glanced at the newly acquired Patek Phillippe watch that had set him back almost half a million dollars and muttered under his breath, “It’s fucking late already . . . Ivan, what the hell were you thinking? Never let it happen again!”
“Da . . . yes, sir,” a shamed Ivan answered, looking at his shoes.
Myatlev was keen on speaking English and wanted his staff to follow suit. Although he was one of the true Russian oligarchs, he spent the majority of his time in the Western world.
Myatlev was Russian by father, Iranian by mother and place of birth, and Ukrainian by choice. His father, Kirill Myatlev, a KGB Lieutenant Colonel of the First Chief Directorate, had taken an assignment in late 1952 at the USSR Embassy in Tehran in the sore aftermath of the Iran-Azerbaijan Crisis. Several years after the Crisis had ended, tensions between the USSR and Iran over the disputed territories at the core of the conflict were still high, making his posting with Tehran a challenging assignment. This Crisis, many historians agree, was one of the events marking the beginning of the Cold War.
In 1952, under the leadership of Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and Secretary General Joseph Stalin, the USSR was expanding its horizons. The country was preparing for the omnipresent and inevitable Cold War by strengthening its intelligence networks and consolidating its diplomatic relationships with its remaining allies. Key intelligence officers of the First Chief Directorate took posts in embassies around the world, assuming the roles of unofficial leaders for all foreign intelligence operations in their respective countries of assignment.
Kirill Myatlev was no exception. His posting was strategic, one of the hot potatoes of KGB’s foreign intelligence assignments under a diplomatic ruse. He served his country well and held the post for many years. While he was deployed in Tehran, Stalin died and was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, a personal acquaintance of Myatlev’s.
This personal relationship kept Vladimir Myatlev’s career unaffected by the change in leadership following Stalin’s death. Foreign intelligence had changed hands, moving under the leadership of Lavrenty Beria, who’d disbanded all existing structures and reassigned everyone, placing all his loyal people in KGB leadership roles and crucial foreign soil assignments.
Kirill Myatlev survived the political depuration of the First Chief Directorate and continued his station in Tehran unperturbed. That’s where he met Farrin, Vitaliy’s mother, and with the prerequisite blessing from KGB headquarters in place, married her. Vitaliy was born in Tehran a year later, and they all lived there for five more years before Moscow recalled them.
Farrin struggled adapting to life in Moscow, constantly surrounded by drunks spewing profanities and engaging in crude behaviors, all insulting her profound Islamic beliefs. She had hoped that her son would become a devout Muslim. However, young Vitaliy took after his father and showed no real faith in any denomination and no interest in anything or anyone but himself. Disillusioned, heartbroken, and hopeless, Farrin left Russia to live with her family in Tehran. She never came back to visit; as for Vitaliy and his father, they didn’t miss her all that much. One was busy working foreign intelligence, now a Major General, while the other was growing up as an unsupervised teenager with lots of attitude and early problems with authority, women, and alcohol abuse, having the time of his life.
Major General Myatlev transferred his rebellious son into a select high school reserved for sons and daughters of elite Communist Party members, Central Committee leaders, members of the government, high-ranking military, and militia officials. No longer feeling elitist among such peers, Vitaliy spiraled even more. His drinking binges offered him a few near-death experiences, and some of the sex orgies he organized became well known in the school and beyond. He was becoming a liability for his father, a risk to his career.
By the time Vitaliy had finally graduated, soon after his 18th birthday, his father had already grown tired of using his influence with the militia to keep the rebellious, irresponsible son out of jail. Setting his foot down, he gave his son no other alternative than to join the KGB and start building a career in intelligence, where he could closely supervise his progress and make him walk the line. Not having much choice, Vitaliy took the offer and was immediately accepted by the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB; his father had made sure of that. Vitaliy hated that decision for many painful months of boot camps, interrogations, and other hardcore training