The Dark Chronicles (65 page)

I ran across the airfield, my chest burning and my head pounding with the desire to reach safety. We reached a fence, and beyond it was a road, a motorway of some sort. I glanced back for a moment: Sarah was a few yards behind me, but the plane was still sitting there in the darkness, and there was nobody coming for us. We had made it. We were going to be all right.

It was when we reached the road that I slowed down for a moment, and I felt a tug at my sleeve. I turned to see Sarah pulling at it.

‘What is it? Are you hurt?’

I followed the direction of her gaze. In the distance was a line of buildings, shrouded in morning mist. But slowly I realized that many of them were domes.

Onion domes.

It hit me like a kick to the stomach and I knelt down on the tarmac and waited until they came to fetch us.

*

We didn’t have to wait long. There were four or five of them: burly men in suits the same shade of grey as the tarmac. Now I saw that a couple of black Chaika limousines were parked on the other side of the plane, and as they walked us towards them I glanced over at Sarah. She gave me a look of sheer panic in return, and I felt numb inside.

Sasha was waiting for us. He stared right through me, then shook hands with the security men and headed into one of the Chaikas. We were led over to the other one, which had a flag pinned to the front grille. The door was opened, and we climbed into the rear. The interior was bright red – Soviet red – with fold-down seats on
the side nearest the driver. The leather was cold against the back of my neck. I looked up and saw a man seated opposite us, wearing a uniform: gold glinted on his epaulettes. He was very old, and deeply tanned. He looked alarmingly reptilian, his eyes glinting through a network of wrinkles that spread like tributaries across the landscape of his face, and for a fraction of a moment I had the thought that it was Auden, the great poet revealed as Moscow’s puppetmaster-in-chief, the final Russian doll in the collection. But it wasn’t Auden, of course: the nose was snubbed, and the eyes were tiny sparks in the crumpled papyrus of skin.

‘Hello, Yuri,’ I said.

‘Greetings,’ he said, and smiled to show a collection of nicotine-stained teeth. ‘But perhaps now you can call me Fedor Fedorovich.’ His eyes flicked over Sarah. ‘So this is the woman.’ The tip of his tongue darted from his mouth and licked at his lips. I shivered inwardly as I remembered his ‘daughter’ in Burgdorf.

‘Are you the maniac behind this idea?’ I said. ‘This…’ I struggled to find a word. ‘. . .
game
?’

He turned his eyes to me, dipping his head in a mocking bow. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not the “maniac” behind the strategy, as you put it, although I have had my input. But I am old now – the new guard do not listen to me as much these days.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘I know that our objectives have not always been clear to you. As I am sure you understand, we cannot always provide agents such as yourself with the full picture, so you could not know where our priorities lay in this operation. I nevertheless congratulate you for your efforts to save our Italian comrades from being wrongfully blamed for the deaths of innocent civilians, even if—’

‘I was more interested in the civilians than your comrades.’

He gazed at me for a moment, then turned his head to look out of the window. ‘Take a word of advice from an old man,’ he said quietly, and his voice was a little colder now, a little stiff: ‘When we arrive, adopt the line I have proposed instead. I think it will help you fit in better.’

He suddenly leaned forward, and I flinched. He smiled at my nerves and lifted a bottle of vodka from a compartment in the door, along with three shot glasses. He thrust a glass each into my and Sarah’s hands, then poured out measures for each of us. ‘I give you a toast,’ he said. ‘You must drink it
do dna
: to the bottom.’ Then he cried out
‘Mir i druzhba!’
– ‘Peace and friendship!’ – raised his glass and downed the contents, eyeing me carefully over the rim as he did.

I turned and stared out of the window, and saw the domes and spires looming out of the mist ahead. We were approaching Moscow: a new world. It was one I had been heading for since I had sought this man out in 1945, but my reprieve had finally come to a close – I had reached the end of the road, as another Russian had told me not long ago.

