Hundreds of millions of watchers across the world stared in amazement. Those to the west awoke, turned on their TVs and saw the image of the motionless Admiral Nakhimov fill the screen. Those to the east left their desks as the word spread and crowded round their televisions amid an excited buzz of comment. No one could understand it. But it had just happened.
In Russia the start of the inquiry occurred within minutes. Streams of queries flowed out of the private office of the Vozhd to Murmansk, but Northern Fleet HQ could not respond with a logical explanation.
In Washington, the President was woken and studied the TV images as every channel covered the story. Then he began to tweet. He also put in a call to Marjory Graham in London.
She was trying to raise Sir Adrian. He was in his car, being driven back from Northwood to his flat at Admiralty Arch. He had been up all night taking command of a Russian battlecruiser. At Chandler’s Court, Dr Jeremy Hendricks gazed at the screens in the computer room and swore softly.
In another wing the teenager who had delivered the codes that enabled the penetration was fast asleep. He was not all that interested.
It did not take the cyber-experts at Murmansk more than twenty-four hours to report back to the Kremlin. This was not a malfunction. Against unimaginable odds, their system had simply been penetrated and, for seven vital minutes, had been under the command of a malign stranger.
The voice from the private office in the Kremlin was not forgiving. They had assured him that their technology was unassailable, based on a trillion-to-one likelihood of infiltration. There would be multiple dismissals, even criminal charges, on the grounds of culpable negligence.
Technical officers at Murmansk began to plan the huge operation that would be necessary to get the mass of inert steel off that sandbank. The Moscow-based and government-controlled TV and radio media, which by noon had not even carried the story, tried to work out how to explain what had happened even to a docile Russian public. Word was spreading; even in a controlled dictatorship the power of the internet cannot be repressed for very long.
In his seventh-floor office at Yasenevo the man controlling the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian Federation gazed out of the plate-glass picture window that gave on to the birch forest beneath him. Far away he could see the glitter where the spring sun touched the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. He knew the call was imminent. It came at noon on the day after the grounding. Yevgeni Krilov knew who would be on the line. It was the red phone. He crossed the room to pick it up at the second ring. The SVR man listened briefly then ordered his car.
Like the self-effacing Englishman currently installing himself in a small flat in London, Krilov was a career-long intelligence officer, beginning under Communism. He too had been talent-spotted at university and intensively interviewed before being accepted for the KGB.
Another in his intake was the man whose call he was now answering, the former secret policeman who had become master of all Russia. But while the Vozhd had been assigned the Second Chief Directorate (internal) and posted to Dresden in Russian-run East Germany, Yevgeni Krilov had shown a flair for languages and secured a posting to the First Chief Directorate (foreign espionage), which was regarded as the cream of the cream.
He had served in three overseas embassies, two of them hostile: Rome and London. He spoke workable Italian and excellent English. Like the Vozhd, he later parted from Communism without hesitation when the moment came, for he had long seen its numerous flaws. But he never lost his passion for Mother Russia.
Though at that point he had no idea how the disaster at Goodwin Sands had occurred or who was behind it, over two extensive careers in espionage, he and the Englishman had, ironically, clashed swords before.
Krilov’s ZiL limousine entered the grounds of the Kremlin as always by the Borovitsky Gate, banned to all but senior officials. Although no underling could possibly be riding in a ZiL, the fanatically loyal FSO guards stopped Krilov’s car and examined him through the windows. Then they lifted the barrier and waved his driver forward.
The Vozhd has three offices. There is the big outer one, large enough to receive delegations; the smaller inner one, functional, workaday, with the crossed flags behind the desk, one the Russian national flag, the other the black, double-headed eagle. Almost no one ever gets to the smallest and innermost room, where there are intimate family portraits. But it was here that Krilov was received.
The man who totally controlled the gangster-impregnated regime of the new Russia was white with rage. He could barely express himself for emotion.
Krilov knew him well. Not only were they of similar age, their careers had run in parallel. He knew that the Vozhd had never wholly got over the disintegration of that Russian empire, the USSR, which had accompanied the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he had never forgiven. He had watched the Vozhd seeth as the USSR was disbanded and humiliation after disgrace were heaped upon his beloved Mother Russia. He had not betrayed Communism; it was the other way round: Communism had betrayed his country. The Vozhd had returned from Germany just before the German Democratic Republic had vanished to be reunited with West Germany. He had climbed through the ranks of the bureaucratic structure that governed his native St Petersburg, then transferred to Moscow. In the capital he had attached his career to the star of Boris Yeltsin, riding the old drunk’s coat-tails until he became Mr Indispensable.
It was no secret that he had never respected the ageing alcoholic, but he had been able to manipulate him to the point where, retiring from the presidency to withdraw and die in peace, Yeltsin had anointed him successor.
During the Yeltsin years the present chief had fumed with anger as he watched his homeland being systematically stripped of every mineral and natural asset, to be handed over by corrupt officials to opportunists and gangsters. But there was, back then, nothing he could do to stop it. By the time he attained the presidency, he had learned and understood the three cornerstones of power in Russia. They had not changed since the time of the Tsars.
