The final scene in this saga of deception and betrayal - as described by Orlov from first-hand accounts given him by all the OGPU actors involved - has a touch of farce in it, alongside the drama. Grisha produced a blanket for the shivering Lioubov and military raincoats for the two men - Savinkov's bearing a colonel's badge of rank. They then drove some fifteen miles to a forester's log cabin in the middle of a clearing. Inside they were introduced to three men, using false names, who were in fact their chief captors: the red-headed Puzitsky, who had led the Tiflis hospital charade; a thin young man who looked like a German village pastor but was in fact Pilar, the OGPU chief of Byelorussia; and the plump, well-groomed Artuzov himself, who could not resist coming in person to witness the moment of his triumph.

That moment came after a jolly interval (for each side was very happy in its way) during which the ubiquitous samovar started to hum and Madame Derental began setting the table and preparing an omelette from the eggs on display. Then, at a signal from Artuzov, Grisha politely relieved the visitors of any weapons they carried (the baroness producing with a giggle a small pearl-handled Browning pistol from her underwear). Grisha then frisked a puzzled Savinkov and pronounced what was in effect a death sentence on the prize victim: "Boris Viktorovich, believe me, this is the saddest day of my life, but I must declare you under arrest. I came to like you very much but revolutionary duty comes first."

Savinkov was probably too dumbfounded to hear Pilar adding his solemn warning against any attempt at escape, telling him that the cabin "is surrounded by my men"

Another agent, General Alexander Orlov, shortly followed. His real name was Lev Feldbin. In the second half of the twenties he was a 'resident' (spy) in Paris, and in 1933-1935 he operated in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In 1936, while the show trials were in progress, Orlov was sent to Spain, where General Franco was fighting, with Hitler's support, against the left-wing Republican government, which was aided by Stalin.

Stalin exploited the Spanish Civil War to the full. Besides supplying Soviet arms to the Republicans, he flooded their army with Soviet "military advisers," genuine or spurious, but in reality mostly NKVD agents. From Spain, Stalin's spies infiltrated other European countries, while in Spain itself they recruited additional agents from among the antifascists. Stalin made Orlov deputy chief military adviser to the Republican army. His official assignment was to organize intelligence and counterintelligence activities and guerrilla warfare behind Franco's lines.

He had a further, unofficial task. Stalin had a secret and extremely important aim in Spain: to eliminate the supporters of Trotsky who had gathered from all over the world to fight for the Spanish revolution. NKVD men, and Comintern agents loyal to Stalin, accused the Trotskyists of espionage and ruthlessly executed them. As the Stalinist spy Sudoplatov said in his memoirs: "When the Spanish Civil War ended there was no room left in the world for Trotsky."
But Orlov's main service was the top-secret assignment which he subsequently described in his book. When General Franco's forces were approaching Madrid, Orlov received an encoded telegram from a certain "Ivan Vasilievich." (Stalin sometimes signed secret telegrams with the Christian name and patronymic of his greatest hero, Ivan the Terrible.)

The telegram ordered Orlov to persuade the government of the Spanish Republic to transfer the country's gold reserves to the USSR. His efforts were successful. The gold had been stored in a cave at Cartagena. To the end of his days, Orlov remembered entering the cave and suddenly seeing a mountainous pile of boxes containing six hundred tons of gold. The Boss had insisted in his telegram that there should be no trace of Russian involvement in the export of the gold, and Orlov realized that he had no intention of returning it. Ever thrifty, the Boss obviously regarded the gold as a form of payment by the Republicans for his help in the war. Orlov supervised the export of the gold as "Mr. Blakeston, representative of the National Bank of America."

