Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  ‘They’ve been scared out of their wits and they won’t move a muscle to help anyone,’ we had learned at one of our periodic briefings by our experts in Oxford. ‘Don’t hold your breath for a popular uprising, there won’t be one. Look instead for the power bases. If there is to be a new revolution, that is where it will start.’

  Opposition, we were told, would come from within the Soviet leadership, from those who believed they were losing their power base or that the government’s policies were no longer sustainable. We should keep our eyes open for signs of ranks being broken, of political ambition being brutally curtailed, of serious disagreements within the Politburo. We watched, waited, and then came Marchenko. Not what we had expected but when we came to think about it, we weren’t sure what we had expected.

  The analysts set to work on the revolt in the Institute of Nuclear Research. Had the prevailing social and economic conditions in the Soviet Union reached the point where we were witnessing the beginning of social breakdown? we wanted to know. Would Stalin’s removal by his own people usher in a truly new world? Would we soon be able to settle down to the real task of creating a post-war society that could offer a total break with the past, a rejection of war and the new deadly weapons of war? These were tempting hypotheses to consider.

  We pinned the names of our targets to a board on the wall in Arthur Gurney’s office: Voroshilov, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and others. We scanned photographs from the news agencies of recent state events, ticking off the names of the sombre figures on the podiums. We compared lists of names in Pravda reports of official meetings. We read transcripts of broadcasts from Radio Moscow. We reviewed Martineau’s briefings for the last six months.

  ‘You’ll be surprised how much good information lies in front of our eyes only we never see it,’ Colin Maitland said to encourage us after a particularly bleak day. His remarks did little to relieve our frustration. What we were looking for, he reminded us, were convergences, coincidences, missing names, names unexpectedly linked by presence or absence, a senior commander with a member of the Politburo, the head of the KGB with a member of the Central Committee or the Supreme Soviet. But if the links were there, they evaded us.

  One by one the names on the board were eliminated. After five days we were left with three names, two members of the Politburo and a general. Martineau helped us clear the politicians; one was ill (over eighty and in hospital suffering from cancer of the liver) while the other, a deputy from Tashkent, was abroad (a member of a Foreign Affairs Committee mission to Tito in Yugoslavia). That left one last name, General Alexei Kosintzev, a military commander unknown to all of us. It was not the conclusion to the exercise we had expected, nor did it fill us with jubilation.

  Kosintzev was Ukrainian, a young commander (mid-forties) of a tank regiment, a professional soldier all his life. He had fought against the Romanians at Stalingrad as part of General Eremenko’s army, before being seriously wounded with a crushed pelvis when the car in which he was travelling overturned during a German mortar attack. He had recovered to take his part in the last campaign of the war and he had been one of the first to arrive in Berlin. After the war he had served on the Allied Commission for a time and was known to the British and American military as an ambitious and intelligent officer, if abrasive in manner. A disciplinarian, he was not liked but respected.

  He had made his reputation during the war and was regarded as one of the brightest of the coming generation of military commanders. Cautious, calculating, a good administrator, a soldier whose bravery drew great respect from his men – these were the recurring epithets used to describe him. That was where the problem lay. Similar descriptions applied to others like him. Kosintzev was strictly second-division, a face too young to be seen at the front of the podium, one of a number of future front runners. The problem was, at this moment in time he did not carry any power or authority (so the analysis ran), so how could he pose any threat to the political hierarchy?

  ‘Where’s the leverage with a tank regiment that’s not even stationed anywhere near Moscow?’ Corless asked, impatient that our activities had yielded little of any value. ‘Kosintzev’s a professional soldier who’s managed his career well. He may get to the top but not for years yet. We’ve no evidence of any political activity, no confrontation with Party officials, no deviation from Marxist ideology, and nor would we expect any. He’s a Party member by default because those are the rules he must obey. Men like that don’t lead revolts against authority because authority is the goal they’ve set their heart on achieving.’

