Light and Shadow

by Mark Colvin

  It’s now clear from a number of sources that the embassy in Outer Mongolia, like the consulate-general in Hanoi, was maintained by the SIS budget and was therefore ‘their’ station. As Professor Aldrich suggests, this meant that a large part of the premises concealed a Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Signals Intelligence (SigInt) station whose principal purpose was to monitor communications between China and the Soviet Union, and, where possible, the internal communications of each regarding the other.

  Mao, once something of a protégé of Stalin’s, had if anything outdone his mentor in bloodthirsty extremism, shrugging off some of Moscow’s influence in the process. Especially after the mysterious death of Lin Biao, there were real fears in some quarters that the two communist superpowers might go to war, and any signs of that would first be reflected on the borders, notably that between the Soviet satellite state of Outer Mongolia and the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. SigInt for the period remains closely guarded, no doubt to protect ‘systems and methods’, but I have read a number of confidential and secret documents written by my father, now declassified, which confirm, among other things, that one of his central preoccupations was the number and placement of Soviet troops in Mongolia, which ranged from 20 000 to 200 000 depending on his source.

  In my own observation of his activities during the summer I spent there, ‘protecting’ GCHQ’s SigInt was only part of the job: he was constantly using his eyes, his ears and his contacts to gather human intelligence (HumInt) as well. His sources ranged widely among the diplomatic community, both overt and covert: there are references to conversations with ambassadors of friendly states such as India and France, and an intriguing suggestion of an informant in the Romanian embassy. But he ranged far wider than the diplomatic circuit. In fact, his whole method was to get out of the embassy, and out of Ulan Bator, as much as possible.

  Two days after I arrived, the Er-Lian anecdote about Lin Biao cropped up over dinner. I only hadn’t mentioned it before because there’d been so much personal catching up to do, about Oxford, friends and family, and it just wasn’t at the top of my mind. I told the story as a throwaway, and was shocked at Dad’s furious reaction. He went straight to his office and filed a report.

  It had not been common knowledge at all. It was the first ever Chinese account of the circumstances of Lin Biao’s death, and I’d clearly been meant to pass it on. How did my father know that? Because in the past twelve to twenty-four hours, in a couple of other ambiguous encounters in countries in Eastern and Western Europe, the Chinese had ‘let it be known’ that this was their official version. But my vagueness had seen him beaten to the intelligence scoop of the year by a whole thirty-six hours. Not my finest hour, but then again, I was his son, not his agent, and he didn’t hold a grudge, at least not for more than a day.

  Dad used to get up very early, walk across the landing through the safe-like office doors, and usually finish his official work by lunchtime. I would spend the morning talking to my stepmother, Moranna, playing with the children, and otherwise trying not to get in the way. I had plenty of reading to do, anyway, so it was no problem to have a few hours a day alone with my books.

  Mongolia is, I believe, after Kyrgyzstan, the country furthest from the sea in the whole world: a high, dry, climate where it seldom rains in summer but which experiences extreme cold in winter. I was there in high summer, so almost every day Dad and I would pile into the Range Rover with fishing rods and drive into the steppe. There was a theoretical limit on our travels of a 40-kilometre radius around the capital, but this did not seem to be policed in any systematic fashion. The whole country was said to have no more than 200 kilometres of tarmac roads, most of them in and directly around the capital, with the rest built for Soviet transport. Once we got on the dirt, there was never any sign of being followed.

  We explored rivers and streams, fishing on dry fly, wet fly and spinners, for grayling, char and trout. The world’s largest trout, a massive beast called the taimen, is native to Mongolia, and we had some heavier tackle on hand just in case: one day I did see a huge creature break the water about 200 metres downstream, but I cast for about two hours in vain. Dad fished mostly from the banks, while in the dry heat, I liked getting into the water, waist-deep if necessary, to cast. I had no waders, but the smooth pebbles of the riverbed were easy under my plimsolls or bare feet, and the rivers seldom too fast-flowing for safety. They were idyllic days, fishing and talking. And, on the way home at the end of the afternoon, observing.