While all this was happening Orlov carefully read the reports of the Moscow trials in Pravda. He realized that they spelled the complete destruction of the old Party. It was not difficult for him, as an old Party member and a GPU officer since 1924, to foresee what his own end might be. So when, in 1938, he was told to return quickly on a Soviet motor vessel, allegedly for secret consultations, he did not hesitate. His hour had come, and, like Reiss and Krivitsky before him, he chose to remain in the West. Knowing how ruthlessly the Boss punished defectors, Orlov wrote to him proposing a deal: if the Boss spared him and his family he undertook to keep secret all that he knew. The Boss did not reply, but acted accordingly, and Orlov survived. He did not publish his book about the secrets of the NKVD, from which I have so frequently quoted, until after Stalin's death.
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It seems that Nin had first been taken by car from Barcelona to Orlov's own prison, in the dilapidated ex-cathedral city of Alcala de Henares, Azana's birthplace and Cervantes's, but now almost a Russian colony. He there underwent the customary Soviet interrogation of traitors to the cause. His resistance to these methods was amazing. He refused to sign documents admitting his guilt and that of his friends. Orlov was at his wits' end. So were Bielov and Vittorio Vidali, who apparently were his colleagues in the actual interrogation of Nin. What should they do? Orlov himself went in deadly fear of Yezhov, the insensate chief of the GPU in Russia. Eventually, according to Hernandez later, the Italian Vidali (Carlos Contreras) suggested that a 'Nazi' attack to liberate Nin should be simulated. So, one dark night, probably 22 or 23 June, they took him to a house in Alcala used by the (communist) head of the air force, Ignacio Hildago de Cisneros. There he was tortured but he confessed nothing. He was taken out and killed in a field halfway between Alcala and Perales de Tajuna. Orlov with an assistant (Juzik) went to the prison in Alcala where Nin had been held. His refusal to admit his guilt probably saved the lives of his friends. Stalin and Yezhov perhaps planned a trial in Spain on the model of the Moscow trials, with a paraphernalia of confessions; if so, they were thwarted, though, during subsequent months, the remaining POUM leaders were subjected to interrogation and torture.

Nin was not giving in. He was resisting until he fainted. His inquisitors were getting impatient. They decided to abandon the 'dry' method. Then the blood flowed, the skin peeled off, muscles torn, physical suffering pushed to the limits of human endurance. Nin resisted the cruel pain of the most refined tortures. In a few days his face was a shapeless mass of flesh.

Probably the most ominous of all the developments in Republican territory at this time was the rationalization of the security services into the SIM, Servicio de Investigacion Militar. Prieto was the architect of this restructuring to increase central control, but the communists promptly seized it for their own use. Prieto believed that the fragmented growth of counter-espionage organizations was uncontrolled and inefficient. One intelligence chief complained that "everyone in our rearguard carried on counter-espionage". Independent services with their own networks of agents were run by the army, the Directorate General of Security, the carabineros, the foreign ministry, the Generalidad and the Basque government in exile (now based in Barcelona). Even the International Brigades had their own NKVD-run branch of heretic hunters based at Albacete. The new department was out of its creator's control as soon as it was constituted in August, since the communists had started to infiltrate and control the police and security services in the autumn of 1936....

This particular variety of the disease can, of course, be ascribed to Russian carriers, but one cannot say that, if Orlov and his NKVD men had not come to Spain, nothing of the sort would have happened. If Russian communism appeared to its critics as Tsarism with a proletarian face, then Spanish communism, with its power base in New Castile, seemed to them to be growing into a Marxist variation of Philip II's integrated state based on the army. The SIM resembled the Inquisition and the commissars the church.

SIM officers included both unquestioningly loyal Party members and the ambitious. Its unchallenged power attracted opportunists of every sort to its ranks. Even its former civil guard commander, Colonel Uribarri, escaped abroad with several million pesetas. The core of executive officers then created a network of agents through bribery and blackmail. They even managed to plant their organization in resolutely anti-communist formations as a result of their control of transfer and promotion. For example, a nineteen-year-old rifleman in 119 Brigade was suborned and then promoted overnight to become the SIM chief of the whole formation with a greater power of life and death than its commander.
It is difficult to know the total number of agents employed by the SIM. There were said to have been 6,000 in Madrid alone, and its official payroll was 22 million pesetas. Its 13 sections covered every facet of civilian and military life and its agents were present in every district and command. There was a separate espionage section operating in Nationalist territory, called the SIEP (Servicio de Investigacion Especial Periferica). The most feared section was the 13th, otherwise known as the Special Brigade, which was responsible for interrogation. When its infamous reputation became known abroad, it simply changed its name. The government insisted that it had been disbanded, but in fact there was an increase in the number of its victims who `crossed over to the enemy' (the euphemism for death under torture or secret execution).

The SIM's interrogation methods evolved beyond beatings with rubber piping, hot and cold water treatment, splinters inserted under nails, and mock executions which had been carried out in the early days. The Soviet advisers made the procedures more scientific. Cell floors were specially constructed with the sharp corners of bricks pointing upward so that the naked prisoners were in constant pain. Strange metallic sounds, colours, lights and sloping floors were used as disorientation and sensory-deprivation techniques. If these failed, or if the interrogators were in a hurry, there was always the 'electric chair' and the `noise box' but they risked sending prisoners mad too quickly.

