Kompromat

by Stanley Johnson

  A new silky, cultivated voice, speaking perfect English, was to be heard on the recording:

  ‘Interesting. Very interesting,’ Georgiy Reznikov said. ‘Let’s talk about global warming too? As you may know, President Popov believes that Siberia should blossom like the rose. He believes Russia needs the massive increase of productivity in Siberia that global warming will make possible. How can a Craig Administration help here?’

  ‘We can help bigly,’ they heard Craig reply. ‘Global warming’s bullshit, a giant hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to grab American jobs. I’ll make sure we pull out of the Paris Agreement. I’ll dismember the EPA – the Environmental Protection Agency – and revive the American coal industry. Believe you me, we can warm up Siberia in no time at all. One degree, two degrees, three degrees, ROCK! We’ll rock around the clock tonight! Remember Bill Haley and his Comets, Ambassador?’

  Sensing that the US Republican presidential candidate was on a roll, Georgiy Reznikov quickly interrupted. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. This has been a most productive meeting. I can assure you that President Popov will be pleased. In view of what I have heard today I am authorized to tell you that between now and Election Day we will make sure that our cache of emails from the Democratic National Committee, including those from Caroline Mann, the Democratic presidential candidate, is deployed to the fullest possible extent. We further undertake to offer Craig Shipping and Craig Oil the most favourable terms possible as far as their operations in the Russian Arctic are concerned.’

  Reznikov paused. ‘Of course, we will, I hope, have further conversations, many further conversations when Ron – may I call you Ron? – is elected. But perhaps our discussions today will do for starters.’

  ‘Just one thing,’ Craig intervened. ‘Don’t forget about my old friend Mickey Selkirk. Selkirk Global is planning a major expansion in Russia. I think he has his eyes on Pravda and Izvestia as well as RT, Russian television!’

  ‘I am sure President Popov will be pleased to hear that too,’ Reznikov replied.

  Zhang turned the recording off. ‘There’s more where that came from. Of course, we don’t listen to all of it. Normally, we just store the recordings after checking electronically for key words. What we’ve just heard happens to be particularly interesting.’

  President Liu Wang-Ji stood up and put his arm round Zhang’s shoulder. ‘Well done, old friend. You have been tested and have not been found wanting. Don’t forget to take those US-Flag boxer shorts with you when you go.’

  Halfway to the door, President Liu Wang-Ji paused: ‘That Logan Act you mentioned. That’s a pretty old statute, isn’t it? Dates from 1799? Is it still in force?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Zhang replied.

  President Liu Wang-Ji didn’t miss a trick, he thought. That was probably why Liu was President and he wasn’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Galina Aslanova, head of Special Projects in the FSB’s Moscow Headquarters, had been required to undertake many strange assignments in the course of her career as a secret agent. She had learned how to assassinate people with undetectable poisons, how to kill them with a single blow of the hand, how to hack computers and siphon money from bank accounts. But up till now she had never been asked to impersonate a schoolgirl from Illinois.

  Yuri Yasonov came to see her with less than ten days to go before the US Presidential Election. ‘I’ve had a message from our people in Washington,’ he said. ‘They think Craig’s in trouble. He’s closing the gap on Mann, but not fast enough. We’ve got to do more.’

  ‘What more can we do?’ Galina asked.

  As the operative with overall responsibility for Tectonic Plate, the FSB’s project designed to change the whole structure of international politics, Galina was quite ready to do whatever was necessary to influence or subvert normal democratic processes but on this particular occasion, with time running out, she was at a loss.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Yuri said. ‘I think we have to get the FBI to reopen the enquiry into Caroline Mann’s emails. I’m not criticizing you, Galina. Please don’t get me wrong. At the technical level, the FBI couldn’t have been more helpful. We handed them 30,000 of Caroline Mann’s hacked emails, via WikiLeaks. Wilbur Brown, the FBI director, put his analysts to work as we always assumed he would. Whatever the political pressures might have been on him to do nothing, he could hardly duck that one. And the analysts came up with a conclusion which was totally helpful to us.’

  Yuri Yasonov paused while he consulted his papers.

