Free Red to Black by Alex Dryden Page B

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 tosee 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