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Back to Part 8
Slunchen Bryag, on the Black
Sea, Bulgaria 1973
Even before lunch Nina and I were losing our
inhibitions, pretending to rip each other’s clothes off, but after all the
brandy and champagne we were both champing for whatever action might happen
later in the day. We already knew what that would be, but a rite of
seduction still had to be performed, to elevate our encounter above animal
lust to the heights of romantic passion.
So I offered to take her for an afternoon drive
to the monastery ten miles outside town along the coast. A monastery? What
kind of turn-on could that be, you may ask, but this was a monastery with a
difference and, to reach it, I had been given a luxurious ‘company car’ and
a chauffeur (both hired by me, she assumed). Soon we were whisking past
rickety old Lada taxis up the mountain road until we were soaring high above
the smooth waters of the Black Sea, towards the vineyards which were the
monastery’s main attraction at a time when Bulgaria was ruled by a godless
Communist regime. On most days any ordinary visitor may sample its vintages
but when we arrived almost the entire community turned out to greet us like
VIPs. It was apparent that the brothers had been tipped off that we were
coming and instructed to make a big fuss. They plied us with so many glasses
filled with red wines of every hue, from pale amber to rich ruby red, that
by the time we set off back to town we were feeling very merry. On the way
down, in the vast space of a back seat fit for the state president, I had an
idea to try my luck. I reached out and we touched hands. Then she placed her
hand on my knee, assertively, and kept it there.
Back at the hotel our chauffeur decanted us and
without a word, Nina came with me to my room. When I opened it I had a most
pleasant surprise. No longer merely a hotel room - even a five star one - it
had been transformed into a palace of seduction.
There were flowers all over. There were
chocolates. There were plate-fulls of the local fluffy delicacy, known as
Nun’s Bosoms, and consisting of a light sponge with a cherry on top. And of
course there was even more drink, gallons of it. More champagne, more brandy
- a Moldavian brand cheekily named Napoleon - and the best wines from
Hungary.
Then on came the music. Until this point the
speakers in my room had pumped out nothing but state radio broadcasts of
galumphing folk dance orchestras and military bands, interspersed with news
of booming production figures from the federation of socialist tractor
co-operatives. But now they were playing that French ditty, “Je T’Aime, Moi
Non Plus”, which I had never heard before because, when I was last in
England, it had been banned for its explicit lyrics. They were entirely
appropriate for this occasion, I admit, but even I was shocked by the
orgasmic grunts and sharp intakes of breath from Jane Birkin and Serge
Gainsbourg. Of course, the record did the trick. Suddenly Nina came on to
me. I could see she was ready: glistening eyes, wide dilating pupils, and
such shallow gasps. She was up for it, desperate for it, as we both
approached the climax of a two day courtship. She was ripe, I was ready, as
now we really dig drag off each other’s clothes, fall into each other’s arms
and make love.
It had all happened as if we were starring in a
steaming hot movie. And maybe we were starring in a movie. After all, if my
KGB handler had gone to the trouble of laying on the flowers, booze and
Nun’s Bosoms, they might have installed hidden cameras as well. If so, then
anyone watching this encounter may have concluded that I was sex-starved. My
first burst of love-making was a torrent of ejaculation which must have both
astonished Nina and disappointed her. But any voyeurs may also have rated me
virile, for I came back half a dozen times.
Such enthusiasm on my part was entirely down to
Nina, though I’m far from sure I satisfied her. If I had performed more
skilfully the first time, I might have given her more pleasure than I did by
repeatedly returning to the scene of the crime thereafter. But if we really
were being observed, and my repeated revivals were winning me ever higher
marks from my KGB umpires, it was all down to Nina. She made me look good.
She was such an accomplished lover, she would have made anyone look good. If
I now appeared to be Romeo, or even a Super Romeo, it was she who had been
the leader, the initiator of every action. For me this was an exceptional
experience, this was the Fuck of the Century. Yes, it was thoroughly normal
straight healthy sex with a normal straight healthy woman, but nothing I did
later throughout my Romeo career ever quite matched that first time.
