IN THE SPRING of the year 2000 Vladimir Putin moved into the Kremlin and began to cement his seat of power.
At the British embassy across the River Moskva from the Kremlin, Finn slowly undermined whatever power he possessed. He told me he’d argued with his station head about the direction in which Putin was taking Russia. He was uncharacteristically truculent and morose.
One afternoon the two of us took a trip out to New Jerusalem, the seventeenth-century Orthodox monastery on the River Istra west of Moscow, and afterwards we had supper with friends of mine who lived nearby. Finn usually drove when we went anywhere, but this time he asked me to bring my car. He was in a foul mood.
‘I’ve been given a formal warning,’ he grumbled. ‘Accept my government’s policy, work with the status quo, or get out.’
‘That seems reasonable,’ I said. Then we both laughed that it was I who was telling him to be loyal to his country. The rest of the trip revived his spirits and he seemed like his usual self.
But he told me as we walked around the huge monastery later that behind the scenes they were going to get him out anyway.
‘I’m finished with Moscow,’ he said finally, and we lit a candle to us.
He held my hand.
‘And I don’t want us to be separated,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘So if it’s going to be one thing or the other,’ he said, ‘us together, or you staying in Russia without me, which is it to be?’
I didn’t reply. And after the night by the pond, this was my second denial, a second opportunity lost.
In the weeks after our trip out to New Jerusalem, Putin first gathered round him the trusted members of his St Petersburg KGB clan, people who had worked with him when he was deputy mayor of the city, and from earlier when he was stationed in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell.
Simultaneously he summoned the men who had been the real rulers of Russia in the shadows behind Yeltsin’s presidency.
I heard from a colleague based at the Kremlin that they came to him one by one. These shadow rulers were known to us Russians and to the world as the oligarchs. In the words of Boris Berezovsky, the oil, metals and media billionaire, they were the ‘seven bankers who ruled Russia’. These immensely powerful men had formed an uneasy alliance between themselves- one that transcended the clash of their own business interests–in order to put their support behind Putin to win the presidential elections. First, they had persuaded Yeltsin as the millennium approached to hand his crown over to the younger man and now they supported Putin to ensure that he won the contested election. They were backing him with their huge resources as the best candidate to protect their own interests.
One night Finn and I went to see American Beauty at the cinema in Tverskaya. Finn fidgeted throughout the film and when I tried to talk about it afterwards he appeared not to have seen it at all.
‘They’re afraid for their prospects if Evgeni Primakov wins the presidency,’ Finn said.
‘Who?’ I asked him, thinking about Kevin Spacey’s dead-looking face in the movie.
‘The oligarchs! They’re so afraid of Primakov that they’re going to jump straight into the fire and support Putin!’
Primakov was my chief, the boss of the SVR, who was running against Putin in the elections.
‘Are there really people like that in America?’ I asked, thinking still about Spacey’s character. But Finn was obsessed. For once it was me trying to introduce some levity, not him.
‘It’s just the same as it was five years ago,’ Finn went on. ‘Then it was the Communists they were afraid of. They thought the Communists would turn back the clock and deprive them of their wealth. So they formed an alliance between themselves for as long as it took to see off that threat and make sure Yeltsin was re-elected.’
‘Are we going to get something to eat?’ I suggested. ‘Or are you going to rave on out here? I’m freezing.’
So we went into Yolki-Palki on the other side of the Bolshoi from Tverskaya. Finn always liked it there. The restaurant was dressed up in peasant decor with straw bales and wooden farm animals and checked tablecloths. Finn stopped talking about the elections for a moment.
‘This place has never been the same since the city banned the real animals,’ Finn said.
Back in the early nineties, when it first opened, the restaurant had real chickens and ducks that wandered about inside.
But then Finn was off again before we’d even ordered.
‘Putin is essentially the oligarchs’ choice,’ he said. ‘He’s reassured them somehow. Why do they believe him?’
‘Because it’s what they want to believe.’
Later we walked in the freezing night to the Kremlin and watched the black Mercedes and four-wheel-drive Porsches enter and leave the Kremlin with their windows blacked out, and I told him, one by one, which rich Russian baron had come to pay his respects to Putin.
