by Jeremy Duns
In Chapter XXIII, Paul Dark reads the Italian military intelligence document discovered in 1990, and the figures mentioned there are taken from it. The ‘strategy document’ he reads earlier is my own invention. Right-wing establishment figures in both Britain and Italy were plotting against their governments during this period and, according to Daniele Ganser, an SIS agent betrayed the stay-behind networks to the KGB in Sweden in 1968. Italian Gladio members were trained by British special forces instructors in England, but their main training facility was a secret military base at Poglina in Sardinia, near Capo Marrargiu. In two separate right-wing coup attempts in Italy, in 1964 and 1970, there were plans to detain left-wing leaders, journalists and activists at this same base. The area between Capo Marrargiu and Alghero is known as The Griffons’ Coast, as it is home to the griffon vultures that Paul and Sarah encounter in Chapter XVII. Part of the area is now a reserve for this species.
In Chapter IX, Paul Dark discovers that his handlers in Moscow were initially unsure of the validity of the information he had given them. This is partly based on accounts of Moscow’s scepticism towards Kim Philby and other members of the Cambridge Ring during the Second World War. Genrikh Borovik in The Philby Files and Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev in The Crown Jewels quote declassified Soviet intelligence files expressing these suspicions, including several reports concluding that Philby and the other members of the ring must have been discovered by British intelligence and were unwittingly passing on disinformation. The spies were not fully cleared of suspicion by Moscow until 1944.
The frontispiece quote is taken from a memorandum prepared by George Kennan that set out the case for the United States’ use of ‘organized political warfare’, and is quoted courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration (RG 273, Records of the National Security Council, NSC 10/2. Top Secret). The United States’ post-war influence on Italy and fear of the Communist party coming to power in that country is widely documented, and it is clear from former CIA chief William Colby’s memoirs and other sources that the Americans were instrumental in setting up and running several post-war stay-behind networks, including in Italy.
It is thought that most of the superpowers investigated the use of biological weapons during the Cold War, often developing research carried out in the Second World War. In 1942, British military scientists detonated anthrax bombs on the Scottish island Gruinard: it was not decontaminated until 1990. As far as we know, Britain never ‘weaponized’ Lassa Fever, although the United States and the Soviet Union both suspected the other of trying to do so. In the 1970s, American scientists investigating the disease in Liberia encountered Soviet researchers looking for Lassa antibodies, reagents and samples. The darkened room in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna is inspired by a description of a work in that gallery in Kate Simon’s Rome: Places and Pleasures, and on the earlier work of Lucio Fontana.
The ball at the top of St Peter’s Basilica is no longer open to the public, but it was in 1969, and was large enough to accommodate sixteen stout-hearted tourists. The Chapel of the Shroud in Turin is still under renovation following the fire in 1997. From April 2010, visitors will be able to see it for the first time since its controversial restoration in 2002.
I would also like to thank the Confraternity of the Holy Shroud and the Museo della Sindone in Turin; the staff of the bookshops Ardengo, Tara and Open Door in Rome; Caroline Brick at the London Transport Museum; Isobel Lee, Enrico Morriello, Sandra Cavallo, Francesca Rossi, Isabel de Vasconcellos, Sebastiano Mattei, Craig Arthur, Clare Nicholls, Evelyn Depoortere, Carla Buckley, Grant McKenzie, Helmut Schierer, Sharon and Luke Peppard, Nick Catford, Roger Whiffin, Blaine Bachman, Graham Belton, Ajay Chowdhury, Rob Ward, Phil Anderson, Phil Hatfield, Steven Savile and Tom Pendergrass for their comments, expertise and suggestions; my agent, Antony Topping, for his skilful shepherding of me to this point; my editors, Mike Jones at Simon & Schuster and Kathryn Court at Viking for their faith in Paul Dark; my parents and parents-in-law; my daughters, Astrid and Rebecca; and my wife, Johanna.
