Book Read Free

Kompromat

Page 15

by Stanley Johnson


  When it was her turn to speak, Chancellor Helga Brun sensed the mood lightening in the Chamber.

  ‘I thought I would start by talking about football,’ she began. ‘I know that’s a safe subject. Of course, Germany was delighted to win the last World Cup in Brazil in 2014, and we are all looking forward to the next World Cup in Russia in 2018.’

  The parliamentarians applauded enthusiastically. President Popov leaned over to the chancellor and in a stage whisper said, ‘Maybe it will be a Russia–Germany final.’

  Thomas Hartkopf’s attention began to wander. It always did when people talked about football. Couldn’t stand the game.

  So he listened with half an ear as Helga Brun moved on from football, to welcome President Popov on his historic visit to Berlin. He heard her speak eloquently of the importance of the relationship between Russia and Germany, as Popov himself had. Then she started on about Europe. Funny, wasn’t it, how even the best-intentioned people could drone on?

  The chancellor finally grabbed his full attention when she started to reflect on current challenges, particularly the war in Syria, the refugee crisis and its impact on Germany.

  ‘Let me be clear about this,’ Helga Brun said. ‘In the presence of my good friend, Igor Popov, President of the Russian Federation, whom we are honoured to have with us today, I condemn the surge in German attacks on refugee shelters. That is unworthy of our country. I believe that the issue of asylum could become a bigger challenge for the European Union than the Greek debt crisis or the stability of the euro. Indeed, the issue of asylum could be the next major European project, in which we show whether we are really able to take joint action.’

  Thomas Hartkopf could sense the sudden change of mood in the Bundestag Plenary Chamber. It was as though a door had been left open and an icy blast had entered the room. Basically, he knew, the members were fed up with the asylum issue. Many of them thought that Germany had been far too generous to refugees already. How many more could the country absorb?

  As the chancellor spoke, he could see members fidgeting on their well-padded seats. Surely the chancellor was not going to spoil the morning with some ill-judged platitudes about the need for compassion and brotherly love?

  Well, on this particular historic occasion, Helga Brun, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, eschewed platitudes entirely. She was not a tall woman, but that morning she stood very tall indeed.

  She looked straight out into the body of the chamber, raising her voice, just as she would raise people’s hopes around the world.

  ‘Today I pledge,’ she proclaimed, ‘that Germany will play its full part in resolving this crisis. The UN refugee agency has said that the number of people driven from their homes by conflict and crisis has topped fifty million for the first time since World War II. Fifty million! That is unbelievable. This is a situation which cannot be allowed to continue. Germany will welcome those refugees with open arms. We will do what common humanity requires us to do. We already have over one million refugees in Germany. I promise that we will do more, much more. We can do it! And I promise we will do whatever we can!’

  While the high-ups were being entertained elsewhere, there was a buffet lunch for officials in one of the Bundestag’s dining rooms. Thomas Hartkopf found himself standing next to a tall, suave Russian.

  They had met several times over the last few years, for example at G8 summits. Russia had been expelled or ‘disinvited’ from the G8 in 2014, but it still participated in the annual Munich Security Conference.

  The two men found a quiet corner where they could talk.

  ‘Chancellor Brun went out on a limb this morning, didn’t she?’ Yuri Yasonov commented. ‘If this hadn’t been a special occasion, I feel some hard words might have been said by some of the members. They weren’t keen on the chancellor’s open-ended commitment on asylum seekers, were they?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Hartkopf agreed. ‘I took a look at my boss, Otto Friedrich, the minister of the Interior. He was purple in the face with rage. That pledge on migrants obviously took him by surprise.’

  ‘Do you think Friedrich will make a move? Will he stand against Brun in the elections?’ Yasonov asked.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Hartkopf replied. ‘He may not go for it now, but I don’t think he’ll wait for ever. And he has that Bavarian power base. That always counts for a lot in German politics.’

  ‘If Mrs Brun goes, Friedrich is the chancellor’s natural successor, isn’t he?’

