In between campaigning, Mervyn had been putting the finishing touches to his first book, a sociological work on Soviet youth. He’d been working on it, on and off, since 1958, and now it was in galleys, ready for final correction. The work, Mervyn hoped, would give his sagging academic career a boost, and prove to be his passport to the permanent college fellowship he had coveted all his adult life. But now, as the battle lines were being drawn for a war of attrition, he had qualms. Could the book, mild stuff though it was, possibly offend the Soviets and harm his chances of getting Mila out?
After weeks of agonizing, he decided not to risk it. Mervyn called the publisher, Oxford University Press, and asked to withdraw the book from its list. There was much consternation at the press, and at St Anthony’s. It was a fantastic sacrifice to make, and Mervyn probably knew at the time that he was doing his chances of academic success irreparable harm. ‘From one point of view this is good,’ he wrote to Mila, telling her of his decision. ‘But so much effort, so much nervous energy, all for nothing…’ As I sit, finishing my own book after five years of effort, my father’s sacrifice seems unimaginably vast. For weeks afterwards, Mervyn could hardly bring himself to believe what he had done.
On 26 April 1965 Gerald Brooke, a young lecturer who Mervyn had known while they were both exchange students at Moscow State University, was arrested by the KGB. He was picked up at the Moscow apartment of an agent of the Popular Labour Union, or NTS, a small and hapless CIA-funded anti-Soviet organization. The organization was so hopelessly compromised, it later emerged, that there were almost as many Soviet informers as real, misguided agitators. Brooke was caught delivering propaganda leaflets to a pair of unfortunate NTS agents who had themselves been arrested a few days before. When Brooke arrived at their apartment, the KGB were waiting.
The NTS had once tried to recruit Mervyn at Oxford. Georgy Miller, an elderly Russian émigré, tried to persuade my father to deliver a package of papers to a contact in Moscow. My father had wisely refused; Miller, it seems, had had more success persuading Brooke. But it had been a close call. There, thought Mervyn as he read the news of Brooke’s arrest, but for the Grace of God go I.
Brooke was put on trial for anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. The Soviet press used the case to launch an anti-Western campaign. Mervyn’s old Moscow University friend Martin Dewhirst had also been accused of anti-Soviet activity during Brooke’s trial, as was Peter Reddaway, another friend of Mervyn’s who had also been expelled from the Soviet Union. But, mercifully, Mervyn’s name was not mentioned at the trial or in the press. Why, he never found out.
Soon rumours began to circulate that the Soviet authorities were offering to swap Brooke for Peter and Helen Kroger, a pair of American Communists who had worked as Soviet spies, first as couriers to the Manhattan Project spy ring in the United States in the 1940s and then in lesser roles in the UK. The Krogers were serving twenty-year sentences for espionage in England after having been caught running a spy ring at Portland, Britain’s nuclear submarine facility. Brooke, a mere graduate student, was by no means in the same league as the Krogers, and Mervyn and others suspected that he was simply a pawn in a larger game. The Krogers themselves confirmed this in a BBC interview in 1990. Brooke had been arrested specifically for use as a trading card to get the Krogers back, they confirmed, after intense lobbying in Moscow by their KGB controller in London, Konon Melody, a.k.a. Gordon Lonsdale, who had escaped arrest and made it home when the spy ring was rolled up but dedicated himself to securing the release of his old agents.
Mervyn hatched the idea that Mila could be included in any possible spy swap. ‘There is already talk of a Brooke-Kroger exchange,’ Mervyn wrote to Frederick Cumber, a businessman with good relations with the Soviet embassy. ‘Which means two Ksfor one B. I personally think there are a number of excellent arguments for getting Mila tagged on to this. The Russians would regard it as a negligible concession, and they are certainly anxious to get the Krogers out. The months of separation are weighing very heavily on both of us, and not a day goes by without my giving a great deal of thought to the problem in hand. We live, so to speak, by letter. I have now received some 430 from Mila, and sent her about the same number (not to mention postcards).’
The glimmer of hope of a deal, however, soon dwindled after the British government announced that they would not countenance such an exchange: the Cabinet flatly refused to yield to Soviet blackmail.
In Moscow, Mila would pass her days listening to English language learning records. She repeated the simple stories about Nora and Harry and their lost dog, who was returned by the butcher along with a bill for the sausages the dog had eaten. Some of Mervyn’s letters were posted in error in her neighbour Yevdokia’s box, and Lyudmila picked the lock with knitting needles and a pair of scissors to retrieve them. Prey to growing paranoia, she asked Mervyn to send a list of his letters, suspecting her neighbours of stealing them. ‘They are sharpening their knives,’ Mila feared. She slept badly, plagued by nightmares of separation shot through with long-suppressed memories of her own childhood.
‘Last night I dreamt a horrible dream. I screamed and cried and my sister thought I was ill. I can’t believe the dream wasn’t real, it was so vivid. So now everyone is asleep and I am still crying. My sister says the dream is a very bad omen. It seems I was born to this unhappiness… such burning pain, such perverse sophisticated torture. All my strength and thoughts are put into our love. There is no way back for me.’
The Foreign Office were now taking no pains to conceal their irritation at Mervyn’s harangues. Howard Smith, the head of the ‘Northern Department’ which handled Russia, seemed to consider Mervyn, at best, a troublesome ne’er-do-well, and took his calls with increasing exasperation, bordering on rudeness.
‘Dr Matthews’ case is one with… which we are very familiar,’ wrote Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, to Laurie Pavitt, MP, who had written on Mervyn’s behalf. ‘He has been told repeatedly in correspondence and interviews with officials and Foreign Office ministers alike the reasons why we do not consider it right to single out his case for official representations. In view of the past history of the case there is really no possibility of a favourable reaction to official intervention. ‘
The low point in Matthews-Foreign Office relations came when Howard Smith came to dinner at St Antony’s. Mervyn asked Fred, the College Steward, to ask Smith to come up to his rooms after dinner. When Smith appeared in the doorway, Mervyn lost control of himself and, as he put it later, ‘expressed an earthy view of his person’.
‘Smith came back into the Common Room visibly shaken,’ Mervyn’s friend Harry Willets told him later. ‘He told everyone in hearing that you had been sprawled in an armchair and called him “the shit of Smiths” when he opened your door. His cigar had gone out.’ Mervyn’s recollection is that he only called Smith ‘a fart’. Perhaps he called him both.