Authors: Sam Eastland
As soon as he had departed from the Kremlin, Professor Swift made his way to the British Embassy at 46 Ulitsa Vorovskovo. There, in a small, dark room at the end of a long corridor, Swift perched on the end of a stiff-backed wooden chair, nervously smoking a cigarette. The haughty confidence he had put on display before Stalin was now replaced by scowling agitation.
From the shadows came the sound of a deep breath being drawn in. Then a man leaned forward, his face suddenly illuminated by the glow of a glass-hooded lamp which stood upon the desk between them. He had an oval face, yellowish teeth and neatly combed hair shellacked on to his scalp with lavender-smelling pomade. His name was Oswald Hansard and although the brass plaque on his door had him listed as the sub-director of the Royal Agricultural Trade Commission, he was in fact the Moscow station chief of British Intelligence. ‘So you think that Pekkala will help us?’ he asked.
Swift sipped at his cigarette and then exhaled in two grey jets through his chapped nostrils. ‘I think he will follow his conscience, whatever Stalin has to say about it.’
‘I’m sure a good number of men and women in this country have followed their conscience, and I dare say it bought them a ticket to Siberia, if they even made it that far.’
‘It’s different with Pekkala,’ remarked Swift. ‘Stalin seems to take a perverse pleasure in being stood up to by this Finn. Even though he has the power to make Pekkala disappear from the face of the earth with nothing so much as a phone call to Lubyanka, he won’t do it.’
‘And why is that, do you suppose?’
‘If I had to guess, I’d say it is because he knows Pekkala doesn’t care. He’s not afraid and there’s nothing Stalin can do about it. If you want my opinion, the only thing keeping Pekkala alive is the very fact that he has placed less value on his life than on his work.’
‘And that work is what they have in common,’ added Hansard.
‘The only thing, I’d say, but it’s enough.’
‘So he will help us?’ Hansard asked again.
‘I think he might,’ answered Swift, ‘for the sake of the woman.’
Hansard sat back heavily, vanishing again into the shadows. ‘But it’s been years since he last set eyes upon her. Surely, he has moved on by now. Any practical person would have done so.’
Swift laughed quietly.
‘Did I say something funny?’ snapped the station chief.
‘Well, yes sir, I think you did. Has there never been someone you loved, from whom you were kept apart by fate and circumstance?’
Hansard paused, sucking at his yellow teeth. ‘In practical terms . . .’
‘And that’s where you really are being funny, sir,’ interrupted Professor Swift.
‘Well, I’m glad to have kept you so amused,’ growled Hansard.
‘What I mean, sir, is that practicality has nothing to do with this. Neither has time itself. Once a love like that has been kindled, nothing can extinguish it. It remains suspended, like an insect trapped in amber. Time cannot alter it. Words cannot undo it.’
Hansard sighed and rose up from his chair. He walked out into the middle of the room. Although he had on a grey suit, and a black and white checked tie, he wore no socks or shoes and his pale feet glowed with a sickly pallor. ‘Highly impractical,’ he muttered.
‘As you say, sir,’ answered Swift, stubbing out his cigarette in a peach-coloured onyx ashtray on the desk, ‘but the world would be a poorer place without people who believed in such things. And besides, in this case, you will admit, it serves our purpose well.’
He gave an exasperated sigh.
The station chief glanced up. ‘Something on your mind, Swift?’
‘Actually, sir, there is. Pekkala asked me how this woman ended up working for us.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I guessed and said she volunteered. The fact is I have no idea.’
‘Nevertheless,’ replied Hansard, ‘you stumbled into the truth.’
‘But what is her story, sir?’
‘I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you now,’ said Hansard. ‘She was first approached by the French Security Service, the Deuxième Bureau, when she was living in Paris back in 1938. At the time, she was a teacher at some small private school in Paris. The Deuxième had been keeping their eye on her for some time. They knew she was Russian, of course, and that her parents had been murdered by the Bolsheviks back in the early 1920s. At the time, the Deuxième were concerned that the entire French government had become riddled with Soviet spies.’
