Manhunt (3 page)

In fact, the building itself extended for three floors below street level, in addition to the more visible seven above. It also housed the Foreign Operations Executive. The FOE’s address
and telephone numbers appeared in no directory, classified or otherwise, and no references to it, or its staff, or its considerable budget, were ever to be found in any official publication. There
were three good reasons for this.

Firstly, as the FOE was a covert executive arm subordinate to the Secret Intelligence Service, even admitting to the existence of FOE would be tantamount to admitting that SIS itself existed,
something that the British government had only ever done with the greatest possible reluctance. This curious failure to acknowledge something that was common knowledge to almost everyone –
even London taxi drivers had routinely referred to Century House, the old headquarters building of the SIS, as ‘Spook House’ – has never been satisfactorily explained, and it led
indirectly to the ‘Spycatcher’ humiliation.

Secondly, all FOE operations were both covert and deniable, which meant that FOE had to be the same.

Thirdly, the FOE’s Director, Richard Simpson, was almost chronically paranoid about security, and invariably applied the ‘need-to-know’ principle as ruthlessly as possible. As
far as he was concerned, nobody – apart from the Prime Minister and the Head and Deputy Head of SIS, to whom Simpson was operationally and functionally responsible – needed to know
anything at all about FOE.

Even the members of the Joint Intelligence Committee, of which he was a non-speaking member, believed Simpson was simply an assistant to Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the Head of SIS. At an operational
level, of course, things had to be somewhat different, as SIS officers frequently had to brief or debrief their FOE counterparts, but Simpson ensured that even these essential meetings were always
conducted well away from Hammersmith and, where possible, in safe houses or on neutral ground.

The incoming call from Old Admiralty Building was made just after four in the afternoon. Simpson had been expecting it, and picked up the telephone immediately. ‘Yes?’

‘Switchboard, sir, with a call from the OAB.’

‘Right, put it through,’ Simpson said.

There was a click, a pause, and then the slightly nasal voice of Colonel Baldwin could be heard. ‘Mr Simpson?’

‘Yes. Any problems?’

‘No,’ Baldwin replied, with a slight hesitation. ‘He is somewhat insubordinate, as his reports suggested – he even inferred, somewhat obliquely, that I was a fool –
but I think he has the qualities that you need.’

Simpson grunted. ‘Did he take the job?’

‘No,’ Baldwin said, ‘but I’m quite certain that he will. I’m sure he needs the money, for one thing, but I think the idea of the work itself attracted
him.’

Simpson, who had ordered a check on Richter’s bank account through SIS, and knew exactly how much he needed the money, nodded in silent agreement. ‘What’s the earliest he could
become available?’

‘On Monday immediately after he accepts the job,’ Baldwin replied.

‘So that could be as soon as next week?’ Simpson asked.

‘Yes, as long as he calls me either tomorrow or Friday,’ Baldwin said. He asked, after a brief pause, ‘Is there some urgency about this, Mr Simpson?’

‘Yes,’ Simpson said flatly, and without any elaboration. ‘Keep me informed,’ he added, and put down the telephone.

Simpson sat in silence for a few moments, then stood up and walked over to the south-facing window. His office was on the building’s seventh floor, and he gazed without interest at an
uninspiring view across the adjacent rooftops towards the Hammersmith flyover. Simpson was small and pinkish, and as fastidious in matters of dress and appearance as he was professional in his
work. His dark grey suit was immaculate, and even the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket looked perfectly pressed.

He walked back to his desk, sat down again, and opened the temporary file bearing the single word ‘RICHTER’ on the cover. He looked briefly at the photograph attached on the
left-hand side, and then scanned the personal details revealed on the printed sheets opposite.

‘You’ll do,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll have to do.’ Then he closed the file, put it to one side of his desk and turned his attention to the pink file he had been
studying for most of the afternoon. Its title was ‘EGRET SEVEN’.

