The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  Technical data filled the air for the next fifteen minutes. Sakharovsky had to force himself to listen for he knew that his First Directorate would be made responsible for obtaining this information in England. And so it was later agreed. After ten minutes on other business, the meeting broke up.

  ‘Come, Alexander,’ Andropov turned to the old man, ‘we must welcome our guests. Alexei? – are you coming to meet our Czech colleagues? No? Well, see you on Sunday then. You too, Vassily: you’re with us on the hunt as well, aren’t you? Remember it’s a five o’clock start. Unless you want to sleep at the lodge overnight? No one else coming downstairs with us?’ Andropov looked round the room. ‘Very well then, I thank you for your attention. Gentlemen: I bid you a “happy weekend”.’

  Andropov sometimes introduced odd, English phrases into his conversation: ‘Vaudeville Ham’, ‘Happy weekend’, ‘The more the merrier’. The archaisms were always there, waiting rudely to emerge, often in the most inappropriate circumstances. And this was one of them, Alexei Flitlianov thought. ‘Happy weekend’? Certainly Andropov’s professional outlook at that moment did not warrant any such jeux d’esprit – the weather around him seemed threatening indeed. There was some contradiction here – these happy words in a time of vast conspiracy. Flitlianov could not account for this good humour. It was as though he had stumbled for the first time on an untranslatable idiom in Andropov’s commonplace phrase book.

  *

  ‘Good. I didn’t think he’d come with us. We can talk after we’ve seen our Czech friends.’ Andropov spoke to Sakharovsky quietly as they walked down one flight of stairs to the second KGB suite in the Presidential Tower on the 18th floor. There they welcomed their guests who had arrived earlier in the evening on the last flight of the day from Prague: the head of the Czech Internal Security police, Colonel Hartep, and Andropov’s Russian liaison officer in Prague, Chief of the KGB bureau there, together with assorted deputies, assistants and bodyguards. But the little social reunion between the two security organisations didn’t last long.

  Andropov brought it quickly to a close. ‘Gentlemen, you’ve had a long day. Tomorrow – our first meeting. Comrade Sakharovsky will be in the chair. I will be with you for the afternoon session. On Sunday, as last year, our hunting party.’ He turned to the Colonel: ‘I trust your aim remains true, Colonel? The quarry, I gather, are as lively as ever. I believe we shall have some “good hunting”.’ But Colonel Hartep was not a linguist and Andropov’s sally died at once in the rigid atmosphere.

  But for Andropov and Sakharovsky the meeting had served its purpose: it had delayed their departure from the Hotel, they had not had to leave with the others of the committee and could thus travel back home together, undetected in the same car.

  ‘Well?’ Andropov spoke as soon as the big Zil limousine began to gather speed through the freezing empty streets of the city, moving out of Red Square towards the northern suburbs. ‘What do you think?’

  Sakharovsky rubbed his hands busily again, though the car was warm enough against the bitter night.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure now. He handled it perfectly. A great actor – or else he’s nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Yes. I had the same feeling for a while. But I’m sure it’s him.’

  ‘I don’t know. It looks very possible, I agree,’ Sakharovsky went on. ‘But that’s my worry: it’s too obvious. What Flitlianov did in his imaginary profile of the Sixth Directorate was to outline almost exactly the real subsidiary group – which he controls, which your predecessor appointed him to, which you and I know about. The Sixth Directorate he suggested – almost everything about it, its formation, composition and so on – corresponds with our own internal security division which he heads: an equally “clandestine” directorate. Are we to suppose that this is the basis of the whole conspiracy – that the men Flitlianov has recruited over the years are there to ensure not the security of the KGB but its destruction?’