‘And had it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ replied Hansard. ‘Their fears were entirely justified. That’s why they needed someone who could speak Russian, but with enough hatred for Stalin that they could, perhaps, be put to use in ferreting out these infiltrators.’
‘And what did she say to that?’
‘Apparently, she told them she would rather be a school teacher than some kind of glamorous spy.’
‘And yet they persuaded her somehow.’
‘Not until the war broke out,’ said Hansard. ‘As the Germans began their invasion of France, and it became clear that the French army was about to collapse, the Bureau approached her again. This time, it was with an offer to get her out of the country, along with a number of others whom, they believed, might prove useful as agents in carrying on the war effort even after France had fallen. And with France about to fall, the only way they could do that was by delivering those agents to us.’
‘How did they come to choose Simonova? After all, she had no training and she had already turned them down once.’
‘But that’s precisely why they did choose her,’ explained Hansard. ‘The Bureau suspected that lists of its active agents might already have fallen into the hands of German intelligence, so they chose people who had not become operational, or whose identities might have failed to make their way on to the Bureau’s roster.’
‘But that can’t have been the only reason they chose her.’
‘It wasn’t,’ answered Hansard. ‘You see, in addition to French and Russian, she also spoke fluent German. Her father, Gustav Seimann, had been a riding instructor for the Grand Duke of Hesse, a close relative of Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra. When Alexandra, who was herself a German, married Nicholas, she brought in a number of people from her native country to play various roles in her new life among the Russians. The tutor of her children, for example, was an Englishman named Gibbes. There was also a Frenchman named Doctor Gilliard, whom she put on her household staff. And when it came time to teach her children how to ride, she brought in the Grand Duke’s riding instructor. Gustav Seimann settled down in Petersburg and made a new life for himself. He even changed his name to Simonov.’
‘That shows a lot of faith,’ remarked Swift.
‘They
were
faithful,’ agreed Hansard. ‘Some of these foreigners turned out to be the most loyal members of her retinue. Simonov himself was said to have been killed when he rode out by himself to confront a band of roving Cossacks who had made their way on to the grounds of the Tsarskoye Selo estate. That act of bravery cost him his life, but it shows how he remained loyal right up to the end, and I’m told there are many who didn’t.’
‘I suppose the Deuxième Bureau were hoping for the same kind of commitment from his daughter.’
‘Nothing less would do,’ replied Hansard. ‘By the time they got to her, the situation in Paris had become critical. The place had been declared an open city, and most of those who could flee did precisely that. Given the situation, this time the woman agreed.’
‘How did they get her out?’
‘They drove her straight to Le Bourget airfield, just outside of Paris, loaded her aboard one of those lumbering Lysander planes, the kind with the big wheels that can land on just about anything, and two hours later she was in England. They trained her at our Special Operations camp at Arisaig up in Scotland. From there, she went to Beaulieu, Lord Montagu’s place over in the New Forest. Less than a month later, they sent her back to France, this time on a fishing boat we modified to transport agents to and from the Continent, operating out of the Helford River estuary. She was put ashore somewhere near Boulogne and made her way to Paris.’
‘And nobody became suspicious that she’d been gone all that time?’ asked Swift.
‘So many people had left the city after the Germans broke through the French lines at Sedan that her absence was not considered unusual. The school had closed, temporarily, and the students had all been sent home. People were scattered all over the country. When things settled down a bit and life in Paris began to return to normal, or as normal as it could ever be under occupation, those who had fled began to return. Simonova simply joined the tide of refugees making their way back into the city. The little school where she worked reopened and, after registering with the German authorities, she simply resumed her work as a teacher.’
‘And what then?’ demanded Swift. ‘How did she help the war effort? Did she start bumping off people in the middle of the night?’
‘Hardly,’ answered Hansard. ‘Remember, she could speak German, and we had known all along that the occupation government would need people who were fluent in that language as well as in French. She volunteered and, sure enough, they put her to work.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Nothing too onerous. Typing out translations of public notices. Things like that.’