Forget democracy. It was a pretence and a sham, and the Russian people did not really want it anyway. The three pillars of power were the government with its secret police, mega-money and the criminal underworld. Form an alliance of these three and you could rule Russia for ever. So he did.
Through the FSB, the renamed secret police, you could have anyone who got in your way arrested, charged, tried and convicted. That sort of power meant you would win any election, rigged if need be; it meant that the media would do and publish what they were told; and it meant that the Duma, the parliament, would pass any law you told it to. Throw in the armed forces, the police and the judiciary, and the country was yours.
As for cornerstone two, tackling mega-money was easy. The angry ex-secret policeman may have seethed as he watched his country denuded of its natural assets and in its wake the emergence of a network of five hundred multimillionaire oligarchs, but he had no hesitation in joining them. Yevgeni Krilov knew he was in a room with the richest man in Russia, possibly the world. No one did a ruble’s worth of business in Russia without paying a percentage fee to the supreme boss, albeit through a complex network of shell companies and front men.
And the third factor, the ruthless ‘thieves in law’, this alternative society had existed under the Tsars and had, effectively, run the labour camps, the fearsome Gulag, from within right across the country. In the era of post-Communism, the Vori v Zakone had spread to establish large and lucrative branches in most cities of the developed world, and especially in New York and London. They were very useful for ‘wet work’, the obedient infliction of violence as and where needed. (The ‘wet’, of course, refers to human blood.)
The Vozhd kept his conversation and his instructions short. He had no need to mention the name Admiral Nakhimov.
‘It was not an accident or a technical malfunction. It was sabotage. That is very clear. Whoever did it – and my suspicions lie with our enemies in the UK – has inflicted a
truly massive humiliation on our country. The entire planet is staring at our ship marooned on an English sandbank. There must be retribution. I am placing it in your hands. Your orders are three.
‘Discover who it was. Trace that person or persons. Eliminate them. You may go.’
Krilov had his orders. As the biggest tugs in the Russian navy and the maritime world were being assigned or chartered to proceed to the English Channel, he drove back to Yasenevo to begin a manhunt.
In espionage, few things are this simple, but Krilov had a stroke of luck. As the new orders filtered down the floors at Yasenevo, a sharp-eyed archivist recalled having seen a minor item filed out of Washington. For unknown reasons, some weeks back, the American government had lodged with the British a request for the extradition of a computer hacker. A few days later, also for no given reason, the USA had cancelled the request. It might be nothing, reasoned Krilov, but even in the intelligence world, once described by CIA veteran James Angleton as a wilderness of mirrors, two and two still made four. Two major computer hackers in a month? He sent for the file.
There was little enough that could be added to the snippet from the Attorney General’s department, but the once-wanted offender was called Luke Jennings and he came from Luton.
Yevgeni Krilov had two chains of agents inside the United Kingdom. One was official, the network inside the Russian embassy, or what remained of it after the devastating expulsions following the Skripal affair. Its reconstruction was ongoing. Leading this network was the recently appointed Stepan Kukushkin, posing as the assistant commercial counsellor but probably fooling no one.
Krilov’s other chain was made up of the ‘illegals’ or ‘sleepers’ passing themselves off as legitimate British citizens and speaking perfect English. The agent heading these masqueraded as a shopkeeper in the West End of London whose British name was Burke. His real name was Dmitri Volkov.
Broadly speaking, sleeper agents fall into two categories. Some are born and raised in the countries they are now prepared to betray. They can pass easily for a native of that land because that is exactly what they are. As for motivation, there are several.
During the Cold War the bulk of those in the West betraying their own homeland were dedicated Communists for whom the lust to see the triumph of Communism worldwide overcame any loyalty to the country in which they lived. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, those who were prepared to work for the West were so almost always because of a profound disillusion, maturing into loathing, of the Communist dictatorships into which they had been born. There were other motivations – greed, resentment at their treatment, the wish to earn an assisted escape to a better life in the West. But the main one was a desire to help bring down a regime they had come to despise. These usually volunteered their services as a one-off in exchange for an aided escape but were persuaded to stay as an agent-in-place until they had earned an exit.
The other category consists of quite different patriots inserted at great risk to themselves to pretend to be natives of the target country and, being fluent in both the language and the culture of the target country, to live there and serve their real love back home. These are known as ‘illegals’ and also as ‘sleepers’.
In their use, there are also two choices. Some simply and regularly pass on information that comes their way by virtue of the job they do. This is usually low-level data, and its extraction poses little risk. But such agents have to be ‘serviced’ or ‘handled’, meaning they need a constant channel along which to pass their gleaned information so that it eventually reaches the intelligence HQ of the country they are serving.
This was the function the sleeper inside the US Justice Department served when she noticed that the USA had rescinded without explanation a request to the British for the extradition of a British teenager called Luke Jennings from a town called Luton on an accusation of hacking classified US computers.
