I couldn’t understand, if his life was so bad, why he didn’t simply change it, get another job-retire, even. Fearful now of the change in my relationship with him, as he demanded I accompany him to functions, I didn’t fully understand that he endured a constricting fear that killed his self-expression. He lived in fear from the past, too; a fear that would eventually infect me.

What I also didn’t know, until much later, was that he worked in the most secret department of the SVR that dealt with nelegali, illegals. These were foreign nationals who had come to train in Russia in order to strike against their own countries. This department was called Department S. My father was a major recruiter of citizens of Syria and neighbouring countries and ran a vitally important network in the Middle East. He was a personal friend of Yasser Arafat.

But to me he was just a dangerous, lonely, angry man, who had, therefore, to be manipulated carefully. I remember one terrible night, when, after a state function, we had returned to one of the several apartments in Moscow that seemed to be at his disposal. He was drunker than usual, and began to manhandle me, though I couldn’t say for certain that it was molestation. I gave him more and more vodka until eventually he fell asleep. When I confronted him the next day, he said I had imagined the whole thing.

Twice he tried to marry me off to the sons of colleagues, including Vladimir, the older boy from school Number 47 whom I’d been instructed to befriend and with whom I’d maintained a distant friendship throughout our schooldays. Vladimir even asked me to marry him when I was seventeen and my father went into a fury when I refused. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, a necessary addition to a husband’s career. I didn’t want to be a woman whose job was to ‘understand’ her husband.

In avoiding that trap, I ended up in another.

Perhaps it was compensation for my refusal to marry Vladimir or any of my father’s choices that led me, subconsciously, to try to please him in other ways. And that was my weakness, believing I could still have a proper relationship with a man like him at all. But it was for this reason that I applied to study at the secret KGB training establishment at Yasenovo- the Forest–to the south of Moscow.