The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Read online

  Your downside, Bob, is time, which as you tell me is your big problem. An oil deal that size can’t happen overnight, not even with your pal in the Kremlin pulling the levers, so you won’t have anything to auction for, well—

  Not fucking interested. Next?

  My next one, Bob, is your scrap metal. And I’m not talking pushing a barrow down Cable Street and yelling up at windows for any old iron. I’m talking the very best top-quality metal ever made, mountains of it, churned out regardless of cost by a command economy gone loco: parks full of rusty tanks, weaponry, clapped-out factories, dud power stations and all the rest of the junk left over from five-year plans, seven-year plans and no-plans-at-all. But in your world market, Bob, priceless raw metal just waiting for somebody like you to come along. And nobody needs to own it but you. You’ll be doing Russia a favour, cleaning the stuff up. A nice letter from our pal at the Kremlin thanking you for your trouble, and a couple of phone calls to people in metals I know, you’re home and dry.

  Except what?

  Your downside, Bob? Is your cost of collection. Is your high personal visibility at this juncture in your life with the eyes of the world upon you, I’ll put it that way. Because sooner or later somebody over there is going to ask why it’s Bob Maxwell doing the cleaning up, and not someone nice and Russian.

  So Maxwell asks impatiently what Barry’s third proposal is. And Barry says: your blood, Bob.

  ‘Your blood, Bob,’ Barry tells Robert Maxwell, ‘is a very valuable commodity in any market place. But your Russian blood, properly extracted and marketed, is a very serious goldmine indeed. Your Russian citizen is patriotic. When he hears on his radio or television, or reads in his Russian newspaper, that there’s been a national tragedy, be it a little war somewhere, or a train smash, or a plane crash, or an earthquake, or a gas pipe blowing up, or a terrorist blowing up a market place, your Russian doesn’t just sit there, he goes straight down to his nearest hospital and he gives blood. Gives it, Bob. For free. As the good citizen he is. Millions of gallons of it. They queue up, they stand there quietly in line, which they’re used to, and they give free blood. It’s what they do out of the goodness of their Russian hearts. Free.’

  Barry pauses over his steak in case I have a question, but none comes to me, perhaps because I have the shivery feeling it’s no longer Robert Maxwell he’s pitching to, it’s me.

  ‘So given your unlimited supply of Russian blood, free at source,’ Barry resumes, putting on his logistical hat, ‘what else do you need? It’s Russia, so organization is bound to be your first worry. The transfusion service is there, so it’s already collection of a sort, but you’ll have to sharpen it up. Then there’s your distribution. There’s cold storage in every Russian city, so all you’ve got to do is raise the quantity level. Bigger and better storage, more of it. Who funds your operation? The Soviet state does, what’s left of it. The Soviet state, out of the goodness of its heart, improves and modernizes the service nationally, which is overdue, and Gorby gives himself a pat on the back for it. The Soviet exchequer funds the operation centrally, each Republic sends an agreed percentage of its take to a central blood bank – in Moscow, near one of your airports – as a quid pro quo for the funding. What does your central blood bank in Moscow officially use the blood for? Unspecified mega-emergencies nationwide. And what are you using it for? You’ve got a brace of refrigerated 747s working the shuttle between Sheremetyevo and Kennedy airports. You don’t have to buy them. Lease them through me. Ship the blood to New York, have chemists check it for HIV en route, and I know just the boys. Have you got any idea at all what they’re paying out there in the world market for a gallon of Aids-tested, Caucasian blood? I’ll tell you . . .’

  And the downside, Barry? This time it’s me who’s asking, not Maxwell, and Barry is already shaking his head.

  ‘David, there was not a downside. That blood would have gone like clockwork. I’d be very surprised if it isn’t going like clockwork for somebody at this very minute.’

  So why not for Bob?

  It’s the date, David, isn’t it? Barry is back to that all-important date he warned me about at the beginning of his story.