The other use is to keep completely unnoticed an agent who can be called on for one-off missions – an errand now and again, a bit of detective work. This was what the Russian agent Dmitri Volkov was tasked to do in fulfilment of the mission imposed by Krilov.
Two days later, Volkov, or Mr Burke, noticed a small advert in the usual place in the usual paper. It contained the usual harmless wording which meant that he was wanted in Moscow. He closed up his shop and headed east, diverting to three different countries, all in the European Union and signatories of the Schengen Agreement, meaning that they had virtually no border checks. He arrived as a tourist at Sheremetyevo airport after a total of twenty hours in transit. In the cab on the way to downtown Moscow he reverted to his Russian passport.
The briefing was short and to the point. He did not even go out to Yasenevo. The meeting was in town, just in case of an unfortunate recognition at HQ. He had worked there once, and former colleagues still did. Caution was always worthwhile.
Krilov gave his UK operative all that he had. The target was Luton, the family name Jennings, and one of them was a computer addict. Where was he now? Within twenty-four hours, Dmitri Volkov was heading back to London. Nothing was committed to paper and absolutely nothing to the airwaves or the internet.
On his way back to the UK, Dmitri Volkov, another lifelong ‘spook’ and veteran of the old days, mused on the irony that all this modern technology simply meant that total security now demanded the old methods, a personal ‘meet’. He also decided who among the twenty sleepers he could call upon he would use. He finally decided upon four.
He intended that each of his British nationals need know nothing about the other three. All would report to him with harmless phone calls.
One would establish which Jennings family was the one containing a Luke and where they lived, or had lived, if they had moved. He would pass this information on to Agent B. That was all. This second agent would investigate the house. If it was now vacant, he could, posing as a prospective buyer, question the estate agent and maybe the neighbours. The third would investigate the social life of the target. The fourth would remain in his hotel room in reserve.
The reason for choosing four sleepers was security. The same man making enquiries all over the town might be spotted, if, perchance, Luke Jennings himself was also a subject of interest to British counter-intelligence.
In separate cars, from the separate small hotels in which they were lodging, the four agents slipped into Luton two days later. In short – their instructions were: move fast.
Agent A was tasked to have a look at the electoral register. In the UK, this is a public document. Political constituency officials study it. It also includes addresses. Agent A reported back within a day. There were nine Jennings families in Luton but only one contained someone named Luke. He was listed as being eighteen, just on the electoral register after qualifying on his last birthday. The register showed him as living with his parents. There was an address for the now three voters who lived there. Two parents, Harold and Sue, and the teenager.
Agent B was told where to go and cruised past. In the garden a placard on a post announced that the house was for sale. The estate agent was listed. Agent B went there and secured a viewing that afternoon.
On his visit he could see that the house had clearly been gutted and professionally cleaned. There was not even an old envelope, an invoice or a bill indicating where the family might have gone. Until the cupboard under the stairs. Agent B insisted on peering everywhere and in the small area off the hallway, up against the far wall, lay a discarded golf tee. It was possible the dark cupboard had once played host to a set of golf clubs, a hobby of the father, perhaps.
The next day Agent C took over. There are three golf clubs serving the town of Luton. From his hotel bedroom the Russian rang the first then hit gold with the second. His patter was perfectly inoffensive.
‘Look, I wonder if you can help me. I have just moved into the Luton area and I’m trying to make contact with an old mate who lives here. He sent me his card but, like an ass, I’ve lost it. But he did
tell me at the time that he had joined a terrific golf club. Would that be you? Fella called Harold Jennings.’
It was the assistant secretary on the line.
‘We do have a Harold Jennings on file, sir. Would that be him?’
‘Yes, that would be him. Would you have a number for him?’
It was a landline number and it was disconnected. Almost certainly the number of the abandoned house. Not that it mattered any more. Agent C drove out to the golf club.
He chose the lunch hour, asked to see the secretary and enquired after a membership.
‘I think you may be in luck, sir,’ said the affable official. ‘We are normally jammed full, but we recently lost a couple of members. One went to the great nineteenth hole in the sky and I believe the other has emigrated. Let me introduce you to the bar while I go and check.’
The bar was crowded and jolly, with members coming in off the eighteenth hole in twos and fours, leaving their kit in the changing room and ordering a stiffener before lunch. Agent C began to circulate. His patter was the same as on the phone.
‘I’ve just moved out here from London. Used to have a very good mate who was a member here. Harold Jennings. Is he still here?’
Toby Wilson was at the bar, and his large, veined nose indicated he was no stranger to it.
‘He was until a month ago. Are you joining? Good show. Yes, Harold’s gone and emigrated. Oh, don’t mind if I do. Gin and tonic. Many thanks.’
The barman knew his man. The fizzing glass was on the bar before its predecessor was empty. The secretary returned with forms to fill in. Agent C complied. They would never trace him anyway; the address he gave was completely phoney. Just a formality, explained the secretary. It would have to go before the committee, but he foresaw no problem for a chum of Harold Jennings, playing off ten. In the meantime, why not enjoy the bar as his guest? Then he was called away. Agent C returned to Toby Wilson.