anderson observed.

Danby sat down again in the swivel chair facing Anderson. ‘It’s your job to stem those leaks.’ The pale eyes stared across the desk.

‘I can’t stop the richest men in the Western world trading stories. The critics say Bilderberg rules the world. That whatever is discussed at their conferences just happens to happen. If I were a billionaire then maybe I could do something.’

‘There’s no law that says the captains of industry shouldn’t meet privately.’

Anderson hadn’t said there was, but Danby’s belief in the American Dream was well-known. He told Danby that, in his view, ‘privately’ meant secretly and then tried to steer the conversation in a different direction – ‘My private nightmare is in my Secret Service capacity. All that clout under one roof. One of these days someone is going to get wise to it ….’

‘An assassination?’ Danby smiled thinly. ‘Perhaps, Mr Anderson, that is the reason for the … secrecy.’ You couldn’t deflect a man like Danby.

‘Why just one, sir? Supposing a terrorist organisation got wind of the next Bilderberg? They could eliminate the whole goddam bunch of them. Or hold them to an astronomical ransom. Which, of course, they’d pay,’ he added.

‘It’s your job to stop them, Mr Anderson. You had a battalion of police and agents working for you. The Woodstock Inn was more like Fort Knox.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ Anderson said quietly, ‘my private nightmare doesn’t concern terrorists: it concerns cranks. Just one. How many assassinations throughout history have been carried out by nuts? And I can tell you this, sir, when it’s happened, someone will turn round and say, “He was a guy who kept himself to himself.”’

‘A sobering thought, Mr Anderson. But the Secret Service has the utmost faith in your abilities. In fact,’ Danby said, picking up his now-empty cup, examining it and tossing it into the wastepaper basket, ‘they have agreed to upgrade you and increase your expenses.’

‘I’m very grateful, sir.’

‘So has the CIA. You are now the highest graded black in the Agency. And your expenses will be higher than most whites draw, so keep it to yourself. Danby closed the dossier on Anderson. ‘You’ll even be able to pay that last instalment on your apartment. A thousand dollars, wasn’t it, Mr Anderson?’

Anderson nodded.

Danby picked up Anderson’s preliminary report. ‘And now to work,’ he said.

‘What do we know about Herr Danzer?’ Danby asked.

‘Not as much as I’d like to. He’s Swiss –’

‘I know that,’ impatiently.

‘He’s a financier with offices on the Bahnofstrasse in Zurich.’

‘What sort of a financier?’

‘Currency speculation. If he got wind of a proposal to devalue a currency at Bilderberg ….’

‘He’d be even richer than he is now.’

‘And yet he doesn’t live extravagantly.’

‘Do the Swiss ever? They live well, I believe.’

‘And yet he does have a taste for extravagance. It’s as if he isn’t in control of his money.’

‘Funds for the Party?’

Anderson shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Married?’

Anderson shook his head. ‘But he likes women.’

‘Any other weaknesses?’

‘I haven’t had time to find out.’

‘Mmmmmmm.’ Danby pinched the bridge of his nose where his spectacles rested. ‘Then you must find the time. Does he drink?’

‘Champagne,’ Anderson said. ‘The best.’

‘I gather you don’t regard that as an extravagance, Mr Anderson.’

‘It’s not an extravagance with his sort of money. But he could have a yacht, a private plane, a penthouse in Monte Carlo. He hasn’t got any of those ….’

‘Does he gamble?’ Danby held up his hand. ‘I apologise, that’s his profession.’ He paused. ‘Any particular women?’

‘The usual. Jet-set. Models, starlets, poor-little-rich-girls. All beautiful,’ Anderson said, wondering if a tinge of envy had entered his voice.

‘Where does he live?’

‘In Zurich. An apartment– more expensive than mine,’ forestalling Danby.

‘Does Prentice know all this?’

Anderson’s head snapped up. ‘Prentice?’

Danby said patiently: ‘George Prentice, the British agent who has also penetrated Bilderberg.’

Christ, Anderson thought, Danby kept you on your toes. ‘I don’t know what Prentice knows,’ he told Danby.

‘We’re collaborating,’ Danby said tersely.

‘As from when?’

‘As from now. As you know we have worked closely with Britain’s MI6 since Penkovsky.’

Anderson knew. Oleg Penkovsky had been deputy chief of the Soviet State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research. He was also a colonel in Russian military intelligence – and a spy for the West.

But when he had first tried to join the CIA in Turkey he had been turned down. The British had enlisted him and offered to share his secrets with the CIA. The spirit of cooperation that had foundered after the Burgess/Maclean/Philby debacles had been re-established.

At his trial in May 1963 Penkovsky had admitted passing 5,000 frames of film showing Soviet classified information and had been sentenced to death.

‘Is it necessary to cooperate in this case?’ Anderson asked.

‘It’s in your own interests. As you probably know Prentice has a good front. Not only is he a professor of economics but he runs an industrial consultancy for an English businessman named Paul Kingdon. He might even know more about the industrialists attending Bilderberg than we do.’

Danby stood up and walked over to the globe in the corner of the office. ‘I have a few thoughts about Herr Danzer,’ he said, spinning the globe. ‘You see, he conforms to a pattern. We’ve met Karl Danzers before. Soviet agents with a liking for Western decadence who don’t have the opportunity to enjoy it to the full.’

‘You think he can be turned, sir?’

‘That’s for you to find out. And that’s where Prentice will be useful. You see, I figure you might be a little conspicuous here,’ as his finger landed unerringly on Zurich on the spinning globe.

