It was his seventh year as a Soviet adviser providing counsel to the Afghan Communist regime. His area of expertise was the workings of a secret police force, forced into a job no KGB officer wanted. The dangers were numerous. Several advisers had been savagely murdered, regional offices overrun; there had been public decapitations. He was performing the most hated job in a society where he was hated not only as an agent but also as an occupier. His task both now and before the Soviet military occupation was to create an Afghan political police force capable of protecting the fledgling Communist Party. Communism couldn’t be exported to Afghanistan without also exporting a political police force: the two went hand in hand, the party and the police, the ideology and the arrests. Having abandoned the profession in his homeland, he’d been forced to return to the job that Raisa had so despised. If he left his post, or failed in his duties, if he tried to run, he would be executed. Military discipline applied. Correctly suspecting the threat to his life might not scare him, it had been made clear that the repercussions to his daughters would be serious, their reputations would be tarnished and their prospects damaged, which tethered him to thejob. Locked in servitude to the State, his only choice was to carry out his responsibilities as they’d been outlined – well aware that his superiors did not expect him to survive. Yet he’d clung on, a ragged existence, and he was now the longest-serving Soviet adviser based in Afghanistan.

The Afghan Communist Party was a young creation, formed only a few years before he touched down in a rickety propeller aeroplane at Kabul airport in 1973. Grandly named the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, it was led by a man called Nur Mohammad Taraki: an agent of the Soviet Union and codenamed NUR. Since the party wasn’t in power there was no way for Leo to establish anything as sophisticated as an official police force and initially his job was merely to keep the party from being destroyed by its enemies both foreign and domestic. It was as if he’d been sent back in time to Lenin’s early years: Communism existing as a minority party under mortal threat from all sides. It had been a wretched struggle to deflect numerous CIA plots and resolve internal rivalries. Few were more surprised than Leo when, in the April coup of 1978, the Communist Party seized power. Agent NUR became President of Afghanistan and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council. At that point Leo’s duties transformed. He could now advise on how to set up a secret-police force with uniforms and prisons, a force with one purpose – to maintain and preserve the Communists’ grip on power.