27 August 2024
Martin Dewhirst reviews The Kremlin’s Confidant: How a British Naval Officer Suspended the Cold War: A biography of Lieutenant Commander Martin Packard MBE, by David S. Tonge, [hardback, £20, 352pp, ISBN-9781399059381, Pen & Sword Books, Barnsley, 2024]
This stimulating monograph, well written, sensibly organised and on the whole professionally edited and indexed, should be of considerable interest to at least three kinds of readers:
1. Those who are intrigued by officials and officers who do a pretty good job on the whole but who also engage from time to time in unofficial activities for the benefit of their personal cause(s) that go far beyond dropping the occasional bit of confidential or even top secret information to a trusted journalist.
2. Those who want to be reminded or told more about the political situation in the 1960s and later, especially in/on and around Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. This reviewer had, for instance, completely forgotten about ‘Soviet hopes that Malta could prove [to be] the Cuba of the Mediterranean had made relationships with Malta a priority for Moscow’ (pp. 6-7, 13). Packard’s extra-curricular activities in that part of the world became known to London and, apparently, Washington, with some civil and military officials feeling sure that he was becoming, or had already become, a serious risk to Western security.
3. Those who are still unclear about the various motives of those in the Lubyanka and the Kremlin who were behind the anti-Gorbachev coup and the counter-coup in Moscow in August 1991. Who, if any, were the ‘goodies’ among them, or were they all ‘baddies’ of one sort of another, including, of course, Yel’tsin and the wretched Gaidar, with his dreadful economic strategy (wholeheartedly supported by many in the West) that inevitably gave rise to the later and still current dangers to the world as a whole and Ukraine in particular? Will or will not Putin go down in history as the ruler of Russia who ‘lost’ Ukraine for ever?
Most readers of this review will be mainly interested in what Tonge has to say about the third question, so this is what I shall now concentrate on. Martin Packard (22-8-1931 – ) resolved to join the Navy in 1943 and subsequently enlisted for 21 years of service to his country. He became, i.a., a naval pilot and was sometimes seconded to the RAF, but had several other interesting and very sensitive postings. Disaster struck in 1968, when he was threatened with being court-marshalled, but eventually, two days after his 37th birthday, he was ‘merely’ honourably discharged from the service with his rank equivalent to that of Squadron Leader in the RAF or Major in the Army – perhaps a typical British compromise. (See especially pp. 127-8.) It’s not clear to me when he was awarded his MBE and whether it was part of the early retirement package, intended to keep him quiet. See also pp. 275-77.
So what was he to do now, having been turned from an officer into a dissident (p. 114)? The best solution was to become a businessman, and his most successful venture was to go, in Malta, into making and selling real American jeans! He produced millions of them, some even for Levi Strauss, many of which were sold, directly or indirectly, to the USSR. This eventually led to his first visit, very much a working visit, to the USSR in 1983 (see pp. 268-70), i.e., before Gorbachev became the top Soviet leader. People he met there and/or later include Mikhail Filippov (who has been living in Malta since 2015 and to whom Tonge is particularly sympathetic), Marat Gramov and Aleksandr Strelkov (use the Index for references to all three). The big question is whether they are or were honourable men, a question my modest skills on the Internet make it impossible to answer. Perhaps the fabulous Christo Grozev and Bellingcat could help?! What do worry me are a few of the alleged quotations in the book, two of which I reproduce here:
‘Turner took to Nicolopoulos and his new wife, Galina Suslova, the daughter of Fyodor Vasilevich Suslov, a Volga boatman who had risen to be the long-term rector of the Marxism-Leninism University of the Moscow City Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the school for all top Soviet officials. His signature was on Brezhnev’s diploma – as it had been on that of Khrushchev.’ (p. 212)
In 1989 Packard received a scheduled visit in the Moscow hotel where he was staying from a ‘dapper, medium-built gentleman’ whom he (Packard) recalls as saying:
‘I am Head of the Second Directorate of the KGB, which has responsibility for foreigners in this country. When you first came here in 1983, we took a very close look at you. You were a former Royal Navy officer and you had been an intelligence analyst for NATO and the British. It was our experience that almost all American and British businessmen visiting Moscow had been briefed by their intelligence services. You were highly commended by those with whom you had dealings and we never had any cause to suspect you of intelligence-gathering.
When the decisions were taken for political change, it was decided that we needed the help of some sympathetic foreign business figures in order to achieve industrial convergence with Western Europe in advance of the changes scheduled for 1991. Various names were shortlisted and yours was one of three that were approved. Since then we have been impressed with your efforts, and we want you to be assured of our support.
[…] Our problem is that we no longer have the strong central leadership which is essential. You would be surprised if I showed you round my offices. Nobody has a picture of Mr Gorbachev over their desks, but a lot of my officers do have one of Mrs Thatcher. They regard her as the sort of leader that we need.’ (pp. 269-70)
Tonge adds: ‘Much of this echoed what Filippov had said three years before.’ (p. 269). The name of the visitor is still unclear (p. 274), and it is also unclear to me when Packard last visited Soviet and/or neo-Soviet Russia and what he now thinks of them. His memory of an apparent 1986 attempt to poison him (pp. 20-22 and 264-65) also raises doubts, as Tonge honestly admits. Nonetheless, I found his last paragraph convincing and moving:
‘No one prism can catch the complexity of this vigorous and fundamentally decent man who so often so nearly got it right, but whose very decency was to prove so dangerous to so many and, ultimately, to bring him down.’ (p. 287)
