The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (34 page)

Larissa didn’t wait for her husband’s answer, but went on to say that they were both shut up inside Arzamas-16, a city the very name of which would make anybody depressed. And behind barbed wire too. Yes, Larissa knew that they were free to come and go as they wished, but now Yury mustn’t interrupt her because she was far from finished.

For whose sake had Yury slaved day after day? First it was for Stalin, and he was completely mad. Then it was Khrushchev’s turn, and the only sign that man showed of any human warmth was that he had Marshal Beria executed. And now it was Brezhnev – who smelled bad!

‘Larissa!’ exclaimed Yury Borisovich in horror.

‘Now don’t you sit there and Larissa me, dear Jilij. That Brezhnev smells – those are your own words.’

She went on to say that Allan Emmanuel had come at a most opportune moment, because she had recently become more and more depressed at the thought of dying inside that barbed wire fence in the city that officially didn’t exist. Could Larissa and
Yury even count on real gravestones? Or would you need coded language on them too, for security reasons?

‘Here lies Comrade X and his dear wife Y,’ said Larissa.

Yury didn’t answer. His dear wife might have something of a point there. And now Larissa delivered the knockout blow:

‘So why not spy for a few years together with your friend here, and then we’ll be helped to flee to New York and once there we can go to the Metropolitan every evening. We’ll get a life, dear Yury, just before we die.’

While Yury looked as if he was giving in, Allan went on to explain in more detail how this had come about. He had by a rather roundabout route met a Mr Hutton in Paris, and this Hutton was a man who seemed to be close to ex-President Johnson and also to have a high position within the CIA.

When Hutton heard that Allan knew Yury Borisovich from long ago, and that Yury possibly owed Allan a favour, then Hutton had worked out a plan.

Allan hadn’t listened very carefully to the global political aspects of the plan, because when people started talking politics then he stopped listening. It sort of happened by itself.

The Soviet nuclear physicist had come to his senses, and now he nodded in recognition. Politics wasn’t Yury’s favourite subject, not in any way. He was of course a socialist heart and soul, but if anybody asked him to elaborate, he’d run into problems.

Allan attempted to summarize what Secret Agent Hutton had said. It had something to do with the fact that the Soviet Union would either attack the USA with nuclear weapons, or it wouldn’t.

Yury agreed that such was the situation. Either/or, those were the alternatives.

Furthermore, the CIA man Hutton, as far as Allan could remember, had expressed concern as to the consequences a Soviet attack would have for the USA.

Because even if the Soviet nuclear arsenal was only big enough to wipe out America once, Hutton thought that was bad enough.

Yury Borisovich nodded a third time, and said that without a doubt it would be pretty bad for the American people if the USA was wiped out.

But how Hutton tied all the ends together, that Allan couldn’t really say. For some reason, he wanted to know what the Soviet arsenal consisted of. When he had found out, he could
recommend
that President Johnson start negotiations with the Soviet Union over atomic disarmament. Although now, of course, Johnson wasn’t the president any longer, so… no, Allan didn’t know. Politics was often not only unnecessary, but sometimes also unnecessarily complicated.

Yury was the technical boss of the entire Soviet nuclear weapons programme, and he knew everything about the programme’s strategy, geography and force. But during his twenty-three years in the service of the Soviet nuclear programme, he hadn’t thought – and hadn’t needed to think – a single political thought. That suited Yury and his health exceptionally well. He had over the course of the years survived three different leaders as well as Marshal Beria. To live so long and stay in a high position was not the fate of many powerful men in the Soviet Union.

Yury knew what sacrifices Larissa had had to make. And now, when they really deserved a pension and a dacha by the Black Sea, the extent of her self-sacrifice was greater than ever. But she had never complained. Never ever. So now Yury listened all the more closely when she said:

‘Beloved, dear Yury. Let us, together with Allan Emmanuel, contribute a little to peace in this world, and let us then move to New York. You can give the medals back and Brezhnev can stuff them up his backside.’

