Yesterday's Spy: A Novel

Also by Tom Bradby

Shadow Dancer

The Sleep of the Dead

The Master of Rain

The White Russian

The God of Chaos

Blood Money

Secret Service

Double Agent

Triple Cross

TOM

BRADBY

YESTERDAY’S

SPY

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2022 by Master of Rain Ltd

Jacket design by James Iacobelli

Jacket collage images: man, Donald Jean © Arcangel Images; Tehran street © AP Images/Tom Fitzsimmons; glass and texture © shutterstock

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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover editon: August 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5904-5

eISBN 978-0-8021-5905-2

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

To Claudia, Jack, Louisa and Sam

Prologue

Göttingen, Germany, March 1933

In another time and place, it would have taken all of Harry’s ­self-­control not to laugh at the spectacle in front of him. But this was neither the time nor the place, and he had the growing sense that they ought to have left long ago.

He had found himself captivated, though, by the woman sitting at the table next to them. She had a wide face, full cheeks, a radiant smile and tumbling auburn hair. Her laugh demanded attention and he’d been rewarding it with more than was polite, even if they had yet to be introduced or exchange a word. He told himself that the pimply youth engaging her in earnest conversation must be a brother or cousin, perhaps a friend.

They were in the gloomy basement of a beer hall called the Ratskeller, normally the haunt of students and those leftists still brave enough to show their faces in public. But tonight it was awash with sweaty Nazis, drunk on Pilsner, their pristine, ridiculous uniforms and the very real ­prospect – the reality, even – of absolute power. It was a cavernous room, with dark timber panelling, iron light fittings that hung low over the bar, and vaulted stone ceilings, which seemed to magnify the Nazis’ booming voices into something that resembled rolling thunder. Perhaps it was. The gloom was thick with cigarette smoke, tables draped in stained white cloths packed close together.

Harry, who had been studying under the great mathematics professors Hermann Weyl and Edmund Landau for his entire term away from Cambridge, was trying to explain to David Wilson, who had missed the first half of the term due to illness, just how much had changed since the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s emergency decree, which had been its most direct consequence. The Nazis had real power now and, in his view, intended to use it to extinguish what remained of Weimar’s fragile democracy. Even the Ratskeller’s owners had thought it safer to nail up photographs of Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering, which hung just above Harry’s head in the corner.

The Führer was no longer a laughing matter, if he ever had been. And the presence at the long Nazi table of Simon ­Hughes-­Hallett and Ed Haddon, their fellow Cambridge students, only served to underscore that fact. If the cream of the British aristocracy was now paying homage to these dangerous men, the world had a problem. ‘We should go,’ Harry told Wilson. His friend was not of a martial, or even brave, disposition and he thought it best to get him away before things deteriorated.

The pimply youth at the table next to them appeared to agree. He nodded. ‘We should, too,’ he told the vibrant woman opposite him.

‘I’m enjoying myself,’ she shot back. ‘I haven’t seen anything this funny in years.’

‘We shouldn’t be laughing.’

‘So you say. I don’t see why not. They’re all fat and sweaty, the ugliest people I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘Sadly, politics in Germany,’ Harry interjected, sensing his chance for an introduction and leaning across the gap between their tables, ‘as everywhere else, is not a beauty contest.’

The woman turned to him and gave him the benefit of her ­mega-­watt smile. ‘It really should be.’

He offered her his hand. ‘Harry Tower.’

She took it, her palm cool to the touch. ‘Amanda James.’

The Brownshirts at the table nearest to the wall stood to delight the few student drinkers who had remained with another ­rendition – their ­third – of the Horst Wessel Song. ­Hughes-­Hallett rose to his feet beside them. He was a big man, gone early to seed, with a puffy face that made him look like a pumpkin. He was very drunk, too, with a voice that could shatter glass at a hundred paces. ‘Isn’t he the one who urinated on you from his rooms in the quad?’ David Wilson asked.

Harry had forgotten he’d told Wilson that.

‘Die Fahne hoch!’ the men belted out. ‘Die Reihen fest geschlossen!’ Raise the flag! Our ranks are closed!

The room fell silent in acquiescence. There were already rumours that Göttingen’s ­world-­famous mathematics department was about to be purged of all its Jews, or those married to them, which would likely render it next to useless. The assumption was that every other faculty would soon face similar pressures. Harry had already written to the college authorities back home to outline his concerns, not that it would do him, or them, much good. He was giving serious thought to cutting short his studies here.

