The hidden man

29

Jenny telephoned to say that she would be half an hour late for her appointment with Ben. It was 9.45 in the morning. Having finished his third cup of coffee of the day, he walked downstairs and retrieved the post from the metal box bolted to his front door. The number of messages of condolence he now received in relation to his father’s death had dwindled to perhaps one or two a week. And none today, it seemed. Just an electricity bill, addressed to Alice, and something from a French mail-order clothing store she liked to use from time to time. The obligatory bank statement, a takeaway flyer, and a postcard addressed to the house next door in Elgin Crescent that had obviously been delivered by mistake. Then, second from the bottom, Ben discovered an airmail envelope made out in his name containing what felt like a substantial letter. A return address had been written on the reverse side.

Robert Bone US Post Office/Box 650 Rt 12 °Cornish New Hampshire 03745 United States of America

Inside the envelope he found a typed, six-page letter written on fine, watermarked paper and folded twice with care. Only Ben’s name was handwritten, the barely legible scrawl of a hyperactive mind. He began to read:

Dear Benjamin

We met all too briefly at the service to commemorate the death of your father, Christopher, who was, as I hope I communicated to you at the time, a close and dear friend of mine. I promised as my wife and I departed that afternoon that I would write you and Mark with some of my recollections of Christopher, both the good times and the bad. However, I also believe that what I have to say may help to cast some light on the reason why your father was killed.

Ben read that last sentence twice and found himself speeding through what followed.

Your father was loyal to his friends, an erudite and sophisticated man, troublesome on occasion, at times maybe even a little impossible. The Keen temper was famous on both sides of the Atlantic! He loved Russia as his second home: its beauty, its fine tradition of literature, of poetry and music. Most of all, and this may sound odd of an Intelligence man, he loved the honesty of the people, what he described to me as ‘the lack of evasiveness in the Russian soul’. When Jock spoke at the funeral he touched on all of these things but I could sense from talking to Mark and to you even briefly on the driveway that there was a good deal missing, too many gaps left unfilled.

As you will no doubt be aware by now, Christopher worked for British Intelligence for almost twenty years. In 1977 — his first year with the SIS — he was posted to Berlin where he remained for the next four years. (Most of what I’m about to tell you is classified information, so I would ask that you bear that in mind when you consider who to speak to about it.) I first met Christopher in the winter of ’79, as one of the agency’s Station Chiefs. Liked him immediately, almost as a brother. The Foreign Office can specialize in disdain, but Christopher wasn’t arrogant in that sense. I gained the impression that he was unlike his other colleagues, just eager to do the best job he could. Anyway, that Christmas Brezhnev drank one too many egg nogs and decided to send troops into Afghanistan and for a while we all thought we might be on the brink of another global war. But the powers in Washington — I’m talking predominantly about hawks in the Reagan administration like Casey at the CIA- saw the invasion as an opportunity. Even if the Afghan resistance wasn’t ever going to be able to defeat the Soviets, they decided that at least the United States could prolong the agony and visit upon the Russians the equivalent of their own Vietnam.

To that end, and on a very clandestine basis, America began arming and supporting the mujahaddin and soon Central Asia was crawling with every intelligence outfit in the civilized world: the Chinese, the Iranians, the French, the Italians, Pakistan’s ISI, of course — and MI6. Jock, for example, because of his background in the military, was instrumental in training senior members of the resistance in combat techniques, even flying some senior mujahaddin figures to the Highlands of Scotland for exercises with the SAS. If there was a difference in the American and British approaches to the war, it lay in operations like these. While we tended to view the conflict as essentially ideological — a stepping-stone, if you like, on the way to winning the Cold War — MI6 took a more traditional approach, seeing Afghanistan as an opportunity to recruit Soviet military and government personnel as agents who would return to Moscow and bring them valuable intelligence in five or ten years’ time. Meanwhile, Reagan, Casey and later Bob Gates were still playing The Great Game, trying to manipulate the future of an entire continent by playing factions off against one another.

Ben stopped reading and took the letter upstairs. He wondered when Bone was going to get to the point. Most of what he was saying had been reported, ad nauseam, in the papers after 9/11, articles that Ben had tended to skip through laziness. Was this just another stranger promising to throw light on the mystery of Christopher Keen? At least Bone had managed to get over the page. The sheer bulk of his letter was impressive, if only because many of the others had been so inconsequential. He poured himself a glass of water and continued reading in the studio.

