Kompromat

by Stanley Johnson

  Joshan Gupta, head of MI5’s technical support services, understood the need to come up with an answer quickly. But he was also deeply reluctant to draw conclusions that the evidence didn’t support. MI5 and its sister service MI6 had been deeply scarred by the ‘dodgy dossier’ at the time of the Iraq war, when Britain’s intelligence services had been accused of distorting, falsifying or, at the very least, ‘sexing up’ evidence relating to Saddam Hussain’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). They didn’t want to be caught twice in the same trap.

  ‘Let’s try to be clear,’ Gupta said. ‘The Chinese somehow acquire a video which shows the former Secretary of State Edward Barnard in a compromising position. We all accept that Barnard is indeed the man in the lift with the two Russian ladies but we seem collectively to be conceding that the man on the bed is not Mr Barnard. First, there is Barnard’s own statement that he does not believe he is involved, even though he was possibly inebriated or even drugged. Second, CCTV evidence from the hotel shows Barnard entering his room alone, and not in the company of the two Russian ladies. Third, according to Mrs Barnard, Mr Barnard does not normally wear boxer shorts and would certainly never have worn US-Flag boxer shorts.’

  Joshan Gupta paused.

  ‘But surely,’ he continued, ‘it would be going too far to argue that just because Ronald Craig was in the Kempinski Hotel at the same time as the two Russian ladies, the figure on the bed with the said ladies is indeed Mr Craig?’

  Jill Hepworth, one of MI6’s Russian specialists, was keen to put forward the alternative point of view.

  ‘Let’s blow up those boxer shorts again,’ she requested.

  As the image of the US-Flag boxer shorts appeared on the giant screen in the MI5 basement conference room, Jill Hepworth took out a laser pointer.

  ‘Okay,’ she continued. ‘We can all see the way PUT AMERICA FIRST has been printed on, or perhaps sewn into, the waistband of the boxer shorts. But let’s look a little closer. Do you see the embroidered logo on the left leg, the little white ‘‘b’’ inside a black circle? Do you know whose logo that is? Well, I did some research. It’s the Bloomingdales logo. And where is Bloomingdales located? In New York? And where does Ronald Craig spend a good deal of his time? The answer’s New York. I read he even flies back home to New York to sleep in his own bed when he’s on the campaign trail. He could easily send someone over to Bloomingdales from Craig Tower to buy some boxer shorts.’

  Gupta was still sceptical. ‘With respect, even if we could establish that Mr Craig buys his underwear at Bloomingdales, this would not necessarily prove that he is the man on the bed.’

  Lillian Peters, head of the Foreign Office’s security team, who was chairing the meeting, was anxious to bring the meeting to a close.

  ‘So what line do you propose we take?’ she asked.

  ‘I would say we hold our fire,’ Gupta replied. ‘This could be another classic case of Kompromat, like that of Yuri Skuratov. Let me remind you that a few years back, Yuri Skuratov, Russia’s then Prosecutor-General, was in the middle of one of the biggest investigations of his career, tracking down high-profile Russian officials accused of taking huge bribes, when a tape surfaced.

  ‘Grainy footage, apparently captured on a concealed camera, showed Skuratov having sex with two prostitutes. Hours after it aired on Russian state television, Skuratov was suspended from his post, despite his protestations. Popov, who at the time was working at the Federal Security Agency, which we now know as the FSB, publicly certified that Skuratov was the man pictured on the videotape. Surprise, surprise! Yeltsin appointed Popov prime minister in the same year.’

  Gupta paused and looked around the room. He felt he was beginning to win over the waverers.

  ‘This is very much a part of the way Russia works,’ he continued. ‘Intelligence agencies collect compromising information on individuals, or they fake such information to use later, when it’s to their advantage. The Skuratov affair is a case in point. Those grainy pictures were Skuratov’s undoing but they were almost certainly faked.’

  Lillian Peters pondered her options. There was always a temptation to rush to judgement, but she shuddered to think of the consequences if they got it wrong.

  She made up her mind. ‘I would propose that we send a holding report up to Dame Jane. We tell her that we are still considering the file.’