  ‘That seems to me very probable. You say it’s too obvious. But look at it another way: it was also a unique opportunity for anyone with this sort of long-term conspiracy in mind: Flitlianov has had the entire responsibility for forming this security division, with very little reference to the top. He had his own budget, which always included a large floating allocation, including hard currency overseas. He kept everything to himself. That was the whole point of the operation originally, which I don’t think I would ever have sanctioned: he was to recruit and train a special corps of men, here and abroad, quite outside the regular KGB channels, and to place these men among KGB operatives whose loyalty or performance we had doubts about. His division is an early-warning system throughout the KGB. And all right, I’ll admit it has worked extraordinarily well. We’ve suffered very few lapses. But you can see the unique lever it’s given him: none of the other Directorates know of the existence of this group. And how much do you and I really know of it? That again was part of the original plan: that the names of Flitlianov’s little army of agents provocateurs should be kept on a single file, with him. There was, of course, to be no general access to them – no possibility of crossed lines, of anyone in the official KGB ever knowing the names, or anything about the members of this unofficial group.’

  ‘You have access to those files, if you want it. You could open the whole thing up.’

  ‘Yes, I have. But the birds would fly before I got anywhere with an investigation. Besides, it is likely that most of the names he has on file in Moscow are bona fide members of his security group. And the rest – the real members of his conspiracy – won’t be on any list at all. No, when we move, we must hit everyone in this, not just the leader. That’s essential. Otherwise it is just killing part of a worm – the rest lives on, and reproduces itself. And remember this is not just one or two defectors, or double agents – or someone working for the CIA or the British SIS or the Germans, just out to get a few secrets from us. This is a group of men, a disciplined intelligence corps – there could be hundreds of them – dedicated to overthrowing the KGB and after that the Soviet State. Unless we get all the leaders of this group we might as well not bother at all.’

  ‘You’d have to track these people down almost simultaneously then – if you want them all. Flitlianov pointed that out. An almost impossible task.’

  ‘We’ll see. But whatever we have to do this is the time to keep Flitlianov in the dark, keep him guessing, undermine his confidence. That’s why I gave him the opportunity of describing his own security division at the meeting – I put the words into his mouth. He must have been surprised: he can have no idea what I’m up to – whether I know and if so what and how much I know. Prepare him psychologically. It’s the only way we can ever hope to get anything out of him when the time comes. Meanwhile, we keep the pressure on him. Sunday will give us another occasion for that. It’s an invitation, in the present circumstances, he can’t refuse.’

  ‘But what if he does refuse it?’ Sakharovsky asked. ‘What if Alexei is the leader of this group, realises he’s a marked man, and decides to break now – before Sunday? In his position, even under the closest possible surveillance, he mightn’t find it impossible to get out of the country.’

  Andropov was suddenly happy in the warmth, looking out on the bitter, empty streets – happy as the man is who has the final ace up his sleeve.

  ‘Well that – as I see it – is the whole point of this psychological pressure: to make him run. That would be the beginning of the end of our troubles, I think – one sure way of getting a lead on the other ringleaders. Those are the people he’d make for. Or person. That’s the one thing he’d have to do at some point outside – make contact with his deputies – or deputy – and start re-activating his group from outside the Union.

  ‘You see, as you pointed out just now, the strange thing is that almost everything Alexei said about the formation of this imaginary Sixth Directorate is true of his own clandestine group. He went out of his way to make the point – an extraordinary ris
k which nearly came off – an immense double bluff: telling the truth about his own group in order to put us off his trail entirely. You remember what he said – what he insisted – that he would use the chain and not the block cut-out with his men? He would know the name of his first deputy, who in turn would have recruited the second and so on; each deputy recruiting his own men? Well, if that’s true, and I think it is, then his immediate contact overseas would be this first deputy. And that’s someone we want as much as Alexei himself. Through him we start to eat our way along the chain to all the others. So I’m hoping he will run.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Sakharovsky nodded, following the line of thought ‘On the other hand if he does run in order to make this vital contact he’s going to be looking over his shoulder.’

