The kremlins confidant, p.1
The Kremlin's Confidant, page 1
The Kremlin’s Confidant
The Kremlin’s Confidant
How a British Naval Officer Suspended the Cold War
A biography of Lieutenant Commander Martin Packard MBE
David S. Tonge
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Pen & Sword Military
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Yorkshire - Philadelphia
Copyright © David S. Tonge, 2024
ISBN 978 1 39905 938 1
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mobi ISBN 978 1 39905 940 4
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Servant of Perestroika
Dancing with Bears
Chapter 2 Knight Rampant
Empire, Church and Family
Sailing in the Cold War
From Flying to Cruising
Getting it Wrong on Cyprus
Chapter 3 Loose Cannon in Greece
Right Coup, Wrong Guys
From Officer to Dissident
Scarlet Pimpernel
Ideals on the Side
Strains of Freedom
Chapter 4 Mediterranean Mogul
Jean King
The Years with Mintoff
Chapter 5 Challenging the Cold War
Lured by Perestroika
Building Castles in Moscow
Losing the Plot
Skirmishing in Ukraine
Rooted in England
Between CIA and KGB
Chapter 6 Epilogue
Travelling with Martin
Notes
Preface
January 2024
This is the tale of a man of extraordinary achievements and a staggering collapse. It started as a biography and developed into a quest to understand what went wrong in a life which had once glittered so brightly.
Cyprus, Greece and Malta – Martin Packard was a central player in these three countries in the febrile 1960s and 1970s which so shaped the Europe of today. As the US anguished that the Mediterranean would become a Communist lake, Packard found himself cast as a foil to Western intrigues, his life shedding light on the darker side of the emergence of today’s parliamentary democracies in southern Europe.
In an unknown initiative by Moscow to reach out to the West, Packard was offered Communist Party support to develop Soviet trade with Europe. The approach came from a Kremlin insider, and every door was opened to this former naval officer – from the south to north of Siberia, and from Latvia in the west to Kamchatka in the long-closed east. Wherever he went, he was told he was the first Westerner the officials had ever met. Coal, timber, foodstuffs, textiles – a cornucopia was laid in front of him. At one point, to Moscow, he was ‘probably the most important foreign businessman in Russia’.
The story of Packard chips away at some of the prejudices in received history, especially with regards to the benignness of US and British foreign policy. But it does not end well.
As the hermetically sealed Soviet empire began to open, he was a unique witness to the evanescent possibility of East–West harmony. However, with the Communist Party imploding, Moscow lost its ability to deliver on its promises. The bargain he had struck with the Kremlin proved Faustian and it all began to go terribly wrong. Others, more unscrupulous at gaming the system, grew rich from his initiatives. Time and again, he and the unfortunates he had attracted to his side were left behind.
Never daunted, his projects to improve the human lot became ever more grandiose, and the checks repeated. Was he a Don Quixote tilting at unassailable windmills? Was he moving midst the foes of a Walter Mitty? Or was he a victim of the very values and system which had earlier given him the strength to rise so high?
Quests, like lives, never end as they start, but from this emerged a compelling human story of a parson’s son and naval officer jousting on a world stage as he sought to make that world a better place. An Icarus of our times.
Acknowledgements
The years I spent researching this work took me from the Mediterranean to the Irish Sea and from Athens to Moscow. Yet always it was as if the centre of this web was the area of small country parsonages north of Oxford where Martin grew up and where he lives today. Over walks from one Thames-side pub to another, he opened his past with me, sharing his draft memoirs on his years with the Greek resistance, the extensive company papers that he had kept, and his telephone book. He might have sought to remove the icy letters from infuriated business partners or keep me from a few who no longer talk to him. He did not.
He was as generous with his time as with sharing his friends. These include a few whom I count myself lucky to have met, notably Mikhail Filippov, the Kremlin insider who became his partner; John Nicolopoulos, meteoric in Washington and Moscow; Sophia Rossovsky, his interpreter; Brian Reid from Dublin; and Byron Veras, his colleague in Athens, Valletta and Moscow.
Others who gave their time include Martin’s eldest sister Rosemary, his first wife Kiki, Giselle Roberge (Agee), James Castle, Martin Dewhirst, Christopher Roper and Mary Southcott. I also received help in my initial research from Brendan O’Malley, lead author of the definitive The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion, I.B. Tauris, 2011. Later support came from Francis Bennett and Caroline Thornycroft. My enduring thanks to them and the others mentioned.
Dedication
To Peri, who with me met this sterling group whose lives were changed by Martin as he set out to change the world, and to John Nicolopoulos, so missed.
