Guest post from Mike Murtagh.

When I first heard about the recent Ukrainian attack on the Russian nuclear bomber base, I thought, ‘I bet I know where that is!’ And I was right!

For those of you that have read the book, Engels-2 airbase, near Saratov in the Volga Region, is where my colleagues and I were trying to recce when we had a close encounter with our FSB ‘Watchers’.

Part of our work responsibilities in the Defence Section of the British Embassy in Moscow in the mid- to late-90s was to travel on the road throughout the Russian Federation, at the behest of our Masters in London, to carry out reconnaissance of military and military-related targets throughout the country. We would do our best to get around the local security measures and, hopefully, get photographic evidence of what might be going on at any particular location.

As with every aspect of living in Russia at that time and working in a diplomatic environment, we were subject to close surveillance by the Russian security services and intelligence agencies. For example, our apartments and offices were routinely bugged and subjected occasionally to searches when we were not at home.

We tried to keep the plans for these in-country outings as secret as possible. If the security agencies got wind of them, and particularly where we were planning to visit en route, we could bank on all sorts of measures being taken against us in order to frustrate our aims. The sorts of measures taken could, conceivably, have culminated, in extreme cases, in our being ‘taken out’ in circumstances of plausible deniability. It was not without its potential dangers! We never discussed our plans outside our secure speech facilities at the Embassy and certainly never in our apartments.

Usually, we would arrive at a location and go to our hotel in the early evening, in order to start our activities that day as early as possible. That way, our hotel registration cards would not make their way to the local security agency offices until we had moved on to our next target. We had, out of necessity in this case, broken this cardinal rule governing our activities when we had stayed a second night in one location, thereby making it easier for our FSB opponents to get a handle on us and monitor our activities.

As a result, on our second day in Saratov, we picked up a tail almost immediately and couldn’t seem to shake it off, resulting in a rather lengthy cat-and-mouse pantomime in the Volga countryside, as each participant tried their hardest to frustrate the intentions of the other. This resulted in the most bizarre confrontation that I ever experienced in the 5 years that I spent in Russia. Suffice to say that, on this occasion, the FSB managed to harass us sufficiently to frustrate that particular mission. You win some, you lose some…

I recount the full story in Spying On The Kremlin, along with stories of other adventures on the road in the wide open spaces of Russia.