‘SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt.’ The SA marches with calm, steady step.

Like hell it does, Harry thought. The SA was the least calm and steady body of men he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter.

‘My God,’ Amanda said, in horror. ‘They are simply appalling.’

As the song ground on towards its inexorable and somewhat telling ­conclusion – ‘Already Hitler’s banners fly over all streets. The time of bondage will last but a little while now’ – Harry’s gaze was drawn to a man who sat alone in the corner. At first, he’d thought him likely to be one of the university’s academics, but any reputable professor would surely long since have had the good sense to depart. And this slight, angular fellow just sat there, tugging at his moustache and drinking his single glass of Pilsner with measured care. And watching everyone. Who was he? Harry wondered. And why was he sitting alone, his gaze flicking from Harry to the Nazis and their companions and back again?

He surely wasn’t from the Gestapo. It was a facet of life in Hitler’s new Germany that you always felt watched.

Unable to contain herself, Amanda stood and proceeded to ­goose-­step up and down the room with her finger beneath her nose to imitate Hitler’s moustache.

Her mockery was so brazen that the uniformed thugs and their companions fell silent. Only ­Hughes-­Hallett’s booming voice pierced the hush. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ He looked at the pimply youth she had been sitting with. ‘Can’t you control your woman, Carrington? I thought she was supposed to be the daughter of an earl. You’d think she’d have more damned manners.’

The nearest Nazi reached over and tried to grab Amanda’s skirt. She pulled away, but he had enough of a hold to force her to slip on the flagstones. She hit the floor hard. Another Nazi, a big sweaty man with dark hair cropped close to his skull, lurched forward, took the hem of Amanda’s dress and flipped it over her head to reveal her underwear. There was a roar of laughter.

Amanda screamed. The man stood over her, as if about to contemplate a more serious assault. But Carrington dived at his feet to reassemble Amanda’s clothes and beg forgiveness. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘she’s very drunk. She meant no harm.’

Yes, she bloody did, Harry thought. And liked her all the more for it.

Carrington hurried Amanda towards the door and, for a moment, it looked as if that might be the end of the matter. But Harry had seen enough of the Nazis to know restraint was not part of their ­make-­up. The men stood and began to follow the couple to the door, hitching their belts and pulling up their sleeves.

Harry caught the eye of the man in the corner. A ­half-­smile tugged at the corners of his lips, as if he was interested to see how this would play out. He was gazing intently at Harry, his right hand clutching a homburg on the table in front of him. He had his coat on his lap, as if about to leave.

‘Stay here,’ Harry instructed David Wilson. The last thing he needed was a vicar’s progeny as a wingman in a dark alley late at night.

Harry hurried up the steps and emerged into a chill wind, the cobbled alley half lit by a lone ­street-­lamp. He heard voices, then a single, anguished cry. He walked into the gloom and figures gradually took shape. Carrington was at the back, an ineffectual, whimpering bystander. Amanda was somewhere in the midst of the sweaty throng, trying to fight back, grunting and crying in terror.

Harry could not quite discern the men’s ­intention – ­harassment, humiliation, assault, ­rape – but if he had learnt one thing in the tumult of his childhood, it was how to handle dangerous odds.

Attack with overwhelming force.

And then run fast.

He hit the men at the back of the group, like a runaway train. They were drunker than he had imagined and scattered like pins in a bowling alley. But the big man who had assaulted her first recovered quickly. He turned, faced Harry. ‘Scheisser,’ he grunted. He swung with a giant fist, but Harry was too fast. He ducked easily, then hit the big man such a devastating punch with his right that he careered back into a ­drain­pipe and smashed to the ground.

Harry picked up Amanda, threw her over his shoulder and ran, through the twisting fog, down the winding cobbled street beneath the ethereal glow of the night lamps.

The footsteps behind them faded into rancid curses.

Harry stopped running. He put Amanda down. She had a hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh, despite the trauma of the assault. ‘Whoever you are, you’re a bloody maniac,’ he said.

She smiled back at him. ‘Well, whoever you are, you’re a good man to know in a tight spot. How did you learn to fight like that?’

‘Wait here.’

Harry retraced his steps carefully, wanting to be sure their pursuers had abandoned them to the night. He lurked in the gloom by the entrance to a butcher’s shop not far from the scene of their crimes.

The Ratskeller was swallowing the last of the dejected Nazis. Carrington, the pimply youth, had vanished. And only the small, slight man who had been watching him in the bar stood outside still, playing with his moustache.