Select Bibliography
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999)
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive
II: The KGB and the World (Allen Lane, 2005) Charles Arnold-Baker, For He Is An Englishman: Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman (Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2007)
Jeffrey M. Bale, ‘Right-wing Terrorists and the Extra Parliamentary Left in Post-World War 2 Europe: Collusion or Manipulation?’ (in Lobster, issue 18, 1989)
Luca Massimo Barbero (ed.), Time & Place: Milano-Torino 1958– 1968 (Steidl, 2008)
John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (Bantam, 1974)
George Blake, No Other Choice (Jonathan Cape, 1990)
Genrikh Borovik, ed. Phillip Knightley, The Philby Files: The Secret
Life of the Master-Spy – KGB Archives Revealed (Little, Brown and Company, 1994)
Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy (Mandarin, 1996)
Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia (Hutchinson, 1979)
Robert Cecil, A Divided Life: A Biography of Donald Maclean (Coronet, 1990)
Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia’ (in Flash Art, 1967)
William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (Simon & Schuster, 1978)
Peter Collins, Ed McDonough, Alfa Romeo Tipo 33: The Development and Racing History (Veloce, 2006)
Nicholas Cullina, ‘From Vietnam to Fiat-nam: the politics of Arte Povera’ (in October, issue 124, spring 2008)
Guy Debord, ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art’ (in Internationale Situationniste, No. 8, 1963)
Len Deighton (ed.), London Dossier (Penguin, 1967)
Pierre de Villemarest, GRU: Le plus secret des services soviétiques, 1918–1988 (Stock, 1988)
Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (Touchstone, 2000)
Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (Grafton, 1992)
Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Pimlico, 2005)
Fodor’s Guide to Europe (Hodder and Stoughton, 1969)
Fodor’s Guide to Italy (Hodder and Stoughton, 1969)
M. R. D. Foot (ed.), Secret Lives (Oxford University Press, 2002)
M. R. D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive, 1940–1946 (BBC, 1984)
Alec Forshaw and Theo Bergström, Smithfield Past and Present (Heinemann, 1980)
Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (Frank Cass, 2005)
Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (Penguin, 1994)
Roland Gaucher, The Terrorists: From Tsarist Russia to the OAS (Secker & Warburg, 1965)
Ian V. Hogg and John Weeks, Military Small Arms of the Twentieth Century (DBI Books, 1985)
Harold F. Hutchison, Visitor’s London (London Transport, 1968)
Alexander Kouzminov, Biological Espionage (Greenhill Books, 2005)
Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed A Generation (Sphere, 1977)
Kim Philby, My Silent War (Grafton, 1989)
Rufina Philby with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov, The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years (St Ermin’s Press, 2003)
George Rosie, ‘Integrated scheme for new Heathrow terminal’ (in Design, June 1969)
W. Ritchie Russell, Brain Memory Learning: A Neurologist’s View
(Oxford University Press, 1959)
Kate Simon, Italy: The Places In Between (Harper and Row, 1970)
Kate Simon, Rome: Places and Pleasures (Alfred A Knopf, 1972)
Kate Simon, London: Places and Pleasures (MacGibbon and Kee, 1969)
Michael Smith, The Spying Game: The Secret His
tory of British Espionage (Politico’s, 2004)
David Teacher, Rogue Agents: The Cercle Pinay Complex, 1951–1991 (Institute for the Study and Globalization and Covert Politics, 2008, online)
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain (IB Tauris, 2006)
Anthony Verrier, Through The Looking Glass: British Foreign Policy in an Age of Illusions (WW Norton & Company, 1983)
Nigel West, The Illegals (Coronet, 1994)
Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels (HarperCollins, 1999)
Terry White, Swords of Lightning: Special Forces and the Changing Faces of Warfare (BPCC Wheatons, 1992)
Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (Authors Choice Press, 2002)
‘Of Dart Guns and Poisons’ (in Time, 29 September 1975)
A Trip to Italy (Italian State Tourist Department, 1969)
THE MOSCOW OPTION
For Johanna, Rebecca and Astrid
A Note on the Background
This novel is inspired by real events that took place in October 1969, and much of the information in it is drawn from declassified material, some of which has never previously been published. The document quoted in Chapter VII is a translation of a dossier written by the head of Soviet military intelligence in 1964.
