The Dark Chronicles (68 page)

I felt a momentary pang of pity for the men around the table, many of whom I recognized from Service dossiers. My eyes flicked around as though playing Pelmanism. Seated directly to Brezhnev’s right was Kosygin, the Premier, a bulldog. Next to him was Suslov – he looked like a kindly old don, but his staunch Stalinism and behind-the-scenes machinations had earned him the nickname the ‘Red Eminence’. Then there was Grechko, the Minister of Defence and head of the armed forces – the classic military type with hair cropped
en brosse
.

Next to him was Ivashutin, head of the GRU. Portly, around sixty, he was one of Brezhnev’s old cronies, having known him since the war, when he had been a senior officer in SMERSH on the Ukrainian front. He had taken part in the arrest of Serov, and then been appointed head of the GRU in his place by Brezhnev. Opposite him sat Andropov, the new head of the KGB, inscrutable in horn-rimmed spectacles. He and Ivashutin were thought to detest each other, which was perhaps why they had been seated so far apart.

These grey, heavy men constituted the ‘Supreme Command’ or ‘Defence Council’, the core of the Politburo and decision-making
power in a crisis – and they were mostly hardliners. As well as sending dissidents to work camps, Brezhnev was also cracking down on signs of reform in the satellite states, which had culminated in the ruthless intervention in Czechoslovakia the previous spring.

Several reports had reached the Service that Brezhnev had become significantly unpopular with the Soviet people as a result, and in January there had even been an attempt on his life. A soldier, apparently upset by the Prague invasion, had fled his base in Leningrad, taking with him two loaded Makarovs and four clips from his unit’s safe. Arriving in Moscow, he had stolen a police uniform belonging to his father and, posing as an officer at one of the cordons leading into the Kremlin, had tried to shoot Brezhnev as he was being driven through for a homecoming celebration for several cosmonauts. But he got the wrong car and had hit one of the cosmonauts instead.

In the meantime, Brezhnev continued the roll-back to Stalinism. In his address to the Congress of the Polish Communist Party in November, he had stated that a threat to the security of any ‘socialist’ country was a threat to them all, and would be dealt with as such. The Brezhnev Doctrine, as it was soon known, overturned the idea of sovereign states that had been at the heart of the Warsaw Pact. I wondered if another state had decided to try to test his steel. This wasn’t a group of men you would gather together on a whim.

Most alarming to me was Yuri’s presence. He’d altered his appearance a little since I’d last seen him. His white hair was still shorn close to the skull, but he had cultivated a thin goatee to match it; I suspected because he wanted to appear more distinguished. He had unluckily conspicuous features for a spy – a strange snubbed nose and tiny eyes in a mass of leathery wrinkles – and the effect was of a mischievous schoolboy peering out of the face of an old man.

From his uniform and position at the table, it looked like he was Ivashutin’s deputy. On my arrival in Moscow, he had given the impression of having long been sidelined from the
apparat
, an old
hand who had been stepped over by younger men. And yet here he was, in the heart of the lion’s den, deputy head of the GRU. Either he had been promoted in the last few months, or – more likely – he had only wanted me to believe he had been sidelined so that I would underestimate him, giving him an advantage in interrogation. Not for the first time he had pulled the wool over my eyes with infuriating ease.

Brezhnev had sat down, and was drinking water from a glass while he looked me over. His eyes were like bullet holes.

‘Remind me, Colonel-General Proshin,’ he said without adjusting his gaze. ‘Why did you wish to bring this man here? Looking at his dossier, it seems we feel that he is not to be trusted.’

‘That is not quite so, General Secretary,’ Yuri replied evenly. ‘We have been determining precisely what level of trust we can place in him at one of our secure facilities.’

Brezhnev sat back and folded his arms. ‘For six months?’

Yuri’s tiny eyes didn’t flicker. ‘We strive to be thorough, General Secretary. The dossier contains some provisional thoughts, but our plan was to make a more thorough assessment once we had gathered all the available information. However, considering the current situation, I requested permission to bring him before the Council because I felt that as a result of his former position as Deputy Chief of the British Service, he may be able to help us.’

