Requiem for a Spy: A Novel of Nuclear Espionage Read online

  Requiem for a Spy

  A Novel of Nuclear Espionage

  Richard Miles & Jill Rose

  © Copyright Richard Miles & Jill Rose 2021

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2021 by Richard Miles & Jill Rose

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-785-9

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Cover Design by Trevor Scobie

  Thank you so much for reading one of our Political-Thriller novels.

  If you enjoyed our book, please check out our recommendation

  for your next great read!

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  “an ingeniously plotted, deftly paced political-thriller”—Iain Reid, winner of the Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Awardand author of THE TRUTH ABOUT LUCK

  For my family

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Coda

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Note from the Author

  BRW Info

  Prelude

  by Jill Rose

  My uncle Richard Miles was born in October 1917, the youngest child of the Reverend Edwin ‘Ted’ Miles of Glamorgan and his wife Annie, née Jones, of Bala in North Wales. My father Roger was two years older, and they had two sisters: Marion (1909) and Margaret (1911). Edwin was a Presbyterian minister; Annie had been one of the first women to graduate from Aberystwyth College, University of Wales, and had taught French before her marriage. Although he spent his formative years in England, Richard was raised with a deep pride in his Welsh ancestry, as well as close family ties, a strong sense of duty and service, and the moral rectitude of his parents’ faith.

  Richard took his degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) from Exeter College Oxford in 1939, and almost immediately enlisted in the Royal Navy. He served with the Arctic convoys before being promoted to Lieutenant, at which point they discovered he had a hearing defect due to a congenital deformity of his right ear that, to Richard’s dismay, precluded further active service, and he was sent to a shore establishment.

  In the summer of 1942 Richard was selected as the Royal Navy’s representative to the International Youth Assembly in Washington DC, along with representatives from the Royal Air Force and the Army. At the end of August, he and his companions arrived in the US capital, where he met the President’s wife Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, a sponsor of the meeting. Richard was subsequently posted to the British Embassy in Washington, where he would remain for the rest of the war, with responsibilities for White House Liaison with the Naval Attaché’s Office. Mrs Roosevelt took a liking to the young naval officer, and this was the start of a warm friendship between them that would last for the next twenty years until her death in 1962.

  Richard later worked for the embassy’s Economic Advisor Dr Redvers Opie, and in July 1944 was an adviser to the British Delegation at the Bretton Woods Conference, which established the economic order of the post-war world. He returned to England for a few months immediately after the war, working for the Treasury Department, and he was a member of the British team at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, which formalized the division of Europe and inadvertently set the stage for the Cold War. By 1946 he was back in the States as adviser to the British Delegation to the United Nations and adviser to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, working with Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was the UK’s first Permanent Representative to the United Nations, towards controlling nuclear weapons.

  By March 1948 the talks were at a stalemate in the face of Russian intransigence. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko insisted that all existing bombs (i.e. American) must be destroyed before discussions could begin on international controls. Richard pointed out that this would leave the Soviet Union with a free hand to develop its own weapons; ‘Miles Tells UN Reds Want US Weapons Destroyed So They Can Make Own’, announced the New York Herald Tribune on 19 March. The meeting ended with a public spat between Richard and Gromyko as, led by Great Britain, the UN Atomic Energy Commission voted to drop consideration of the Russian proposal.

  Richard’s determination in not acquiescing to the Russian plan was more consequential than appeared at the time. In May 1944 a high flyer from the Foreign Office in London was seconded to the British Embassy in Washington. He was just four years older than Richard, and their paths would have crossed both socially and professionally. He became First Secretary, and from early in 1947 until the middle of 1948 he was Secretary of the Anglo-American-Canadian Policy Committee on atomic energy matters. His name was Donald Maclean, and in 1951 he was revealed as a Soviet spy who had for many years been passing top secret information to the KGB. Maclean defected to Moscow along with fellow-traveller Guy Burgess, the first two of the infamous Cambridge Five to be exposed. It is certain, therefore, that in March 1948 Andrei Gromyko had far more knowledge of the American nuclear programme than Richard and his colleagues could have suspected. In his biography A Spy Named Orphan, author Roland Philipps points out that thanks to Maclean, the Russians were able accurately to assess the s
trength of the American stockpile of bombs. We can only speculate as to what might have happened had the Soviets succeeded in their aim to eliminate the American nuclear arsenal.

