Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  Among them was Leonid Krasov. He worked as a journalist for Tass and within weeks of his arrival he had established contacts in Fleet Street, government departments, political parties and the trades unions. With his fluency in English and his undoubted charm (how unlike our image of a communist he was), he rapidly became a popular figure in London.

  In those first months of his posting we kept a persistent eye on him. He paid routine visits to the Russian embassy but we would have been surprised if he hadn’t. He did not appear to spend much time there (a good sign); he certainly wasn’t friendly with any of the staff, diplomatic or KGB (even better). The evidence suggested that we had to take him for what he said he was, a working journalist posted to London.

  I met the diminutive Russian at a party a year after Stalingrad. We had a drink together one evening a week or two later and found we got on. He was the first Russian I had ever got to know and I enjoyed his company. His lugubrious view of the world amused me. I declared this relationship to Corless, who saw it as a possible investment in the future.

  ‘Cultivate him,’ he said. ‘You never know when a friendly Soviet may come in useful, nor what you might learn from him. But don’t forget, he’s not only Russian, he’s Soviet, whatever he may say to the contrary.’

  I was left to work out the difference for myself.

  In the months after the Yalta Conference, a group within SOVINT produced a report that showed how the Soviet Union could well become our enemy once the present hostilities ceased. This upset the Russian desk at the Foreign Office, who sat on the report and successfully prevented its official circulation. (Guy Benton denied a hand in this but few of us believed him.) A number of carbon copies did the rounds and unofficially the report had its converts. Corless was one of them.

  ‘We’re keeping an eye on the Soviets in London,’ he warned. ‘Even if they appear friendly, they probably aren’t. That includes Krasov.’

  I argued that it was hard to see Krasov working against us, but Corless showed me how the inveterate party-goer, friend of politicians, journalists and the military, the atypical communist, could pick up gossip in the normal course of his journalistic activities which, when shipped back to Moscow for analysis, might yield unexpected clues to the whereabouts of senior military personnel or to the direction of political thinking within the Government. That, in turn, might reveal information about British military intentions or our national political temper. Both had a value to a potential enemy.

  I kept a close eye on Krasov but remained unconvinced. We ate our way through the best London restaurants (I was continually astonished at his extraordinary appetite), we met at parties where, usually late in the evening, Krasov could be persuaded to play American popular songs on the piano. His great love was Fats Waller, of whom he did a hilarious and much requested imitation.

  Women adored him. At parties he would be surrounded by them; when we met for dinner, he would often have to make a telephone call before dessert to confirm the assignation he had set up for when our dinner ended, though he never talked about his conquests.

  One night a month or two after the war ended, Krasov arrived uninvited at my flat in Victoria. He was already well oiled and he got drunker as the evening progressed. He insisted I drink with him, which I did with great reluctance. He rambled on about his disillusion with the Soviet Union, his fears for the future, how communism was taking the wrong path, how the idealism of his youth had no place any more. How could he return to a Russia that had betrayed its own revolutionary ideals? What was to become of him? For one awful moment I thought he might be going to cry.

  Suffering from a terrible hangover, I reported this conversation to Corless and gave it my own gloss. Was this a sign that Krasov was out of sorts with his own side? Was he warming us up because he wanted to work for us? Corless dismissed my optimism.

  ‘He’s Russian,’ he said. ‘The Russians are unstable. He’s acting in the national character, not out of it.’ The drunkenness, he maintained, was as much an illusion as his disillusion was a disguise. The hammering in my head made it all feel horribly real to me, though I couldn’t tell Corless that.

  ‘Our relations with the Soviets are cooling,’ Corless said. ‘Krasov knows that. He’s unhappy about it. He’s letting his feelings show. Don’t be taken in. Keep him in your sights. Stay friendly with him. He may tell us something yet.’

  A week or two later, in an unusual moment of intimacy prompted by a large glass of my best malt, Krasov opened his heart and poured out his troubles to me. The difference was that this time he was more or less sober.

