Monday
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow
There were only seventeen passengers in the pale-yellow chartered coach which turned off the Moscow peripheral highway near the village of Tëplyystan, at just after eight-forty in the morning. Raya Kosov stretched herself comfortably across the two seats she had secured when she had boarded the vehicle, thirty minutes earlier, outside the Davydkovo station to the south-west of central Moscow, and she gazed incuriously out of the window.
The coach bounced and rattled on the uneven road surface as it made its way past the large sign warning ‘Halt! No Trespassing! Water Conservation District’, and continued slowly down the narrow road leading into the dense forest. About two hundred metres further on, the coach stopped at what looked like a militia post, but was actually a checkpoint manned continuously by armed SVR – Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi, or Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, personnel.
Two of the SVR troopers, wearing the uniforms of militiamen, boarded the coach as soon as it drew to a halt, and proceeded slowly and deliberately down the central aisle, as they carefully checked the identification of each occupant in turn.
Raya was sitting near the back, on the right-hand side of the coach, and she smiled at the young trooper as he reached out his hand for her pass. The trooper smiled back, as he did every time he saw her when he was on duty. Raya wondered how long it would be before he asked her out – or at least said something to her other than, ‘Thank you, Captain Kosov.’
‘Thank you, Captain Kosov,’ the trooper said predictably, and Raya suppressed a chuckle as she replaced her pass in her handbag. The pass was a buff-coloured plastic card bearing her photograph and a series of perforations which formed a code specifying the areas within headquarters that she was authorized to enter.
Once the guards had left the coach, it continued for just over half a kilometre further into the forest, and then skirted a large roundabout bordered by the various car parks used by senior SVR officers. It came to a halt beside the guardroom, which bore an entirely misleading bronze plaque that announced in golden letters, to anyone who penetrated that far, that this building was a designated ‘Scientific Research Centre’. The guardroom was the only point of access through a high chain-link fence topped by razor-wire, and it was occupied by armed troops from the SVR Guards Division, who again checked the passes of all the coach passengers as they filed through the turnstiles.
Once she had made it through the guardroom, Raya stepped out briskly along a driveway flanked by lawns and flowerbeds, covering the four hundred yards to SVR Headquarters in just a few minutes. The building was the former headquarters of the First Chief Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, better known as the KGB.
As the Soviet Union’s all-pervasive Committee for State Security, this organization was the direct linear descendant of the Cheka, the terror organization created in 1917 by Feliks Dzerzhinsky to liquidate any opponents of communism. Over time, it had become one of the three principal forces within the USSR. The other two were the GRU – Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, or Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff – effectively Russian military intelligence; and, of course, the Communist Party itself. Of the three, the KGB was the largest and arguably the most powerful, but certainly the most feared organization.
The reason for this was simple. Although the KGB had a prime responsibility for any intelligence operations conducted against foreign powers, it was also required to ensure that the various peoples comprising the Soviet Union remained obedient to the directives and instructions of the ruling Communist Party. With such a vast population, the only effective method of achieving this was to enlist the regular assistance of unofficial informers, which the KGB recruited in huge numbers.
The recruitment method employed was as simple and effective as it was ruthless. A Soviet citizen would be told to report to the local KGB headquarters – an invitation that was impossible to ignore. Once there, he would be asked if he wished to assist the Communist Party by acting as an unofficial and unpaid agent of the KGB. To this question, the unfortunate citizen could only answer in the affirmative, because to refuse to act for the Communist Party could be legally defined as treason, and that was an offence punishable by death.
But, even by agreeing to become an informer, that citizen was not yet out of the wood. If the reports he or she supplied to the KGB officers, about immediate family, friends and acquaintances, did not contain a sufficient amount of compromising material, the informer would be summoned back by the KGB. Its officers would then point out how other informers operating in the same district were producing evidence of the type needed, so the new informer must either be deliberately suppressing information, or not seeking it with sufficient assiduity. Both failings in responsibility were by any definition both anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, and would therefore amount to treason.
In desperation, many informers resorted to inventing stories about mysterious strangers, or reporting snatches of conversation supposedly overheard between unidentified citizens, or else settling grudges by implicating people who had merely annoyed or cheated them.
