Colonel Oleg Tretyakov needed to get out of his office. It was stifling — too many people, too many telephones ringing. He needed to think.
He had relocated to Kaliningrad — the Russian exclave along the Baltic — twenty-four months ago in preparation for the invasion of neighboring Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Of course, no one in his government would dare refer to it as an invasion. They were taking back territory they saw as rightfully theirs. Publicly, they planned on calling it a “peacekeeping” mission aimed at protecting “ethnic” Russians. It was a dubious term at best, as most of Central Europe was, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, under Russian control and thereby still contained people of Russian lineage, or “ethnic” Russians.
The plan was simple and had worked for Russia before — foment dissent, encourage uprisings, and use their permanent position on the Security Council to defeat any vote for UN peacekeepers to be sent in.
Instead, Russia would magnanimously offer to send in Russian Special Forces soldiers who would provide “security” until referendums could be held and political solutions arrived at.
Of course the referendums would be bogus, would break in Russia’s favor, and the Russian government would use the “democratic” results to justify officially annexing the Baltic States.
To help create an environment of chaos, local intelligence assets — as well as “useful idiots”—were being paid, trained, and directed to create as much anarchy as possible. Their efforts were being amplified by legions of online trolls, armies of Internet bots, and hordes of fake news sites — all of which were run out of a secret facility in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency.
A GRU cyberespionage group called Fancy Bear rounded everything out. Fancy Bear hacked sensitive information and passed it on to the Internet Research Agency. The Internet Research Agency then used the information to create yet more fake news stories. Fellow travellers, also known as “fifth columns,” in the targeted countries acted like repeater stations, boosting anything and everything the Internet Research Agency and Fancy Bear put out.
This basket of espionage and propaganda tactics was called “special,” or “hybrid” warfare, and the Russians were masters of it. By the time NATO could realize what had happened, or could even respond, the Baltic States would already be lost. Tretyakov’s job, though, was to make sure that if NATO did respond, that response would be as weak and ineffective as possible.
This meant knowing as much as possible about NATO’s operations. To do that, he had developed a vast network of spies — both inside and outside of the organization.
The creation of the PRF anti-NATO terror organization had been his idea — and its cells hadn’t been limited to just NATO countries. Cells had been created not only in nations that were currently considering membership, but in ones that might be sympathetic to NATO and provide staging to NATO forces or other strategic military support.
Moscow considered it a clever plan. Diverting attention away from any Russian involvement by making the world believe the PRF was a genuine grassroots uprising across NATO was brilliant.
There had been no equivocation. Moscow had made it crystal clear that his mission was of critical importance. And that importance was driven home by the size of his budget. In his decades in military intelligence, he had never seen anything like it.
But with exceptional responsibility came exceptional accountability. News had broken about Norway. His superiors back at headquarters were not happy. They wanted a report. How was that PRF cell discovered? Did any of its members survive? Was there anything linking them to Russia? What did the Norwegian authorities know? What was the status of the other cells? What changes did he plan to make?
They were overthinking it — reacting, instead of acting. The truth was, he didn’t plan on changing anything. Not without a good, solid reason. The rest of the cells were still in place and ready.
He didn’t know how the Norwegian cell had been uncovered. He was just as confused and angry as his superiors were.
Putting that cell together had taken a tremendous amount of work. Getting them into positions where they could be hired to service equipment in those caves had taken even more work. It had been a good plan, a solid plan.
Something, though, had gone wrong. Someone had talked, or had slipped up somehow. And while the GRU had plenty of spies across Norway, the information was slow in coming in.
Only a small piece of intelligence had made its way to him so far. At the last minute, just before the raid on the cell had been conducted, two investigators from NATO had been added to the assault team.
His source didn’t have any more information than that, but he was working on it.
Tretyakov was not surprised. There had been three attacks on NATO personnel up to this point. Per his instructions, the People’s Revolutionary Front had taken credit for each one. He wanted NATO chasing the organization down, wasting its time and energy — racking up bad press at every possible turn. What he needed to be careful about, though, was NATO making too much progress too quickly.
In the case of Norway, he had many questions. How had the authorities uncovered the cell? Had they done it on their own? Did they have help? And if they did have help, where had that help come from? NATO? The Americans? Finally, was there anything in Norway that could lead to the other PRF cells that had not yet been deployed?
There were countless moving parts, but that’s where Tretyakov excelled. His brain was incredibly flexible and its gears moved smoothly in concert with each other. That was until now, which was why he needed to escape the cacophony of his office.
Exiting the building, he walked down the broad Leninskiy Prospekt toward the Pregolya River.
It was cold. The sky overhead steel-gray. Snow was predicted soon. He turned the collar of his leather jacket up against the chill.
As he moved down the sidewalk, his dark, narrow eyes swept from side to side, taking everything in. He had been in the intelligence game for decades and there were certain habits that you never lost — even on your home turf.
He kept his dark, receding hair cut short — not military short, but rather businessman short. When he traveled from country to country on a range of different passports, businessman was his preferred cover.
For a man of fifty-two, he was in decent shape. He ran and did calisthenics almost daily.
Like most Russians he was a drinker. But unlike so many of his countrymen, he didn’t drink to excess.
He rarely drank in public and almost never with his colleagues or subordinates — unless he was trying to get one of them drunk, so he could squeeze information out of them.
When he drank, it was solely to unwind, and he always knew when he’d had enough.
Alcoholism was rampant in the Russian military. It was such a problem that soldiers’ field rations even included small bottles of vodka.
He saw it within the GRU as well. Empty bottles could be found on windowsills and toilet tanks in every men’s room. No doubt many full or half-full bottles were hidden away in desk drawers throughout the building as well. It was a national sickness — the means by which the masses numbed themselves while the politicians and oligarchs avoided having to answer for the people’s shitty existence.
Russia was better than this. His countrymen had lost their pride. The USSR had been a global superpower. It had demanded respect on the world stage. It had launched the first earth-orbiting satellite, had put the first man into space, as well as the first modular space station. It had introduced the world’s first regional jet and had invented the first artificial heart. It had carried out the first heart transplant, the first lung transplant, and the first liver transplant. It had grown to be the world’s second-largest overall economy.