  He was, he explained, ‘old London hand’. The new regime of hardline purists at the embassy feared the dangers of contamination from too close an association with decadent bourgeois. Everyone who had been stationed in London longer than six months, and that included the ambassador and the head of the news agency, was under surveillance. The world was not moving in a direction Krasov liked or understood. How he yearned for the old days and the camaraderie of the war years. Life had been so much simpler then. It was a lament I was getting used to.

  ‘Remember those years in war? Remember parties after Stalingrad? There was strong friendship between our countries then. Now we are being forced to be enemies. It is not what I like.’

  How politics ruins the lives of ordinary people, we agreed. If only the politicians could leave us all alone, how much better a place the world would be.

  ‘If this is what peace brings us,’ he added gloomily, ‘I prefer certainties of war.’

  I was his friend, he said. His good English friend. In many ways he felt we were alike. Surely I must understand what he meant? The Soviet Union he had left to come to London was being replaced by a Soviet Union he did not recognize, a world in which he believed he had no part, where he was ‘fish out of water’. The purity of the Soviet ideal had been buried in the murky politics of survival and ambition. The revolutionaries had gone, the bureaucrats had won. He was an old revolutionary with nothing to fight for, his ideals had been stolen by those who had inherited the world he had helped to make. It was the long and bitter lament of a displaced man.

  When he talked like this, was Krasov putting on an act, or was he genuine? After he’d gone, I wrote down what he had said and analysed it. Krasov was giving me a coded message, I quickly concluded, whose cipher needed no decrypt. He was afraid to return home. He wanted to stay in London. I was to help him achieve this because I was his friend.

  Weeks passed. The Department was deeply involved in the processing of Peter information. I saw Krasov for irregular but punishing drinking sessions, often in the company of his English friends. It all seemed harmless enough in its way (except for the morning after when I would always swear ‘never again’), and I hardly bothered to tell Corless about my meetings with him.

  Then, on the evening I introduced him to Danny Stevens, he told us that the London interlude was finally over, and that he had been recalled to Moscow. He was being watched, he said, to make sure he didn’t weaken in the last few days and try to stay.

  ‘So ridiculous. What would I stay for?’

  He put a brave face on his by now very uncertain future but I sensed his heart wasn’t in it. He came for a drink in my flat the following night and I tried to argue him out of returning. I genuinely feared for his safety when he got back and told him so. He wouldn’t listen. He was ‘great survivor’, he said. Moscow was where he belonged. The old rebel had vanished. In his place I saw a compromising Krasov whom I didn’t like because it didn’t fit what I knew.

  His friends organized a series of farewell parties. I saw him repeatedly but never to talk to alone. It was as if he was deliberately staying out of reach.

  ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ he said. ‘We will meet soon. We will talk one last time, I promise.’

  He didn’t keep his promise because he disappeared. For three days I heard nothing. Then Danny telephoned me from Cambridge to say Krasov was with him (what the hell was he doing in
Cambridge of all places?) and he was on the run from his own people. He’d put Krasov up for the night but now the little Russian had got it into his head that the vultures were circling the Fens and if he stayed any longer, he’d be carrion.

  ‘I told him vultures have never been spotted in the Fens,’ Danny said. ‘But I don’t think I convinced him.’

  Why did he imagine London was safer than Cambridge? I asked. Danny couldn’t say. He was putting Krasov on the King’s Cross train and begged me to be there to meet him.

  The code was easy and I made the translation I was sure that Krasov wanted me to make. He had decided not to return to Moscow and now he wanted protection from his own side as a prelude to coming over. That was why he wanted me to meet him. It was an opportunity not to be missed. I arrived at King’s Cross twenty minutes early, and spent the time prowling around on the lookout for obvious Russians. If there were any there, I didn’t spot them.

