Kirkov's account of what happened next was probably garbled by the intensity of his own emotions in recalling it. Evidently he played the outraged papa to the hilt. Anna insisted that she and Mustafa wanted to get married and Mustafa tried to convince Kirkov that this was indeed their intention. But Kirkov wouldn't buy it. No filthy Arab pervert son-in-law for him. His daughter had disgraced him, and now she was no longer his daughter. He disowned her. He ordered her out of the house.
Once out, the couple had to face up to the seriousness of their situation. The State might have raised objections to their marriage even with Anna's father's consent. Without it, such a marriage would never be allowed. As a foreign exchange student, Mustafa’s freedom was severely limited. What would they do? Where would Anna go? Their only chance was to flee the country together, but that too posed problems.
Surprisingly, these problems proved fairly easy for them to solve. Mustafa enlisted the aid of a Turkish girl, a fellow exchange student, and the details of their plan to skip the country fell into place.
The Turkish girl gave Anna her passport and another fellow student of Mustafa’s doctored it so that the description tallied with Anna's appearance and her photo appeared in place of the original one. Then Mustafa located an ancient Moslem mosque, the last to survive in Moscow, left untouched by the Communist government as their proof to the Arab countries that the commissars honored their religion. One mosque was small enough price to pay in a Russia which would woo Arab allegiance by coughing up the financing for an Aswan Dam. Mustafa bribed the priest in charge of the mosque and he and Anna were married without the necessary paper of permission from the government.
Mustafa then informed his government that he wished to return to Egypt, and travel arrangements were made for him. These papers were also doctored to allow transit for both man and wife. Only three days after Josef Kirkov had discovered the lovers, they were on the train from Moscow to Sevastapol. From here, they boarded a boat and crossed the Black Sea to the seaport of Sinop in Turkey.
Three things happened then. The Turkish girl went to her embassy and reported that her passport had been stolen. Moscow officials began making inquiries of Josef Kirkov as to the whereabouts of his daughter. And Anna sent her father a long letter from Sinop—a result of the last vestiges of her training as a dutiful daughter—and told him what they had done. She also told him that they were going to Cairo, Mustafa's native city.
But they never went to Cairo. And Kirkov never heard from his daughter again. It was as though the earth had swallowed them up. Mustafa and Anna vanished and all efforts to trace them were in vain.
Such efforts might never have been made at all if it hadn't been for certain facts brought to the attention of the NKVD, Russia's secret police. Their interest was first aroused by the fact that Kirkov was an important atomic scientist and had access to the most classified information. Checks on him and his family were routine.
When they learned that his daughter had successfully escaped the country in the company of a foreigner, their first concern was as to how much secret data she might have had access to. Kirkov, loyal Commie that he was, confessed that his daughter was as familiar with his work as any expert in the field. He further revealed to them that she had both the training and the knowledge to explain the solutions to many nuclear problems it had taken both the Russians and the Americans years to figure out. In effect, Anna knew enough to create nuclear weapons—and that was a damn sight more than half the countries of the world knew.
Bad as this was, there was much worse to come. They naturally launched an immediate check on Mustafa Ben Narour. What they learned must have floored them.
Mustafa had been a member of the Egyptian Communist Party since his ’teens. Furthermore, he was known among his fellow Communists to be an ardent Stalinist. He'd repeatedly voiced views well to the left of Moscow and had been disciplined for his frankness on a few occasions.
But the real eye-opener was the revelation of Mustafa's activities only a few short months before he'd gone to Moscow as an exchange student. At that time a high-ranking diplomatic mission from Red China had visited Cairo to confer with Nasser. Mustafa had become quite friendly with the members of that mission. Indeed, he was known to have been the lover of one of the female secretaries attached to it.
What all this meant was that Mustafa might well be an agent in the employ of the Chinese Reds. If so, what he had succeeded in doing had world-shattering implications. More than anything else, Red China wanted to master nuclear power. Much of her animosity towards Russia stems from the refusal of the U.S.S.R. to share nuclear secrets with her. Now a possible Chinese agent had abducted one of the few people in the world capable of giving Red China the H-bomb. And he'd done it at a time when China was showing even more signs of aggression towards Russia than she customarily displayed to the U. S.
The implications panicked the Russkys. They tried a desperate and foolish gamble—-and lost. They planted the story in Pravda that an Arab exchange student, one Mustafa Ben-Narouz, had abducted a Russian schoolgirl against her will, forced her to leave the country with him, and subsequently sold her into harem slavery.
The idea behind this exposé, which was splashed all over Pravda's pages under 24-point scare headlines, was that it would embarrass the Egyptian government into finding the runaway lovers and returning Anna to Moscow. That subsequent events would prove that this wild guess had more than a few elements of accuracy is beside the point. It was foolhardy at the time because the Egyptian government refused point-blank to cooperate -- which might have been expected.
They refused to look for the lovers. They refused to allow any of the U.A.R. exchange students in Moscow to be questioned by the N.K.V.D. They asked for and received the cooperation of all the other Asian and African embassies in Moscow and none of their exchange students were made available for questioning either. On top of which, the U.A.R. presented a strong note to the Russian embassy in Cairo demanding an immediate apology-—which they got post haste, accompanied as the note was by a threat of re-opening certain negotiations with the British.
But the apology came too late. The Eastern exchange students were infuriated by the accusation. They looked on it as the latest of many racial slurs they'd encountered since coming to Russia. They rioted in protest. An African student was killed—-gratuitously, it was claimed — by Moscow police, and the riots were repeated-—this time even more violently. RACE RIOTS IN MOSCOW! —such was the headline flashed around the world.
Piecing all of this together, many things became clearer to me. One was the question of Mustafa's using "the silver clasp" when making love to Anna. Obviously, he'd been introduced to it by the Chinese girl he'd had an affair with in Cairo.
Another puzzle solved for me was why the Russian secret police in Damascus would be instructed to cooperate with an American, and why an American agent -- which I presumed Charles Putnam to be-—would arrange for me to take instructions from a Russian spy. The answer, of course, lay in the fact that at the highest level the Russians feared the Chinese more than they did us. In his heart-of-hearts, Khrushchev knew that the United States would never launch a nuclear war without the most heinous provocation. But the Chinese, if they had the bomb, might well do just that. Their government was composed of hotheads and extremists, and for them to possess the secrets of atomic energy was like giving a mentally retarded child a loaded revolver and telling to go out and play in the schoolyard with the other kids.