There's a story I've been haunted by ever since I first read it. It appeared in May, without fanfare, in the sports pages of an English newspaper. The writer told it badly, without emphasis, as if he had no idea it was much of a story at all.


I almost never read the sports pages, but for some reason my eye was drawn to this particular piece. I read it once, twice, with mounting horror. It put the world we live in into a sharp and ugly new perspective.


The piece concerned a Russian soccer player named Dmitri Kharine, who had moved to England from Russia "with gloves and a license to thrill." Since the age of 18, apparently, Kharine had been a professional goalie, first for Moscow Torpedo, and then for CSKA Moscow, the former Red Army team. Then, in December 1992, at the urging of one of their scouts, the London club Chelsea signed him from CSKA for a fee of $600,000.


So far, so good, seemingly for everyone concerned. For the $600,000 fee was, according to Chelsea's assistant manager Gwyn Williams, "Mickey Mouse money for a goal-keeper of [Kharine's] quality." The club had been considering buying an inferior Englishman for almost four times his price. Now they had "one of the best [goal-keepers] in Europe," said Williams, at a saving of over 1.5 million bucks.


The piece made much of the sheer range of what Chelsea had bought, from balletic grace to awesome shot-stopping powers. "It's difficult to know how good some of his saves are," said Glenn Hoddle, Chelsea's manager, "because [Kharine] makes it all look so easy."


Well, good, I thought as I read this. Another Russian success story, another Russian able for the first time to turn his skills into reasonable money. He might have been got on the cheap by a knowing English club, but at least he had respect. He was paid a decent wage, he could now provide for his family. As the article began to maunder on about the circumstances of Kharine's signing -- about scouting reports on the 1992 European Championship finals and CSKA's "startling" victory over Barcelona in the European Cup -- I got ready to turn the page.


But then, right in the soft center of the piece, I suddenly saw this, buried at the foot of a column: "That was the easy part for Chelsea. When Kharine came for a Chelsea trial, he was alone; but when he came back to sign, Russian interest mushroomed."


I read on. "There were two blokes with him at the airport when he came back here," said Williams. "When we got to the hotel there were two more. Later another two blokes emerged. They seemed to be military people interpreting for him."


Military people? Six interpreters? I read on, looking for details. But there were none, beyond the fact that the six men in Kharine's entourage seemed to want "a piece of the action." All that followed, equally deadpan, was another episode in this woeful story. For as soon as Kharine moved into a rented house outside London, it was immediately burgled. "Jewelry and money were stolen. It was Christmas Eve."


"Dmitri was training," said Williams, "and my wife had taken his wife to Tesco's to do some shopping. I couldn't get anyone to repair the door. You had to feel sorry for him. He was 2,000 miles from home, he can't speak the language and he didn't know whom to trust."


I read on, expecting the article to put two and two together and come to conclusions. But there was nothing. The piece simply went on to discuss how Kharine had to wait a month for his debut with the team. The piece, indeed, wasn't about any of all this. The call-out, after the headline about "gloves and a license to thrill" was: "Every good team needs a good goal-keeper." That's all. It was if the writer, and everyone else involved, simply assumed that extortion and burglary -- and six military interpreters -- were what routinely happened to any Russian making money abroad.


This may well be true, for all I know. Indeed, I have read newspaper articles claiming that "most Russians living in Britain" have to pay "rent" after they are "telephoned by strange people from the Caucasus asking if they can do business together." But that's not quite the point. The point is the sheer speed at which one conventional wisdom has now been replaced by another in the minds of foreigners. If this article is anything to go by, it's how fast the all-powerful international KGB has been replaced by the all-powerful international Russian mafia.