The Dark Chronicles (97 page)

Also in
Chapter VII
, Dark reads a fictional document, but one in which several real Soviet agents are mentioned. Melita Norwood was exposed as HOLA in 1999, and ERIC was revealed to be Engelbert Broda in 2009. Both passed the Soviets documents about Britain’s nuclear research programme. The East Germans’ spy codenamed MICHELLE was Ursula Lorenzen, who was recruited by a honey
trap in 1962. In 1967 she was appointed assistant to the British Director for Operations in NATO’s General Secretariat in Brussels.

During the Cold War, the British press became obsessed with the identity of ‘the Fifth Man’, but the known double agents now number many more than five – and even those may only represent the tip of an iceberg. In
Chapter XI
, Paul Dark names several British agents who served the Soviet Union, but does not mention Melita Norwood, Ivor Montagu, J. B. S. Haldane, Goronwy Rees, Raymond Fletcher, Geoffrey Prime, Arthur Wynn, Leo Long, Tom Driberg, Bob Stewart, Edith Tudor Hart or others who passed information to Soviet intelligence before 1969 but had not yet been exposed. I believe the Soviet Union may have recruited many more agents in Britain and elsewhere than have been revealed to date, as part of a wide-ranging plan to plant long-term sleepers in the West.

Donald Maclean
was
discreetly involved with dissidents in Moscow after his defection, and was a friend of Roy Medvedev. The old acquaintance from Cambridge who was asked if he might be a sleeper ‘they’ had never got around to waking up was Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit – this incident is discussed in Robert Cecil’s biography of Maclean,
A Divided Life
.

The instant camera used by Anton is a Foton, which was produced in very limited numbers in the Soviet Union in 1969. Paul and Sarah’s method of crossing the Soviet– Finnish border is inspired by a successful attempt made by defector Georgi Ivanov, described by Nigel Hamilton in the 1990 book
Frontiers
. The pistol fired underwater in
Chapter XVIII
is a prototype of a
Spetsialnyj Podvodnyj Pistolet
(‘Special Underwater Pistol’), or SPP-1. Vladimir Simonov began work on the design in 1960, and it was finally accepted for use by the Soviet Navy in 1971.

The thinking behind Yuri’s attempt to provoke a nuclear war in the novel was inspired by an aspect of Cold War nuclear strategy mentioned by Nigel Calder in his 1979 book
Nuclear Nightmares
:

Finally, I would like to thank Helmut Schierer, John Dishon, Emma Lowth, Arianne Burnette, my agent Antony Topping and my editors Mike Jones in the UK and Kathryn Court in the US for their wealth of helpful insights and suggestions on the novel, and my wife and daughters for their unending patience as I wrote it.