Your father and I were posted to Kabul in the late winter of 1984, about a year before the introduction of the American Stinger missile drastically turned the tide of the war in favor of the mujahaddin. Christopher was an undeclared SIS officer working out of the British Embassy while I operated under cover of a Dutch aid organization which was predominantly a front for American espionage activity. It was a coincidence that we were there at the same time and while I spent a lot of hours on the road, shuttling between Peshawar and Kabul, we still managed to see quite a bit of each other and I was grateful to have a friend out there. What fascinated both of us about the invasion was the opportunity it provided to see the Soviet forces at first hand — how they operated in a military situation and so forth. (Don’t forget that this is the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets were still thought of as the Great Satan by Reagan and Thatcher.) A lot of people would be embarrassed to admit this in light of what happened within five or six years, but there were still a lot of high-profile individuals who gave credence to the idea that the Soviet Empire was aggressively expansionist and posed a serious threat to Western democracy.

What we discovered was that the Soviet machine was anything but effective. The army was riddled with corruption and petty crime. Drug and alcohol abuse were endemic and the conditions under which most soldiers were forced to live wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to a hostage in downtown Beirut. Added to that you had non-Slavic elements in the Soviet army who were Muslims not only hostile to the Communist system as a whole but also being asked to fight their own people — ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen Afghans who were their Muslim brethren. It was a crazy situation.

Now as an intelligence officer, a situation like that looks like a big opportunity — and that’s how your father saw it. Pretty soon his whole raison d’etre for being out in Central Asia was to recruit members of the Soviet armed forces and medical staff as agents for British Intelligence. The Russians had made Afghanistan into a big black market and soldiers with nothing better to do would just wander around bartering gasoline, food rations, military clothing and footwear, even selling their own weapons and ammunition to get hold of drugs or alcohol. So it was possible for an experienced intelligence operative, fluent in Russian as your dad was, to engineer situations in which he encountered the enemy at first hand.

One individual like this was a young soldier who began there and then to spill his guts about everything that had been happening, not aware who your father really was, and probably not caring too much either. His name was Mischa Kostov and Christopher couldn’t have known it at the time but he was just about the best potential Soviet agent he was ever going to get his hands on. Mischa — I never met him, of course, but I know he was a sweet kid — was recruited to the army at the age of twenty, and drafted, I think, in April of ’85. As he told it to your father, he’d done about ten weeks of basic training in desert and mountain warfare at a camp in Termez before being sent by train to a Soviet assembly point in Ashkhabad and then on to Kabul by air. This was standard procedure and at this point in his military career the kid’s excited — not only does he get to serve Mother Russia, but the future looks rosy once he gets home. Afghan veterans were given preferential treatment when it came to getting jobs or a place at a good university, a decent apartment in Moscow. Added to that, a guy from the Russian army serves two years in Afghanistan, it’s counted as the equivalent of six back home, so if everything goes OK, Mischa is on to a fast-track promotion and treble his salary.

Only he finds there were guys in his unit who are only fighting for personal gain. There’s nothing ideological going on. Mischa’s a young man and he’s starting to realize that this is a selfish world we live in, that everybody’s out for themselves. Patriotism? Forget it. Most of his comrades have been told they’re going to Afghanistan to fight Iranian and Chinese mercenaries, to build kindergartens and schools for Afghan kids. And then they get there and see that this is bullshit. The soldiers are bored, too, restless and — in 85/86 — increasingly conscious that they’re never going to win the war. These are men quite a bit younger than yourself, Ben, with no women around and nothing to do but smoke hashish or opium, maybe shoot up some koknar. Sure we smoked some weed in Vietnam, but Afghanistan was like goddam Woodstock. The Agency later estimated that at least half a million young Soviet men were exposed to narcotics of one kind or another while serving tours of duty in Afghanistan. And when they went back home, they took that problem with them.

