slender, had sandy hair and a fair complexion, and wore glasses. «My name is Jim, and I represent the United States government,» he said in flawless Russian. «It is a pleasure to meet you and an honor to inform you that the President of the United States has granted your request for political asylum. You have nothing to worry about. As soon as the necessary bureaucratic procedures are completed, you will fly to the States. It won't be long.
«Do you have any questions or requests? Is there anything you would like to say?»
«No. I understand everything.»
«All right. Take good care of yourself. I will see you soon, and we will be able to talk more freely later.»
Somehow Belenko had expected more, something dramatic, even epic, and he was vaguely disappointed that his first encounter with an American had been so simple, almost casual.
The Dark Forces, they seem very peaceful. Maybe they are just being clever in a way I don't know.
Repeatedly apologizing for the character of his lodging, the Japanese exerted themselves to make Belenko feel comfortable and welcome. They laid mattresses on the floor of his cell, brought pillows, sheets, and blankets, wheeled in a color television set, gave him a chess board, invited him to work out in the gym or use the steam bath. They emphasized over and over that the guards, who would stand by him every minute of the day and night and even accompany him to the bathroom, were his protectors, not his captors. And that evening they served him a multicourse dinner that was the best he ever had eaten.
Thinking that a banquet had been especially prepared for him, he asked who the chef was. The Japanese said they simply had ordered the food from a common cafe across the street from the compound.
«Really!» Belenko blurted. «I heard you were all starving over here.»
After dinner he luxuriated in the steam bath and, for the first time since strapping himself into the cockpit at Chuguyevka, he relaxed. His two guards were beaming when he emerged, clad in a silk kimono and sandals. Exhausted as he was, he craved exercise and started toward the gym, but they tugged at his sleeve and pointed him back toward the cell. Someone had procured for him a half-liter bottle of cold Japanese beer. It was even better than its reputation. He slept profoundly even though the guards kept the cell and corridor fully illuminated throughout the night.
The second morning in Tokyo the Japanese dumbfounded him with an announcement that he would have to stand trial for breaking their laws. He could not quite believe what was happening as they led him into an office of the prison, where a robed judge greeted him with a formal statement, translated by an aged interpreter.
«You are accused of breaking the laws of Japan on four counts. You illegally intruded on our airspace. You entered our country without a visa. You carried a pistol. You fired a pistol. How do you plead to these charges?»
«Well, I did all that.»
«Why did you disturb our airspace?»
«I did not have a donkey to ride here. The aircraft was the only means of transportation available to me. This means of transportation will not permanently damage your airspace. The aircraft moves through the air without harming the air.» The interpreter giggled during its translation.
«Why did you not have a visa?»
«If I had requested a visa, I would have been shot.»
«Why did you bring with you a pistol?»
«The pistol was a required part of my equipment; without it, I would not have been allowed to fly.»
«Why did you fire the pistol?»
«To keep away people who I feared might damage something of great value to the rest of the world.»
«Are you prepared to sign a confession admitting your guilt to these crimes?»
«If that is what you want.»
«It is my judgment that this is a special case and no punishment is warranted. Do not fear. This will not interfere with your plans.»
Having satisfied the requirements of the legal bureaucracy, the judge smiled, shook hands with Belenko, and asked the interpreter to wish him well.
During the judicial proceedings, a package and note had been delivered to his cell: «It was nice talking with you. I will be pleased if these books help you pass the time. With best regards, Jim.»
The package contained two books: a collection of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Great Terror by Robert Conquest, both in Russian. Anyone caught reading either in the Soviet Union could expect a minimum prison sentence of three years. Drawn by the lure of the forbidden, Belenko read curiously at first, then passionately, then as a man driven and possessed. He read through the day and into the night, and he trembled often as he read.
The words of Solzhenitsyn reeked and shouted of the truth, the truth he long had seen but the fundamental meaning of which he never had fully comprehended. He had seen the village Solzhenitsyn recreates in Matryona's House, the mean, hungry, desolate, cockroached-infested, manure-ridden, hopeless village. Although Solzhenitsyn was describing a village of the 1950s, Belenko had seen the same village in 1976; he had seen it at Chuguyevka; he had seen it at the village beyond the fence of the training center where he studied the MiG-25. He had seen the zek in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He had seen him just last spring on the road from the freight terminal to Chuguyevka. In fact, the dying Ukrainian exile he had picked up had looked just like Ivan Denisovich.
The Great Terror unveiled for Belenko the full dimensions in all their horror of the Stalin purges, wherein at least 15 million people — children, women, men, Party faithful and heroes, loyal generals and intelligence officers, workers, peasants — were starved, shot, or tortured to death. Never had he read a book which so meticulously documented every stated fact by references to published sources, mostly Soviet sources, brilliantly collated to convey a message of overwhelming authenticity. All of Khrushchev's calumnies about Stalin were true, just as the millions or billions of deifying words previously uttered and printed about him were lies. But Khrushchev, Belenko now realized, had let loose only a little of the truth.
Caring for neither food nor drink, he read and reread well into the early morning of his third day until he was sure, sure that one quest of his life had ended in fulfillment.
All his intellectual life he had detected symptoms of a sickness in Soviet society, signs that something was fundamentally wrong. They proliferated, overpowered, and ultimately drove him away with the conclusion that the illness was incurable. Yet he never understood the underlying cause; he never discerned any logic or pattern in all the failures, stupidities, cruelties, and injustices he observed. Now Solzhenitsyn, a Russian studying Soviet society from within, and Conquest, an Englishman, analyzing it from without, independently and in separate ways gave him the understanding for which he always had quested.
The perennial shortages of virtually everything the people wanted and needed, the enduring backwardness and chronic failures of agriculture, the inefficiencies of the factories were not really the fault of individuals or local bureaucrats or Khrushchev or Stalin, as the official explanations variously claimed. Neither was the maintenance of a rigidly stratified society under the name of a classless society, tyranny under the banner of freedom, concentration camps under the label of justice. Even the ghastly pogroms ordered by Stalin and the ridiculous, ruinous economic policies of Khrushchev were only superficially their fault.
The cause of all lay within the Soviet system itself. Dependent for survival on tyranny, it inevitably spawned tyrants, gave them sway, and could tolerate within the body politic no antidote to their excesses or errors. During his twenty-nine years under the system, life always had been essentially the same because the system was the same. And whatever cosmetics might be applied to alter its appearance before the world, however repression might ebb and rise in intensity, the system always would yield essentially the same results.
If everything they said about communism, about themselves was a lie, then maybe what they said about the rest of the world also was a lie. Maybe there is hope. Anyway, I am free of it forever.
But by midmorning Belenko had cause to wonder whether he really was free of it. The bright young Foreign Office official who accompanied him from Hakodate came to the prison, and the concern manifested by his face and words caused Belenko concern.
«The Soviet Union is exerting enormous pressure on us. They do not believe that you are acting voluntarily. They are accusing us of keeping you by use of force and narcotics, and we have been put in a very difficult situation. They are trying desperately to take you back.
«Now you do not have to do this. It is entirely your choice. But it would be a great service to Japan if you would meet with a Soviet representative and disprove their accusations, prove that you are acting out of your own desires.»
