The Envoy

by Edward Wilson

Genres: Spy Thrillers; Historical Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

The setting is 1950s London, at the height of the Cold War. Kit Fournier is ostensibly a senior diplomat at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, but is actually CIA bureau chef in London. The Arms Race informs much of the action in this fastpaced page turner which sees Kit go undercover to meet a dissident KGB agent, lose a loved one, have a crisis of soul and get blackmailed into becoming a double agent for M16...

Release date: April 1, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 177

Sample

May, 1948. In a small posting, like the one in Nice, the consul is on call twenty-four hours a day. Kit was asleep in his one-bedroom apartment on the rue Marengo. It was a very nice dream involving a passionate mouth. The phone rang just as things started to get interesting. Kit rubbed his eyes and let it ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp. He turned it on and looked at the alarm clock: two a.m. He let the phone ring three more times; they could wait. He assumed it was the commissariat de police, the local cops – yet again – for the US Navy was in port. Kit finally picked up the phone and answered in French. ‘Bonsoir, what sort of shit are our sailors causing now?’


There was an awkward pause before the caller spoke. The language was French, but the accent was angry American and wanted to know who was on the phone.

‘It’s me, Kit Fournier. Is that you Mr Patterson?’ Patterson was DCM, Deputy Chief of Mission, at the US Embassy in Paris.

‘Yes, Kit, it’s me. You didn’t sound like you were fully awake.’

‘I am now, sir.’

‘Listen, something serious has happened and you need to get moving. Is the car gassed up?’

‘I think so – but I’ve got some spare cans anyway.’

‘There’s been an airplane crash in the Ardèche – and it looks like a US citizen may have perished. The gendarmes have found an American passport naming the holder as Lady Hartington.’

‘Sounds like she’s a Brit. Maybe the gendarmes got it wrong. They don’t always recruit geniuses you know?’

‘No, Kit, I think they got it right. Lady Hartington used to be known as Kathleen Kennedy, Joe Kennedy’s daughter. Her British husband was killed in the war, but she kept the title. Did you ever meet her?’

Kit cast his mind back. He was still at school. It was a late spring day in 1940 and America was still at peace, but the Brits were getting hammered in France. ‘Yeah, I did meet her, but only briefly. They came down for the Maryland Hunt Cup. Kathleen and her brother Jack were staying at Zeke Coleman’s place.’


‘Do you remember her well enough to identify the body?’

Kit closed his eyes tight and thought, Why me? He hated dealing with dead bodies. After a moment, he said, ‘I think so, she wasn’t a great beauty, but she was a bubbly girl.’


Kit ended up giving a lift to the British consul who dozed for most of the first part of the journey. The Brit’s own car, a 30s Citroën, had blown its head gasket. From time to time Kit studied his passenger’s face. The burns were hideous; one ear had melted into a jagged swirl like a broken conch shell. Kit assumed it was a war face from a burning ship or plane – or a tank that had ‘brewed up’.


The British consul began to yawn and stretch as Kit weaved his way through the streets of Aix-en-Provence. The pollarded plane trees that lined the boulevards were already in full leaf. Aix smelled of lavender and drains. ‘How are we for time?’ The Englishman’s voice was standard Foreign Office languid, but the vowels were flat and he said ‘uz’ instead of ‘us’. The only English accents that Kit recognised – upper-class and Cockney – were from films. And his passenger certainly didn’t speak either of those. Nor did he sound like the British officers he had briefly encountered in the Far East.

‘We’re doing OK,’ said Kit.

‘I could murder a croissant and a bowl of café au lait.’

Kit parked the car on a square with peeling green benches and a memorial for the ’14–’18 war. An elderly woman wearing a white apron was standing outside the Café des Sports. She looked at the corps diplomatique badge on the bumper of Kit’s Ford and frowned. The two consuls chose an outside table. The woman’s expression softened when she saw the Englishman’s face. She seemed to know what had happened. When the Englishman ordered for both of them in perfect French his regional accent disappeared. As the woman padded off to the kitchen, Kit turned to his companion. ‘I don’t recognise your accent.’


‘In French?’

‘No, in English. Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?’

The Englishman looked amused. ‘Rotherham.’


Kit was none the wiser. His fellow consul might just as well have mentioned one of Jupiter’s lesser moons. For Kit, England was just as strange and foreign.