  ‘Summer 1991, remember? Gorby is hanging on to power by his fingernails. The Party’s falling apart at the seams and Yeltsin is after his balls. Come autumn, the Republics are clamouring for their independence, and nobody’s thinking of sending blood to Moscow. More likely they’re thinking Moscow could send a bit of something to the Republics for a change.’

  And your friend Bob? I ask.

  ‘Bob Maxwell wasn’t blind and he wasn’t stupid, David. Once he knew Gorby was done for, he knew blood was off the table and his last chance was gone. If he’d held on for a month, he’d have seen the Soviet Union sunk for ever, and Gorby go down with the ship. Bob knew the game was up, so he didn’t hang about, did he?’

  In the novel that I eventually wrote, I used Barry’s idea about marketing Russian blood, but it didn’t play as strongly as I meant it to, perhaps because nobody killed himself on account of it.

  But here’s a tailpiece to that twenty-five-minute lunch date with Rupert Murdoch at the Savoy Grill. One of Murdoch’s ex-aides, writing of his former employer’s performance before the British parliamentary committee delving into the phone-hacking conducted by one of his newspapers, described how Murdoch’s advisers had urged him to remove the array of gold rings from his left hand before he informed his audience, with a clot in his voice, that this was the humblest day of his life.

  20

  The biggest bears in the garden

  I have met two former heads of the KGB in my life and I liked them both. The last to hold the job before the KGB changed its name, though not its spots, was Vadim Bakatin. Intelligence services, somebody clever said, are like the wiring in a house: the new owner moves in, he drops the switch, and it’s the same old lights that come on again.

  It is 1993. Vadim Bakatin, the retired head of the extinct KGB, is drawing broken arrows on his doodle-pad. They have nicely tailored feathers and slim shafts. But halfway along they make a right-angle turn and become boomerang arrows, each tip pointing in a different direction and always out of the page. He draws them while he sits strictly to attention at the long table in my Russian publisher’s conference room, his centurion’s back arched and his head drawn stiffly into his shoulders as if for ceremonial inspection. Reforma Fund says the English side of his badly printed card. International Fund for Social & Economic Reforms.

  He is a heavy, gingery, Nordic-looking man, with a sad smile and mottled, capable hands. Born and bred in Novosibirsk, he is by training an engineer, a former director of state construction, former member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, former Minister of Internal Affairs. Then in 1991, to his surprise and not altogether his pleasure, Mikhail Gorbachev handed him the poisoned chalice: take over the KGB for me and clean it up. Sitting listening to him now, I could well imagine what might have prompted Gorbachev to offer him the job: Bakatin’s patent decency, which is of the deep-running, stubborn sort, made of awkward silences while he carefully weighs a question before delivering the carefully weighed answer.

  ‘My recommendations were not popular with the KGB,’ he observes, and draws another arrow. And as an afterthought: ‘This was not an easy assignment.’

  He means: not an easy assignment to breeze into KGB Headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square one summer’s morning, purge it at one blow of its autocratic tendencies and deliver a new, sanitized, socially aware spy service fit for purpose in the reconstructed democratic Russia that Gorbachev dreamed of. Bakatin knew from the beginning that the going would be tough. But how much he knew is anyone’s guess. Was he aware that the KGB was a streamlined kleptocracy that had already pocketed a large chunk of the nation’s stock of hard currency and gold reserves and stashed it abroad? That its chieftains were hand in glove with the country’s organized-crime syndic
ates? That many were old-guard Stalinists who saw Gorbachev as the Great Destroyer?

  Whatever Bakatin did or didn’t know, he performed an act of such glasnost that it remains unique in the annals of intelligence services across the globe. Within weeks of taking office, he handed to Robert Strauss, the United States Ambassador to Russia, a chart, together with a users’ handbook, of the listening devices that had been installed by the KGB’s audio team in the fabric of the new building designated to replace the existing US Embassy. According to Strauss, he performed this gesture ‘unconditionally, out of a sense of cooperation and goodwill’. According to Moscow’s many wits, when the American sweepers had taken out the KGB’s devices, the building was on the point of collapse.

