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JEFFREY Marchbanks thought there might be a way he could help his colleague in Moscow in his search for the authenticity, or lack of it, of the Black Manifesto.
One of Macdonald’s problems was that he had no reasonable means of gaining access to the person of Igor Komarov. Marchbanks calculated that a personal in-depth interview with the leader of the Union of Patriotic Forces might give some clue about whether the man who portrayed himself as an admittedly right-wing Conservative and Nationalist hid beneath his veneer the ambitions of a raging Nazi.
He thought he might know someone who could get that interview. The previous winter he had been on a pheasant shoot and among the guests had been the newly appointed editor of Britain’s leading Conservative daily newspaper. On July 21 Marchbanks called the editor, reminded him of the pheasant shoot, and set up a lunch date for the following day at his club in St. James’s.
Moscow, July 1985
THE escape of Gordievsky caused a blazing row in Moscow. It took place on the last day of the month in the personal office on the third floor of the KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinski Square of the chairman of the KGB himself
It was a gloomy office that had in its time been the den of some of the bloodiest monsters the planet has known. Orders had been signed at the T-shaped desk that caused men to shriek under torture, to die of hypothermia in the wastelands of Siberia or kneeling in a bleak courtyard with a pistol bullet in the brain.
General Viktor Chebrikov did not quite have those powers anymore. Things were changing and execution orders had to be approved by the president himself. But for traitors they would still be signed, and the conference of that day would ensure that more were yet to come.
Very much on the defensive in front of the chairman’s desk was the head of the First Chief Directorate, Vladimir Kryuchkov. It was his men who had fouled up so badly. On the attack was the head of the Second Chief Directorate, the short, chunky, bull-shouldered General Vitali Boyarov, and he was spitting angry.
“The whole thing has been a complete … razebaistvo,” he stormed. Even among the generals, the use of locker-room language was very much the thing, a proof of soldierly crudeness and working-class origins. The word means “fuckup.”
“It won’t happen again,” muttered Kryuchkov defensively.
“Let us agree then,” said the Chairman, “on a structure from which we do not deviate. On the sovereign territory of the USSR traitors will be arrested and interrogated by the Second Chief Directorate. If there are ever any more traitors identified, that is what will happen. Understood?”
“There will be more,” muttered Kryuchkov. “Thirteen more.”
There was silence in the room for several seconds.
“Are you trying to tell us something, Vladimir Aleksandrovitch?” asked the Chairman quietly.
That was when Kryuchkov revealed what had happened at Chadwick’s in Washington six weeks earlier. Boyarov let out a long whistle.
Within a week General Chebrikov, flushed with his agency’s success, revealed all to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Meanwhile, General Boyarov was preparing his Rat-catcher Commission, the team who would interrogate the traitors as and when they were identified and arrested. To head the team he wanted someone special. The file was on his desk, a colonel, only forty but experienced, an interrogator who never failed.
Born 1945 in Molotov, formerly Perm and now called Perm again since Stalin’s henchman Molotov fell into disgrace in 1957. Son of a decorated soldier who had survived and returned home to sire a son.
Little Tolya grew up under strict official indoctrination in the gray northern city. The notes recalled that his fanatical father loathed Khrushchev for criticizing the hero Stalin and that the boy had inherited and abided by all his father’s attitudes.
In 1963 he had been called up at eighteen and seconded to the Interior Troops of the Interior Ministry, the MVD. These troops were assigned to protect prisons, labor camps, and detention centers and were used as antiriot troops. The young soldier had taken to the work as a duck to water.
In those units the spirit of repression and mass control prevailed. So well did the boy do that he received a rare reward, a transfer to the Leningrad Military Institute of Foreign Languages. This was a cover for the KGB training academy, known in the agency as “the manger” because it turned out constant fodder for the ranks. Graduates of the Kormushka were famous for their ruthlessness, dedication, and loyalty. The young man shone again, and was again rewarded.
This time it was a posting to the Moscow Oblast (city and region) branch of the Second Chief Directorate where he spent four years earning a fine reputation as a clever desk officer, thorough investigator, and tough interrogator. Indeed he so specialized in the latter that he wrote a highly regarded paper on it, which gained him a transfer to the national headquarters of the Second Chief Directorate.
Since then he had never left Moscow, working out of headquarters mainly against the hated Americans, covering their embassy and tailing their diplomatic personnel. At one point he spent a year in the Investigative Service, before returning to the Second CD. Superior officers and instructors had taken the time to note in the files his passionate hatred of Anglo-Americans, Jews, spies, and traitors, and an unexplained but acceptable level of sadism in his interrogations.
General Boyarov closed the dossier with a smile. He had his man. If quick results were wanted and no messing about, Colonel Anatoli Grishin was the man for him.
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OF the remaining thirteen, one was lucky, or smart. Sergei Bokhan was an officer of Soviet military intelligence, posted in Athens. He was abruptly ordered back to Moscow on the grounds that his son was having exam problems at his military academy. He happened to know the boy was doing fine. Having deliberately missed the booked plane home, he contacted the CIA station in Athens and was brought out of there in a hurry.
The other twelve were caught. Some were inside the USSR, others abroad. Those abroad were ordered home on a variety of pretexts, all false. All were arrested on arrival.
Boyarov had chosen well. All twelve were intensively interrogated and all twelve confessed. The alternative was even more intensive interrogation. Two escaped with years in slave labor camps and now live in America. The other ten were tortured and shot.
CHAPTER 5