When they crossed the Rhône at Montélimar, a gendarme on a motorcycle waved them down. Kit’s big American Ford stood out like an elephant in the French countryside. The gendarme informed them that the bodies had been removed from the village hall at Saint-Bauzille and transferred to the district council offices, the préfecture at Privas. The gendarme then saluted and gave them a motorcycle escort for the last twenty miles. Kit was embarrassed by the attention and stares of roadside peasants. The Englishman’s ironic smile made things worse.


Arriving at the préfecture, they were greeted with some ceremony by a high-ranking gendarme and a very elderly man in a black suit with a Legion of Honour in his buttonhole. The old man introduced himself as the mayor, but everyone else referred to him as ‘the chief’. There were also reporters with notepads, but the gendarme kept them at bay.


Kit and the Englishman were ushered into an office that was lined with dark polished wood. There was a crucifix on the wall behind the desk and a framed military citation describing an action that had taken place in Quang Nam Province in 1886. Christ, thought Kit, this guy really is old. The mayor invited them to sit down. The door opened and an elderly woman in black entered the room bearing a tray of coffee and petits fours. The loose heels of her espadrilles slapped loudly on the polished floor. Kit wondered if the patronne from the cafe in Aix had somehow followed them – they could have been twins. The woman poured the coffee into Limoges china cups and left. Kit felt engulfed by a wave of happiness and peace. He would have been content to spend the rest of his days in that dark room listening to the clock tick and smelling the furniture polish and must of age. He wondered if he could have it all dismantled and re-erected – including the old man and his Legion of Honour – in the garden of his home in Maryland. The ultimate tourist souvenir.


As they sipped the coffee the mayor explained that there were only four bodies, not eight or ten as originally reported. ‘This confusion,’ he said, ‘may have been because this type of aeroplane has seats for eight passengers. But there were only two passengers – and with the two pilots – that makes four.’ The old man turned to the Englishman. ‘Three of them were carrying British passports. But you must confirm their identities before we will sign a permit allowing the repatriation of their remains. Are you capable of doing this?’


‘I have been telegraphed detailed physical descriptions of the two pilots – a Mr Peter Townshend and a Mr Arthur Freeman. The passenger, Peter Fitzwilliam …’

The Frenchman interrupted. ‘The passport identifies the bearer as Earl Fitzwilliam.’

‘Yes, that was his title. In any case, Fitzwilliam was a prominent figure in French horse racing and breeding. I not only have recent photographs of him, but his trainer is coming down from Paris to help identify the body.’


‘Very good.’ The mayor turned to Kit. ‘And the young lady, how sad. Her passport bears the name Lady Hartington, but it is an American passport.’ The Frenchman sounded like a naturalist describing a rare hybrid butterfly. ‘And I believe her father was a close friend of Roosevelt and a former American ambassador …’ the old man’s eyes flicked to the Englishman, ‘to Great Britain.’

‘Yes,’ said Kit, ‘that is correct.’

‘And can you identify her?’

‘I knew her personally.’

‘That is very good. Her father is at this moment on the way to Privas – and it might be kind to spare him the pain of seeing his daughter. Her face is …’ The Frenchman frowned and made a gesture against his own face suggesting disfigurement.

Kit felt sick at what he was going to have to do. He was also surprised to hear that Joe Kennedy was in France. Patterson hadn’t mentioned it.

‘We have had to turn our conference room into a temporary morgue. The bodies are now being transferred into zinc-lined coffins that we had sent from Montélimar. It enables them to be packed in ice.’

The old man, reflected Kit, clearly thought of everything

The mayor steepled his fingers and continued. ‘There are no embalming facilities in the region. Personally, I find the practice barbaric and unnatural.’

Kit nodded agreement.


‘There is,’ said the Frenchman, ‘also the matter of taking an inventory of the belongings of the deceased. We follow strict guidelines. Everything must be witnessed and countersigned.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kit as he finished his coffee. He left the petits fours untouched.

‘When you are ready, you may view the deceased.’