III

Zurich is Switzerland’s largest city. It is also one of the world’s largest storehouses of money and therefore a dull place: bankers do not besport themselves on their own premises.

The streets of the city, divided by the Limmat River, are clinically clean, the night-life as permissive as a whist-drive. It is not, however, without its charm – the historic guild-houses, the twin towers of Grössmunster Church, said to be the finest example of Romanesque Ecclesiastical architecture in Switzerland, the backcloth of snow-crested mountains.

But the language is Swiss francs, and when the leaves of the trees on Bahnofstrasse are ruffled by a breeze from Lake Zurich they rustle like bank-notes.

Dull.

But not when you are twenty years-old and in the arms of the man you love. A wonderful man, a handsome man, an idealist …. Idealists are thin on the ground in Zurich.

Helga Keller stirred and looked into the brown eyes of Karl Danzer. ‘Tell me again,’ she said.

‘Tell you what?’

‘Tell me about Russia.’

‘Ah Mother Russia. The steppes sparkling in the snow beneath blue skies in winter … the wind rippling the corn in summer … the cottages like fretwork dolls’ houses … the forests of birch where tigers still prowl ….’

‘And Moscow,’ she said, snuggling up against him on the couch in his apartment. ‘Tell me about Moscow.’

He kissed her. ‘You will see it one day. Soon perhaps. Hear the music of the skates on the ice in the parks … see the domes of the Kremlin gold in the dawn …. Taste the fires of vodka as we drink with our comrades.’

‘I like to hear you talk about comrades,’ she said. ‘I like to hear about people who are … alive.’

Neither her father’s friends, nor the girls at the finishing school at Basle, had been alive.

‘They are alive – full of life – because they share. That is the heart of the matter. Sharing. Common endeavour. Even today,’ throwing out one arm as though dashing a glass against the wall, ‘we still drink to the glorious revolution. The revolution that will one day spread throughout the world.’

Helga Keller glowed with the visions. ‘And we shall be part of it. If only I could help more ….’

‘You have helped already,’ Danzer told her. ‘They are very pleased with what you have done.’

‘And to think that until three months ago I didn’t spare a thought for this … this sharing. I’d read about Communism, but here they talk about it as if it is a crime ….’

‘To such people,’ Danzer said, ‘Socialism is a crime. Grand larceny. The theft of their privilege. The distribution of their wealth to the underprivileged …. Has it been three months?’ he asked in surprise.

‘Two months, two weeks, three days ….’ She felt the warmth of the sunshine reach her through the window. Outside, the lake sparkled, the flanks of the mountains were green with young growth. Helga had known from the moment she awoke that the hazy dawn was filled with portent; that June 12th 1971, was one of those days that would change her life; she glimpsed patterns of destiny and was filled with delicious anticipation.

She stretched herself and took in the apartment. It was, she supposed, expensively furnished – she had no yardstick by which to judge expenditure – but certainly not lavishly. (Karl had explained that, to maintain his front, he had to live reasonably well.)

It certainly needed a woman’s touch. But there was no chance of a permanent relationship in Zurich. Karl had explained that, too.

Karl put his arm round her. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a blue silk shirt tapered at the waist; through the silk she could feel the thud of his heart. His hand stroked her waist, then cupped her breast. Wings of fear – or was it excitement? – fluttered inside her. She was so inexperienced, ridiculous in 1971. But if you were the daughter of a Zurich banker …. She hoped that he would understand; be grateful, even, that she had kept herself …. God, what an antiquated expression ….

‘Helga.’

She didn’t reply. It was ridiculous. They both knew …. Did he perhaps think that she didn’t want to? How do I show him? Then a thought occurred to her that made her feel suddenly foolish. Supposing he didn’t want to? She wasn’t a raving beauty. Her long, dark, lustrous hair had been much admired but nothing much else; no one had ever complimented her on her figure, although it wasn’t too bad, perhaps a little too full. Swiss! She closed her eyes in mortification and the warmth of the sun no longer reached her.

‘I love you,’ he said as his hand caressed her breast. Feeling exploded inside her.

He led her to the bedroom which she would remember for the rest of her life. The deep white carpet and the books on the bedside table, and the smell of after-shave and the triangle of blue water jostling with light through the roof-tops. He lay on the single bed and she lay beside him and he kissed her lips, her neck, her breasts which had somehow become exposed.

He went to the bathroom, returning in a dressing gown embroidered with Chinese patterns, by which time she was naked beneath the sheets. Trembling.

Would he know immediately that she was a virgin? In the books that she had read surreptitiously at finishing school – sex was a subject that was never finished, not even started —they always knew and the girl said: ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

His lips were on her breasts and she was guiding his hands to the warm mound that needed him. His hardness astonished her: it was like warm marble. She slid her fingers along its length, then wanted him inside her. Karl, my love …. She lay back and opened her legs and guided him.

And afterwards she couldn’t remember whether or not there had been any pain.

* * *

When they began to make love George Prentice removed his earphones and switched off the receiver in an apartment not far from Danzer’s.

He removed the tiny cassette that had been recording the conversation between Karl Danzer and Helga Keller, labelled it and stacked it neatly in the wooden cigar box containing the other Danzer recordings. A dozen of them in all.

Danzer, you’re not a pro: you should sweep your apartment every day. But that, Prentice knew, wasn’t true: Danzer was a pro. It was merely that he had become careless, his reactions dulled by the good life – and the mistaken belief that he was above suspicion.

Stupid bitch, he thought, as he considered what Helga Keller was now doing in Danzer’s bedroom. Did she imagine she was the only one? She should hear some of the other recordings.