  One day we drove back on a dirt track past a small army installation, where a Soviet military officer was trying to drill a Mongolian platoon. They were not actively rebellious (though in my father’s despatches he records numerous instances of Mongolians deliberately spitting to show contempt for a Soviet colonial overlord). They were simply pretending not to understand what the officer was saying. The command of ‘Halt’ would be ignored, for example, or on ‘Left turn’, half of them would turn right or about-turn. Whole groups of them would march blithely off the parade ground, pretending they couldn’t hear the officer’s yells. I was reminded of The Good Soldier Schweik, Jaroslav Hašek’s side-splitting novel of Czech ‘dumb insolence’ under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  One thing my father was on the lookout for was the survival of Mongolia’s religion under Soviet rule, which had done its best to suppress the creed. Essentially similar to Tibetan Buddhism, but with strong animist overtones, its signs, when you got out into the country, were everywhere if you knew where to look: every spring and every stream running into a brook or river sported a branch, planted in the ground and decorated with fluttering prayer-flags to the gods or spirits of water and land. In order to uphold the fiction that it was not trying to impose atheism on a religious population, the Soviet Union allowed the Mongols to maintain the Lamaist Gandan Monastery in Ulan Bator. But they also set up, close by, a lurid museum of the atrocities committed by monks before the country was ‘liberated’ by Sukh Baatar in 1921, allowing it to boast of being the world’s second communist country.

  Dad’s insistence on getting out and seeing for himself was not confined to the summer months. In the winter, he would go shooting grouse and sand partridge for the pot, usually in company with the Yugoslav ambassador, Vladimir Milovanovic, a Serb former World War II Partisan. Who could say what exactly these two knew of each other’s activities during and after the war, but they were, strangely, friends.

  Mongolian winters are very, very cold, with temperatures as low as 40 degrees Celsius at night, often exacerbated by wind chill. While we were out fishing one summer afternoon, Dad told me the story of a shooting expedition seven months earlier, in deep midwinter, when Milovanovic’s Russian-built Gazik broke down. This, from his memoir, is pretty much how I remember him telling it then:

  The Ambassador’s only method of repair was to warm the carburettor with the flame of a petrol cigarette-lighter. The temperature was minus 35°C. It was getting dark. The nearest village, from which we were separated by a river, was ten kilometres away. But unless we were to dance together all night, or sleep in one another’s arms, even fur-coats and hats and five woollen layers below the coats, would not prevent us, if we stayed by the car, from freezing to death before morning.

  We set off down the hill. The faster stretches of the river, despite the terrible cold, were still flowing. We moved downstream until we found the stream frozen over. We could not, however, gauge the thickness of the ice nor the weight it would bear. If it broke, we should die quite soon. We looked at each other and stepped out, laden with guns and game, hand—incomprehensibly—in hand, across the ten-yard section, and reached the other side. ‘That wasn’t too difficult’, said Milovanovic. As he spoke, the ice broke up behind us.

  We walked up the valley, all vehicles resolutely ignoring our signals. In the village Post Office, lit by guttering candles, an aged crone refused to allow us to use the telephone until Milovanovic distracted her with a bottle of Yugoslav brandy.
I was then able to get through to the British Embassy and a Landrover arrived an hour later. The experience gave a firm foundation for friendship.

  I always had the impression that it was a friendship of mixed suspicion and trust, with each probing the other for clues about the intentions of their respective power blocs. But one thing they certainly agreed on—given that Tito’s Yugoslavia was the most maverick of the Iron Curtain nations—was that the Soviet experiment in Mongolia was not working, and that the country was only even partly viable because about 80 per cent of its economy consisted of subsidies from Moscow.

