Kompromat

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Fyodor Stephanov, senior agent at the FSB office in St Petersburg, was still feeling sore from the beating Lyudmila Markova and her team from FSB Moscow had given him. Frankly, he thought they had overdone it. Everyone freelanced a bit nowadays. Given the wages the FSB paid, that wasn’t surprising. He hadn’t realized that just about everybody had been chasing that Golden Shower video. Still, it was off his hands now. Moscow could do what they liked with it. And they no doubt would.

Lyudmila Markova had given him stern warning. ‘Don’t do it again,’ she advised, twisting his neck with a vice-like grip. ‘Otherwise you’ll be in real trouble.’

He took her seriously. She was one tough lady. But he needed to supplement his income.

One evening a week, after his FSB shift had ended, he worked for an outfit known as the Internet Research Agency at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg.

Number 55 Savushkina was a newly built, four-storey office block, which housed upwards of 400 internet trolls. The trolls worked in rooms of about twenty people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.

The trolls took shifts writing mainly in blogs along assigned propaganda lines for LiveJournal and Vkontakte, outlets that had literally hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. Artists too were employed to draw political cartoons. Employees worked for twelve hours every other day. A blogger’s quota was ten posts per shift, and each post had to have at least 750 characters.

Bloggers employed at the Savushkina Street office earned approximately 40,000 Russian roubles a week. As far as Fyodor Stephanov was concerned it, it was money for jam. The time would come, he thought, when he might pack in his job at the FSB entirely and become a full-time troll.

In the short time he at been working at 55 Savushkina Street, Stephanov had discovered he had a remarkable aptitude for the task.

He had already begun his evening shift when a new PRIORITY TASK dropped into his inbox.

‘Another one about Ukraine.’ He sighed as he opened the message. ‘Was there anything new to say about Ukraine?’

But when he read the instructions, he saw that the new task wasn’t about Ukraine at all. It was about the German chancellor’s speech and the alleged ‘flood of refugees’ about to invade Europe.

‘Use your imagination!’ the instruction said. ‘Find video footage of refugees climbing barriers to break through border posts; migrants raping defenceless women, setting fire to buildings, and generally running amok.’

The technical support team at 55, Savushkina Street was first rate. You wrote the words; they found the pictures, cutting, splicing and pasting with precision. Take the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, for example. Easy to tie that one to migrants and asylum seekers. Or that lorry in Nice, literally mowing people down on the Promenade des Anglais. Who was responsible for that? Terrorists entering France disguised as immigrants! Cue-in shots of dark-bearded men hurling obscenities at the camera.

That particular evening it seemed the trolls at 55, Savushkina Street were instructed to churn out not just blogs with photos attached, but whole video clips.

Stephanov was given the task of reviewing one such film in its final stages before transmission. The basic commentary was in English since the clip would go out worldwide on RT and other media.

He put his earphones on and listened to the Russian translation:

When the video had finished, Stephanov removed his earphones. He wasn’t a specialist but he doubted whether that clip could have been knocked out in the brief hours that had elapsed since the chancellor delivered her speech to the Bundestag.

That meant that someone somewhere had had advance notice of what Helga Brun was going to say.

Interesting, thought Stephanov. Very interesting.

At the end of May, with less than a month to go before the Referendum vote, the Leave campaign’s policy board gathered for a crucial strategy session at Leave’s headquarters in Westminster Towers, a new and prestigious Thames-side office block situated immediately opposite the Houses of Parliament.

Edward Barnard, as Leave chairman, opened the meeting:

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve been out of the country quite a lot recently but Harriet Marshall, our campaign director, has had her finger on the pulse, and so I am going to ask her to bring us up to date with developments.’

Harriet didn’t waste time.

‘We’ve got a lot to thank the German chancellor for,’ she began. ‘All the data we have indicates that, since her speech, the immigration issue has risen right to the top of the pile.’

She glanced at her notes: ‘Our polling data shows the Leave campaign has been gaining momentum in recent days, rising from being eight points behind in mid–late April to a dead heat on fifty per cent apiece in the current poll of polls.