Kathleen’s face wasn’t as bad as the old man had suggested. Her jaw was crushed and bruised purple – and there was a wide gash down the left side of her face. But the worst thing was the way her lips were half open as if trying to utter a cry. Kit could also see that her teeth had been broken and shattered by the impact. He gently touched her forehead and said, ‘Sorry.’ That’s the thing about being born a Catholic: you always feel guilty even if it isn’t your fault. You can stop believing – it’s all infantile nonsense after all – but you can’t stop the guilt.

The Englishman came over to the coffin and stood beside Kit. ‘She’s in much better shape than my lot. The gendarme says she was seated in the back of the plane – and got less impact. You ought to see the pilots.’

‘No thanks.’

‘They were both ex-RAF. They must have known they were going to die, but still remembered to stuff handkerchiefs in their mouths.’

‘What’s that for?’

‘Stops you from biting your tongue off when you crash.’

On the other side of the room, the gendarmes had set up four trestle tables. Each table was laden with the belongings of one of the deceased. The pilots’ tables were nearly empty. Fitzwilliam’s contained only a small suitcase and its contents – but Kathleen’s table was heavily burdened and overflowing.

The men’s belongings were quickly dealt with. The most valuable thing was Fitzwilliam’s signet ring – there was also a lot of cash. Kit stood by while the gendarme officer counted out every note and coin. When it was all finished, Kit signed his name under the Englishman’s as a witness.


Kathleen’s belongings were going to take a lot more time. The gendarme began with the most valuable items: a number of necklaces and heirloom brooches that were on loan from her dead husband’s family. It didn’t seem right to Kit that she should have taken them to glam up for a weekend with a married man on the French Riviera.


When the jewels were all inventoried and signed for, the gendarme began on the clothing – and there was a lot of it. Kit’s brief memory of Kathleen had slotted her as a wholesome ‘skirt and sweater girl’. She reminded him of the Mother Seton girls with their white bobby socks and saddle shoes kicking through mounds of autumn leaves on North Charles Street. But the contents of her suitcase suggested that ‘skirt and sweater’ was no longer her image. The poor gendarme was aware of the solemnity of the occasion – and tried not to smile as he waded his way through silken mounds of negligees, brassieres, stockings and knickers. There were also camisoles embroidered with her initials, KKH, and a pair of black lacy suspender belts. Kit heard a door open as he signed another inventory, but didn’t turn around. The remaining items were even more intimate: a douche and a contraceptive diaphragm. These weren’t the toilet items of a fresh-faced convent girl.


The voice behind Kit spoke with a strong Boston twang. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Kit handed the diaphragm back to the gendarme as he turned to face the man asking the question. He recognised Ambassador Joseph Kennedy at once. Kit knew, instinctively, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time – and that nothing he could say or do was going to make any difference. ‘Good afternoon, sir, my name’s Kit Fournier, I’m the US consul in Nice.’

‘I didn’t ask who you were – I asked what you think you’re doing?’

‘I am very sorry, Ambassador Kennedy, to have to inform you …’

‘You don’t inform me of anything, young man. Where’s my daughter?’

Kit pointed across the room to the coffin. For the first time, he became aware of the smell of chrysanthemums. The funereal flowers seemed suddenly to flood the room. ‘She’s there, sir, next to the wall.’

Kennedy walked over to the coffin, glanced quickly down at his daughter. Then he half-turned and looked at Kit. ‘Why are you still here? Get the hell out and don’t come back.’


A week later Kit was sitting in the office of Jimmy Patterson, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Paris embassy. Patterson leaned back in his chair and smiled. ‘I feel sorry for you, Kit. He’s not an easy man to deal with – and, poor you, you were only carrying out your consular duties as survivor assistance officer.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I can understand how Kennedy must have felt.’

‘He’s an almighty powerful man, Kit, and men like that are even more dangerous when they’re grieving. First of all, let me give you some instructions. One, don’t ever, ever mention what you saw and heard in Privas on 14 May. Two, Kathleen Kennedy Hartington was not involved with Peter Earl Fitzwilliam who was, of course, a happily married man. Ambassador Kennedy’s daughter was just a friend of the family and, after a chance encounter with Lord Fitzwilliam in London, was offered a seat on a chartered plane to the south of France to meet her father. That’s the line, got it?’


‘Got it.’

‘Now, Kit, what are we going to do with you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think that, in your own interest, a little career change might be in order.’

‘Does Kennedy want me kicked out of the diplomatic corps?’

