I took the train down to Godalming, where Gordievsky met me in a blue blazer, with a peach shirt and a violet silk hanky sprouting from his jacket pocket. There was no visible security at his home, but I knew this man—the West’s biggest Cold War catch ever—was well protected by surveillance. Gordievsky was cordial, inclined toward coarse humor punctuated with hearty laughs. At dinner with his English girlfriend along, he whispered conspiratorially, alerting me that she shouldn’t hear.
“Russians want to hear rough language. They think it brings life to the conversation,” he said, giving both sides of his face a light slap for emphasis. This is why Russian men can speak impolitely to their wives, he said.
Like Nikolai Khokhlov, Gordievsky fled Russia without his family. There was much explaining to do when he and his wife, Leila, reunited a few years later. She flew into London with their two daughters—eleven-year-old Mariya and ten-year-old Anna—but reconciliation proved elusive. After a few days, the wife and daughters returned to Moscow, and divorce followed. By the time I met Gordievsky, no one in the family was speaking to him.
I asked why his wife had bothered to make the trip. “She wanted the money,” he replied. He was clearly bitter. “There was £200,000 to her, plus £170,000 of private education for the two girls. Plus she receives £1,250 a month as compensation for being an ‘abandoned wife.’ She brainwashed the girls that I am a traitor.”
CHAPTER 7
The Crusading American
Paul Klebnikov and Glorious Russia
IN MOSCOW, I STARTED ASKING AROUND ABOUT AN AMERICAN named Paul Klebnikov. The Forbes reporter’s investigative stories, especially on billionaire Boris Berezovsky, had attracted wide attention there. I had run across his work while writing a book on oil and been struck by his obvious confidence when describing Russia’s elites. Much of the nation’s super-rich—guys I couldn’t get to—granted him access, and the insights that he gained led to a number of exclusive reports on corruption. The detail that filled his stories made them especially enjoyable to read.
I was surprised to discover that Klebnikov seemed a kindred spirit of Vladimir Putin. That set him apart from his more skeptical—in some cases, downright hostile—journalistic colleagues. But then Klebnikov wasn’t an orthodox reporter. He was an unabashed crusader on a shared mission with the Russian president. Both saw themselves duty bound to assist in the restoration of a great Russia—prosperous, powerful, and respected by the world. Both attacked anyone who appeared to be impeding that goal. Neither seemed to pause to consider that his vision of historic Russia might have been more romantic than real.
Klebnikov’s leanings were more understandable when one considered his origins. Unlike Putin, who was most strongly influenced by his sentimental loyalty to Russia’s security services, Klebnikov was driven by blood. A descendant of czarist-era aristocrats, he quoted Pushkin with regularity and spoke fluent Russian with what some acquaintances presumed was the accent of a nineteenth-century nobleman. (New York magazine reported that he and two friends ran the city’s marathon in T-shirts bearing the double-headed Russian eagle, and that Klebnikov led them in Russian military songs to keep spirits high. “We’re fighting for Mother Russia and the czar!” went one lyric.)
He acquired his enthusiasm for things Russian at an early age. His family’s Manhattan apartment was festooned with memorabilia of the old country. Descendants of Russia’s displaced nobility were regular visitors, and the young Klebnikov was taught to respect his family’s place in history. Stories were told around the dinner table about men such as Ivan Pouschine, a Klebnikov ancestor who was imprisoned for involvement in an 1825 uprising known as the Decembrist revolt, and great-grandfather Arcadi Nebolsin, a Russian admiral slain by mutineers during the Bolshevik revolution. An entire generation of the family had fled Russia during the 1917 uprising.
At the same time, Klebnikov became comfortable around the well-to-do. He was a guest at the homes of schoolmates from St. Bernard’s, on the Upper East Side, and Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, both exclusive schools. Later, he studied at two highly selective universities, UC Berkeley, in California, and the London School of Economics. His wife-to-be, Helen, or “Musa,” as she was known, was the daughter of John Train, a wealthy New York investment adviser and bestselling author of books including The Money Masters.
Forbes hired Klebnikov in 1989 at the age of twenty-six, soon after he completed his research for a doctorate in Russian studies. His intimate knowledge of life in the upper class dovetailed nicely with the magazine’s interests. He visited Institut Le Rosey, in Rolle, Switzerland, where he had taught tennis five years earlier, and wrote an unforgettable piece about this boarding school for the coddled rich, including the children of princes and kings. Klebnikov’s inquisitive mind was evident in a later investigative report on the wealth of Iran’s Rafsanjani family, whose patriarchs were among “a handful of clerics who call the shots behind the curtain and have gotten very rich in the process.” It was groundbreaking work.
Along the way, he traveled regularly to Russia and wrote stories lamenting what he saw as its decline into criminality under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In December 1996, he made his biggest splash ever, with a story highly critical of Boris Berezovsky. The piece—headlined “Godfather of the Kremlin?”—suggested that the oligarch had become Russia’s greatest baron by consorting with gangsters and being complicit in murder. The latter charge led to a Berezovsky libel suit, which was resolved when Forbes publicly retracted the implication that the billionaire had played a role in anyone’s death.
The Berezovsky story had run without a byline, apparently out of concern for Klebnikov’s safety. But it did not take much guesswork in Moscow to determine the author’s identity, and death threats soon began to arrive. He continued to write about Russia, but with an armed bodyguard at his side whenever he visited the country.
Klebnikov heaped scorn on Yeltsin, soon to be succeeded by Putin. In a 1999 piece for Forbes, he accused the lame duck president of presiding over a “gangster state. Corrupt from top to bottom, it is ruled by a small group of political bosses and their crony capitalist friends. The gang feeds on state assets and protects itself with violence.” These virtual traitors were preventing the revival of his beloved Russia, Klebnikov believed.
But Berezovsky topped his list of scoundrels. In 2000, a Klebnikov biography of the oligarch was published under the title of Godfather of the Kremlin. The book drew heavily on the piece four years earlier in Forbes, although this time there was no question mark. Klebnikov ticked off Berezovsky’s alleged misdeeds on the path from small-time mathematician to wealthy kingmaker—a career, he wrote, that was “replete with bankrupt companies and violent deaths.” Klebnikov thought that Berezovsky was an object lesson in why foreigners during Yeltsin’s rule should have let Russia be Russia instead of trying to impose Western traditions. “If it is hard for westerners to understand how the introduction of democratic principles could have been so poisonous to Russian society, Berezovsky’s career holds one of the keys,” he wrote.
According to his editors, to understand Klebnikov one had to read Eastern Approaches, the 1951 memoir of Fitzroy Maclean. The classic account follows the swashbuckling Scot through hair-raising adventures as a British diplomat observing Stalin’s 1937 purge trial of Bukharin; as a clandestine traveler to Central Asia and Afghanistan; and particularly as Winston Churchill’s personal ambassador to Tito in the mountains of Croatia during World War II. I was lucky enough to meet Maclean in Georgia a few months before his death, in 1996, at the age of eighty-five. He dozed off a few times as we sat in his hotel room, discussing his hopes for Georgia’s young independence. But with a bejeweled Georgian sword on the nightstand and a pair of carved Scottish canes by his side, Maclean was still at heart a man of action.