IV

October 1969, Moscow

I shivered at the memory of the cold water and the dead eyes of the crewmen. I had tried to banish thoughts of the operation for years, although it had occasionally featured in my nightmares. My brief time in Finland had given me my first glimpse of a world in which we were as ruthless as our enemies and were already betraying our allies. It was also a source of personal shame: I had failed to complete the operation, and had killed a man to boot, although I had justified the latter to myself as being a matter of my life or his. I now wondered if some repressed feelings of guilt about Smythe had eased the Soviets’ recruitment of me a few months later. Possibly – but I would probably have succumbed to Anna’s charms anyway.

I had worried how to break the news to Templeton, but in the event he hadn’t seemed overly concerned. He’d listened patiently to my debriefing, then asked a few questions, mainly about the precise position of the hatch when I’d left it. He wanted to know, of course, if it was firmly shut so that nobody else would be able to get in. I assured him this was the case, and persuaded myself it was, too, although a nagging doubt came to me in my dreams in the following weeks that it had not fully closed behind me.

He told me that Smythe was certainly an NKVD man, as there was nobody of that name at the Legation in Stockholm, and told me to put it out of my mind. ‘They may still be our allies technically,’ he said, ‘but make no mistake – to all intents and purposes, they are our enemies now. He threatened to compromise your mission, and would certainly have tried to shoot you had the positions been reversed. Indeed, it sounds as though he was about to. You did the right thing – I would have done the same.’ I handed over von Trotha’s orders, and was dismissed. He never mentioned the operation to me again.

I had stayed on in Helsinki for a few more weeks, but then the Soviets entered Berlin and everything started happening very fast. I travelled to Stockholm to see Mother, this time taking an aeroplane, but it was a wasted journey, as she had simply stared through me with a blank gaze, drool spilling grotesquely from her mouth. On returning to Helsinki, Templeton pulled me in to his office and told me I was wanted back in London. I took the next flight from the airport, landing in a bank of fog. I spent a couple of weeks kicking my heels in Baker Street and wondering what I was supposed to be doing, before I was handed a coded cable from agent 2080 – Father – in which he requested I join him immediately at a farmhouse ten miles outside Lübeck, in the British Zone of Germany.

That operation had eventually brought me here, to this depressing conference room beneath Moscow. The men seated around me had listened in chilly silence as I had described my actions in 1945, but it didn’t take long for them to respond. Suslov was the first to speak, and he addressed himself to Yuri.

‘Is this your promised breakthrough?’ he said with undisguised contempt. ‘I am unimpressed. Why should we believe anything this man says? Of course he will argue that this is an accident, in order to stop us from attacking the West. In this situation, his loyalties aren’t with us. He’s useless – worse than Philby.’

That was interesting: they had already asked Philby. It made sense he hadn’t been much help, as it had been years since he’d been involved in this sort of discussion in London, and by most accounts he was now a drunken wreck of a man –not that I was a shining example. But it put my presence here in a new, rather more unpleasant light: it seemed that it had been Yuri’s brainwave to summon me, and it wasn’t proving a popular decision.

‘You’re right,’ I said to Suslov, and he swivelled to look at me. ‘It would take a lot for me to argue that you should launch a nuclear attack on the West, but it’s got nothing to do with patriotism. Nobody can win that war.’

‘If I may, General Secretary,’ broke in Yuri, ‘it seems that this man’s testimony may provide some of the answers we seek. He has told us that as a member of British intelligence he was sent to Finland to capture German chemical weapons at the end of the war, so that they could be used against us after it. As it seems that those very same chemical weapons are now being used against us, can it be plausible that the West is not involved? Surely the most likely scenario is that the British have returned to this sunken submarine and retrieved the mustard gas.’

I took a breath to calm myself. Had my recounting of my operation in Åland in 1945 just made Britain a target for a nuclear strike?

‘Nobody knew the location of the U-boat apart from me and my immediate superior,’ I said. ‘And he is dead.’

