Shadow State

Luke Harding

• Verlag: Harper
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062966056
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Russian Politics

A thrilling account of how Russia is waging a hidden war against America and the West, using espionage, corruption, fake news, and KGB-style murder

March 2018. Two Russian assassins arrive in a provincial English city to kill a former officer from Russia's GRU intelligence agency. His crime? Passing secrets to British spies. The poison? A lethal nerve agent, novichok. The attempted execution was a reminder – as if one were needed - of Russia's contempt for international norms. The Soviet Union and its doctrine are long gone, but the playbook used by the Kremlin's spies during that long confrontation with the West is back. And the underlying goal remains the same: to undermine democracy and exploit divisions within American and European society and politics.

Moscow's support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has grown into the biggest political scandal of modern times. Its American players are well-known. In Shadow State, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Luke Harding reveals the Russians behind the story: the spies, hackers and internet trolls. Harding charts how the Kremlin has updated Communist-era methods of influence and propaganda for the age of Facebook and Twitter, and considers the compelling question of our age: what exactly does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump?

Similar to those of the Cold War, Putin's ambitions are truly global. His emissaries include oligarchs, bankers, lawyers, mercenaries, and agents of influence. They roam from Salisbury to Helsinki, Ukraine to Central Africa, London to Washington, D.C. Shadow State is the singular account of how the Kremlin seeks to reshape the world, to divide the US from its European friends, and to remake America in its own dark and kleptocratic image. This is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how our politics came to be so chaotic and divided. Nothing less than the future of Western democracy is at stake.

Chapter 1

Visitors from Moscow

Moscow–London–Salisbury–Washington, DC

MARCH 2018

A wolf circling sheep.

—CHRISTOPHER STEELE ON VLADIMIR PUTIN

The two men who got on a flight from Moscow to London didn’t look like assassins. They were dressed inconspicuously, in jeans and fleece jackets. Their names were Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. At least that is what their Russian passports said. Both were about forty. Neither seemed suspicious. Businessmen? Or tourists maybe?

The plane trundled down the icy runway. In Moscow the temperature was cold and raw. It had fallen below -10ºC, not unusual for early March. In Britain it had been snowing. The pair had brought woolly hats. And a couple of satchels. One of them contained a bottle of what looked like French perfume. In the event that they were stopped at UK customs, the Nina Ricci fragrance might be explained away as a gift—a gallant one, with “Made in France” on the box.

Aeroflot flight SU2588 touched down at Gatwick Airport, 30 miles south of central London. It was Friday, March 2, 2018, and midafternoon. The two Russians made their way to passport control. Boshirov had dark hair and a goatee; Petrov was clean-shaven, his hairline thinning as middle age set in. We can only guess their mood. If they were nervous, no official noticed.

The British security service has a database of persons of interest—terrorists, criminals, fraudsters. Apparently Petrov and Boshirov weren’t on it. At immigration their passports and visas were checked and they were nodded through. What the UK border force didn’t know is that the visitors from Moscow were actually spies—ones working for a hostile foreign power.

They were career officers with Russian military intelligence. Colonels, even. Their real names were Anatoliy Chepiga (Boshirov) and Alexander Mishkin (Petrov). Their service had created a fake identity, and helpfully in the best traditions of Cold War spycraft had supplied them with real passports that supported their fictitious cover.

Chepiga and Mishkin had come to London on a secret mission.

They were there to murder someone.

Probably this wasn’t their first such assignment, known by the KGB as mokroye delo or “wet work.” Naturally, details of such activities are hard to come by, but travel records show a number of trips to Europe. This “work” had taken them to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Geneva. Their employer back in Moscow was the GRU, or Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye. Full title: the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

The GRU is the most powerful and secretive of Russia’s three spy agencies. It’s military, under the command of the Defense Ministry and the General Staff. Back in the USSR, the army-led GRU and the spy-led KGB were often in conflict. Some of this rivalry spilled into the post-Communist era of Boris Yeltsin and Putin. The GRU was in competition with the FSB, the KGB’s domestic successor, which Putin headed before becoming prime minister in 1999, and then president. And with the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence agency, the former KGB’s first directorate, operating under diplomatic cover.

The FSB handled security at home. It sniffed out and quashed opposition to the Kremlin, arresting students and political activists, locking up bloggers and protesters, and maintaining order. From time to time it carried out foreign operations. Most took place in the “near abroad”—within neighboring former Soviet republics, which Moscow continued to view as parts of its imperium.

The GRU, by contrast, was global. It dealt with external threats. Its mandate was everywhere. The organization’s activities ranged from traditional military deployments, in war zones such as Syria, to coups and invasions. Its officers saw themselves as part of a glorious tradition, stretching back to Russia’s battles against Napoleon and Crimea, through to the First and Second World Wars—the latter the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call it—and the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan.

Murder was something of a throwback to the GRU’s twentieth-century heyday. The revolutionary state of Vladimir Lenin and its various successors had plenty of experience in political killing. Lenin, Stalin, even the ostensibly reformist regime of Khrushchev, had all sent agents to snuff out “traitors.” These deaths were seen as necessary to protect a noble and progressive state besieged by capitalist enemies. And by nationalist ones. Moscow hunted down Ukrainian leaders abroad, including Stepan Bandera, killed in Munich in 1959 by a KGB assassin using a cyanide spray pistol hidden in a newspaper.

