A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  She looked genuinely pleased to see me. That was what I remembered. And even though I realised, in retrospect, how desperate she was to get out of there, I don’t believe that was all of it.

  ‘Of course I’m pleased to see you,’ she said. ‘Elliot, you trust your instincts with other people. Trust them with me.’ Then: ‘It’s been hell the last few weeks.’

  She’d been blamed for a questionable bit of intelligence that shouldn’t have mattered, should have been dismissed at analysis, but got rushed into the public domain and ended up stalling UN action. It shouldn’t have been her thing at all. Joanna was I/Ops. Information Operations covered a lot, from briefing agents before missions abroad to more covert psychological operations: planting stories, attempts to influence events in another country or organisation in a direction favourable to Britain. Hearts and minds, which wasn’t always as fluffy as it sounds. On the wall of their HQ in Basra I’d seen a drawing of someone’s brain exploding, above the unofficial slogan: Because physical wounds heal.

  In Turkey, she was in charge of what she called triage. Hundreds of people were fleeing over the border from Syria each day. Joanna had to identify those with military intelligence, those who might be turned and persuaded to engage in various missions, those with propaganda potential. The morning after the handover we drove to the border and she showed me the big white tents set up with rows of fold-out tables inside: a front line of UN staff, a back line of spooks dividing up the refugees. It looked like a careers fair. She’d spent four weeks collecting horror stories for her own propaganda operation. She photographed what she could, distributed secure phones and laptops to any rebels heading back east and willing to blog, hooked them up with reporters via WhatsApp. She ran workshops with the US state department, tutoring cyberactivists on how to craft their message. Later, in the bar, she’d joke about it: There’s three of them, bandaged to the eyes, and I’m trying to establish if they’ve used Wordpress …

  Then Mescaline turned up. He was meant to be I/OPs only, then started supplying broader intelligence. That was where things went badly wrong. She was putting a brave face on, having been told to step away. I was sent over under the new Bohren cover to assess things. Was he planting disinformation intentionally? Part of a bigger Russian-led psyop? If so, could he be turned again? Tripled? It had been done before.

  Joanna briefed me as we drove from the airport. Nineteen years old, Khasan Idrisov had led a turbulent life. Orphaned, adopted by Chechens, he’d headed to Syria a few years previously. Supposedly he wanted out. That was why he’d approached Joanna in the first place. There’d been no one else on hand to receive what he’d described as time-sensitive information on chemical weapons.

  ‘You’re going to try to turn him?’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to see what he wants.’

  ‘What are they saying about me in the UK?’

  ‘I don’t know. But that’s what analysts are there for: to catch this kind of thing before it blows up.’

  ‘I was played.’

  ‘It’s Russians. Russians fuck with your head.’

  The whole thing had the hallmarks of a GRU campaign, at a time when Russia were stepping up involvement in the conflict. The GRU was Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, more active internationally than the FSB, which was technically civilian rather than military. The GRU’s main declared function was military external intelligence, but it also did special ops, and under its umbrella of special ops came some very curious ones. Hence Idrisov might lead to more than just terrorists, I thought.

  The handover was awkward and dangerous as ever. Idrisov was evidently traumatised, chainsmoked, avoided looking at me. We were all sweating. Joanna had her headscarf down around her shoulders. He had survived a drone strike twelve months earlier and his badly treated wounds smelled acrid and gangrenous in the heat. We agreed the communication protocol was unchanged. He kept asking when he could move to the UK.

  Joanna had been drinking. My bosses said she was being rotated. She said she was being fired, and if she wasn’t fired she’d had enough anyway, which is what you say at the end of missions. After the meeting, Idrisov had returned to risking his life – or betraying us – the two of us got shashlik at a place Joanna liked: no glass in the windows, good-natured men with Kalashnikovs guarding the door. She said she was burned out. The way she saw it, all our work had been undone. We’d been outplayed.