Then, of course, there was alcohol. These are Russians, after all. At one point — independent of Christopher and Mischa — I interrogated a Soviet soldier who told me the guys on his unit used to drink eau de cologne, antifreeze, glue, even brake fluid just to get themselves drunk. But far as your dad could tell, Mischa was more clear-headed. The army was rife with smug gling, pillaging, reprisals, torture, but he stayed out of it, keeping his head down. Only the gradual effect of the corruption on his morale was taking its toll and that’s what your father relied on, that’s the cynical line we had to take. There were men coming into Mischa’s unit from the front lines every day and the stories they had to tell were just horrifying. Hygiene, for one, non-existent. Here they are trying to fight one of the most sophisticated, battle-hardened resistance armies in history and the Russian soldiers are having to contend with dysentery, hepatitis, yellow jaundice, malaria, typhus, skin infections brought about simply by not having access to a shower or even hot water — sometimes for a month at a time. Clean sheets, clean underwear, are unheard of for these men. When they eat, it’s off aluminum plates that haven’t been cleaned in weeks. In the desert areas there’s sand and lice everywhere, heatstroke and dehydration, then frostbite in winter. Mischa was tough, and he could cope with this, but what he couldn’t stand was listening night after night to guys who were being destroyed by war.

After a while he was posted west towards the border with Iran and became involved in some of the heaviest fighting any unit had known out there. Your father began to worry that he wasn’t going to make it back. Forgive me for saying this, Ben, but I think in a sense Mischa had become almost like a son to him. Of course he did return to Kabul and it was then that he told Christopher that several of his comrades had come into conflict with older soldiers in their unit. The Soviet army has what they call ‘stariki’, veterans who, regardless of rank or ability, have an unwritten right to make life as tough as they can for younger conscripts. If you’d served less than six months in the army, it could get rough and young recruits, some of whom were just sixteen or seventeen years old, were forced to scrub toilets with toothbrushes, run around camp wearing gas masks until they fainted or just woken up in the dead of night for no better reason than that’s what the stariki wanted. The culture was so ingrained you could even get higher ranking officers at the mercy of their subordinates simply because they were younger or had served less time. And of course if they tried to complain to their commanding officers the treatment was only going to get worse. The irony was that these soldiers were out there to fight the mujahaddin, but their real enemy turned out to be themselves.

There was one Muslim guy on Mischa’s unit who, as far as we could tell, was straight out of high school in Uzbekistan. Like I said before, there was a lot of bad feeling between the Slav majority and the ‘churkas’, Soviet Muslims from the southern republics. The bullying in this case got so bad he went missing for two days. The regiment drove themselves crazy looking for him, wondering if he’d deserted to the rebels, but eventually he got tracked back to his village in Uzbekistan. Somehow he’d managed to get a pass back home and just run away. So the Soviets put him in solitary for three weeks and then he gets called back to the front and life in the barracks deteriorates further. Bullying and punishment on a level Mischa didn’t even want to talk about. He was ashamed, I think. This is a proud son of Soviet Russia with scales falling from his eyes. Christopher later found out that the stariki beat this Muslim kid every night with an iron bar and that he was raped by another soldier on at least two separate occasions. He wrote a letter home to Uzbekistan, begging his father to get him out of there, but what could his dad do? The kid’s already gone AWOL once, he’s a stain on the family. So no help comes and the inevitable happens. One night he crept out of bed at 2 A.M., took a knife into the bathroom and slit his own throat. He was eighteen years old.

That spring, Mischa was posted back to the front, this time south towards Kandahar, but a new company commander, name of Rudovski, had been assigned to his unit because the previous guy got killed. Rudovski came with a sidekick, Domenko, a sergeant smacked out on liquor and char 24 hours every day. This was when the atrocities started, a summer of mindless slaughter to which Mischa bore terrible witness. The worst of it came in August when the unit captures a dozen Afghan kids armed only with a few bird guns, just trying to do their bit for the resistance. The Russians are only about ten clicks from their base and Mischa suggests handing them over to the Afghan Security Service. But Rudovski has other ideas. He orders the Afghan kids to strip naked and starts tying them up, hands and feet. Then he lays them on the road and Rudovski tells one of the drivers to run them over with an armoured personnel carrier. The BMP driver said he wouldn’t do it and neither would several of the other soldiers. Rudovski knew enough not to ask Mischa. So eventually he turned to Domenko and says something like ‘Show these cowards how to love the motherland’, and then Domenko climbs into the BMP and just drives over the kids and crushes them.