  ‘With those technical people, you could never be sure,’ Bakatin earnestly confides to me. ‘I told Strauss it was the best I could get out of them.’

  As a reward for this courageous act of openness, he earned himself the full fury of the organization he commanded. Cries of treason went up, his post was abolished and for a short time, under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, the KGB was parcelled out to other departments, only to have itself promptly resurrected with increased powers and a new name under the personal command of Vladimir Putin, himself a child of the old KGB.

  Back to his broken arrows, Vadim Bakatin is musing about spying. Those who do it for a living are obsessives, out of touch with normal life, he says. He himself entered and left the spy business as a novice.

  ‘You know far more about it than I do,’ he adds suddenly, looking up.

  ‘But that’s not true,’ I protest. ‘I’m a novice too. I did the work when I was young and got out thirty years ago. I’ve been living off my wits ever since.’

  He draws an arrow.

  ‘So it’s a game,’ he says.

  Does he mean I’m a game? Or the spying industry is? He shakes his head, as if to say it doesn’t matter either way. Suddenly his questions become the mystified outcry of a man deprived of his convictions. Where is the world going? Where is Russia going? Where is the middle way, the humanitarian one, between capitalist and socialist excess? He’s a socialist, he says. He grew up a socialist:

  ‘I was brought up from childhood to believe that communism was the only true path for humanity. Okay, things went wrong. Power got into the wrong hands, the Party took some wrong turnings. But I still believe that we were the moral force for good in the world. What are we now? Where is the moral force?’

  It would be hard to find a greater contrast between two men: the introspective Bakatin, engineer and Party stalwart from Novosibirsk, and the Georgian-bred Yevgeny Primakov, half-Jewish son of a woman doctor and a politically persecuted father, scholar, Arabist, statesman, academician and – in the course of half a century’s service to a system not famed for its tenderness towards those who fall foul of it – master survivor.

  Unlike Bakatin, Yevgeny Primakov was eminently qualified to take over the KGB or any other heavyweight intelligence service. As a young Soviet field agent, codenamed MAKSIM, he had spied in the Middle East and in the United States, now as correspondent for Moscow Radio, now as a print journalist for Pravda. But even while he was in the field, his ascent through the scientific and political ranks of Soviet power continued. And when Soviet power ended, Primakov continued to prevail, so it surprised nobody when, after five years as head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, he was promoted to Russian Foreign Minister, in which capacity he came one day to London to discuss NATO matters with the British Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind.

  And it was on the evening of that same day that my wife and I were summoned at no notice to dine with Primakov and his wife at the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. In the morning, my literary agent had taken a breathless call from Rifkind’s Private Office: the Foreign Secretary requires a signed book of mine to present to his Russian opposite number, Yevgeny Primakov.

  A particular book, or just any book? my agent asks.

  Smiley’s People. And he needs it fast.

  I don’t keep stacks of my books around me, but I managed to dig out a hardback copy of Smiley’s People in reasonable condition. No doubt for reasons of national economy, Rifkind’s office had said nothing of providing a courier, so we rang for one, wrapped up the book, addressed the parcel to Rifkind care of the Foreign Office, SW1, and dispatched it.

  A couple of hours later, the Private Office rang again. No book, for God’s sake, what’s happened? Frantic calls by my wife to the courier service. Package under advisement was delivered to Foreign Office at such-and-such an hour and signed for by recipient. We relay this information to the Private Office. Oh Christ, then it must be stuck in bloody Security, we’ll check. They check. The book, having presumably been sniffed at and shaken and X-rayed, is wrested from the clutches of bloody Security, and perhaps Rifkind adds his name to mine, along with a collegial line or two, one foreign minister to the other. We shall never know because neither my agent nor I had another peep out of Rifkind or his Private Office.

  Time to dress up and call a black cab. My wife has invested in white orchids in a pot for our hostess, the Russian Ambassador’s wife. I have put together a carrier bag of books and videos for Primakov. Our cab pulls up outside the Russian Embassy. No lights burn. I am obsessive about punctuality, so we’re a quarter of an hour early. But it’s a balmy evening and there’s a red diplomatic police car parked a few yards down the kerb.

