‘Money,’ replied Sami. ‘For a pot of gold, people will sell their soul.’ He was paraphrasing Michael Jackson again, about the impulse to lie for money, even to kill for it.
On the Neva, two pink granite Egyptian sphinxes – originally from ancient Luxor – stand on the embankment in front of the Academy of Arts. A few hundred yards upstream, a stone’s throw from the Big House, crouch two other, modern sphinxes. On one side the bronzes appear to be the most beautiful creatures: feminine, pensive, full-breasted. Yet on the other side their faces are hollow-eyed skulls. The artist Mikhail Shemyakin created them to pay tribute to the victims of political repression, siting the monument at the spot where the drains from the KGB basement had poured blood into the river.
Chekhov once foresaw that in his homeland ‘a type of toad and crocodile will come to power more frightful than anything that ever came out of Spain’s Inquisition – a narrow-minded, self-righteous, overbearingly ambitious type, totally lacking in conscience. Charlatans and wolves in sheep’s clothing will be able to lie and dissemble to their heart’s content.’
Sami and I stood in silence by the river, beside the haunted sphinxes, with the smell of autumn in the air.
13
Cold War 2.0
On Monday morning I made some calls. A friend of a friend at the Home Office told me that London had a proud history of offering asylum to those in need. ‘The key is that the need has to be real,’ he said.
I reminded him that northern Nigeria suffers from insurgency and kidnapping as well as both drought and floods, devastating the lives of thousands of internally displaced people.
‘But you say he’s in Russia.’
I explained that Sami was trapped.
‘The integrity of the UK’s asylum system is based on fair, objective and informed assessment of conditions in the country of origin,’ he replied as if reading from a screen. ‘In any case, he has to get here first.’
Sami needed a visa to enter the UK but none would be forthcoming. He could not apply for refugee status from outside the country. No airline would let him board a flight without a visa. It was a catch-22 situation; only by entering the country illegally could he apply for legal residence. I left voicemails, sent emails and heard nothing in return. I didn’t cast the net wider as I realised there was no legitimate way for me to help Sami.
Once again I recognised that the freedom to travel was a privilege, a First World privilege, which may be why I hit on the idea of cruise ships. Travel writers are often gifted holidays or hotel stays in exchange for a newspaper article awash with azure seas and purple prose. I know a travel editor who has a passion for cruises, and more than once he has tried to sign me up for a complimentary trip. A quick web search revealed that both Cunard and P&O ships were due to call at St Petersburg in the next few days. So I dropped the editor a line, asking if I could join the cruise… with a friend. In my desire to help, I imagined Sami and I meeting the ship’s passengers during their Hermitage Museum tour. We’d slip on to the company coach and back on board without port police or immigration checks. Sami could become the first refugee to reach Southampton in a first-class cabin.
In our hotel room Sami watched me as I waited for the reply. He must have realised that optimism had got the better of me. ‘You are a good man,’ he said, then went out to find a solution for himself.
In the afternoon I had a meeting that couldn’t be missed. It had taken months to arrange, negotiated in secret through another Russian exile. Since the fall of the Wall, Moscow had worked to develop a new weapon. Now it was among the most powerful in its arsenal and I was to meet one of its operators, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who lived alone with two cats near to the botanical gardens.
In 1989, at the end of the Cold War, Russia wasn’t connected to the internet. In 1991 Relcom, the country’s first commercial internet service provider, had been ordered by the KGB to print paper copies of every email carried over its network. But the early naivety was swept aside as Kremlin tacticians fathomed the huge strategic potential of the World Wide Web.
In 2007 Moscow began to flex its cyber muscles by attacking Putin’s least favourite Baltic state, crashing Estonia’s national computer network. A few months later its hackers broke into Georgian government websites to manipulate public opinion during the Russian-Georgian war. In 2014 similar attacks were launched before the seizure of Crimea. Next, in 2015, Russian hackers shut down Ukraine’s power grid and France’s TV5Monde. In the same year an assault on the Bundestag – so stealthy that it went undetected for six months – succeeded in ‘comprehensive strategic data gathering’ according to the German intelligence agency. Another foreign cyber attack – similar to the first Estonian DDoS (distributed denial of service) offensive – is believed to have caused the collapse of the British government’s voter registration website in the run-up to the 2016 EU Brexit referendum, thereby disenfranchising tens of thousands of people. In the same year seasoned operatives from the GRU – the armed forces’ military intelligence agency – hacked the US presidential election, penetrating both Democratic and Republican Party computer networks, weaponising data and pinpointing infrastructure vulnerabilities ‘for use at a later date’, reported the Senate Intelligence Committee. Russia also secreted malware into the Twitter accounts of more than 10,000 Pentagon employees. One click – to an intriguing sports story or kitten lover’s website – allowed the hackers to take control of the victim’s account, as well as his or her mobile phone and computer. ‘Cyber weapons can affect a huge amount of people as can nuclear weapons,’ General Vladimir Sherstyuk, a member of Russia’s National Security Council, told the MIT Technology Review. ‘But there is one big difference between them. Cyber weapons are very cheap. Almost free of charge.’
As I waited at the botanical gardens (by the giant water-lilies pool, as arranged), I thought of how the KGB’s ‘Active Measures Department’ has continued to subvert free thought. Its disinformation is calculated to undermine trust and shift the balance of power. Its tactics haven’t much changed since Lenin and Stalin first manipulated truth at home and abroad, aiming to control people’s minds by limiting the scope of their thinking.
After an hour I realised that my ‘operator’ wouldn’t show and went in search of the St Petersburg troll factory. A red-and-white tram dropped me off on leafy Savushkina Street and I walked under the trees towards the unremarkable four-storey Olgino office building.
‘Internet operators wanted! Job at chic office in Olgino!!!’ the job adverts had exclaimed. ‘Task: posting comments at profile sites in the internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. Payments every week and free meals!!!’
For the last decade the so-called Internet Research Agency – a particularly mendacious division of Russia’s virtual arsenal – has waged war by hacking emotions. Its employees each work six Facebook or ten Twitter accounts: linking pornography to Russian opposition politicians on VKontakte, slamming democrats on Breitbart, dissing writers who criticised the Kremlin on Amazon, championing Brexit on Daily Mail Online. Bots, short for robots, then forward their ‘personal’ comments to countless fake accounts, making them trend by manipulating Google’s algorithms. Migrants rape thirteen-year-old Russian girl in Berlin! EU to ban baptism! The Queen warns of World War Three! Florida school shooter shouts Arabic phrases before killing spree! Stop the Islamisation of Texas!