I
Late October 1969, Moscow, Soviet Union
I was asleep when they came for me. I was running through a field, palm trees in the distance, when I woke to find a man shaking my shoulders and yelling my name.
I sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, sweat pouring off me. The man was wearing a cap, and looked to be barely out of his teens. Part of my mind was still caught up in the dream: I was sure I’d been in the field before, but couldn’t think when or where. But I didn’t get the chance to consider it further because I was being hauled from the mattress by my arms. Now I could see that there were two men, both in the same uniform but one without a cap. Neither was part of my usual guard detail.
‘Get up, scum!’ shouted the one in the cap, leaning in so close that he was just a couple of inches from me. His face was squared off, with a wide jawline and a pug nose, and he was wearing some foul eau de cologne that seemed to have been impregnated with the scent of fir trees rolled in diesel. He shoved a pile of clothes into my arms.
‘Put these on, old man,’ he sneered. ‘And make it fast.’
I looked at the bundle. There was a dark suit, crumpled and baggy, a white shirt with sweat stains around the armpits, and a pair of slip-on shoes. No belt or tie.
I started to dress, my eyes still half gummed with sleep. What the hell was going on? I’d been wearing the same grey tunic and trousers since my arrival here, so why the sudden change of clothes? Perhaps they were transferring me to another prison, or to a courtroom – Sasha had often mentioned the possibility of a trial. Or perhaps they were simply dressing me up to take me out to the woods to finish me off. I had a sudden memory of a summer’s day in 1945 in the British Zone in Germany, the jeep riding through the burnt-out roads with Shashkevich manacled in the back, until we came to the clearing; the Luger heavy in my hand as I placed it against his neck; his sweating, shaking; and my finger squeezing down on the trigger…
I shivered at the thought, but found to my surprise that I wasn’t afraid. There were worse ways to go. I wouldn’t feel it, at least. I’d been here six months but it seemed much longer, and the future held nothing for me but the gradual disintegration of my body. I was forty-four, but already felt twice that. Rather a bullet through the head than the prolonged suffering and indignity of old age and disease.
‘Faster!’ shouted the man in the cap. He must be the senior of the two. I finished buttoning the shirt and, as I leaned down to pick up the trousers, realized that both men were armed with pistols at the hip. Judging by the size of the holsters, they were Makarovs. Despite their resemblance to the Walther PP, their combat effectiveness was comparatively poor, and I began gauging the distance between the men, the angles of their bodies and their respective weights to see if there might be any possibility of catching them by surprise, taking one of their pistols and turning it on the other. But it was just a habit, a tired old spook’s reflex. I had no real intention of attempting to escape. There was nowhere to go. Even if I were able to overpower these two, there would be dozens, if not hundreds, more of them.
I adjusted the lapel of the jacket and stood to attention, ready. The suit was a couple of sizes too large for me and stank of stale urine, but it felt almost civilized to be wearing one again. The guards led me through the door of the cell and marched me down a series of corridors, until we reached a large steel door I hadn’t seen before. Once it had been unlocked, we walked through it and, for the first time in nearly six months, I found myself outside.
*
We appeared to be on an enormous airfield. I took a deep breath, then exhaled. My breath misted: it was at least a couple of degrees below freezing.