‘They come like boyars to a medieval tsar,’ Finn said. ‘They pay their respects and hope to exert their influence.’
And in the course of those weeks up to Putin’s election victory in March, they all came: the oligarchs, the richest, most powerful men in Russia. Preceded, some said, by lavish gifts or suitcases of cash, they came to ensure that their choice for the elections was an ally. They were confident, powerful and richer than the rest of Russia put together.
But once he’d got their money and once their media outlets had ensured his victory, Putin was not the man they thought they’d voted for. To their dismay, having funded his rise to power, what they found was a president unlike the weakened, pliant Yeltsin.
While Putin had the decor of Yeltsin’s Kremlin bathroom changed from whimsical trompes l’oeil of twittering birds and fluffy clouds to a formal burgundy, ‘like dried blood’ as one of the oligarchs put it, he also changed other, more important, matters. From now on, he told them firmly, only if they stayed out of politics could they run their businesses and continue to enjoy the wealth they’d seized. It was not what they wanted to hear and many of them, to their cost, didn’t actually believe it.
When Boris Berezovsky confidently went off to his French château on the Côte d’Azur in the summer of 2000 to rest and recuperate after the successful but gruelling spring election campaign, he left his protégé Stepanovich with a list of names to give to the newly elected Vladimir Putin of those he wanted to see in positions of power around the President. The list was Berezovsky’s hold on power.
But at the Forest, I watched my bosses and they laughed at the names on it. The Kingmaker had made a serious error.
By the end of the summer, Berezovsky’s television stations were confiscated by Putin and he, with Gusinsky, fled into exile-Berezovsky to London, Gusinsky to Tel Aviv.
‘I told you, didn’t I, Rabbit?’ Finn said triumphantly.
I don’t know what role Stepanovich had in the fall of Berezovsky, if he had a role at all. But we all saw that from then on he was very close to Putin and, later, Berezovsky cursed his protégé’s betrayal. Stepanovich, who only a few years before served the drinks on Berezovsky’s private jet, had made a separate peace.
‘Watch what happens now,’ Finn said. ‘Berezovsky and Gusinsky are examples pour encourager les autres. Just watch.’
It was true. With Berezovsky’s fall, the others quickly saw which way the wind now blew from the Kremlin and they bent their knees to the new chief and his KGB entourage.
Only the richest of them all, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, took a stand against Putin. He lasted until 2004, when his private jet was stormed by masked special forces on a Siberian runway. Tried in a kangaroo court, he was put away to rot in a Siberian uranium mine that still serves as a prison camp in our new democratic Russia. For disobeying the President’s instruction to stay out of politics, he received eight brutal years in Russia’s old gulag, with the promise of more to come.
Between Putin’s appointment to the presidency on New Year’s Eve and the March elections, on the other side of the Moskva River from the Kremlin, the British embassy prepared for a visit to Moscow by Tony Blair in February 2000, to endorse Putin as candidate.
‘Blair’s come smiling to Moscow,’ Finn said. ‘He’s been strolling in the grounds of Putin’s dacha, describing Putin to the lapdog press as a reformer, a man we can do business with. The little creep wants to be Margaret Thatcher and casts Putin as his Gorbachev.’
To return this endorsement of him, Putin graced Blair with the rich reward of making London the venue for his first official foreign visit after he was elected. In London, Putin was given the red-carpet treatment and dined with the Queen. The massacres of Chechens in Putin’s war there were brushed aside by Downing Street. Putin promised the hopeful world a ‘dictatorship of the law’.
But whose law, we asked ourselves in Russia, if not the law of the KGB?
During this time, Finn and I often met at the Baltschug Hotel on the river, a few doors away from the British embassy, and we enjoyed its fine view of the Kremlin over lunch or a drink or in bed. Despite me telling him archly that the Forest would gladly pay for our room, Finn somehow obtained these rooms at what he called ‘diplomatic rates’, and said he didn’t want our lovemaking being listened to.
‘I’m supposed to persuade you,’ I said.
‘Then you’ve failed.’
‘Thank God for that.’
We could never trust Finn’s apartment, nor mine, and to the irritation of Kerchenko, visiting random hotel rooms was the only way to keep our most private moments to ourselves.