It was conservatively estimated that, during the KGB’s heyday, two out of every five Soviet citizens were operating as full- or part-time informers for the organization. A saying popular in Russia at the time suggested that every time a Soviet citizen farted, the KGB could smell it, and this was not considered to be much of an exaggeration.
When Mikhail Gorbachev, and later Boris Yeltsin, came to power in Russia, the winds of change were already blowing, and the KGB was officially disbanded in 1991. In fact, of course, no such thing happened.
The KGB had always acted as the ‘sword and shield’ of the Communist Party, and there was no way that the Party – not to mention the Russian government – would voluntarily disarm itself by destroying its main intelligence service and principal means of support. Besides, it needed the KGB to keep the peoples of the Confederation of Independent States in check, just as the KGB had controlled the actions of the citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for over half a century.
What actually took place was little more than a departmental reorganization.
The Border Guards’ Chief Directorate, which was charged with maintaining the physical security of all Soviet borders, was transferred to the Russian Army, which should probably have been responsible for that from the start. The Second Chief Directorate, effectively the domestic security service, and the Fifth Chief Directorate, responsible for the control of dissident groups within the Soviet Union, were similiarly reformed and renamed.
But the prestigious First Chief Directorate, with responsibility for foreign espionage and intelligence operations, continued its operations without interruption. Except for two changes of name, that is. The first such change, to Centralnoye Sluzhba Razvyedki, or the Central Intelligence Service of the USSR, occurred in 1991. That designation lasted only until January 1992, when it then became the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi, the name under which it still operates. The only other significant change at the time was the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov, an experienced professional intelligence officer, as the organization’s first head. Neither of these changes had any practical effect upon the ongoing operations at Yasenevo, apart from alterations in section titles and several irritating and largely unnecessary revisions to the internal telephone directory.
The SVR retained control of all agents recruited and run by the KGB, and has been diligently increasing their numbers ever since, not least because the break-up of the former USSR has significantly added to the number of countries from which Russia now requires intelligence data.
The new organization continues to work from the former KGB’s sixty-acre complex of offices at Yasenevo – bearing more than a passing resemblance to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency at Langley, Virginia. The main building was designed by Finnish architects and its construction utilized considerable quantities of aluminium and glass. The original seven-storey structure is shaped like three-pointed star, but is now dwarfed by a new twenty-two-floor extension situated at the far end of the western arm of the core building.
Raya Kosov walked towards the extremity of the northeasterly wing, passing on her way the separate entrance reserved for senior officers. She pushed through the glass double doors of the main entrance, stepped into a wide marble foyer,and again showed her pass to further SVR sentries. Striding past the bust of Feliks Dzerzhinsky standing in the middle of the foyer, she crossed to the news-stand to one side, where she bought a magazine. She then passed through a further checkpoint and into the new extension building, before stopping at the main bank of elevators.
As the doors opened, she stepped into the lift, and pressed the button for the fifteenth floor.
Paxton Hall, Felsham, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
The land had been a part of the Paxton family estate in Suffolk since 1675, but the proximity of marshy fenland and the difficulty of providing proper drainage had ensured that it remained relatively unproductive. In 1724 Roger Paxton decided to erect a new family seat at the edge of the land, and within eight years the Paxton family had built the Hall and moved in.
Roger Paxton’s abiding passion, and his ultimate ruin, was gambling, and in 1742 ownership of the house, and the six acres of woodland that surrounded it, passed to one Giles de Verney in settlement of numerous debts. The new owner took up residence with his family, put up with the damp and cold for just over two years, and then gave the property to his cousin Charles.
Charles de Verney actually liked living in the Hall, and his descendants continued to reside there until the early years of the twentieth century. The last de Verney to own the property was Edith, who survived her husband by the better part of forty years and, after his death in 1876, retreated to the Hall in her widow’s weeds.
With the passing years, she became increasingly eccentric and erratic in her behaviour, virtually never leaving the premises and steadily filling each room of the large house with rubbish. Edith finally died in her small single bedroom at one end of the east wing, all alone as she’d been for fifteen years, and her body wasn’t found there for nearly three weeks.