  Gupta held up his hand.

  ‘Yes, Mr Gupta.’

  ‘I hope I have not seemed too negative. There may still be a chance of reaching a firm conclusion, one way or the other. There are images which are obscure and grainy, as in the Skuratov case, and then there are images where the face and other features have been distorted, as a result of a deliberate act of pixelation. Let’s blow up those images again. If they have been deliberately pixelated, we may be able to depixelate them.’

  He had their attention. These boffins, Lillian Peters thought, often waited till the last moment before coming up with the goods.

  Later that day, Dame Jane Porter went to see the home secretary, with no officials present. Her two close aides, Giles Mortimer and Holly Percy, knew most of what was going on. But they didn’t need to know everything. Not yet anyway.

  Mabel Killick ushered her visitor to the sofa in the corner of her large office in the Home Office. She closed the door and pulled up a chair.

  ‘Well, Jane?’ Mabel Killick was at her most charming. ‘How are you getting on? What’s the verdict?’

  ‘They’re still working on the Kempinski video,’ Jane Porter said. ‘They hope to depixelate the images.’

  ‘Ah,’ the home secretary nodded knowledgeably. ‘When do they expect a result?’

  ‘Hard to say. Apparently this is a long and difficult process with no guarantee of success.’

  ‘What about the memory-stick the Russians gave Edward Barnard? How are things going there? Are all those documents fake too? The Russians seem to be making a habit of it at the moment, don’t they? Fake news seems to be all the rage. You just don’t know what to believe.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Home Secretary, that the memory-stick documents are in fact fake,’ Jane Porter said. ‘We’ve been going through them one by one. Virtually all of them are, or appear to be, genuine documents emanating from the PM’s office. The narrative they portray is indeed the narrative that happened: the run-up to the PM’s Bloomberg speech, the PM’s manuscript additions to the manifesto, late in the day, indicating his personal commitment to the Referendum. Those are all genuine verifiable documents, though how they got into the hands of the Russians to form the basis of their Brexit dossier, if I may call it that, is still not clear. That, as you can imagine, is a matter of great concern to us. If Number 10 itself is not secure, who and what is?’

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ the home secretary said. ‘What about the exchanges the prime minister had with Fred Malkin, Conservative Party chairman, about huge cash transfers into Conservative Party funds in exchange for the Referendum commitment? Surely to heaven those documents aren’t genuine.’

  Dame Jane Porter sighed. ‘Things are not looking good. And it wasn’t just the promise Jeremy Hartley gave in the Bloomberg speech. The manifesto commitment was even more explicit. Of course, the PM never expected that he would ever have to deliver on that commitment. The Lib Dems would always have vetoed it. But then the Conservatives won an outright majority and the PM was hoist by his own petard.’

  Mabel Killick stood up and walked over to the window. She gazed out at traffic on Horseferry Road. She’d had to take many difficult decisions in her long tenure as home secretary, but this was one of the most difficult.

  She turned towards her guest and said in the gravest tones, ‘We’re going to have to pursue this one wherever it leads, even if it leads to the door of the prime minister himself. You’ll have to bring the Met in, and the financial boys. What happened to the money you are talking about?’

  Her voice trailed off. For a brief moment she put her head in her hands. If the pri
me minister had to step down, or was forced out, or – thoughts of the Cayman Islands and illicit personal accounts popped unbidden into her head – yes, conceivably, even went to prison, then who on earth would succeed him?

  ‘We must keep this one under the tightest of wraps till we’re ready to spring,’ she instructed.

  Jane Porter looked down at the home secretary’s trademark leopard-print kitten heels. Mabel Killick was always ready to spring, she thought.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Lyudmila Markova and her fearsome, all-female team flew down to St Petersburg on the afternoon of Thursday May 26th, 2016. A squad car was waiting to take them to their hotel. Next morning, dressed in full riot gear, they headed for FSB St Petersburg headquarters on Cherniavski Street.

  At precisely 8:30a.m. they entered the building, flashed their passes at the security desk and belted up the stairs to the second floor.

