The Devil's Alternative

well knew, was far out against the rules.

After Valentina, Berlin had palled. A year later he was transferred by Reuters to Paris, and it was two years after that, when he was back in London again, kicking his heels in the head office on Fleet Street, that a civilian he had known in Berlin, a man who had worked at the British headquarters there, Hitler’s old Olympic stadium, had made a point of looking him up and renewing their acquaintance. There had been a dinner, and another man had joined them. The ac­quaintance from the stadium had excused himself and left during coffee. The newcomer had been friendly and noncom­mittal. But by the second brandy he had made his point.

“Some of my associates in the Firm,” he had said with dis­arming diffidence, “were wondering if you could do us a little favor.”

That was the first time Munro had heard the term “the Firm.” Later he would learn the terminology. To those in the Anglo-American alliance of intelligence services, a strange and guarded but ultimately vital alliance, the SIS was always called “the Firm.” To its employees, those in the counterintelligence arm, or MI5, were “the Colleagues.” The CIA at Langley, Virginia, was “the Company,” and its staff “the Cousins.” On the opposite side worked “the Opposition,” whose headquarters in Moscow were at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s secret-police boss and the founder of the old Cheka. This building would always be known as “the Center,” and the territory east of the Iron Curtain as “the Bloc.”

The meeting in the London restaurant was in December 1964, and the proposal, confirmed later in a small flat in Chelsea, was for a “little run into the Bloc.” He made it in the spring of 1965 while ostensibly covering the Leipzig Fair in East Germany. It was a pig of a run.

He left Leipzig at the right time and drove to the meet in Dresden, close by the Albertinium Museum. The package in his inner pocket felt like five Bibles, and everyone seemed to be looking at him. The East German Army officer who knew where the Russians were locating their tactical rockets in the Saxon hillsides showed up half an hour late, by which time two officers of the People’s Police undoubtedly were watching him. The swap of packages went off all right, somewhere in the bushes of the nearby park. Then he returned to his car and set off southwest for the Gera Crossroads and the Ba­varian border checkpoint. On the outskirts of Dresden a local driver rammed him from the front offside, although Munro had the right-of-way. He had not even had time to transfer the package to the hiding place between the trunk and the back seat; it was still in the breast pocket of his blazer.

There were two gut-wrenching hours in a local police station, every moment dreading the command “Turn out your pockets, please, mein Herr.” There was enough up against his breastbone to collect him twenty-five years in Potma labor camp. Eventually he was allowed to go. Then the battery went flat and four policemen had to push-start him.

The front offside wheel was screaming from a fractured roller bearing inside the hub, and it was suggested he might like to stay overnight and get it mended. He pleaded that his visa time expired at midnight—which it did—and set off again. He made the checkpoint on the Saale River between Flauen in East Germany and Hof in the West at ten minutes before midnight, having driven at twenty miles per hour all the way, rending the night air with the screaming of the front wheel. When he chugged past the Bavarian guards on the other side, he was wet with sweat.

A year later he left Reuters and accepted a suggestion to sit for the Civil Service Entrance examinations as a late en­trant. He was twenty-nine.

The CSE examinations are unavoidable for anyone trying to join the Civil Service. Based on the results, the Treasury has first choice of the cream, which enables that department to foul up the British economy with impeccable academic references. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office get next choice, and as Munro had a First he had no trouble entering the foreign service, usually the cover for staffers of the Firm.

In sixteen years he had specialized in economic intelligence matters and the Soviet Union, though he had never been there before. He had had foreign postings in Turkey, Austria, and Mexico. In 1967, just turned thirty-one, he had married. But after the honeymoon it had been an increasingly loveless union, a mistake, and it was quietly ended six years later. Since then there had been affairs, of course, and they were all known to the Firm, but he had stayed single.

There was one affair he had never mentioned to the Firm, and had the fact of it, and his covering up of it, leaked out, he would have been fired on the spot.

