Deception (52 page)

^c
An untranslatable Russian word derived from
sila
(force). It could be rendered as ‘men of power' or more colloquially as ‘the hard men'. It chiefly refers to the veterans of the Soviet-era KGB and members of its successor organisations. But it also includes those with a background in the armed forces and in the quasimilitary Interior Ministry (MVD) as well as prosecutors and other agencies with the powers to snoop, bug and punish.

^d
In inches she would be
35
–
24
–
35.

^e
Putin studied international law at Leningrad State University. He graduated in
1975
and joined the KGB immediately afterwards.

^f
Unfortunately the Russian word on the button means ‘overload'; the correct term for ‘reset' would have been
Perezagruzka
.

^g
The ‘West' is a wobbly concept that defies precise description. It includes Anglosphere countries such as Australia and New Zealand (and in many cases Japan), which are not ‘western' in any geographical sense. In this book I use it broadly to mean in economic and political terms the thirty-four member countries of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a rich-country club that promotes good governance. In a security context I use it to mean NATO and its allies, which would include, for these purposes, Sweden and Finland.

^h
An arcane distinction is sometimes drawn between counter-espionage (active and offensive measures, such as distracting, impeding, expelling or recruiting the officers of a hostile foreign service) and counter-intelligence (more general preventative measures such as screening and surveillance, aimed at finding leaks and plugging them).

ⁱ
As well as highlighting the potential, some felt he was downplaying the dangers. A notable occasion was in early
2005
at the Davos World Economic Forum, when opinion was already turning sharply against the evident cronyism and incompetence of the Putin regime. Mr Browder was one of a handful of prominent Westerners to express a strong contrary opinion.

^j
Russia was chairing the G-
8
(a group of countries that in those days tried to run the world economy). The original G-
6
, convened in
1975
, comprised Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States and then added Canada as a member. As a sop to Mr Yeltsin, Russia was invited to join in
1997
. Since
2009
, the G-
20
, which includes the big emerging economies, has largely taken the G-
8
's place.

^k
Kameya also paid more than the combined taxes paid by the largest retbiler (XS, which paid $
57
m) and the largest dairy and juice company (Wimm Bill Dann, which paid $
42
m). Hermitage's other companies paid a further $
272
m.

^l
They were: Valery Kurochkin, a convicted thief, and Vyacheslav Khlebnckov, a convicted burglar. The three companies were called Instar, Logos Plus and Grand Active.

^m
The
5
.
4
bn roubles was paid out within two days via a newly created account at Universal Savings Bank. This was a curious institution. Two nominee shareholders in the bank were also shareholders in the three obscure companies that became the owners of the stolen Hermitage companies. The main beneficial shareholder is a convicted criminal called Dmitri Klyuev, who has past links to other questionable FSB-related transactions. In the summer of
2008
, once Hermitage started firing its legal salvos, the bank filed for voluntary liquidation.

ⁿ
The federal authorities abolished this loophole in
2002
. In
2006
they ended another quirk, a two-tier market in Gazprom shares. This had created a lucrative opportunity for investors (including Hermitage) to buy locally listed ones for foreign clients at a large and legal discount.

^o
A farcical but revealing element in this came with the discovery of ‘stolen' documents brought from Russia to London and then sent back to Moscow from the DHL office in Lambeth, by two men of Slavic appearance (captured on CCTV), falsely giving the address of the Hermitage office in London. Barely forty-five minutes after the package was delivered to a law office in Moscow, the police arrived in search of the documents and confiscated the package, in what looks like a clumsy attempt to frame Mr Khairetdinov, another of the Hermitage lawyers. It is unclear what the package contained. A police protocol lists obviously forged documents, such as a power of attorney issued in the name of a non-existent person (using a surname that had featured in previous lawsuits against Hermitage), official files that would normally be in the custody of the authorities, and ‘documents in foreign language' with ‘stamps of Belize'.

^p
Mr Magnitsky's lawyer, Dmitri Kharitonov, also says that on repeated occasions Silchenko offered to release him if he would incriminate Mr Browder.

^q
Mostly from other bits of the former Soviet Union, they are habitually cheated, abused and on occasion murdered, by their employers, or by the police, or by thuggish political extremists.

^r
Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del
(Ministry of Internal Affairs).

^s
He also put Georgia in this category and said that Ukraine was heading there.

^t
Many worried that a supposedly defensive alliance was waging an aggressive war against a historic Russian ally. Yet NATO got involved only reluctantly and belatedly, after the multiple massacres in the preceding Bosnian war, and when Russian foot-dragging had stymied efforts to stop a Serbian attack on Kosovo.

^u
Of course Western intelligence collects information on Russia too. America's National Security Agency gathers electronic data from antennae in north-eastern Poland, close to the Russian border.

^v
I am concealing the full details of this case out of consideration for his family.

^w
Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye
(Main Intelligence Directorate).