There are no reliable estimates of the total number of SIM prisoners, nor of the proportions, though it seems fairly certain that there were more Republicans than Nationalists. It was alleged that any critic of Russian military incompetence, such as foreign volunteer pilots, was as likely to find himself accused of treason as a person who opposed the communists on ideological grounds. Meanwhile, in public, the new military tribunals tried 'fifth columnists' (a term which had been extended to include any opponents of the communist line). The Basque minister of Justice, Manuel de Irujo, resigned his post in protest at their rigged proceedings, but he still kept his seat in the cabinet. Negrin simply dismissed critical accounts of SIM activity as enemy propaganda.

The communists had been remarkably successful in creating a large degree of control over the government, the bureaucracy and the machinery of public order, while retaining a token presence of only two minor ministries in the cabinet - a requirement of Russian foreign policy. They had made themselves indispensable to the centrist politicians who had wanted to restore state power and who were now too involved in the process to protest. Nevertheless, a reaction against communist power was starting to develop, especially within the army.

It has been argued that Khrushchev and his associates wanted personal revenge on Stalin who had so long humiliated them. Whoever believes this does not know the men who spent twenty years as Stalin's apprentices; he taught them always to put political expediency ahead of personal feelings. Stalin personally hated Lenin, who had disowned him in his last testament; he hounded Lenin's widow; he destroyed all of Lenin's personal friends. But Stalin the politician knew what was good for him. Year after year he built Lenin up as a deity and established himself as Lenin's true prophet.

Why didn't Khrushchev and his colleagues do as Stalin did? They had been Stalin's closest aides for many years. As such, they had inherited his power. Why did they not perpetuate Stalin's cult and profit from it?

By means of rewriting and falsifying history Stalin had succeeded in building himself up as the supreme strategist of the October Revolution and the only infallible leader of world Communism. He had transformed the backward country of Russia into a powerful industrial empire. He had won military victories unequalled in the history of Russia. He had outwitted his Western allies at Teheran, Yalta and in China. He had extended the power of the Soviet Union over 900 million people. With such a record Stalin was not good enough for Khrushchev, Bulganin and the others as an ancestor?

Moreover, it is obvious that Khrushchev and the others must have realised that by indicting Stalin they would gravely endanger themselves. They had been closest to him. They had condoned and abetted many of his crimes. Their sudden attack on Stalin was bound to rouse in the minds of the Russian people angry recollections of how Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kaganovich, Miloyan and Malenkov had glorified Stalin and his policies before huge audiences of Communist Party activists, how they had justified Stalin's bloody Moscow trials and how they had hailed the shooting of the Red Army Generals as a "just punishment of traitors".

The bosses of the Kremlin no doubt knew that in the minds of the Russian people pertinent questions were bound to arise as to their complicity in Stalin's crimes and their fitness for continuing as leaders of the Soviet Union and world Communism. But in spite of that, Khrushchev and the rest found it necessary to bring into the open the story of Stalin's crimes. Why did they take such a risk? Why did they do it now, at this time?

Something must have happened to the new oligarchs which had left them only one way out: to disown Stalin completely and to do it fast. That "something", I am convinced, was the discovery of the incontrovertible proof that Stalin had been an agent provocateur of the Tsarist secret police.

The Kremlin leaders then had no real alternative but to try to cut the umbilical cord that tied them to a usurper and impostor who had few parallels in all human history. The risk was enormous, but unless they dissociated themselves fast and fully from the Tsarist agent, they might themselves have been doomed. They could not take a chance on keeping the dreadful secret from leaking out ultimately, now that Stalin himself was not there to keep it smothered. And possibly there were those - Marshal Zhukov or others - who warned that the facts would not remain secret unless the Stalin myth was completely deflated.

One of the areas of suspicion uncovered had concerned allegations about his role in the anti-Trotsky purges in Spain. Their attention had particularly been drawn by a public challenge against Orlov made by the ex-Minister of Information in the Catalan Government in a letter published in the 11 May edition of Life. Jaime Miravitales demanded to know whether the former Soviet General who had written the Stalin articles was the NKVD chief in Spain. Orlov had also been accused by the former Republican Minister Jose Hernandez in his recently published memoir of planning the assassination of Indalecio Prieto, the Republican Minister of War, and carrying out the execution of Andres Nin "under orders to liquidate Trotskyists in foreign countries".