William Verney – whose branch of the family had dropped the ‘de’ in 1863 – became the new owner, but preferred the social life of London and his spacious flat in Knightsbridge. He visited the property, and declared that it was one of the most unattractive houses he had ever seen, and certainly the ugliest property he had ever had the misfortune to own. He had the place cleared out and cleaned up, then secured it against intruders and the winds blowing off the North Sea, and virtually forgot about it.
For no readily discernible reason, the house was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence in the latter stages of the First World War, but was not actually used for any known purpose. In 1919, with the male line of the Verney family all but exterminated in the carnage of the Somme and in Flanders, the few surviving members decided they had no need of this big, draughty old place on the edge of the fens, and gratefully accepted the ministry’s somewhat niggardly offer to purchase it.
Builders were employed to sort out the damp in the extensive cellars, windows and doors were replaced, and the interior was repainted and redecorated. Then, perhaps not knowing quite what else to do with the place, the ministry closed up the Hall and employed a local building firm to visit and inspect the premises on a monthly basis.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the place was hurriedly opened up again and converted: first into a rest and recuperation centre for injured RAF airmen, and then into a training centre for Special Operations Executive (SOE) personnel. The explosions and noise of small-arms fire that echoed through the surrounding woods were a constant reminder of the difficult and dangerous missions being undertaken by the young men and women that the locals occasionally spotted in the village.
Oddly enough, nobody seemed particularly surprised when those noises continued after hostilities had ended. Locals who thought they knew exactly what was going on – which in Suffolk meant almost everyone – nodded wisely when asked about the Hall, and it soon became common knowledge that Royal Marine Commandos had taken over the estate for training purposes.
When the Special Air Service stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in April 1980, word spread quickly around Felsham that the Hall had been used for the final training before the attack. Many locals claimed to have noticed one or more of the troopers drinking in the local pubs before the assault took place and even to have recognized some of the black-clad figures seen clambering over parapets on News at Ten.
All of which, of course, was complete nonsense, but the stories suited the authorities well enough. In fact, neither the Royal Marines nor the SAS had ever been anywhere near Paxton Hall. At the end of the Second World War, ownership of the building had been quietly transferred from the Ministry of Defence to the Foreign Office, and the Secret Intelligence Service had moved in.
Or, to be exact, a caretaker staff moved in, and the Hall became one of two SIS safe houses in Suffolk. The cars and vans occasionally arriving at odd hours of the day and night did not contain SAS troopers eager to improve their shooting skills, although there was a firing range on the property which was still used occasionally. Instead, the vehicles conveyed SIS agents who had to be briefed prior to undertaking missions abroad; or defectors – only a few, but one of the most important sources of foreign intelligence – fetched in for initial debriefing, and intelligence professionals who needed a secure and discreet location for their meetings with members of other services.
The first car to arrive, early that afternoon, was a dark green Jaguar saloon with a single occupant. The vehicle stopped at the guardhouse, just outside the electrically controlled gates, and after a few moments was permitted to proceed up the drive. The second vehicle – also a Jaguar, but black and with three men inside – arrived ten minutes later.
Old Admiralty Building, Spring Gardens, London
The office assigned to Richter, on the first floor of the Old Admiralty Building, was almost exactly what he had been expecting. It was a small room, with yellowish-cream walls that badly needed repainting, preferably in a different colour, and contained two metal desks, with somewhat worn swivel chairs, and four grey filing cabinets. The single window looked out into a light well that extended up to the roof, and the gloom meant that the twin overhead fluorescent lights were switched on all day. Although clearly intended to accommodate two people, there was no sign of any other occupant. The only good thing about it, Richter thought, was that at least he wouldn’t be spending all his working hours here.
He had driven up from Cornwall on Sunday, and found his room at RAF Uxbridge without difficulty. He knew the base well from his previous appointment at Military Air Traffic Operations – MATO – which was then based at Hillingdon House, within the RAF Uxbridge station complex.
