The English Girl: A Novel

describe the atmosphere inside 10 Downing Street accurately, though I admit that, unlike Gabriel Allon, I have never set foot beyond the security barrier along Whitehall. When creating Jeremy Fallon, my fictitious chief of staff, I gave him the broad authority that Prime Minister Tony Blair gave to his real chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. I am quite confident that, had the brilliant and scrupulous Powell been at the side of Jonathan Lancaster, the entire sordid affair portrayed in The English Girl would not have occurred.
    The increased spying on the part of Russia’s intelligence services against Western targets has been well documented. The KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky recently told the Guardian newspaper that the size of the SVR’s London rezidentura has reached Cold War levels. Gordievsky is in a unique position to make such a claim because he worked for the KGB in London from 1982 to 1985. Furthermore, he is not alone in his assessment; MI5 has come to the same conclusion. “It is a matter of some disappointment to me,” said MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans, “that I still have to devote significant amounts of equipment, money, and staff to countering this threat. They are resources which I would far rather devote to countering the threat from international terrorism.”
    While London is clearly an important hub of Russian intelligence activity, the United States remains the primary focus of Moscow Center. The FBI provided ample proof of this fact in June 2010, when it arrested ten Russian spies who had been living in the United States under non-official illegal cover for several years. Fearful of jeopardizing its much-touted “reset” in relations with the Kremlin, the Obama administration quickly agreed to return all the spies to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, the largest between the United States and Russia since the Cold War. The most notorious of the Russian spies was Anna Chapman, a comely femme fatale who lived in London for several years before settling in New York as a real estate agent and party girl. Since returning to Russia, Chapman has hosted a television program, written a newspaper column, and posed for a magazine cover in French lingerie. She was also appointed to the guiding council of the Young Guard of United Russia, a pro-Kremlin organization affiliated with the country’s ruling party. Critics of the Young Guard often refer to it darkly as the “Putin Youth.”
    Much of Russia’s spying against the United States is industrial and economic in nature. The reasons are painfully obvious. Nearly a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains largely an economic basket case, heavily dependent on raw materials and, of course, oil and gas. President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of what energy means to the new Russia. Indeed, the Kremlin spelled it out clearly in a 2003 strategy paper that declared the “role of the country in the global energy markets largely determines its geopolitical influence.” Wisely, the Kremlin has softened its language when talking about the importance of Russia’s energy sector, but the goals remain the same. Stripped of its empire and militarily feeble, Russia now intends to wield power on the world stage with oil and gas rather than nuclear weapons and Marxist-Leninist ideology. What’s more, the Kremlin’s state-owned energy giants are no longer content to operate only within the boundaries of Russia, where production of oil and gas has leveled off. They are now acquiring both “upstream” and “downstream” assets as part of their stratagem to become truly global energy players. In short, the Russian Federation is attempting to become a Eurasian Saudi Arabia.
    Gazprom, the state-owned Russian behemoth, is the world’s largest gas company, and its revenues are the source of much of the Kremlin’s annual federal budget. Several former Soviet Republics receive all their natural gas from Russia, as does tiny Finland. Austria receives more than 80 percent of its gas from Russia; Germany, about 40 percent. While advances in drilling technology are bringing more gas to the international marketplace, the pipelines linking Europe and Russia will help to ensure Gazprom’s dominant position for years to come. Its many European customers should bear in mind that Gazprom operated as an instrument of political repression in 2001, when it purchased NTV, Russia’s only independent national broadcast outlet and a