Orlov's finely honed response was to admit that while he was NKVD chief in Spain, he had played no part in Nin's murder, or in the attempt on Prieto's life. In a denial that smacked of protesting too much, he claimed that he would not have been trusted by Stalin with such a sensitive operation because he himself was already marked down for liquidation. Even had he received such orders, Orlov insisted, his diplomatic status and role as adviser on intelligence and guerilla activities would have precluded his involvement. To dispel any remaining doubts Orlov stated that the assassinations in Spain had not been directed by him but by "a task force of secret liquidators sent from Moscow, one of whom, Bolodin, was probably the agent who did away with Nin".

This was the text that Orlov subsequently reprised with vigour and consistency to the FBI, the Immigration Service, the Senate Sub-Committee and to the CIA whenever the charges made against him in Hernandez's memoirs were resurrected. He had more trouble dismissing the very specific charges made by his old NKVD comrade Krivitsky in his memoir. When he was taxed with these allegations, Orlov produced a line by line rebuttal of Krivitsky's "absolutely foolish" allegations that the NKVD in Spain had "employed all the methods familiar in Moscow of extorting confessions and summary executions". It was "simply invention", Orlov said of Krivitsky's recollection of seeing the letter from General Berzin demanding the NKVD General's recall because he was behaving with "colonial" ruthlessness in Spain. "Absolute invention" was how Orlov rejected the charge that he had been involved in the disappearance of the POUM leader. "Had I killed Nin," Orlov said in the annotation of Krivitsky's text he prepared for the FBI, "Russia in the eyes of the world would have been discredited." He maintained that he knew "nothing concerning their disappearance or murder in Spain".

Orlov's elaborately constructed denials are now exposed as deliberate deceptions by his actual reports in the NKVD files of the kidnapping of Nin and the other so-called liternoye delo operations. The FBI made repeated attempts to break through Orlov's barrier of dissimulation, but they failed every time they tried to get the truth in the course of their two-year investigation. A number of witnesses were found who corroborated the allegations of murder and secret police terror Orlov masterminded in Spain, but none could produce any hard evidence to back up what were hearsay claims. Typical of the charges was an unidentified source in Miami who told the FBI that Orlov had a "bad reputation" as NKVD chief in Spain because he had controlled the Spanish secret police, who in turn systematically purged and "put to death persons opposing the efforts of the Republican Government".

Confirmation of the facts of these cases did come from veteran American journalists who covered the Spanish Civil War, including Louis Fischer of the New York Times and Paul Wohl, an associate editor of Christian Science Monitor. Even Sokolsky, who had helped Orlov get Stalin's Crimes published, voiced his own suspicions that there was a darker side to the former General's Spanish activity although he was not interviewed by the FBI until after he announced that he knew Orlov, in his October 19 review of Orlov's memoir in the Washington Times Herald. This he had praised as "a most valuable book" for its authentic portrayal of Stalin's character, which, he wrote, "stands out like a horrible frightening nightmare: this man was devoid of all moral qualities". But in his review Sokolsky had also urged Orlov to write about his role in the Spanish Civil War "to fill in some of the blank spaces in this carnival of murder". Privately, he told FBI investigators that he for one did "not have full confidence in any people like Orlov". Sokolsky said that he had suggested to Orlov that he write a book which revealed how the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were manipulated by the Communists. According to the FBI special agent's report on this conversation, Sokolsky was highly critical of Orlov for not writing his own autobiography and hiding his own account behind that of Stalin.

"The big story," Sokolsky said was "what Orlov himself did". It was his opinion that his friend from Bobruysk was holding back the real truth about himself "because if he told the full story this might paint Orlov as a criminal". The contemporary NKVD records confirm that Sokolsky was not only correct, but that the emigre journalist had accurately divined the strategic objective of his boyhood friend. Orlov, as the files demonstrate, was responsible for engineering and directing a Stalinist purge of the POUM, that led to the death of Nin and hundreds of Trotsky's Spanish supporters and other opponents of the Moscow-backed Republican Government. But without the documentary evidence that was to surface forty years later in the NKVD archives, the FBI in 1952, despite its conviction of Orlov's complicity in the Spanish purges, had no way of breaking through his barrier of lies. Hoover was all the more chagrined because he had jealously insisted on monopolizing the debriefing of Orlov, fending off all requests from the INS and the CIA who were kept posted only with summaries of the Bureau's slow progress.44

