‘Fair enough,’ he replied. ‘I’ll get on to it.’
And so it all came to pass, and fortunately – from my point of view and the publisher’s, but not of my family – the rain it raineth every day. I would write up about 7,000 words a day in longhand, then post them to Barbara, my secretary, in London, who typed them up each day and sent a copy to me and a copy to Dennis. We would then confer on the telephone. So the 70,000-word book was completed in ten days.
I remember saying at the end of all this: ‘It’s your life, Dennis. Are you sure I’ve got things right?’ He replied: ‘Well, Denise (his daughter) has read it and she says it’s fine.’ So I was never quite sure whether Dennis had read it at all.
The visit to Coalisland, a republican redoubt close to the Irish border, was quite dramatic. Dennis was taking me along to a snooker exhibition he was giving, and we were stopped several times on the way, and on the way back, by British troops, who sometimes seemed to emerge from bushes at the side of the road, with bits of the shrubbery still clinging to their uniforms. Dennis’s snooker cue in its metal case attracted special attention. In the hall itself, Dennis introduced me as the editor of The Observer. We were both surprised when this news was greeted with prolonged cheering. Dennis then whispered: ‘They think you’re the editor of the Coalisland Observer!’
• • •
Writing Kasparov’s book involved several visits to Moscow. I had first been there in 1970 on an inaugural flight by JAL, the Japanese airline, from London to Tokyo via Moscow. On the way back we stopped for a few days in Moscow. I had been reading two books on the journey: Inside Russia Today by John Gunther and a book on the Beatles by Hunter Davies. As we said goodbye to our Russian escorts, one of them whispered to me, asking if I could leave her the book I had been reading. I slipped her the Gunther, thinking she would want to read an outsider’s picture of her country. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the other one.’ So I gave her the Beatles book.
My action in passing her a Western book on the airport runway was spotted by our minder. As a result, I was whisked away for questioning in a special room after being strip-searched. Back at the office a couple of days later, our lunch guest was John le Carré in his guise as David Cornwell. At lunch, when I told the story of being held by the KGB, le Carré peppered me with questions: ‘How big was the room? Was there a window? What colour were the walls? Were there any pictures on the walls?’
• • •
When I was introduced to Kasparov and his English manager, Andrew Page, I had a question for them. I had heard that Dominic Lawson, an acknowledged expert on chess, had been lined up for the job, so why hadn’t this happened?
‘Garry didn’t get on with him,’ said Page. ‘He felt Lawson was telling him about chess.’
Then I said to both of them: ‘I really don’t know much about chess, you know.’
Kasparov replied in his guttural voice, tapping his forehead: ‘Not to worry, Mr Trelford. I know about chess.’
Page then said:
Garry is very impressed that someone of your standing as an editor is prepared to help him with this. He knows it will be intelligently written. Besides, the book won’t be all about chess. It will be about his private life as well. Did you know that he has been invited to be a judge of the Miss World contest?
‘Yes,’ said Garry. ‘Why do you think they asked me to do that?’
‘Well, Garry,’ I replied, ‘maybe they think you’re a world champion at that game too.’
They both laughed and Kasparov put his arm round my shoulder: ‘Donald, I think we will get on.’
• • •
It was, of course, an amazing assignment, following the world champion to tournaments around Europe, Moscow, St Petersburg and Dubai, seeing all the matches close up. When I went to see him in Moscow I would often be met by a limousine at the aircraft steps and be borne off to see Kasparov without the need to show a passport or a visa. It was a far cry from being strip-searched by the KGB.
I soon became aware of the tense political atmosphere surrounding the game. Garry was campaigning for the overthrow of Florencio Campomanes, the Filipino head of FIDE, the world governing body, whom he suspected of being in league with (and very possibly in the pay of) the Russians. There would be conspiratorial meetings late at night in his hotel room at tournaments as he sought support from other grandmasters to have the FIDE chief removed.