‘Not quite, but it might be an idea to lie doggo for a while.’

‘Long unpaid leave?’

‘No, Kit, you can still be a diplomat, but I think you need to add another string to your bow.’

‘Oh, I know, one of those God-awful courses learning some obscure language that no one can pick up after the age of five.’

‘You are a good linguist, but that’s not what I had in mind.’ Patterson looked closely at Kit. ‘You were in the OSS at the end of the war.’

‘Yeah, but I wasn’t any good at that cloak and dagger stuff – I was too young and naive. The only reason I ended up in the unit was because my dad pulled strings.’

‘By the way, how is your dad?’

Kit knew that Patterson’s question had overtones. His father had retired from the army a few months after the war ended – and there were rumours that he had ‘gone a bit funny’. He spent a lot of time trying to organise medical help for atomic bomb radiation victims in Japan. ‘Dad’s fine,’ said Kit.


Patterson could see that he had touched a raw nerve and returned to Kit’s career prospects. ‘You know, Kit, there has never been a clear line between diplomacy and intelligence gathering. To a certain extent every envoy is a spy, and …’

‘And what?’

‘And I think, Kit, that if you’re not prepared to get your hands dirty, you’re not going to survive in this business.’

‘Ergo?’

‘Ergo, take my advice. Listen, Kit, your old outfit, the OSS never disappeared; they’re just operating under a different name – and recruiting like mad. With your experience and background you’d be perfect.’

Kit realised that he wasn’t being offered a choice. ‘Would it mean that my career as a diplomat is over?’

‘No, far from it, you’ll still be an accredited diplomat carrying a black passport – only your post will be called “cover”– “diplomatic cover”. Who knows, you might even get two pay cheques.’


Kit smiled. ‘And will it keep Kennedy and his pals on the Seventh Floor off my back?’

‘That’s for sure.’

The Agency’s next training intake was scheduled for September. Kit spent several weeks of accumulated leave on a walking tour in the south of France. He returned to Paris at the end of August so he could say goodbye to various friends before catching a boat train to Le Havre, from where he had booked a liner berth to New York. On his last night in Paris, Kit ran into Porfirio Rubirosa at Abélard’s – not one of Rubi’s usual hangouts. Kit had first met Rubirosa in Santo Domingo where his father had been US military attaché. Kit was only eleven at the time and Rubi, then a captain in the Dominican army, had become a family friend. At the time Rubirosa was married to President Trujillo’s daughter – and had very little to do. He treated Kit like a little brother, teaching him to ride and shoot. Rubi’s excursions with young Kit were partly genuine kindness, but also gave him a cover to visit various ladies. Kit spent a lot of time leading Rubi’s rider-less horse around in circles.


The Dominican idyll came to an end in 1937 when Kit’s father confronted Trujillo directly about the massacre of Haitian migrants by armed Dominican vigilantes. His father was sure the army was involved – up to twenty thousand Haitians had been killed. There was a grotesque test to determine who was Haitian. A gunman held up a piece of parsley in front of a suspect. To a French-speaking Haitian, who knew it as ‘persil’, the Spanish equivalent, ‘perejil’, was unpronounceable. Rubirosa, to his credit, was not in any way involved for at the time he had been an undersecretary at the Dominican legation in Berlin, where he supplemented his salary by selling visas and passports to Jews. Meanwhile in Santo Domingo, Kit’s father was relieved of his post and sent back to Washington. It wasn’t the first time or last time that conscience would damage his career.


Kit wasn’t only surprised to see Rubirosa at Abélard’s; he was surprised to see him in Paris at all. ‘I thought,’ said Kit, ‘you were Dominican ambassador to Argentina.’

‘Argentina, the polo is fantastic – the best in the world. But the peasants play this game called pato, where you ride a pony bareback and chase live ducks that you have to catch and kill with your bare hands. It’s very dangerous, especially for the ducks.’


‘But, Rubi, why are you not there? What brings you to Paris?’

‘Things haven’t been too good with Doris …’

‘What a pity,’ said Kit. Doris Duke, Rubirosa’s third wife, was reputedly the third richest woman in the world.

‘… and, to be honest, I don’t think Trujillo was very happy with the way I was doing my job in Buenos Aires. What about you, Kit? When are you going to become an ambassador?’