That morning he had travelled into London by tube, arriving at the Old Admiralty Building just after nine. He’d been greeted there in a somewhat perfunctory fashion by Colonel Baldwin, before he was shown round the building by a young Royal Navy lieutenant. Getting his photograph taken, and sorting out his building pass and personal identity card – which identified him as a Senior Executive Officer, but did not specify for which organization he worked – had occupied the rest of that morning. Richter had then gone for lunch in a nearby pub with the lieutenant, who was on hold-over pending a posting abroad, and he had returned to his office just after one-thirty.
He had been sitting at his desk for less than five minutes, doing absolutely nothing because there was absolutely nothing for him to do, when Baldwin knocked on the door and walked in.
Richter looked up enquiringly. ‘This is somewhat sooner than I expected,’ Baldwin announced, ‘but it looks as if your first trip will be taking place on Wednesday this week.’
‘Where to?’ Richter asked.
‘France, I think,’ Baldwin replied, ‘but you’re scheduled to attend a formal briefing tomorrow morning. It will take place in Hammersmith, at this address.’ The colonel placed a single sheet of paper on the desk top.
Richter barely even glanced at it. ‘A formal briefing for a courier delivery?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that a bit of overkill?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Baldwin said. ‘It may not be completely straightforward.’
Richter looked up and smiled thinly. ‘I’d have been very surprised if it was,’ he remarked.
Baldwin stared at him silently for a few moments, then turned on his heel and left the office.
Paxton Hall, Felsham, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
The main conference room was on the ground floor, but the four men had decided to meet in the first-floor library instead. The chairs were more comfortable for one thing, and Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the current ‘C’ – the head of the Secret Intelligence Service – preferred an informal atmosphere. And in the library he could smoke.
‘Are you sure, absolutely sure, of your facts?’ he asked William Moore, the head of Section Nine of the SIS and responsible for Russian affairs, once the pleasantries were out of the way.
Moore shook his head. ‘Not one hundred per cent, Sir Malcolm, no. With any data of this sort there is always room for some doubt, some uncertainty. The balance of probability, though, suggests that we have been compromised.’
The man at the other end of the table snorted in disgust. ‘Why don’t you just come out with it? What you mean is that we’ve got a high-level mole.’
Holbeche looked pained by the remark. In his opinion, George Arkin – the head of the Security Service, MI5 – was rather too blunt in his opinion, especially where delicate inter-service matters were concerned. Arkin’s background was north-country and police – neither of which endeared him to Holbeche – and both his origins and his career had engendered a fondness for what Arkin liked to call plain speaking and common sense.
One of the tasks with which the Security Service was entrusted was the detection and investigation of traitors within the ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service, and this role had on numerous occasions led to outright hostility between the two organizations.
‘Yes,’ Holbeche agreed, ‘we think we have a mole.’
He had been reluctant to involve Arkin at all, but the data obtained by Moore had left him with little alternative. He just hoped that this whole episode could be wrapped up fairly quickly and quietly.
‘Right, then,’ Arkin nodded briskly, ‘what’s your evidence, and what do you want me to do about it? And who’s this Mr Simpson, and what’s he doing here?’ He gestured to the smaller man sitting in the armchair to his right.
‘Mr Simpson is here as my assistant and advisor,’ Holbeche snapped. ‘Now, Moore will outline the data we’ve so far received.’ He sat back in his chair and reached into his jacket pocket for a cigar.
William Moore took a red file from his briefcase and placed it on the table in front of him, but didn’t yet open it. He leaned forward and, in unconscious mimicry, Arkin and Simpson did the same. When Moore now spoke, his voice was low and intense.
‘Ten days ago,’ he said, ‘a Russian diplomatic courier was taken suddenly and violently ill at Heathrow Airport. He had already passed through Passport Control, and was sitting in the departure lounge waiting to board the flight to Moscow when he got up and made a dash towards the toilet, but vomited on the floor before he made it, and then passed out.’