When Mischa got back to Kabul he told your father about all of this and the information went into a CX that was read at the highest levels of government in both the UK and the United States. But by then he was a changed man, addicted to opium, couldn’t function without it, and he’d become sloppy. Christopher, who was maybe more involved than he should have been, and too upset about what was going on, was intent on somehow getting Mischa out of Afghanistan, even if it was only as far as Islamabad. He was afraid, as I was, that Mischa would blow his cover. But he couldn’t get authorization from SIS. Nothing could be allowed to disturb the illusion that Western intelligence agencies were adopting a passive role in the Afghan conflict, offering humanitarian assistance and nothing more. No matter that the Soviets knew all about CIA and SIS activity by that stage. What happened is that Mischa was blown. The army had gotten suspicious and he was observed en route to a clandestine meeting with your father and then later executed by court martial.

This is highly classified information, Ben, but it’s central to my theory about what happened in London and I don’t think it’s right that you and Mark should be prevented from knowing the truth. When the Soviet archives were opened up and Western intelligence analysts were able to unravel many of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, I discovered that Mischa’s father had worked for the KGB. SIS and Christopher had always believed that he was simply a middle-ranking civil servant in Moscow, but through my old contacts at the Agency — I quit in ’92 — I was able to find out that Dimitri Kostov had operated within a First Chief Directorate section known as Department V. Department V was a relatively new section of the KGB created in the late sixties to replace the Thirteenth Department of the FCD, which organized what we used to call ‘wet jobs’. Assassinations, for want of a better word. Nominally Department V was tasked only with carrying out acts of sabotage, but under the control of Andropov there’s strong evidence to suggest that assassinations continued.

My fear is this. When Mischa was blown, SIS was concerned that he may have divulged your father’s identity to the Soviet military prior to his execution. Christopher was taken out of Afghanistan as a precaution and reassigned to China. His career never recovered and when SIS was overhauled under McColl in the early 1990s, he was pushed out. Something very similar happened to Mischa’s father, almost like a mirror. When it was discovered that his son had been betraying secrets to the British, Kostov was discharged from the KGB and sent to Minsk to process employment records. He turned to drink, lost his wife, and only came back to Moscow after the putsch when his old KGB friends, most of whom were running the country in one guise or another, were able to find him work.

That’s what I know. Kostov had numerous aliases — Kalugin, Sudoplatov, Solovyov — and I’ve never been able to track him down. Time and again I would talk to your father about the possibility of Kostov coming after him but he just wouldn’t talk about Mischa. He felt like he’d killed a man, sent him to his death. And coupled with the guilt he felt about you and Mark, the pain was often hard to bear.

Your father was a proud man and would just laugh off my concerns. ‘How would Kostov ever find me?’ he used to say. ‘He doesn’t even know my name.’ I was just a conspiracy theorist, another paranoid Yank who couldn’t let go of the job. But nobody’s identity was secure — a list of SIS officers worldwide was posted on the Internet about five years ago. Your father’s name was on that list.

I would urge you to take this information to the police if I thought they would be permitted to act on it. I tried to alert SIS to the problem a long time ago, but my bridges are burned there now. Everything falls on deaf ears.

It frustrates me to end on such a downbeat note but I loved Christopher and his loss has affected me. Please contact me at the address stated if you want to talk through any of what I’ve written here today. Together I believe we can solve this situation and maybe help to put the past behind us.

Yours sincerely,

Robert M. Bone

When he had finished reading the letter, Ben continued to stare at the base of the final page, as if expecting further words to appear. For some time he remained like this, a cross-legged figure in the centre of the room, unsure of how to proceed. Oddly, there was still an instinctive part of him that wished to remain ignorant of his father’s past, a stubborn refusal to grapple with the truth. Under different circumstances, he might even have scrunched up Bone’s letter and thrown it petulantly into the nearest bin.

That, after all, was how he had survived for the best part of twenty-five years.

But almost every sentence Bone had written, every one of his recollections and theories, had been revelatory, clues not simply towards the solving of a murder, but vital pieces in the jigsaw of his father’s life. Ben immediately wanted to share the letter with Mark, and yet a part of him enjoyed the buzz of privileged information. This was the breakthrough the police had been searching for, but it was also a secret glimpse into a world that his brother could only have guessed at.