The Fox

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.