In the late 1980s Gorbachev ended such killings. It was a new age in which Russia and the West were friends. The next Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, confirmed and expanded this collaboration. Under Putin, however, murders stealthily resumed. Journalists, political critics, an ex-deputy prime minister turned irritant . . . all died in opaque ways. A former KGB officer himself, Putin had a particular loathing for those who betrayed the Fatherland. These people were scum. Traitors got what was coming to them, he said.

ARRIVING AT GATWICK, Chepiga and Mishkin picked up their travel suitcases. They strolled through a green corridor that said “Nothing to Declare.” An automatic camera captured them exiting through parallel lanes. They headed into the capital. No one came after them.

So far, so easy. Britain—it appeared—was soft and weak. Despite a string of London–Moscow spy scandals, a country described unflatteringly on Russian television as “foggy Albion” was unprepared and sleepy. True, British spooks had picked up an unusual level of activity at the Russian embassy in Kensington. But this hadn’t been connected to the two travelers with backpacks, riding the subway like anybody else.

The pair emerged into the daylight and went to the City Stay Hotel in Bow, East London. They were staying for two nights. The place was anonymous and a little shabby: Asian receptionist, a worn swivel chair behind a desk, ordinary rooms, white-painted walls. Next door is a Barclays Bank. When I stopped by, a woman in a headscarf was in a line at an ATM. Buses, cars, and taxis trundled past. There was a perpetual traffic rumble.

The neighborhood has a light railway station, a car rental company, and a Bangladeshi corner shop selling fruit, vegetables, and halal chicken. A statue of the Victorian prime minister Gladstone adorns the local church.

Close to the spies’ accommodation is a police station and a magistrates’ court. The Edwardian-era outpost of the Metropolitan Police is no longer open to the public. On the wall is a plaque commemorating the district’s Roman heritage. And a community noticeboard, which in the light of events looks faintly ridiculous. One message reads “Don’t let a pickpocket spoil your day.” Another shows a group of watchful meerkats peering out among urban tower blocks. The board says nothing about visiting assassins, or how you might spot one.

The next day, Saturday, March 3, the two GRU officers went to London’s Waterloo Station and got on a train. Their destination was the West of England and Salisbury, home of the man they had been sent to kill. Police believe that their trip that Saturday was reconnaissance. Chepiga took a pair of black gloves. They spent a couple of hours there and went back to the hotel.

The person meant to die was called Sergei Skripal.

Skripal was living quietly in Salisbury, a place where nothing much happened. His personal story was almost incredible. He arrived in Britain in 2010 via a US-brokered spy swap. Skripal was the least well known of a small group of double agents and defectors now living in the UK and America.

The most famous, Oleg Gordievsky, betrayed the KGB for ideological reasons and did enormous damage to the Soviet espionage machine. He lived in Surrey. If a list existed of “traitors” the Kremlin might wish to kill, Gordievsky’s name was surely at the top. It was closely followed by that of Oleg Kalugin, the longtime head of KGB operations in the US and a prominent critic of his old agency and of Putin. Kalugin was based in the state of Maryland, not far from Washington, DC.

Skripal was a lesser figure. He had begun his career as a Soviet paratrooper, taking part in daring clandestine missions in China and Afghanistan. In 1979 the GRU recruited him. In the 1980s Skripal worked for the GRU on the island of Malta, attached to the Soviet embassy there under diplomatic cover. By the time he got his next foreign posting—to Madrid, in Spain—the USSR had collapsed.

As Skripal saw it, the Soviet state’s demise invalidated his obligations to it. Everyone was trying to survive in the new free-market economy. Skripal sought to invest in a Malaga hotel. Then something better came up: an approach from a pleasant businessman who charmed Skripal’s wife, Liudmila, and bought presents for their kids. One day the businessman let it be known he had “friends” in the British government.

Skripal agreed to work for MI6.

The arrangement lasted eight years. So far as we know, Skripal was the US and Britain’s only GRU mole. He knew little about operational matters, but willingly handed over details of the GRU’s hierarchy and structure—what MI6 teaches its new joiners to call ORBAT, or order of battle. There were meetings with his British handlers in Spain, Portugal, Malta, Italy, and Turkey. Recalled to Moscow, Skripal continued to communicate with London. He wrote in invisible ink in the margins of a Russian novel. His wife delivered it to MI6 during a vacation in Spain.

This was risky stuff, done for $3,000 per meeting from Her Majesty’s budget-minded government. Skripal appears to have been an un-Gordievsky: he did it for the cash. In 2004 the FSB got a tip-off from Spain and arrested him. He was convicted and imprisoned. Six years later he was picked up from his penal colony, flown by special plane to Austria, and swapped on the tarmac of Vienna International Airport for a group of Russian “sleeper agents” caught red-handed by the FBI. A throwback to the Cold War or a sign of things to come? Skripal left his homeland with a presidential pardon.