  ‘A strong candidate, at least,’ Hartkopf acknowledged.

  They had ordered a selection of pastries to follow the main course. Yasonov passed the plate across. ‘Here’s something which might help Dr Friedrich on his way.’

  Hartkopf was careful to palm the flash-drive before helping himself to a thick slice of Black Forest cake.

  Later that night, sitting in his study at home, Dr Otto Friedrich examined the dossier in detail. He was staggered. There it all was in black and white. The fact that her name hadn’t shown up in the Stasi files the government acquired after the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t necessarily mean that Helga Brun wasn’t implicated. It could just mean she was already in a position to suppress the evidence. But the one file she had not been able to suppress was the one Popov had managed to take back to Moscow when the mission of the KGB’s Dresden office was disbanded.

  So what had ‘Mina’ done for the Russians?

  ‘Mein Gott!’ he exclaimed. He had always wondered about the way Helga Brun had come to power, how she had out manoeuvred Hans Bloch, when Bloch was chairman of the CDU. Deed done, Helga Brun herself became party chairman and subsequently chancellor. The whole game plan was laid out in the documents. An extremely rude word escaped his lips almost involuntarily. It was obvious what had happened. Helga Brun may have been following instructions from Moscow for years!

  There was one document he still had to study, and this one was Russian. It was labelled ‘Bundestag: Chancellor’s speech’.

  ‘Good God!’ Dr Friedrich exclaimed again when he opened the file. There it all was in black and white. The full text of the chancellor’s speech which he himself had seen in draft. A diagonal bar across each page said SECRET. How had Popov’s people got hold of that? Only a handful of Cabinet members in Germany had seen it in advance.

  He had been furious that morning when the chancellor gave that pledge on the asylum seekers, cursing her for ad-libbing.

  ‘We can do it! And I promise we will do what we can!’ appeared in bold red type in the document he had up on the screen.

  Dr Friedrich picked up the phone. He’d have to report this.

  He paused. Who was he going to report it to? To the chancellor? Not likely, given the circumstances. To the minister in charge of security? Well, he was the minister in charge of security. He could hardly report to himself. Who else then?

  Another thought occurred to him. People would ask how he came to be in possession of this explosive information. Was he going to admit that a senior Russian official passed a data-stick to his own state secretary concealed in a slice of Black Forest cake?

  There were legal issues too. In the Federal Republic even ministers of the Interior needed court orders. At least they were supposed to have them. He could just hear the federal prosecutor asking with a sneer, ‘And have you been spying on the chancellor, Dr Friedrich?’

  He replaced the phone. Better to wait.

  Judging by the latest news bulletins, Helga Brun’s newly announced policy of a Germany ‘open-to-all-comers’ was already receiving a huge thumbs-down from the electorate.

  Her star, as Dr Friedrich saw it, was beginning to fade and the effects of today’s speech might sink her altogether.

  His own political star, on the contrary, was already rising fast.

  When the moment came he would be ready. And he would have the top-secret ‘Mina’ dossier if he needed extra ammunition to fatally wound the political career of the chancellor.

  CHAPTER TW
ENTY-FOUR

  Fyodor Stephanov, senior agent at the FSB office in St Petersburg, was still feeling sore from the beating Lyudmila Markova and her team from FSB Moscow had given him. Frankly, he thought they had overdone it. Everyone freelanced a bit nowadays. Given the wages the FSB paid, that wasn’t surprising. He hadn’t realized that just about everybody had been chasing that Golden Shower video. Still, it was off his hands now. Moscow could do what they liked with it. And they no doubt would.

  Lyudmila Markova had given him stern warning. ‘Don’t do it again,’ she advised, twisting his neck with a vice-like grip. ‘Otherwise you’ll be in real trouble.’

  He took her seriously. She was one tough lady. But he needed to supplement his income.

  One evening a week, after his FSB shift had ended, he worked for an outfit known as the Internet Research Agency at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg.

