Russian secret meeting in Britain

By Giles Foden

President Putin attended a meeting of Cobra, the cabinet security committee, at Downing Street yesterday. It's almost certainly the first time in history someone so influential in Russian politics has attended such a secret meeting in Britain - unless one were to count Harold Wilson, whom spooks of the time thought too friendly with the Soviets. Putin would have been among old friends as MI6 chief Sir John Scarlett is likely to have attended, along with MI5 head Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. Both Scarlett and to a lesser degree Manningham-Buller were involved in the running of KGB double-agent Oleg Gordievsky in London during the 1970s. Gordievsky spends much of his time these days attacking his former KGB colleague Mr Putin in print, but for his British handlers he has nothing but praise. He has described Manningham-Buller as "a brilliant counter-espionage officer - bright, sharp and full of colour". Yet Scarlett was his "most brilliant" case officer. Though he will be pretty much blinded surrounded by all this brilliance, Putin might also recall the day Scarlett scored a coup as MI6 Moscow station chief, spiriting Vasili Mitrokhin, a top archivist in Russian intelligence, out to Latvia. He should do: it was November 7, 1992, the 75th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

So the Taliban spokesman has been captured. At one stage frequently in touch with reporters, speaking by satellite phone from undisclosed locations, Al-Campbell often provided very accurate information. But sometimes he also made outlandish claims. He refused to speak to the London Evening Standard Diary the other day because, he said, diarists "are smelly". We look forward to the publication of his own diaries - unless, that is, they are banned by the cabinet secretary for less than fragrant "security reasons".

Putin's appointment at No 10 also saw him awarding medals to five Royal Navy divers involved in the rescue of the crew of a Russian mini submarine trapped on the Pacific Ocean floor in August. It is a far cry from how the Russians used to deal with our frogmen. Witness the case of Lionel "Buster" Crabb, who in 1956 was given instructions to inspect the propellor and rudder of the Ordjonikidze, a cruiser which had brought Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to Portsmouth harbour as part of a state visit to Britain. Crabb disappeared and a corpse with neither head nor hands was washed up near Chichester a few months afterwards. It has never been confirmed this body was Crabb's, indeed in Tim Binding's splendid novel Man Overboard - published earlier this year - Crabb assumes a new life as Commander Korablov. Cabinet papers declassified this summer show that Crabb was not alone in spying on the Ordjonikidze. As a service to the British press and historians of the future, will President Putin finally clear up the matter? We won't hold anything against you, neither head nor hands.

The Eagle's Nest Pentecostal Church in Arnold, a dormitory town north of Nottingham, now holds its Sunday-evening services in a pub. For an hour at the Maid Marian on Coppice Road, there's Christian rock and five minutes of preaching, but the bar stays open. A reporter asked regulars what they thought. In reply he was told, in a slight misquotation: "Well, if the mountain won't go to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain." Accordingly, the church's website at genesishosting.org has been hung out to dry by a group of Turkish hackers.

A glimpse of how silly Conservatives look when they try to be groovy is available on the website wavenetwork.co.uk, where Tory youth group Wave Network advertises the chance to "pimp" (improve, in hip-hop slang) the party via an interactive game. "Pimp up my party" is based on an MTV programme, Pimp my Ride, in which cars are done up. In the Tory version, you are apparently asked to compare the party to a car (eg old Roller, Morris Minor), choose what hubcaps or go-faster stripes you want, what to put on the stereo, and finally pick a driver, ie Ken Clarke, David Cameron or David Davis. When we tried, as in confirmation of an old song, the web game wasn't working.