The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

by John le Carré

  ‘You know Desert Storm, David?’ Primakov demands.

  Yes, Yevgeny, I know Desert Storm.

  ‘Saddam, he was a friend from me. You know what I mean by friend, David?’

  Yes, Yevgeny, I think in this context I know what you mean by friend.

  ‘Saddam, he telephones to me’ – indignation mounting – ‘“Yevgeny. Save my face. Get me out of Kuwait.”’

  He allows time for the significance of this request to sink in. Gradually it does. He is telling me that Saddam Hussein asked him to persuade George Bush Senior to let him pull his forces out of Kuwait with dignity – save his face – in which case there need be no war between the United States and Iraq.

  ‘So I go to Bush,’ he continues, striking angrily at the name. ‘This man is’ – tense discussion with the interpreter. If it is on the tip of Primakov’s tongue to use strong language to describe George Bush Senior, he restrains himself.

  ‘This Bush is not cooperative,’ he asserts reluctantly, and allows himself a grimace of indignation. ‘Therefore I come to England,’ he resumes. ‘To Britain. To your Thatcher. I come’ – another flurried consultation with his interpreter, and this time I catch the Russian word dacha, which is about the only one I know.

  ‘Chequers,’ says the interpreter.

  ‘So I come to Chequers.’ A hand flies up commanding our silence, but the entire table is dead silent already. ‘For one hour this woman lectures me. They want the war!’

  It is after midnight when my wife and I return down the Russian Embassy’s front doorsteps to England. Did Primakov ask me a single personal or political question during that whole long evening? Did we talk literature, spying, life? If we did, I have no memory of it. I remember only that he seemed to want me to share his frustration; to know that as a peacemaker and a reasonable human being, he had done his damnedest to stop a war, and that his efforts had foundered on what he regarded as the pig-headedness of two Western leaders.

  There is an ironic epilogue to this tale that I only recently caught up with. It’s a decade later. With the younger Bush in power and the invasion of Iraq again imminent, Primakov flies to Baghdad and urges his old friend Saddam to hand over whatever weapons of mass destruction he may or may not have to the United Nations for safekeeping. This time it’s not Bush Junior but Saddam who gives him the brush-off, on the grounds that the Americans would never dare do it to him: they had too many secrets in common.

  I had not seen Primakov or spoken to him since that dinner. No letter, no email had passed between us. Now and then an invitation trickled down at third hand: tell David any time he’s in Moscow, et cetera. But Putin’s Russia didn’t draw me, and I didn’t call him. Then, come the spring of 2015, I received a message that he was ailing and would I send him some more of my books to read. Since nobody said which books, my wife and I made up a great box of them in hardback. I signed each book, added a dedication, and we dispatched the box by courier to the address we’d been given, only to have it returned by Russian customs on the grounds that it contained too many books at one time. We broke the books up into smaller lots and presumably they made it through the lines, although no word came back.

  And now it never will, because Yevgeny Primakov died before he could read them. In his memoirs, I’m told, he writes kindly about me, which pleases me very much. As I write, I am trying to get my hands on the text. But this is Russia.

  How do I see that evening from this distance? I have long ago discovered that on the odd occasions when I come face to face with people of power, my critical faculties go out of the window and all I want to do is be there, listen and watch. To Primakov, I was an evening’s curiosity, a bit of time out, but also, as I like to think, a chance to speak from the heart to a writer whose work had rung bells with him.

  Vadim Bakatin had only agreed to talk to me as a favour to a friend, but once again I like to think I provided him with an opportunity to speak as he felt. People at the epicentre, in my limited experience of the breed, have little idea of what’s going on around them. The fact that they are themselves the epicentre makes it all the harder. It took an American visitor to Moscow to ask Primakov which character in my books he related to:

  ‘Why, George Smiley of course!’

