Kompromat

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Joshan Gupta, Head of MI5’s technical support services, reckoned that he had spent at least one hundred hours on that bloody film.

At first he had assumed that the images of the man on the bed in St Petersburg’s Kempinski Hotel, whoever he was, had been simply pixelated and that with persistence it might be possible to de-pixelate them. He had worked evenings and weekends, but still he had made no progress. He finally realized that the images were not only heavily pixelated; they were encrypted as well. If you couldn’t crack the code, you couldn’t see the images.

Of course, MI5 had its own military-grade versions of most of the photo-encryption and decryption programmes available on the internet. But you were always playing catch-up. Nowadays the most innocuous messages could be sent in code. More than one billion people in 180 countries used end-to-end encryption for everyday communications. Only you and the person you were communicating with knew the content of the message.

In the end, Gupta was forced to report to his superiors in MI5 that he had drawn a blank as far as establishing the identity of the mystery man was concerned.

There the matter rested until one evening, out of the blue, a pop-up message appeared on his screen:

He almost missed it. Golden Shower!

Gupta picked up the phone to talk to his supervisor. ‘Mohammed,’ he said, ‘I think we’ve got a breakthrough. We’re going to need the Director to come down here pretty quickly.’

Mohammed Abbas, the ranking officer in Gupta’s section, went to fetch the MI5 director and escorted her to Joshan Gupta’s desk.

Dame Jane Porter was not herself a technical expert, but she was a quick study and ready to grapple with the jargon of cyber warfare, even if she didn’t fully understand it.

‘This could be a trap, couldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘If you click on this “Golden Shower” link, couldn’t you be compromising the integrity of our whole system? Opening the link might allow them to launch a Trojan Horse, a worm or a virus, or some other malware, which could literally close us down.’

Mohammed Abbas wasn’t so sure. ‘I don’t think that’s what they’re after. I think they’re trying to tell us something.’

Dame Jane Porter looked around the room. It wasn’t often that she came down into the bowels of the ship. A hundred people or more were working at their computers. This was where the war on terror was waged. Day after day, hour after hour. There was so much at stake.

‘Let’s go for it,’ she said. ‘If the whole thing goes up the spout, it’s my head which will roll. Are you okay with that?’

Of course, they were okay with it. They only hoped she’d put it in writing.

Gupta clicked on the link. Seconds later the video began to play. They had all seen it before, of course, but still it didn’t make for pleasant viewing. Dame Jane Porter shuddered involuntarily when it came to the ‘Golden Shower’ scene. What kind of man enjoyed that?

At first, even in the depixelated version, it wasn’t easy to distinguish the facial features. The man’s hair, a great orange-blond mop, got in the way. But then, suddenly, as the girls moved off the bed and the man came up for air, they had a clear view of his face, looking straight at the camera. He had a nasty scar on his right cheekbone.

Later that day, Dame Jane chaired an inter-departmental meeting. Roger Wales, head of MI6’s Russian desk, and Jill Hepworth, one of 6’s technical experts, came over the river from Vauxhall Cross to 5’s headquarters in Millbank.

‘So who is this man on the bed, if it’s not Ronald Craig?’ Jane Porter asked.

‘We’re pretty sure we know the answer.’ Roger Wales sounded smug. He had good reason to be. MI6 had spent years, and a good deal of taxpayers’ money, refining their facial recognition system.

‘As we all know,’ Wales continued, ‘facial recognition systems are still far from perfect. Ideally, we look for 3D methods. These can achieve significantly higher accuracy than their 2D counterparts. In fact, I would say that 3D methods of facial recognition now rival fingerprint recognition. Unfortunately the video we have just seen can’t be analysed in 3D, but the good news is that the facial images we have are clear and usable. We have run them through the database and we have double-checked with our people in Moscow.’

He paused and looked round the room, making the most of the moment. ‘We believe with 99.3 % certainty,’ Wales continued, ‘that the man on the bed goes by the name of Fyodor Stephanov, an FSB operative based in the St Petersburg office. We believe that the Golden Shower scenario was a freelance operation organized by Stephanov, and possibly some other colleagues in St Petersburg, to generate commercially valuable Kompromat material. We further believe that the video we have just seen, with Stephanov as the male lead, was both pixelated and encrypted to disguise Stephanov’s identity and then spliced into the genuine footage of Edward Barnard meeting the two Russian ladies in the lift in the Kempinski. The consolidated film was then sold or otherwise made available via the black market to agents of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The MSS, as we know, then tried to blackmail Edward Barnard.

‘For the purposes of the film Stephanov used some obvious props. The US-flag boxer shorts, as we have seen, feature prominently in the film. And the depixelated version of the film shows Stephanov wearing a wig resembling the flamboyant hairstyle of Mr Ronald Craig.

‘Even if this started out as a freelance scam in the FSB St Petersburg office, it is clear that Moscow somehow got wind of it. Our people confirm that the FSB office in St Petersburg was raided the other day by an all-female SWAT team from Moscow. Lyudmila Markova, the team leader, was positively identified by one of our agents just as she left the FSB offices on Cherniavski Street followed by four other women, all bearing boxes or cartons of office computers, files and other material.

‘We therefore believe,’ Roger Wales concluded, ‘that Moscow found what it was looking for, namely the original undoctored, depixelated footage of the Golden Shower film.’

Wales turned to the man sitting next to him at the table. ‘I’d like to pay tribute, if I may, to our colleague, Joshua Gupta. You will all recall the scepticism Joshua expressed when we first met in this very room to review the film. He argued that just because there was a pair of US-Flag boxer shorts on the bed with “PUT AMERICA FIRST” inscribed on the waistband, we shouldn’t necessarily conclude that the man involved in that Golden Shower scene was Ronald C. Craig. He was right.’

Joshua Gupta accepted the tribute gracefully. ‘Those boxer shorts will turn up one day. I expect they’ll find a big fluffy hairpiece too!’

They all laughed, grateful for some light relief.