Chapter 1
Servant of Perestroika
‘Experience is not what happens to a man; it’s what a man does with what happens to him.’
Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts: An Anthology with Commentaries, Chatto & Windus, 1932
Dancing with Bears
Pioneering in southern Siberia
It was only when he was two hours out of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport that Martin Packard was told his destination was the Siberian city of Barnaul, nestling north of the Altai mountains, as close to Peking as Moscow, and long closed to Westerners, not least to those with a background in intelligence.
Set deep from European invaders, this was a centre of production of Soviet tanks and had supplied half the cartridges used by the Soviet Armed Forces in the Second World War. Having taken off just before midnight, Martin was told he would arrive at this shadowy heartland of the Warsaw Pact’s military might at 6.30 a.m., have one hour to get ready, and then meet with the biggest industries in Siberia to help build their future trade and investment with companies in Western Europe.
It was autumn 1988 and such ideas would be almost as revolutionary to the Soviet bureaucrats as they were daunting to Martin himself, a 57-year-old Englishman who had built up four jeans factories since being forced out of the Royal Navy, had little other experience of business, but had been tasked by the Kremlin to open up Soviet trade:
We landed before dawn, not my favourite time of day, at this depressing city, and dashed to the hotel. After shaving and sprucing myself up, I went downstairs and was greeted by a local dignitary who said, ‘Mr Packard, you are the first Westerner to come officially to this region since 1917,’ – which I found hard to believe. He took me to his offices in a good-looking building. Next to these was a meeting room with hard seats. It could seat 100 to 150 people and it was crowded. I was told the twenty biggest enterprises in Siberia were there.
Martin’s host was Aleksandr Surikov, deputy chairman of the Executive Committee of the territory. Surikov launched the proceedings, followed by Mikhail Filippov, Martin’s companion from the flight who was from the Ministry of International Trade and whose presence was a confirmation of Kremlin backing for this unprecedented initiative. The audience was told how the process of perestroika (restructuring) launched by Mikhail Gorbachev, meant greater independence for each enterprise, encouraging them to update their operations and to start exports. They were told that each group would have twenty to thirty minutes with their British visitor:
I was given a private room and was seated at a small table. The first delegation was ushered in and a tough man sat down opposite me. This was Anatoly, w
Anatoly said he had been told that he could offer for sale abroad any coal that he could produce in excess of his current norms, and that half the resulting hard-currency benefits would accrue to his enterprises. This represented a major shift from the traditional practice of Moscow telling the Kuzbas miners how much coal to produce and then marketing that coal. All the mines received was the price set in Moscow, a price which allowed the business to function but not to generate any profit or ensure any benefit for the workforce. If the mines were to receive hard currency rather than roubles, they would be able to buy the equipment they wanted from abroad and pay miners in hard currency.
The aim of the change was to increase output and quality, and a critical part of this was rewarding workers for their own productivity. It was a logical scheme that Anatoly said, if implemented, would improve the lives of his work force. ‘It sounds fantastic. Every one of my miners wants to have a Japanese motor car and somewhere nice to live. I can tell them, “Produce more and in a year each of you can have a Toyota.” I have no problem at all in tripling output and offering you 700 million tonnes a year.’ Such a figure would have been greater than production of coal in all the rest of Europe, east and west.
I was impressed by Anatoly. Later, I found that he was typical of that hardy race of Russians who had been exiled to the eastern and northern coalfields and developed a tough form of semi-independence, far distant from Moscow. I promised him that I would locate foreign specialists and visit Kuzbas with them to discuss how we could work together.
The next delegation told Martin that they controlled timber operations covering a million square kilometres of north-central Siberia, an area with more timber than the whole of West Europe and North America together. They had received the same briefing. They said they had no modern felling equipment and no processing facilities, and were keen on any co-operation that would bring them direct access to foreign currency:
I said, ‘Let’s do as much of the processing as you can out here in Siberia. You can cut the timber, saw it, and send it out as sawn logs or semi-finished products. That is better to transport and, if labour costs little, makes sense.’ Again, I told them that I would return with foreign experts on timber management and timber-processing operations. We drew up plans to export through various ports.
The next guy told me that they had the biggest meat-processing factory in the Soviet Union. From my experience with Russian food, I baulked at the idea of trying to market Soviet meat pies and sausages but I thought there were other ways in which UK technology might benefit them. After that came steel, marble, textiles – anything you could think of and they would come up with offers of ginormous quantities. And so on it went, an exhausting day with twenty half-hour periods of intense discussion, talking with major producers of industrial goods of which I had only the sketchiest knowledge while pretending that I was the fount of Western wisdom.