  ‘Certainly. That’s why I have in mind two things: I want to make him think it’s time to run, yet without allowing him to think that we know for certain he’s our man. He’s given us an opening on this with Vassily Chechulian: he’s suggested him as an alternative suspect. Well, we’ll go along with that. We’ll take Vassily. And afterwards keep Alexei moving in his real job, take the heat off him, put him back on an even keel with some genuine priority business in his own Second Directorate. And that’s the moment I think he’ll choose to run. It was always catching people that mattered in our job,’ Andropov ruminated. ‘Now it’s just the opposite; making sure they get away.’

  There was silence as the car glided along towards the slopes of the Moscow hills, approaching an exclusive suburb, a parkway with villas along either side and a guard post at one end of it.

  ‘You’re putting a lot of strain on my surveillance here,’ Sakharovsky thought aloud. ‘And most of it overseas. A small mistake by one of my men – a one-way street he doesn’t know about, a metro system which Alexei knows backwards – and you’ve lost him as well as all your leads. Why not just take Alexei in Moscow – and screw it out of him here. Keep it simple. Shouldn’t that be the essence of it all?’

  Yuri Andropov leant across and put his hand on Sakharovsky’s knee. ‘Yes, Alexander, but remember something else: we’re almost certain it’s Flitlianov. Not absolutely. We could still be wrong. If he runs we’ll have conclusive proof. And we still need that. Look – what’s the use of cutting the wrong man’s leg off? Of course we could get a confession out of him – to anything we wanted. But what would be the point? This isn’t a show trial. We want the truth. And therefore we have to have the right man to begin with before we can think of extracting confessions. We can’t put every senior KGB officer who might be guilty into the wind-tunnel. No, if Alexei runs, then we’ll know who it is. And that’s half the battle. We can take him overseas and interrogate him there if necessary – or wait and see what contacts he makes. We can do any number of things. But we get nowhere by leaving things as they stand. We must make the running, induce the action – that is of the essence.’

  ‘Very well then. I’ll make the arrangements. Increase his surveillance. But remember, I’m stretched on that – using my own men in Moscow who are normally overseas operators. I can’t of course use anybody from Alexei’s own directorate.’

  ‘I know. But there won’t be long to wait, I think, before he goes over to your side of the fence. Not long.’

  It was nearly midnight when he dropped Sakharovsky at his villa. Andropov wondered if his daughter, Yelena, might still be up when he got home himself. He hoped she would be. He wanted to see as much of her as possible before she went back to Leningrad after the weekend.

  *

  Yelena was in the kitchen, dressed for bed, making a hot drink, when Yuri Andropov arrived home at his villa further up the parkway.

  ‘For you, Tata?’ she asked. ‘It’s English cocoa from the dollar shop. Shall I make you a cup?’

  ‘Please. A half cup. I don’t know if I like it.’

  He didn’t like it at all. But he wanted an excuse to be with her, any reason: to talk with her, just gossip – to look at her, this tall daughter of his with a round soft face like her mother’s, but with sharper eyes, blackberry dark and quick, and a mind far sharper still; her thin hair severely flat now over her head, and tied up at the back ready for the pillow – the single bed next the other in the spare room. Did she bring them close together for the night, he wondered, closer to that dull husband of hers? Did she make that kind of gesture with him? What sort of relationship did they have that way? How did they manage in bed?

  He thought about these things now. For now he knew that she shared these things about and inside her body with another man, that she had not given herself up for good to the worthy jailer who lay upstairs. She lived in other secret ways. It had started a month before with a rumour which he had checked on, arranging for one of his personal assistants to carry out the surveillance. A report confirming it had been given to him that morning: for more than a year his daughter had been having an affair with Alexei Flitlianov

  They had met ten years before, when Yelena had been at University in Moscow, almost a child. But the liaison had only begun recently, had flourished in Leningrad where Flitlianov, with his interest in painting, had gone to see exhibitions at the Hermitage Museum where she worked, and had continued intermittently and discreetly whenever she had come down to Moscow to see her old friends and family. He should, he knew, have been shocked by her behaviour, and vastly alarmed by the threat their association presented to him in the current circumstances. But he was not; rather the risks they had run, and his vision of those risks, appealed to him in a strange way, just as Arkadi Raikin’s many disguises had done.