Sure, in the service of the Kremlin, I would
later enjoy far more extraordinary sex with even more beautiful women, I
would have scores of bizarre encounters in the weirdest places with girls
who could have graced the catwalks of Milan and the covers of magazines, but
at that point in my life Nina took the biscuit - or rather the Nun’s Bosoms
- for novelty, initiation and enthusiasm.
And so that first night, whether the cameras were
turning or not, we rested every so often and then made love again. We
behaved quite straight. After all, we were just getting to know each other.
Stuffing each other not just with each other but with all those chocolates,
that champagne and that wine the Hungarians call Bull’s Blood. I had never
tasted it before and I told Nina I greatly enjoyed it. How apt, she
murmured, patting me on the head and calling me ‘El Toro’, perhaps by way of
commenting on the way I had performed, not on this occasion in a china shop
but in her fine porcelain body.
So, after that delirious bucolic trip to the
country, we had broken down the barriers, and established a strong sexual
relationship. And over the next few days we spent our daylight hours walking
on the beach and in the woods, hand in hand, arms around each other, like
young lovers. She cast aside her earlier inhibitions about expressing
affection in public and repeatedly wrapped herself around me without caring
who might see us. And during the nights we were into more sex, rapidly
progressing to activities which were a novelty to me but which I hugely
enjoyed. For instance, after coming three times I may not have been standing
to attention - forgive my soldier’s way of expressing myself - so she took
such expert oral care of me that my erection rapidly revived. Neither my
wife nor any of my previous girlfriends had gone in for that stuff. I’m not
saying Nina was the first to suck it - I had a nurse who had done nothing
else - but this was my first truly uninhibited sexual experience.
I’m sure it was my performance with Nina which
got me hired as a Romeo Spy, a job I kept up for the next seven years. Yes,
I had won the part through Nina, although my audition notes would have read:
virile but inept.
It was a dream début but I’m under no illusions
that the entire show had been controlled. First we had been despatched to
get drunk with those monks, next the bedroom had been transformed into a
Venetian whorehouse, then Je T’Aime incited us to unrelenting lust. And all
the while through the window, we could see the beach and the Black Sea
immediately below our balustrade, as if with just one bait on a rod, we
could catch our dinner.
In truth, we were the dinner. Each of us was bait
for the other, and we both ended up in the cooking pot. Not that Nina knew
this, either then or ever - unless she reads this. Even I had only the
slightest inkling of what it was all about and I had no idea of what it
would become but the sex was only the start of it. What really mattered was
what we did in between the gourmet meals, the champagne, the sun, the beach,
the walks, and throughout those hours while we waited for the desire to come
again. And that was... talk. She told me all about her life, her childhood,
her marriage, her husband, her children. She kept on telling me she was
very, very happy. And so, naturally, I had to ask her, why was she on
holiday alone?
That’s when Nina told me all about her husband’s
total preoccupation with something at work. It must have been something
pretty important, otherwise why hadn’t he come with her to Bulgaria when the
offer of a seaside holiday with her tourist courier girlfriend had come up.
No chance of him getting away, but he had said he was all in favour of her
getting a break.
Nina then went on to tell me that he worked for a
secret organization, which was involved in keeping observation on the entire
staff of Willy Brandt, then Federal Chancellor of West Germany. She said
they had discovered there was a spy in Brandt’s office who was leaking state
secrets that ended up in Moscow, but they did not know which person was that
spy. She also told me that the spy’s existence had been confirmed through
information fed back from Moscow by a spy working for British intelligence.
Nina said her husband was really grateful to Britain. And here was I fucking
his wife.
She had told me the bare bones of the story even
before we did any fucking, but once we had become lovers she confided
specific details. She explained that her husband was not a security or
intelligence officer himself. Instead he was in the bureaucracy of Willy
Brandt’s political party, the Social Democrats (SPD). He was also working
for something called the East-West Reunification Committee, which had
outraged Moscow. The Russians had said that the mere existence of any
organization dedicated to re-unifying East and West Germany was contrary to
the Potsdam Agreement, which had cast the frontiers of central Europe in
bronze after World War Two.