At 8 p.m. I was taken for a banquet and then delivered to the airport for the six-hour flight back to Moscow. The next day, I had a long session at the Ministry of Internal Trade to discuss the mechanism by which my initiatives were to be pursued. I said I would need direct access to those sectors of industry where I could see real opportunities for early development, that I would need the formal allocation of raw materials for sale abroad, and that I would need to identify foreign experts willing to return with me to assess the viability of co-operation in each sector. I was promised that what I requested would be made available.
Further visits to Barnaul followed, with additional factories and activities coming under Martin’s spotlight. He would be flown by helicopter to the factories of the seven or eight prospects which seemed most promising, all within a couple of hundred miles of Barnaul and many built around the Kuzbas coal fields. One factory, which was trying to produce rolling stock for the railways, was the biggest producer of T54 tanks. Finding alternative outlets for that factory stumped him.
Trust soon developed to the point where the Russians felt ready for that symbol of friendship, a written document:
I had been out for continual visits in helicopters to visit mines and works, which because of shaky helicopters was tiring. After five days of this, Surikov says, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll have a big dinner before you go, so we need to have the protocol to sign at the dinner. We’ve seen protocols you have written before. You are very good at them. We’ll write ours, you write yours. Get it to me tomorrow morning, we’ll work on it and see what we want to include from yours, then we’ll sign and have dinner.’
This was at 8.30 p.m., after several bottles of vodka and a large meal at each factory during the day, each one expecting you to drink vodka with them. I said good night and stumbled off to write the protocol. I worked through the night and had it ready at 7 a.m. I delivered it to Surikov and went off for more visits. During the day, I drank a good deal more vodka, had more meals, got to dinner, and when I sat down instead of the usual one bottle of vodka in front of each place there were two. Surikov was looking jovial. Sophia, my interpreter, was on my right. The evening started with a round of speeches. Or rather, I would make a little speech and the interpreter would make a dramatic speech about the future of the world, co-operation and joint ventures. And then we got to the point in the meal where toasting gets serious, gazing into each other’s eyes to show you are genuinely committed and knocking back vodka, linking arms and drinking together. It was very moving. You’d done so much together. You had become real chums. But there was no sign of this protocol.
Surikov said it was still being prepared, ‘Thirty pages, you know bureaucracy.’ By now, with pure tiredness and so much vodka, I am beginning to get woozy. Then he said it was time for speeches. I stood up and blanked out. I couldn’t work out whether I was in Russia, Malta, or Greece. I don’t know what I said, but I could see Sophia beside me dramatically making up what I was saying; I was probably talking about my grandmother and the cat she once put in a washing machine. Then Surikov stood up and made his speech.
At this point, a guy came rushing in with two huge folders and two gold pens. We sat down at a little table to sign. I looked at the text. It was entirely in Russian. I asked where was the English version. Surikov said there was no English version. ‘Martin, I thought your version was so much better than ours, so this is your version entirely translated into Russian, your version.’ ‘How am I to know that?’ Sophia took a quick look and said it looked alright. He said, ‘Martin, I am going to sign it and I too have not read the final version which they just brought in. I give you my word. This is unique in the annals of Russian history. No Russian minister, certainly none since 1917, has ever signed a document of this sort without verifying every single word. I’m putting my life on the line.’ He was signing blind because he trusted me.
The document was full of lofty statements about the future of western Siberia. It set out a vision of future co-operation with the industrialised world in general and with Britain in particular to develop western Siberia’s resources. It was, in Martin’s words, ‘One of my masterpieces, a letter of intent twinning Britain with western Siberia.’
The Barnaul meeting had represented a considerable gamble by Filippov. His responsibilities included developing trade with Ireland and Malta. The latter was growing into a significant trading partner for the Soviet Union, and Martin’s jeans company there, CIM, dominated bilateral trade. Filippov considered Barnaul could help this trade flourish, partly because it was considered to have an efficient administration and partly because the region represented a springboard for developing business with the neighbouring oblasts of Novosibirsk, the scientific and industrial centre, and coal-rich Kemerovo.
Back in Moscow, the Ministry of Internal Trade endorsed the concept of the letter and set an initial counter-trade target of $160 million in each direction, with this to rise to $2 billion. Martin was authorised to start exports of fertilisers, coal and steel. It was like a scene from A Thousand and One Nights, with the huris of Paradise replaced by sacks of gold. There was the prospect of getting seriously rich, but he always says that motivated him less than the sense that he could change so many people’s lives for the better.
