There had been a hundred different interpretations of the true faith over the years, Andropov thought, and none of them had really mattered; they could be identified, isolated and crushed — as had happened so many times before: with Trotsky, with Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia twelve years later. But here was one Marxist deviation that mattered a great deal, for it had taken root in the heart of the Citadel; a flower that had bloomed ferociously in secret, a drug of liberal dissidence that had seeded itself who knew how far about the organisation: a belief that could not be identified and isolated, and therefore could not be crushed. It was a threat that could only, as yet, be smelt, elusive and frightening as the sweet smell of a ghost passing from room to room in a charnel house.
When and where would it rise up and take form?
Somewhere, hidden in the vast ramifications of the KGB, totally integrated in the huge secret machine, trained from youth, and now paid by the organisation, was a group of people — ten, a hundred or a thousand, who could say? — more dangerous to the Soviet Union than any outside threat. For what might come from east or west had for long been a known quantity; the KGB had been responsible for the information. But the nature of this force was quite unknown. It fed and had its being at the magnetic centre of the State and to look for it was to reverse the whole natural process of the KGB, to turn the organisation in upon itself, towards an unmapped territory of vast treason where they had no guides. Here the compasses, which before had led unerringly to secret dissension everywhere else, spun wildly. So it was that these men had set themselves and this suite aside to take new bearings, to identify this disease at the heart of their lives, isolate the canker and cut it out.
They were all there when Andropov arrived, the heads of the five Chief Directorates, some already seated at a table in the main room, two others who had been talking by the window quickly joining them: the old man Alexander Sakharovsky, Chief of the KGB’s foreign intelligence operation, the First Directorate; Alexei Flitlianov, the youngest of them, a bachelor of 49, head of the Second Directorate responsible for all security matters within the State; Vassily Chechulian, Third Directorate, counter-espionage, a muscular, hearty man; Grigori Rahv, impeccably dressed, the cartoon image of a capitalist banker, in charge of the KGB’s scientific arm — electronics, communications, laboratories; and the Chief of the Fifth Directorate — Management, Personnel and Finance — Viktor Savitsky, an anonymous figure, member of the party’s Central Committee, an accountant by early profession — whose only noticeable characteristic was that he still took immense pains to look and behave like one.
Andropov bowed quickly round the table, exchanged brief and formal greetings and then sat down. He lifted both hands to his face, shaped them as for prayer, brought them to either side of his nose and rubbed it for a second. Then, closing his eyes, he clasped his fingers beneath his chin and was quite silent. Finally, as though he had completed grace before a meal, he spoke.
‘I take it we have no further news.’ He didn’t bother to look round for confirmation, but instead let another silence grow on the air, allowing it unnecessary age, so that it became a herald of mysterious change. Then he continued suddenly and brightly: ‘Very well then. Since we’ve got nowhere with the facts, let’s try using our imagination. Put ourselves in the position of this group — or more precisely let one of us do that. There are five of you here. We will create a Sixth Directorate and thus try and establish its composition and purposes — and a head of that Directorate. And we’ll put him sitting in that chair — a man that has come here, just as each of you has, to discuss the problems of his section. Alexei, you start it off. You’re transferred from the Second to the Sixth Directorate as of now. Let me start by asking you a few questions. First of all, some background. What are your objectives?’
Alexei Flitlianov smiled and moved easily in his seat. He was a compact, intelligent-faced man, like an energetic academic, full but prematurely greying hair sweeping sideways across his head into white tufts above his ears, and front teeth just slightly out of true: his eyes were dark and set well back in his skull and in the winter pallor of his face they glittered, like candles inside a Hallowe’en turnip: an awkward face with several bad lapses in the design, but for all that — as so often in such cases — attractive in a way not immediately decipherable.
‘I’m honoured.’ Flitlianov’s smile ended and he leant forward earnestly, shoulders hunched, concentrating on a spot somewhere in the middle of the table. ‘Objectives. Well, to begin with, control of the KGB.’
‘You want my job.’
‘Yes. But not for reasons of mere power play. The motives are political.’
‘Do they originate from the Politburo, the Central Committee or the Army?’
‘No. My origins lie entirely within the KGB.’
‘Do you have contacts, support in government or the Army?’
‘Yes, I think I must have, after so long. Let’s say I have my men marked outside. I know who to approach when the moment is ripe.’
‘And these political objectives — they are towards “Open Socialism”, democratic alternatives?’
‘Yes. The provenance here would be Trotsky, Luxemburg, Dubcek — among others. Particularly Dubcek, I should say; “The Prague Spring”, that would be the line. Marxist, certainly, but without a dictatorial, monolithic structure.’ Flitlianov emerged briefly from his role and looked round the table: ‘In fact we know the nature of these inappropriate objectives very well indeed: we have successfully inhibited them for many years, within the Union and more particularly outside it.’
‘The counter-revolution then? At last …’ Andropov smiled.
‘Not in any overtly violent terms. A bloodless coup. It would depend on timing — on choosing the right moment to support and promote a group of people in the Central Committee and one or two others in the Politburo.’
‘The new leaders?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you must have the support, I think, of one or two of these political figures already. You would surely not have gone ahead for so long on your scheme without it.’
‘Yes, I must have such support. Thus there must be a political arm to this Sixth Directorate. It would have been quite unrealistic of me to have continued such a scheme without that.’
‘What would the “right moment” be in all this? What would induce you to move? What are you waiting for?’
‘Some moment of crucial dissent within the Central Committee or the Politburo.’