  Number 55 Savushkina was a newly built, four-storey office block, which housed upwards of 400 internet trolls. The trolls worked in rooms of about twenty people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.

  The trolls took shifts writing mainly in blogs along assigned propaganda lines for LiveJournal and Vkontakte, outlets that had literally hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. Artists too were employed to draw political cartoons. Employees worked for twelve hours every other day. A blogger’s quota was ten posts per shift, and each post had to have at least 750 characters.

  Bloggers employed at the Savushkina Street office earned approximately 40,000 Russian roubles a week. As far as Fyodor Stephanov was concerned it, it was money for jam. The time would come, he thought, when he might pack in his job at the FSB entirely and become a full-time troll.

  In the short time he at been working at 55 Savushkina Street, Stephanov had discovered he had a remarkable aptitude for the task.

  He had already begun his evening shift when a new PRIORITY TASK dropped into his inbox.

  ‘Another one about Ukraine.’ He sighed as he opened the message. ‘Was there anything new to say about Ukraine?’

  But when he read the instructions, he saw that the new task wasn’t about Ukraine at all. It was about the German chancellor’s speech and the alleged ‘flood of refugees’ about to invade Europe.

  ‘Use your imagination!’ the instruction said. ‘Find video footage of refugees climbing barriers to break through border posts; migrants raping defenceless women, setting fire to buildings, and generally running amok.’

  The technical support team at 55, Savushkina Street was first rate. You wrote the words; they found the pictures, cutting, splicing and pasting with precision. Take the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, for example. Easy to tie that one to migrants and asylum seekers. Or that lorry in Nice, literally mowing people down on the Promenade des Anglais. Who was responsible for that? Terrorists entering France disguised as immigrants! Cue-in shots of dark-bearded men hurling obscenities at the camera.

  That particular evening it seemed the trolls at 55, Savushkina Street were instructed to churn out not just blogs with photos attached, but whole video clips.

  Stephanov was given the task of reviewing one such film in its final stages before transmission. The basic commentary was in English since the clip would go out worldwide on RT and other media.

  He put his earphones on and listened to the Russian translation:

  ‘Speaking in Berlin, Chancellor Helga Brun defied critics of her refugee policies by insisting there would be no change to her open-door migration stance.

  ‘Commentators say that Germany has been rattled by an axe attack on a train in Würzburg, a mass shooting in Munich, a machete attack in Reutlingen and a suicide bomb in Ansbach – all within a week. The attacks left thirteen dead. Three of the attacks were carried out by asylum seekers and one by a German-Iranian who harboured a hatred of Arabs and Turks.

  ‘Brun reiterated her credo: “We can do it!” (“Wir schaffen das!”). She has repeated the phrase over and over since Germany’s migration crisis exploded, when she opened up the German border to tens of thousands of mainly Muslim migrants stranded in Hungary.

  ‘She said: “We decided to fulfil our humanitarian obligations. I did not say it would be easy. I said back then, and I will say it again now, that we can manage our historic task – and this is a historic test in times of globalization – just as we have managed so much already, we can do it. Germany is a strong country”.’

  When the video had finished, Stephanov removed his earphones. He wasn’t a specialist but he doubted whether that clip could have been knocked out in the brief hours that had elapsed since the chancellor delivered her speech to the Bundestag.

  That meant that someone somewhere had had advance notice of what Helga Brun was going to say.

  Interesting, thought Stephanov. Very interesting.

  At the end of May, with less than a month to go before the Referendum vote, the Leave campaign’s policy board gathered for a crucial strategy session at Leave’s headquarters in Westminster Towers, a new and prestigious Thames-side office block situated immediately opposite the Houses of Parliament.

  Edward Barnard, as Leave chairman, opened the meeting:

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve been out of the country quite a lot recently but Harriet Marshall, our campaign director, has had her finger on the pulse, and so I am going to ask her to bring us up to date with developments.’

  Harriet didn’t waste time.

  ‘We’ve got a lot to thank the German chancellor for,’ she began. ‘All the data we have indicates that, since her speech, the immigration issue has risen right to the top of the pile.’