This rigidity had obliged the East-West
Reunification Committee to go underground but it had vast amounts of money,
including plenty to pay West Germany’s security services to conduct a vast
investigation into every one of the hundreds of people working within the
Chancellery, just to find this spy. Nina told me that these millions of
marks could only be handed to the secret service on his signature. By the
time she had come to Bulgaria for this break, the suspects had been narrowed
down to just two: a middle-aged female secretary close to Brandt, and a male
secretary who was even closer to the Chancellor and whom Nina described as a
thorough workaholic. Spies or not, both these people must have been vetted
several times to be allowed to reach and remain in positions of such
sensitivity.
Of course to Nina I was just a holiday romance so
I could not display too great an interest in her tale, even though its
implications for the KGB were immense. She was spilling out all this
priceless intelligence not in a formal interrogation but in idle post-coital
- or pre-coital - chat. Even so, after our second night together, I did get
her to reveal that her husband had mentioned the name of the male suspect
but at the time she was distracted by serving dinner or doing the dishes and
could not remember it. She did recall that it was a strange name, not of
German origin. Later, all of a sudden, it came back to her. Guillaume.
Gunther Guillaume.
Day by day, I had been reporting what Nina was
saying back to my KGB handler, Nick. At first he pretended to be scarcely
interested, then he encouraged me to find out more, and when I told him
these last highly specific details, he suddenly announced that he was going
to Moscow. When I next saw him, a week later, he confirmed what I already
suspected. Through seducing Nina I had gathered ‘intelligence’ of such
significance that it had set the KGB in turmoil. I had given its boss, Yuri
Andropov, Russia’s future president, advance warning that one of
international Communism’s best placed agents was about to be uncovered but
it was still not too late to get him out of West Germany and bring him
‘home’.
As it turned out, Gunther Guillaume was left in
place and was eventually captured, in a scandal which would bring down
Chancellor Brandt himself. This was neither Moscow’s fault nor mine. Indeed,
later when I went to Moscow, Andropov thanked me in person for my efforts
and accorded me one of the KGB’s highest honours. I had become one of
Russia’s most valuable roving assets.
Meantime on Nina’s last full day in the resort we
made love a few more times. By now she had become even more daring,
demanding to make love in the pine forest, which we did. By this time we
were ‘in love’. Both of us. And we promised to keep in touch, to write to
each other, and so she gave me her full name and her home address, in Bonn.
She said she was very glad to have met me but stressed that she still loved
her husband. There was no question of her abandoning her marriage, although
another holiday romance with me would be fine. We both agreed that on no
account was I to barge in on her marriage.
On her last morning I took her down to the coach
and kissed her goodbye. Even before the coach had disappeared, I was aching
for her. Did I feel remorse for betraying her pillow talk? Not really. I
compartmentalised my feelings. There was a box marked ‘love’, or ‘lust’
perhaps, and a box marked ‘survival’, alongside another marked ‘revenge’.
But I did wonder, while we made love time and again, how had I come to this.
What extraordinary circumstances had brought me, in a little over twelve
months, from being a staunchly patriotic London policeman to becoming an
agent of the Soviet Union? How had I, a former British army officer, from a
family that had served the Empire for over a century in far-flung outposts
often at great danger, sunk to shagging another man’s wife for Mother
Russia?
That I had shagged to such great effect was
Beginner’s Luck. How I would maintain my usefulness to Moscow for another
seven years owed more to stamina, dedication and imagination than just
happening to hit it off with a vulnerable German tourist. When someone told
Gary Player he was a lucky golfer, Player replied, “Yes, I am lucky, but the
funny thing is, the more I practise, the luckier I get”.
Working for Russia I would have a lot of
practice, and a lot of luck. That’s what made me the most successful Romeo
Spy in the history of the KGB.
The real James Bond was an Englishman. The
trouble was, he was working for the other side. |