  We went back to our SOVINT advisers, calling for anything we could get. They returned the expected verdict that Kosintzev was a determined and loyal officer who had neither the military prestige nor the political power base to be the focus of any kind of opposition. By now I agreed with Boys-Allen that our search had sent us haring off in the wrong direction and if we spent much more on this investigation, we’d be up to our necks in something evil-smelling and sticky. Better to call it a day now – and try another tack. The amateur psychiatrists among us – Adrian Gardner and Guy Benton – would have none of it. They insisted on a further investigation, looking for psychological reasons for a Kosintzev revolt. Couldn’t he harbour grudges against that authority, they argued, which his ‘correct behaviour’ might conceal? Perhaps he had suffered experiences that had undermined his moral position. His injury at Stalingrad? A failure to win promotion? A bitterness at favours granted to others?

  ‘My guess is he thanked his lucky stars he got a crushed pelvis and not a bullet in the head and spent most of that campaign in hospital,’ Boys-Allen said to general agreement. ‘We wouldn’t be talking about him today if he hadn’t.’

  Adrian Gardner was undeterred: how about psychological damage caused by the appalling casualties his regiment had suffered in the battle for Stalingrad?

  ‘Show me a Russian commander who loses sleep over the cost of victory,’ Arthur Gurney said dismissively. From the limited analysis we had conducted, he said, the subject was clean and he couldn’t see that situation being reversed.

  We were depressed at Kosintzev’s unlikely casting in the role of opponent to the regime. Was this a case of mistaken identity? Had we got the wrong man? Should we start all over again, from a different angle this time – and if so, which angle? Yet despite our doubts, we couldn’t quite dismiss Kosintzev: he was still a member of the military elite – an insider–and his regiment provided some kind of power base.

  ‘On the surface he doesn’t look like our man,’ Colin said. ‘But maybe he has a dark secret. If so, we must uncover it.’

  Looking for what Adrian Gardner cynically described as ‘a second-rate needle in a collectivized Soviet haystack’, we went in search of Kosintzev’s secret. Almost on cue, Martineau reported that Kosintzev had done a disappearing act. His regiment was on manoeuvres on the Polish border but he wasn’t with them. He didn’t attend the bimonthly regional commanders’ meeting in Moscow. Our hopes rose. Was he on secondment at a military academy? we asked cautiously. No sign of him there, apparently. Martineau located his apartment in Moscow. Empty. No one had been seen entering or leaving for ten days or more. Kosintzev was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was our man after all.

  ‘Generals don’t disappear,’ Corless said, dismissing as fanciful the idea that our inability to find Kosintsev implied anything other than our own inefficiency. ‘They retire or they die. Kosintzev is too young to retire and we’ve no evidence he’s dead. On that basis alone, he can be found. Find him.’

  Hardly had he spoken than Kosintzev was back (‘lucky Corless’) tanned and fit, at a meeting of the Military Policy Review Committee. His wife and two sons reappeared in his Moscow apartment. They too were tanned. Kosintzev’s absence could be easily explained, Martineau told us shamefacedly. He had been on holiday at the Black Sea. Our hopes dissolved. He didn’t stay long at the military conference. He flew back to rejoin his regiment on the Polish border. We couldn’t build a conspir
acy on that.

  *

  Two weeks went by. Kosintzev was fading ingloriously into one of the many ‘might-have-been’ cases in the filing cabinets of the Registry when an extraordinary and apparently unconnected event took place. A young soldier, on leave from his regiment, was queuing with hundreds of others outside Lenin’s tomb in Red Square when he suddenly stepped out of the line, turned to face the crowd, pulled a revolver from his overcoat pocket and shouted something incoherent. Then he put the gun to his head and blew his brains out.

  Although it was a very public suicide, it was not reported in the Soviet newspapers but it was seen on the front pages of the Western press, its cause the source of much speculation but no definite conclusions. (A tourist had taken a photograph of the crumpled body before the guards got to it and had then, despite aggressive tactics by the secret police, successfully smuggled it out of the Soviet Union.) Peter had nothing to say about it, but Martineau came up with an unexpected link that brought new life to our investigations.

