When Lyudmila was sixteen, her older brother Piotr was recalled from Paris, where he had run a network of local intelligence agents supplying information to the international Communist Party, although everybody knew that Comintern was actually run by the Soviet espionage agency. Six months later, he was arrested because he had lived in the West and his ideological purity had therefore been corrupted. This time there was no trial. Lyudmila later learned that he had been executed by firing squad.
Two years after that, another brother simply disappeared while working for Soviet intelligence in Germany, and as a result, when Lyudmila joined the intelligence service herself—at the time, it was called the NKVD—she underwent a rigorous interrogation. Miraculously, she survived. The fact that she had been the one to denounce her brother to the NKVD worked in her favor, as did her extensive knowledge of Marxist theory, her avowed disgust of bourgeois capitalist society, and her exceptionally ascetic lifestyle.
That was in 1932. Since then Lyudmila has survived the purges of the late 1930s and the slaughter of the Great Patriotic War, from which nobody else in her entering class at the NKVD—by now reformed into the KGB—was left alive. Lyudmila survives not because she’s extraordinarily brilliant, or strategic, or well connected. She survives because she has two rules. The first is not to attract attention to herself. Comrade Stalin doesn’t know her name. Beria of the secret police doesn’t know her name. She serves them quietly, anonymously. Others who clamored for recognition are now dead, or starving to death in a Siberian gulag. Not Lyudmila. She does all the dirty work. She finds girls to supply Beria’s particular needs, for example, and she finds ways to silence the grieved family members who demand some explanation. When it comes to sniffing out heretical thoughts, nobody has a more sensitive nose than Lyudmila. She’s particularly good at extracting confessions. Never once has she claimed credit for any of these acts of patriotism. She lets others claim the credit and then watches as they, too, fall victim to some denouncement. Some discovery of impurity in thought or deed. They all fall eventually.
The second rule is even more important: trust nobody. Trust nothing! Every single person she meets, inside the KGB and outside of it, is suspect. Every piece of information that crosses her desk, gathered from networks within the Soviet Union and without, is suspect. Lyudmila has one faith—the Communist state. Everything else falls sacrifice to this one idea, even herself.
Lyudmila doesn’t trust this particular man one bit, even though he’s supplied the KGB and its predecessors with valuable information from the British Foreign Office for the past twenty years. His name is Guy Burgess, and he’s recently arrived from London with a fellow spy named Donald Maclean. They defected together, just ahead of the authorities who were about to unmask them at last.
Lyudmila knows who tipped them off. She knows where all the Soviet Union’s diligent moles have built their hills and tunnels in the great institutions of the West—political, academic, military, scientific, you name it. She knows the almost laughable fact that one of Britain’s top spy catchers is, in fact, a Soviet spy himself. She knows their code names, and what they’ve done and what they’ve produced, over the years and last week, and exactly how much alcohol they drink to dull the psychological pain of committing treason against a country and a culture that consider a gentleman’s honor so sacrosanct as to be taken for granted. (Quite a lot, even by Russian standards.)
She carries all this information in her head as she sits across the table from Burgess, who lounges in his chair and chain-smokes the British cigarettes they’ve provided for him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’s telling her. “If there were some clever high-level plot to infiltrate Moscow Centre—American or British—I’d have heard about it. Philby gets all that intelligence right from the source, and I happened to be living in Philby’s own bloody basement in Washington, not one month ago.”
“Perhaps this operation is taking place above STANLEY’s head,” she says, in her nearly flawless English—taking pains to use Kim Philby’s code name, as good tradecraft requires.
Burgess shakes his head. “Nothing takes place above Philby’s head. MI-6 trusts him like a priest. My God, they handed him the Volkov defection case, didn’t they? About as hush-hush as it gets. He speaks to the CIA head on a daily basis. He and Jim Angleton are like brothers.”
“Nevertheless. They will have been made suspicious by these telegram decryptions. They will have realized our network has penetrated their agencies and their government departments at the highest level. It is possible and even likely that they will have undertaken an operation outside of the intelligence service itself, to root out everyone who has been disloyal.”
“That’s your own paranoia talking,” Burgess says. “I assure you, the British don’t see it that way. They can’t conceive a Cambridge man passing along secrets to a foreign country. They’ll go on assuming it was some cipher room clerk from Reading who needs the money to pay off his bookie.”
Lyudmila stares at him with distaste. He’s slovenly, this man. His shirt collar is stained, his teeth are indescribably yellow, his skin is slack and paunchy from incessant drinking, from overindulgence in rich food, from scorn for physical exercise. Possibly he’s the most undisciplined man she’s ever met, at least in this profession, and what’s worse, he’s an open homosexual who makes no effort at all to disguise or control his voracious carnal appetites. But while Lyudmila is suspicious and puritanical, she’s also fair. Burgess possesses a brilliant intellect and exerts enormous charm, when he chooses. He also knows everything about everybody.
She decides to lay a single card on the table.
“We have recently intercepted a communication from here in Moscow to a contact named ASCOT in London. Do you know who this ASCOT might be?”
He flicks some ash from his cigarette into the overflowing tray at his elbow. “Not the slightest idea. I’ve never heard of an agent named ASCOT. Where was the communication directed?”
“To a private address. A flat in West London that seems to be owned by a shipping company called Lonicera. We have the flat under surveillance at the moment, but we have not been able to determine anything of significance. We suspect, however, that this communication may be the key to a number of recent security leaks, for which we have been unable to identify the source.”
“Lonicera, eh? Doesn’t ring a bell.”
As an intelligence agent of nearly two decades’ standing, Burgess is a practiced liar. Still, Lyudmila can’t detect any sign of deception in his voice or his affect. He looks so at ease, he might be sprawled in his own living room, except Lyudmila suspects that Burgess’s living room—the one he left behind in London, anyway—is equally as squalid as Burgess himself.
“Very well,” she says. “You will, of course, inform us immediately should your memory ring a bell, after all?”
“With pleasure. I’m eager to be of service.”
If she were alone, Lyudmila’s mouth would curve with contempt. Defectors! Really, they’re such a nuisance. They know too much, they’re altogether too eager to be of service. Don’t they understand that defection means retirement? What use can a defector possibly be? He’s already given up all his information. He can’t go back to his home country for more. His only value is publicity—the triumph of Soviet intelligence. Otherwise, he’s just a drain on the state. You have to find him some job that will keep him out of trouble. You have to give him a nice apartment and access to luxury Western goods, so he doesn’t complain. You have to keep a close eye on him, to make sure he’s not getting restless and disillusioned.
In fact, Lyudmila can think of only one defector whose assimilation has gone smoothly, without any headaches for her—a happy, contented Soviet citizen with his happy, contented family.
Almost as if he can read her mind, Burgess stubs out his cigarette and says, “By the by, how’s Digby coming along?”