Campomanes had halted his first world championship bid against the holder, Anatoly Karpov, in 1984 after Garry had recovered with an astonishing effort of will from a five-nil deficit (the winner needed to reach six points) to three to five, claiming that the players were exhausted – it was already the longest chess match in history. But in fact it was Karpov who had been fought to a standstill and the decision to stop the match had been made at the behest of the Russians to save their man. Karpov, from an uncomplicated Slavic background, was much preferred by the officials as their champion to the maverick and unpredictable Kasparov, who came from Azerbaijan, was half-Jewish and half-Armenian.
Garry was sure that the Russian officials had plotted to prevent him beating Karpov and had thrown every kind of obstacle in his way. In the rematch, however, Kasparov had taken the title at the age of twenty-two, but still felt himself to be under siege. It was a time of massive change in the Soviet Union, with Gorbachev struggling to introduce his perestroika reforms, so I presented Kasparov as the champion of change and Karpov as the representative of the old guard in the Kremlin.
Kasparov was wary of the association with Gorbachev, preferring Boris Yeltsin. This baffled me because Gorbachev seemed to be the more intelligent man, with a clear reforming agenda, whereas Yeltsin had never shaken off his reputation as a drinker. When I asked Kasparov about this, he said: ‘They are both sitting on the fence. On one side is Communism, on the other side is democracy. Gorbachev’s legs are still on the Communist side, while Yeltsin’s legs are dangling on the democratic side.’
I remember an assembly of the International Press Institute in Moscow, where I sat with David English, the long-serving editor of the Daily Mail, while we watched Yeltsin make the opening address. His glass was being constantly refreshed with what we were meant to think was water. But David and I were seated in a position where we could peep round the screen at the edge of the stage and could plainly see the lackey who brought the ‘water’ on stage refilling the glasses from a bottle of Stolichnaya.
• • •
It was fascinating to watch how diligently Kasparov prepared for all his matches, even if they were relatively unimportant exhibitions. Once, I remember, Garry was due to play the whole Swiss team in Zurich in what is known as a ‘simul’, or simultaneous group of matches, where the grandmaster takes on several boards at once. Garry was concerned about the Swiss champion, who had recently beaten a Soviet grandmaster. So he kept playing and replaying the key game on his computer until we had to tell him it was time for dinner.
He finished soon after and explained that he had found a counter to the Swiss player’s attack that the Soviet grandmaster had missed. So the next day he led the Swiss champion into replaying that game, making the same moves that the Soviet player had used. His opponent must have thought it was his birthday, being invited to revisit the scene of his greatest triumph. That was the view in the grandmasters’ room, where all the moves are carefully analysed. They couldn’t understand why Kasparov was falling into the same trap. It was as if he was being pulled into a quagmire. Then, suddenly, in a flurry of moves, it was all over and Kasparov had won.
At a tournament in Brussels, which I watched in the grandmasters’ room so that I could follow what was going on, the general verdict was that the game was heading for an inevitable draw. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Kasparov found a way to win. I went up in the lift to his hotel room and plucked up the courage to ask: ‘For how many moves had you been preparing that coup de grâce?’ ‘Thirteen,’ he replied.
Kasparov introduced me to his mentor, Mikha
il Botvinnik, who had been world champion throughout the post-war years. A tall man with a kindly countenance behind heavy glasses, he reminded me a bit of his fellow countryman, the cellist Rostropovich, but with a much calmer demeanour. When we talked, he said he had perfected a computer programme that would solve the problems of the Russian economy, but he couldn’t get the authorities to listen.
• • •
Garry took me to Baku, a windy city on the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake, to meet his formidable mother, Klara, who had been the driving force in his life after his father had died of cancer at the age of thirty-nine, when he was seven. Klara was a charming and very attractive woman with a powerful aura around her. His father had been an engineer from a family of musicians. Garry later had to escape from Baku, never to return, when the newly independent Azerbaijani government, having split with Moscow, started a pogrom against ethnic Armenians. Kasparov hired a Tupulov airliner to carry his family and friends out of the country.
