Kompromat

by Stanley Johnson

The next clip was of Popov helping Craig to his feet.

  Barnard continued to provide a running commentary. ‘Craig is holding his right upper arm where the ranger injected the Tolazoline. My guess is that if you’re looking for a secret mini-transmitter, forget about Craig’s buttocks. Go for the right upper arm. And check out that ranger. Maybe he’s on the books of the FSB.’

  ‘You could be right. You could just possibly be right!’ Wilbur Brown said. ‘We should have thought of that and we didn’t.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Barnard asked. ‘Ask Craig to report to Walter Reed again?’

  Wilbur Brown shook his head. ‘I don’t think the Republican presidential candidate would take kindly to that that. He already thinks we’re bugging his phone. Are we Five Eyes still?’

  ‘Roger that!’ Barnard replied. ‘Five Eyes all the way!’

  The director of the FBI tapped the side of his nose meaningfully. ‘We might just do nothing,’ he said. ‘For the time being at least.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Joshan Gupta, Head of MI5’s technical support services, reckoned that he had spent at least one hundred hours on that bloody film.

  At first he had assumed that the images of the man on the bed in St Petersburg’s Kempinski Hotel, whoever he was, had been simply pixelated and that with persistence it might be possible to de-pixelate them. He had worked evenings and weekends, but still he had made no progress. He finally realized that the images were not only heavily pixelated; they were encrypted as well. If you couldn’t crack the code, you couldn’t see the images.

  Of course, MI5 had its own military-grade versions of most of the photo-encryption and decryption programmes available on the internet. But you were always playing catch-up. Nowadays the most innocuous messages could be sent in code. More than one billion people in 180 countries used end-to-end encryption for everyday communications. Only you and the person you were communicating with knew the content of the message.

  In the end, Gupta was forced to report to his superiors in MI5 that he had drawn a blank as far as establishing the identity of the mystery man was concerned.

  There the matter rested until one evening, out of the blue, a pop-up message appeared on his screen:

  ‘5 Star Kempinski Hotel, Moika 22, Moscow. No booking fees. Late Check-out until 4p.m. Early Check-in from 11a.m. Free Underground Parking. Free Wifi, Turn down Service, Room Comfort Menu including Golden Shower, Garage Parking, Kids’ Club etc.’

  He almost missed it. Golden Shower!

  Gupta picked up the phone to talk to his supervisor. ‘Mohammed,’ he said, ‘I think we’ve got a breakthrough. We’re going to need the Director to come down here pretty quickly.’

  Mohammed Abbas, the ranking officer in Gupta’s section, went to fetch the MI5 director and escorted her to Joshan Gupta’s desk.

  Dame Jane Porter was not herself a technical expert, but she was a quick study and ready to grapple with the jargon of cyber warfare, even if she didn’t fully understand it.

  ‘This could be a trap, couldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘If you click on this “Golden Shower” link, couldn’t you be compromising the integrity of our whole system? Opening the link might allow them to launch a Trojan Horse, a worm or a virus, or some other malware, which could literally close us down.’

  Mohammed Abbas wasn’t so sure. ‘I don’t think that’s what they’re after. I think they’re trying to tell us something.’

  Dame Jane Porter looked around the room. It wasn’t often that she came down into the bowels of the ship. A hundred people or more were working at their computers. This was where the war on terror was waged. Day after day, hour after hour. There was so much at stake.

  ‘Let’s go for it,’ she said. ‘If the whole thing goes up the spout, it’s my head which will roll. Are you okay with that?’

  Of course, they were okay with it. They only hoped she’d put it in writing.

  Gupta clicked on the link. Seconds later the video began to play. They had all seen it before, of course, but still it didn’t make for pleasant viewing. Dame Jane Porter shuddered involuntarily when it came to the ‘Golden Shower’ scene. What kind of man enjoyed that?

  At first, even in the depixelated version, it wasn’t easy to distinguish the facial features. The man’s hair, a great orange-blond mop, got in the way. But then, suddenly, as the girls moved off the bed and the man came up for air, they had a clear view of his face, looking straight at the camera. He had a nasty scar on his right cheekbone.