Southern England

The train journey home was better than Richter had expected, mainly because he had managed to fight his way to a seat immediately. Having picked up a paperback at the
station bookstall, he tried to read it as the train headed west, but his mind kept wandering away from the printed word.

Three things bothered him. First, at no time during his career in the service had Richter ever been aware of any requirement for a dedicated courier of the type proposed by Colonel Baldwin.
Second, although the salary starting point was about what you might expect for courier duties, the annual increments were far too large. Third, coincidence apart, it seemed more than just
providential that this job should have been created at exactly the time when Richter most needed to find employment. It was almost as if this job had been picked for him, rather than the other way
around.

The next morning, Richter rang Baldwin and told him he’d take it.

Monday

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

There were only seventeen passengers in the pale-yellow chartered coach which turned off the Moscow peripheral highway near the village of Tëplyystan, at just after
eight-forty in the morning. Raya Kosov stretched herself comfortably across the two seats she had secured when she had boarded the vehicle, thirty minutes earlier, outside the Davydkovo station to
the south-west of central Moscow, and she gazed incuriously out of the window.

The coach bounced and rattled on the uneven road surface as it made its way past the large sign warning ‘Halt! No Trespassing! Water Conservation District’, and continued slowly down
the narrow road leading into the dense forest. About two hundred metres further on, the coach stopped at what looked like a militia post, but was actually a checkpoint manned continuously by armed
SVR – Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi, or Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, personnel.

Two of the SVR troopers, wearing the uniforms of militiamen, boarded the coach as soon as it drew to a halt, and proceeded slowly and deliberately down the central aisle, as they carefully
checked the identification of each occupant in turn.

Raya was sitting near the back, on the right-hand side of the coach, and she smiled at the young trooper as he reached out his hand for her pass. The trooper smiled back, as he did every time he
saw her when he was on duty. Raya wondered how long it would be before he asked her out – or at least said something to her other than, ‘Thank you, Captain Kosov.’

‘Thank you, Captain Kosov,’ the trooper said predictably, and Raya suppressed a chuckle as she replaced her pass in her handbag. The pass was a buff-coloured plastic card bearing her
photograph and a series of perforations which formed a code specifying the areas within headquarters that she was authorized to enter.

Once the guards had left the coach, it continued for just over half a kilometre further into the forest, and then skirted a large roundabout bordered by the various car parks used by senior SVR
officers. It came to a halt beside the guardroom, which bore an entirely misleading bronze plaque that announced in golden letters, to anyone who penetrated that far, that this building was a
designated ‘Scientific Research Centre’. The guardroom was the only point of access through a high chain-link fence topped by razor-wire, and it was occupied by armed troops from the
SVR Guards Division, who again checked the passes of all the coach passengers as they filed through the turnstiles.

Once she had made it through the guardroom, Raya stepped out briskly along a driveway flanked by lawns and flowerbeds, covering the four hundred yards to SVR Headquarters in just a few minutes.
The building was the former headquarters of the First Chief Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, better known as the KGB.

As the Soviet Union’s all-pervasive Committee for State Security, this organization was the direct linear descendant of the Cheka, the terror organization created in 1917 by Feliks
Dzerzhinsky to liquidate any opponents of communism. Over time, it had become one of the three principal forces within the USSR. The other two were the GRU – Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye
Upravleniye, or Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff – effectively Russian military intelligence; and, of course, the Communist Party itself. Of the three, the KGB was
the largest and arguably the most powerful, but certainly the most feared organization.

The reason for this was simple. Although the KGB had a prime responsibility for any intelligence operations conducted against foreign powers, it was also required to ensure that the various
peoples comprising the Soviet Union remained obedient to the directives and instructions of the ruling Communist Party. With such a vast population, the only effective method of achieving this was
to enlist the regular assistance of unofficial informers, which the KGB recruited in huge numbers.

