by Jeremy Duns
And so on, ad infinitum. Part of me had been expecting it – the documents I’d discovered in Rome had revealed that for several years they had suspected me of being a plant by the Service, feeding them carefully selected secrets along with a healthy dose of disinformation: in effect, a triple agent.
That theory had eventually been discredited in ’51 and I’d been cleared as ‘highly valuable’, but now Yuri revived it. The material I had taken so many risks to give them meant nothing to him. It was only the information I had neglected to hand over that he found telling. But while it was true that the higher I’d risen in the Service the greater my access to classified material had been, my seniority had often made it harder for me to hand material over, because so few others had such access. If it had ever come to light that the Soviets had this kind of information, I would have immediately come under suspicion.
Yuri had dismissed this argument with a wave of his hand. While my actions would have had me strung up in England, from his perspective I was now an erratic agent with perplexing gaps in his story, who for good measure had betrayed several Soviet agents and even killed two of them. It didn’t help that I made no attempt to conceal that I was disgusted with myself for falling into their arms, and with him for the way in which he had recruited me.
He had finally lost patience with me in June, and it was then that I had been moved into Steklyashka, where one day I had been marched into a briefing room and been confronted by Sasha, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d arrived in Moscow. He had been my handler since the early Fifties, but any hope that he might prove to be any more understanding as a result was rapidly dispelled. He had barely acknowledged our past relationship, and was even more hostile than Yuri had been. I’d always known that his friendliness towards me was contrived, of course, as real as the intimacy a prostitute shows a wealthy and potentially long-term client, but it had still come as a shock when it was switched off so swiftly, and so absolutely. The familiar ‘My dear Paul’ had no longer issued from his lips, and his benign condescension had been replaced by a cold and sometimes frightening implacability.
At first I’d thought his behaviour was a pose, a way to get me to talk more by making me want to recapture the old bonhomie, but I’d soon realized that there was nothing forced about it, and that this was in fact his real self – or, at least, his Soviet self.
I looked at him now, partly obscured by the back of his seat, staring at the road ahead of us. He was wearing a uniform and ushanka, neither of which I’d ever seen him wear before, and he didn’t look right somehow. I knew every inch of his face, from the lines around the eyes to the bristles of his pointed beard, but I found it increasingly hard to associate him with the cheery fellow in the tweed coat and polka-dot tie I had met in an assortment of pubs, cinemas and dives in London, a collector’s book of postage stamps under his arm. English Sasha had always seemed podgy and harmless, but Soviet Sasha was a burly bear of a man with an air of barely repressed violence emanating from him. Over the years he’d often told me that he loved London, and I wondered if that had simply been a lie to get me on his side, or if his recall to Moscow had hardened him, and he’d forgotten his appreciation of the good life he’d once led in the West.
Perhaps he was simply scared. My failures as an agent reflected badly on him, and possibly even placed him under suspicion of disloyalty. After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had been, relatively speaking, benign, but Brezhnev had started pushing things back in the other direction: arresting dissidents and sending them to labour camps or into ‘internal exile’. Perhaps that was where we were all going now: to some gulag in Siberia where we would freeze our arses off until we died.
Whatever the reason, when Sasha had taken over my case any remaining pretence that I was simply an agent undergoing a debriefing had vanished. I was unequivocally a prisoner, placed in a small concrete cell and entitled to one bowl of thin soup and three cigarettes a day. Every morning and afternoon I had been made to write an account of my career, operation by operation, month by month. After that, I would be summoned into a small office, where he would question me at length on everything I’d written. We had reached June 1961.
The car took a sudden turn, throwing my shoulder against the door. The windows were covered by grey curtains, but there was a small gap near the edge and I peered through it at the streets speeding by. Giant portraits of Lenin lined the roads, but I saw very few other cars. It must still be quite early in the morning. Domes shone faintly in the distance, and there was a glint of copper in the sky, a refraction, I imagined, from the giant stars of the Kremlin. But then we took a turn – we didn’t seem to be heading that way.