  Later that day, Dame Jane chaired an inter-departmental meeting. Roger Wales, head of MI6’s Russian desk, and Jill Hepworth, one of 6’s technical experts, came over the river from Vauxhall Cross to 5’s headquarters in Millbank.

  ‘So who is this man on the bed, if it’s not Ronald Craig?’ Jane Porter asked.

  ‘We’re pretty sure we know the answer.’ Roger Wales sounded smug. He had good reason to be. MI6 had spent years, and a good deal of taxpayers’ money, refining their facial recognition system.

  ‘As we all know,’ Wales continued, ‘facial recognition systems are still far from perfect. Ideally, we look for 3D methods. These can achieve significantly higher accuracy than their 2D counterparts. In fact, I would say that 3D methods of facial recognition now rival fingerprint recognition. Unfortunately the video we have just seen can’t be analysed in 3D, but the good news is that the facial images we have are clear and usable. We have run them through the database and we have double-checked with our people in Moscow.’

  He paused and looked round the room, making the most of the moment. ‘We believe with 99.3 % certainty,’ Wales continued, ‘that the man on the bed goes by the name of Fyodor Stephanov, an FSB operative based in the St Petersburg office. We believe that the Golden Shower scenario was a freelance operation organized by Stephanov, and possibly some other colleagues in St Petersburg, to generate commercially valuable Kompromat material. We further believe that the video we have just seen, with Stephanov as the male lead, was both pixelated and encrypted to disguise Stephanov’s identity and then spliced into the genuine footage of Edward Barnard meeting the two Russian ladies in the lift in the Kempinski. The consolidated film was then sold or otherwise made available via the black market to agents of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The MSS, as we know, then tried to blackmail Edward Barnard.

  ‘For the purposes of the film Stephanov used some obvious props. The US-flag boxer shorts, as we have seen, feature prominently in the film. And the depixelated version of the film shows Stephanov wearing a wig resembling the flamboyant hairstyle of Mr Ronald Craig.

  ‘Even if this started out as a freelance scam in the FSB St Petersburg office, it is clear that Moscow somehow got wind of it. Our people confirm that the FSB office in St Petersburg was raided the other day by an all-female SWAT team from Moscow. Lyudmila Markova, the team leader, was positively identified by one of our agents just as she left the FSB offices on Cherniavski Street followed by four other women, all bearing boxes or cartons of office computers, files and other material.

  ‘We therefore believe,’ Roger Wales concluded, ‘that Moscow found what it was looking for, namely the original undoctored, depixelated footage of the Golden Shower film.’

  Wales turned to the man sitting next to him at the table. ‘I’d like to pay tribute, if I may, to our colleague, Joshua Gupta. You will all recall the scepticism Joshua expressed when we first met in this very room to review the film. He argued that just because there was a pair of US-Flag boxer shorts on the bed with “PUT AMERICA FIRST” inscribed on the waistband, we shouldn’t necessarily conclude that the man involved in that Golden Shower scene was Ronald C. Craig. He was right.’

  Joshua Gupta accepted the tribute gracefully. ‘Those boxer shorts will turn up one day. I expect they’ll find a big fluffy hairpiece too!’

  They all laughed, grateful for some light relief.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Chinese President Liu Wang-Ji sat at his desk
in Zhongnanhai, the old imperial enclave that lay immediately west of the Forbidden City, waiting for Zhang Fu-Shen, the minister of State Security, to arrive. The two men had known each other a long time. They both belonged to the small group of people who could trace their ancestry back to the men or women who had been with Mao Tse-Tung on the Long March more than seventy years earlier. On the first of October each year, the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People’s Republic, these direct descendants of the Heroes of the Revolution climbed up to the great wide balcony above the Gate of Heavenly Peace to gaze down on the crowds in Tiananmen Square.

  ‘Hello, old friend,’ Liu Wang-Ji said, when Zhang Fu-Shen arrived. ‘Have some tea.’

  They sat in armchairs side by side. Liu poured tea.

  Zhang had brought a small parcel with him, wrapped in brown paper with a red ribbon around it tied in a neat bow. He placed it on the ornamental carved-wood table in front of them.