  *

  Krasov answered all the Saturday contacts, one visit and two telephone calls. On Sunday morning he said he had slept well and was listening to a concert of Russian music on the wireless. I could hear it in the background as we talked, a martial chorus from Borodin’s Prince Igor. He was in reasonable spirits when I went to the flat before lunch. By the afternoon, his mood had changed, and he was once more full of doubts about himself and his future.

  ‘If you’re afraid to go back to Moscow,’ I said, taking the plunge, ‘why not stay put? You’ve got friends. We could help you make a new life here. You’d be safe.’

  ‘Why would you British want me?’ he said. ‘I have nothing to offer. No secrets, no expertise. I am journalist, not diplomat.’

  I tried to argue him out of this position. I was sure, I said, that he had information we would find of value.

  ‘I am Russian,’ he said. ‘Is not easy choice for me to stay here. How can I live for rest of my life outside my country? I have seen White Russians here, they are pathetic, dreaming of world that never existed, living without money, full of illusions, telling themselves that soon communist world will fall to pieces and then they will return to former lives in glory. I am not delusional. I cannot live in dreamland. Clock cannot be put back. I am not one of these lost people.’

  ‘Then what are you?’ I asked, trying to wrench him back to the point.

  ‘What indeed, my friend? What indeed? That is what I ask myself all days of my life.’

  The argument was circular. He did not want to return to Russia because he was afraid he would be killed, though he refused to say why. He did not want to stay in England because he could not face a life of exile, and anyway he had nothing to offer the British. Then the fatalism surfaced again.

  ‘It is pointless, this pretending. There is no escape. They will find me, they will kill me. That much is certain. It was bad mistake to go to Cambridge. I will telephone Russian embassy now. I will give myself up.’

  I tried vainly to argue with him. He wouldn’t listen. No need to telephone, he said. His people were probably waiting outside now in the square. All he had to do was open the door. What did it matter? His life was over. I should leave him to his fate.

  I lost my temper.

  ‘For God’s sake, Leo. What’s keeping you? You’re free to walk out of here whenever you like. No one’s stopping you. So why not do it? Why not give your people the pleasure of taking you back to Moscow and putting a bullet through your head?’

  He looked at me, hurt and disappointed.

  ‘That is first time you shout at me, Monty.’

  I felt guilty at once. I was angry at his indecision and impatient of his justifiable reasons for it.

  ‘You’re driving me to it, Leo. I can’t interpret your wishes. I don’t know what you want me to do. If you don’t want me to help you stay here, say so and I’ll go. All you’ve got to do is make up your mind.’

  We looked at each other in silence. Then he held my arm.

  ‘I am sorry, my friend,’ he said. ‘I am frightened. That is it. I am frightened of what they do to me when they find me. Forgive me.’

  ‘Keep your head down here and they won’t find you. I’ll see to that,’ I said rashly.

  ‘I wish I could believe that. They have eyes everywhere,’ Krasov said.

  I wanted to hit him. ‘For God’s sake, Leo.’

  ‘You are good man, Monty. But you will never understand what is like to be Russian.’

  I left him to his own devices soon after that, relieved to get away. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be Russian and I didn’t want to. I was angry with him, and angry with myself for not trusting him.

  I replayed the conversation in my head, sensing there was more to this whole business than I had allowed for. I had made an offer to help Krasov stay in the West and he had refused without actually refusing. He had never said no but I had got the message. Did that mean he had changed his mind? Or had he never had any intention of defecting, and Corless was right after all? If so, what was the ‘escape’ to Cambridge about? What was he doing there? I thought of Peter’s warning about Stevens. Was Krasov’s visit connected with that? Did the change of mind that led to his return to London mean he had completed some task for his Soviet masters in Cambridge? What was he doing hiding in Lowndes Square now if he wasn’t on the run from his own people? As I failed to find satisfactory answers, I saw myself being manipulated and the man I had treated as a friend slowly turning into … what? A stranger? Or an enemy?

