The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

colleague on duty. Anybody who was doing anything of a counter-revolutionary nature did not do so in such a public way.
    Nobody could be that stupid.
    In addition, there were at least a handful of professional KGB and GRU informers at the restaurant where the actual recruiting was successfully carried out that evening. At table number nine, a man spluttered vodka over the food, hid his face in his hands, waved his arms about, rolled his eyes and was told off by his wife — in other words, a completely normal scene in any Russian restaurant. Not worth noting.
    So it came about that a politically blind American agent was allowed to cook up a global peace strategy together with a politically blind Soviet nuclear weapons boss – without either the KGB or the GRU putting in their veto. When the European CIA boss in Paris, Ryan Hutton, received notice that the recruitment was completed, he said to himself that Karlsson had to be more professional than he seemed.
     
    The Bolshoi Theatre renewed its repertoire three or four times a year. In addition, there would be at least one annual guest performance like the one from the Vienna Opera.
    Thus there were a handful of occasions every year when Allan and Yury Borisovich could meet discreetly in Yury and Larissa’s hotel suite to cook up some suitable nuclear weapons information to be sent to the CIA. They mixed fantasy with reality in such a way that from an American perspective the information was both credible and encouraging.
     
    One consequence of Allan’s intelligence reports was that President Nixon’s staff at the beginning of the 1970s started to work on Moscow to bring about a summit meeting with mutual disarmament on the agenda. Nixon felt safe knowing that the USA was the stronger of the two.
    Chairman Brezhnev, for his part, was not actually against the idea of a disarmament treaty, because his intelligence reports told him that the Soviet Union was the stronger of the two. What complicated the picture was that a cleaning lady at the CIA section for intelligence reports had sold some remarkable information to the GRU. She had got hold of documents sent from the CIA office in Paris, which indicated that the CIA had a spy placed at the centre of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. The problem was that the information he sent was not correct. If Nixon wanted to disarm on the basis of false information that a Soviet mythomaniac sent to the CIA in Paris, then of course Brezhnev had nothing against it. But the whole thing was so complicated that it required time to think. And the mythomaniac had to be found.
    Brezhnev’s first measure was to call in his technical nuclear weapons boss, the unswervingly loyal Yury Borisovich Popov, and ask for an analysis of where the disinformation to the Americans could have originated. Because even if what theCIA had obtained severely underestimated the Soviet nuclear weapons capacity, the way the documents were formulated showed a worryingly good insight into the topic. Which was why expert assistance was needed from Popov.
    Popov read what he and his friend Allan had cooked up, and shrugged his shoulders. Those documents, Popov said, could have been written by any student at all after a bit of research in a library. It was nothing for Comrade Brezhnev to worry about, if Comrade Brezhnev would allow a simple physicist to have an opinion on the matter?
    Yes, that was exactly why Brezhnev had asked Yury Borisovich to come. He thanked his technical nuclear weapons boss heartily for his help, and sent his regards to Larissa Aleksandrevna, Yury Borisovich’s charming wife.
     
    While the KGB set up discreet surveillance on literature related to nuclear weapons at two hundred libraries in the Soviet Union, Brezhnev continued to wonder how he should respond to Nixon’s unofficial proposals, right up until the day – the horror of it! – when Nixon was invited to China to meet that fatty Mao Tse-tung! Brezhnev and Mao had recently told each other to go to hell once and for all, and now there was suddenly a risk that China and the USA might form an unholy alliance against the Soviet Union. And that must not be allowed to happen.
    So, the following day, Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America, received an official invitation to visit the Soviet Union. This was followed by hard work off stage and when one thing had finally led to another, Brezhnev and Nixon had not only shaken hands but also signed two separate