  When she passed out in the hotel room I sat up watching news until I wasn’t watching any more: images of the chemical attack, unblemished corpses, men and women fallen alongside pets and birds as if all nature had succumbed to some overarching fatigue. Online, Russians were suggesting that the whole thing was arranged by anti-Assad forces to gain US sympathy and airstrikes. As evidence they pointed towards the UK’s own footage of rebel groups with missile launchers and what looked like canisters of sarin in the vicinity of the attack around the same time. The imagery was a result of intelligence supplied by Joanna. The Russians were having a field day.

  I don’t know what was true. No one ever sees the whole picture, but in a situation like that momentum is truth, and we lost momentum. Plans for intervention stalled. The UN froze. Russia walked in.

  Twice a week Idrisov crossed over to deliver handwritten messages from IS command, which he shared with me. I moved us out of the Lighthouse to a safe house in the suburbs of Iskenderun. He gave me nothing valuable. Two months later he missed a meeting. An execution video turned up the following week. His confession to camera was that he was a spy for MI6. According to GCHQ, it looked likely the Russians had used him enough and decided to blow him. I wanted to talk to Joanna about it, about this vindication of our theory, but at that time she’d gone off-radar as well, busy with her new role.

  Now no longer at Six?

  My new anxiety confused the jet lag. It was 10 p.m. here, 1 a.m. in Saudi Arabia, 4 a.m. in Astana, Kazakhstan. Where was I?

  I finished the wine, found some English money and went out. The cold November night caught me by surprise, but I couldn’t be bothered to return for a coat. Walking felt good. The area suited me: international students, business travellers, tourists. The pubs were small enough to monitor from your seat. I favoured the Queen’s Arms. It didn’t play music, which meant you could hear conversations, sometimes even relax.

  I ordered a pint of IPA and the ease of acquiring alcohol seemed briefly hilarious. Back in the land of the infidel, of personal space, cautious eye contact. Out of the realm of sweet teas and shisha and close, wiry bodies. Reacquainted with the blunt functionality of the pint, solid enough to grip and stop yourself from falling. A TV in the corner of the pub showed Sky news: flooding in Yorkshire, a glamorous awards ceremony. I thought through the stories that weren’t there. Someone laughed; a chesty public-school bellow. The man was one of a group of five beside the bar: white shirts, fresh haircuts. The laugher had a cashmere scarf loose around his neck, elbow on the bar, delivering an anecdote about turning up to someone’s place in the country uninvited. He reminded me of Christopher Bohren, in the bar of the Belvédère Hotel, in Istanbul’s Club 29. I had always been fascinated by people with acts, performers who know that, so long as you make life more interesting, you can commit whatever evil you want. Close by him, a young woman turned in circles. She held her phone in front of her face. I tried to see if she was Skyping or recording. She had strong makeup, a dark fringe, ankle boots with silver studs. A friend with hair scraped back in a ponytail watched her from a table in the corner. I angled my face away and tried to remember if they’d been here when I arrived. They were noticeable and I hadn’t noticed them.

  When I went up to get another drink the woman with the fringe appeared beside me, clutching a purse.

  ‘Long day?’ she said.

  She sounded Eastern European, maybe Scandinavian. Neither of the drinks on their table was finished; the trip to the bar seemed premature.

  ‘Long year.’ I smiled and extended a hand. ‘Christopher.’


  ‘Anna.’

  ‘Where are you girls off to tonight?’ I asked. She named a club a mile or so away. I tried to imagine what route would bring them via the Queen’s Arms. It was a down-at-heel start to the night.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ I asked.

  I bought them drinks, joined them. The friend, Inga, was taller and quieter. They were art students, apparently. They had just started at St Martins. I spoke at length about art auctions, private galleries, offered to guide them around London. My persona of the last twelve months was a bon vivant, a war profiteer at ease with his demons. It was a relief to resurrect him briefly.

  ‘Do you both have student ID?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said.

  ‘You know the government’s trying to persuade universities to put nationalities on a hologram. And then, if your visa expires, you won’t be able to get back in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take a look.’