Yury gave up and said ‘yes’ to the whole deal (except for the bit about Brezhnev’s backside) and soon afterwards, Yury and Allan agreed that President Nixon probably didn’t need to hear the entire truth, but rather something that would make him happy. Because a happy Nixon would please Brezhnev, and if they were both happy then there surely couldn’t be a war, could there?

Allan had just recruited a spy by holding up a poster in a public place, in the country with the world’s most effective secret police apparatus. Both a military GRU captain and a civilian KGB director were also at the Bolshoi Theatre the evening in question, together with their wives. Both of them, like everybody else, had seen the man with the poster on the bottom step. And both of them had been in the business far too long to sound the alarm to some colleague on duty. Anybody who was doing anything of a counter-revolutionary nature did not do so in such a public way.

Nobody could be that stupid.

In addition, there were at least a handful of professional KGB and GRU informers at the restaurant where the actual recruiting was successfully carried out that evening. At table number nine, a man spluttered vodka over the food, hid his face in his hands, waved his arms about, rolled his eyes and was told off by his wife — in other words, a completely normal scene in any Russian restaurant. Not worth noting.

So it came about that a politically blind American agent was allowed to cook up a global peace strategy together with a politically blind Soviet nuclear weapons boss – without either the KGB or the GRU putting in their veto. When the European CIA boss in Paris, Ryan Hutton, received notice that the recruitment was completed, he said to himself that Karlsson had to be more professional than he seemed.

The Bolshoi Theatre renewed its repertoire three or four times a year. In addition, there would be at least one annual guest performance like the one from the Vienna Opera.

Thus there were a handful of occasions every year when Allan and Yury Borisovich could meet discreetly in Yury and Larissa’s hotel suite to cook up some suitable nuclear weapons information to be sent to the CIA. They mixed fantasy with reality in such a way that from an American perspective the information was both credible and encouraging.

One consequence of Allan’s intelligence reports was that President Nixon’s staff at the beginning of the 1970s started to work on Moscow to bring about a summit meeting with mutual disarmament on the agenda. Nixon felt safe knowing that the USA was the stronger of the two.

Chairman Brezhnev, for his part, was not actually against the idea of a disarmament treaty, because his intelligence reports told him that the Soviet Union was the stronger of the two. What complicated the picture was that a cleaning lady at the CIA section for intelligence reports had sold some remarkable information to the GRU. She had got hold of documents sent from the CIA office in Paris, which indicated that the CIA had a spy placed at the centre of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. The problem was that the information he sent was not correct. If Nixon wanted to disarm on the basis of false information that a Soviet mythomaniac sent to the CIA in Paris, then of course Brezhnev had nothing against it. But the whole thing was so complicated that it required time to think. And the mythomaniac had to be found.

Brezhnev’s first measure was to call in his technical nuclear weapons boss, the unswervingly loyal Yury Borisovich Popov, and ask for an analysis of where the disinformation to the Americans could have originated. Because even if what the
CIA had obtained severely underestimated the Soviet nuclear weapons capacity, the way the documents were formulated showed a worryingly good insight into the topic. Which was why expert assistance was needed from Popov.

Popov read what he and his friend Allan had cooked up, and shrugged his shoulders. Those documents, Popov said, could have been written by any student at all after a bit of research in a library. It was nothing for Comrade Brezhnev to worry about, if Comrade Brezhnev would allow a simple physicist to have an opinion on the matter?

Yes, that was exactly why Brezhnev had asked Yury Borisovich to come. He thanked his technical nuclear weapons boss heartily for his help, and sent his regards to Larissa Aleksandrevna, Yury Borisovich’s charming wife.

While the KGB set up discreet surveillance on literature related to nuclear weapons at two hundred libraries in the Soviet Union, Brezhnev continued to wonder how he should respond to Nixon’s unofficial proposals, right up until the day – the horror of it! – when Nixon was invited to China to meet that fatty Mao Tse-tung! Brezhnev and Mao had recently told each other to go to hell once and for all, and now there was
suddenly
a risk that China and the USA might form an unholy alliance against the Soviet Union. And that must not be allowed to happen.