  *

  Yuri Andropov had various official appointments in the Kremlin the next morning, a Saturday. But one in the late morning before he left was unofficial, unknown and unseen.

  Andrei Suslov, First Deputy Premier, Senior Politburo member and intellectual conscience of all the hard-liners and Stalinists in the Party, met him in the empty conference room next to his office. He was a tall, emaciated figure, bald patches in his wispy, plucked-out hair, and a jaw that narrowed fearfully into a foreshortened chin in an egg-like skull.

  He had the air of a mystic, of some old anchorite on a hill, bird-like above the storms, observing the turmoil which his teachings had brought out beneath him with distant relish.

  ‘Sakharovsky will take it,’ Andropov said as soon as they were alone. ‘But he’s no fool as you well know. He’ll report my plan for Flitlianov to your security committee. You can only try and ride it out with them.’

  ‘Leave that to me. To us. Your plans for rounding up Flitlianov’s aides can be made to seem perfectly appropriate to the Politburo. The important thing is that Flitlianov should be made to run. Is that going ahead?’

  ‘Halfway. There’s more to come. But I think he’ll run.’

  ‘He’d better. Because unless he does we really can’t move at all. We’ve no hard evidence. But once he’s out of the country – known to be in the clear – then we can hit all the soft-liners here, in the Politburo and Central Committee, crack down on the new men, put them through the hoop one by one. Kosygin will not be able to prevent it: the security of the State will be in obvious jeopardy.’

  Suslov lit another cigarette, chain-smoking. ‘Remember, we want some real conspiracy to show its head clearly: that would be the supreme justification for the new regime. We need some real opposition to make a proper change, an end to the Ostpolitik and the US detente. Flitlianov must run; that is the first thing. We can’t take him here. Any confession extracted from him by us would be mistrusted completely: our faction would be at a disadvantage from the outset. We must, when we move, be seen to be working quite naturally in response to a genuine threat to the State, which this is. We shall have ample grounds for starting our operation by the very fact of his escape. After that, of course, you must make every effort to get the names of the others in his group. But the crux of our whole plan is that Flitlianov should get safely out of the country and that his escape should be confirmed without
question. What will he do, do you think? Where will he go? How will he do it?’

  ‘London perhaps. Where the telephone call originated. But how? I’ve no idea. He’ll have thought up something pretty good. He’s had the time, the position, the contacts. We may lose him from the very beginning.’

  But as he said this Andropov felt the nervous reaction of a lie that had moved deep within him. For he thought he knew how Flitlianov would leave the country: he would leave it with or through his daughter. And he felt completely paralysed by this intuition – unable to prevent it or even investigate it. For this was precisely his and Suslov’s intention: as long as Flitlianov left the country, it didn’t matter how he did it. And Yuri Andropov saw his daughter for a moment floating away in the air, as in a fairy tale, escaping to a happy kingdom in the arms of another man – who was himself.

  2

  They drove almost two hundred kilometres north-east of Moscow, to the village of Orlyoni, in the darkness of Sunday morning. Turning off the main road here, passing a police check-point, they travelled another ten kilometres due east along what had once been little more than a winding cart track but now was a narrow paved road, with huge banks of frozen snow pushed into both ditches by ploughs. The country here was heavily wooded, undulating, without habitation. The trees were fir, cut fifty yards back from either side of the road, but from then on rising steeply and thickly in long avenues over the many small hills that dotted the area. It was part of a huge forestry development covering thousands of acres of what had once been a great estate before the revolution. Now it had been sealed off and, with the lodge at its centre, made over to the KGB. It was their country seat, as it were, used, among other things, to entertain guests – for shooting in the winter, and for training seminars and conferences in the summer.