I can well understand that joy and relief experienced by the supporters and families of the hostages released yesterday by Vladimir Putin. For I myself owe my life to a Cold War spy swap.
In October 1969, the British government exchanged Peter and Helen Kroger, two senior Soviet career spies nabbed for running a very real espionage ring, for Gerald Brooke, a British student who had served five years in a Russian jail for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. The exchange was so unequal that Brezhnev’s Politburo agreed to throw in three Soviet citizens who wanted to marry Britons in as a makeweight. One was my mother, Lyudmila Bibikova.
Releasing Navalny would have been too dangerous and too humiliating a move for Putin to stomach
She had met Dr Mervyn Matthews, a young British academic, at Moscow university six years before and they tried to marry. The KGB blocked the wedding and tried to get my future father to work for them.
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