  Suicide soldier in K’s regiment, his encoded wire read. If there was any connection between the suicide and our discovery of Kosintzev, we had no idea what it was but the wire was enough to make us reach for the file once more. Martineau did a good job for us, sending back secret photographs of the funeral: the grieving mother at the graveside, the young soldier’s brothers, other relatives (we presumed) and friends and there, in spite of the grainy quality of the photograph, beside the dead man’s mother we saw, Kosintzev in uniform, who, Martineau told us, had flown to Moscow for the funeral.

  After the funeral, Kosintzev did not return at once to his regiment as we had expected. He stayed in Moscow. In the next forty-eight hours he made two visits to the Kremlin. On each occasion he was unaccompanied, though there was nothing sinister in that. Each visit lasted an hour.

  We chewed our pencils and puzzled it over. A young soldier kills himself while on leave; his general flies back to attend his funeral. Why? A gesture, the good general associating himself with his men? If it had been an accident, a death in the course of duty, we could understand Kosintzev’s presence. But this was suicide. Kosintzev’s behaviour was unusual.

  ‘Perhaps something has happened, some event, which caused this poor young man to kill himself. You could explain Kosintzev’s presence as a gesture of solidarity, a protest – dignified, correct, but a protest none the less.’

  It was a possible, if unlikely, reading, awakening echoes of Maitland’s ‘dark secrets’. We put forward possible reasons for the suicide. Homosexuality. Depression. Incidents of bullying (upgraded to racial bullying – the young man was a Muslim from Azerbaijan, we had learned). We were about to give up when Martineau sent us a cutting from the pages of Isvestia.

  Memorial to those who died on 18 February.

  To all those names we add one more in sorrow.

  How long before the list lengthens?

  Patriots of the 24th Tank Regiment.

  ‘February the eighteenth was the day on which the Soviet research laboratory went up in flames,’ Colin Maitland reminded us, ‘according to Peter.’

  What possible connection could the 24th Tank Regiment have with an accident in a Soviet nuclear laboratory in a suburb of Moscow? If there were connections (and there were cynics among us), this was really going over the top, too bizarre to carry credibility. We were baffled. Over the next four days, with Martineau’s help, some facts emerged.

  The 24th Tank Regiment, under Kosintzev’s command, had been stationed in the Russian Sector of Berlin. That was not difficult to establish. Their tour of duty came to an end on 14 February. On that day they began the laborious process of packing up to return to their barracks outside Moscow. We got confirmation of this from the British High Command in Berlin.

  Kosintzev had made his last official appearance at the Allied Commission on 12 February. That was a matter of record. He had then flown back to Moscow, in advance of his men, and two days later had gone on leave – he had mentioned to Martineau at a party on 15 February that he was going to the Black Sea. His second in command, Gerenko, who had accompanied him to Moscow, stayed behind with an advance party preparing the barracks.

  Had there been any accounts or rumours of an accident around that time involving the military, we asked Martineau, as we tried to identify ‘those who died on 18 February’? No, came the reply. None. Apart from D4 explosion, night of February 18 quiet.

  Unexpectedly, Boys-Allen put forward a theory that gained support throughout the day. ‘Solidarity,’ he said, suddenly. ‘That’s the connection. Maybe the parents of some of the soldiers in the Twenty-fourth Tank Regiment died in the fire at the apartment block,’ he argued.

  ‘How do you explain the phrase “To all those names we add one more in sorrow”?’ Guy Benton asked.

  ‘We know many died in the accident. Perhaps a few survived, badly burned. Maybe the father or mother of one of them has died within the last week of injuries received that night.’

  We put the question to Martineau. ‘Any reports of old age pensioners dying in the last ten days of burns received on the eighteenth of February?’

  ‘That’s a tricky one,’ Colin said as he watched the cipher clerk encode the message for the teleprinter. Two days of silence followed. Then: No survivors of fire on 18 February. Official report appears true.

  Whoever the Patriots of the 24th Tank Regiment might be, it appeared their secret was secure.

  8

  DANNY

  The telephone jarred me from the depths of sleep. My watch said it was ten to seven.

  ‘I need you in the office as soon as you can make it – half an hour at the latest,’ Charlie said, sounding hoarse with exhaustion. ‘Something’s come up.’