The recruitment method employed was as simple and effective as it was ruthless. A Soviet citizen would be told to report to the local KGB headquarters – an invitation that was impossible
to ignore. Once there, he would be asked if he wished to assist the Communist Party by acting as an unofficial and unpaid agent of the KGB. To this question, the unfortunate citizen could only
answer in the affirmative, because to refuse to act for the Communist Party could be legally defined as treason, and that was an offence punishable by death.

But, even by agreeing to become an informer, that citizen was not yet out of the wood. If the reports he or she supplied to the KGB officers, about immediate family, friends and acquaintances,
did not contain a sufficient amount of compromising material, the informer would be summoned back by the KGB. Its officers would then point out how other informers operating in the same district
were producing evidence of the type needed, so the new informer must either be deliberately suppressing information, or not seeking it with sufficient assiduity. Both failings in responsibility
were by any definition both anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, and would therefore amount to treason.

In desperation, many informers resorted to inventing stories about mysterious strangers, or reporting snatches of conversation supposedly overheard between unidentified citizens, or else
settling grudges by implicating people who had merely annoyed or cheated them.

It was conservatively estimated that, during the KGB’s heyday, two out of every five Soviet citizens were operating as full- or part-time informers for the organization. A saying popular
in Russia at the time suggested that every time a Soviet citizen farted, the KGB could smell it, and this was not considered to be much of an exaggeration.

When Mikhail Gorbachev, and later Boris Yeltsin, came to power in Russia, the winds of change were already blowing, and the KGB was officially disbanded in 1991. In fact, of course, no such
thing happened.

The KGB had always acted as the ‘sword and shield’ of the Communist Party, and there was no way that the Party – not to mention the Russian government – would voluntarily
disarm itself by destroying its main intelligence service and principal means of support. Besides, it needed the KGB to keep the peoples of the Confederation of Independent States in check, just as
the KGB had controlled the actions of the citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for over half a century.

What actually took place was little more than a departmental reorganization.

The Border Guards’ Chief Directorate, which was charged with maintaining the physical security of all Soviet borders, was transferred to the Russian Army, which should probably have been
responsible for that from the start. The Second Chief Directorate, effectively the domestic security service, and the Fifth Chief Directorate, responsible for the control of dissident groups within
the Soviet Union, were similiarly reformed and renamed.

But the prestigious First Chief Directorate, with responsibility for foreign espionage and intelligence operations, continued its operations without interruption. Except for two changes of name,
that is. The first such change, to Centralnoye Sluzhba Razvyedki, or the Central Intelligence Service of the USSR, occurred in 1991. That designation lasted only until January 1992, when it then
became the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi, the name under which it still operates. The only other significant change at the time was the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov, an experienced
professional intelligence officer, as the organization’s first head. Neither of these changes had any practical effect upon the ongoing operations at Yasenevo, apart from alterations in
section titles and several irritating and largely unnecessary revisions to the internal telephone directory.

The SVR retained control of all agents recruited and run by the KGB, and has been diligently increasing their numbers ever since, not least because the break-up of the former USSR has
significantly added to the number of countries from which Russia now requires intelligence data.

The new organization continues to work from the former KGB’s sixty-acre complex of offices at Yasenevo – bearing more than a passing resemblance to the headquarters of the Central
Intelligence Agency at Langley, Virginia. The main building was designed by Finnish architects and its construction utilized considerable quantities of aluminium and glass. The original
seven-storey structure is shaped like three-pointed star, but is now dwarfed by a new twenty-two-floor extension situated at the far end of the western arm of the core building.

Raya Kosov walked towards the extremity of the northeasterly wing, passing on her way the separate entrance reserved for senior officers. She pushed through the glass double doors of the main
entrance, stepped into a wide marble foyer,and again showed her pass to further SVR sentries. Striding past the bust of Feliks Dzerzhinsky standing in the middle of the foyer, she crossed to the
news-stand to one side, where she bought a magazine. She then passed through a further checkpoint and into the new extension building, before stopping at the main bank of elevators.