‘But he will have filed a report,’ said Yuri, his forefingers pressed against his chin. ‘As a result of your defection to us, your old colleagues in London will have investigated every document connected to your career, I think. Presumably they found a report on this from 1945, and decided to act on it.’

I stared at him. Could that have happened? He was right that they would have searched through everything. Could they have dug up reports Templeton had written for SOE in 1945? It was possible – they would certainly have been looking through his files. But most of SOE’s files had been destroyed after the war, and it was hard enough even to find a Service file from those days. I thought of the canisters again, and of the liquid slowly seeping from them.

‘The Service doesn’t operate like that,’ I said. ‘If they had retrieved the mustard gas, they wouldn’t have attacked your nearest submarine base with it. Nobody in the West has any interest in provoking a nuclear conflict.’

Ivashutin, the GRU head, gave a laugh as dry as a lizard’s cough. ‘Come, what sort of fools do you take us for?’

I turned to face him. ‘I’m quite serious. The possibility of a surprise attack has been discussed, naturally – it’s raised every few years, usually by one of the more belligerent generals, and usually when you lot have done something that annoys us. Then the call goes up: “Why don’t we just hit the Russians, hard and fast?” But wiser heads always prevail. The relevant experts at NATO have calculated that a first strike would not be enough to disable you completely, and would simply result in you striking back. Until we come to a point where one side’s forces seriously outweigh the other, the logic of deterrence still holds. But even if you don’t subscribe to that view, this is clearly an accident – just look at the distances.’

I pulled the map on the table nearer to me and turned it to face Ivashutin. ‘The U-boat sank here. Here are Paldiski and Hiiumaa. They’re less than fifty miles away. It’s obvious that the gas has leaked from the submarine and the currents have carried it to the shores of these bases, just as they carried Captain von Trotha’s body.’

Ivashutin smiled. ‘Or perhaps that was what we were meant to think. After all, your former colleagues in London know that you are in Moscow and are likely to tell us all this. Our bases are heavily fortified: leaking chemical weapons into the water nearby is an ingenious way of breaching the security.’

‘What if he is right, though?’ said a new voice, and I scanned the table to locate it – Andropov, the KGB chief. ‘What if the Americans are simply conducting an exercise with the B-52s, and the incidents in Paldiski and Hiiumaa are accidental?’

‘All of them occurring at the same time?’ said Brezhnev. ‘That seems very unlikely.’

Andropov switched on an obsequious smile. ‘Indeed, General Secretary. But it may still be the case. Are we sure we want to risk the consequences if Comrades Ivashutin and Proshin are wrong in their assessment? If the West is really about to launch a surprise attack on us, what is their motive?’

Yuri’s jaw muscles showed through his cheeks as he struggled to stay calm. ‘Perhaps they feel sure they will be able to survive and win a protracted nuclear conflict,’ he said carefully.

Ivashutin nodded. ‘Yes, or perhaps they have underestimated our capability to retaliate. Perhaps putting a man on the moon has made them think they are invincible.’

Nobody laughed, and I understood it wasn’t supposed to be a joke. So the Americans must have finally pulled it off since my arrival here, the great journey finally realized. I remembered last year’s INVALUABLE exercise in Whitehall with a chill. Its imagined scenario to trigger a nuclear conflict had been that hawks in the Kremlin had been emboldened by placing a man on the moon. Now that event had apparently taken place, but it was the Americans who had done it. Could it be that hawks in Washington, newly elevated by the glory of beating the Soviets to the moon, had got hold of Nixon and persuaded him that a surprise strike was achievable? It was unthinkable, surely.

But there were nuclear-armed B-52s heading towards the Soviet border.

‘My department takes the view that the West wants us to follow precisely your logic, Yuri Vladimirovich,’ Ivashutin was saying. ‘We think that this is a surprise attack that is designed to destroy us through our own uncertainty over whether or not we should retaliate. If we live to survive this, perhaps we should consider such a strategy ourselves.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Brezhnev. ‘All of you.’