The sky was the colour of slate, and the barbed wire and bare-branched trees formed a strange tracery against it. To my left, I could make out several large buildings. I recognized their outlines from dossiers I had read and memorized in London years before and knew, finally, where I had been held all this time. The building we had just left was nicknamed Steklyashka – ‘the sheet of glass’ – by its inhabitants, because two of its wings were encased in glass. A former army hospital, it now served as the headquarters of the GRU – Soviet military intelligence. It had been my first guess, but it came as a shock nevertheless. I suppose I’d made the place another world in my mind, away from the reach of dossiers.
My escorts gripped me by the arms again and we headed across the tarmac, buffeted by the wind. We passed several helicopters and armoured tanks, and I remembered that it was, by my calculations, the last week of October, and guessed they were destined for the annual parade in Red Square.
A car was waiting for us near the perimeter, its engine running. It was a polished black ZiL limousine with red flags attached to the mudguards. That was interesting: they were usually reserved for the very top brass. I recalled reading a report that there were only a couple of dozen in the whole country. The man with the cap opened the rear door and his bare-headed comrade pushed me onto a cold vinyl seat. He climbed in beside me, while his colleague walked around to the other side. Up front, a driver was seated with his hands on the wheel, and sitting next to him was Sasha. There was also someone sitting in the back seat next to me, and as I turned I saw that it was Sarah.
*
Sasha snapped at the driver to head off, and we passed through a barricade and turned onto a broad avenue. I caught the word ‘Vladimir’, and my heart sank: that was the prison east of Moscow where they had held both Greville Wynne and Gary Powers. But then he said it again and I realized that it was the name of the man with the cap and that he was asking why they had taken so long to fetch me. Vladimir replied that I’d been difficult, and Sasha grunted disapprovingly. They were in an almighty hurry, clearly, but there was something else to it – an edge of panic? I decided not to think about what it might mean: I’d find out soon enough.
I looked at Sarah. She sensed my gaze and turned to me. As our eyes met, a thousand thoughts went unspoken. She was wearing a shapeless grey dress. Although she seemed thinner and her blonde hair was cut brutally short, she looked much the same as when I’d last seen her, in the back seat of a limousine like this one about six months ago. I felt a hollowness in my stomach as I remembered it: we had come to a stop on a barricaded street, and I’d watched helplessly as she’d been swiftly bundled into another car and driven away. I’d vowed to myself that I would protect her come what may, but when the moment had arrived I’d offered no protest. But she had survived. I had long given up hope of that. I’d felt that they wouldn’t risk giving her any freedom for fear she might reach the British embassy and tell them everything we had learned in Italy. As a junior member of the Service, she had very little information to give them. Once they had extrac
ted it from her, I’d reasoned, they would have seen little point in keeping her alive.
But they had. I tried not to think about what they had put her through instead, but an image of the girl Yuri had kept in his rooms in the camp in Germany, and of the way he had flicked his tongue over his lips at his first sight of Sarah, flashed into my mind nevertheless. Repulsion and rage coursed through me.
It had soon become clear to me that Yuri, or Colonel Fedor Fedorovich Proshin as I now knew his real name to be, had been the mastermind behind my career as a Soviet agent, from my recruitment at the age of twenty onwards. He had greeted me in Moscow, but it was no hero’s welcome. I was one of several British double agents who had ended up here: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and George Blake. But, unlike them, I was no longer a Communist, and had been brought here against my will, whereas they had all defected by choice.
After I’d been put through a comprehensive – and extremely unpleasant – medical examination, Yuri had proceeded to interrogate me about every aspect of the twenty-four years since I had sought him out in a displaced persons camp in the British Zone of Germany. He hadn’t presented it as an interrogation at first, even installing me in fairly comfortable quarters, but the armed guards had never left me with any doubt about the truth of the situation.
He had started every morning the same way: once I was seated, he would open up my dossier and read directly from the reports my handlers had sent to Moscow at whichever point in my career we had reached. After that, the questions would begin.
‘Why did you cut off all contact for eighteen months after this meeting?’
‘Why did you not mention that Burgess and Maclean had come under suspicion?’
‘Why didn’t you tell us about Penkovsky?’