My parents’ false marriage affected me in unexpected ways. My father began to take me out to official functions in place of my mother. I knew it was because my youth and beauty reflected well on him. And I hated him for it.

By the beginning of the eighties the Soviet Union was nearing the end of its irreversible decline, and then the genial Ronald Reagan raised the stakes still further by placing a new missile system in Western Europe. This decline had been going on for a long time, of course, but nobody really understood it except the SVR- our agents abroad- who could see the outside world most clearly. The truth had become so devalued that it had effectively ceased to exist. Even the Politburo had to be told by the KGB, who learned from the SVR, that things weren’t what they wanted them to be. Like anyone else, the complacent Communist Party bosses in their closed enclave of the Politburo chose to believe their own illusions.

In 1982, mainly for this reason-a a final recognition that decline was irreversible without change, and that the intelligence services were our country’s only hope of survival- the Politburo appointed the KGB boss Yuri Andropov as leader, and our first KGB president. Where before the KGB had been a servant of the Party, this fateful move was the beginning of a reversal of that hierarchy. My father was very pleased.

‘At last we’ve got someone who knows how to run the country,’ he said angrily. ‘A real professional, not some politician.’

Years later when I told Finn of my father’s remark, he said it almost exactly mirrored what was said in Britain when someone with a life outside politics became a minister in the British Government.

‘But at least in England it’s always someone from the business world, not a spy chief,’ Finn said. ‘Spies in England work for Her Majesty’s Government.’