5
THE KRASNOZNAMENNIY INSTITUTE, or KI, was where women trained for the KGB. I studied there for three years, and then went on to put my training into practice at Balashiha-2, in the forest to the east of Moscow. There I trained foreign female subversives, the nelegali, whose eventual role was to return to their own countries and undermine them with terrorist activities.
During this time, I also lectured to the male KGB students in Vishka, or the Tower, as it was called.
Balashiha-2 is both the strongroom of the Kremlin and its arsenal and training ground for covert and subversive operations, hidden in the vast forest fifteen miles east of Moscow. To keep the capital’s population obedient it hosts the notorious Dzerzhinskaya army division, but Balashiha’s real usefulness lies in its highly secret training camp for KGB units involved in foreign operations. They call this the Centre of Special Purposes. It is where the paramilitary spetsnaz are based, or special forces units like Vympel, the Alfa Group and the nelegali in the ‘Foreigners’ Area’.
To all of us the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was called the Forest. The Forest then and today is the centre of Russia’s subversive operations abroad.
My admission to the Forest was not as easy as my impeccable background would suggest. Though my father had friends there, they could only facilitate interviews, not help me through them. I was interviewed intensely for weeks and what caused me most trouble was the short story I’d written at school, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’.
Was I sympathetic to the condemned man in his cell awaiting execution, as my father had accused me? Did I believe in American free-market activities, which the condemned man was guilty of pursuing? Was I critical of the law and the arm of the law that executed the guilty criminal?
The interview when the subject of the short story was raised took place early one morning, out at Balashiha. One of my three interrogators asked me: ‘Why do you sympathise with the guilty man in your story?’
‘I make him seem convincing,’ I answered. ‘That isn’t the same thing as sympathising.’
‘But he should not seem convincing!’ he demanded.
The man had thick lips, and eyes like shale.
To their consternation, I stood up and drained my glass of water. Then I looked him in the eye.
‘The guilty are never convincing, Comrade. Were you convinced?’
I found that manipulation came effortlessly. I convinced them that the story was the opposite of what I knew it to be, that it was in fact highly unsympathetic to the condemned man. They were pleased. I realised then that great manipulators are themselves susceptible to manipulation.
Some of the assessment was absurd, like something out of a KGB manual from Stalin’s time–which, in some cases, it was. Despite my impeccable linguistic qualifications, they tested my English language from a schoolbook written in 1941. The first three lines were, ‘Long Live International Youth Day! Long Live the Communist Party! Long Live Comrade Stalin!’–conversational gambits that I’ve never found particularly useful.
The book was a story concerning two schoolchildren, Sasha and Misha. My favourite chapter in it was called ‘Two Little Patriots’, in which Sasha and Misha go for a walk in the woods near the border and see something behind a tree, which turns out to be a man. He is wearing white clothes and is carrying a white bag, and is all but invisible against the snow. The boys realise he is a spy. They alert the border guards and the man is arrested. ‘He is a spy!’ the KGB officer, who dashes to the scene, proclaims. ‘Well done, boys!’
‘Well done, boys!’ later became another coded phrase between myself and Finn. We uttered it whenever we wished to indicate a disastrous decision by our respective leaders.
My time at Krasnoznamenniy taught me to speak English like a native, to handle weapons, to make IEDs–or improvised explosive devices-and most of the arts of self-defence. And my time at the Forest put this training into action as I then trained others.
I also endured the increasingly unconvincing political ‘education’, which nobody seemed to take seriously any more. Few people really believed what they were told about the West. Once, it had been necessary to induce a fear of the West so great that it overshadowed the fear ordinary people, at any rate, had of our own system. But not any more, not by the late eighties. By 1989, we didn’t even use the title ‘KGB’ among ourselves, so discredited had the organisation become.
As Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union, morale in the organisation was lower than ever and it reached rock bottom under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Our training went on, just as before, but without the ideological underpinning.
But the Forest had its entertaining aspects, if, like me, you were given to silent mockery. I particularly enjoyed the company of Dato and Zviad, a Georgian and an Armenian. They were in a special division of mainly Georgian and Armenian men who were training to be homosexual honey traps. Finn loved my stories about this division and he used to glow with the gleeful enjoyment of joking about homosexual honey traps when he was at Moscow’s diplomatic parties even when, once again, he was warned to stop by the British embassy.
‘Practising being a practising homosexual,’ Finn called it.
In 1991, just as I was finishing my training, Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his villa in Sochi on the Black Sea. I came back to Moscow that August, just before the coup took place. I saw the Dzerzhinskaya division enter the city in the early hours of the coup and watched with foreboding as the new and short-lived ‘President’ Yanayev visibly trembled as he promised us Russians that Gorbachev’s reforms would continue.
Yanayev and the KGB general at the head of the coup, Kryuchkov, were clearly way out of their depth and received little support, even from the special forces. The coup leaders had seized power in a haze of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’, which they were perhaps too drunk to realise had never gone away.
This inept coup set back plans that, unknown to all but very few in the KGB, were well under way. These plans had been drawn up to manage the transition from Communist Party rule to a new Russia. Instead, however, Boris Yeltsin filled the vacuum left by the bumbling coup leaders. Yeltsin became the hero. He stood on a battle tank and won over the people and the army. The coup was crushed and three days later I watched from the Lubyanka as crowds advanced on our old KGB headquarters. At the last minute, as we held our breath before wreaking death on the streets, the mob turned away and toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of our secret police.
I was twenty-three years old and it was the oddest time to be starting a career in the KGB. Freedom, real freedom, at last seemed within reach of us Russians for the first time in our history.
By the time I met Finn seven years later my career path had accelerated me to the rank of colonel. He had been Second Secretary of Trade and Investment at the British embassy for those eight years, under surveillance by us and confidently marked down as SIS, MI6, a British spy.
My father, remote, claustrophobic and sinister, was pleased with my swift rise and the good reports of my progress, which he read avidly. My mother didn’t seem to care. Nana just laughed and called me ‘Colonel’ when she wanted to annoy me.
When I met Finn I had grown out of my affair with my fencing trainer, because-I’m ashamed to admit- he was too nice. I was having an affair with a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ called Alex. A hard man, forty-eight years old and from the Vympel spetsnaz group, Alex was one of the small team that had entered the presidential palace in Kabul on Christmas Eve in 1979 when the USSR overthrew the regime in Afghanistan.