After so long in exile, Skripal might have been forgiven for thinking himself safe. Who would remember him? The colleagues he had betrayed—if you could call it that—were mostly retired or dead. The world had moved on. Perhaps his British minders who from time to time took him to a pub assured him that all was well.

The GRU, however, is an unforgiving entity. It has its own code of honor and brotherhood. And a good memory.

That Saturday, Skripal collected his daughter, Yulia, from London’s Heathrow International Airport. A friend and ex-neighbor, Ross Cassidy, drove him to the airport. Yulia was visiting from Moscow. On the ride home Skripal and Yulia talked intently. At some point it became obvious that a black BMW was shadowing their car. Inside the vehicle was a woman with bleached blond hair and a man in his forties, Cassidy said.

The next morning, on Sunday, March 4, Chepiga and Mishkin repeated their journey—leaving early from their hotel in Bow and catching the 8:05 a.m. train back to Salisbury. This was not reconnaissance. This time it was murder. According to police, the pair was carrying the French perfume bottle. It contained an unusual and terrible poison.

FOR A BRIEF period after the fall of the Soviet Union the Chekists were out. (The name comes from the Cheka, Lenin’s first secret police, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission.) The elderly KGB plotters who carried out a coup in summer 1991 against Gorbachev found themselves under arrest. Democracy in the shape of Yeltsin seemed ascendant. After decades of totalitarian rule, Russians were free—albeit with their savings wiped out in the new economy.

All Soviet institutions were demoralized and in shambles, but the spies were intent on plotting a way back and were uniquely placed to do so. One of those who felt the loss of the USSR acutely was Putin, who had missed perestroika and instead spent communism’s twilight years in Dresden and East Germany as a first directorate officer. Returning in early 1990 to his home city of Leningrad (soon to be St. Petersburg), Putin reinvented himself as an aide to its new democratic mayor, Anatoliy Sobchak. Putin’s career took a sharp upward turn.

Power may have changed in Russia, but the system and its bureaucrats remained implacably Soviet in their thinking. Intelligence officers in London who had spent the Cold War fighting against what one called the “Dark Tower of the Soviet Union” believed that Moscow’s intentions were still bad. The difference was that in the early 1990s the cash-strapped Kremlin lacked the resources to do anything about it.

By the time Putin became president in 2000, this was no longer the case. Oil prices rose. The state budget grew. Funds flowed into Putin’s spy agencies, including the GRU, which in 2006 moved into a new headquarters building, known as the Aquarium, in downtown Moscow. Much of this happened while the West was preoccupied with other things—wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the specter of Islamist terrorism. Putin offered Russian citizens a social contract of sorts: greater prosperity in exchange for fewer rights.

At this point the US and its allies viewed Russia as a regional power that bullied its neighbors and engaged in domestic repression. It did not see Moscow as a rival, a superpower, or as a source of strategic concern. Washington was late to appreciate that Putin had his own vision of Russia’s place in the twenty-first century. A bigger and a darker one.

In 2007 Putin made his revisionist intentions known in a speech at a Munich security conference in Germany. He spoke shortly before standing down from the presidency, temporarily, in favor of his protégé Dmitry Medvedev. Putin attacked the US’s dominance of global affairs and reeled off a series of grudges: NATO expansion; Western “meddling” in Russia’s elections; nuclear treaty violations. Russia, he said, would no longer accept a “unipolar” world.

What that meant became clear. In Russia’s backyard the tanks started to roll—into Georgia, and into Ukraine, whose peninsular territory, Crimea, Moscow effortlessly stole in 2014. Across Europe—from Rome to Berlin and Prague—Putin rebooted old KGB ways of influence and political subversion. Secret military cells began to operate in Western Europe, the land of the enemy.

Historically, the Politburo had funded foreign Communist parties. In nations such as France and Italy, the postwar Communists were a significant force. Under Putin this support for the hard left continued. Western anti-imperialists opposed to American aggression often cheered Putin’s stance.

Increasingly, though, the Kremlin’s preferred international partners came from the populist far right—Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria, Marine Le Pen in France. They shared similar ideas: nationalism, sovereignty, power politics, and hostility toward immigrants. Moscow loaned assistance and sometimes cash to candidates who might disrupt the status quo, and discredit democracy and the European Union along the way. A new far-right internationale began to coalesce.

Putin wasn’t a master of influence or an all-knowing villain sitting behind a console with flashing buttons. He was an opportunist. He was ruthless and well practiced. His attempts to play God in other people’s elections often didn’t come off. Moscow’s practical support for favored external politicians fel...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Visitors from Moscow
• Chapter 2: Bashnya
• Chapter 3: You and I
• Chapter 4: Four Pillars
• Chapter 5: The Servants
• Chapter 6: Close Access
• Chapter 7: Everything Is Open
• Chapter 8: East India Company
• Chapter 9: Moscow Gold
• Chapter 10: Tonto
• Chapter 11: Reckoning
• Chapter 12: Quid Pro Quo
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Sources
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Luke Harding
• Copyright
• About the Publisher