  Oldrich Cerný should in no way be compared with either Bakatin or Primakov, both professed communists of their day. In 1993, four years after the Berlin Wall came down, Oldrich Cerný – Olda to his friends – took over the Czech foreign intelligence service and, at the behest of his old friend and fellow dissident, Václav Havel, set about turning it into a place fit for habitation by the Western spy community. Over the five years in which he ran it, he struck up a close relationship with Britain’s MI6, notably with Richard Dearlove, who later became its Chief under Tony Blair. Quite soon after Cerný’s retirement from the post, I visited him in Prague and we spent a couple of days together, now in his tiny apartment with Helena, his companion of many years, and now out and about in one of the city’s many cellar bars, drinking Scotch at scrubbed pine tables.

  Before getting the job, Cerný, like Vadim Bakatin, knew nothing whatever of intelligence work which, as Havel explained, was why he had chosen him. Once he took it over, he couldn’t believe what he had walked into:

  ‘The bastards didn’t know the fucking Cold War was over,’ he exclaimed between gusts of laughter.

  Few foreigners can swear convincingly in English, but Cerný was the exception. He had studied at Newcastle on a grant awarded him during the Prague Spring, so perhaps that’s where he learned the art. On his return to a country once again under Russia’s heel, he translated children’s books by day and wrote anonymous dissident tracts by night.

  ‘We had guys spying on Germany!’ he went on incredulously. ‘In nineteen-fucking-ninety-three! We had guys out in the street with truncheons looking for priests and anti-Party elements they could beat the shit out of! “Listen,” I told them. “We don’t do that stuff any more. We’re a fucking democracy!”’

  If Cerný talked with the exuberance of a man released, he had every right to. He was an anti-communist by nature and by birth. His father, a wartime Czech resistance fighter, had been imprisoned in Buchenwald by the Nazis, then given twenty years for treason by the communists. One of his earliest memories was seeing his father’s coffin being dumped on the family doorstep by the prison goons.

  Little wonder then that Cerný the writer, dramatist, translator and graduate in English Literature should have waged a lifelong battle against political tyranny; or that he was repeatedly hauled in for interrogation by the KGB and Czech intelligence who, having failed to recruit him, persecuted him instead.

  And it is interesting that, for all his protestations of being hopelessly ill-equipped to take over his country’s spies after its split with Slovakia, he held the job down for five years, retired with distinction, went on to direct a human rights foundation established by his friend Havel, and set up his own Security Studies think-tank that, fifteen years later and three years after his death, flourishes undiminished.

  In London, shortly before Cerný’s death, I met the ageing Václav Havel at a private luncheon given by the Czech Ambassador. Tired and visibly ill, he sat alone and largely silent. Those who knew him best, knew to leave him to himself. Timidly, I approached him and mentioned Cerný’s name. I said I had had a good time with him in Prague. Suddenly he brightened:

  ‘Then you were lucky,’ he said, and sat smiling for a while.

  21

  Among the Ingush

  I had heard of Issa Kostoev, but if you’re under fifty you probably won’t have done. He was the Russian police officer in charge of Crimes of Special Importance who in 1990 artfully coaxed a confession from the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, a Ukrainian engineer with fifty-three victims to his name. Today, Kostoev is a tireless and outspoken member of the Russian parliament, urging greater respect and citize
ns’ rights for the people of the North Caucasus, and particularly for his own people, the Ingush, whose fate he feels is unknown to the wider world.

  He was barely born when Stalin declared all Chechen and Ingush to be criminals for collaborating with the German invader – a thing they had emphatically not done. The entire Ingush nation – his mother included – was forcibly deported to slave-labour camps in Kazakhstan. One of his earliest childhood memories is watching Russian guards on horseback whipping his mother for gleaning corn. The Ingush, he says darkly, hate all invaders equally. Even when Stalin died and they were grudgingly allowed home, they found their houses given over to the Ossetians, a tribe of Christianized usurpers from south of the mountains, and Stalin’s former henchmen. But what angers him most is the racial discrimination of the average Russian towards his people.

  ‘I’m a Russian nigger,’ he insists, yanking furiously at his Asian nose and ears. ‘I can be arrested in the Moscow streets any time, just for having these!’ Then without apology he changes metaphors, claiming that the Ingush are Russia’s Palestinians: ‘First they kick us out of our towns and villages, then they hate us for surviving.’