‘I’m not. I’m sailing back to the States tomorrow.’

‘From Le Havre?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Let me give you a lift in the new Ferrari.’

The next morning Rubi really opened her up on the long straight on the route nationale between Pontoise and Rouen. The Ferrari was a road car, but a real racing machine too. There were no luxuries, the seats were canvas instead of leather. Everything nonessential was stripped out. Rubi was capable of purity too.


Windblown, they stopped for a simple lunch in Rouen of foie gras and red wine. When Rubirosa got up to have a pee, Kit followed him to the pissoir – he had to see if it was true. And he might never have another opportunity to see the famous ‘Ding Dong Daddy from Santo Domingo’.


It was a fine sunny day and the pissoir was in an open yard at the back of the cafe. It was, thought Kit, one of the nicest things about France – the way you could have a pee in the open air and watch the world go by. He tried not to make it obvious that he was leaning over to have a look. He even thought of making small talk about the route or the weather to try to prove he wasn’t really looking. But when Kit actually saw it, he was stunned speechless – it really was almost a foot long. But the impressive thing was its girth; it was as thick as a man’s wrist.


Despite his dissimulation, Porfirio saw that Kit had stolen a look at his cock. Rubirosa began in English. ‘You know there’s an operation for these things. It’s called, reduction phalloplasty. It certainly would make playing polo and driving fast cars a lot more comfortable. Porfirio did up his flies and then pinched Kit’s cheek with his thumb and forefinger. ‘But boy, I don’t think your rich gringas would still want to sleep with me.’


They followed the route départmentale for the rest of the journey. The road twisted and turned as it followed the sinuosity of the Seine valley. The sun was straight before them, blinding and leading. It made Kit think about power: Rubirosa’s power, Kennedy’s power. Theirs were obvious forms of power. But, thought Kit, what kind of power can I have, can I wield? He was about to cross a great ocean to find out.


Lord Cherwell knew what sort of language appealed to the Old Man. And the importance of keeping it all on a single page, otherwise things didn’t always get read. As soon as the Prime Minister picked up the memo his eye was drawn to the key paragraph:


If we are unable to make the bombs ourselves and have to rely entirely on the American army for this vital weapon we shall sink to the rank of a second-class nation, only permitted to supply auxiliary troops like native levies who were allowed small arms but no artillery.

The Prime Minister adjusted his reading glasses and went back to the top of the page:

The McMahon Act (1946) forbids Americans to disclose any atomic secrets to foreigners.

Churchill then picked up a pen and drew a question mark next to the offending passage. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘by “foreigners”, they do not mean us. What about our wartime agreements?’

‘They have been superseded. We should gain nothing, Prime Minister, by referring to them now.’

‘Are you really saying,’ Churchill’s voice was ringing with indignant irritation, ‘that the Americans would refuse to give us any information about bomb design, still less an allocation of bombs?’

‘Whether we like it or not,’ Cherwell spoke softly but firmly, ‘this seems to be the present position.’

The Prime Minister frowned and regarded the memo’s final point. The words seemed to taunt him like a cold-eyed gambler offering another card.

A decision is wanted now.

Operation Ivy; device codename Mike, M for megaton. At a half-second before seven-fifteen a.m., Mike, the world’s first hydrogen bomb, was detonated. The explosion yielded 10.4 megatons, a force 693 times more powerful than the atom bomb that had devastated Hiroshima. The fireball was three and a half miles in diameter; the mushroom cloud rose to a height of twenty-five miles and spread to a width of a hundred miles – one hundred million tons of radioactive material was blasted into the atmosphere. The ground zero islands disappeared completely and were replaced by a crater large enough to contain fourteen Pentagons.


Leighton Fournier, Kit’s father, witnessed the explosion from the deck of the USS Estes. He had used his position as a member of the ABCC, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, to wrangle an invitation to the test. His obsession with the new bombs was one of the reasons why his colleagues whispered that he ‘had gone funny’.


