Making Enemies (3 page)

‘Why not? Anything’s better than the Reds.’

It was an astonishing statement. For a moment I wanted to challenge him, then I thought better of it.

‘And let the guilty get away with it? The people we’ve been at war with for six years?’

‘So what? That war’s over and done with. We’ve got to build up their country as fast as we can. Who cares if they were Nazis once? They’re Germans now and they’re on our side. The world’s moved on. New times, new enemies.’

‘Reds?’

‘Right. Bastards. Real godforsaken, motherfucking communist
bastards. They’re the enemy now. Berlin’s the front line and we’re the guys getting shot at.’

I had met a few Russians in the course of my duties in Berlin and their behaviour had been impossible, unreasonable to a degree I’d never experienced before. My companion sensed agreement in my silence.

‘I’ll tell you something else. This is the way the world’s headed from now on. Us against the Reds, eyeball to eyeball, wherever you turn. Try telling that to a politician. Your people. Mine. Who gives a shit? The war to end wars is over, they say. War talk is talking dirty. We all love the Russians because Stalin was on our side when it counted, so he’s a great guy. Nobody wants to know what he’s doing to us now. That’s what scares me. I tell you, there’s a new war starting, right here, right now, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, especially when they get their own nuclear bomb.’

He took my empty glass from me and stood up.

‘The Russians snatch people off the streets every day in Berlin, but who cares about Berlin? If it were London or Washington we’d be on the brink of World War Three. By the time our politicians come to their senses, it
will
be London or Washington. What will the fuckers do then? Call in the military to save their skins once more. Nothing new in that, is there? That’s what men in uniform have been doing since time began. Saving skins that don’t deserve to be saved. If the guys back home would listen to us, none of this need ever happen.’

He laughed and broke the mood.

‘Let’s have another drink.’

He returned from the bar with two other Americans and they spent the next two hours telling stories about their wars. It was the companionship of uniform, fine as long as it lasted but soon enough forgotten.

Our journey began again shortly after midnight. I tried to sleep but the cold crept into my bones and I sat for most of the night staring out into the darkness, seeing nothing but the occasional light reflected on the snow. We could have been going anywhere. I hoped we were going to Calais.

Andropov is questioning her once more. How long is it since her first interview? She can no longer remember.

Her mother has been released unharmed. She continues to live in her apartment, her son has not suffered at school, her neighbours are not whispering about her or avoiding her, the babushka in the front hall recognizes her when she leaves the building or returns home (though she never smiles), she continues her work at the Institute. On the surface it is as if the interrogation had never taken place. But she knows that her own freedom is now a technical matter.

‘If I were to ask you what is the most valuable piece of information the West has given us about their nuclear programme, what would you answer?’

She shifts uncomfortably in her chair and says nothing. To her relief he is not waiting for her to reply.

‘Sixteen months ago, when they dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they told us that a nuclear device can be exploded. That moment shifted the balance of power decisively in their favour. The West has done what we have so far found impossible to do. That puts our own nuclear programme under very considerable pressure.’

What is the phrase she has heard Yuri Miskin use? Problem Number One, for which a State Committee has been created. (Every problem in need of a solution has a State Committee.) The pressures of Problem Number One are obvious even to her, and generally she has little contact with the political staff. Work harder, work faster, achieve more, they tell the Institute from their protected position on the sidelines. Be patriotic, think only of the state. How little politicians and their apparatchiks understand about the scientific process.

‘I have given you our best industrial and technical resources,
scientists, technicians. We have sown our people like seeds in the American laboratories and those seeds have ripened. Our spies have brought us secrets from the West, samples of uranium 235, drawings, calculations. But still there is no bomb, no explosion.’

Andropov is pacing around the room. She does not follow his movements. She looks down at her hands (she clasps them tightly together in her lap) or straight ahead at his empty chair. Andropov reaches past her to put out one cigarette and light another.

‘The words of Comrade Stalin.’

Comrade Stalin? Does he have any idea of the enormous technical problems they have to resolve, of the vast industrial resources such an ambitious project will absorb, of the months and years of intense, painstaking work that must be dedicated to their task?