  I remember Richard telling me, many years later, that he had known Donald Maclean, and that he had even written a roman à clef inspired by him. At that time I knew hardly anything about the infamous Cambridge spy ring . . . I was only four years old when the Burgess and Maclean scandal first broke in 1951.

  Looking back on what I’ve just written about his early career and the exhilarating years he spent in America, it strikes me that my uncle was something of a Forrest Gump-like character, a participant in and an astute observer of some of the key events and most notable people of the time: Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Roald Dahl (with whom he shared a house in Washington), Sir Alexander Cadogan, Kay Halle, Drew Pearson, Andrei Gromyko and, of course, Donald Maclean. Richard did sometimes talk to me about it, but to my everlasting regret, I never asked him to elaborate, to tell me more, and much of what he told me has slipped out of my memory banks.

  One of my uncle’s stories, however, has long been part of our family lore. Richard was a strong believer in the ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States. So when Churchill, on one of his wartime visits to the US, asked what Britain could do to cement the bond and show the country’s appreciation for the help of the American people, Richard suggested that this would be an ideal time for the UK to switch to driving on the right as a gesture of solidarity. Churchill immediately shot down the idea, arguing that it was essential that the driver be on the left so that his sword arm was free in the event of an attacker approaching on the opposite side of the road! And so today the UK still stubbornly drives on the left.

  I don’t know exactly where or when this encounter took place, but I know it’s a true story. It’s been corroborated by Richard’s friend, the journalist and socialite Kay Halle, a confidante of Winston’s son Randolph.

  I emigrated in 1970, and it was not until the early 1980s that I got to know Richard better. In 1982 my husband Allen and I were living in Rockville, Maryland, just outside Washington. Richard still had friends in the capital, and on one of his visits he took us to lunch with one of these friends – Richard Helms, who had been head of the CIA for seven years in the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Helms was tall and gentlemanly; he recounted that on one occasion, as he entered the Concorde in France, he had been frisked by French security and only later realized that one of the guards had relieved him of his wallet! We were amused by the chutzpah of the guy who pick-pocketed the head of the American Intelligence service!

  I later learnt that Mrs Cynthia Helms was a long-standing friend of Richard’s. As a young WREN she had worked for my uncle in 1942, and they had remained close. (In 2017, as I was writing my book Nursing Churchill: Wartime Life from the Private Letters of Winston Churchill’s Nurse (Foreword by Emma Soames; Amberley, June 2018), I contacted Cynthia, who was then in her nineties and still living in Washington, and we talked about Richard. In February 2019 I went to Washington to give a talk about my book, and arranged to visit Cynthia at home. Alas, the city was engulfed by an ill-timed blizzard and I was forced to cancel our meeting. I had another opportunity later in the year, but after I received no reply to my emails I discovered, to my dismay, that she had died in the spring. Richard had been very fond of Cynthia and I’m sure she could have answered some of my questions about him, so I was deeply disappointed that I was unable to ask her.)

  Richard and his wife Caroline had separated by this time (although they remained on amicable terms for the rest of their lives) and he was living on his own in a riverside flat in Kingston. On my annual visits to the UK, Richard would pick me up in his car after my flight landed at Heathrow Airport in the morning and take me back to his flat for coffee and a short rest, before driving me to my Mum and Dad’s house in Chichester. I remember the glass French doors affording a view across to the Thames. The flat was filled with books and magazines, and I can still picture Richard relaxing in his armchair doing the Times crossword, with a glass of whisky on the table in front of him and his pipe in the ashtray at his elbow.

  Richard worked for the government until he retired, although he never reached the most senior ranks of the Civil Service as he might have expected. He once remarked to me, rather ruefully, that “I peaked early”. He believed that in those earlier days he had offended some of the higher-ups, and that had held him back, though I never learned more about who or why. He was moderate in his politics, a lifelong member of the Liberal Party and of the Reform Club. He was an enthusiastic mariner, a member and sometime Commodore of the Tamesis Sailing Club, and he kept an ancient motor launch in which he would sometimes take friends and family for excursions on the river – until the day the engine blew up with my sister and two of her children on board! (Fortunately, though somewhat shaken, no one was hurt, but that was the end of the fluvial outings).