  Charlie and Simon were both waiting for me when I arrived in Eccleston Street, a copy of a political weekly open in front of them.

  ‘Read this first,’ Charlie said. ‘Then we’ll talk.’ He handed me the paper. Someone, I presumed it was Simon, had underscored some of the comments in the article on Watson-Jones by a Tory backbench MP I’d never heard of called Nathaniel Naismith.

  Watson-Jones was a dangerous warmonger, I read. There was a consistently bellicose line throughout his speeches and in the columns of Front Line, the political newsletter he published. The Soviet Union was portrayed as more villainous than Nazi Germany, a threat to the free world that could be resisted only by rearmament on an unprecedented scale. Was this a truly held belief or were murkier motives at work? We were reminded that money was not something Watson-Jones had much of before his marriage to the American heiress, Meredith Devereaux. The Devereaux fortune came from the profits of an American aeronautics company which held a number of lucrative government defence contracts. Hardly surprising that Watson-Jones was such a staunch supporter of major rearmament in the West. He had more than just the national interest to promote.

  It was a devastating attack, the writing full of anger and loathing. There was little doubt Naismith meant business, though what kind of business wasn’t clear.

  ‘Who’s Naismith?’ I asked.

  ‘A maverick Yorkshireman,’ Simon said. ‘Likes to be known as a bit of a rebel. He hangs on to the Party whip by the skin of his teeth. I wouldn’t count him as a friend.’

  ‘This is heavyweight stuff,’ I said. ‘There has to be more to it than personal dislike.’

  ‘What did I say, Charlie?’ Watson-Jones nodded furiously at me, endorsing my view. ‘There’s a conspiracy. Someone’s got it in for me and I want to know who.’

  Charlie looked exhausted. I guessed he’d been woken up a lot earlier than I had. I felt guilty. I hadn’t meant to feed Watson-Jones’s paranoia.

  ‘We’ve no grounds for thinking that,’ Charlie said with great control. ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘The evidence is here, Charlie. In black and white. Every damn word of it.’ Watson-Jones waved the magazine in front of him. ‘This man wants my head, not for himself – he hasn’t got the gumption – bu
t because someone has put him up to it.’ He turned away to look out of the window. ‘Where the hell is Gelfmann?’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ Charlie said. ‘He said he’d get here as soon as he could.’

  ‘Why can’t he be here when I want him? I’m paying him enough.’

  In our previous meetings, Watson-Jones had always impressed me with his self-control. There was a coolness about him that encouraged the belief he’d be effective in a crisis. That was gone now. He betrayed his tension through a succession of nervous gestures while his words fell over each other in the fight to make some sense of what had happened. There wasn’t even a pretence of coolness now. We were seeing the man as he was, not the man he had invented. It didn’t fill me with confidence.

  ‘Is Naismith important?’ I asked. ‘Does his opinion matter?’

  ‘Good God, no. The man’s a nonentity,’ Watson-Jones said quickly. ‘Nobody gives a damn what he thinks.’

  ‘The editor of this rag takes a different view,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Whose side are you on, Charlie? His or mine?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Simon.’

  ‘I’m under great strain,’ he said, taking a deep breath and attempting some semblance of self-control. ‘I’ve got to believe Naismith didn’t write this piece off his own bat. It’s not his style. That means it’s a put-up job. We have to find out who’s behind him and what they’ve after. Then we have to put a stop to it before any more damage is done.’

  ‘Have you any idea who that might be?’ I got the message that Charlie didn’t believe in conspiracy theories. His hint was lost on Watson-Jones.

  ‘I’m baffled,’ Watson-Jones said. ‘I don’t expect to be liked by everyone, but there’s no evidence I can think of to suggest this was in the wind.’ He looked down at the magazine. ‘There’s something else, too. If a political editor wants a controversial piece, he gets someone with a reputation to write it. Weight is essential to credibility. Naismith’s a cantankerous old bugger who bores everyone rigid with his unending tales of how things are managed better in Yorkshire. He’s not got the standing for this sort of thing.’