I forced myself to look across at Sarah. Her face was as cool and beautiful as the moment I had met her in the British embassy in Rome. But her mind, I knew, was flooded with confusion and fear. I had brought her to this point. Another life lay ahead of us now, and we would have to draw on all our reserves to survive it – and I must find a way to protect her. She met my gaze and stretched out her hand. I clasped her soft, ringless fingers in mine, then raised the glass in my other.

‘Mir i druzhba,’
I said, and as the liquid burned the back of my throat, Fedor Fedorovich’s laughter echoed in my ears.

Among wolves, I thought, howl like a wolf…

This book is a work of fiction, but it is set against a background of real events. In the late 1960s, Britain and Italy both witnessed widespread industrial action, the springing up of terrorist groups, and plots against the governments of the day by senior members of their respective intelligence communities. The First of May group did machine-gun the American embassy in London in 1967, and carried out several other attacks and kidnappings until disbanding in the early 1970s, whereupon their mantle was taken up by the Angry Brigade and others. In Italy, several anarchist and Communist groups carried out attacks on civilians at this time, eventually flowering into the Red Brigades and other groups that terrorized the country for much of the ’70s and ’80s.

As with
Free Agent
, I was inspired by the investigative journalism of Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, particularly a chapter in their book
Smear! Wilson and the Secret State
in which they described attempts to organize a coup in the United Kingdom during this period as part of a longer-term ‘strategy of tension’ against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Arte come Terrore is fictional, inspired by Germano Celant’s essay
Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia
, published in the journal
Flash Art
in 1967, in which he wrote of a revolutionary existence that ‘becomes terror’ (‘
Un esistere rivoluzionario che si fa Terrore
’) – I took his metaphor
literally and extended it. However, two explosions did take place in Milan in April 1969, and several anarchists were charged in relation to them. Some now believe that those and several subsequent attacks, such as the bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in December 1969, which killed 16 people and injured 80, and the bombing of Bologna train station in August 1980, which killed 85 people and injured over 200, may not have been carried out by anarchists or left-wing terrorists, as originally thought, but by right-wing groups with connections to Italy’s secret services, NATO, the CIA, MI6 and others.

In 1990, two Italian judges discovered a document written by Italian military intelligence in 1959 that outlined the purpose and structure of a network known as Gladio. In a statement to Italy’s parliament on 24 October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed that this had been part of a secret NATO operation, known under different names in other countries, which had been set up shortly after the Second World War as a contingency plan in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The plan had involved the creation of ‘stay-behind nets’: forces that could provide effective resistance to the Soviets, and which had access to hidden caches of arms, supplies and technical equipment in many countries.

The existence of British stay-behind networks and their offshoots had been publicized prior to Andreotti’s statement. In 1977, Chapman Pincher wrote in the
Daily Express
of the existence of the ‘Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee’, which he claimed contained an ‘underground resistance organization which could rapidly be expanded in the event of the Russian occupation of any part of NATO, including Britain’ and which had links to the Ministry of Defence and the SAS. And in 1983, Anthony Verrier stated in a footnote in his book
Through The Looking Glass
that ‘
current
NATO planning’ (his emphasis) gave the SAS a similar role to that previously held by SOE regarding stay-behind parties. Since 1990,
little else has been revealed of Britain’s post-war networks, although an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London in 1995 noted that junior Royal Marine officers in Austria had been detached from their normal duties in the early ’50s in order to prepare supply caches and coordinate with local agents for stay-behind parties.

The CIA established the Turkish arm of the network in 1952, but I have speculated that the British had already done some work along these lines a year earlier. This is based in part on a paragraph in Kim Philby’s memoirs in which he stated that SIS’s Directorate of War Planning was busy setting up ‘centres of resistance’ and guerrilla bases in Turkey to counter a possible Soviet invasion while he was stationed there in the late ’40s: in other words, a stay-behind network. If Philby were telling the truth, one presumes he informed Moscow at the time, meaning that at least part of the stay-behind operation was compromised from the start. If he was lying, the Soviets nevertheless knew about such plans by 1968, when his memoirs were published.