The room hushed immediately. The GRU and KGB hated each other’s guts. They were wholly separate agencies, with competing structures in Moscow and embassies around the world. Both operated within and outside the Soviet Union, but the KGB spent most of its time wading in the weeds of individual espionage operations while the GRU was generally concerned with the big picture, including the biggest of all, the threat of an attack on the Soviet Union. This was the GRU’s case, but from the way Andropov was speaking he appeared to have Brezhnev’s ear more than Ivashutin.

This was peculiar, because Ivashutin was an old pal of Brezhnev’s, and had been handpicked by him to head the GRU after Serov had been dismissed in ’61 following the discovery that Penkovsky was working for the Service and CIA. Perhaps there was still some residual stain on the GRU’s reputation as a result. Until that point, it had been almost invisible to the outside world, but Penkovsky had given the West a mass of information, some of which, I had discovered on becoming Head of Soviet Section, had helped avert nuclear war during the Cuban crisis.

There was no love lost between Andropov and Ivashutin. As I knew from personal experience, the KGB had recently sabotaged a major GRU operation in Nigeria – and presumably Andropov had been behind that.

‘Is this possible?’ Brezhnev said, addressing Yuri. ‘Could it be that the events at these bases are the result of a chemical leak?’

‘It is possible, General Secretary,’ he conceded, glaring at me. ‘But as you yourself pointed out, considering the Americans’ actions it would seem too great a coincidence—’

‘It is not a coincidence,’ I said. ‘It’s an accident, and one that was bound to happen sooner or later. The Baltic is strewn with volatile chemical weapons, as you well know, because many of them were dumped there by you.’

‘Is this true?’ said Brezhnev.

‘That was Zhukov’s doing, General Secretary,’ piped up Grechko. ‘He ordered the practice when he was in command of the administration in Germany after the Great Patriotic War. But that was not until ’47 or ’48, and if I recall correctly it was not done anywhere in this area, but near the islands of Gotland and Bornholm.’

‘It sounds like the sort of thing Zhukov would think up,’ Brezhnev said. ‘It’s as well he retired when he did.’

‘Indeed,’ said Grechko, seizing the opportunity to take another kick at one of his predecessors. ‘But he was not alone in the mistake: the British, French and Americans also dumped chemical weapons in the Baltic. Occasionally, some come to the surface, but I think I’m right in saying that this has never happened anywhere near these particular bases.’

Yuri nodded. ‘That is correct, esteemed comrade. This is confirmed in the latest report by the investigating scientists, who have never even encountered this type of mustard gas before. I have also never heard of any attempt by either the British or ourselves to obtain such a weapon.’

‘Someone notified your people in Helsinki about the U-boat captain in 1945,’ I said, ‘and they sent an agent out there to get to him. There will be a report on it in your files.’

‘We don’t have time to dig around in archives,’ said Brezhnev. ‘We must make a decision now.’ He pushed his chair back and walked to the wall behind him, staring at the false window as though it were a real one looking out on the skyline of Moscow. Habit, I supposed. ‘Comrade Grechko,’ he said finally, addressing himself to the wall. ‘What course of action do you advise?’

Grechko didn’t hesitate. ‘As you know, General Secretary, we have just completed the “Zapad” war game. One of our conclusions was that the West would be foolish to engage in any sort of preliminary war and would in reality be much more likely to defeat us with a surprise nuclear attack. It seems that they have come to the same conclusion. If they are indeed preparing to launch against us, I believe our best strategy is to launch our own attack before they do.’

He used the word kontrapodgotovka, a counter-preparation strike that would disrupt the enemy’s first strike. But, of course, that assumed that the Americans were indeed planning a first strike.

Brezhnev nodded.

‘If the Americans launch their weapons, how much notice will we have?’

Grechko grimaced. ‘We estimate that our radars would detect the missiles between fifteen and seventeen minutes of them hitting their target, General Secretary.’

‘And how long will it take us to launch our missiles if I give the order to do so?’