  Anna took the purse from her bag and clicked it open. It was thick with cards. She removed a student ID from among them.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Can I see?’ I took it from her and memorised the name and the ID number. ‘Maybe they haven’t yet. Should be the same technology on the bank card.’ I pointed at her open wallet. She slipped a bank card out. Same name: Ms A. Nailand. Bank account at Rietuma Banka in Latvia.

  ‘You know a lot,’ she said.

  ‘I’m just paranoid about the government.’

  Maybe they were real. I took a mental step back; a pause for reflection. Loss of faith in reality was one of the first signs of psychosis. And of being in the game too long. The laugher and his crew moved off, the girls remained. If this was something, they knew where to find me. Tailed from the airport? Picked up at the hotel? That would be concerning. If it wasn’t anything then I needed to wind down and shake off the tension of the last few months before I made a fool of myself.

  After twenty minutes I’d probed as much as I could without appearing excessively suspicious. I checked my watch.

  ‘I’ve got to run.’ I focused in on Anna. ‘I know a few gallery openings next week. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in coming along, would you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Anna said, too readily. I took her number.

  ‘And can I take a photo of us all?’ I said. ‘Something to make my friends jealous?’

  I checked them out online when I got back to the suite. Anna Nailand, Latvian art student, appeared across a few social media sites. So did Inga. How much social media do you need to be real? It was a question I’d spent more time contemplating than was healthy.

  I had a message from a contact in Switzerland: Bohren’s art dealership in Lausanne was shuttered. So much for a discreet draw-down. Things like that exposed you. Bohren might not have had my name or any other details, but he had my face. When I tried to see if anyone else had noticed this, or anything else odd, I discovered that Bohren’s email accounts had been closed down.

  And no sign of Joanna.

  I watched the road beneath the hotel window, then the park across the road, then drew the curtains again. I felt the clean coldness that came when I was about to act.

  I opened my laptop – logged in to my agent’s Deutsche Bank account.

  Balance $1,792,021.

  I’d watched these figures a lot over the last year: debits and transfers signifying arms and alliances. I’d never stuck my hand in before, but it was simple enough. I clicked ‘transfer money’, went into payees and found the account details for my own Shariah-compliant account with the Jersey branch of the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. I set up three transfers of ninety grand, clicked ‘send now’.

  It cleared in minutes.

  I transferred a hundred thousand from Jersey to an account with Union Bancaire Privée in Geneva, then converted the rest of the money to Bitcoin, stored in an anonymous Dark Wallet account. I sent 50k to Evotec’s Cyprus account and submitted two tasking requests: information on the TutaNota address that had sent the message – where it had been set up and what device the email was sent from. I also sent the video file and asked for a forensic analysis: what kind of device was meant to have produced it; what CGI software was used in its construction.

  I did my own research. The software involved used deep-level machine learning: you fed in images of someone’s face and the program taught itself how that face worked, how to generate new versions. It split itself into creator and critic, creating examples and then seeing if it could convince itself that they were real, feeding back errors until it could.

  You needed the bodies, though, onto which the faces were mapped. Who was my body double? More seriously: who had the resources for all this? The process required a high-speed graphics processing unit. Supplying it with adequate training data meant having access to hundreds of images of that person. For someone moving around, like I was in the clip, seen from all angles, you might need thousands to be convincing.

  I tried to sleep, got up an hour later and watched the clip again. I took a screengrab of my face and used it to set up a recognition alert on Cognizance, the only facial-recognition software that tracked online appearances rather than just CCTV feeds. I did the same for my companion. My sleep-deprived brain was convinced: this was Catalyst, the man who was going to kill me.

  SIX

  I woke, sweating hard, at 5.30 a.m. There had been no more messages from whoever was using Mescaline’s protocols. I checked world news, then found shorts and a T-shirt, ran hard across Hyde Park, outpacing the night’s images, one eye out for any surveillance. A mile and a half in eleven minutes. Not bad: would get me into infantry, but not paras any more. I drank a bitter coffee at a cab drivers’ shelter, the only place open in the dawn. I had been looking forward to today. To a tentative attempt at being myself.