  The population of Mongolia then was about the size of Adelaide now, one and a quarter million, but spread over an area half the size of India. Notoriously, the Mongolian people were greatly outnumbered by animals, of which there were about twenty million. The majority of those were sheep, which constituted most of the national diet, provided tallow for lighting, and whose wool clothed the Mongols and made the rugs which insulated their gers, the round white-frame tents (called yurts by the Russians) in which this nomadic people had lived for centuries. Most of the other animals were horses, the short sturdy beasts on which the Mongols under Genghis Khan had conquered China, whose milk the Mongols relied on, and which (along with camels) were still the foundation of nomadic life and transport.

  As the colonial power, the Soviet Union had tried everything possible to eliminate nomadism, insisting that the Mongols create collective farms instead of moving from place to place according to the season and their knowledge of the land. But the collective farms had largely failed: the ‘national herd’ and its output were actually smaller than before Stalin began to impose Russian systems on Mongolian agriculture. And in Ulan Bator, my father said, there was copious evidence from all foreign observers that Mongols forced by the Soviets to live in concrete apartment blocks would instead slip away each night to their own gers, dotted around the outskirts of the city. Colonialism and communism had combined to form a remarkably dysfunctional country, both as a society and an economy.

  I discovered during research for this book that my father’s confidential 1973 annual review was now declassified, though hitherto unpublished. It begins:

  Ulan Bator’s only dry-cleaner recently informed one of my colleagues that the concern had fulfilled its 1973 Plan, and no more clothes would therefore be accepted until April 1974. This seemed a goodish joke, but it later emerged that, far from fulfilling the plan, the cleaners had run out of equipment, and forgotten to order more. Shifty incompetence remains the characteristic of this Marxist State.

  I should emphasise that, while he disliked Mongolia’s Soviet overlords and their puppets in government very much, my father genuinely loved the country and its people. The normal length of an ambassador’s posting in Ulan Bator was two years: he chose to extend his to almost four. After the fall of communism, he did everything possible to help Mongolia open up trade and diplomatic links to Britain, and at his funeral in 2003, the Mongolian ambassador was conspicuous among the mourners.

  * * *

  During his tour of duty, my father set out to visit every corner of the country that he could. This was only partly a question of ‘flying the flag’ or gathering routine political intelligence about the state of the place: it was also a calculated attempt to find out where he was and was not allowed to go, on the principle that the forbidden zones must be forbidden for a reason and that reason was probably military. In the summer of 1972, I accompanied him and my stepmother Moranna on one of these long trips, to the country’s remote west and north-west.

  The airborne sections of this journey around four aimags (provinces) were undertaken with Mongolian Airways, in Soviet-built copies of the wartime Douglas DC-3 Dakota. An aviation workhorse in its original version, the Dakota’s Russian-built Lisunov and Ilyushin knock-offs were if anything even more spartan than the original. Flying was neither luxurious nor reassuring: Mongols who travelled with us tended to vomit copiously during flights, and rush out praying to forbidden gods and kissing the ground in gratitude on landing. As diplomatic VIPs, we were generally seated at the front of the cabin; towards the rear, clucking could be heard, indicating the presence in the cabin of caged or tied chickens.

  We arrived in Hovd, the capital of an aimag on the border with the Chinese region of Xinjiang, and were driven to the town’s guesthouse, a whitewashed, mudbrick, two-storey building whose rooms provided little more than a hard bed, a table, a jug and a ewer. My father was just remarking that we were almost certainly the first Westerners in these parts since the 1920s when a tall white man in a Loden coat and Tyrolean hat, complete with feather, came down the stairs carrying a hunting rifle. He and my father struck up a conversation in German. It turned out that he was an Austrian and either a first or second cousin of my sister’s godmother, a friend from the Vienna days. They conversed for some time about mutual friends and acquaintances before the man departed on his mission: he had paid a large sum to the Mongolian Government for one of the few annual licences to hunt ibex (wild goat) and argal (wild sheep) in the nearby Altai Mountains. I have never encountered a better practical proof of the truism that ‘It’s a small world’.

