In truth, the diminutive size of my salary never bothered me – it was enough for me and my family, so why should we have asked for more? – but I still feel lacerated by one memory in particular. Alexander Yakovlev, then the top ideologist of the CPSU and a close ally of Gorbachev, came to visit the United States at the very end of the 1980s. He was a man I had always respected; I even read the book he’d written about American politics before crossing the Atlantic. And then we met him. There he was, slouching in front of us in a gaudy tracksuit, which emphasised his huge belly. How could we take it as anything other than a calculated way of showing the contempt he felt for us? He made desultory conversation for a while, before producing an enormous shopping list of consumer goods – clothes, radios, tape recorders, jeans – that we were expected to provide for him out of the special fund that every KGB station retained for the use of visiting members of the Politburo. (We were not encouraged to ask questions about what they spent it on; indeed we were warned off making any kind of investigation into the lives of senior party officials.) This was the man who, like Gorbachev, had for years been telling us how we should be devoted to the party, devoted to the country, devoted to the ideas of socialism, and here he was, indulging in unabashed, hedonistic consumerism. I was not alone in feeling humiliated that for so long we had been fooled into thinking that Yakovlev actually believed in the sentiments he had expected us to embrace without question. It told me everything I needed to know about the kind of men who were now leading our nation.
This feeling was only reinforced later when I heard an interview with Yakovlev that was broadcast on the television. The man who, in 1991, brokered the meeting between Yeltsin and Gorbachev that sealed the fate of the USSR talked about how, in 1946, he had observed a group of former Soviet prisoners of war being shepherded into cattle trucks destined for the gulags of the Far East. He said that he could not comprehend how Red Army men whose only ‘crime’ was to have been captured by the Germans could be declared traitors by their own government. It was at that moment, he claimed, that he suddenly understood the rottenness of the socialist system. While I have always felt sympathetic to these unfortunate Soviet soldiers, and believe that the treatment they received on their return was terribly unfair, I cannot help feeling betrayed by him. For the next three decades, he was the top ideologist of the Soviet Union; we were taught only to serve – no personal interests, no excuses, only orders, targets and achievements – while he and the others at the top of the party were living in a completely different world.
In those years I spent in New York during the 1980s I was, officially at least, responsible for helping to prepare the positions of the Soviet Union on essential legal and technical issues, some of which had been under discussion for many decades. One of the most prominent of these was the question of geostationary orbit, which is crucial for the placement of vessels such as communication and weather satellites. Developing countries were very conscious that outer space had already become a limited resource, one that had hitherto been monopolised by the first world. Their great concern was that when the moment arrived when they were in a position to launch a satellite, there simply wouldn’t be any room for it up beyond the heavens. It sounds strange, even counter-intuitive, but it took up many hours of our time. Another pressing problem regarded the regulation of the use of nuclear power in outer space. What was the appropriate, ethical, practical way of disposing of the ensuing waste?
Much of what I did was routine work in which my engineering background proved invaluable. It was sometimes difficult to find solutions in a situation where 159 nations, many of whom did not have access to the information they needed to construct an informed opinion, were nevertheless all trying to advance their interests. However, it was a fascinating insight into the mechanism of international relations as it operated under the UN umbrella, and also an exemplar of the way in which professionals from a huge range of nations, many of which were still locked into the cold war’s tensions, could come together in a spirit of amity and build a profound and lasting consensus.
This sense of cheerful cooperation was not always evident within the 1,500-strong Soviet diplomatic contingent, which was prone to the usual quarrels and tensions experienced by such groups (exacerbated, I have no doubt, by the strange environment and the pressures and dislocations that always attend being away from home for long periods). But I remain on good terms with many of my former comrades. In the circumstances, it was easy to form close personal ties, which often led to us supporting each other, even (perhaps especially) in emergencies. While we were still all in New York, I learned that the little daughter of one of my colleagues had a chronic disease requiring expensive treatment, which he just could not afford. I remember to this day how bitter his sadness was when he shared the news of her affliction with me. Though the common practice in such cases was an immediate return home for the whole family, because I knew them all well and was, moreover, aware of how valuable the work of my colleague was, I decided to help him. I had already made some good friends among Americans by that time, some of whom were doctors. I discussed the case in detail with one of them, and I am still grateful to that doctor who immediately offered a treatment at his clinic, free of charge. The girl was treated, and my colleague was able to remain in post.
I was actually one of the few intelligence officers who took his diplomatic cover work seriously, but nevertheless my shadow-life absorbed as much of my time as my day-to-day existence. The difference between diplomats and intelligence operatives is largely one of methodology: while the diplomat uses open, legitimate channels and sources of information, an undercover agent uses more diverse routes. Their prime targets exist in the shadows, hidden from public view. I was surprised by the furore caused by the news that certain members of Trump’s team had met with Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the United States, for surely that is exactly what a diplomat should be doing. What else is he there for?
When one arrives as a secret services agent in another country, one quickly enters into an unspoken arrangement with the other side – a prickly kind of modus vivendi. Our end of the bargain was that we had to ensure that we behaved in such a way that we never unnecessarily inconvenienced or endangered our American counterparts, or, worse still, humiliated them. So if you noticed you had a couple of men from the other side on your tail, you did not make any efforts to lose them… unless you had very good reason to do so. Otherwise you’d face very severe consequences – at the very least, you’d return to your car and find all your tyres punctured.
But even if there was a certain amount of respect between the two sides, I knew it would be fatal if that relationship evolved into something resembling friendship. They could be small things in themselves – birthday cards thrown through the car window of an American counterpart, or those occasions when agents would approach their tails in a café and inform them that they did not need to think about moving for at least an hour since the agent was going to lunch with his family. I completely prohibited this kind of communication, because I knew how amity could shade into compromise. Be polite, behave appropriately, but never cross the line.