The Fourth Protocol

Unlike Leonid Brezhnev, who had loved the ornate, the rococo, and the luxurious, the General Secretary was known to be an ascetic man in his private tastes. The furniture was Swedish or Finnish whitewood, spare, clean cut, and functional. Apart from two no-doubt-priceless Bokhara rugs, there was nothing antique. There was a low coffee table and four chairs arranged around it, the grouping being open at one end to permit a fifth absent chair. Still standing—no one was about to sit without permission—were three men. Philby knew them all, and they nodded greetings.

One was Vladimir Ilich Krilov. He was a professor of modern history at Moscow University. His real importance was as a walking encyclopedia on the subject of the Socialist and Communist parties of Western Europe; he specialized in Britain. More important, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s rubber-stamp, one-party parliament; a member of the Academy of Sciences; and a frequent consultant for the International Department of the Central Committee of which the General Secretary had once been the head.

The man in civilian clothes but with a soldierly bearing was General Pyotr Sergeivitch Marchenko. Philby knew him only vaguely, but was aware that he was a senior officer in the GRU, the Soviet armed forces’ own military intelligence arm. Marchenko was an expert on the techniques of internal security and of its counterpart, destabilization, and his particular area of interest had always been the democracies of Western Europe, whose police and internal-security forces he had studied half his life.

The third man was Dr. Josef Viktorovitch Rogov, also an academician, a physicist by discipline. But his fame lay in another title—chess grand master. He was known to be one of the General Secretary’s few personal friends, a man on whom the Soviet leader had called several times in the past when he felt he needed to use that remarkable brain in the planning stages of certain operations.

The four men had been there two minutes when the double doors at the end of the room opened and the undisputed master of Soviet Russia, her dominions, satellites, and colonies, entered.

He was in a wheelchair, pushed by a tall steward in a white jacket. The chair was propelled to the vacant space left for it.

“Please be seated,” said the General Secretary.

Philby was surprised by the changes in the man. He was seventy-five, and his face and the backs of his hands were blotched and mottled in the manner of very old men. The open-heart surgery of 1985 seemed to have worked, and the pacemaker appeared to be doing the job. And yet he looked frail. The white hair, thick and lustrous in the May Day portraits, making him look like every family’s favorite doctor, had almost vanished.

There were brown smudges around both eyes.

A mile up the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the old village of Kuntsevo, set in a huge territory inside a two-meter timber palisade fence in the heart of a birch forest, stood the hyperexclusive Central Committee Hospital. It was a modernization and extension of the old Kuntsevo Clinic. In the grounds of the hospital stood Stalin’s old dacha, the surprisingly modest bungalow in which the tyrant had spent so much of his time and where he had finally died. The whole of this dacha had been converted into the country’s most modern intensive-care medical unit for the benefit of this man who now sat in his wheelchair studying them one by one. Six top specialists were on permanent call at the dacha at Kuntsevo, and to them each week went the General Secretary for treatment. It was evident they were keeping him alive—just. But the brain was still there, behind the chilly eyes that looked through the gold-rimmed glasses. He blinked rarely, and then slowly, like a bird of prey.

He wasted no time with preamble. Philby knew he never did. Nodding to the other three, he said, “You Comrades have read the memorandum of our friend, Comrade Colonel Philby.”

It was not a question, but the other three nodded their assent.

“Then you will experience no surprise to learn that I regard the victory of Britain’s Labour Party, and thence of the ultra-left wing of that Party, as a priority of Soviet interest. I wish you four to form a very discreet committee to advise me on any method that might occur to you that would enable us to assist—completely covertly, of course—in that victory.

“You will discuss this with no one. Documents, if any, will be prepared by you alone.

Notes will be burned. Meetings will be held in personal residences. You will not associate in public. You will consult no one else. And you will report to me by telephoning here and speaking to Major Pavlov. I will then arrange a meeting at which you can report your proposals.”