So, the following day, Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America, received an official invitation to visit the Soviet Union. This was followed by hard work off stage and when one thing had finally led to another, Brezhnev and Nixon had not only shaken hands but also signed two separate
disarmament
treaties: one concerning anti-ballistic missiles (the ABM Treaty) and the other concerning strategic weapons. As the signing took place in Moscow, Nixon seized the opportunity
to shake hands with the agent at the American Embassy who had so brilliantly supplied him with information about the Soviet nuclear weapons capacity.

‘You’re welcome, Mr President,’ said Allan. ‘But aren’t you going to invite me to dinner too? They usually do.’

‘Who does?’ asked the astounded president.

‘Well,’ said Allan. ‘The people who were satisfied with my help… Franco and Truman and Stalin… and Chairman Mao… although he didn’t give me anything but noodles… but it was very late in the evening of course… and the Swedish prime minister only gave me coffee when I come to think of it. Mind you, that wasn’t so bad either, considering there was rationing in those days…’

Luckily President Nixon had been briefed as to the agent’s past, so he could calmly say that there was regrettably not time for dinner with Mr Karlsson. But then he added that an American president could not readily be less obliging than a Swedish prime minister, so a cup of coffee was definitely called for, and cognac to go with it. Now this very minute, if that suited?

Allan thanked him for the invitation, and asked if a double cognac might be in order if he refrained from the coffee. Nixon answered that the American national budget could probably support both.

The two gentlemen had a pleasant hour together, or at least, as pleasant as it could be for Allan to listen to President Nixon talk politics. The American president asked about how the political game worked in Indonesia. Without mentioning Amanda by name, Allan described in detail how careers in politics came about there. President Nixon listened carefully and seemed to be giving the subject his serious attention.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’

Allan and Yury were pleased with each other and with the developments. It seemed that the GRU and KGB had calmed down when it came to searching for the spy, and Allan and Yury found that comforting. Or as Allan put it:

‘It is better not to have two murder organisations on your heels.’

Then he added that the two friends ought not to spend too much time on the KGB, GRU and all the other abbreviations, which they in any case couldn’t do anything about. Instead, it was high time to cook up the next intelligence report for Secret Agent Hutton and his president. Considerable rust damage to the middle-range missile store in Kamchatka, could they elaborate on that?

Yury praised Allan for his delightful imagination. It made it so easy to put the intelligence reports together. And that meant more time for food, drink and good company.

Richard M. Nixon had every reason to be satisfied with most things. Right up until the time when he didn’t have any reason at all.

The American people loved their president and re-elected him in 1972, in a landslide. Nixon won in forty-nine states, George McGovern just managed to win one.

But then everything got more difficult. And even more difficult. And in the end, Nixon had to do what no other American president had done before.

He had to resign.

Allan read about the so-called Watergate scandal in all the available papers at the city library in Moscow. In summary, Nixon had evidently cheated on his taxes, received illegal
campaign
donations, ordered secret bombings, persecuted enemies and made use of break-ins and telephone bugging. Allan thought that the president must have been impressed by that
conversation over a double cognac in Paris. And then he said to the newspaper picture of Nixon:

‘You should have gone in for a career in Indonesia instead. You would have gone far there.’

The years went by. Nixon was replaced by Gerald Ford who was replaced by Jimmy Carter. And all the while Brezhnev stayed where he was. Just like Allan, Yury and Larissa. The three of them continued to meet five or six times a year, and they had just as good a time on every occasion. The meetings always resulted in a suitably imaginative report about the current status of the Soviet arsenal of nuclear weapons. Over the years, Allan and Yury had chosen to tone down the Soviet capacity more and more, because they noticed how much more satisfied this made the Americans (regardless of who the president was, it seemed) and how much more pleasant the atmosphere then seemed to be between the leaders of the two countries.