The World

Further down, in the lower ranks of the KGB, Andropov fostered an esprit of knightly loyalty. In 1969, he promoted a new cult of the secret policeman, the Chekist, backing a TV mini-series Seventeen Moments of Spring featuring a Soviet super-spy, Colonel Isayev, who penetrates Nazi headquarters using the name Stierlitz.

^* It worked. Stierlitz became a Soviet hero. Brezhnev so loved the series he changed the timing of Central Committee meetings to watch it, and it inspired many – including a Leningrad law student named Vladimir Putin – to join the KGB. Putin hero-worshiped Andropov and wanted to be Stierlitz. ‘My notion of the KGB,’ he remembered, ‘came from romantic spy stories.’

In 1975, Putin joined the KGB at the age of twenty-three, working in both counter-intelligence and internal surveillance. Later he was trained at the Yuri Andropov Institute. His background was conventional. He had grown up in the impoverished, leaky apartments of a decaying Leningrad block, running with street children, but his mother, Maria, forty-one at his birth, had lost a baby in the Siege and cossetted him with the special attention that can sometimes endow a child with great self-confidence. Vladimir – known as Vova – was rescued by the kindness of a Jewish neighbour who fed him while his parents worked, and by his sports training as a karate fighter. But he had a deeper secret-police connection: his grandfather Spiridon had worked in the NKVD service staff, cooking for both Lenin and Stalin; his father had served with NKVD units in the war.

Now the poisoning of the Afghan tyrant proved more difficult than Andropov had hoped: Brezhnev and the Politburo agonized over what to do. Andropov initially advised restraint. Let poison do its work. But if intervention became necessary, surely it would be quick and easy.

In August 1978 the shah of Iran was telephoned by his neighbouring potentate, Saddam Hussein, Iraqi vice-president, who asked if he would approve the killing of that troublesome Iranian exile in Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam explained that Khomeini was making trouble among Iraqi Shiites. Saddam could kill him or exile him. Which would the shah choose?

IMAM, SHAH AND SADDAM

By now even the shah’s courtiers were suggesting reform. In June 1974, Alam asked him, ‘How can we expect people to go without bread when we’re telling them we’re in the midst of a golden age?’ The shah ‘seemed thoroughly taken aback and ordered me to set up a committee’. Yet the shah’s gambit to make Iran the hegemon of the Gulf and break up Iraq was working. He had backed a bloody Kurdish insurgency, led by the latest warlord of the Barzani family, which forced the Iraqis to recognize their autonomy.^* But the emergent leader of Iraq – Saddam Hussein – feared that the loss of Kurdistan would break the country up.

The shah and Alam regarded Saddam as a ‘slim, handsome young man of considerable intelligence’. Born in the town of Tikrit, he had not been spoiled by an admiring mother nor had he clashed with an aggressive father. Instead his father had died after his birth and his mother Sabha had collapsed, sending the child to be raised in Baghdad by her brother, Khairallah Talfah, a radical Arab nationalist. Khairallah introduced the boy to the Baathist Party, which in 1963 seized power in both Iraq and Syria, though it was soon crippled by feuds and purges. ‘The Baathists,’ said Khrushchev, watching the killings, ‘borrowed their methods from Hitler.’ Saddam earned kudos with the attempted assassination of an Iraqi president and fled to Egypt, but in 1968 he returned when his cousin General Ahmed al-Bakr, who was in turn married to Uncle Talfah’s sister, seized power in the latest spasm of Baathist faction fighting, appointing Saddam as secret police supremo.

When Saddam married his uncle’s daughter, Sajida, a teacher, he placed himself at the centre of a tiny clan, soon joined by his uncle’s son and his half-brothers. As the shah spent billions on American armaments, Saddam, vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command, cultivated Moscow. In April 1972, Baghdad signed a treaty with the Soviets, while Saddam became close to the KGB spy Yevgeny Primakov – sometimes codenamed Maxim though his real name was Finkelstein (he was Jewish) – who admired in the Iraqi a ‘firmness that often turned into cruelty, a strong will bordering on implacable stubbornness’. Al-Bakr fell ill just as the shah’s Kurdish rebels threatened to detach northern Iraq. Saddam was not strong enough to stop them; he had to negotiate.