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There I trained foreign female subversives, the nelegali, whose eventual role was to return to their own countries and undermine them with terrorist activities.
    During this time, I also lectured to the male KGB students in Vishka, or the Tower, as it was called.
    Balashiha-2 is both the strongroom of the Kremlin and its arsenal and training ground for covert and subversive operations, hidden in the vast forest fifteen miles east of Moscow. To keep the capital’s population obedient it hosts the notorious Dzerzhinskaya army division, but Balashiha’s real usefulness lies in its highly secret training camp for KGB units involved in foreign operations. They call this the Centre of Special Purposes. It is where the paramilitary spetsnaz are based, or special forces units like Vympel, the Alfa Group and the nelegali in the ‘Foreigners’ Area’.
    To all of us the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was called the Forest. The Forest then and today is the centre of Russia’s subversive operations abroad.
    My admission to the Forest was not as easy as my impeccable background would suggest. Though my father had friends there, they could only facilitate interviews, not help me through them. I was interviewed intensely for weeks and what caused me most trouble was the short story I’d written at school, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’.
    Was I sympathetic to the condemned man in his cell awaiting execution, as my father had accused me? Did I believe in American free-market activities, which the condemned man was guilty of pursuing? Was I critical of the law and the arm of the law that executed the guilty criminal?
    The interview when the subject of the short story was raised took place early one morning, out at Balashiha. One of my three interrogators asked me: ‘Why do you sympathise with the guilty man in your story?’
    ‘I make him seem convincing,’ I answered. ‘That isn’t the same thing as sympathising.’
    ‘But he should not seem convincing!’ he demanded.
    The man had thick lips, and eyes like shale.
    To their consternation, I stood up and drained my glass of water. Then I looked him in the eye.
    ‘The guilty are never convincing, Comrade. Were you convinced?’
    I found that manipulation came effortlessly. I convinced them that the story was the opposite of what I knew it to be, that it was in fact highly unsympathetic to the condemned man. They were pleased. I realised then that great manipulators are themselves susceptible to manipulation.
    Some of the assessment was absurd, like something out of a KGB manual from Stalin’s time–which, in some cases, it was. Despite my impeccable linguistic qualifications, they tested my English language from a schoolbook written in 1941. The first three lines were, ‘Long Live International Youth Day! Long Live the Communist Party! Long Live Comrade Stalin!’–conversational gambits that I’ve never found particularly useful.
    The book was a story concerning two schoolchildren, Sasha and Misha. My favourite chapter in it was called ‘Two Little Patriots’, in which Sasha and Misha go for a walk in the woods near the border and see something behind a tree, which turns out to be a man. He is wearing white clothes and is carrying a white bag, and is all but invisible against the snow. The boys realise he is a spy. They alert the border guards and the man is arrested. ‘He is a spy!’ the KGB officer, who dashes to the scene, proclaims. ‘Well done, boys!’
    ‘Well done, boys!’ later became another coded phrase between myself and Finn. We uttered it whenever we wished to indicate a disastrous decision by our respective leaders.
    My time at Krasnoznamenniy taught me to speak English like a native, to handle weapons, to make IEDs–or improvised explosive devices-and most of the arts of self-defence. And my time at the Forest put this training into action as I then trained others.
    I also endured the increasingly unconvincing political