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The Praga-side districts of Warsaw used to be a neglected part of town for much of its post-communist period. Only after the National Stadium on the right bank of the Vistula was rebuilt for the European Soccer Championships 2012, these parts of the Polish capital started to get more attention and attract investment.
Praga was now a very diverse and ever-changing place. In some parts, artists and entrepreneurs opened up studios, galleries, bars, and restaurants. In others, families renovated the two- or three-story mansions. Saska Kępa was one of those middle-class neighborhoods.
Ulica Poselska was quiet and dark at 0350 hours. The white two-story in the middle of the street had a small balcony in the upstairs facing the street. The owners had invested into a single garage below street level whose roof was turned into a huge sun deck with a door into the family room on the downstairs. An alarm siren and light were visibly installed above the balcony door. The house showed no signs of activity inside.
A squad of Spetsnaz crept up to the house, their Tigr standing at the corner of the street ready to race forward on a signal from the rear-guard. The point man jumped the fence and opened the gate leading to the garage from the inside. A narrow set of stairs led up to the deck. One by one the soldiers climbed it.
The number two man placed his right elbow on the glass door and pushed on it until the pane was under high pressure. With the palm of his left hand he punched his right fist. The glass broke almost inaudibly, he quickly pulled a couple of large shards out of the frame. He repeated the procedure with the inside pane of the double-glazed door, then reached inside, and opened the door with the handle.
Raid-squad Galina proceeded inside, through the family room, up the stairs to where the bedrooms were. The point man and number two went to where they assumed the master bedroom would be. The others stood guard at the doors covered in children’s drawings.
Just as they approached the door, a burst of automatic fire ripped through the frosted glass panel. The point man dropped dead immediately, he got two in the armor and one in the face. The number two man raised his submachine gun at the shooter, a thirty-something woman in a nightgown. She shot another burst from behind the high box spring bed then reloaded her AK-74.
Number two swung the flashbang around the corner he had taken cover behind. It landed on the bed and exploded. The window shattered from the blast, and the bright light blinded the woman briefly. She lay on the floor behind the bed, still disoriented, when numbers two and three stormed in and apprehended her. They gave her a thorough beating until she dropped unconscious. With thick zip ties on her wrists and ankles, they carried her out to the Tigr that was now waiting in front of the shot-up family home.
The sergeant typed into his SemFoNi app ‘raid squad galina, poselska, target apprehended, electronics undamaged, one casualty’.
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“Excellent,” Bravlin tented his fingers and grinned. “I trust they will bring them right here,” he asked Colonel Popov with a yawn. “Wake me when they arrive, I will get a little shut-eye.”
The colonel shook his head, typed in a few commands into his SemFoNi interface, and took a sip of Russian chay from his cup. He briefly thought of the first casualty among his group, one man lost. Casualties on their own side were to be expected at some point, why not now. Popov shrugged it off.
The combination of his approach to raid in the early morning with the unsoldierly 6th Directorate hacker’s tools was very successful. Of six raid parties, five apprehended the target and secured the devices undamaged. The sixth did not find the target in his student dorm room but reported a laptop to be secured. If Bravlin were right, they would improve their hit rate considerably with the undamaged devices.
✽✽✽
“Don’t go. Can’t we go one more time, Łukasz?” the blonde said while the young man put on his jeans. She lay there on the sheets and played with her considerable bosom. “Łukaszuniu, please,” she moaned. “You’re so strong, and I need a strong man now. Please, do me one more time. You’re so good to me.” She moaned again as if she were rehearsing for an adult film audition.
The student hesitated and looked at his friend with benefits. She was begging for more and that turned him on, no doubt. He looked at his watch, it was 5:45 in the morning. He took his phone from his right trouser pocket, the battery had died in the meantime. “What the heck, I won’t get any sleep anyway. But only one go, I have somewhere to be at eight o’clock.”
✽✽✽
“More raids, Panie Generale,” the captain reported to Bilinski at Kraków headquarters. “The husband of a TDF lieutenant called the police this morning. His wife had gotten a threat-call on her cell phone during the night, and he’d decided to take the children to his mother’s house. When he returned in the early morning, the bedroom was shot up and his wife missing. He said there was blood all over the upstairs.”
“Kurwa, Kryska, how can they pick out our stay-behind operatives so easily in a population of 1.8 million?” Bilinski snapped.
“Well, at the moment we estimate Warsaw to have just under a million,” the captain stopped talking when he perceived the look he had earned for the clever remark. He cleared his throat and continued to report. “The lieutenant was scheduled to take part in an ambush on a road-transport of tanks to the front today. The cell leader just informed us that he had four no-shows for the preparation and he aborted the mission. He asks where the people are, he can’t get hold of them.”
“Kurwa, no,” Bilinski slammed his hand flat on the desk. “Anything else?”
“Maybe it’s a weird coincidence, but we also got a report by a TDF private, a student at Uniwersytet Warszawski living in one of their dorms. He was supposed to go to a briefing this morning where he reported the following,” Captain Kryska smirked. “I’ve got to read it to you, ‘I banged this girl until about 7:00 a.m. because she wouldn’t let go of me. We did it like five times, all in all.’”