The car slowed to a halt in front of a nondescript building painted a faded orange, and I was dragged out by one of the men. The other stayed in the car with Sarah, and I wondered fleetingly if it would be the last time I saw her.
It had started to snow now and the wind was sharper, biting into my cheeks and stinging my eyelids. Sasha led the way to a sentry box manned by two lieutenants in light blue greatcoats, both armed with finely polished semiautomatic rifles. A pigeon pecking at the ground nearby suddenly came to a standstill and turned in the same direction, its chest puffed out, and for a moment it looked like it was imitating the sentries. All it needed was a few brass buttons and a miniature ushanka to complete the picture, but a moment later it returned to its pecking, and the illusion was broken.
Sasha handed some papers to one of the men, who looked through them, then turned and spoke into a small grate in the wall. There was a loud hissing noise, and I saw that the whole section of wall was, in fact, an air-locked door. With some effort, the sentry pulled it open and stepped inside. After a moment’s hesitation, Sasha motioned to me, and we followed him in.
We were in a dimly lit space, smaller than the size of my cell. I could see the sentry just ahead, wrestling with the lock of another, much larger, door. Once he had opened it, we walked into a room with concrete walls and a large blanket of green netting in the middle. The sentry knelt down and pulled this to one side, revealing a small wire cage recessed several feet into the floor. He climbed down into it and Sasha and I followed. The sentry pulled a lever in a box on the side of the cage, and we started to descend with a loud cranking noise.
It was then that I recognized the mood I hadn’t been able to identify in the car. It wasn’t panic. It was fear. They were all terrified out of their wits, and I couldn’t blame them. Those had been bomb-blast doors we had just come through.
We were entering a nuclear bunker.
II
As the machinery of the lift whirred, I tried to gather my thoughts. I knew very little about the Soviets’ contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack – few did – but years of surveillance by the West indicated that they had built a massive underground city in the area of Ramenki, a few miles outside Moscow. I didn’t think we were there but still beneath the capital where it was thought there was a complex of command and control points and a bunker built by Stalin before the war, all of it connected by a secret second underground railway system.
I thought we must now be inside that labyrinth, but several things were puzzling me. First, why were we going into it at all? There couldn’t have been an attack, because we had come here overground. Was it some sort of exercise, then, or simply a secret meeting? It seemed a little over the top for either, and didn’t account for the level of fear I was sensing in Sasha and the others. And secondly, why on earth were they bringing me here? Since my arrival in May, their treatment of me had been overwhelmingly hostile, yet now I was apparently trusted enough to be taken to one of their most secret military locations.
The lift jolted to a sudden halt. The sentry gestured for us to step out, and when we had, he pulled the lever and the cage started ascending again, leaving me alone with Sasha. Another sentry stepped from the shadows and led us into a narrow passageway with curved steel walls. Lamps riveted to the walls were spaced every few feet, halos shimmering
around them, but between them it was pitch dark. It was also unpleasantly clammy. I tried to catch my breath, but Sasha, directly behind me, pushed me forward.
We walked down the steel plankway of the passage, the echo of our footsteps flattened and tinny. After a few minutes, we reached a large door covered in a thick cushion of black leather. The sentry pushed a button on the wall and a few seconds later the door swung open. Sasha gestured to me to enter first, and I stepped through. He followed. The door immediately shut behind us, and a second later I heard the echo of the sentry’s footsteps as he began the walk back up the corridor.
I took a breath and looked up. Lights shone down from sconces in the walls, and it took a moment for my vision to adjust. We were in a huge hall, the far end of which was taken up by a circular table with a segment cut out of its centre. This was encircled by thick marble pillars that held up an elaborate painted cupola that looked like it belonged in the Vatican. Seated around the table were around thirty elderly men, some of them wearing dark suits but most in uniform. A man was standing at the table. Unlike the others he was jacketless, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. In one hand he clutched an amber cigarette holder, in the other a sheaf of papers he was brandishing at his audience. I didn’t recognize him at first, because he was wearing spectacles and his hair was slightly in disarray, but then he looked up through dark eyes under thick eyebrows, and I realized with a start that it was Brezhnev.