  ‘Please open it, Mr President,’ he said. ‘My people couldn’t find the film, but they found these instead.’

  The Chinese president unwrapped the package. ‘What are these?’ he asked, holding up the silk boxer shorts, emblazoned with the US Flag and the embroidered message: ‘PUT AMERICA FIRST’.

  ‘They are the proof we need,’ Zhang replied.

  ‘Proof of what?’

  ‘Proof that we have been barking up the wrong tree. The DNA evidence was conclusive. No American was involved in the Golden Shower episode. Certainly not an American presidential candidate. The boxer shorts belonged to the FSB operative in St Petersburg who set up the whole scam in the first place.’

  The president fingered the shorts. He examined the label. ‘It says “Bloomingdales Finest. Made in China”. That’s something to be proud of anyway, I suppose.’

  Liu Wang-Ji lit a cigarette. His doctor had advised him to give up smoking, but to no avail. He might as well have asked a wolf to stop baying at the moon.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ President Liu asked. ‘You don’t seem to have made much progress so far. You failed to neutralize Edward Barnard. Britain voted to Leave and now the EU itself seems to be about to break up. Who knows what is going to happen in France, or even Germany? You thought you had a big fish there in the Kempinski Hotel, but you ended up with a minnow. I hope you have something else up your sleeve.’

  The Chinese president’s voice still sounded friendly enough, but Zhang noticed a steely tone which had not been there before. He realized that his own future was poised on a knife-edge. Liu Wang-Ji, in his rise to the highest post in the land, had treated his rivals with extreme ruthlessness. Some of them had met with ‘unfortunate accidents’; others had gone to jail in remote provinces. Still others had simply disappeared and their bodies had never been found.

  He knew he was sipping his green-leaf tea not in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, but in the Last Chance Saloon.

  ‘Well, yes, I do have a plan,’ he said, ‘a way to turn the tables.’

  ‘It had better be good,’ Liu Wang-Ji observed.

  For the next fifteen minutes the Chinese president listened with increasing interest as Zhang Fu-Shen explained his new scheme in detail.

  ‘Do you remember that meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee we had back in May, here in Zhongnanhai, when we discussed US–China relations?’ Zhang asked.

  ‘Of course, I remember it. I chaired it.’

  ‘Then you will also remember,’ Zhang continued, ‘that we discussed the famous Amur tiger incident.’

  ‘I certainly do,’ Liu replied. ‘I dined out on that story for weeks.’

  ‘And do you remember that at that same Politburo meeting I reported that Ronald Craig, at that time a presidential candidate, had been treated in Khabarovsk General Hospital for a buttock wound?’

  President Li smiled. ‘I laughed like a drain, as I recall.’

  Zhang came to the point. ‘The Politburo’s instructions to the Ministry of State Security were recorded in the minutes of the May meeting of the Standing Committee. I have brought them with me. Shall I read out the precise words?’

  Zhang fished the paper from his pocket. ‘Point 9 of the Minutes reads as follows:

  “The Minister in charge of the Ministry of State Security is hereby instructed to investigate why the president of the Russian Federation, Igor Popov, shot US presidential candidate Ronald C. Craig in the backside with a tranquillizing dart”.’

  Zhang laid the paper on the little wooden table next to the US-Flag boxer shorts. ‘What I am about to say now, Mr President, is for your ears only.’

  ‘Go ahead, Minister Zhang.’ Their friendship might have dated back for decades, but business was business. Zhang was going to have to come up with something pretty good or he was for the chop. Literally.

  Zhang took his time. He knew this was a make-or-break moment.

  ‘As you know,’ he began, ‘Khabarovsk is situated on the Russia–China border. There are many ethnic Chinese living and working there. One of the surgeons in Khabarovsk General Hospital is Professor Gung Ho-Min. Professor Gung is also one of the MSS key agents in Khabarovsk. One day Gung was informed by the hospital authorities that he might be required to attend to a high-level patient who, in the very near future, would be brought into the hospital suffering from a wound to the buttocks. He was instructed, when tending the wound, to insert subcutaneously in the patient’s upper right arm a mini radio-transmitter which would be made available to him at the appropriate time.’