^x
I focus in this chapter on solely HUMINT (the recruitment and running of human sources) not SIGINT (electronic intercepts) or geospatial reconnaissance (via satellite). I am also leaving out, among other intelligence professionals, the analysts and reporting officers who make sense of the spies' work.

^y
This former Napoleonic fort, once used by Britain's wartime Special Operations Executive, is not as secret as perhaps it should be. Its postcode is PO
12 2
AT; other details including a telephone number are available on the internet.

^z
A related problem is that a single money-grubbing source may sell the same, slightly tweaked, information to several agencies: to America's CIA and Germany's BND for example. A dubious piece of information checks out from several seemingly different sources, and counts as solid. Yet behind it is just one agent, single-mindedly maximising his income. It is this that lay behind the colossal blunder that Western intelligence made over Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

^aa
650
acres.

^ab
Mr Edbrook is presumably quoting from another CIA document not yet declassified.

^ac
I think this creates horrific problems for real NGOs and should be off-limits.

^ad
Ms Chapman and another junior illegal ferried laptop computers between Russia and America, rather more often than planned because of repeated technical glitches. When they worked, the laptops were used to send clandestine radio transmissions to intelligence officers based at Russian diplomatic missions.

^ae
Known as the ‘Forest' or the ‘Sanatorium', the SVR headquarters is a Finnish-built skyscraper complex in the district of Yasenevo, just south of the Moscow ring-road.

^af
Square brackets signify material redacted by the FBI before the complaint was made public.

^ag
I contacted Heathfield via LinkedIn, offering him a chance to review this chapter and give his comments. He replied by giving an email address, but never downloaded the file I sent him.

^ah
I made repeated attempts to gain Ms Chapman's side of the story for this book. I received two messages in return from her Facebook account. One read: ‘How can you possibly write a book without
1
decent article in press that is based on some what [sic] true facts? No interview, no nothing . . .' The other noted: ‘I was the one who suffered and you will be the one to gain? :)' I responded: ‘I hope my book will sell well but even if I win a Pulitzer prize (which I won't) you will always be more famous than me!' I received no answer to this, or to an extensive list of questions.

^ai
In fact an intelligence officer based at the Russian mission to the United Nations in New York, under the diplomatic cover of ‘second secretary'. It appears that most if not all the illegals were run from the Russian mission in New York, not from the embassy in Washington, DC.

^aj
He gained political asylum in Britain in
2003
, taking up a promise made when he brokered the release of two British hostages in Chechnya in
1998
.

^ak
She is sometimes described as a ‘belly' dancer and sometimes as a ‘ballet' dancer. This may be a confusion caused by pronunciation.

^al
Luckily my web-savvy son Johnny suggested that I make a screenshot of the Google cache version of the site.

^am
Her website (annachapman.ru) gives details of her exploits. Curiously, it was registered in April
2010
, before the spy scandal broke.

^an
Compared to Russia, the Baltic states are tiny. But so are most countries. Their combined land area is around the size of California; the total population of the three countries is just under
7
m, rather less than Greater London (
7
.
8
m). Lithuania, with
3
.
2
m, is the largest, Latvia has
2
.
2
m people and Estonia has
1
.
3
m.

^ao
The Kreevians died out in the nineteenth century in Latvia. Probably the last mother-tongue speaker of Livonian died in
2009
. The Prussian language became extinct in the eighteenth century, though German colonisers adopted the placename. Around ten thousand Vepsians survive, mostly in Russia. The Vends ceased to be a distinct ethnic group in the sixteenth century.

^ap
Britain had longstanding commercial and cultural ties with the region. An Anglican church in Riga opened in
1859
, built on English soil specially imported by the wealthy merchants who traded furs and timber. A Scot, George Armitstead (known as Džordžs Armitsteds in Latvian), was even the city's mayor in
1901
–
1912
.

^aq
Previously St Petersburg, soon to be Leningrad.

^ar
Xenophon Kalamatiano was caught trying to scale the wall of the Norwegian embassy, which represented American interests. His interrogator examined his hefty walking stick and found it stuffed with roubles and receipts from his agents. He survived a spell in the Lubyanka and was exchanged for American food aid in August
1921
.

^as
The Bolsheviks refused to allow the dying man a drink of water, or the embassy chaplain to attend to him. My suggestion to the British consulate in St Petersburg, when it opened in
1992
, to name a prize or scholarship after this gallant officer met with a sorry lack of enthusiasm.

^at
Both Russian battleships still had their Tsarist-era names with religious allusions: ‘Peter and Paul' and ‘Andrew the First-called [apostle]'. A French naval force was also in the Baltic but unable to take part in hostilities against the Bolsheviks for fear that the sailors would mutiny.

^au
Very roughly, around £
250
,
000
or $
400
,
000
in modern money.

^av
It was part of an underground army comprising the remnants of the armed forces of the short-lived Ukrainian republic, anti-Bolshevik Russians based in Poland and others.