On joining the service, like everyone else, he had to write a complete life story of himself, followed by a viva voce exam­ination by a senior officer. (This procedure is repeated every five years of service. Among the matters of interest are inevi­tably any emotional or social involvement with personnel from behind the Iron Curtain—or anywhere else, for that matter.)

The first time he was asked, something inside him rebelled, as it had in the olive grove on Cyprus. He knew he was loyal, that he would never be suborned over the matter of Valen­tina, even if the Opposition knew about it, which he was cer­tain they did not. If an attempt were ever made to blackmail him over it, he would admit it and resign, but never accede. He just did not want the fingers of other men, not to mention filing clerks, rummaging through a part of the most private inside of him. Nobody owns me but me! So he said “No” to the question, and broke the rules. Once trapped by the lie, he had to stick with it. He repeated it three times in sixteen years. Nothing had ever happened because of it, and nothing ever would happen. He was certain of it. The affair was a secret, dead and buried. It would always be so.

Had he been less deep in his reverie, he might have noticed something. From a private box high in the left- hand wall of the theater, he was being observed. Before the lights went up for the entr’acte, the watcher had vanished.

The thirteen men who grouped around the Politburo table in the Kremlin the following day were subdued and watchful, sensing that the report of the professor of agronomy could trigger a faction fight such as there had not been since Khrushchev fell.

Rudin as usual surveyed them all through his drifting spire of cigarette smoke. Petrov of Party Organizations was in his usual seat to his left, with Ivanenko of the KGB beyond him. Rykov of Foreign Affairs shuffled his papers; Vishnayev the Party theoretician and Kerensky of the Red Army sat in stony silence. Rudin surveyed the other seven, calculating which way they would jump if it came to a fight.

There were the three non-Russians: Vitautas the Balt, from Vilnius, Lithuania; Chavadze the Georgian, from Tbilisi; and Mukhamed the Tajik, an Oriental and born a Muslim. The presence of each was a sop to the minorities, but in fact each had paid the price to be there. Each, Rudin knew, was com­pletely russified; the price had been high, higher than a Great Russian would have had to pay. Each had been First Party Secretary for his republic, and two still were. Each had super­vised programs of vigorous repression against their fellow na­tionals, crushing dissidents, nationalists, poets, writers, artists, intelligentsia, and workers who had even hinted at a less than one hundred percent acceptance of the rule of Great Russia over them. None could go back without the protection of Moscow, and each would side, if it came to it, with the fac­tion that would ensure his survival—that is, the winning one. Rudin did not relish the prospect of a faction fight, but he had held it in mind since he had first read Professor Yakovlev’s report in the privacy of his study.

That left four more, all Russians. There were Komarov of the Agriculture Ministry, still extremely ill at ease; Stepanov, head of the trade unions; Shushkin, responsible for liaison with foreign Communist parties worldwide; and Petryanov, with special responsibilities for economics and industrial plan­ning.

“Comrades,” began Rudin slowly, “you have all studied the Yakovlev report at your leisure. You have all observed Com­rade Komarov’s separate report to the effect that next Sep­tember and October our aggregate grain yield will fall short of target by close to one hundred forty million tons. Let us consider first questions first. Can the Soviet Union survive for one year on no more than one hundred million tons of grain?”

The discussion lasted an hour. It was bitter, acrimonious, but virtually unanimous. Such a shortage of grain would lead to privations that had not been seen since the Second World War. If the state bought even an irreducible minimum to make bread for the cities, the countryside would be left with almost nothing. The slaughter of livestock, as the winter snows covered the grazing lands and the beasts were left without forage or feed grains, would strip the Soviet Union of every four-footed animal. It would take a generation to recover the livestock herds. To leave even the minimum of grain on the land would starve the cities.

At last Rudin cut them short.

“Very well. If we insist on accepting the famine, both in grains and, as a consequence, in meat several months