  They caught Fyodor Stephanov hitching his trousers up on the way back from the toilet. Markova slammed him against the wall and rammed her pistol into his gut.

  ‘Take him down, girls,’ she ordered.

  The dungeons at Cherniavski Street are not as dark and menacing as the dungeons of the KGB’s Lubyanka building in Moscow, but they are the next best thing.

  ‘Do you want the rack or the thumbscrew?’ Lyudmila asked. She was only half joking.

  Two hours later, the FSB SWAT team had all the information they needed. They had all the original footage, as well as a copy of the video that Fyodor Stephanov, with the connivance of his superiors in FSB, St Petersburg, had sold on the black market.

  ‘That was a nice little scam you had going, wasn’t it?’ Lyudmila had taunted him. ‘That wasn’t the first time you sold Kompromat, eh? Make a practice of it, do you? Hit him again, Maria. Kick him in the crotch. Wrench his arms from their sockets. He’ll talk soon enough.’

  Maria duly obliged, so did the rest of the team. They were glad to take their turn. Just warming up for the day ahead. That was how they saw it. Galina Aslanova had instructed them to take a tough line and that was what they did.

  ‘How did you find out it was me?’ Fyodor Stephanov whimpered as they left.

  ‘You were the bloody duty officer, that night, weren’t you? You were stupid enough to ring the girls from your duty phone.’ Lyudmila spat at him. ‘Who else could it be?’

  Five hours later, back in Moscow, Galina Aslanova reviewed the material her SWAT team had brought back from St Petersburg.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘Very interesting.’ She picked up the phone and hesitated for a moment. The FSB director, Pavel Golov, was out of town for the day. Should she wait for him to come back? Or should she go straight to the top?

  She made up her mind. This was a matter which couldn’t wait. She had known President Popov for years. He had been her boss for a while when he headed the KGB before going on to higher things. Popov had given her a card with his private number.

  She had destroyed the card, but she had memorized the number. She dialled it now.

  ‘Mr President, I need to speak to you in person. I will bring the material.’

  ‘What material?’

  Galina hesitated. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr President. I’m not sure this phone is secure.’

  Igor Popov laughed. ‘Now you’re telling me! I’m at the dacha. Come on over. I’ll send a car.’

  The sprawling countryside estate of Novo Ogaryovo – a huge parkland containing several palatial buildings on the banks of the Moscow River – lies about fifteen miles from Moscow on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye highway. If President Popov was travelling there by car, rather than by helicopter (his preferred mode of transport), the police would sideline the traffic so that decoy cars could speed the full length of the route to check for problems. Only then would Popov’s twelve-car armoured motorcade race through at speeds of up to 150mph.

  Galina Aslanova didn’t quite receive the full presidential treatment – hers was just a one-car motorcade – but the driver of the BMW switched on the ‘migalka’, or the blue flashing light, which entitled him to ignore legally most rules of the road. Galina arrived at the presidential dacha less than an hour after the telephone conversation with the Russian president.

  The term ‘dacha’ was a misnomer. Novo Ogaryovo bore little resemblance to the structures that Muscovites conventionally called ‘dachas’: modest country retreats which they had built or otherwise acquired in the outlying rural districts for weekend breaks or to escape the searing heat of the summer. There was nothing modest about Novo Ogaryovo. ‘Palatial’ would have been a better word. There were half a dozen reception rooms and a dozen guest rooms, a stable to house the president’s horses and a manège where he could practise dressage. There was also a shooting gallery which he used almost daily and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The whole estate was enclosed by an eight-metre high fence: a world within a world.

  Whenever he could, Popov worked at Novo Ogaryovo rather than in the Kremlin. Over the years, many visiting heads of state had been entertained at the dacha. Some had even been invited to stay the night, a signal honour.

  Yuri Yasonov came to the door of the dacha to greet Galina Aslanova. They knew each other well, of course. They had both been part of Popov’s inner circle during his time as director of the KGB. Galina had stayed on in the KGB, now renamed FSB, when Popov left the director’s post for higher things, but Yuri had moved with his boss to the Kremlin and now served as Popov’s key aide.

  ‘Wonderful to see you,’ Yasonov said. ‘The president’s waiting in the den.’