At sea                    


  Near Eniwetok      


Marshall Islands   


 

1 November 1952    


Día de los Muertos 


Dear Kit,


I’ve just attended a preview of the end of the world. They gave us bigwigs radiation badges and dark glasses like welders wear, but the ordinary sailors had nothing. A few seconds before the end of countdown, everyone without protective glasses was ordered to go to the other side of the ship and face away from the blast. It was scary; my frightened animal self wanted to go with them. The last seconds of the countdown seemed to take forever as if Time had stopped in its tracks and was asking us to reconsider what we were doing. As soon as the flash occurred I instinctively covered my eyes and saw all the bones in both my hands. I turned away and faced the ship. All the ladders, the superstructure and all the gun turrets had turned from grey into sepulchre white – as if the Estes had become a ghost ship. When I turned my eyes back to the blast, the fireball was forming into a mushroom cloud. At first like a giant puffball streaked with red, then a white mushroom with a stem. The frightening thing was the way it just kept growing and growing. About fifteen or twenty seconds later the shock wave hit us and rocked the ship from stem to stern. My ears popped and popped again and then there was a boom behind us as the shock wave passed through us and headed out to sea. By now I thought it was all over, but that explosive cloud kept growing. It was now more like a giant doughnut then a mushroom. It was turning dark grey and black and heading towards us. A few minutes later, the skipper ordered us all below and the ship was completely buttoned up – every hatch and porthole secured. We were steaming away from the test site at full speed and the ship’s topsides were being washed down with high pressure hoses and sprinklers. Gosh.


I arrived on Eniwetok Atoll four days before the test (long bumpy flight in a MATS C-54 Skymaster) and was treated with more hospitality than my humble status merited. I was feasted on steak and lobster and boated out to coral reefs to snorkel in clear turquoise waters amid shoals of brightly coloured fish. (Un paradiso terrestre? Yes, Kit, I am aware of the irony.) The scientists treated me like visiting royalty and proudly showed off their pet monster. The Mike device wasn’t a ‘bomb’ such as you drop out of a B-29: it was a small factory, the size of a two-storey house bristling with cylinders, tubes and refrigeration units holding reservoirs of liquid deuterium (a form of heavy hydrogen that boils at – (minus!) 417 degrees Fahrenheit). But, my new friends assured me that once the principles of releasing that apocalyptic power are understood, it will take only months to produce a ‘weaponised’ miniature version of Mike.


The odd thing about the scientists was not just their intelligence, but their civilised awareness of the enormity of what they were doing. One of them said to me: ‘Five billion years of evolution has led to this: the capability to destroy everything time has bought. And why? To threaten obliteration on a former ally that we have turned into an enemy – because we don’t like their economic system.’ I suppose, Kit, that we’re all the same: willing pawns manipulated by the vast currents of history. Only maybe, we shouldn’t be quite so ‘willing’.


 

Much love, Your silly old dad





PS The name of the island that we just blew up was Elugelab; ‘Flower’ in Micronesian dialect.


Leighton folded the letter and put it in his bag. He knew that it would be weeks before he could post it. All communication and news from the test site was embargoed for the next sixteen days. It was feared that the news might affect the US presidential election that was only a week away. Two days after the explosion Leighton took part in a flight over the test area for the purpose of taking air samples and monitoring radiation levels. The plane never returned.


The American proposal to drop atomic bombs on North Korea if the truce broke down shocked the British delegation. Churchill regarded the bomb as something new and apocalyptic; but for President Eisenhower nuclear weapons were nothing more than the latest ‘improvements’ in military weapons. The President was polite and friendly, but never smiled or laughed. Churchill was gloomy and full of pent-up anger and resented the way that John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State, behaved as if he was running the show. Every time that Churchill broached the idea of a summit with the Soviet Union to try to reduce the danger of nuclear war, Dulles put on a stern preacher face as if the Prime Minister was suggesting a deal with Satan.


There was, of course, something that everyone thought about, but no one dared say. At least not in public, for it would be a tactless breach of diplomacy. What would happen, say, if a hawkish Washington decided to end the Soviet problem with a pre-emptive nuclear strike? And it was a tempting option, for the US military planners knew that the Russians still lacked the capability to retaliate across the Atlantic. But … they could reach Britain – and that’s where the revenging Soviet bombs would fall. The British people would bear the brunt of American rashness – and most of them would die.


The Defence Policy Committee authorises a British H-bomb programme.




London, 1956. Mice, thought Kit. Not tiny rodents, but MICE: money, ideology, coercion, excitement. Basic training for case officers: the four means that you use to recruit an agent or persuade someone to betray their