General Bilinski was not entirely his usual cool self. He was about to shout at the captain for wasting his time with some college-sex phantasy while men and women were dying.
Kryska sensed the tension. “Wait for it, ‘Then I went back to my dorm room where I found the door knocked down and my laptop missing. My next-door neighbor’s door stood open. When I went in to look for him, another neighbor came by and told me the next-door had been clubbed unconscious by a Russian soldier and taken to the hospital later.’”
“And here it comes,” the captain said. “He wrote at the end of the report ‘I had received some automated call, like from a telemarketer, saying I was in danger and should leave my room. That was the only reason why I was awake at all. Otherwise, I would have missed out on the booty call. I probably would have slept through the night.’ See what I mean?”
Bilinski still looked a little angry and puzzled. His anger clouded his usually very sharp mind.
“What if the threat call the husband talked about was the same thing as this telemarketing call?” Captain Kryska just stood there in front of the Head of Military Intelligence and waited for a reaction to his theory.
“But where did the call originate?”
“The private reported an anonymous caller and the husband didn’t say.” The captain made a short pause before he collected his courage to take a shot in the dark. “Maybe someone is warning our operators. Someone we don’t know, but who is on our side.”
“We had our best hackers on the task to infiltrate the GRU network,” Bilinski barked. “No way in, they said.”
“There might be a better hacker out there who found a way in.” The captain shuffled his feet feeling uncomfortable about the speculating. He knew his superior as open-minded but also as an absolute fact-fanatic. Creativity was welcome but only so far as it could be backed up with solid data.
Bilinski got up from his chair and looked Kryska straight in the eyes. “You know full well, that we can’t afford any jumping to conclusions in our line of busines
s.”
“Yes, Panie Generale,” the captain said looking at his feet.
“You have until 1500 hours today to back up your hunch. Be assured, this is an exception because we’re desperate. Normally we don’t follow hunches, only theories backed up by hard data.” Bilinski dismissed the visibly relieved captain and sat back down in his chair.
The general felt terribly tired.
The Polish stay-behind network had been his baby since its inception. As a young officer, he had read about the so-called Gladio organization in Italy. The scandal of a supposedly NATO-sponsored secret army was never fully uncovered and left plenty of room for conspiracy theorists to cook up the craziest stories.
The known fact was that there was a network of hundreds of highly-trained paramilitaries in Italy. They had hidden enough weapons and ammunition in secret caches for a small war. Former Gladio operatives who had exposed themselves to the public stated that their objective was to fight a guerilla war in case of an invasion by Warsaw Pact forces.
Left-wing conspiracy theorists claim that Gladio was also behind terrorist attacks under false-flag in the seventies and eighties.
As a hobby, he tried to gather as much information on the concept of such a stay-behind army as possible. He studied the Nazis’ Werwolf program, which was dead in the water. He also looked into the CIA-sponsored German network BDJ-TD, Bund Deutscher Jugend-Technischer Dienst, which seemed to produce good results during the early Cold War but ultimately died in a public scandal in the late 1950s.
Also, the following attempts in various NATO countries were well thought out but poorly executed. The necessary cooperation between civilian intelligence services who ran the operations and the military who were supposed to provide weapons and logistics had never worked as it should have. Bilinski had identified this as the most critical birth defect of all previous organizations.
Human error due to lack of discipline in operations was another. It led to the deaths of dozens of agents in East Germany who were set up as an early-warning system for Russian troop movements. Their West German handlers had grown so fond of their agents that they sent them coded birthday greetings over short wave.
The codes had been broken by Stasi Hauptabteilung III long before. So, all the counterintelligence directorate had to do was wait for an answer, triangulate the approximate location of the emitter, and compare the birthdates of the region’s inhabitants with the date of the original transmission.
There were false positives and innocent, law-abiding workers and peasants landed in interrogation cells and were brutally tortured. The ‘democratic Germany’ in this matter, like in many others, applied a ‘the end justifies the means’ attitude. The state accepted such unfortunate misunderstandings as inevitable in the fight for peace and progress.
Stasi had shared many of its findings about the Western stay-behind networks with their comrades in Poland and the Soviet Union. Bilinski probably had more information buried in the archives of Esbecja than the Germans in their own secret archives of their Bundesnachrichtendienst and the Stasi. Esbecja, the Służba Bezpieńczestwa, communist Poland’s Security Service had a very well organized and largely intact archive to which he as an intelligence officer had access.
Of course, he had studied the history of the Polish insurgent networks during World War II, also the ones that were not part of the Armia Krajowa, like the Jewish insurgents in Warsaw and the forests of Belarus.
He always knew that unless such an initiative can be kept secret and at the same time get full support from the armed forces, a stay-behind army would always fail to produce results. Ideally, it would be a part of the armed forces to avoid any inter-agency troubles.