  I was out of my depth. The moment I got home I telephoned the duty officer in Horseferry Road who reluctantly gave me a number for Corless. I tried it but there was no answer. I rang Corless every thirty minutes but there was no one home.

  Two hours later I went back to Lowndes Square as we had agreed. The flat was empty. Krasov had vanished. Some decision had been taken, but I had no idea what.

  2

  RUTH

  The telephone rings twice and stops.

  She is startled, even though she is expecting it. She looks at her watch. Twelve-eighteen. Why must it always be so late? Wearily she drags herself out of her chair, puts on her coat, scarf, fur hat and boots and quietly leaves the flat, locking the door behind her. Down in the elevator. Across the dimly lit lobby. (What business is it of the babushka’s what she does at this time of night? She can think what she likes.) Out into the dark street, the cold air hitting her like a blow.

  She and Andropov no longer meet in his office. There are no more telephone calls for her at the Institute, no official car arrives to collect her during working hours. Each night she waits for the eloquent, commanding silence after the second ring before she sets out into the freezing dark. Three blocks away, parked outside the Novostny Bank building, its exhaust congealing in the night air, the black limousine waits for her.

  Andropov sits inside, smoking. She opens the door, gets in and is driven off into the night. Not a word is spoken between them, no greeting, no acknowledgement of her presence. Andropov ignores her until they are alone. Their meeting places vary in location but little in setting; anonymous rooms in unlived-in apartments scattered all over Moscow. She wonders what else they are used for.

  It is like this most nights now.

  *

  Her question at the progress meeting has touched a secret nerve among the senior scientific staff at the Institute, and set off a response beyond her imagining. She finds anonymous notes tucked into her overall pocket, slipped inside copies of minutes of meetings left in her in-tray; one is hidden behind the flowerpot she keeps on her window sill. The text of each is similar: admiration at her courage in asking what others have never dared to ask. She is flattered but not beguiled.

  Discretely her correspondents identify themselves. Secret smiles in the canteen, doors held open for her and a touch on the arm as she passes. The ladies’ lavatory becomes an unexpected centre of revelation, glances, smiles, nods – a Masonic language of recognition. As she adjusts the clips in her hair, faces appear next to hers in the mirror a
nd knowing looks are exchanged.

  ‘They are behaving as I expected,’ Andropov tells her. ‘Encourage them.’

  One night Leon Gromsky (he is an expert on explosive lenses), catches up with her as they leave the Institute. He whispers that he has been unable to sleep since her brave statement at the progress meeting. His conscience has been reawakened. He now questions their work at the Institute.

  ‘We cannot create such a mighty weapon of destruction without establishing political limits to its use,’ he says. He is not alone in this opinion, he tells her. There are others who share his doubts and are willing to join them.

  ‘Join what?’ she asks, terrified at this unexpected level of involvement. She has never joined anything in her life. She hates joining.

  He doesn’t hear her question in his enthusiasm to enlist her support in a new cause. Gromsky is an enthusiast.

  She tries to steer him away from the idea of any meeting of ‘those of like mind.’ She is ashamed of the deception she is practising, but how does she know Gromsky hasn’t been set up by the secret police to trap her? (Later, Andropov puts her mind at rest on this point.) Gromsky brushes aside her objections. Her courage has aroused in him a sense of responsibility for what they are doing.

  ‘Given the nature of our work, we cannot remain passive. We must act.’

  She concedes to his request because Andropov has told her she must. Late one evening four of her colleagues from the Institute arrive separately at her apartment.

  She listens to them talk, using the presence of her mother and son in the next room as an excuse for them to keep their voices down, privately terrified that her neighbours will report to the secret police the unusual noise in her flat and that suddenly the door will burst open and they will all be arrested. Twice during the evening she goes into the kitchen by herself, turns out the light and looks through the curtain at the street below. Once she opens her front door and peers into the corridor. She sees and hears nothing. Her absences go unnoticed by the others, who are gripped by the fever of their new-found freedom to speak their minds.