  At 9.30 a.m. I walked to the Maghreb Bookshop on Sussex Gardens, behind the Edgware Road. It was a cornucopia of second-hand books from around the world, most languages represented, forgotten poets gathered in the dust, shelves that squeezed you as you burrowed in.

  After half an hour, I took my haul to the counter and the owner studied them. Among others, I had chosen some poetry in Kalmyk – the Kalmyks in Russia were Buddhist descendants of the Mongols – plus a nineteenth-century account of travelling in Kazakhstan. The owner was a small Egyptian man who wore V-neck sweaters and glasses on a chain. He lifted the Kalmyk collection.

  ‘You understand this?’

  ‘A little. I am interested in endangered languages.’

  I pocketed the Kalmyk collection and the Kazakh travelogue, took the rest to a house on Lisson Grove. It was identical to the elegant houses on either side but for a small brass plaque beside the door announcing the Healing Foundation for the Victims of Torture. The door was open. I walked into a long hallway with clients’ artwork on the walls, leading directly through to a well-tended garden, where a Sudanese couple were arranging bunting and tables for a party.

  ‘Is Hany around?’

  At the sound of my voice, Hany Aziz appeared, grinning, from among the foliage.

  ‘Martin,’ he said, because Martin was the name he knew. He clasped my hand. I savoured the sweet incongruity I felt every time I saw him in London, a man I had first set eyes on in Cairo’s Tora Prison. That crippled figure had been banished. Aziz’s tightly curled hair was now a London grey, but his eyes had grown more youthful. A fine access agent, once I’d acquired his freedom and services, introducing me to the intellectuals and firebrands that passed through his basement. He had established the healing centre five years ago, after arriving in the UK.

  I gave him the books and we asked after one another’s lives. He told me how he was faring; I lied about mine.

  ‘You must come to the party this afternoon, Martin. Old friends will be there. You remember Sania.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They remember you fondly. And the children.’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘Then next time.’


  ‘I promise.’

  I told him I had an appointment and left him to the garden. Walking back down the cool corridor I thought: I got him out. Even if Egypt went to shit. I don’t abandon them.

  Café Rakka was nearby. Early in my career I had sought out London cafés popular with various émigré groups, and used them to practise going grey, becoming unnoticed. At the time, I thought maybe I would pick up snippets of information, but people didn’t often talk politics and when they did it was usually to parrot the editorials of the popular Arabic newspapers. Still, the food in this one was good, as was the fresh mint tea. You found yourself searching faces. Who might have made it over? Café Rakka had yellowed tourist posters on the walls: the Al-Madina souq, the Great Mosque, Palmyra with the Temple of Bel, all bombed to memories now. Early in the uprising, they had installed a TV and kept it on news, but at some point it had been switched off.

  I ordered tea and kibbeh, balls of bread stuffed with ground meat and walnuts. The men wore harsh eau de colognes and ragged moustaches, cracking sunflower seeds with their teeth. Stirring sugar into their mint tea, with the sound of small bells ringing. Sometimes, in Egypt, you would hear that sound as you spoke on the phone: security officers from the dreaded Amn al-Dawla stirring their tea as they listened in. A group of four young Yemeni men entered, accompanied by an older man. I eavesdropped on them, talking about their trips to the Home Office to claim asylum. I tried to ascertain which towns they’d come from, but couldn’t glean any details. One of them put in a call to his parents, who had made it to South Korea, by the sound of it, but had experienced trouble of a kind that I failed to ascertain before his credit ran out.

  The Royal Mail delivery office on Harrow Road housed the Post Office box to which my own post got diverted, serviced fortnightly by the housekeeping team. The care with which they propped up my clandestine existence seemed suddenly oppressive, dependency-inducing. Currently inside the box was post that had arrived since the last visit: a postcard from a university girlfriend, Laura, showing Marrakech at night: On honeymoon. We visited Morocco and I thought of you. Did you get the wedding invitation? Don’t worry – I know you’ve been out of the country.