‘Or he may lie to us.’

Yuri nodded. ‘That is naturally a possibility. But if so—’

‘Could I just interject for a moment?’ I said, and two dozen heads jerked in my direction. ‘Would someone mind telling me what’s going on?’

An hour previously, I would have thought I would be one of the last people the Soviet leadership would want to bring into their confidence, but they obviously wanted something from me and they would have to show their hand sooner or later. It was intimidating being in such company, but I had, after all, been in similar company in London, and I thought it was wise to try to establish
that I was on the same level as they, rather than a circus act they could discuss and poke at will. If I could undermine Yuri at the same time, all the better. I hadn’t seen the bastard in months, but I had good cause to loathe him. He had indeed placed me in a ‘secure facility’, and Christ knew what he’d done to Sarah.

Brezhnev lit another cigarette, and gestured to Yuri that he should answer my question. Yuri straightened his back and stared at me with unalloyed hatred radiating from his hobgoblin eyes.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We would like you to tell us all you know about the West’s plans for nuclear conflict.’

I took that in, eyeing Brezhnev’s cigarette and wishing I had my own to puff. An image flashed into my mind: the toothless grin of the old man in the stand near Sloane Square Underground as he slid a pack of Players into my waiting fingers. I shook my head free of it.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I said.

‘Come,’ said Yuri, and gave a slow, condescending smile. ‘You were deputy head of the Service.’

‘For about five minutes. I can tell you about the broad strategy, if you like, but the only people who know the details of the plans are those directly involved in them.’

‘In the bunkers, you mean.’

He was trying to get me to give him something he could follow up on. I didn’t react. I noted that this seemed to be his show, since none of the others were talking. That suggested the meeting had been called on account of information received by the GRU.

‘You know where the bunkers are, of course?’ he said.

‘Not off by heart, no. I’m afraid I can’t really tell you much about “the West” as a whole. I know a bit about the British strategy, a little about NATO’s and next to nothing about the Americans’.’

Three seats down, I saw Andropov look away and purse his lips, and guessed it was the Americans they were interested in.

‘Very well,’ said Yuri, his tone a little more curt. ‘Please tell us what you do know.’

I smiled sweetly at him, stalling for time so I could work out what was going on and how to react. I could simply refuse to cooperate, of course. I didn’t much like being woken up, yelled at and
fetched
to an underground bunker without any explanation, and part of me was tempted to tell them where to stick it. But that would be foolish – if I didn’t appear to be trying to answer their questions sincerely, they would simply put a bullet through the back of my head. They might do it anyway, but there was a chance they wouldn’t. So swallow your pride, play nicely, sound convincing, and if you’re very lucky they won’t shoot you at the end of this and might even give you a slightly more comfortable cell.

The difficulty was in picking precisely which pieces of information I could safely tell them. Because I did, of course, know quite a lot about the West’s plans for nuclear conflict, having been given a copy of the War Book on being appointed Head of Soviet Section in late ’65. I had also taken part in dozens of meetings over the years on the intricacies of post-strike contingency plans, including with counterparts at NATO and CIA.

This time last year I had taken part in INVALUABLE, a top secret Whitehall exercise that had preceded NATO’s wider scenario in Bonn. It was one of a series of seemingly interminable exercises carried out by a select handful of officials to test the War Book’s contingency plans in case of an escalation to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. After a while they became a nuisance, and it was difficult to connect them with the idea of a real conflict. Was this a comparable Soviet exercise? It didn’t seem like it – nobody had been sweating this much in London.

If so, it might be that other men in uniforms were scurrying into bunkers in other parts of the world. If the United States felt an attack was imminent, about a thousand people were to retreat to a complex of steel-protected buildings set inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Members of Congress would be evacuated to a bunker in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, while the President would move to Camp David and the Pentagon to a facility nearby.
In the event that one of their nuclear command or ground launch centres were hit or their capability damaged, a round-the-clock airborne command post codenamed ‘Looking Glass’ would take over. They also had on patrol some forty submarines, loaded with Polaris nuclear-armed missiles.