This was a shattering blow to Kasparov, for his roots were in Baku and he used to retreat there for solace after his global travels. Parts of the city and neighbouring places like Sheki and Shemakha are like relics from Omar Khayam’s world of A Thousand and One Nights, with donkeys pottering along the streets and women in highly coloured Azerbaijani headscarves drawing water from the well.
On my last night in Baku, Garry had said to me: ‘Tonight, Donald, we have a party under our hotel. The heads of the KGB and the Communist Party for Azerbaijan will be there.’ I asked: ‘Why is the party under our hotel, Garry, and not in the hotel?’ He replied frankly: ‘Because we don’t want everyone to see how some of us live.’
The party started in the sauna bath, then we all had a plunge and wrapped ourselves in huge white towels which we kept on for the banquet that followed. We went into a room which had a vast number of trestle tables, all groaning with the weight of Caspian delicacies: red and black caviar, beans with walnuts, pickled tomatoes and eggplants stuffed with herbs and garlic, smoked sturgeon and herrings, beef tongue, crab salad, pancakes with fish, meat and herbs inside, watercress, parsley, shalik or fish on a spit. We served ourselves then sat round a long table in our towels, looking like Roman senators.
The meal was interrupted by a constant stream of vodka toasts, all in Russian, but interpreters were sprinkled around the table so that the non-Russians present could keep up. Kasparov told me that he had always been puzzled by the habit in Britain of pouring glasses of vodka then putting the stopper back in the bottle, which never happened in Russia. Eventually there was a toast to me as their distinguished British visitor – at least, it was supposed to be to me, but the speaker added, rather surprisingly: ‘And to Margaret Thatcher, greatest British Prime Minister since Churchill.’
I was a bit stunned by this and replied: ‘Mrs Thatcher may be your favourite British Prime Minister, but she isn’t mine, and I am certainly not her favourite newspaper editor.’ There was general amusement at this, so I was encouraged to add: ‘And I have news for you people. Margaret Thatcher isn’t a Communist.’ This was greeted at first in total silence, then a lonevoice came from along the table (afterwards I learned that it belonged to Kasparov’s uncle, Leonid, a composer): ‘Donald, we have news for you, too. Neither are we!’
At this the whole room erupted with applause and laughter. That this could happen in the presence of the local heads of the KBG and the Communist Party suggested to me that Communism in the Soviet Union was finished, despite Gorbachev’s best efforts to keep a reformed version going. When I got back to The Observer in London, I told my foreign experts: ‘By the way, Communism is finished in Russia,’ and relayed the story. They were sceptical and one of them, Mark Frankland, had the cheek to say, jokingly: ‘Leave the politics to us, Donald. You stick to snooker.’ But, of course, it wasn’t long before I was shown to be right.
• • •
One day, when he was in London, I took Garry to lunch with Tiny Rowland at Cheapside. The two giant egos eyed each other warily. Finally, Tiny said: ‘If you can put me in touch with the man who calls the shots in Russia’s platinum business, I will pay one million pounds into any account of yours anywhere in the world.’
Kasparov was quite excited by this proposition and as soon as we got back into my office car he was on the telephone to Moscow to start finding out the name of the apparatchik who could make his fortune. Whether he ever got anywhere with this quest I never heard.
• • •
Andrew Page asked me to lay on a dinner at Zen, the Mayfair restaurant, for Garry to meet some celebrities. He particularly asked to meet Selina Scott, who had become a star with the arrival of breakfast television. At the dinner, however, he hardly addressed a word to her, apparently out of shyness, and as the evening went on he looked increasingly disgruntled. I put this down to the fact that nobody was talking about him. I had noticed before that he couldn’t stand it if any of us started talking about a subject that excluded him.
His massive ego, which almost matched his IQ, couldn’t cope with being ignored – a childish trait common, I gather, in people who had been infant prodigies in music or mathematics as well as chess. The talent for all these activities is said to come from the same specialised area of the cortex in the brain. Their personalities can become distorted as they grow up through lack of contact with other children and by the obsessive nursing of their particular talent to the exclusion of normal everyday life.