  ‘And Professor Gung didn’t query these instructions?’ Liu asked.

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ Zhang replied. ‘This is Russia, remember. People do what they’re told, particularly when, like Professor Gung, they belong to a vulnerable ethnic minority. But in my opinion,’ Zhang continued, ‘Gung showed particular brilliance and insight. He was able to procure from MSS sources within Khabarovsk one of our own mini radio-transmitters. While the patient was anaesthetized, he inserted the Russian transmitter, as instructed, in the patient’s upper right arm, while inserting the Chinese transmitter in the left buttock.’

  President Li whistled. ‘Are you saying that Ronald Craig, the man I met in St Petersburg at the World Tiger Conference and who is now quite possibly about to be elected President of the United States, has been bugged both by the Russians and by us? We both have something on him, in the most literal sense!’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Zhang replied.

  He took out his mobile phone, put it on the table and turned up the volume.

  ‘Listen to this, Mr President. This is a recording of a conversation which took place yesterday in Washington, around 2:30p.m., Eastern Standard Time. The system we have installed sends the actual GPS location of the originating transmission, give or take ten metres on either side. In this particular case we know that the transmission originated at 2650 Wisconsin Avenue, North-West Washington. That happens to be the address of the Russian Embassy.’

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ President Liu Wang-Ji protested. ‘There’s no reason why a presidential candidate shouldn’t visit the Russian Embassy. A presidential candidate can call on the Russian ambassador, might even have drink or dinner. Russian officials can talk to American officials in their own homes too.’

  ‘In theory, that’s right,’ Zhang agreed. ‘The US doesn’t have an Official Secrets Act like other countries, but don’t forget that the US has the Logan Act which makes it a crime for an unauthorized person to actually negotiate with a foreign power. That’s the key issue.

  ‘I ought to explain,’ Zhang continued as they settled down to listen to the tape, ‘that there seem to be three people in the room at the Russian Embassy. One of them is Ronald Craig himself. The other we believe is Bert Rumbold, Craig’s right-hand man and Director of Strategy for Craig’s presidential campaign. The third person is Georgiy Reznikov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, who is hosting the meeting.’

  He pressed the ‘play’ button. ‘You’ll hear Craig’s voic
e first,’ Zhang said.

  Given that the mini-radio-transmitter was placed several millimetres below the tough skin of Ronald’s Craig’s gluteus maximus, the clarity of the recording was remarkable.

  ‘Okay guys,’ they heard Craig say. ‘This is what we’re offering if I’m elected President. Number One, the US is going to drop the current sanctions against Russia, as regards Crimea and the Ukraine. We would hope that NATO will follow us in this, but even if they don’t we will act unilaterally.

  ‘Number Two: if I’m elected President, the United States will not challenge the deployment by Russia of the ground-based, nuclear-capable 9M729 missiles, even though possession of these missiles is a violation of the terms of the INF. Bert, what the hell does INF stand for?’

  ‘Now we’re going to hear Bert Rumbold,’ Zhang commented.

  Sitting there in Zhongnanhai, Beijing, seven thousand miles from Washington, they heard a low throaty comment: ‘INF means the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Ron.’

  ‘Thanks so much, Bert. We understand the 9M729s have a range of 620 to 3240 miles. Apparently they hit Syria from the Caspian the other day. So if we agree that their use is compatible with the INF, then Russia can legally hit every capital in Europe. More to the point, perhaps, Russia will able to blast the living daylights out of every city in China.

  ‘Let’s take China’s build-up in the South China Seas. I believe the United States must be ready to go to war with China over these illegal bases. But it would be better still if Russia and the US could take a coordinated approach. We can say to China “Pull back from the Spratlys” or the Russians will whack Chengdu or Xian or wherever with their 9M729 missiles can reach. We could also put pressure on them to deal with North Korea, tell North Korea to nix their nuclear testing programme, for example. And if the Chinese don’t deal with North Korea, we will!’

  ‘Good God,’ President Liu Wang-Ji exclaimed. ‘This is dynamite!’