The call consisted of three short blows of breath. A minute later, the phone rang again. Once more: three short blows of breath. Mr Cowell, under diplomatic cover, was the MI6 handler for Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s single most important asset in the Kremlin — and the calls he took were the prearranged code that Penkovsky was to use to tell him that a Soviet nuclear attack on the West was imminent.
I’d have shat a brick. Wouldn’t you? But Cowell kept his cool. He didn’t call London and get the counterstrike underway. He didn’t put his head between his knees and wait for oblivion. The sky could have been black with Russian nukes, but he didn’t, in fact, do a damn thing. He judged — correctly, as it turned out — that Penkovsky had been rumbled and his codes compromised. Cowell didn’t tell another soul that he’d just been warned about the end of the world.
And had it not been for his sangfroid, it really could have been the end of the world. To those of us who lived through only the tail-end of it, Peter Hennessy’s superb book gives a sense of quite how terrifying the Cold War’s warm patches really were.
Hennessy tells the story of a jokey 1961 encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that
the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself.
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This book is the story of the secret state built to cope with the war that never happened — from the acquisition of the deterrent to contingency planning, civil defence and the multiply-code-named plans for what to do in the event of the four-minute warning.
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