• • •
In order to complete the book, I had to find reasons for visiting Moscow that also suited The Observer. One of these was the publication of Andrei Gromyko’s memoirs, which I had bought for serialisation in the paper, and on the strength of that sought an interview with the veteran diplomat.
Gromyko was one of the most important Soviet figures in the Cold War period, having served as Foreign Minister, ambassador to the United Nations, to the United States, to Cuba and to Britain. Gorbachev had finally given him the ceremonial role of head of state. Having been born eight years before the revolution in the time of the Tsars, Gromyko had served under Stalin, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev.
I managed to secure the interview and he invited me to dinner in his dacha outside Moscow. The visit was filmed for the BBC’s Newsnight programme. At dinner, attended by his Polish wife, no alcohol was served. Gromyko explained that when he was a boy, he and some friends had dug up an illicit whisky still in a field. After drinking from it, he was taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped. He had never drunk a drop of alcohol since. He told me that once, when as an ambassador he was greeting guests at diplomatic receptions, the smell from the tray of drinks nearby almost made him sick.
I asked him about the level of drinking in the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev had forlornly tried to halt, and I dared to ask whether it was true that Brezhnev had been an alcoholic. He paused for a while, staring at me closely, then took off his shoe and banged it on the table, shouting: ‘Da, da, da!’ (‘Yes, yes, yes!’) This was a deliberate inversion of his regular use of the word ‘Nyet’ to impose a Soviet veto at the United Security Council, where he had become known as ‘Mr No’.
Afterwards we went for a walk in his garden to talk about world affairs. This appeared in The Observer over a long feature headlined: ‘A Walk in the Woods with Gromyko’, with a picture showing our two backs in heavy overcoats. Gromyko had been involved in every attempted global peace initiative since the Second World War and was a leading figure in the move towards détente between the Soviet Union and the United States. I had the feeling that, if asked, he could have listed the details of every arms agreement for the past half-century.
• • •
What I was very keen to achieve was getting an accredited Observer correspondent back into Moscow. Mark Frankland had been expelled as part of a tit-for-tat exercise in response to Britain’s expulsion of a whole bunch of Soviet spies who worked on Highgate Hill. I didn’t want to approach the press depart
ment at the Soviet Foreign Office because they would just follow orders and had no power to change them. I needed access to a more senior FO figure, which Kasparov helped me to find.
When I turned up at the senior apparatchik’s office, the prospects did not look good. It didn’t help that he spoke no English, or pretended not to. He was a huge bear of a man who sat behind an even bigger and distant desk. When I finally got him to understand that I was talking about The Observer, he suddenly came alive, but not in a good way.
He kept muttering, time and again while shaking his head: ‘Observer, Nora Beloff, Observer, Nora Beloff,’ as if he were recalling some great sadness in his life. Nora had recently driven through the country to report on the plight of Soviet Jews and had caused great annoyance to the Russians, mainly by what she wrote, but also by the way she had lectured them.
• • •
Nora Beloff had been The Observer’s long-time political correspondent and became a bit of a legend. She had joined the paper in Paris in David Astor’s early days as editor, having worked in the Foreign Office intelligence department during the war and then for The Economist. She was a member of the distinguished intellectual family of Beloffs. Her brother was Max, later Lord Beloff, and her sister had married a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. Nora, not to put too fine a point on it, was an awkward customer.
When Mark Arnold-Forster had sent a story to The Observer from Paris in 1963, on the Saturday before General de Gaulle’s historic Monday press conference, in which he vetoed Britain’s entry to the Common Market, he had forecast this outcome correctly. He had received confirmation from a lone junior French official in an otherwise deserted President’s office. Nora had persuaded David Astor that this could not possibly be true, so The Observer had spiked a major scoop. Arnold-Forster resigned in protest and went back to The Guardian, where he had started.
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