*
He stared at Sasha and me for a moment, evidently caught in mid-sentence. Then he set down his papers.
‘Who the hell is this?’ he said, his voice a deep baritone.
There was a scraping noise and I followed it to about halfway down the table, where one of the men was pushing his chair back. It was Yuri. He was wearing the uniform of a Colonel-General: it was immaculate, perfectly pressed, with a line of glittering medals across the chest.
‘Paul Dark, General Secretary,’ he said. ‘The British agent. You may remember I suggested fetching him earlier, in case he had any knowledge pertinent to the situation. His file is in the papers, Section Five.’ He leaned over and picked up a folder from an attaché case on the table.
Brezhnev waved his hand as though swatting at a fly.
‘Be seated.’
Yuri bowed extravagantly and then beckoned me with two fingers, like an emperor summoning a slave. I glared at him, but stepped forward. Yuri gestured towards a vacant chair next to him and I installed myself, the hard wood of the seat angling into my buttocks. Yuri recoiled from me a little, wrinkling his nose: it had been a few days since I’d had a shower. I repressed the urge to place my hands around his throat and crush his windpipe.
Sasha was still standing by the door, and Yuri nodded at him.
‘Thank you, Alexander Stepanovich. That will be all.’
Sasha hesitated for a fraction of a second before saluting, but in that moment an odd expression came over his face. It wasn’t quite disappointment, I thought – more like hurt. Perhaps he had been expecting to stay. He turned and marched back out of the door.
I looked around the rest of the room. It was in the grandiose style the Soviets reserved for their upper echelons. There were oil paintings on the walls, elaborate cornices, highly polished parquet floors and, arranged on the table, a dozen or more telephones, the Bakelite glistening under the glow of Art Deco lamps. One wall was taken up with a row of clocks giving the current time in Moscow, Washington, Peking, London and several other cities. It had just gone seven o’clock in the morning here. The wall behind Brezhnev was covered in red velvet curtains; I presumed to give the illusion that there were windows behind them. A large map of the world was spread out across the table, and around it were strewn pens, papers, bottles of Borzhom mineral water and glasses. It was much grander than the British bunkers I’d visited, which had been grim, skeletal places devoid of any luxuries – nothing but holes in the ground, as one minister had called them. But this place was just as lifeless in its way, and just as depressing. It wasn’t real life, but a simulacrum of it. I wondered how long they’d been down here; I was already feeling claustrophobic, and I’d only just arrived.
One thing was abundantly clear. This wasn’t an exercise, or a good spot for a meeting. Something had to be seriously wrong for Brezhnev to be in an underground bunker. Although he was in his early sixties, he looked much older. Everyone knew him to be stout, hearty and fond of a drink, as all good Russians were, but he looked a wreck. There were dark circles around his eyes, and I now saw that one hand was shaking. He looked like a bull that had been cornered: angry and ready to lash out.
I felt a momentary pang of pity for the men around the table, many of whom I recognized from Service dossiers. My eyes flicked around as though playing Pelmanism. Seated directly to Brezhnev’s right was Kosygin, the Premier, a bulldog. Next to him was Suslov – he looked like a kindly old don, but his staunch Stalinism and behind-the-scenes machinations had earned him the nickname the ‘Red Eminence’. Then there was Grechko, the Minister of Defence and head of the armed forces – the classic military type with hair cropped en brosse.
Next to him was Ivashutin, head of the GRU. Portly, around sixty, he was one of Brezhnev’s old cronies, having known him since the war, when he had been a senior officer in SMERSH on the Ukrainian front. He had taken part in the arrest of Serov, and then been appointed head of the GRU in his place by Brezhnev. Opposite him sat Andropov, the new head of the KGB, inscrutable in horn-rimmed spectacles. He and Ivashutin were thought to detest each other, which was perhaps why they had been seated so far apart.
