Making Enemies (11 page)

It was much later when the singing began. We had eaten by then and were in the sitting room, sprawled before a blazing fire, the remains of a bottle of claret within reach. We had exhausted politics; whether or not the country would run out of coal before this bitter winter ended; how best to supplement a ration-book diet; and a philosophical discussion on the state of the post-war world. My father’s unexplained excitement had cooled.

Perhaps it was the presence of the piano that drew Krasov back into memories of his past. He stood by it for a long time before he played a note or two. No one said anything. Then he sat down, stretched his fingers and played a chord. Then another. He bent low over the keyboard, his eyes tightly shut, and started to sing to himself.

It was a truly Russian song, he explained, full of boldness and pathos, happiness and grief. Something precious, youthful love at its most extreme, was found and then lost. As we listened, the darkness around us was filled with the events of the song. We saw reapers in the field, among them a young peasant boy, tall and blond, and beside him a girl. All day long he works beside her, inspired by her beauty. At sunset, as the reapers drift away from the field, he declares his love. But as she looks up to take his kiss, a gypsy rides by, his black hair flowing in the wind, his gold earrings glinting in the dying sun. One call of her name and she has slipped from the boy’s arms and is gone, lost in the night. The young farmhand’s heart lies broken like the stalks of corn he holds in his hands.

It was an extraordinary performance, dramatic and powerful, and we clapped him when he had finished. For a moment, in the half-light, I saw my father’s face strangely contorted as he listened to this song of love that might have been. Krasov bowed and thanked us, claiming his singing was without merit. He refused to sing any more,
saying that songs about his mother country filled him with memories that only made him sad.

It was my father who suggested Rogers and Hart. He had an unexpected passion for popular music, and no voice at all. But Celia could sing and my father asked her to do so now, if Krasov would play. Celia hummed the tune, Krasov picked up the chords. She smiled at him and broke into a song.

Krasov took up the melody and played a soft accompaniment to her quiet alto, catching her phrasing, echoing it, leading her carefully through the music. He had only to hear the melodic line once to be able to improvise with chords and occasional trills, to catch the bitter-sweet mood of the songs.

Celia’s voice was not strong but Krasov’s presence, his sympathetic accompaniment, his musicality, gave her a confidence I had not seen before. She seemed to be singing for my father, and the sound of her voice was slowly drawing from him the anxiety whose symptoms he had displayed so strongly earlier in the evening.

For a time I thought there was more to it than that, a deeper and more personal message. I sensed Celia was singing for my father alone; Krasov and I were forgotten or ignored. It was like listening unobserved to an intimate conversation. With each line she was declaring her love, as if instinctively she knew she had to win my father back, letting the words of the song say what she could find no other way to say. Only later, when I asked myself why she felt she had needed to do this, did my reason prevail and I rejected my memory as fanciful and wrong. Celia and my father were happy. There was no reason to suggest any threat to their marriage.

We stayed like that until the logs in the fireplace had become glowing ash. Krasov closed the piano, smiled and thanked Celia for her kindness to him. He bowed to my father, kissed Celia’s hand and went up to bed.

By the following morning he had got it into his head that his pursuers were on his track and knew where he was. He insisted he had to leave at once. Cambridge was no longer safe. He would return to London where Monty would know what to do with him. He must leave now, this minute, he was sorry, please, we should try to understand.

Bewildered, we watched him go, a small dark figure outlined sharply against the snow.

Krasov’s appearance shocked me; he was pale and nervous. My confident drinking companion had vanished. In his place I saw a man frightened and bemused, no longer sporting the bravado which had been for so long his trademark.

Things were bad and worse threatened, he told me, desperately clinging on to my arm. He could not go back to Moscow because he now knew they would kill him. When I asked him why, all he would say was that there were reasons. He refused to elaborate. I tried to persuade him not to be so melodramatic but he wouldn’t listen. I was his friend, he said. We had good times together. I must protect him. He needed somewhere to hide. Now. At once. Before it was too late.