Who the hell was he?

Perhaps it was Harry’s imagination, but he seemed to smile as he raised his hat. Harry turned away from him and headed back, a spring now in his step, to the woman who had just exploded into his life.

1

London, August 1953

As he hurried along Whitehall, Harry’s feet were as damp as they had been during the Kent winters of his childhood, but that was no surprise. They’d seen nothing but rain for weeks. Wimbledon had been a washout, Lord’s looked like an ornamental lake, the trains ran intermittently, if at all, and the bus he had travelled to work on this morning might have been surfing over the river.

He ran up Downing Street, banged hard on Britain’s most famous door and stepped briskly into the hall as soon as it was opened. He shook his umbrella on the ­flagstones by the entrance. ‘Sorry, bloody weather,’ he grumbled apologetically. The porter returned his smile and took the umbrella without complaint. ‘Harry Tower, here to see the prime minister.’

‘Yes, sir. I believe you know the way.’

Harry hurried down the hall and took the stairs three at a time. He was waved through by the secretary and eased into the study quietly. It was much too small to arrive unnoticed.

Winston Churchill sat slumped in the chair by his desk, smoking one of his infamous cigars and looking every one of his ­seventy-­nine years. Ed Haddon and William Oswald, Harry’s colleagues in the Secret Intelligence Service operations department, stood before a map of Tehran on the far side of the desk. ‘You recall Harry Tower,’ Ed Haddon said. ‘We asked him to attend because he had some direct experience in Tehran at the end of the war.’ Harry was tempted to ask why they had excluded him from the planning of this operation and all communication with the Americans, but he managed to bite his tongue.

‘I’m old, not senile,’ Churchill shot back. ‘Sit,’ he ordered Harry, as if he wished to have company at the level of his steely gaze. ‘Go on,’ he growled at Haddon.

‘Just before midnight, Colonel Nasiri will arrive here to arrest Prime Minister Mossadegh.’ Haddon was pointing at the map of central Tehran. ‘The PM will no doubt attempt to call out the military to prevent his removal from power, but when he attempts to contact General Riahi, the chief of staff, he will find no one at home.’ Haddon tried a smile. It made him look constipated – Churchill had that effect on people. ‘Colonel Nasiri and his detachment of the Imperial Guard will already have called there to arrest the general, too,’ Haddon continued.

‘On whose authority?’

‘The Americans have persuaded the Shah to sign a firman, an executive order to appoint General ­Zahedi – a close ally of the royal family – to replace Mr Mossadegh as prime minister. The arrests will be carried out on General Zahedi’s orders, after the firman has taken effect.’

‘Is the order legal?’

Haddon looked at Oswald nervously. Harry had learnt long ago that Winston Churchill would forgive most things, but not being lied to. ‘That’s a matter of opinion, Prime Minister,’ Haddon replied.

‘I’d guessed that,’ Churchill said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘So whose opinion should I rely upon?’

‘It’s true that, under Iran’s constitution,’ Haddon went on smoothly, ‘the Shah cannot technically remove or appoint a prime minister without the consent of the Iran­ian parliament. But we are confident our colleagues in the ­CIA – using our contacts, of ­course – have raised the fear of a Communist takeover to such a fever pitch in Tehran that this move will be widely welcomed, or at least accepted, by the Iranian people.’

‘This coup, you mean,’ Churchill replied. It wasn’t offered as a criticism. The prime minister loved nothing more, Harry knew, than his part in the great game of international relations, especially when it was to be carried out in such a nakedly ­cloak-­and-­dagger fashion.

‘A transfer of power, Prime Minister.’ Haddon treated him to the more confident trademark grin that had once made him the darling of the SIS typing pool. Harry tried hard to suppress a smile of his own. He knew the prime minister well enough to be certain he would be impervious to Haddon’s oleaginous charm.

‘Can we deny involvement?’ Churchill growled.

‘Yes,’ Oswald said. ‘Operation Ajax is being run on the ground entirely by the CIA, though, as we said, they’re using our former contacts in Tehran and are liaising with our team in Cyprus. So, even in the ­worst-­case scenario that the CIA team is blown, we could still plausibly deny any British involvement.’

‘But the Americans remain grateful for our assistance and support,’ Haddon said, as if worried he was losing the prime minister’s interest. ‘They understand they could not be attempting this transfer of power without our many contacts on the ground in Tehran and that we would be running the show if Mr Mossadegh had not closed our embassy and expelled all of our people.’