In Britain, if ballistic missiles or some other form of explosive weapon were detected by the receivers at RAF Fylingdales or by the Royal Observer Corps, information about the objects’ radar arrays, height, speed and inclination would immediately be fed into the Threat Report Panel in Fylingdales’ operations room. If deemed a credible threat, the Home Office would be informed and could then issue the ‘Four-Minute Warning’ – so called because of the length of time between it being given and oncoming missiles reaching their targets, although it might in fact be as little as three and a half minutes.

The warning would be broadcast by the BBC on television and radio, and sirens would be sounded across the country. The warning would advise people to stay in their own homes, and to move to their fallout rooms. In reality, as I knew from discussions on the issue, very few people would survive a sustained nuclear strike. Even if they made it to shelter within four minutes, had stockpiled a fortnight’s supply of provisions and were ‘lucky’ enough to survive the attack, after their food and water supplies had run out there would be nowhere to find more.

In the early days, the idea had been to try to protect the public as a whole from an attack, but the emphasis had shifted to protecting only those who would be needed to reconstruct the country. One early plan had been for the Prime Minister and a small group to stay in London and beat a retreat to a network of rooms under Whitehall, an extension of those built during the last war. But that had been scrapped after two secret reports in the mid-Fifties had painted a horrific picture of the consequences of an H-bomb attack on Britain.

Expert analysis of Whitehall’s ‘citadels’, as the bunkers were
known, had revealed that they might not withstand a direct strike, and that a single explosion could also block their exits, entombing the Prime Minister and his advisers below ground. The boffins had also estimated that an attack on Britain with ten hydrogen bombs would turn much of the country into a radioactive wasteland, and kill or seriously injure sixteen million people – around a third of the population. Another thirteen million people, many of them suffering from contamination, would be imprisoned in their shelters for at least a week. Reading the reports, it was hard to see how the country would ever be able to recover.

As a result, the plans had been changed so that if an attack seemed imminent, several days before the Four-Minute Warning led to ordinary members of the public uselessly shepherding their children into their feebly protected basements, the Cabinet, members of the royal family and senior members of the government, the military, the Service, Five and the scientific community would be evacuated to a 35-acre blast-proof bunker that had been built in the old limestone quarries in Corsham, Wiltshire, with a few hundred others retreating to underground operational headquarters around the country.

But in ’63, Kim Philby defected to Moscow. He hadn’t been indoctrinated into the Corsham plan, but some feared he might nevertheless have got wind of it. If so, the Russians could wipe Britain off the map simply by aiming missiles at London and the bunker in Wiltshire. And so, in May ’68, a brand new plan had been put into place, known to only a handful of people.

If it looked like a nuclear attack was imminent, instead of the ‘great and the good’ being whisked to Corsham, they would instead be split into several groups. RAF helicopters based at Little Rissington in Gloucestershire would fly to Whitehall and wait at the Horse Guards Parade for the Prime Minister and a couple of dozen others – including a few from the Service – and each group would be flown to a different location. I was earmarked to be taken to Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, to the maze of rooms built
beneath it in the nineteenth century by the agoraphobic fifth Duke of Portland. The idea that central government would evacuate to Corsham had been kept in place as a cover story, a decoy to protect the new plan and to stop anyone looking for the PYTHON sites, as they had been codenamed.

A thought crystallized in my mind. Despite the Service’s fears that Philby had blown Corsham, it seemed clear from Yuri’s questions that they did
not
know about it. If so, that meant that all the money and effort to create the PYTHON plan had been a waste. I had decided not to tell them when I learned about it last spring, and I certainly didn’t want to tell them now. Apart from having lost any vestige of belief in their cause, I didn’t want to be responsible for starting a nuclear war.

But I
could
tell them about Corsham, which was no longer in use, and make it seem very convincing – I had learned about it in ’65, and had even been given a tour of the place. But before I answered, I needed to find out why were they asking. Were they planning to attack the West, and if so, why?