  Galina had been to the dacha at Novo Ogaryovo before. She had sometimes been summoned at short notice to attend hastily scheduled conferences, which were presided over by President Popov with a degree of formality befitting his position. But she had never before ventured into the president’s own personal den.

  ‘Galina! Thank you so much for coming. Wonderful to see you!’ President Popov wasn’t usually so effusive. There were occasions when he could be gruff and taciturn. But this wasn’t one of them. He pulled Galina towards him, enveloping her in a muscular embrace.

  ‘You and your team did a great job in St Petersburg, I heard,’ Popov said. ‘I hear some of our people down there had been carrying out unauthorized surveillance and selling reports on the black market. But you set him straight. Gave him what for, so I understand. Good show! Now let’s see what you’ve got.’

  Galina Aslanova thought she was going to swoon. They sat side- by-side on the sofa, knees touching. God, the man was sexy, she thought.

  As the video played on the wide screen in front of them, she managed, somehow, to concentrate on the matter in hand.

  ‘What we got in St Petersburg,’ she explained, ‘was the raw material and that’s what we’re seeing now. The first part shows Barnard having a drink in the bar of the Kempinski and then going up in the hotel lift with the two girls. The second part shows the two girls and Mr X playing around on one of the Kempinski’s king-size beds.’

  Popov whistled. ‘And you think you can identify Mr X, do you?’

  ‘I think we can,’ Galina Aslanova said. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure we can.’

  For the next thirty minutes, the three of them sat, totally absorbed by the degrading spectacle, faithfully recorded by the FSB’s concealed cameras.

  ‘Are you sure this is being filmed in the presidential suite at the Kempinski?’ Popov asked at one point.

  ‘Yes, we’re sure. See all the gold curtains and marble tops. That’s the presidential suite all right,’ Galina replied. ‘And the CCTV shows the girls outside the suite, knocking on the door.’

  Popov had spent too much of his career as an intelligence officer to be fobbed off with circumstantial evidence, however convincing it might seem.

  ‘What about the man’s face? I agree the body seems right in terms of size and shape. But we need to see the face? Most of the time the man’s face seemed to be occupied in ways we can’t see.’

  ‘We s
ee the hair, don’t we?’ Galina was sure she had got it right. ‘That sunburst of hair, like a halo. No mistaking that, surely?’

  Popov let out a great roar of laughter. ‘Halo! That’s rich. That’s the first time anyone has suggested to me that he has a halo round his head!’

  Popov was a man who knew how to weigh up the pros and cons. He was used to that.

  ‘I congratulate you, Galina Aslanova. You deserve a medal and I shall see that you get it. Will you stay for dinner?’

  Galina Aslanova didn’t just stay for dinner. She stayed the night.

  ‘I don’t have any pyjamas,’ she protested half-heartedly.

  ‘I don’t see why you need pyjamas,’ Popov countered. ‘I don’t.’

  To say that Galina Aslanova and Igor Popov slept together that night was, in a strict sense, misleading. They hardly slept at all.

  For Galina, it was a dream come true. She had admired this man for so long and now here she was, in his bed, in his arms.

  Funny, she thought, how when it came to making love, all that macho stuff went right out of the window. It was almost as though he cared for her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Harriet Marshall met Edward Barnard at Heathrow on the latter’s return from Australia. They drove down to Wiltshire together.

  Melissa Barnard was still in Ireland, so Marshall, who by now was very much at home in Coleman Court, fixed breakfast while Barnard showered and changed. It had been a long flight.

  ‘You did a great job with Mickey Selkirk,’ Harriet said over the coffee. ‘The great Selkirk machine is primed and ready to go.’

  ‘What are they waiting for?’ Barnard asked ‘Shouldn’t they be moving into action with all guns blazing?’

  ‘We’ve got to give them some real ammunition. It’s not enough to talk about the Greek crisis, or the problems of the Eurozone or “faceless Brussels bureaucrats”. What we’ve been saying about spending money on the NHS is helping. Our slogan “Take Back Control” appears to resonate. But that’s not going to swing it.’