Following Andreotti’s statement in the Italian parliament, many people questioned whether members of Gladio and the other stay-behind networks had turned from their original mission of protecting Western Europe from Soviet invasion to supporting, planning or executing terrorist attacks on civilians – attacks that were then blamed on Communists and others in order to unite public feeling against the Left and bolster the country’s security structures. Since 1990, a great deal of information has emerged to support this idea, but despite parliamentary inquiries, arrests, trials, acquittals and retrials in Italy, Turkey and elsewhere, it remains unproven. Until NATO declassifies all its files on these networks, the truth may never be known – and perhaps not even then.

For the purposes of this novel I have presumed that NATO’s post-war stay-behind networks were subverted for false-flag terrorist
operations, and have used some established facts in the hope of creating plausible fiction. My main sources were Philip Willan’s
Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy
and Daniele Ganser’s
NATO’s Secret Armies
. I am especially grateful to Philip Willan for his comments on an early draft of the novel.

In
Chapter XXIII
, Paul Dark reads the Italian military intelligence document discovered in 1990, and the figures mentioned there are taken from it. The ‘strategy document’ he reads earlier is my own invention. Right-wing establishment figures in both Britain and Italy were plotting against their governments during this period and, according to Daniele Ganser, an SIS agent betrayed the stay-behind networks to the KGB in Sweden in 1968. Italian Gladio members were trained by British special forces instructors in England, but their main training facility was a secret military base at Poglina in Sardinia, near Capo Marrargiu. In two separate right-wing coup attempts in Italy, in 1964 and 1970, there were plans to detain left-wing leaders, journalists and activists at this same base. The area between Capo Marrargiu and Alghero is known as The Griffons’ Coast, as it is home to the griffon vultures that Paul and Sarah encounter in
Chapter XVII
. Part of the area is now a reserve for this species.

In
Chapter IX
, Paul Dark discovers that his handlers in Moscow were initially unsure of the validity of the information he had given them. This is partly based on accounts of Moscow’s scepticism towards Kim Philby and other members of the Cambridge Ring during the Second World War. Genrikh Borovik in
The Philby Files
and Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev in
The Crown Jewels
quote declassified Soviet intelligence files expressing these suspicions, including several reports concluding that Philby and the other members of the ring must have been discovered by British intelligence and were unwittingly passing on disinformation. The spies were not fully cleared of suspicion by Moscow until 1944.

The frontispiece quote is taken from a memorandum prepared by George Kennan that set out the case for the United States’ use of ‘organized political warfare’, and is quoted courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration (RG 273, Records of the National Security Council, NSC 10/2. Top Secret). The United States’ post-war influence on Italy and fear of the Communist party coming to power in that country is widely documented, and it is clear from former CIA chief William Colby’s memoirs and other sources that the Americans were instrumental in setting up and running several post-war stay-behind networks, including in Italy.

It is thought that most of the superpowers investigated the use of biological weapons during the Cold War, often developing research carried out in the Second World War. In 1942, British military scientists detonated anthrax bombs on the Scottish island Gruinard: it was not decontaminated until 1990. As far as we know, Britain never ‘weaponized’ Lassa Fever, although the United States and the Soviet Union both suspected the other of trying to do so. In the 1970s, American scientists investigating the disease in Liberia encountered Soviet researchers looking for Lassa antibodies, reagents and samples. The darkened room in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna is inspired by a description of a work in that gallery in Kate Simon’s
Rome: Places and Pleasures
, and on the earlier work of Lucio Fontana.

The ball at the top of St Peter’s Basilica is no longer open to the public, but it was in 1969, and was large enough to accommodate sixteen stout-hearted tourists. The Chapel of the Shroud in Turin is still under renovation following the fire in 1997. From April 2010, visitors will be able to see it for the first time since its controversial restoration in 2002.