The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [64]
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