The tightening pressure on my arm banished any hope of arguing him out of his position. We couldn’t stand at the cab rank all day. Whether I believed him or not (I wasn’t sure but on balance I didn’t), what mattered was that to Krasov his fear was real. If I was his friend (and I was) I had to help him.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure you’re safe for the present. Then we’ll decide what to do about you.’

Looking at the neurotic figure beside me in the taxi (he crouched on the floor for the entire journey), I knew I had taken a huge risk in choosing loyalty to a friend over loyalty to the Department. I justified my action by telling myself it was only a matter of time before Krasov in this mood (unlike anything I’d experienced before) asked for political asylum. I was sure Krasov’s defection would deal a significant blow to Soviet self-esteem and be a feather in SOVINT’S cap. A sense of elation overcame my foreboding.

The flat in Lowndes Square wasn’t an official safe house but somewhere to be used in emergencies. Krasov’s first act on entering
was to pull the curtains. I opened them again and gave him his instructions. He was not to keep the curtains undrawn after dark, nor to draw them before it was dark. (It was now midday.) If he played the wireless, then it was to be played quietly. Not to answer the telephone, except at times agreed with me: I made him memorize the hours when I would call him and the procedure I would use. He was not to answer the door unless he heard the signal first. We agreed the times I would come in to check he was all right. On no account was he to go out for any reason at all. Secretly I decided to put a twenty-four-hour watch on the building.

‘How shall I eat?’ he asked.

‘There’s enough food here for a week,’ I said, ‘even for someone with your outrageous appetite.’

‘Thank you, my friend,’ Krasov said solemnly, as I finished the tour of the apartment. ‘You are saving my life.’

‘I’m giving you a breathing space,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows where you are. For now you’re safe.’

‘Maybe I am too much trouble,’ he said gloomily. ‘Maybe I change my mind and give myself up.’

To whom? The Russians? Why was he running away from them? Why on earth had he gone to Cambridge? What had he done that put his life in danger? There were any number of questions to which I wanted answers but for the moment Krasov was in no mood to provide them.

‘You’ve got thirty-six hours to think about that,’ I said firmly. ‘For the moment, you’re safe. Be grateful for that.’

‘Safety,’ he said. ‘That is concept hard to imagine.’

I left him trying to do just that.

*

Krasov had arrived in London as Hitler began his ill-starred invasion of Russia. At stake was the route through the Urals and the Caucasus to the rich oilfields of the Middle East. Stalingrad was the gate through which the Germans had to pass if they were to gain this prize. We saw our fate in the hands of the Russians, and over the succeeding weeks, as we followed the fortunes of this extraordinary battle, our alliance with the Soviet Union was at its strongest. From the sidelines we prayed the German advance would be stopped but feared it wouldn’t. Then in February, the battle finally over, we cheered the victory and toasted every Russian we knew.

Among them was Leonid Krasov. He worked as a journalist for Tass and within weeks of his arrival he had established contacts in Fleet Street, government departments, political parties and the trades unions. With his fluency in English and his undoubted charm (how unlike our image of a communist he was), he rapidly became a popular figure in London.

In those first months of his posting we kept a persistent eye on him. He paid routine visits to the Russian embassy but we would have been surprised if he hadn’t. He did not appear to spend much time there (a good sign); he certainly wasn’t friendly with any of the staff, diplomatic or KGB (even better). The evidence suggested that we had to take him for what he said he was, a working journalist posted to London.

I met the diminutive Russian at a party a year after Stalingrad. We had a drink together one evening a week or two later and found we got on. He was the first Russian I had ever got to know and I enjoyed his company. His lugubrious view of the world amused me. I declared this relationship to Corless, who saw it as a possible investment in the future.

‘Cultivate him,’ he said. ‘You never know when a friendly Soviet may come in useful, nor what you might learn from him. But don’t forget, he’s not only Russian, he’s Soviet, whatever he may say to the contrary.’