  Good evening, officers.

  Good evening to you, sir and madam.

  We have a small problem, officers. We’re dining at the Russian Embassy, but we’re early, and we’ve brought these gifts for our hosts. May we leave them in your care while we take a stroll round Kensington Palace Gardens?

  Of course you may, sir, but not in the car, I’m afraid. Put them down on the pavement there and we’ll keep an eye on them for you.

  We put our parcels down on the pavement, stroll, return, collect our parcels, which in the meantime have not exploded. We mount the Embassy steps. A sudden blaze of light, the front door opens. Very big men in suits glower at our parcels. One of them reaches for the orchids, another pokes inside my carrier bag. We are nodded through to the splendid drawing room. It’s empty. I am assailed by inappropriate memories. At the age of twenty-odd, as an aspiring young spy in the British interest, I had attended a string of awful Anglo-Soviet Friendship meetings in this very room, before being spirited upstairs by over-friendly KGB talent-spotters, there to watch Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for the umpteenth time and submit to yet another courteous inquisition about my life, origins, girlfriends, political leanings and aspirations, all in the vain hope that I shall become the target of a Soviet intelligence pass and thus acquire in the eyes of my British masters the coveted status of double agent. It never happened, which – given the scale of Soviet penetration of our intelligence services in those days – should not surprise anyone. Or perhaps I just didn’t smell right, which wouldn’t surprise me either.

  Back then, there was also a tiny bar in a corner of this beautiful room. It dispensed warm white wine to any comrade hardy enough to fight his way through the crush. It is still there, and tonight it is manned by a babushka in her seventies.

  ‘You want drink?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘What you want drink?’

  ‘Scotch, please. Two.’

  ‘Whisky?’

  ‘Yes, whisky.’

  ‘You want two? For her also?’

  ‘Please. With soda, no ice.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Water’s fine.’

  But we have barely taken a first sip when the double doors fly open and enter Primakov, escorted by his wife and the Russian Ambassador’s wife, then the Ambassador himself and a troupe of suntanned power-men in lightweight suits. Coming to a halt before us, Primakov pulls a comic smile and points an accusing finger at
my glass.

  ‘What are you drinking?’

  ‘Scotch.’

  ‘You are in Russia now. Drink vodka.’

  We return our un-drunk Scotches to the babushka, join the troupe and at light-infantry speed proceed to the elegant pre-Revolutionary dining room. One long table, candlelit. I sit as directed, three feet across it from Primakov. My wife is two stops down on the same side, looking a lot calmer than I feel. Big-shouldered waiters fill our vodka glasses to the brim. Primakov, I suspect, has already refreshed himself. He is very jolly, very twinkly. His wife sits beside him. She is a blonde and beautiful Estonian doctor with a motherly glow. On his other side sits his interpreter, but Primakov prefers his own vigorous style of English with an occasional prompt.

  The power-men in lightweight suits, I have meanwhile been told, are Russian ambassadors from across the Middle East, summoned to London for a conference. My wife and I are the only non-Russians at the table.

  ‘You will call me Yevgeny, I will call you David,’ Primakov informs me.

  Dinner has begun. When Primakov speaks, no one else does. He speaks suddenly, after much thought, consulting his interpreter only when he’s stumped for a word. Like most Russian intellectuals I have met, he has no time for small talk. His subjects for tonight, in the following order, are Saddam Hussein, President George Bush Senior, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and his own abortive efforts to head off the Gulf War. He is an agile and vivid communicator of great charm. His eyes do not lightly let you go. Periodically he breaks off, beams at me, raises his glass, proposes a toast. I raise my glass, beam back and respond. There must be a waiter with a vodka bottle for every guest. There is certainly one for me. When you’re caught for a vodka marathon, an English friend urged me the first time I went to Russia, stick to vodka and don’t for God’s sake go for that lethal Crimean Sekt (champagne). I have never been more grateful for his advice.