The Steering Group

by M. J. Laurence

  I think he was secretly pleased that I had found out from his mother Natalia, but pretended it was a shock. His time at the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI and Bauman University had been hard and he hadn’t found any friends, deliberately distancing himself from Asad at the request of Alex and his father so as not to raise suspicions. He had basically been alone since I had left Moscow, and his move into a military research role at Sarov had isolated him further and further from human interaction on a personal scale which had slowly torn him apart inside. He had yearned for our friendship and, after all the hideous expectations that had been put upon him at the research facility in Sarov, and the endless isolation and secrecy, he explained that he had felt there was no way out. He was so lonely it was killing him, literally, and there was too much pressure from the family now with all the additional business and political entanglements his father and Alex had become involved with.

  I had to let him tell me the whole thing over at least three times, and the words just ate me up and took me back to my friend Robert who had killed himself after sexual abuse by his foster parents all those years ago. The isolation, the loneliness and the pressures of life and work in order to succeed and be someone else’s hero, devoid of true love, friendship and the fun of innocence, really is a dark path no young person should be made to walk. For Anatoly that path had only ever been lit up by my short presence in Moscow. When someone talks of suicide, as sick as it may sound, I can tell if they are genuine or not. It’s that absolute loss of any hope and the unmistakable accompanying silence and utter despair that gives it away. Anatoly had found that despair and was only just surviving it. I remember telling him again all about Robert so he could feel my pain also and know I fully understood him and couldn’t live through another suicide again. That encounter brought us to a new place as friends and brothers, closer still. Then he asked if he could come to England with me.

  I was thrust into a mind-blowing mental dive by Anatoly asking to come to England. It had suddenly become time to get a proper drink so we headed off to a hotel bar, where I desperately tried to turn the whole conversation around to his work and why it was so depressing for him. The England thing needed to be processed later. I managed to get him talking about work and he described his employment at the Russian Scientific Research Institute for Experimental Physics (VNIIEF), Sarov (Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Sarov). He explained how his life was like being in prison, especially following a number of security breaches and some of the offsite storage facilities being compromised on two separate occasions. There had been a lot of security checks and interrogation of the staff, which was wearing him down. Anatoly was without doubt a man of superior intellect, a genius set on a path that would be destined for fame within the Iron Curtain, but there were flies in the ointment, and those flies were the family which he could not squash.

  The conversation was gold. I sat and learned everything Anatoly did and was involved in at VNIIEF. They conducted nuclear warhead design, within which Anatoly was a designer but was also engaged in teams and projects related to advanced conventional weapons, nuclear safety and intellectual property protection, and his latest assignments were working on Russia’s most advanced supercomputers in the further development of an ISKRA laser-based inertial confinement fusion device. My mouth was literally agape. Anatoly laughed at me, and I just laughed back and said that it was all beyond me and joked that maybe he should come to England with me to escape it all because I didn’t understand a word he was talking about. It was actually perfect cover for me; my true ignorance of what he was describing hid my true intentions, like a chameleon moving off the sand and onto a tree – my colours were all they needed to be.

  I think he was sometimes in need of a mental escape outside of work, which I presented to him in the form of adventure and possibly misdirection. Anatoly wasn’t really too adventurous or brave, even a little risk adverse, but loved it when I would thrust it all upon him. He pretended he wanted to do things like skydiving or scuba but needed a chaperone or someone who wouldn’t make fun if he didn’t see it through. On the quad bikes he wouldn’t go fast; he would drive like a grandfather until I encouraged him to push the envelope. He knew that when I was around I would pick him up or protect him, I suppose; I was the brother he never had. He obviously never had the opportunity to talk about anything really close to him and felt it was okay to let me in on the outlines of what he did. He was stuck in Sarov all week and rarely got home at weekends as it was about a nine-hour drive from Moscow and not always possible because of the weather. He worked mostly alone and only had a few work acquaintances. Speaking with Anatoly I didn’t see why he was alone; I found him easy to communicate with and never found or thought that conversation with him was over complex or difficult to initiate. However, if you listened to him talking to Alex it would be almost a different language, and you would feel like a dustman discussing maths problems, like Cauchy’s integral formula, with a mathematics professor, the conversation leaving you completely lost and with more questions than you set out with.

  It was getting late and we decided to get back to the apartment as no doubt we would be missed and needed to get dressed for dinner. Anatoly was very specific that we should keep our conversation private as his father had such high expectations of him and now wouldn’t be a good time to upset the family. Anatoly explained that there was a lot of business to be conducted whilst the family was here in Dubai and that he wasn’t comfortable with it all and just wanted to have some family time and leave the world of work back in Russia. My mind was moving away from the mission and more to the possibility of a defection, a possibility that hadn’t been considered as yet by the Steering Group.