  He was warm, funny and smart, and though he had no children of his own, he was very fond of his siblings’ children, his seven nieces and nephews. He and Roger had a close fraternal relationship. Richard was best man at my parents’ wedding in 1942, and was godfather to my sister Lesley. When Dad died in 1990, Richard was with us, and together he and I went to the Registrar’s office for the depressing task of completing the official paperwork, followed by a companionable drink in a nearby pub to try to cheer ourselves up.

  In 1994 Richard moved from Kingston into Tan-y-Craig, the little house in rural Wales that had once been the family’s vacation cottage, and where his sister Margaret had been living before her death. It was not an easy place for me to get to on my annual visits to Mum in Chichester, so I saw too little of him in the last few years of his life. I wish now that I had made more of an effort.

  Richard died in 1997, and left Tan-y-Craig, with all his stuff still in it, to his sister Marion’s daughter, my cousin Elaine. Fortunately Elaine, like me, doesn’t throw much away, and she stuffed all his old papers away in the attic, where they remained for the next twenty years. In 2017, as I was going through my mother’s documents for my book Nursing Churchill, I found four letters that Richard had written to his brother Roger from Washington during the war, full of delightful insights about his time there. I asked Elaine if she would dig around and see if she could unearth any more. She sent me a bundle of papers that had been living for all those years in a Tesco bag at the back of a wardrobe. It was mostly correspondence between our grandparents, Annie and Ted Miles, when Ted was serving at the front in World War One (fascinating stuff in itself!), but there was a handful of letters that Richard had written to his parents and sister, as well as some from my Dad, and some from Eleanor Roosevelt. Elaine also sent me the typed draft manuscript of the legendary roman à clef.

  To my delight, the novel was complete; indeed, more than complete, as there were two drafts of much of the book, and even three of parts of it, as well as many hand-written notes and addenda. It was not always easy to figure out which was the older and which was the newer material. My challenge was to sort out the differing versions, to reconcile the inconsistencies, to fix the errors and make some judicious revisions and rewrites, and meld it all into one coherent final version that remained faithful to my uncle’s original work.

  The novel is set in the US and UK in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Although ostensibly wartime allies, the relationship between the Soviet Union and America and her allies had already chilled into what would become known as the Cold War. The protagonist is an idealistic young British naval officer named Tom Davis, working for the British Embassy in Washington, who is drawn into the murky and dangerous world of spies and counter-spies, making him question all that he has ever believed.

  I hope that my brief exposition of the backstory, and what insights I can offer into my uncle’s character and
career, enhance your enjoyment of Requiem for a Spy.

  O, what a tangled web we weave

  When first we practice to deceive!

  –Walter Scott

  Chapter One

  Curiously, I had never seen a dead body up close before, despite having served in a naval cruiser on the Arctic convoys in the early years of the war. At sea, we believed we depth-charged a U-boat. We saw still-smouldering hulks of merchant ships in convoys we had sought to protect. Aeroplanes crashed before our eyes. Never did we see the victims. In Portsmouth a raid had buried us in the vaulted cellars of our barrack block. We were dug out. We never knew or saw the many corpses about us. The dead face of Patrick Marsden was the first show of death to have confronted me.

  So I entered the room trying my best to look nonchalant, to give the impression to these hard-boiled cops that this was not the first time, even though I was sick inside with trepidation.

  I managed to withhold any sense of shock at what I saw. Marsden had been seated at a desk in the window of the quite spacious bed-sitter. I observed the bed, nearer to us at the door, roughly made and apparently unslept in. I paused in the doorway, deliberately casting over the rest of the scene. I focussed on the bookshelf, recognising the distinctive bindings of Gollancz Left Book Club titles.

  I moved forward. The body, in shirt and shorts, was slumped forward to the desk, where the head rested in a pool of blood. There was a blueish wound on the right, up-facing temple; the real mess seemed to be on the other side of the dreadful face. A rather pink and unhairy face, as I remembered, which now had the texture of a Stilton cheese. The lips, rather full and feminine, were drawn back in hideous tension over clenched teeth. His right hand was curled around a small handgun; I noticed that the nails were bitten down to the quick.