effect, a separate country within Russia, funded by the new businessmen they controlled, and by Russians in the West. But they were also funded with even greater quantities of cash by the illegals who were already in positions of great financial power–in private banks and private companies in the West–men like Otto Roth.
‘Directorate “S” was integrated on an international level, like any independent country. There are thousands of you out there, Anna. Like you, they have the best education, years of experience in the field. Each officer has up to a dozen illegals at his disposal somewhere abroad; operatives who are self-sufficient and who pay back when told to pay back.
‘And they worked in cells, just as they did when it all began before the Revolution, before Lenin returned to Russia in 1917, the year Kokoschka, as it happens, took up his professorship in Dresden. These cells were in the same mould the KGB has always favoured. Even completely cut off from the KGB body, deprived of state financing, left out in the cold, the structure would still survive and prosper.
‘And Ivanov and Putin, and the others Putin gathered around him, they knew this—they were, of course, part of it—and when they took power they began to fold Directorate “S” and all its hundreds of cells back into the mixing bowl of Russian politics like cream into a souffle. They owed their positions of power to Directorate “S” and Directorate “S”, like some precious Holy Grail buried during the dark years of democracy, was ready to change the world when it re-emerged.
‘And so, slowly, from 1991, the Patriots have built the economic structures they needed; they have suborned the notionally independent businesses that came to power under Yeltsin, and they have brought the various mafias in under their wing, killing those crime bosses who opposed them. It is the biggest nationalisation of mafia and gangster groups in history.
‘And with all these methods, the Patriots have created an overarching state super-business that controls half the world’s energy supplies. The state’s energy supplier, Gazprom, the largest company in the world, is of course at its head. And the Patriots have elided the guiding hand of the Communist Party out of existence, out of history. The Patriots sit at the head of this new economic machine they have created.’
I get up and put the kettle on the stove but I forget to fill it with water. Then I catch myself and take it off and hold it under the tap until it’s full. I leave the tap on and wash my face with my hands while the kettle heats and I can try to think. Who is Mikhail? Where is Finn?
I make tea, with a lot of sugar, and sit down at the kitchen table, stirring the tea while I look at how Finn continues.
‘Mikhail is very senior in Directorate “S”, Anna. In fact, he is one of the few who knew the structure well enough to bring it all together when the time was right. It was Mikhail who, behind the scenes, raised Putin from being Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg to becoming head of the KGB, then prime minister, before finally helping to elevate him to the presidency.’
I feel Finn pausing for thought, or perhaps to pour himself a drink, or simply to walk away from what he’s writing and to gaze through a window. But his words continue on the page without pause.
‘And so, back to Sudhoff. Whatever body was found in the canal in Berlin, it wasn’t the body of Sudhoff. Sudhoff- his working name in East Germany- was someone else before Sudhoff, and someone else after Sudhoff. He’s been with Putin right from the beginning, long before they “met” for the first time in East Germany. And he was with Putin afterwards. Mikhail is Sudhoff. Codename Mikhail is also codename Sudhoff. He was with Putin in St Petersburg when Putin worked under the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. He was there when Sobchak met his mysterious death. He came with Putin to Moscow and, I hope with all my heart, he is still with Putin now. I hope his wife still lunches with Lyudmilla Putin. I hope this because Mikhail is one of very, very few hopes we have in the West of seeing what Russia has become and what it will grow to be.’
I can almost feel Finn’s pen pause in mid-air.
‘I can tell you that Mikhail has seen this monster he has helped to create. And he doesn’t like what he sees. If the Plan succeeds, and Mikhail remains undetected, his statue will probably be outside the Lubyanka one day. But Mikhail is working to stop it and he cannot survive for long.
‘And if the Plan does not succeed, it will be because Mikhail has tried to alert the world to what he helped create. He is, you might say, a pivotal figure in history, as great a double agent as there has ever been.’
There the writing abruptly ends.
I sit back in the chair, frustrated. He’s dangled a lure, but he hasn’t told me what I want to know. He hasn’t given me the fish.
I tear the little notebook into pieces and burn them one by one in the fireplace. Then I put on my coat. I exit through the back of the house on the lake side, and I walk until darkness falls.
What game is Finn playing? He’s explained Mikhail to me under yet another codename, Sudhoff. Why? Why doesn’t he give me his real name? So his wife lunches with Putin’s wife, but that doesn’t narrow it down much further than Patrushev had already narrowed it down in 2000.
And then, as I stand and stare at the stars that glitter over the lake on this ice-cold evening, I see what Finn is doing. In the past six years he has already offered me my freedom once. Now he is offering me my freedom again, but this time in Putin’s totalitarian Russia. For me to know the real identity of Sudhoff, I will have to take the name to Russia, to tell Patrushev, who will know. I will absolve myself of my sins with the Forest by giving them the name of Sudhoff as my passport back to Russia. Finn is offering me a way to save myself-at the expense of Mikhail, at the expense of the destruction of the Plan. It is Finn’s way of giving me a way back, a way that I thought was closed for good. It is his ultimate trust in me.
But the fact that he doesn’t give me Mikhail’s real name still keeps me at a distance from the truth, so that if I choose to stay here in the West, I will never be burdened with it.
For the moment I put aside the name of Sudhoff and turn Finn’s thesis over in my mind and compare it with what I know Russia has become in the years since Putin came to power. I run over in my head the iron grip in which Directorate ‘S’ holds Russia in 2007.
Four out of every five–eighty per cent–of political leaders and state administrators in Russia are now members of the security services. Most of them have been appointed to these posts by Putin since 2000. They are known as the
Under Putin, politics and business have become one. And all is under the KGB imprimatur, Directorate ‘S’.
This has not happened anywhere else in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.
And when you add it all up, this power, what does it come to? What are all the oil and arms and steel and aluminium and gold and diamonds and uranium and coal and copper and titanium and tantalum, and everything else worth? How many trillion dollars? And all is controlled by the KGB, the
It no longer matters if Vladimir Putin is again ‘elected’, as we still choose to call it in Russia, in 2008. It no longer matters if he overturns the constitution in order to remain in the Kremlin. One of the four out of five will becoming president, that is all that counts.
21
AT THE BEGINNING of September 2001, just after we lost track of Finn as he crossed from France into Switzerland after his meeting with Liakubsky, I was summoned to the Forest by General Kerchenko. The General told me I was to be put through two weeks of intensive retraining. It was routine stuff, he told me, and there was no explanation beyond that.
There was no sign of Yuri or Sasha, my case officers on Finn, and no explanation for that either. Instead, I was assigned Vladimir as my new case officer.
I noted a new deference towards me from Kerchenko. He himself also seemed to have been gently sidelined from Finn’s case and was acting merely as a messenger. I never saw him again.
Vladimir and I spent these two weeks barracked at the Forest. We worked sixteen-hour days and in the late evenings I was given new instructions in coding, separate from Vladimir. I knew I was being prepared to