‘Doesn’t sound like much of a return on our investment.’
‘The thing about being a translator is that, sooner or later, an important document is going to end up on your desk. The people who give it to you might not think it contains any vital information, but even the smallest fragment of intelligence can be built up into something useful over time. Before leaving Beaulieu, she had been given a wireless set which she used for transmitting the information back to England.’
‘And how did we manage to get her to Berlin?’
‘We didn’t,’ said Hansard. ‘The Germans did that by themselves, and we have one man in particular to thank for that. His name is Hermann Fegelein. Before the war, his family managed a riding school down in Bavaria. In the early 1930s, Fegelein joined the Nazi Party and went on to command an SS Cavalry Division on the Eastern Front. In early 1944, he got assigned to Himmler’s private staff as a liaison officer. One of the first places Himmler sent him was Paris. When Fegelein got there, he demanded a secretary who was fluent in German and French from the occupation government.’
‘And they gave her Simonova?’
‘Not right away,’ said Hansard. ‘He sacked the first two people he was offered, probably because he didn’t like the look of them. The thing about Fegelein is that he considers himself a real ladies’ man and it wasn’t until they sent him Simonova that he was finally satisfied. When Fegelein left Paris a couple of months later, she went with him.’
‘As his mistress?’
Hansard shook his head. ‘Only as his private secretary, although I dare say he might have other plans for her in the future. In the meantime, Fegelein has become a go-between for Hitler and Himmler; the two most powerful men in the Third Reich. He was, and still is, present at Hitler’s daily meetings with his High Command. Whatever’s going on, he knows about it.’
‘And so does Simonova, by the sound of it.’
‘Fegelein is no fool. Even if he did trust Simonova, he would not knowingly have given her access to secrets of national importance. More likely, he just gossiped with her about all the various goings-on in Hitler’s entourage. But even gossip has its value and we started broadcasting it back to the Germans, as soon as we had set up the Black Boomerang operation.’
‘You mean the radio station? The one that was supposed to be coming out of Calais?’
‘Yes,’ said Hansard, ‘and after that out of Paris and now they’re broadcasting as Sender Station Elbe or something. Of course, their location never actually changed. They’re in some manor house in Hampshire, I believe, although the operation is so secret that even I’m not sure of the exact location. Thousands of German soldiers and civilians tune into that station every day. It’s the most reliable network they’ve got, and if somebody told them it was run by us, they probably wouldn’t believe it. By airing all those bits of gossip from Hitler’s inner circle, we not only dishearten the listeners, we intrigue them. Everybody likes gossip, especially the kind we’re serving up. But there’s an even greater value to this information,’ Hansard went on. ‘Even if the High Command denies the stories, they know perfectly well it’s the truth. And that means they know we have a source’ – with his thumb and index finger, Hansard measured out a tiny space in front of him – ‘this close to Hitler himself.’
‘I understand all this,’ said Swift, ‘but what I can’t quite grasp is why we are going to such lengths to rescue an agent who, for all intents and purposes, is running a Berlin society page! At my meeting with Stalin and Pekkala I said what you told me to say – that we value the lives of all our agents in the field. But you and I both know that we have cut our losses before, and with agents more valuable than this one.’
‘And I suspect we would have done the same with Simonova if it wasn’t for the fact that HQ back in England seems to think that she can get her hands on something extremely important.’
‘And what is that?’
Hansard sighed and shook his head. ‘Damned if I know, but it must be bloody important for us to go down on bended knee in front of Stalin and beg for the Russians to help us.’ With that, he fished a pocket watch out of his waistcoat pocket.
Swift correctly understood this as a sign that he should take his leave. He stood up and buttoned his jacket. ‘I’ll let you know if we hear anything from Pekkala.’
Hansard nodded. ‘Fingers crossed.’
After sending his message to the Reichschancellery, General Hagemann immediately began organising a trip to Berlin. Once there, he planned to personally deliver all the details of his latest triumph to Adolf Hitler.