  If I do not recall every detail of this lengthy trip, I have an excuse: we were all either quite drunk or quite hung-over—sometimes both—most of the time. To quote my father’s memoir describing one morning of our expedition, ‘When I said to the somon Chairman that we did not usually drink more than three glasses of vodka for breakfast in England, he correctly commented, “You are not in England now.”’ Or this, from a letter he wrote to British Foreign Secretary (and former prime minister) Sir Alec Douglas-Home on another trip: ‘It falls to few to be drunk on the Mongolian steppe at nine o’clock in the morning. Such was my fortune, in a Land Rover, after a gruelling tour of this province.’

  This sottishness was emphatically not of our choosing. Mongolian society, being nomadic, has extremely strong hospitality rituals, born of necessity. If a horseman arrives at your ger at midnight, in a blizzard, you do not turn him away. You give him and his animal shelter, and you ply him with food and drink, knowing that you may someday need the same hospitality in return.

  To quote from the same letter to Douglas-Home,

  without encroaching on you again, Sir, about the sanitary arrangements, the most distressing feature of travel in Mongolia remains the nomad requirement to eat a full and displeasing meal, not only between destinations, but also on departure from one centre and arrival at the next. As the centres these days may be as little as two hours apart, and each repast involves a great deal of arkhi (vodka), strain is imposed. Lies about one’s liver, vegetarian habits and that, are just no use. A Chinese phrase for travel, ‘Eating Bitterness’, is apt at such times.

  I do have memories of the collective farms we biliously visited, the agricultural research stations we inspected, and the tiny provincial museums where we were expected to admire local handicrafts. But they are somewhat blurred, and in any case, I might do better to give you a series of travelling impressions.

  First to those ‘full and displeasing’ meals. There were no menus, but if there had been, they would have read as follows:

  Mutton soup.

  Mutton.

  Mutton dumplings.

  Mutton-fat.

  Mutton pancakes.

  Pickled carrots.

  Mutton.

  And if you were lucky, for variety, there was sweetened sheep’s cream (quite delicious, to be fair) to follow. The mutton dumplings were sometimes very good, once you worked out how to eat them, which was to take a small bite of the outer casing, releasing the hot mutton, onion and herb juices in a hot spurt into your mouth before biting into the contents.

  The worst of all these meals occurred close to the border with Kazakhstan, at a collective farm where we arrived, in the dark, after a ten-hour jounce across the steppe, a drive I thought would never end. The natural inclination was to wash and sleep till the morning, but no. As my father recorde
d in his memoir, there was to be a welcoming dinner featuring the Kazakh national dish:

  half-boiled legs of mutton reposing in a tin wash-basin, surmounted by a sheep’s head, the teeth jauntily protruding. It is the privilege, and duty, of the honoured guest to slice, and eat, from this memento mori, the gristly lips, cheeks and, dear God, the ear.

  Dear God, the ear. The scene is graven on my memory. The ‘tin wash-basin’ was chipped pale-blue enamel, brought in proudly by a young woman who held it above her head before plonking it down with a flourish. Only then did we see the meal in its full horror. The late sheep seemed to stare accusingly at us all. The ‘honoured guest’ on slicing duty was my father, who got the cheek as by right; my stepmother had the lips, while I was left with the ear.

  What was it like? A stewed Goodyear tyre, with added gristle but without the flavour, might be one answer. Forty minutes of solid chewing with no discernible result, might be another. Eventually, as surreptitiously as I could, I stowed the remnants in a plant pot.

  To drink, there was always gunpowder (or caravan) tea boiled with salted water and copious quantities of yak’s butter, Tibetan-style. Otherwise, the basic beverage was koumiss, a lightly fermented mare’s-milk concoction of low alcohol by volume, which tasted like slightly fizzy yoghurt. It was not the koumiss, however, but the arkhi that did the damage. Arkhi is a type of vodka, but to say that is to sell it short. It is distilled milk, usually mare’s milk, and to me it tasted like a cocktail of pure surgical spirit and milk left in the Australian sun for a week. The gag reflex kicked in almost every time I saw it, let alone put it to my lips, and it was only the consciousness that I was, however peripherally, part of a diplomatic mission that allowed me to force it down.