When the minister of defense had first proposed the concept for the Territorial Defense Force, he had seen the opportunity. The initiative had opened a possibility to build an organization as a part of the military that produced thousands of trained operatives and could be kept secret. They would hide their highly-trained stay-behind operators in plain sight among the regular weekend-warriors. They could also hide their materiel, weapons, and ammunition in caches that were secret but still under military control. The operatives would be military, not paramilitary, they could be disciplined and trained regularly during TDF training without blowing their covers.
The birth defects of the former Western networks would be avoided, and the Polish stay-behind army would become a powerful weapon for territorial defense.
This powerful weapon was now getting a blunt edge, though, and it had nothing to do with inter-agency troubles or lack of discipline.
It had to be something else entirely.
Thirty-Five
“Excellent,” the 6th Directorate man said with a sly smile and tented his hands like a dark lord. Shashka and Colonel Popov shared a look but waited patiently for the nerd in the rank of captain to explain his next steps.
“See, I will use their location history, call history, their messaging apps, et cetera to analyze where they were and with whom they were in touch during the last weeks.” Smagin, codenamed Bravlin, connected the smartphones to an array of cables that all led into the air-conditioned server rack he had set up the previous afternoon.
“Your men didn’t find much in the way of specialized devices, apart from this one sat phone here. I will deal with that later. Let me start the data mining algorithm that I developed for this project,” Smagin said and typed a few commands into the keyboard. On the screen coordinates, phone numbers, names, text messages started rolling upward in incredible speed.
“I will spare you the details, the algorithm will be done in something like an hour. I will need another hour, maybe two, to confirm its findings and enrich the target list with data from other sources like the birth register, vehicle registrations, et cetera. I will also send a RAT, a Remote Access Trojan, via a corrupt picture file to the most active contacts.” Smagin raised his hands and looked straight at the two intelligence operators. “Again, I will spare you the details. Any questions?”
Shashka said nothing. Popov only wished good luck, turned around, and left. Shashka followed him silently.
✽✽✽
“Damn, Bilinski, we are in a trench war here. This is worse than in the history books,” General Pułaski was in a decidedly foul mood when he came back from the front. “On both sides, men die in trenches and tanks without us advancing even an inch. The Americans and the Czechs have stopped sending us men, they will happily lend us their vehicles if we can find warm bodies to drive them.”
“I’m sorry, General,” Bilinski replied. “Again, the Russians have found a way to cut one of our key cells down before it could deliver. The T-73s that arrived at the front today should have been stopped by our Praga cell just outside Warsaw.”
“We will not be able to continue this war much longer if we can’t leverage our stay-behind army,” the older general sighed. “My biggest fear is that our Western allies will pull out entirely. In Britain, they already have anti-war rallies. The Germans sit pretty doing nothing, feeling good about their pacifistic image, and the French. Well, they’re busy ironing white flags.”
Pułaski walked to his desk and pulled a bottle of vodka out of the bottom drawer. He broke the seal, opened it and poured an approximate hundred milliliters, sto gram, into two water glasses. He handed one to Bilinski.
“The Balts have dug in deep, armed to the teeth but too afraid to take part in the action. Well, I can’t really blame them. Their contribution alone would not be picture changing anyway.”
He drank the whole glass in one swig. “Without the full support of the British and the Americans we’re fucked. And without our stay-behind army taking the lion’s share of the risk, the Brits and the Amis will pull out.”
✽✽✽
Anatoli Yevgenievich Smagin, aka Bravlin, sat in front of his laptop in the office of the former railroad works. He had ordered a private to requisition an air conditioner for him. The enlisted man and a comrade had cut a seco
nd hole into the outer wall next to the one for the cables for energy and communications. The office now had a cooler and less moist environment than the rest of the black site, but it was still very warm.
His algorithm had started plotting potential hits for safe houses, storage units, and Polish agents on two screens on the wall. One was a list view, the other a map view. On a third monitor, a slide show of the most recent photos stored on the devices rolled about. Most shots were personal pictures, children playing, couples smiling into the camera. The usual with naked breasts and male organs interspersed every now and then. A series of shots raised Bravlin’s interest, a group of five uniformed men with white-and-red armbands setting fire to a Russian flag. Interesting, he thought.
He ran a facial recognition on the men which only produced one hit after comparison with the database of biometric photos of all Polish ID-cards. Either the men were not Poles, or the picture was of insufficient quality for a biometric profile. A few taps on the keyboard confirmed the latter to be the case. “Blyad,” he swore. Nonetheless, he added the hit to his list, and these pictures would be useful in a different way.
He chose one in which the men looked especially enthusiastic, added a wide black rim and added a caption in English ‘We will fuck the Russkis until they hobble back to Siberia’. Not very creative but it might generate the reaction he was hoping for.
He opened a tool he had developed himself based on a piece of code named AnMyth. The Remote Access Trojan for smartphones had been published on an online Git repository a couple of years earlier. He had found it to be quite innovative and lightweight, perfect to spy on enemies of Russia and girls he was interested in. It could be used to hide a command to download the RAT inside a picture file just like the one he had just made.
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