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Authors: Jeremy Duns

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BOOK: The Dark Chronicles
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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
:

Many people, including experts in weapons and strategy, comfort themselves by imagining that the superpowers will
consider a ‘counterforce first strike’ only if it can be overwhelmingly disabling. But ‘damage limitation’ in American parlance and the ‘counter-battery’ operations of Soviet doctrine remain desirable goals for the military men on both sides. If there is going to be a nuclear war, it is better to be hit by 5,000 warheads than by 10,000. Such reasoning leads to pitiless arithmetic: ‘If I can kill a hundred million on his side with a loss of only fifty million on my side, and smash his industry more thoroughly than he smashes mine, I have not lost, because we can restore the damage faster and our ideology will prevail in the world.’ The Soviet military leaders have reasoned in that sort of fashion at least since the fall of Khrushchev …

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.

Select Bibliography
Declassified documents
Cable from Strategic Air Command Headquarters to 12 Air Division et al., Increased Readiness Posture, 23 October 1969, Top Secret (Air Force, FOIA Release)
‘Government War Book Exercises Held During 1968: INVALUABLE’ (The National Archives, PRO, CAB 164/375)
‘Machinery of government in war: Report of working party and related papers’ (The National Archives, DEFE 13/46, 1955)
Memorandum, Secretary of Defense Laird to National Security Adviser Kissinger, 25 June 1969, Subject: Review of US Contingency Plans for Washington Special Actions Group (FOIA release)
Plan of Actions of the Czechoslovak People’s Army for War Time, 14 October 1964 (Central Military Archives, Prague, Collection Ministry of National Defense, Operations Department, 008074/ZD-OS 64, pp. 1–18. Translated by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive, Washington DC, and Anna Locher of the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research, Zurich)
Soviet Study of the Conduct of War in Nuclear Conditions: Memorandum from Ivashutin to Zakharov, 28 August 1964 (Central Archives of the RF Ministry of Defense (TsAMO), Podolsk. Translated by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive)
‘Soviet Wartime Management: The Role of Civil Defense in Leadership Continuity’, Vol. II – Analysis, Interagency Intelligence Memorandum NI IIM 83-10005JX (Washington DC: Director of
Central Intelligence, December 1983, Top Secret; partially declassified in 1997)
Speech by Marshal Grechko at the ‘Zapad’ Exercise, 16 October 1969 (VS. OS-OL, krab. 2915, 999-154, cj 18004, VUA. Translated by Sergey Radchenko for the National Security Archive)
‘Thermonuclear weapons fallout: Report by a group of senior officials under chairmanship of W. Strath’ (The National Archives, CAB 134/940. Records of the Cabinet Office: Minutes and Papers, 1955)
Articles and books
‘An Observer’,
Message from Moscow
(Jonathan Cape, 1969)
‘At Home with the Frazers’ (in
Time
, 3 February 1958)
Charles Arnold-Baker,
For He is an Englishman: Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman
(Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2007)
J. Beddington and A. J. Kinloch, ‘Munitions Dumped at Sea: A Literature Review’ (Imperial College London, 2005)
Bruce G. Blair,
The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War
(The Brookings Institution, 1993)
George Blake,
No Other Choice
(Jonathan Cape, 1990)
Genrikh Borovik, ed. Phillip Knightley,
The Philby Files: The Secret Life of the Master-Spy
– KGB Archives Revealed (Little, Brown and Company, 1994)
Vladimir Bukovsky,
To Build a Castle
(André Deutsch, 1978)
S. Ye. Bulenkov, et al.,
Soviet Manual of Scuba Diving
(translation of April 1969 Soviet Ministry of Defence document, University Press of the Pacific, Hawaii, 2004)
William Burr and J. E. Rey Kimball, ‘Nixon’s Secret Nuclear Alert: Vietnam War Diplomacy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969’ (in
Cold War History
, 2003)
Nigel Calder,
Nuclear Nightmares: An Investigation into Possible Wars
(BBC, 1980)
Robert Cecil,
A Divided Life: A Biography of Donald Maclean
(Coronet, 1990)
Ron Chepesiuk, ‘A sea of trouble?’ (in
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, September 1997)
Bob Clarke,
The Illustrated Guide to Armageddon: Britain’s Cold War
(Amberley, 2009)
Dick Combs,
Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)
Patrick Dalzel-Job,
Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy
(Pen & Sword, 2005)
Michael Dobbs,
One Minute to Midnight
(Arrow, 2009)
Stephen Dorril,
MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service
(Touchstone, 2000)
Ronald Eyre, et al.,
Frontiers
(BBC, 1990)
George Feifer,
Moscow Farewell
(Viking, 1976)
Benjamin B. Fischer, ‘A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare’ (Center for Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, September 1997)
Fodor’s Guide to Europe
(Hodder and Stoughton, 1969)
M. R. D. Foot,
SOE: The Special Operations Executive, 1940–1946
(BBC, 1984)
Kenneth Gustavsson,
80 År på Havet: Sjöbevakningen på Åland, 1930–2010
(PQR, 2010)
Peter Hennessy,
The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst, 1945–2010
(Penguin, 2010)
Bjarne Henriksson,
1939 – Ett Ödeesmättay År För Åland
(Landskapsarkivet, Mariehamn, 1989)
Keith Jeffery,
MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949
(Bloomsbury, 2010)
Kalevi Keskinen and Jorma Mäntykoski,
Suomen Laivasto Sodassa 1939–1945/The Finnish Navy at War in 1939–1945
(Tietoteos, 1991)
Fredrik Laurin, ‘Scandinavia’s Underwater Time Bomb’ (in
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, March 1991)
Jak P. Mallmann Showell (ed.),
What Britain Knew and Wanted to Know About U-Boats
, Volume 1 (International Submarine Archive, 2001)
Vojtech Mastny, ‘How Able Was “Able Archer”?: Nuclear Trigger and Intelligence in Perspective’ (in
Journal of Cold War Studies
, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 2009, pp. 108–123, MIT)
Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne (eds),
A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991
(Central European University Press, 2005)
Zhores Medvedev,
The Medvedev Papers
(Macmillan, 1971)
Louis Mountbatten (foreword),
Combined Operations: The Official Story of the Commandos
(Macmillan, 1943)
Nagel’s Encyclopedia Guide: Leningrad and Its Environs
(Nagel, 1969)
Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley,
Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed A Generation
(Sphere, 1977)
Eleanor Philby,
The Spy I Loved
(Hamish Hamilton, 1968)
Kim Philby,
My Silent War
(Grafton, 1989)
Rufina Philby with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov,
The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years
(St Ermin’s Press, 2003)
Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, ‘The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969’ (in
International Security
, Spring 2003)
Marlise Simons, ‘Discarded War Munitions Leach Poisons Into the Baltic’,
New York Times
, 20 June 2003
Göran Stenlid,
Ålands väder under 1900-talet
(Ålands Museum, 2001)
Jeremi Suri, ‘The Nukes of October: Richard Nixon’s Secret Plan to Bring Peace to Vietnam’ (in
Wired
, 16.03, 25 February 2008)
Viktor Suvorov,
Aquarium: The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy
(Hamish Hamilton, 1985)
Olli Vehviläinen,
Finland and the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia
(Palgrave, 2002)
Leonid Vladimirov,
The Russians
(Pall Mall Press, 1968)
Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev,
The Crown Jewels
(HarperCollins, 1999)
Greville Wynne,
The Man From Moscow
(Hutchinson, 1967)
Greville Wynne,
The Man From Odessa
(Granada, 1983)
BOOK: The Dark Chronicles
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