There was a heated row over the proposed exchange in the Cabinet on 20 June 1969. The arguments in favour of getting Brooke out of Russia were strengthened by the testimony of a British sailor, John Weatherby, who had been briefly interned in Russia and had met Brooke in prison and confirmed that his health was deteriorating. Harold Wilson had firmly opposed the swap since it had been first suggested in 1965, but finally allowed himself to be won over. Perhaps he remembered the persistent young Welshman who had buttonholed him in his Moscow hotel room and on the street in London. More likely, he wanted the seemingly endless saga of Brooke to disappear, and the addition of the Soviet brides to the deal would help to sweeten the bad publicity and charges of giving in to blackmail which would surely follow. Citing humanitarian grounds, the Cabinet formally authorized the exchange. Negotiations on the practicalities would be opened with the Soviets forthwith. Finally, the ‘juggernaut of history’ of which Mila had written so bitterly had shifted its course.
As Mervyn returned from New York on 20 July, the American astronaut Neil Armstrong clambered down from the Apollo 11 lander on to the surface of the moon. ‘We are on different planets,’ Mila had written to Mervyn in 1964, in the first days of their separation. ‘For me to fly to you is as hard as to fly to the moon.’ But now someone had flown to the moon – and, just as unexpectedly, it seemed that Mila’s dream of leaving the Soviet Union wasn’t so impossible after all.
Mervyn was summoned to the Foreign Office. Sir Thomas Brimelow was at first reluctant to admit that Mervyn had finally succeeded. My parents’ case had given the most trouble in the negotiations, Brimelow told my father, and the Russians had wanted to exclude it from the agreement. Mervyn’s tireless campaigning had certainly hindered his case, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Soviets had been prevailed upon to overcome their distaste for the gadfly Matthews. Nevertheless, they had given their consent, and Mervyn could finally expect a Soviet entry visa as soon as the Krogers were free. Mervyn drove home to Pimlico, not daring to believe the news. He decided to mention nothing to Mila, for fear of raising false hopes.
Brooke arrived back in England four days later. His release was on the front pages of the evening papers, with brief mentions of Mervyn and Mila. The same afternoon Michael Stewart made a statement in the House of Commons. Mervyn got a place in the Diplomatic Gallery; Derek was in the Strangers’ Gallery. Stewart announced that it had been agreed to release the Krogers on 24 October. ‘It has been arranged, as a separate matter, that three British subjects who have for some years been endeavouring without success to marry Soviet citizens will be granted visas to enter the Soviet Union to register their marriages…’ Derek and Mervyn, on different sides of the House, raised a small cheer.
The next day’s Times carried full details. Apart from Derek and Mervyn, a third person, Camilla Grey, an art historian, was to be allowed to marry her fiancé Oleg Prokofiev, son of the composer. Camilla had wanted nothing to do with Mervyn’s campaign. There had been some other, more shadowy, side deals. Bill Houghton and Ethel Gee, two Ministry of Defence employees who had been recruited as KGB agents by Peter and Helen Kroger, were to be paroled early.
Most of the papers were disapproving. ‘The higher a value you put on human life, the more vulnerable you are to inhuman blackmail,’ editorialized the Daily Sketch. ‘There is nothing but contempt and a very great concern for future relations after this example of blackmail, applied to a man who had obviously committed no offence that would be regarded as an offence in a democratic society.’
‘Mr Stewart was asked in the Commons, what is to prevent an innocent British tourist being seized in Moscow to set up a sinister package deal for a Russian spy? Mr. Stewart’s reply: “I think one can say with reasonable confidence that a British citizen who goes to the Soviet Union and carefully observes their laws is not at risk.” This is obviously true at the moment while the Red spies Peter and Helen Kroger are still held in Britain. But once they are freed in October?’
Mervyn, though he had benefited from Wilson’s deal, felt his patriotism stung. Britain had indeed got a terrible bargain.
Now the news was official, my father booked a call to Mila in her Moscow apartment, and just caught her as she was preparing to go on a motoring holiday in northern Russia with friends. He told her the news that the spy exchange had begun, and that they were part of it. Yet the imminent prospect of an end to their epic struggle seemed to give neither of them any great joy.
‘I had not expected exclamations of delight, nor tears of joy, and there were none,’ my father wrote later. ‘We had both gone through too much, and had been disappointed too often.’
There seemed to be a hint of distance, and sadness, in Mila’s voice. Apart from all the bureaucratic obstacles still to be overcome, she would have to face leaving her family, friends and homeland. There seemed little prospect that she would ever be allowed to return to see them. She would soon be irrevocably parted from everything she knew and loved except for Mervyn, who had become an almost mythical being to her.
‘Mervusik, my dear,’ Mila wrote the next day, as the news of Brooke’s release broke in the national papers. ‘Today, the 25th, is your birthday, sincere congratulations, I wish you good health, success at work, personal happiness. And I love you very much. I am in a spin. Victor Louis started looking for me from the morning onwards. I didn’t say anything, but they’ll make things up, anyway. He wanted me to say something for his readers. Perhaps I should have, but I refused. He uttered some banalities about our being brave, heroes, and lucky. Then Lena, who’s on holiday in the Baltic, rang. Valery [Golovitser] and my friend Rima called in. Journalists rang from the Daily Express, but I put them off as well. Friends called and congratulated me, they’re all overwhelmed… I can hardly stand up.’
Mervyn’s mother wrote with congratulations, the phone in the Pimlico flat began to ring incessantly. Reporters began turning up on the doorstep. Des Zwar sent a telegram. A few days later Mervyn received a letter from the Inland Revenue, on which an unknown hand had written, ‘Glad to hear the good news yesterday.’
Derek and Mervyn met at the Albert to plan the details. The Soviet consulate had been unhelpful to the last, saying that their visas would only be issued in October, and then they would be able to see their fiancées and register for a date at the Palace of Weddings. They would then have to leave, the official claimed, and come back to Russia a month later when the statutory waiting period had passed and the ceremony was due. In the event, that turned out not to be true – the gruff vice consul was simply exacting his own little piece of revenge on the young men who had, somehow, beaten the system.
Derek signed a deal with the Daily Express. The paper paid for his air tickets and hotel in exchange for an exclusive interview. My father preferred to pay his own way and avoid publicity now that it was no longer needed. ‘Everyone enjoys being famous, but my own public image, in so far as I had one, was too coloured by misfortune and failure. I appeared to be more of a victim than a hero,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Mervyn also hoped to re-launch his academic career with his book, and maybe even get back into ‘one of [Britain’s] two venerable universities’, something notoriety in the press might damage.