‘I don’t require a history lesson,’ Churchill snapped, ‘on this of all subjects. And nor do I need reminding that it was our idea. But how did they get the Shah to sign this firman ? He has the spine of a jellyfish.’

‘I believe the American agent in charge of Operation Ajax is very persuasive, Prime Minister,’ Haddon explained. ‘He tried at first to enlist the help of Princess Ashraf. As you know, she has an insatiable appetite for men and money so is generally likely to understand the merits of an argument when it is presented correctly.’ Haddon spread his arms, as if about to take a bow at what Harry assumed was a kind of joke. ‘When even that didn’t work,’ Haddon swiftly continued, ‘the ­American – the Quiet American, I believe they call ­him – took to visiting the Shah secretly under cover of night. Certain inducements were offered and accepted, but most persuasive was the sense of unity he was able to convey when it came to the governments in Washington and London. The Shah was told in no uncertain terms that regime change was coming, that you and President Eisenhower were of one mind, and that his choice was therefore to be a part of it, or risk being consigned at a young age to the dustbin of history.’

‘The Shah remains in Tehran?’

‘We believe he has asked to be allowed to fly to his palace on the Caspian coast on the day of the transfer of power in case our efforts fail and he needs to flee with his family to Baghdad.’

Churchill shook his head slowly. ‘That’s what I call courage.’ He stared gloomily out of the window at the rain still drenching the verdant Downing Street garden. ‘It’s only a matter of time until we need a new shah. I hope you have some ideas for that.’

They looked at him blankly. ‘We could hardly ask for more than a king who does exactly what we want, surely, Prime Minister,’ Oswald suggested.

‘The world is rarely that simple.’ He surveyed them from beneath hooded eyelids. ‘So, which one of you is the Iran expert ?’

Haddon’s face flushed. He liked to consider himself an expert in pretty much everything. ‘Prime Minister, I am the head of the Near and Far East desks.’

‘You know Iran?’

‘I made a brief visit in ’­forty-­four, ­but—’

‘It must be you, then, Tower.’ Churchill turned to him. ‘Will it work?’

Harry shrugged. He’d had nothing to do with the scheme thus far and had been brought to the meeting, about which Haddon had been extremely nervous, solely because his experience on the ground in Tehran, in ’­forty-­six, was the most recent in London Centre. All of the staff from SIS’s Tehran station, expelled by Mossadegh the year before, were in Cyprus, waiting to jump back in if the coup was successful. And because he knew the prime minister: he had been instrumental during the war in persuading him to switch British support in Yugoslavia from the Chetniks to Tito’s Communist partisans. ‘It’s the Americans’ plan,’ Harry said.

Churchill rewarded him with the ghost of a smile. They’d always got on. ‘I am aware of that. Is it the right one?’

‘I wouldn’t personally bet my dinner money on the Shah.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s weak. And vain. And his head is already full of plans to rival the great Achaemenian emperors. It is not healthy to have delusions of grandeur so early in a reign.’

‘I thought they were defeated by Alexander at the great battle of Marathon,’ Haddon said, looking rather pleased with himself.

Harry turned to him. So did the prime minister, who appeared to share Harry’s surprise. Haddon was always at his worst when showing off his imperfect knowledge of a subject, but undermining the achievements of Cyrus and his successors in building the greatest empire the world had ever known at the heart of what was modern Iran took some beating for sheer stupidity.

‘Do you know the Shah?’ Churchill asked Harry, ignoring Haddon’s discomfort.

‘No. You have the edge on me there.’ Harry was aware that Churchill had met Iran’s young ­king – installed by the British, of course, after his autocratic father had drifted too close to the Nazis – at the Tehran Conference with Stalin and Roosevelt in 1943.

‘But you know Tehran?’

‘I visited half a dozen times in ’­forty-­six.’

‘To do what?’

‘I went to Tabriz, to assess the situation there after the gendarmes trained by Norman Schwarzkopf had managed to expel the Soviets. We naturally assumed it was only a matter of time before Stalin tried again.’

‘The People’s Republic of Azerbaijan,’ Churchill muttered darkly.