But even before he could locate any transport, a plane arrived at the Peenemunde landing strip, with orders to take him immediately to Hitler’s headquarters, where he had been ordered to explain the disappearance of his test rocket.
Hagemann was stunned. It appeared that whatever good news he had hoped to bring about the success of the Diamond Stream device had already been trumped by the missing V-2. God help me, thought Hagemann, if that rocket is anywhere except the bottom of the sea.
Within an hour of receiving the message, the general was on his way to Berlin. There had not even been time to pack an overnight bag. The only thing he had managed to grab from his office, located in a requisitioned farmhouse not far from the ruins of the Peenemunde test facility, was a large leather tube containing schematics of the V-2’s guidance system. These diagrams, painstakingly laid out by draughtsmen assigned to the programme, were a vital part of any presentation Hagemann gave to the High Command. To the untrained eye, they represented an indecipherable scaffolding of blue-veined lines, criss-crossed with arterial red pointers, indicating the names and specification numbers of the system’s multitude of parts.
This was not the first time Hagemann had faced the wrath of the German High Command and he had come to rely upon the indecipherability of his blueprints to baffle and intimidate his fellow generals. The less they understood, the more they would be forced to rely upon Hagemann’s optimistic predictions, and it was these which had kept the V-2 programme alive.
Hitler, on the other hand, seemed to love the labyrinthine complexity of the diagrams. With the schematics laid out in front of him, he would sweep his hands almost lovingly across the skeletal lines of the rocket, demanding explanations for the smallest details, which Hagemann was happy to provide.
The extraordinary cost of the V-2 programme, not to mention the delays caused by Allied bombing and the failure of so many experiments, had earned Hagemann many opponents. As he had been reminded many times by sceptical members of the General Staff, for the cost of every V-2 rocket, the German armaments industry could produce over five hundred Panzerfausts, the single-shot anti-tank weapons so simple and effective that they were now being issued to teams of teenage boys recruited from the Hitler Youth, whose orders were to pedal after Russian tanks on bicycles and engage the 20-ton machines in single combat.
Without Hitler’s approval, the whole endeavour would probably have been shelved years ago, but just as easily as he had kept the programme running, he could also destroy it, with nothing more than a stroke of his pen.
Clutching the leather document tube against his chest, it seemed to Hagemann just then that even his magical drawings might not save him now.
Looking down through patchy clouds from an altitude of 10,000 feet, the landscape, just coming into bloom, appeared so peaceful to the general that his mind kept slipping out of gear, convincing him that there was no war, that there had never been a war, and that it was all just a figment of his own imagination.
But as they descended over the outskirts of Berlin, that calm hallucination fell apart. Ragged scars of saturation bombing lay upon the once-orderly suburbs of Heinersdorf and Pankow. The closer they came to the centre, the worse the damage appeared.
Whole sections of the city, laid out like a map beneath him, were completely unrecognisable now. The cargo plane touched down at Gatow airfield. As the plane rolled to a stop, Hagemann’s gaze was drawn to the carcasses of ruined aircraft which had been bulldozed to the side of the runway.
A car was there to meet him. The last time he had come here, several months before, he had been met by Hitler’s adjutant, Major Otto Günsche, as well as the Führer’s own chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who had entertained him on the drive to the Chancellery with stories of his days as a motorcycle mechanic before the war.
This time, however, his escorts were two grim-faced members of General Rattenhuber’s Security Service, who were in charge of protecting the bunker.
At the sight of them, Hagemann felt his heart clench. He wondered if he was already under arrest.
Neither of the men spoke to him on the drive to the Chancellery building. They sat in the front. He sat in the back.
So this is how a life unravels, thought Hagemann.
This brief moment of self-pity evaporated when he saw what was left of the Chancellery. Barely a single window remained intact and the stone work, particularly on the first floor, was so stubbled with shrapnel damage that it gave the impression of being unfinished, as if the masons had abandoned their work before the final touches on the building had ever been completed.