  ‘Okay, I’ve found it,’ he continued. ‘The FBI read every single email and concluded – and now I’m quoting – that “out of the fifty-two email chains determined by the owning agency to contain classified information, eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; thirty-six chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification”.’

  Yasonov put the paper aside. ‘So where did our scheme go wrong?’ he asked. ‘Confronted with the evidence, why didn’t the FBI bring criminal charges? They should have. We thought they were going to. Criminal charges at this point of her campaign would have holed Caroline Mann below the waterline. But what happens? What does Wilbur Brown, the FBI director, do? He lets Caroline Mann off with a slap on the wrist. Tells her she’s been a naughty girl, and “extremely careless” and please don’t do it again.’

  ‘I’m not sure where this is going?’ Galina said.

  ‘I’ll tell you where it’s going,’ Yuri Yasonov replied. ‘We’re going to force the director of the FBI to reopen the enquiry. He may not have time actually to conclude the new enquiry before Election Day. That doesn’t matter. It may not discover anything new anyway. But the very fact that the FBI is focussing attention yet again on those illegal Caroline Mann emails at this late stage should be enough to sink her. She’ll haemorrhage votes, I promise you.’

  ‘So how do we persuade Wilbur Brown to take another look at this?’ Galina asked. ‘Some piece of Kompromat, perhaps? Something that might persuade him to change his mind?’

  ‘We have nothing on Brown,’ Yuri Yasonov said. ‘He’s squeaky clean. And we don’t have enough time anyway to set up a Kompromat scenario, even assuming Brown would fall for it, which he probably wouldn’t.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Galina Aslanova asked.

  ‘I checked with President Popov this morning. He thinks it’s time for Plan B. Our last best hope to swing this before it’s too late.’

  ‘Plan B!’ Galina exclaimed. ‘Don’t we always say, “there is no Plan B”?’

  ‘Well, there is this time,’ Yasonov replied.

  Julius Lomax, former congressman for Massachusetts 9th Congressional District, had form. A few years earlier, he had had to resign his seat in the House because of a ‘sexting’ scandal but he was still addicted to this particular form of entertainment.

  His wife, Sandra, one of Caroline Mann’s principal aides, had left early for work. His two kids were at school, he had lost his job and he had time on his hands. Only that morning he had met up online with a schoolgirl from Champagne, Illinois, whom he felt, with a bit of help, might be ready to share some of his wilder fantasies.

  He typed a brief, lewd message into his smartphone. He had an appropriate photo of himself all ready to upload.

  In Moscow, 4,500 miles away from Boston, Galina Aslanova gave a thumbs-up sign as the message pinged into her inbox. ‘Bingo,’ she said. ‘He’s hooked.’

  The KSB Moscow office had very kindly supplied a variety of photos of teenage girls in their underwear, all waiting to be uploaded. Galina quickly selected one and pinged it back.

  Lyudmila Markova, tough, ferocious Lyudmila, stood behind her with her own mobile, videoing the exchange. Some of these ‘sexting apps’ had self-delete programmes, as soon as the exchange ended, so you had to take care to make real-time recordings.

  ‘We need to fi
re him up a bit,’ Markova said. ‘Send him a boob shot. Here what about that one? She’s young and pert and pretty. I wouldn’t mind her myself. I wonder where they found her?’

  Seconds later, Julius Lomax fired back. ‘Great! Loved it. What’s the weather like in Champagne? It’s pretty cloudy here in Boston.’

  Galina Aslanova didn’t answer that one immediately. ‘Could be a trap,’ she whispered. ‘He may be checking that I really am in Illinois.’

  She Googled: ‘What’s the weather in Illinois today?’

  ‘Actually, it’s unseasonably warm here today,’ she typed. ‘With highs in the upper seventies.’

  Lyudmila punched her: ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t send that. You’re meant to be under fourteen. Talk like a teenager, not like the weatherman!’

  ‘The weather here’s great’, Galina tried again. ‘You may think this photo’s great too.’

  Within seconds the former congressman sent what he considered was his finest literary effort so far: ‘I can’t help thinking about your pretty little pussy.’