‘According to a Sky News poll, of the twenty-nine per cent of Brits who are still undecided on the issue, twenty-eight per cent are most concerned about the impact the EU has on immigration levels, whereas just fifteen per cent cite the economy as their biggest concern.

‘The Office of National Statistics has admitted that it has underestimated European migration by 1.5 million people. Based on Sky’s results, the events of this week could see Leave actually pull ahead for the first time.

‘You don’t need me to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,’ Harriet continued, ‘that these results are good news for us. Leave campaigners have been focussing on making the public aware of the leading role the European Union has played in driving immigration to Britain into the hundreds of thousands a year, while hampering the British government’s ability to reverse that trend.’

Harriet paused to wait for the round of applause to subside. Then she went on, ‘Meanwhile the Remain campaign has been plugging on with Project Fear and its usual scare tactics, warning all and sundry of economic doom should the British people dare to opt to leave the European Union at the Referendum on the 23rd June. I must say I was a bit shocked to hear Alan Sigsworth, governor of the Bank of England, start talking about recession, inflation, and a “sharp” crash in the value of sterling, lower wages and rising house prices in the event of Brexit”. You would have thought Armageddon was round the corner. And the Bank of England is meant to be independent. Tom Milbourne himself might have written the script!’

Looking around the table, Harriet couldn’t help thinking that the team was shaping up well. She didn’t on the whole have much respect for politicians but this bunch seemed ready to put their shoulders to the wheel.

Take Ed Barnard, for example. Some people might regard Barnard as a kind of ‘useful idiot’. And yes it was true he was ‘useful’, but he was by no means an idiot. Take the way he had built up the relationships with the Craigs. It was Ronald Craig, after all, who invited Barnard to join his daughter, Rosie, on that vital trip to Australia to woo Mickey Selkirk.

Or take Harry Stokes, the ebullient, blond-haired former Mayor of London. Harry was absolutely living up to the high expectations people had of him, wowing the crowds wherever he went. He could be serious too if it was absolutely necessary.

Or take Jack Kellaway, the former minister for Social Affairs, who was playing a key role. If Barnard had led the way in resigning from the Cabinet, Kellaway had followed suit soon after.

Another one to watch was David Cole, the former journalist, and friend of Jeremy Hartley, who had somehow managed to keep his position as a member of the Cabinet even though he had joined the Leave campaign. You never quite knew what Cole was thinking behind those huge owl-like spectacles!

And then there was that dark horse, Andromeda Ledbury. She had turned in a couple of very competent television appearances recently and seemed game for any and all future challenges. She was a woman, too, which helped. Harriet didn’t on the whole believe in gender balance and that kind of thing but you couldn’t ignore it altogether. Not nowadays.

Yes, it was a decent team, Harriet thought. They had begun talking about an ‘alternative government’ and, frankly, it wasn’t such a ludicrous idea.

She decided to wrap up. There was work to do. ‘Let’s be clear about this,’ she said. ‘We may be winning the battle of the airwaves. We may have important parts of the print media on our side. But we are not there yet.’

After coffee, and they got down to the nitty gritty. The spread-sheets came out. Speeches and broadcasts were planned. The itinerary of the Leave Battle Bus was carefully plotted to ensure that, though it would criss-cross the country between now and June 23rd, it would be back in London in time, it was hoped, for a Victory Drive down Whitehall on the morning of June 24th.

Before they left, Harriet Marshall had one last word of caution for them.

‘We’re on the right track,’ she said. ‘But there’s still one thing which could scupper us. What if the EU, at the last minute, agrees after all to the prime minister’s demands in this so-called renegotiation? What if they see which way the wind is blowing and suddenly come up with a vastly improved offer?’

‘What kind of an offer might that be?’ Barnard asked. ‘The EU so far has offered the PM nothing. Nada. Niente. Zilch!’

‘Don’t be too sure,’ Marshall replied. ‘Rabbits and hats come to mind.’