Orlov produced an article on Beria for Life magazine on 20 July 1953, apparently thumbing his nose at the FBI by going direct to the public with his revelations. This further irritated Hoover, who had fostered the impression that his agency was the true fount of accurate information about the Soviet intelligence service. The FBI had been advised by Sokolsky that, because Orlov had expressed his intention of seeking US citizenship to "become a bourgeois", he believed that "if a way could be found to give Orlov assurances he could stay in this country that it would be possible to get his whole story". The Bureau ignored his advice and piled on the pressure. Since the records show Orlov had not admitted his Communist Party membership during his 1940 aliens registration statements, he was technically liable to deportation. To put pressure on Orlov, the FBI permitted the INS to begin their investigation and Orlov's lawyer was informed in October 1953 that his client was expected to present himself at their New York office. According to the law, if the examining immigration officer concluded that there were grounds for a deportation case, "the warrant for his arrest must be served immediately and Orlov taken into custody".

Alerted to the possibility of deportation by a summons from the Immigration Bureau, the Orlovs arrived on 13 November 1953 at the INS offices on 70 Columbus Avenue armed with an affidavit to apply in person for American citizenship. Their papers had been drawn up by their new lawyer, Hugo C. Pollock. This time around the Orlovs had no need to beg for favours and had retained one of the top New York immigration attorneys thanks to the $44,500 they had received in advances. Articles and book had made Orlov something of a cause celebre, but, as he explained to the immigration officer, he still feared to disclose his current address for fear of Soviet reprisals.

Despite Orlov's claims to special treatment by the Immigration authorities because his life was in danger, there is no evidence in the KGB records of the Centre resurrecting action against Orlov after the publication of his articles and book on Stalin. While it was certainly an irritant, the KGB, like Philby, appears to have remained confident that, despite press headlines, their former General would stand by his word and not give damaging revelations about the agents or operations he had listed in his 1938 letter.

Orlov's rank lent credibility to his revelations about Stalin, which were exploited by the Voice of America for propaganda broadcasts to the Soviet bloc. The following year, 1954, CBS broadcast The Terror Begins, a vivid television dramatization based on his version of the Kirov murder.

The one thing that bothered Orlov, and which he witnessed daily during the brief time he was in the US, was the great depression that had enveloped the nation. He could see the inordinate number of men on the streets who seemed to be loitering with no apparent place to go, although of an age that would indicate they should be employed; the scarcity of help-wanted advertisements in the classified section of the newspapers; the long lines of men seeking employment, perhaps for one job opening; the bleak news articles that foreshadowed a long recession; and the welfare kitchens in his own neighbourhoods in Harlem and upper Manhattan that overflowed with people seeking meagre sustenance. All this told him that there had to be a flaw in this capitalist society to generate such economic injustice. He saw from his own perspective the difference between the haves and have nots as he was able to enjoy many amenities in the US only because he had an income. Early on he had learned that under Communism there would be no class distinctions and that the means of production would be common to all. The end result would be a society where all would share and prosper. What deficits he was aware of in the new Soviet Union he attributed to the transitory period that had to be faced by an emerging nation. Also, the USSR was about to embark on another five-year plan which would eliminate all problems. Years later, when explaining the Utopian form of government he had envisaged in the Soviet Union, Orlov revealed that, as an ardent Communist, this had been his way of thinking in 1932. He admitted that it had taken only two short months in the US for him to come to the conclusion that Communism was the avenue he would continue to tread as compared to the years it would take before he saw the inherent flaws in the Communist form of government. With this political philosophy, he would depart the United States.

Mr Gazur and his wife, Ruth, became the only truly close friends the Orlovs had during their more than thirty years of asylum in the United States - so much so that the general had made Mr Gazur his literary administrator and the legal guardian of all his personal papers. Was I interested in seeing these, asked Mr Gazur? He liked what I had written about the man he so admired and would be willing therefore to give me access to material which no outside eye had hitherto seen. When it turned out that the general (who died in 1973) had written extensively from his own experience on the early years of the Bolshevik regime, and that none of this material had appeared in his two published books, I expressed great interest. When it later transpired that, for example, no fewer than sixty-five pages dealt with the Soviet inside story of the rise and fall of "Britain's Intelligence Ace, Sydney Reilly", my interest became compulsive. I soon found myself sitting under an apple tree in the sunlit garden of the Gazurs' hospitable Kentucky home with a fat typescript in my lap. It was the general's much rumoured but still unseen `third book'.