At the Forest, General Kerchenko and my other case officers on Finn, Yuri and Sasha, ignored Finn’s talk about a plan which I had written up in my reports. They just seemed fixated by Finn’s disaffection with MI6 and the ridiculous notion that Finn was ready to come over to our side. But how could he defect, I tried to tell them, when there was no apparent ideological difference between the two sides?
I remember now that Finn had bought and then framed a collection of stamps which had been issued under Gorbachev and which featured the British spy and traitor, Kim Philby. It amused him enormously that Philby should be celebrated even in Gorbachev’s Russia, at the time when both sides in the Cold War were laying down their differences.
But when I told my controllers about the stamps, they failed to see the irony, preferring instead to believe that Finn admired Philby. And every time my reports informed them how Finn railed against Putin, they said it was cover. Kerchenko and Yuri, certainly, really believed he had begun to unburden himself in preparation to defect, that he was a crumbling figure.
Finn certainly gave a very fine impression of crumbling in those times, but I knew it was a feint. Finn didn’t crumble in public. He was a person who crawled away to be on his own if he had so much as a head cold.
Finn’s self-destructive behaviour began to undermine his position at the embassy very fast. At the Baltschug Hotel one afternoon in early summer two months after Putin’s election, over a bottle of extremely expensive champagne, Finn told me he had been sacked. It was an eerie conversation. I knew it wasn’t true and he knew I knew. We’d grown to know each other well in the intervening months and I could sense the guile in his claim. If he’d been sacked he would never have been allowed to meet me, or to go anywhere outside the embassy in Moscow. They’d have had him on a plane back to London before he could pick up his laundry. They’d have given him leave to get out of the country, and then sacked him back in London.
So I knew only that he knew he was going to be sacked. And that could only mean he had engineered it himself. I recalled our conversation at New Jerusalem and how Finn had asked me what I would do if we were separated. During our conversation I realised that even the British didn’t know they were going to sack him yet.
‘I’ve told them I can’t work for a government that backs Putin,’ Finn said to me.
He then went on to reel off a list of evidently rehearsed remarks about Putin; rehearsed for the benefit, I guessed, of his station head. They were mostly things I’d heard him say before, but this time he was using me to get his story right and I played along with him even though my mind was in confusion.
He said Putin was the worst type of KGB insider, and always would be, and that the West was duping itself with its wishful thinking about a new Russia. He said that the British were mad to trust him, even to do business in any committed way with him. And that Putin had showed his spots with the Chechen war and then continued to emerge from the KGB chrysalis in his policy towards the oligarchs.
‘Surely London can see that if Putin really cares about changing Russia he’d force the oligarchs to bend before the rule of law, not before the KGB’s version of it?’ he said angrily.
All Putin was doing, he said, was confiscating the oligarchs’ assets and giving them to his own cronies, not putting them up for auction for the good of the state.
‘But Putin’s clever,’ Finn admitted. ‘By both making war against the Chechens and reining in the oligarchs he’s appealed to the popular tastes that guarantee him the support of the people, which he needs until he tightens the noose. He’ll discard the people when he’s done that, you watch.’ Finn leaned back in his chair. ‘Putin’s won his domestic audience in two simple, brutal moves,’ he said.
I remember Finn’s fist striking the table a little too hard while he was making one of his points, so that other occupants of the bar noticed.
‘It won’t stop there,’ he said. ‘The end of freedom and the confiscation of property for the rich few is just the beginning. There’ll come a time when the KGB will be in control of everyone’s lives again, right down to the minutiae. Doesn’t anybody in Russia care about that?’
He ordered more champagne and I drank so that there would be less to fuel his anger.
‘If London’s going to support Putin in public, it might just as well have supported the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War! It’s worse than that! Russia will be far more dangerous now than it ever was with thousands of nuclear missiles it would never have fired.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said, worried that too many people were overhearing him. But he didn’t seem to hear me.
‘Remember the Plan,’ he said. ‘I told you about the Plan by the pond at Barvikha on New Year’s Eve.’
‘I remember, Finn. I don’t know what you mean.’