I was left to work out the difference for myself.

In the months after the Yalta Conference, a group within SOVINT produced a report that showed how the Soviet Union could well become our enemy once the present hostilities ceased. This upset the Russian desk at the Foreign Office, who sat on the report and successfully prevented its official circulation. (Guy Benton denied a hand in this but few of us believed him.) A number of carbon copies did the rounds and unofficially the report had its converts. Corless was one of them.

‘We’re keeping an eye on the Soviets in London,’ he warned. ‘Even if they appear friendly, they probably aren’t. That includes Krasov.’

I argued that it was hard to see Krasov working against us, but Corless showed me how the inveterate party-goer, friend of politicians, journalists and the military, the atypical communist, could pick up gossip in the normal course of his journalistic activities which, when shipped back to Moscow for analysis, might yield unexpected clues to the whereabouts of senior military personnel or to the direction of
political thinking within the Government. That, in turn, might reveal information about British military intentions or our national political temper. Both had a value to a potential enemy.

I kept a close eye on Krasov but remained unconvinced. We ate our way through the best London restaurants (I was continually astonished at his extraordinary appetite), we met at parties where, usually late in the evening, Krasov could be persuaded to play American popular songs on the piano. His great love was Fats Waller, of whom he did a hilarious and much requested imitation.

Women adored him. At parties he would be surrounded by them; when we met for dinner, he would often have to make a telephone call before dessert to confirm the assignation he had set up for when our dinner ended, though he never talked about his conquests.

One night a month or two after the war ended, Krasov arrived uninvited at my flat in Victoria. He was already well oiled and he got drunker as the evening progressed. He insisted I drink with him, which I did with great reluctance. He rambled on about his disillusion with the Soviet Union, his fears for the future, how communism was taking the wrong path, how the idealism of his youth had no place any more. How could he return to a Russia that had betrayed its own revolutionary ideals? What was to become of him? For one awful moment I thought he might be going to cry.

Suffering from a terrible hangover, I reported this conversation to Corless and gave it my own gloss. Was this a sign that Krasov was out of sorts with his own side? Was he warming us up because he wanted to work for us? Corless dismissed my optimism.

‘He’s Russian,’ he said. ‘The Russians are unstable. He’s acting in the national character, not out of it.’ The drunkenness, he maintained, was as much an illusion as his disillusion was a disguise. The hammering in my head made it all feel horribly real to me, though I couldn’t tell Corless that.

‘Our relations with the Soviets are cooling,’ Corless said. ‘Krasov knows that. He’s unhappy about it. He’s letting his feelings show. Don’t be taken in. Keep him in your sights. Stay friendly with him. He may tell us something yet.’

A week or two later, in an unusual moment of intimacy prompted by a large glass of my best malt, Krasov opened his heart and poured out his troubles to me. The difference was that this time he was more or less sober.

He was, he explained, ‘old London hand’. The new regime of
hardline purists at the embassy feared the dangers of contamination from too close an association with decadent bourgeois. Everyone who had been stationed in London longer than six months, and that included the ambassador and the head of the news agency, was under surveillance. The world was not moving in a direction Krasov liked or understood. How he yearned for the old days and the camaraderie of the war years. Life had been so much simpler then. It was a lament I was getting used to.

‘Remember those years in war? Remember parties after Stalingrad? There was strong friendship between our countries then. Now we are being forced to be enemies. It is not what I like.’

How politics ruins the lives of ordinary people, we agreed. If only the politicians could leave us all alone, how much better a place the world would be.

‘If this is what peace brings us,’ he added gloomily, ‘I prefer certainties of war.’