  Dinner was quite a grand affair with so much over-indulgence on offer. There was a huge buffet arranged in the dining room that opened out through bi-fold doors onto the pool area. There were tables of seafood layered with lobster, crab, prawns, oysters, langoustines and caviar, with forests of salads forming the foundations of the grand ice carvings. King crab and fresh caviar on lettuce boats were my choice of main course, an extravagant indulgence I wasn’t going to refuse. I was sandwiched between Evgeny and Alex, who demanded my undivided attention. The humble dinners of Moscow had been surpassed by the unhidden abundance of money and the deepest desires to explore what could be gained from having so much of it. Food was a great expression of wealth and it was truly on display that day.

  I think after talking with Evgeny I learned that he had become very dependent on the family, more so now that Alex had increasingly demanding deadlines to meet and impatient new customers. He was now feeling vulnerable with his heart condition which in turn attracted endless concern from all who knew. A deep breath or a slight grimace would have everyone standing. I sat with him and let him tell his story; it was quite sad because he expressed his desire to be free again – he would never hunt, run, swim or do any of the things he so wanted to like we did when I lived in Moscow. Alex and I worked hard to drive his thoughts to other possibilities like business and politics. The conversation was politely manoeuvred through the endless minefields of possible depression areas or negativities but eventually we ended up with drinks in the lounge with Mohammed, Ahmed and Nasser. Erik was pleased to isolate all the men from the women, who were now sitting outside conducting some sort of fashion show of shoes and bags, their laughter and overloud conversation gently silenced by the closing of the bi-fold doors. It was time for business.

  Alex was blunt, and asked straight out if I wanted to take up some work for him with Evgeny. The family needed people they could trust and it would only be for a few weeks maybe in a few months’ time. Nasser wanted only family and close friends involved in the logistics chain. Floundering, I remember simply nodding and smiling at Evgeny and not saying anything. Anatoly was upset and asked to come with me and Evgeny, the brothers should stay together he was beckoning, but Erik and Alex both jumped in, almost barking to Anatoly that the family needed him in Sarov. That was the fi
rst time I had ever heard Anatoly swear out loud; he was clearly not happy with being isolated from his brothers again and it was becoming clear why Anatoly wasn’t the content young man I had once known.

  Mohammed pulled out some folders and maps from a leather case he had politely disappeared to reclaim from his room while the domestic argument had taken place. There it was, the whole fucking secret revealed. Anatoly was supplying information from Sarov direct to Mohammed (Mohammed bin Shaban Al Zidjali – Syrian, now working in Iran with his son Asad, both nuclear scientists) who in return for this technical information was paying Ahmed to allow (and maintain approval for) the supply of illegal arms from Russia to Iraq and the Serbians (this included Scud missile parts and chemical weapon components). It was a complex system of payments and agreements, with some shipments having already been used against Ahmed, in that the Iraqi border with Saudi was becoming fortified with Scud missiles supplied directly by Alex, an embarrassment in some quarters of the Russian leadership who hadn’t been aware of the trade-offs Alex had made on their behalf. In short, it was an insurance policy demanded by the end customers in Iraq to allow the arms build-up to continue and to ensure the funding and the bribery gravy train remained unhindered and fully operational.

  It was imperative to the Russians and the Serbians that those groups controlling Saudi territories remained in approval of the movement of arms. The funding needed for the greedy underworld of Middle Eastern politics and terrorist groups would have been very significant to pacify and keep everyone onside in order for the bigger game to be played out. The Saudi regime would no doubt have been simultaneously and painfully unaware that some of the same shipments were being paid for by Iran to customers in Yemen and Lebanon in preparation to turn on their Middle Eastern brothers. (It’s important to know that the relationship between Iran and Russia was good up until the late 1990s, so arms trading, legal or not, to Iran was okay from the Russian viewpoint.) Who knew what will never be fully established; besides, those with whom the Steering Group was involved were operating way below anything that governments of any nation could possibly be aware of. It was all the undertakings of lesser men who sought power but could never attain it.

  The intricate, complex and sometimes hidden relationships and alliances across the Middle East were and probably still are a tangled mess that usually ends in a hatred trail for Israel, hence the involvement of the West and Saudi Arabia’s face-value support to the US and Israel whilst allowing a neighbour to strengthen without apparent action. This, coupled with the entanglements of Sunni and Shia religions, made for an undecipherable code of alliances. The two questions that needed to be asked at the time were: why were the Saudis and their allies willing to forgo generations of refusing to recognise Israel as a country to now invite her to be an ally?; and why were the Israelis willing to accept this role? The answer is: because Israel has nuclear weapons (it’s not a designated nuclear weapon state and does not openly acknowledge it); but until Iran takes her place (and that’s what Mohammed and Asad’s directive was from those seeking power in Iran) then these unlikely friendships must be maintained until the balance is moved. Mohammed was going to make that happen at all costs, buying it all from Russia through whatever means and at whatever cost, including the arming of unfriendly states and the creation of tensions and conflict to shift focus away from the main event, and the eventual development of Iran as a nuclear power. It’s all enough to give an aspirin a serious migraine; and no matter how hard I tried to understand all the reasons why, it was just better and easier to simply obey the last order, fuck all the politics and pull the trigger when ordered to do so.