  Later that morning, Galina Aslanova phoned Yuri Yasonov.

  ‘I think we’ve got what we need,’ she said.

  ‘Attagirl!’ Yasonov replied.

  Less than two hours later, the Selkirk Clarion, America’s biggest-selling national newspaper, published both online and in print a series of messages sent by former congressman Julius Lomax to an underage girl in Champagne, Illinois, although fortunately they kept this as a one-sided conversation with words suggestively blanked out.

  Within an hour the FBI succeeded in obtaining a court order permitting it to seize and examine Lomax’s mobile and laptop as well.

  In seeking the warrant, the FBI indicated it would not only be looking for illegal activity involving the grooming and exploitation of a minor for sexual purposes. It also asked the permission of the court to undertake a complete forensic analysis and review of the files on Lomax’s laptop.

  The FBI argued that such a review ‘will also allow the FBI to determine if there is any evidence of computer intrusions into the subject laptop, and to determine if classified information was accessed by unauthorized users or transferred to any other unauthorized systems’.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Harry Stokes, foreign secretary, called his political adviser, a bright and bubbly young man called Owen Griffiths, into his grand office overlooking St James’s Park for an urgent discussion.

  ‘There have been some developments in the Golden Shower affair,’ he said. ‘The MI5 have somehow managed to depixelate the tape, whatever that means, and they report that Ronald Craig is not, absolutely not, the man on the bed. The original report which gave rise to the Golden Shower scenario seems to have been written by a former MI6 officer, Martin Silver, under contract to the Democratic National Committee. They wanted him to dig up some dirt on Ron Craig. Now they are asking me as the minister responsible for MI6, as well as the Foreign Office, to make it clear that we totally repudiate any suggestion Ron Craig is one of the dramatis personae in the famous Golden Shower event.’

  Stokes got up from his desk and strode across to the window. It was late October and the evening was drawing in.

  ‘Basically, Owen, I think this is a lose-lose situation,’ he continued. ‘If we go public and exonerate Craig, Caroline Mann’s people will complain we are playing politics. They will protest that we are behaving exactly like the Russians, interfering with the US Presidential election by coming out with such a very pro-Craig bit of information just days before the vote. But if we don’t say anything, then Craig’s people will yell blue murder. The Golden Shower rumour has already hurt their candidate. We can be sure Craig won’t put the prime minister at the top of his visitors’ list if he’s elected next week.’

  As a SPAD – Special Political Adviser – Owen Griffiths was free from the normal bureaucratic hang-ups. ‘I think there’s some wriggle room here, Foreign Secretary. My advice would be to put nothing in writing. Why don’t you have a quiet word with Warren Fletcher, the American ambassador? You’ll be meeting him at London Zoo tomorrow when the Duke of Edinburgh opens the new tiger enclosure. That way we won’t be making any public statement, but we can always claim that we passed on sensitive information in a timely and appropriate way. What Warren Fletcher does with this particular piece of news is his problem, not ours.’

  ‘Great stuff, Owen. I know why we pay you.’

  Next morning, a select group of invitees, including Foreign Secretary, Harry Stokes, Warren Fletcher, the American ambassador, Gennadiy Tikhonov, the Russian ambassador to the Court of St James’s, and the world-renowned conservationist and broadcaster, Thomas Pulborough, gathered in front of London Zoo’s spectacular new Tiger Territory. The Duke of Edinburgh, former President of the World Wildlife Fund, made a brief but powerful plea for more national and international action to save threatened tigers and all endangered species.

  ‘The situation of the tiger is getting worse all over the world,’ he said. ‘The Bali, Caspian and Javan subspecies are already extinct. The Sumatran tiger, which you see here today – two adults and three splendid cubs – is critically endangered.’

  The duke pointed to the animals in the enclosure. The zoo had done a tremendous job of recreating a pocket of Indonesian rainforest in the heart of London. While the parents lazed in the late October sunshine, the cubs explored their newly enlarged and improved home, climbing up into the trees and splashing in the lake.

  ‘The Bengal tiger appears to be holding its own and the population of the Siberian or Amur tiger is actually increasing.’