The car came to a halt. The man who had been sitting by the driver climbed out and opened the door for the general.
Hagemann climbed out. ‘Where should I go?’ he asked.
The man gestured up the staircase to the main entrance.
‘People are still working in there?’ gasped Hagemann. ‘But the place is in ruins!’
‘Once you are inside, Herr General,’ said the man, ‘someone will show you the way.’
He took care climbing up the stairs, so as not to trip upon the broken steps. Once inside, he was directed to the entrance of the Führerbunker. Although he had known of the existence of the underground fortress, he had never been down into it. On every other visit, the entranceway had been shut.
He handed his credentials to a guard, who allowed him to pass through the checkpoint after relinquishing his sidearm, a Mauser automatic pistol, which he had never actually fired. He was then escorted down two more sets of stairs, during which time Hagemann noticed the air becoming stale and damp.
Having arrived at the third level below ground, he encountered a new set of guards, who directed him down a narrow corridor to the room where the twice-daily meetings of the High Command had been taking place ever since they migrated underground.
It so happened that Hagemann had arrived just as the midday meeting was about to start.
Entering the conference chamber, Hagemann found himself in a cramped, tomb-like space lit by a single bulb suspended from the ceiling in a metal cage.
At the only table in the room, and sitting on the only chair, was Adolf Hitler. On the other side of the table, herded into a cluster which reminded Hagemann of penguins crowded on to an ice flow, were more high-ranking individuals than he had ever seen collected in one space.
Albert Speer, sweating in a long leather coat, nodded in greeting to Hagemann. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, eyed Hagemann suspiciously, making no attempt to welcome the professor. Beside him stood Joseph Goebbels, in his neatly pressed caramel-brown uniform, as well as Lieutenant General Hermann Fegelein, liaison officer to Heinrich Himmler, Lord of the SS. There were several others whom Hagemann did not know, but he did recognise Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s private secretaries and the only woman present in the room.
Unprepared as Hagemann had been for this unceremonious descent into the bunker, he now felt equally out of place among this crush of National Socialist celebrities.
But the thing which unnerved Hagemann most of all was the sight of Adolf Hitler himself.
The Führer had aged visibly since their last meeting, even though it had taken place only a few months before. His eyes had taken on a glassy sheen and flaccid skin hung like wet laundry from his cheekbones. His hair, although still neatly combed, looked matted and dull and a salting of dandruff lay across the shoulders of his double-breasted jacket.
One thing that had not changed, however, was the fierceness of his glare, which Hagemann now felt as if a searchlight had been turned upon him.
‘Hagemann,’ drawled Hitler. ‘What have you done with my rocket?’
If there had been any warning, even a couple of seconds, about what the Führer was going to say to him, Hagemann would almost certainly not have said what he said next. Instead, he blurted out the first thing that came into his head. ‘I have perfected it,’ he answered defiantly.
Hitler paused, slowly drawing in a breath as if he meant to suck in the last remaining particles of oxygen in the room. Then he sat back in his flimsy wooden chair and drummed his fingers on the table. ‘This’, he asked, ‘is what you call the loss of a V-2, whose whereabouts you cannot trace and which, even now, might have fallen into enemy hands?’
‘Preposterous!’ snapped Goebbels. ‘Hagemann, you will be put on trial for this.’
‘If you will allow me to clarify the situation,’ began the general.
‘By all means,’ answered Hitler. ‘We are all of us here very anxious to see how you interpret perfection.’
‘Especially when you don’t have the rocket to prove it!’ shouted Goebbels.
There was a quiet murmur of laughter in the room.
It was all Hagemann could do not to grab these cackling bullies by their throats and choke the life out of them. Instead of acknowledging this triumph, which signalled the birth of a new age of discovery for the entire human race, very little mattered to the men inside this room except to know exactly how much damage could be done with Hagemann’s invention.
‘Quiet!’ barked Hitler. ‘This is no cause for amusement.’ Then he turned to Hagemann. ‘Well, what have you to say in your defence?’