Entitled The March of Time, Reminiscences by Alexander Orlov, it is 655 pages long and deals in twenty-nine chapters with episodes in his career as a soldier and Soviet secret service man, from those first years of Bolshevik rule down to his own break with Stalin in 1939 and his adventurous flight from his final post in Spain to North America. Much of that Spanish story and his escape from Stalin's clutches had already appeared in print. This account of the earlier period had never been published or even circulated. It covered half the book, much of it on that first decade of Bolshevik power with which I was concerned. (The whole of Chapter Five, for example, gives the real story, over seventy-six pages, of the entrapment of Boris Savinkov, the 'great conspirator', and the most dangerous of all the Bolsheviks' Russian foes.) I have quoted extensively from both of these sections, not only because of the fascinating human detail they provide, but because I came to regard them, after frequent counter-checks, as totally reliable. I ought to explain why, to the general reader and the intelligence buff alike.

There are four main reasons, apart from the circumstance that Orlov rose to be a KGB general. The first is that he was not involved himself in the events he was describing: there is no cause, therefore, to suspect him of exaggerating or of playing down (where things went wrong) his own part in any of the operations. He was, however (and this is the second reason), an irrepressibly curious man, always trying to get to the bottom of the major battles with the West which his department fought - and usually won. He was the ideal example of what, in the profession of journalism, would have been called `the investigative reporter' (and, unlike some of that ilk, he was conscientious about getting his facts straight).

Moreover, and this is the third reason, he was in the right place at the right time and with the right connections. He was twice posted to the Moscow headquarters of the secret police during the years 1924-6, the very years when the Lubyanka was buzzing with excitement over the capture first of Boris Savinkov and then of Sydney Reilly. As a protégé of the police supremo, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Orlov was able to glean all the details of these successive triumphs from the colleagues responsible - either for the running of the deadly deception campaign or the interrogation of the famous prisoners (and sometimes both). Federov, Styrne, Puzitsky, Pilar and, above all, the chiefs right-hand man in the operation, Artur Artuzov, are names which will occur frequently in this narrative. All were repeatedly questioned by the inquisitive Orlov and, in his chronicle of events, he usually names which of his colleagues had been the source for any event or anecdote related.

The fourth reason for believing in Orlov's account is, from the historian's point of view, perhaps the most important. His testimony, on these or other matters, has never been proven wrong when checked out over the years from other reputable sources. This held true when, soon after his death, I spent the best part of a week in Washington being briefed by his CIA case officers (above all the venerable and much-lamented Raymond Rocca) for those two chapters of The Storm Birds on his defection. It still holds true, so far as I can establish, today.

There is much, it must be stressed, that he did not tell his debriefers. Thus, there was no mention of the major role he is known to have played in the early 1930s as the OGPU's roving inspector of foreign intelligence assets - including, in Britain, Philby and the rest of the 'Cambridge Five'. On this he kept mum, though he seems to have been bursting to get it off his chest shortly before he died. But what he did state always stood up over the years and I have been able to confirm this again as regards The March of Time. Whenever his account is compared with other objective versions, Western or Russian, it squares up.

My personal observations of Orlov were all positive. Although he was lean and short in stature, probably no more than 5 feet 7 inches tall, he had cast an enormously large historical shadow. Like a general, he carried himself in an erect military manner, which commanded attention and exuded that elusive condition known as presence. He had the flair for saying the right thing at the right time and what he had to say was organised and concise. His suave manner and dapper appearance reminded one of a European aristocrat and suggested that he was a man of the world, which he was. He was an immaculate dresser and I never saw him without a formal shirt and tie. When he again became financially solvent, his lifestyle dictated the very best; all his purchases, such as clothing and personal items, were from the very best stores, which I suspect was a result of his days in the top echelons of the KGB. Despite his sophistication, he was self-effacing and humble, a combination that few people possess. He never spoke down to anyone and had the ability to listen patiently to the other side. He was an extremely intelligent man of immense character and integrity. I never knew him to lie to me and I had plenty of opportunity to discover if he had. Perhaps he didn't tell me everything about himself during his life as Orlov the KGB general, but then again I never asked.