These grey, heavy men constituted the ‘Supreme Command’ or ‘Defence Council’, the core of the Politburo and decision-making power in a crisis – and they were mostly hardliners. As well as sending dissidents to work camps, Brezhnev was also cracking down on signs of reform in the satellite states, which had culminated in the ruthless intervention in Czechoslovakia the previous spring.
Several reports had reached the Service that Brezhnev had become significantly unpopular with the Soviet people as a result, and in January there had even been an attempt on his life. A soldier, apparently upset by the Prague invasion, had fled his base in Leningrad, taking with him two loaded Makarovs and four clips from his unit’s safe. Arriving in Moscow, he had stolen a police uniform belonging to his father and, posing as an officer at one of the cordons leading into the Kremlin, had tried to shoot Brezhnev as he was being driven through for a homecoming celebration for several cosmonauts. But he got the wrong car and had hit one of the cosmonauts instead.
In the meantime, Brezhnev continued the roll-back to Stalinism. In his address to the Congress of the Polish Communist Party in November, he had stated that a threat to the security of any ‘socialist’ country was a threat to them all, and would be dealt with as such. The Brezhnev Doctrine, as it was soon known, overturned the idea of sovereign states that had been at the heart of the Warsaw Pact. I wondered if another state had decided to try to test his steel. This wasn’t a group of men you would gather together on a whim.
Most alarming to me was Yuri’s presence. He’d altered his appearance a little since I’d last seen him. His white hair was still shorn close to the skull, but he had cultivated a thin goatee to match it; I suspected because he wanted to appear more distinguished. He had unluckily conspicuous features for a spy – a strange snubbed nose and tiny eyes in a mass of leathery wrinkles – and the effect was of a mischievous schoolboy peering out of the face of an old man.
From his uniform and position at the table, it looked like he was Ivashutin’s deputy. On my arrival in Moscow, he had given the impression of having long been sidelined from the apparat, an old hand who had been stepped over by younger men. And yet here he was, in the heart of the lion’s den, deputy head of the GRU. Either he had been promoted in the last few months, or – more likely – he had only wanted me to believe he had been sidelined so that I would underestimate him, giving him an advantage in interrogation. Not f
or the first time he had pulled the wool over my eyes with infuriating ease.
Brezhnev had sat down, and was drinking water from a glass while he looked me over. His eyes were like bullet holes.
‘Remind me, Colonel-General Proshin,’ he said without adjusting his gaze. ‘Why did you wish to bring this man here? Looking at his dossier, it seems we feel that he is not to be trusted.’
‘That is not quite so, General Secretary,’ Yuri replied evenly. ‘We have been determining precisely what level of trust we can place in him at one of our secure facilities.’
Brezhnev sat back and folded his arms. ‘For six months?’
Yuri’s tiny eyes didn’t flicker. ‘We strive to be thorough, General Secretary. The dossier contains some provisional thoughts, but our plan was to make a more thorough assessment once we had gathered all the available information. However, considering the current situation, I requested permission to bring him before the Council because I felt that as a result of his former position as Deputy Chief of the British Service, he may be able to help us.’
‘Or he may lie to us.’
Yuri nodded. ‘That is naturally a possibility. But if so—’
‘Could I just interject for a moment?’ I said, and two dozen heads jerked in my direction. ‘Would someone mind telling me what’s going on?’
An hour previously, I would have thought I would be one of the last people the Soviet leadership would want to bring into their confidence, but they obviously wanted something from me and they would have to show their hand sooner or later. It was intimidating being in such company, but I had, after all, been in similar company in London, and I thought it was wise to try to establish that I was on the same level as they, rather than a circus act they could discuss and poke at will. If I could undermine Yuri at the same time, all the better. I hadn’t seen the bastard in months, but I had good cause to loathe him. He had indeed placed me in a ‘secure facility’, and Christ knew what he’d done to Sarah.