The general had plenty to say.
Over the next few minutes, he explained how steam, produced by concentrated hydrogen peroxide and catalysed by sodium permanganate, propelled a mixture of ethanol and water along a double-walled combustion chamber contained within the rocket. This double wall simultaneously cooled the combustion chamber and heated the fuel, which was then sprayed through a system of more than twelve hundred tiny nozzles.
‘One thousand two hundred and twenty four to be exact,’ said Hagemann.
He went on to describe how the fuel combined with oxygen as it entered the combustion chamber, shaping the air with his hands as if to trace the flow of blazing particles.
‘When the newly designed guidance system is functioning as it should,’ said Hagemann, ‘it creates an ideal trajectory for the rocket, which in turn allows for an optimum fuel consumption ratio. This balance of trajectory and fuel consumption, when perfectly aligned, produces an exhaust plume which appears, to observers on the ground, to resemble a halo of diamonds. Hence the name of the device. This phenomenon, known as the Diamond Stream effect, was witnessed by my observers in the Baltic. That is how we know of our success, even without the physical remains of the rocket.’ As Hagemann paused to catch his breath, he glanced around the room. His eyes met only the blank stares of the assembled dignitaries.
There were occasions when this labyrinth of chemistry and physics had worked to Hagemann’s advantage and listeners, no matter what their rank, would have no choice except to take his word for everything he said.
But this was not one of those occasions. This time Hagemann had lost a rocket approximately 45 feet long and weighing more than 27,000 pounds. Now he very much needed these men to understand exactly what had happened.
‘Think of the engine in your car,’ he began, and immediately the strained looks of the generals and politicians began to relax. Even the most technologically dense of them could picture what lay under the hood of their automobiles, even if they had no idea about the workings of the internal combustion engine.
As Hagemann continued, he did his best to make his audience feel as if he were speaking to each person individually, but the only one who really mattered in this conversation was Hitler himself. In the trembling hands of this man, who was so obviously being devoured from the inside by the all-consuming fact of his defeat, lay not only the future of the V-2 programme but Hagemann’s very existence.
‘When your car engine is not tuned correctly,’ he explained, ‘you end up with a lot of smoke coming out of your exhaust.’
There were some nods of agreement.
‘This happens,’ he continued, ‘because your fuel is not being properly burned. When the engine is correctly tuned, you can barely see any exhaust at all.’
‘So,’ Goebbels said cautiously, ‘with this rocket of yours, instead of seeing nothing . . .’
‘You see diamonds,’ answered Hagemann.
But Speer was not yet satisfied. ‘And the guidance is what tunes the engine?’ he asked, his eyes narrowed with confusion.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ agreed Hagemann. ‘Think of a clock hanging on a wall. If the clock is not hanging at the correct angle, its timing will be off. You can even hear it when the ticking isn’t right.’
‘I have a clock like that,’ muttered Goebbels. ‘No matter what I do, it cannot tell the proper time. And the sound is enough to drive a person crazy, especially at night.’
‘Shut up!’ barked Hitler. ‘This has nothing to do with your clock.’ He nodded at Hagemann. ‘Go on, General.’
‘Think of the ticking of this clock as the result of the spring winding down, just as the exhaust from the V-2’s engine is the result of the fuel as it burns. When the clock is running perfectly, the spring will wind down to the end, telling perfect time along the way. But if the clock is out of balance, the clock will usually stop before the spring has properly wound down. Until now, our rockets have been like clocks whose springs are out of balance. The fuel consumption was not optimised and the rockets, whether they were fired against targets or out into the Baltic Sea, did not achieve their true potential. The Diamond Stream device was designed to create a perfect balance in the rocket. Until this most recent test, that balance had not been achieved. But when it did finally work, not only were we able to witness the distinctive exhaust pattern, but the rocket travelled further than any previous test had done before, without any increase in fuel payload. As of last night,’ he concluded, ‘the Diamond Stream is a reality.’