  The duke paused. As always, he had been well-briefed. ‘I am delighted to see that we have Ambassador Tikhonov among the guests here this morning. I hope he will pass on to Moscow the pleasure we all feel at the progress being made in Russia today, as far as the Siberian tiger is concerned. But this is no time for complacency.’

  After the speeches were over, and the brilliant new Tiger Territory had been officially inaugurated, guests were invited to an official reception in the splendid new Thomas Pulborough Pavilion to mark the occasion.

  Harry Stokes buttonholed Warren Fletcher, the US ambassador.

  Fletcher had been four years in London already. He and his wife entertained on a grand scale in Winfield House, their splendid official residence in Regent’s Park, barely a butterfly hop from the zoo.

  ‘Isn’t the duke amazing?’ Fletcher said. ‘Ninety-five years old, if he’s a day, and still going strong. Wasn’t it great when the tiger came right up behind him as he was speaking? If they hadn’t put that glass screen in the way, the tiger could have had a right royal lunch!’ Then, Fletcher turned serious: ‘Nelly and I have had such a good time here. You guys have been really great. We’ll have to leave, of course, if Craig wins. A new president will always want to have his own man – or woman – in London.’

  ‘Do you think he will win?’ Harry Stokes asked.

  Fletcher waited for a man with a plate of canapés to pass, then he said, ‘Between you and me, there’s a lot of dirty pool going on in this election. The release of those emails has hurt Caroline Mann badly. The Mann campaign is putting a lot of pressure on the FBI Director, Wilbur Brown, to show a bit more even-handedness. Now you guys could help there. You could help a lot. Your man, Martin Silver, reported that Craig featured in that Golden Shower tape. If you could come out with a statement saying there is there is strong and credible evidence that Ronald Craig was indeed implicated, then that could really swing things in Caroline Mann’s favour.’

  It was as close to a direct plea for assistance as the ambassador could get without being overtly partisan. In a way, Harry Stokes felt sorry to have to disappoint him. The Fletchers had been fun. They had transformed the atmosphere at Winfield House. Pop stars had sung there. Jazz concerts had been staged there. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, as well as the young royals, had popped in on a regular basis. But the day Craig was elected president would be the day th
e Fletchers received their marching orders.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Harry Stokes said. ‘We couldn’t support that kind of statement. Apart from the fact that we don’t get involved in other people’s elections – officially, at least – all the “strong and credible evidence” – to use your words – we have, indicates that Ronald Craig was absolutely not the man on the bed in the Kempinski. On the contrary, we think the culprit’s a fellow from the FSB St Petersburg, called Fyodor Stephanov. Your people ought to check that out before you finger Ronald Craig.’

  Warren Fletcher drained his glass. He checked his watch. ‘I’m going to scoot,’ he said. ‘We had word last night that Wilbur Brown plans to make a statement this morning. I need to contact him. Can I name you personally as the origin of this information? He’ll have to decide what to do with it.’

  Harry Stokes shook his head. ‘Best not. We’re still trying to keep our hands clean on this one.’

  ‘What about calling you a “very reliable source”?’

  ‘I’ll settle for that.’

  Just as Harry Stokes was preparing to leave, he noticed Gennadiy Tikhonov, the Russian ambassador, standing by himself with a glass of champagne in his hand. In the months since he became foreign secretary, Stokes had been at least twice to social events at the ambassador’s residence in Kensington Palace Gardens and had returned the hospitality in one of the Foreign Office’s own glittering reception rooms, the Council Chamber of the Old India Office.

  Tikhonov was a large, cheerful man. He waved his glass as Stokes approached. ‘Hello, Foreign Secretary, what a wonderful occasion! Next time President Popov will bring a lovely Amur tiger-cub as a present for your marvellous zoo.’

  ‘Fantastic! Room for lots more tigers here!’ Stokes waved his arm at the large, leafy enclosure.

  The two men shook hands warmly. Officially Britain was still taking a tough line on sanctions, but Stokes didn’t see why that should prevent him from having cordial personal relations with one of Russia’s top diplomats.