  He tells me he will get a group of men together and take me to Ingushetia, why not? It’s a spontaneous invitation but, as I quickly realize, a genuine one. We will explore the glories of the landscape together, we will meet the people of Ingushetia, and I will judge for myself. And while my head is still reeling, I reply that I am honoured, and nothing would give me greater pleasure, and we shake hands on it then and there. The year is 1993.

  All the best interrogators have a certain way with them, some personal characteristic they have learned to turn into a weapon of persuasion. Some present themselves as the soul of sweet reason, others strive to scare or unsettle; others to overwhelm you with their frankness and charm. But big, very tough, utterly inconsolable Issa Kostoev, from the moment you meet him, instils in you an urge to please. Nothing you can say or do, it seems, will dispel the air of perpetual sadness that accompanies his kind, elderly smile.

  ‘And Chikatilo?’ I ask him. ‘What was your moment of breakthrough?’

  A half-lowering of the heavy eyelids, a small sigh. ‘The reek of his breath,’ he replies, after a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Chikatilo ate the private parts of his victims. Over time it affected his digestion.’

  A two-way radio crackles. We are sitting head to head in the permanent dusk of the upper floor of a rickety old building in Moscow with the curtains drawn. Armed men knock, enter, exchange a word, go out again. Are they cops? Ingush patriots? Are we in an office or a safe house? And yes, he’s right: I am among exiles. The stern young woman who is introduced to me only as ‘the Prosecutor’ could as well be one of Salah Tamari’s fighters in Sidon or Beirut. The wheezing photocopier, the ancient typewriter, the half-eaten sandwiches, the overflowing ashtrays and tins of warm Coke are the mandatory furnishings of a Palestinian freedom fighter’s tenuous existence. So is the enormous pistol Kostoev keeps strapped to his rump, except for the times when he slides it into his groin for greater comfort.

  I was interested in the Ingush partly because, as Kostoev rightly said, nobody in the Western world seemed to have heard of them: my American literary agent even asked me whether I had invented them. But mainly I was interested because on my travels I had become drawn to the fate of subject nations after the end of the Cold War. It was the same curiosity that led me at different times to Kenya, Congo, Hong Kong and Panama. In the early nineties the future of the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus was still on the scales. Would the Cold War ‘spheres of interest’ endure? With Russians freed from the chains of Bolshevism, might their southern dependencies wish to be free of Russia? And if so, will their age-old wars with the Bear be resumed?

  The short answer, as we now know, is yes, they would indeed be resumed, and at frightful cost. But at the time of my conversation with Kostoev, the Asian republics’ cry for independence was deafening and nobody seemed to foresee – or, if they did, to care – that the price of suppression might be the radicalization of millions of moderate Muslims.

  I had planned to set my new novel in Chechnya, but now I’d met Kostoev I preferred the cause of the Ingush next door, whose little country had been given away in their absence. Back home in Cornwall, I set about preparing for our promised trip. I applied for a visa and, with Kostoev’s support, got one. From the sports shop in Penzance I bought a rucksack and, surprisingly, a money-belt, in anticipation of my trip. I tried to get a little fitter so that I wouldn’t disgrace myself in the highest mountains in Europe. I contacted British academics who specialized in Russia’s Muslim communities, and discovered, as you always seem to when you start to delve, that there was an international community of impassioned scholars who talked and breathed nothing but the North Caucasus. I became its temporary and very junior member. I cultivated expatriate Chechens and Ingush in Europe, and picked their brains.

  For reasons that I didn’t enquire into, but could well understand, Kostoev preferred to communicate through non-Caucasian intermediaries. He said I should be sure to provide myself with plenty of American cigarettes and a few trinkets. He recommended a cheap wristwatch, gold plated, a Zippo cigarette lighter or two, and a couple of ballpoint pens with metal cases. These were for the likelihood that our train southward was stopped by bandits. They were decent bandits, Kostoev insisted, and they didn’t want to kill anyone. It was just that they felt they had a right to exact a charge from anyone passing through their territory.