Harry nodded. After Soviet forces had refused to withdraw at the agreed deadline at the end of the war, ­left-­wing Iranian activists had tried to declare a breakaway people’s republic in the area around Tabriz close to the border. They had been crushed by the Shah’s Gendarmerie, which had been turned into a crack force by the American General Norman Schwarzkopf during the Allied occupation of Iran. But it had been a ­close-­run thing, one of the first ­stand-­offs of the Cold War, though sadly far from the last. ‘I spent some time in Tehran,’ Harry went on, ‘with the army high command and a few of the key ministers. But mostly I was deep in the countryside, with the tribal leaders, trying to prepare some meaningful resistance in the event of a ­full-­scale Russian invasion.’

‘That doesn’t explain your contempt for the Shah.’

Harry looked at Oswald, then at Haddon. He could tell his scepticism was going down like a cup of cold sick. But what did they expect? He’d got to know the prime minister relatively well during the war and was not in the business of lying to him. ‘With the possible exception of Schwarzkopf’s Gendarmerie and one or two of the other regiments we trained during the war, the Shah’s army is a paper tiger that will fold at the first sign of real Soviet intent. It’s still something of a mystery as to why Stalin didn’t press matters further in ’­forty-­six when he had the chance. But despite his death, Moscow won’t make the same mistake twice and the current chaos in Iran is the perfect opportunity.’

Harry sensed he had the prime minister’s full attention so pressed on. ‘Most of Iran is backward, poor and extremely religious. I spent a lot of my time there in the faith schools, talking to the imams. I concluded a combination of resistance in the mosques and by the tribes outside Tehran might at least make an invasion uncomfortable for Moscow in the ­long-­term.’

‘What has that got to do with the Shah?’

‘He’s not especially devout. He has liberal ideas, which may be laudable but will not sit easily with the conservative masses. If we bet the house on him, we’ll lose it.’

There was a long silence. ‘What do you suggest, then?’ Churchill asked caustically.

Harry didn’t answer. What he thought was that the British should be bolstering Iran’s nascent democracy and accepting that its nationalist leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, had a right to a better deal for the oil being extracted by ­Anglo-­Iranian Oil, but he wasn’t going to argue that in this company.

Churchill shook his head impatiently. ‘Whether the Shah is the right man to protect our interests in the region in the ­long-­term is a different question. We can deal with him another day – God knows, weak dictators are two a penny. But Mossadegh is a ­maniac – demented, a ­lunatic – and we need to defuse this crisis now and get our oil flowing again. The Shah can at least be guaranteed to do that. So my question to you, Tower, this week, here, now, is simple: will the coup work?’

Harry shrugged. ‘We have some competent assets on the ground there, to which we have given Washington full access, and the Americans have more money than God. I don’t know whether you can buy a country, but they’ll be having a damned good go at it. At this stage, there can’t be many left in the city they haven’t attempted to bribe.’

‘You sound like you disapprove of that, too.’

‘I’m not sure it’s a recipe for stability, even in the ­short-­term.’

‘You can buy oil,’ Churchill said, ‘which is the part that worries me. I’ve asked the President for reassurance that American companies will not be given special treatment after this coup is successful. It is our damned oil, after all.’ Churchill sighed deeply. ‘When does this happen?’ He was glaring at Haddon.

‘We’ve agreed with Washington that the precise timing will be left to their team on the ground in Tehran. But any day now, sir.’

‘Tell me the moment it’s done. I’ll want to be the first to congratulate the President. What about the Russians? What’s the state of play now that Stalin is dead?’

He was looking at Harry. ‘The KGB has been preoccupied with endless bouts of ­score-­settling in Moscow since he passed away,’ Harry said. ‘So I suppose at least this makes it a good moment for us to strike.’

‘You think this will wake them up?’

‘Possibly. But too late, with any luck.’

The prime minister nodded, then waved them away. He turned to face the window and puffed noisily on his cigar as they filed out.

No one spoke until they had emerged into Downing Street. ‘Christ,’ Haddon said, ‘he puts me on edge.’

It’s your relentless ambition that does that, Harry thought. Haddon’s raincoat was as snug as his suits – the product of too many long lunches at the Travellers Club and the Garrick. But he’d held off the advances of age in other respects, his thick dark ­curls – proudly ­unkempt – still yet to see a trace of grey. Even though ­Haddon had actually helped smooth Harry’s way into the  ­Service – for reasons he had never quite nailed ­down – he remained the same amoral man who had sung the Horst Wessel Song that night with the Nazis in Göttingen and, back home in Cambridge, sprinkled his ­working-­class scholarship contemporary with exquisitely loaded contempt.

The ravages of age and experience had taken a greater toll on