  The best thing I ever learned from all my time with the Russians and all the tribes of the Middle East is that the enemy of my enemy is now my friend even if he was my enemy in the past. Welcome, friend, let me buy you coffee and give you the means to kill our enemies together. PS How much will that cost? Then kill your friend before any payment is due.

  The family was supplying Nasser with the arms direct from Russia now, some under the guise of legitimate transactions; the source depot was not revealed and was kept a secret that only Alex knew, but the destinations were clear – deliveries would be made to Evgeny in Drobeta-Turnu Severin, a city in Mehedinti County, Oltenia, Romania (on the River Danube) before onward shipment to Nasser in Split, then the remaining cargo would be taken by ship to Iraq through Lebanon, Suez and the Gulf. Alex wanted me to be with Evgeny in Romania to ensure he was okay and see the first of the new shipments through. Alex would look after the initial loadings then it was up to Nasser. Ahmed stepped in and explained how the payment system would work from now on and listed the other beneficiaries. Dilip, our Indian transport contact, would cover all land transport, and Rolando Hernandez from Panama would arrange for the shipping of the cargos from Split to Iraq and Tehran. Mohammed then presented the details of the shipments and the target delivery dates, and fuck it was tight. Most of the arrangements had already been made. It was up to Alex to release the armaments from Russia but Anatoly had yet to pass the next package of documents to Mohammed, which was holding up the payment process. All eyes were on Anatoly, who had hooked a few looks at me during the conversation.

  Anatoly in effect was the man in control, probably more in control than Erik or Alex. Erik was keeping the Russian politicians well fed and onside, spinning webs of half-truths and misdirection, whilst Alex was struggling to keep the lower bottom feeders in the military system happy. Anatoly entered into the negotiation of monies to the family and funds to support and appease the financial demands from the interior who all wanted their slice of the cake. So, as Anatoly had the ace card up his sleeve it was all up for negotiation and the biddings were high. I don’t think it’s possible for any agent involved in espionage or any undercover work to be able to fully process the information at such meetings where the intensity of information being passed is so far off the scale of rational comprehension. Here I was, sitting in an apartment in Dubai witnessing probably one of the biggest illegal arms and information deals in history, with the top players all with their trousers around their ankles haggling out the details and finances. To say I had hit the jackpot would have been an understatement but this all sort of threw out the initial plans set by the Steering Group.

  That night was a long one, a lot of argument from Mohammed, but Anatoly was firm and more professional than his father or Alex. It was clear that Alex didn’t really have full control of the military, either in the supplying depots or in the higher echelons of Moscow KGB who were poised to leak information to the politicians, so he desperately needed the money from Ahmed to keep it all on track. However, it was Anatoly who wouldn’t release the technical information Mohammed wanted so badly for the money initially on offer, which was annoying Alex immensely. It was a circular argument. The Arabs were watching, observing and applying pressure ever so gently. There were other agendas at play here; no doubt the information that Anatoly had was more than craved for by Iran, and the Russians were underestimating their determination to acquire it, and who knows what threats Mohammed had on his head to seal this deal with the Russians or what other promises he had made back in Iran or to splinter groups as side deals. Iran was desperate at the time to press on with its Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, arms dealing was already good business, and the desire for the technology to build a nuclear weapon would be off the scale.

  Nasser sat as intrigued and as neutral as me. Erik eventually sat with me as the floor was given up to individual conversations. Cigarette smoke and air conditioning blended together to form a cold atmosphere of foggy minds lost in frustration and anticipation that went on for some hours. Erik wanted to make clear to me that Alex was under more pressure than anyone. Erik could only keep the politicians happy and turn a blind eye for specific periods of time and couldn’t risk unnecessary attention from the Lubyanka as his dealings were not always in harmony with Alex’s arrangements further down the food chain, so the money needed to flow on time.
This posed the question: would I talk to Anatoly? If so, I would be well rewarded.

  This is the very moment any agent working this deep can almost get sucked in, and the possibility of going from agent to double agent is born. Espionage and counter-espionage, lies and bribes, mixed with targets that have become personal friends embedded within a trusting family on the brink of becoming extraordinarily wealthy all off the back of stolen military intelligence but endorsed by paid-off government officials and a known KGB agent is nothing short of astonishing.

  We were all tired, and Evgeny wasn’t looking too well. I beckoned Alex and Mohammed to end the evening well and for us all to go and re-join the ladies who had gone very quiet out by the pool, lit only now by the underwater lights. I remember looking at Anatoly and I knew right there and then he was ripe for defection if only I could find a way to offer it to him. I now truly knew why he had attempted to end his life. He had been well groomed by his father and Alex and prepared for this job he now found himself in; it was years of planning to get a family member into a position where knowledge is power but more importantly money. I think the Arabs were annoyed, becoming impatient; I had overheard them speaking in Arabic about their frustrations. I offered them whisky and we all took in the night air together. Tomorrow we would resolve our differences. They liked me as the mediator, family but not family, a middle man who could hear the lies, the frustrations and the needs of both parties but was able to see a negotiated way forward.