Spilling the beans about SIS

Since everyone else is spilling the beans, here’s my SIS story:

In 1982, when I was based in Nairobi, a British diplomat came up to me at a cocktail party and said: “Stay away from Ivan so-and-so, the Tass/Izvestia/Radio Moscow (can’t remember which it was) correspondent. He’s the local Soviet intelligence representative. We know he contacted you, and he’ll probably try to exploit you one way or another.”

Indeed, shortly after I arrived in Kenya, the Soviet “journalist” had invited my wife and I to lunch at their home on the grounds that our baby daughters were the same age and would probably get along well together.

It didn’t work out that way: His daughter, probably a future gulag guard, seriously bit my daughter without provocation within 20 minutes of their meeting, instantly ending any hope of a possible friendship.

When he sounded me out on my views of the world, I was delighted to tell him that, after covering the Fall of Saigon in 1975, I’d been back to the now Communist-ruled city, that the town was filthy and poor, and that most of the locals I met asked me nostalgically when the Americans were coming back.

I also told him that in my youth, I had been a member of a Gaullist militia whose main task was to physically confront the General’s enemies, especially the French Communist Party. I don’t think I measured up to what he wanted.

My wife, however, got along very well with his wife. She was a Russian and he was a Georgian of the old school, i.e. those who believe women should stay at home and cook. His wife never left the house and my wife had offered to teach her how to drive, offering her relative independence.

During the driving lessons which followed in the next few weeks my wife told her new friend about Paris, London and New York, and how exciting it was to live in the West.

So I had to tell the British diplomat (who I was soon told was the UK opposite number of the Soviet “journalist”) that it was hardly likely that I would be recruited to GRU or whatever it was then called.

The Soviet fellow was avoiding me like the plague since my visit to his home and he had recently forbidden his wife to see my wife again. Clearly he thought that his wife was being brainwashed.

I could have mentioned the Russian woman as a possible recruit to the US diplomat generally thought to be the CIA station chief in Kenya, a man who looked like a professional wrestler.

But he had other problems at hand. A “panga gang” (Kenyan hoodlums who were the scourge of Nairobi) had tried to forcibly enter his home and he had met them with a .45 automatic in hand, killing one and seriously wounding two others with shots fired through his kitchen door. ■