But he seemed to check himself, and said no more about this obsession of his than he had back then.
Finally, he looked at me with his strange, schizophrenic eyes and said that it wasn’t his conscience that was forcing him to say this, but his common sense, and that it would be hypocritical of him to continue supporting a national policy he totally disagreed with.
I was taken aback by his outburst. It was so public.
‘I’ll only ever tell you the truth,’ he suddenly said. ‘I want you to know that.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ I said.
‘Only you can decide that,’ he replied.
And when I looked at him, I knew that I believed him, even though he was lying about being sacked. I knew that he was speaking to me suddenly from his soul, and that he would only tell me the truth. And in that moment I discovered something that I’d never known; that when someone truly believes in you, a door is opened and you automatically believe in them, too.
I realised then that I felt more for him than I’d dared to think before and I didn’t like to watch him apparently destroying himself. For that’s what he seemed to me to be doing.
I told him that all his high-minded talk about common sense over conscience was simple sophistry, and that it sounded like a contradiction.
And then a strange thing happened. He leaned back in his chair again and a gleam of interest came into his eyes, as if this was the first thing I’d said that he’d noted. In fact, I had the distinct impression he was about to make an actual note of my remark so that his argument could be refined for the real performance of it later.
It was then that I knew for certain this conversation with me was a rehearsal and that he was deliberately engineering his own fall from grace.
But he just smiled. When the rehearsal was over, he was more relaxed than I’d seen him for months. Crises made Finn calm. I’d seen it in him before. They were what he knew and understood. His childhood years had been spent in always having to form his own resolutions to crises.
But I didn’t show that I knew what he was about. I didn’t tell my bosses about this aspect of the afternoon or that I thought Finn was engineering his own dismissal from the Service. He didn’t ask me not to tell them, but it was as if he knew I wouldn’t reveal it to them. And that, I guess, was the first time that I betrayed my country, if only in the small print.
‘I’m going to follow my own path,’ Finn then said, rather grandly. ‘I’m going feral.’
He poured me another glass of champagne. For the first time that afternoon there was an awkward pause. I realised we were entering something he hadn’t rehearsed, something in the real world, and Finn always looked as if he was in a bit of a muddle when his personal reality got too close.
‘Look,’ he said and smiled broadly. ‘You see…darling Rabbit,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you something. I want us to be together. I want you to come with me, Anna.’
His eyes, one beautiful and kind, the other hard and a little frightening, looked into mine.
‘We’ve known each other for such a short time,’ he said.
‘It’s been more than a year,’ I said.
‘You’re the person I want to share my life with.’
I couldn’t speak, and he smiled into my eyes.
‘You don’t have to say anything now,’ he said. ‘Or ever, in fact.’
‘Ask me something else,’ I said at last.
Finn didn’t ask me anything else. Normally, he would have said something like, ‘OK, what time is it in Ouagadougou?’ or something equally facetious. But this time he fiddled with the stem of his glass. We were both, I saw, circling the dangerous territory of acknowledging a need rather than just a desire for one another.
He looked up from his fingers on the champagne stem.
‘When they ask you,’ he said, each word coming out of his mouth like a heavy object, ‘if I said anything out of the ordinary at this meeting…when they ask you that, tell them that I told you I loved you.’
I looked at him in astonishment and then I laughed out loud. It was so perfectly typical of Finn. To be so obtuse, to confuse, to disguise- that was always the geography of his mental processes until time and our knowledge of each other had helped him drop his defences. Whoever he was speaking to had to draw their own conclusions from his riddles.
‘Wait a second,’ I said. ‘Tell them…you told me…that you love me.’
We stared at each other before Finn broke into a smile once more. He knew I was laughing at his inability to just say it. I love you. And then, to the alarm of the other people in the bar, we began to laugh. We laughed and laughed until the laughter itself made us laugh. We stood up and hugged each other closely, and when we pulled away I saw his eyes were watery.
‘You’re leaving, then,’ I said.
He said nothing, and I knew he wouldn’t be drawn by such a direct question.
‘I bet you,’ I said, ‘that you tell me you love me before I tell you I love you.’
‘You’re on.’ He grinned.
It would be a year before I saw Finn again.