‘The 8K84s do not have their warheads attached, General Secretary, and once they have been armed they need to be warmed up for a few hours before they can be launched. But once they are primed and warmed up, the Strategic Rocket Forces can launch within seconds of receiving your signal.’

‘Exactly how many hours does it take for the 8K84s to warm up once the warheads are attached?’

‘Three hours, General Secretary.’

Brezhnev turned, and I saw that a pool of sweat had formed on his forehead. He drew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped at it unthinkingly.

‘Attach the warheads,’ he said.

Grechko’s face flushed.

‘Right away, General Secretary.’

He picked up the telephone nearest him, spoke into it for a few seconds and then replaced it.

I stared at the men around me, dumbfounded by the mounting madness. From memory, 8K84 was the Soviet name for the SS-11 intercontinental ballistic missile. Grechko had used the phrase predvaritel’naya komanda on the telephone: that was the preliminary alert command, given to combat crews as a trigger to prepare nuclear weapons for the next order, the neposredstvennaya komanda, or direct command to launch.

Brezhnev returned to his seat at the head of the table, and clasped his hands together.

‘I would like some more detailed information on the B-52s,’ he said, his baritone now almost cracking. ‘If they breach our no-go zone, I will give the order to launch a strike on our major targets in the West.’

I was also sweating now, and the room seemed to be closing in around me. In a few seconds, Brezhnev had placed the Soviet Union one step away from launching a nuclear attack. It sounded as if he were considering a tactical strike, rather than releasing the country’s entire stockpile of missiles at once – what was referred to as ‘R Hour’ in Britain. But it made little difference. Even if he were to order a tactical strike, the West would retaliate at once and we would be facing full-scale nuclear war in a few hours’ time, with Washington, London, Moscow and many other cities destroyed. Brezhnev didn’t even need to order a strike at all for that to happen. If Washington got wind of the fact that part of the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal had been moved to this position, they might themselves fear an imminent attack and choose to strike pre-emptively.

By believing the Americans were about to launch an attack, Brezhnev might have just pushed them into making one.

There must be some way to stop this.

‘Call your consulate in Åland,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember the precise coordinates, but the U-boat is south-east of an island called Söderviken. Get them to send one of their divers down, or if you don’t have any find a local and pay them to do it. Once they’ve found the canisters, they can radio back the confirmation that they have leaked.’

Brezhnev tilted his head at Yuri. ‘I think we have had quite enough of this man now. Is there anything else we wish to know from him?’

‘Thank you for your patience, General Secretary,’ said Yuri, and just the sound of his voice was now making me nauseous. ‘I believe he may know the West’s likely targets and the order in which they are likely to be attacked, but this may not be a fitting place to extract the information from him.’

‘Give him to me,’ said Andropov. ‘My men will be able to break him in less than an hour.’

My stay in Steklyashka had been far from pleasant, but the KGB’s headquarters, the Lubyanka, was notorious – it was known as Moscow’s tallest building, on account of the floors of cellars it was rumoured to have.

‘Thank you for the offer of assistance, Yuri Vladimirovich,’ said Yuri coolly. ‘But I think we have a way to apply pressure in this case.’

‘I think KGB and GRU should work together on this,’ said Brezhnev. ‘Yuri Vladimirovich, please have the prisoner taken into custody by your men. Fedor Fedorovich, I would like you to accompany him in order to exert your pressure, and to report back here with the results within the hour.’

Fedor Fedorovich, or Yuri as I still thought of him, looked a little paler, but nodded. ‘Of course, General Secretary.’ Andropov flicked the switch on his chair, while Yuri started packing his papers into his attaché case.

‘This won’t help,’ I said, unable to keep the desperation from my voice. ‘You’re making a terrible mistake.’

Brezhnev ignored me, and helped himself to a glass of water. The door opened and two guards marched in, wearing brown coats with blue collar tabs: KGB. They were both armed, so I didn’t resist as they escorted me out of the room, led by Yuri.

‘I’ve told the truth, you fools!’ I screamed as the door closed. But there was no reply, and they led me down the passageway and back to the lift.