I was his friend, he said. His good English friend. In many ways he felt we were alike. Surely I must understand what he meant? The Soviet Union he had left to come to London was being replaced by a Soviet Union he did not recognize, a world in which he believed he had no part, where he was ‘fish out of water’. The purity of the Soviet ideal had been buried in the murky politics of survival and ambition. The revolutionaries had gone, the bureaucrats had won. He was an old revolutionary with nothing to fight for, his ideals had been stolen by those who had inherited the world he had helped to make. It was the long and bitter lament of a displaced man.

When he talked like this, was Krasov putting on an act, or was he genuine? After he’d gone, I wrote down what he had said and analysed it. Krasov was giving me a coded message, I quickly concluded, whose cipher needed no decrypt. He was afraid to return home. He wanted to stay in London. I was to help him achieve this because I was his friend.

Weeks passed. The Department was deeply involved in the processing of Peter information. I saw Krasov for irregular but punishing drinking sessions, often in the company of his English friends. It all seemed harmless enough in its way (except for the morning after when I would always swear ‘never again’), and I hardly bothered to tell Corless about my meetings with him.

Then, on the evening I introduced him to Danny Stevens, he told us that the London interlude was finally over, and that he had
been recalled to Moscow. He was being watched, he said, to make sure he didn’t weaken in the last few days and try to stay.

‘So ridiculous. What would I stay for?’

He put a brave face on his by now very uncertain future but I sensed his heart wasn’t in it. He came for a drink in my flat the following night and I tried to argue him out of returning. I genuinely feared for his safety when he got back and told him so. He wouldn’t listen. He was ‘great survivor’, he said. Moscow was where he belonged. The old rebel had vanished. In his place I saw a compromising Krasov whom I didn’t like because it didn’t fit what I knew.

His friends organized a series of farewell parties. I saw him repeatedly but never to talk to alone. It was as if he was deliberately staying out of reach.

‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ he said. ‘We will meet soon. We will talk one last time, I promise.’

He didn’t keep his promise because he disappeared. For three days I heard nothing. Then Danny telephoned me from Cambridge to say Krasov was with him (what the hell was he doing in Cambridge of all places?) and he was on the run from his own people. He’d put Krasov up for the night but now the little Russian had got it into his head that the vultures were circling the Fens and if he stayed any longer, he’d be carrion.

‘I told him vultures have never been spotted in the Fens,’ Danny said. ‘But I don’t think I convinced him.’

Why did he imagine London was safer than Cambridge? I asked. Danny couldn’t say. He was putting Krasov on the King’s Cross train and begged me to be there to meet him.

The code was easy and I made the translation I was sure that Krasov wanted me to make. He had decided not to return to Moscow and now he wanted protection from his own side as a prelude to coming over. That was why he wanted me to meet him. It was an opportunity not to be missed. I arrived at King’s Cross twenty minutes early, and spent the time prowling around on the lookout for obvious Russians. If there were any there, I didn’t spot them.

*

Krasov answered all the Saturday contacts, one visit and two telephone calls. On Sunday morning he said he had slept well and was listening to a concert of Russian music on the wireless. I could hear it in the background as we talked, a martial chorus from Borodin’s
Prince
Igor
. He was in reasonable spirits when I went to the flat before lunch. By the afternoon, his mood had changed, and he was once more full of doubts about himself and his future.

‘If you’re afraid to go back to Moscow,’ I said, taking the plunge, ‘why not stay put? You’ve got friends. We could help you make a new life here. You’d be safe.’

‘Why would you British want me?’ he said. ‘I have nothing to offer. No secrets, no expertise. I am journalist, not diplomat.’

I tried to argue him out of this position. I was sure, I said, that he had information we would find of value.

‘I am Russian,’ he said. ‘Is not easy choice for me to stay here. How can I live for rest of my life outside my country? I have seen White Russians here, they are pathetic, dreaming of world that never existed, living without money, full of illusions, telling themselves that soon communist world will fall to pieces and then they will return to former lives in glory. I am not delusional. I cannot live in dreamland. Clock cannot be put back. I am not one of these lost people.’