‘The Soviet Union must defend itself against its enemies by exceeding the nuclear successes of the West. At this moment, we have no more important task, but we are not moving fast enough.’

Beria has been appointed Chairman of the Special Committee on Atomic Energy, he tells her, and discussions have taken place recently on how the Soviet nuclear programme can be speeded up. Without a nuclear capability, Soviet foreign policy is at risk. She already knows that because Miskin sits on the Committee representing the Director of the Institute and, though he tells her little, he has described how intense is the pressure on the Institute. Miskin has never mentioned Andropov to her but that is not surprising. Probably Andropov would only attend by special invitation, and Miskin has no head for people. Any issue that Andropov might raise would not catch his interest. Miskin has mastered the art of being present while his mind is far away.

She lets her own mind wander as Andropov talks. She imagines the room. High windows, dim lights, a wide table strewn with papers, too many people. There are always too many people at meetings in the Soviet Union: the watchers watch each other. There is too much smoke. And endless talk.

She hears the discussion. Like all committee discussions, it is circular, political, ragged with bad temper, posturing and self-justification (she has attended too many meetings herself not to know that, whatever their purpose, the attitudes are always the same, only the papers are different). The impatience of the Central Committee and the presence of Beria produce an unusual nervousness.

‘We must steal more secrets from the West,’ the administrators
on the Committee will have said (that is what they always say), as if by voicing their thoughts the act is done. ‘We must copy the American design. Then we will have our Soviet bomb.’

Because the design is American, they are saying without using the words, it is automatically superior, more practical, more liable to work than any Russian design.

But how? How are they to steal more American secrets? Here the representatives of Military Intelligence who have been seconded to Department S will have interrupted, to remind the meeting that contacts with secret Soviet sources in America have been shut down since Gouzenko’s defection because of fears that the FBI is close to uncovering their agents. America and its nuclear research is presently out of bounds and it will be some time before either can be reactivated. The plain fact the Committee must face is that the supply of stolen nuclear secrets has dried up because the American project is now heavily guarded.

(Will anyone have the courage to inform Comrade Stalin? Foolish question).

She is secretly pleased that American secrets are closed to them because it may at last allow the Institute a chance to prove it can match anything the Americans may do, but she is wise enough to keep such ideas to herself.

‘Then we must explore other avenues,’ the chairman will have said; that is the kind of remark he was appointed to make.

‘We should approach Western scientists who are known to be open to the idea of sharing atomic secrets,’ the political administrators will have suggested. ‘What we cannot take secretly, let us ask for openly.’

At moments like these, the same names are wheeled out, Oppenheimer, Nils Bohr, Fermi, Szilard; the same accounts of secret meetings are rehearsed, the same conclusions are drawn. There exists in the West (so the argument goes) a group of pioneer researchers who are believed to be willing to give away their nuclear secrets in support of their ethical belief that no nation should possess a monopoly of nuclear knowledge. Now it is their turn to be the saviours of the Soviet nuclear programme, stepping in valiantly to rescue Stalin’s political programme. That this idea is once more being floated is, she knows, a sign of the Committee’s desperation in its search for a solution. This group may exist: she has her doubts, but she has never heard that it has ever given away a single secret.

But, she also knows, the West is alert to this tactic too. The representatives of Military Intelligence will have made it clear at this meeting, and probably at many others too, that all the avenues for gathering secret information from these sources are being closed off. The West has woken up to the risks. These scientists are quarantined in security, their secrets increasingly unreachable.

Where is Andropov in all this? Is he the thin, pale-faced figure, silently awaiting his moment in the company of his bull-necked, square-headed superiors whose backsides have warmed the chairs they sit in for too long, men who will agree to any course of action in order to secure the privileges they can no longer live without: their large apartments, sable coats for their wives, official cars, holiday villas on the Black Sea?

But the reality of Andropov’s voice interrupts her imagined meeting, and she is brought back to full attention. She warns herself that she must concentrate on what he is saying. She has already paid the price of letting her mind wander once. She must not let that happen again.

