Spies in the Family by Eva Dillon

Author:Eva Dillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Dmitri and Nina Polyakov had arrived in Delhi a few weeks before us. His office was at the Soviet embassy, within a compound whose parks and landscaped boulevards were a tranquil green oasis set improbably in the throbbing center of a third world megalopolis. As chief of the GRU rezidentura, Polyakov was assigned a two-story apartment inside the compound, along with a private driver and cipher clerk whose apartments each had their own entrances. New Delhi was home to a large GRU contingent, which Polyakov ran while operating under diplomatic cover as military attaché.

A colonel at the time of his arrival in New Delhi, Polyakov was in line for promotion to major general, which would place him among the elite in the world of Soviet intelligence, with access to a much higher level of military and political secrets. He had been told privately that this upcoming promotion would be formally announced in the near future, but First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s state visit to India in November 1973 hurried the promotion process along. Polyakov’s duties would require him to formally greet and host the visiting Soviet leader, and for this, a mere colonel wouldn’t do.

Alexander and Petr had stayed behind in Moscow. Petr had graduated from the Twenty-Second Specialized English Language School and been admitted to the Military Institute for Foreign Languages. Alexander was in his second year at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, living with his grandparents in the Kalininsky apartment.

One night at around eleven, shortly before Brezhnev’s India trip, Alexander was at home studying Hindi verb conjugations (he’d been assigned the language by the State) when he was startled by a loud knocking at the door. In earlier times, a knock on the door at such an hour would have set off waves of panic; late night and early morning were the KGB’s favorite times to swoop in and make arrests. Alexander opened the door to find a GRU officer standing there.

“Where’s his uniform?” the officer demanded.

“What uniform?” Alexander said.

“Where is Dmitri Fedorovich’s uniform? We need it.”

“Why?” Alexander asked.

“Later,” said the officer. “You’ll know everything later.”

Alexander did find out later: the GRU urgently needed to make a general’s uniform for his father so he could properly greet the first secretary, and they needed an old one for sizing. It took the GRU tailors three days to make the new one and rush it to New Delhi in a diplomatic pouch just in time for Brezhnev’s arrival.

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