  She glanced at her notes: ‘Our polling data shows the Leave campaign has been gaining momentum in recent days, rising from being eight points behind in mid–late April to a dead heat on fifty per cent apiece in the current poll of polls.

  ‘According to a Sky News poll, of the twenty-nine per cent of Brits who are still undecided on the issue, twenty-eight per cent are most concerned about the impact the EU has on immigration levels, whereas just fifteen per cent cite the economy as their biggest concern.

  ‘The Office of National Statistics has admitted that it has underestimated European migration by 1.5 million people. Based on Sky’s results, the events of this week could see Leave actually pull ahead for the first time.

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,’ Harriet continued, ‘that these results are good news for us. Leave campaigners have been focussing on making the public aware of the leading role the European Union has played in driving immigration to Britain into the hundreds of thousands a year, while hampering the British government’s ability to reverse that trend.’

  Harriet paused to wait for the round of applause to subside. Then she went on, ‘Meanwhile the Remain campaign has been plugging on with Project Fear and its usual scare tactics, warning all and sundry of economic doom should the British people dare to opt to leave the European Union at the Referendum on the 23rd June. I must say I was a bit shocked to hear Alan Sigsworth, governor of the Bank of England, start talking about recession, inflation, and a “sharp” crash in the value of sterling, lower wages and rising house prices in the event of Brexit”. You would have thought Armageddon was round the corner. And the Bank of England is meant to be independent. Tom Milbourne himself might have written the script!’

  Looking around the table, Harriet couldn’t help thinking that the team was shaping up well. She didn’t on the whole have much respect for politicians but this bunch seemed ready to put their shoulders to the wheel.

  Take Ed Barnard, for example. Some people might regard Barnard as a kind of ‘useful idiot’. And yes it was true he was ‘useful’, but he was by no means an idiot. Take the way he had built up the relationships with the Craigs. It was Ronald Craig, after all, who invited Barnard to join his daughter, Rosie, on that vital trip to Australia
to woo Mickey Selkirk.

  Or take Harry Stokes, the ebullient, blond-haired former Mayor of London. Harry was absolutely living up to the high expectations people had of him, wowing the crowds wherever he went. He could be serious too if it was absolutely necessary.

  Or take Jack Kellaway, the former minister for Social Affairs, who was playing a key role. If Barnard had led the way in resigning from the Cabinet, Kellaway had followed suit soon after.

  Another one to watch was David Cole, the former journalist, and friend of Jeremy Hartley, who had somehow managed to keep his position as a member of the Cabinet even though he had joined the Leave campaign. You never quite knew what Cole was thinking behind those huge owl-like spectacles!

  And then there was that dark horse, Andromeda Ledbury. She had turned in a couple of very competent television appearances recently and seemed game for any and all future challenges. She was a woman, too, which helped. Harriet didn’t on the whole believe in gender balance and that kind of thing but you couldn’t ignore it altogether. Not nowadays.

  Yes, it was a decent team, Harriet thought. They had begun talking about an ‘alternative government’ and, frankly, it wasn’t such a ludicrous idea.

  She decided to wrap up. There was work to do. ‘Let’s be clear about this,’ she said. ‘We may be winning the battle of the airwaves. We may have important parts of the print media on our side. But we are not there yet.’

  After coffee, and they got down to the nitty gritty. The spread-sheets came out. Speeches and broadcasts were planned. The itinerary of the Leave Battle Bus was carefully plotted to ensure that, though it would criss-cross the country between now and June 23rd, it would be back in London in time, it was hoped, for a Victory Drive down Whitehall on the morning of June 24th.

  Before they left, Harriet Marshall had one last word of caution for them.

  ‘We’re on the right track,’ she said. ‘But there’s still one thing which could scupper us. What if the EU, at the last minute, agrees after all to the prime minister’s demands in this so-called renegotiation? What if they see which way the wind is blowing and suddenly come up with a vastly improved offer?’

 

‹ Prev