‘An intelligence officer from the Second Bureau makes a contribution to the discussion at this point.’

(Why can’t he tell her that
he
made the suggestion?)

‘If we are denied all access to Western secrets,’ he says, ‘perhaps we should look for other ways of getting their scientists to work for us.’

She looks at him and fear flutters in her heart.

‘The immediate response to this suggestion is laughter,’ Andropov tells her.

‘The British and Americans are hardly likely to accept an invitation to come to Moscow,’ a senior Politburo member says.

She imagines Andropov sitting at the table, lips drawn tight, hands clenched, waiting for the mirth to subside, his cold demeanour slowly commanding attention. The laughter dies away and the room falls silent.

‘Perhaps if the approach were different, they might be persuaded to help us,’ she hears him saying.

The meeting waits in anticipation.

‘You have a proposal, Comrade Andropov?’

‘We know,’ he says, ‘that there is a fundamental disagreement in the West about the development of the atom bomb. Some of their most influential scientists believe that the military use of nuclear power should be banned, no single state should have a military
advantage over another, that nuclear secrets should be shared, the nuclear industry managed under the control of the international scientific community.’

Here he pauses and looks around the table at the faces watching him, waiting for the denouement that will get them all off the hook on which at this moment their future is dangling.

‘It would be interesting to see what effect our support for such a campaign might have on the progress of the West’s nuclear programme.’

There is now complete silence around the committee table. They know that this is not all his plan but as much as he will choose to reveal now.

If you cannot buy secrets, buy time, he says. It is a risky idea, but they are desperate men. Sow doubt and confusion in the suggestible minds of the West; create a sufficient interruption in their development programme by manipulating the weakness of democracy, its use of debate in the search for consensus, to allow Soviet scientists time to complete their work.

At first Andropov is not understood. Why should there be any debate in the West? Why should this plan affect the development of their research?

Andropov smiles briefly. He introduces to the Committee the idea of free speech. There is general puzzlement. How can a society work where anyone may voice his opinion? It is a recipe for chaos and unhappiness.

Andropov argues that by infiltrating the Western mind in this way, by encouraging its powerful leaders to express their doubts, he will provoke a furious and fevered debate on the morality of nuclear energy, slowing progress on their bomb. The outcome will be a paralysing internecine war of words, unresolved and unresolvable, on which the West will choke itself, allowing the innate superiority of the Soviet system to prove itself and passing nuclear leadership to the Soviet Union.

A small bald-headed man gets to his feet. He has the chest of a miner, with short powerful arms. He bangs the table with the flat of his hand.

‘We will spread a poison of self-doubt into the West,’ he shouts. ‘We will confuse our enemies, lead them astray, we will watch them destroy themselves in the agonies of useless debate. Only then will the victory of Marxist-Leninism be complete.’

There have been whispered comments behind his back, while he is speaking, between the chairman and the secretary of the Committee. Now the chairman thanks him for his useful contribution, reminding all present that the purpose of all their actions, especially those under discussion today, is the ultimate defeat of their enemies in the West who threaten the Soviet Union.

‘I would like the permission of this meeting to present a plan for consideration in seven days.’ That is Andropov’s request.

Ruth imagines the glances exchanged, the whispered murmurings, head bent to head, the nods, the hierarchical process of agreement where underlings wait for their seniors to declare their opinion before nodding furiously themselves.

‘Four days, Comrade Andropov. The Committee will hear your plan at a special meeting in four days’ time.’

Four days later, Andropov will have submitted his plan and the same absurd process of evaluation and discussion will have occupied another day in the glorious history of the Soviet Union, at the end of which the chairman will have turned to Andropov and nodded his assent.

And because of that nod she is sitting here now in this room in the Lubyanka, listening to Andropov resurrect her affair with Stevens all those years ago.

Sixteen years. They have waited sixteen years and now she will be made to pay for this single indiscretion of her life.

Andropov waits for a sign that she has understood fully what he is telling her.

‘I am your target,’ she says.

‘No, Comrade Marchenko. You are my instrument. Professor Stevens is my target.’