Moore paused briefly, then continued. ‘The Heathrow medical staff were called immediately, and the Russian, whose name is Sinyavsky, was rushed to the airport medical centre, where the on-call doctor examined him, and from there he was taken to Hillingdon Hospital. Heathrow security staff were notified, because Sinyavsky was carrying a diplomatic passport, and he had a locked briefcase chained to his left wrist. In due course, the Metropolitan Police were notified, and they in turn called the Foreign Office and Special Branch.’
All of them there knew the Security Service had no powers of arrest – in fact, its very existence had only fairly recently been officially acknowledged – and it relied on Special Branch officers to carry out executive actions on its behalf. The Special Branch comprised some four hundred detectives attached to local police forces throughout the country, but with the highest concentration in London, and it was accountable to the Home Secretary through London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
‘The duty Special Branch Inspector, Charles Wingate, immediately went to Hillingdon and saw Sinyavsky in hospital. The Russian was still unconscious, and the doctors thought he was likely to remain that way. They were treating him, by the way, for salmonella poisoning.’
Arkin interrupted, and tried for a joke. ‘Most people get that after they’ve flown with Aeroflot, not before.’ He looked at the faces around him, but saw not a trace of a smile. ‘And’, he added, ‘he seems to have suffered a very severe reaction, if it was salmonella. I thought most people just got stomach cramps, the squits, and so on.’
Moore nodded. ‘Normally, you’d be right, but there are several strains of salmonella, and subsequent tests showed that Sinyavsky had contracted Salmonella typhi, probably from undercooked poultry. Salmonella typhi is a comparatively rare strain, but it causes typhoid fever, and proves fatal in about thirty per cent of cases. Sinyavsky, I’m pleased to say, is now recovering.’
Moore finally picked up the file and opened it. ‘Inspector Wingate instantly ordered Sinyavsky to be kept in isolation – which simply reinforced instructions for what the hospital was already doing – and had an armed police officer posted outside his room. The key for the handcuff on the briefcase was in the pocket of Sinyavsky’s jacket, and the doctors had already removed it from his wrist so that they could treat him more easily. The briefcase, of course, was locked, and was considered diplomatic baggage, so Wingate himself took it into safe custody.’
Moore noticed that Arkin had begun to smile. ‘Let me guess,’ the MI5 man said. ‘In order to notify the appropriate authorities, Inspector Wingate had to open the briefcase in order to try to discover the name of Sinyavsky’s superior. And, while he was leafing through the contents, he happened to notice – and perhaps even copy – some of the papers it contained?’
Moore shook his head. ‘Not exactly,’ he replied, ‘but close. Wingate knew from Sinyavsky’s passport that he was a Russian diplomat, so there was no reason why he should not have contacted the Russian Embassy without even looking at the briefcase. In fact, that’s exactly what he did, but he waited until the following morning before taking action.’
Arkin grunted. ‘Now I remember,’ he said. ‘Our people opened an envelope, as I recall, but the contents were passed immediately to SIS.’
‘Correct.’ Moore nodded briefly, and continued. ‘Wingate handed the briefcase over to A Branch of the Security Service – Operations and Resources – for examination. Their technicians opened the briefcase without any particular difficulty, and they examined the contents. Most of it was just routine but, as Mr Arkin has said, there was one thick A4-size envelope that was heavily sealed and gave a destination address of SVR Headquarters at Yasenevo. After consultation with the MI5 and SIS duty officers, it was decided to open the envelope and copy its contents.’
‘A “flap and seal” artist?’ Simpson asked.
Moore shook his head and smiled. ‘No, the march of technology continues unabated. We no longer even have operatives trained to do that. Instead we have a large grey machine that cuts open the envelope, and then reseals it using the actual fibres of the paper itself. Like the briefcase, the envelope was X-rayed first, to ensure that there were no anti-handling or other security devices, but it was found clean, and then the machine proceeded to open it.’
In the pause that followed, Arkin gazed intently at Moore. ‘Inside,’ Moore continued, ‘we found one hundred and thirty-seven sheets of paper. It was a complete listing of the directory structure and all the file names listed on the London Data Centre System-Three computer.’
‘Oh, fuck me,’ Arkin said very quietly, leaning back in his chair.