  He had reduced our bodyguard to six. Six would be plenty. I bought the trinkets and the Zippos and added them to my rucksack. Forty-eight hours before I was due to depart for Moscow, and thence for Nazran, our intermediary phoned to say the trip had been called off. The ‘appropriate authorities’ could not be responsible for my safe passage and wished me not to come until things had settled down. Which authorities I never knew, but when I turned on the evening news a couple of days later I had reason to be grateful to them. The Red Army had launched a massive land and air attack on Chechnya, and neighbouring Ingushetia looked like being dragged into the war.

  Fifteen years on, when I came to write A Most Wanted Man, I chose a Chechen for my innocent young Russian Muslim caught up in the so-called war on terror. And I called him Issa, after Issa Kostoev.

  22

  Joseph Brodsky’s prize

  Autumn 1987, a sunny day. My wife and I are having lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead. Our one guest is Joseph Brodsky: Russian exile, former Soviet political prisoner, poet and to his many admirers the very soul of Russia. We have known Joseph off and on over a few years, but to be truthful we’re not quite sure why we’ve been recruited to entertain him today.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t on any account let him drink or smoke,’ his London hostess, a lady of wide cultural connection, had warned. Despite recurrent heart problems, he was liable to do both. I said I would do my best but that, from the little I knew of Joseph, he would do whatever he wanted.

  Joseph was not always an easy conversation partner, but over lunch he was unusually bonny, thanks not least to several large Black Label whiskies, consumed over my wife’s gentle protests, and several cigarettes, washed down with bird-like sips of chicken noodle soup.

  Literary people seldom, in my experience, have much to say to one another beyond grousing about agents, publishers and readers – or certainly not to me – and it’s hard for me in retrospect to imagine what we talked about, since the gap between us could scarcely have been wider. I had read his poems, but felt I needed the handbook. I had delighted in his essays – particularly the one on Leningrad, where he was imprisoned – and was moved by his adoration of the late Akhmatova. But if I had to guess, I would say he hadn’t read a word I had written, and that he felt no obligation to.

  Yet somehow we were having a jolly time until Joseph’s hostess, a tall, elegant woman, appeared in the
doorway looking severe. My first thought was that, having run an eye over the bottles on our table and the clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over it, she was about to rebuke us for allowing Joseph to break loose. I quickly realized that she was trying to contain her excitement.

  ‘Joseph,’ she said breathlessly. ‘You have won the prize.’

  Long silence while Joseph draws on his cigarette and scowls into the smoke.

  ‘What prize?’ he growls.

  ‘Joseph, you have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.’

  Joseph’s hand closes quickly over his mouth as if to suppress something shocking it’s about to say. He appeals to me with his eyes as if for help: as well he might, because neither my wife nor I had the smallest notion that he was in the running for the Nobel, let alone that today was the day of the announcement.

  I ask his hostess the obvious question:

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because we have Scandinavian journalists on the doorstep now, Joseph, and they wish to congratulate you, and interview you. Joseph!’

  Joseph’s pained eyes are still appealing to me. Do something, they seem to be saying. Get me out of this. I turn again to his hostess:

  ‘Maybe the Scandinavian journalists are interviewing everybody on the shortlist. Not just the winner. All of them.’

  There is a public telephone in the corridor. His hostess knows that Joseph’s American publisher, Roger Straus, has flown to London to be on hand for this moment. A woman of decision, she promptly rings his hotel and asks for him. When she rings off, she is smiling.

  ‘You must come home now, Joseph,’ she says gently, and touches his arm.

  Joseph takes a last loving pull of his Scotch and with painful slowness rises to his feet. He embraces his hostess and receives her congratulations. My wife and I add ours. The four of us stand on the sunny pavement. Joseph and I are face to face. For a moment I feel I am the prisoner’s friend before he is taken down to the cells of Leningrad. With Russian impetuosity, he throws his arms round me, then with his hands on my shoulders, shoves me back and lets me see the tears forming in his eyes.