At about the same time, *Harry Murdoch was appointed under Scarlett to be Head of the Russian operations and targeting elements of P5 at MI6. Murdoch was the type of bespectacled, donnish figure familiar from spy fiction. An Oxford graduate and Ph.D. to boot, his earlier career in MI6 had taken him to the Middle East. Consumed by work, and afflicted by the unpredictable life of a spy, Murdoch had not married.
In his late forties when he was placed in charge, Murdoch did not suffer fools and ‘upset a lot of people by demanding an altogether higher performance from them’, says one Vauxhall Cross insider. ‘He is an astonishing judge of character,’ observes another, ‘he could weigh up people’s strengths and weaknesses straight away, and was rarely wrong – I’m just glad he never wrote my annual report.’ Murdoch’s role was to deliver more penetrations over a broader range of targets, and as one observer remarks, ‘he is an excellent operational officer who operationalized everything’.
The old idea of a Soviet bloc ‘Master Race’ in MI6 was finally laid to rest. Instead Murdoch dispatched Bagnall and the others in his team of agent runners pitching their way across Europe, Russia, and wherever else in search of the people who could give profound insight into what was really going on.
In the early 1990s SIS tasking on Russia had been narrow in its scope, covering counter-intelligence targets to make sure there were no high-placed Russian moles in Britain, the hidden chemical and biological weapons programmes, and certain issues that worried Whitehall decision-makers relating to nuclear-warhead security as well as the security of the command system for these weapons. By the end of the decade the Russian target was being looked at very differently. So it was around this time that SIS began using partnerships with the nascent services of some former Soviet republics, notably the Baltic ones, to up its game.
It was all very well to think defensively, going for the SVR and GRU, but Murdoch wanted to know more about the FSB also, as it sought to reconstitute its power within Moscow. And with many of its Russian assets now reporting powerful connections between the FSB, organized crime, oligarchs, and politicians, the net would have to be cast wider. You only had to read the Russian press to see all manner of conspiracy theories about state organizations becoming criminal enterprises, but if this was true, what were the wider implications for UK foreign policy?
During this time, people were to approach many targets as they travelled in former Soviet republics or Eastern Europe. Some of the old Master Race war horses who had held on in the agent-running section for rather too long, living on past glories, were also moved on. At this time also, MI6’s P5 sections also stepped up operations designed to capitalize on the new freedoms enjoyed by Russians, allowing them to target and run people at a far lower cost. A consultancy could be set up in the UK or another Western country, and a visiting Russian businessman asked if he’d like to submit reports in return for cash. He could just fax them over, or, as the technology evolved, use email. In this way, British intelligence might tap into all sorts of expertise, whether it was someone working in defence exports or the oil business. The FSB’s suspicion of NGOs and Western businesses would, in this sense, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Events in Moscow, meanwhile, were moving by the summer of 1998 to an important moment, a turning point in the battle between reformist forces and post-communist orthodoxy.
In the early hours of 3 July 1998, masked men entered a dacha in Klokovo, south-west of Moscow. There they found retired general Lev Rokhlin and his wife Tamara, both of whom had been drinking. Rokhlin had been forced out of the chairmanship of the parliamentary defence committee some weeks before, but he and his movement to support the army remained a potent threat to President Yeltsin. The retired officer had talked of impeaching Yeltsin, but the president characterized him and his supporters as planning a coup.
So that warm summer’s night in 1998, the intruders shot the general in the head. More than ten thousand people attended his funeral in Moscow. In the days that followed, Rokhlin’s wife was framed for the crime and charged with murder. That was a neat twist, since in the years it took for the case against her to collapse people did not look elsewhere and other leads were not investigated.
Some time after the crime, Murdoch’s section at Vauxhall Cross received some revelatory intelligence about the murder. There were allegations flying about Moscow that a shadowy ex-KGB type in Yeltsin’s presidential administration, one Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, had arranged it. Three weeks after Rokhlin’s murder, Yeltsin appointed Putin as Director of the FSB. In the view of MI6’s source, a grateful president used this promotion to reward Putin for taking care of the Rokhlin business.
During its period with Putin at the helm (it was just over a year), the FSB became more assertive, the political murder rate increased, and Russia began lurching towards a new war in Chechnya. Four and a half months after Rokhlin’s murder, assassins claimed the life of another Duma member, Galina Staravoitova. At the other end of the political spectrum to the general and his movement, she was the liberal who’d tried to move legislation banning former KGB men from power.
Few politicians in Western countries followed Russian affairs in any great depth. Some, briefed by their intelligence agencies, understood that allegations of corruption swirled around Yeltsin and his family. But publicly most stuck to the line that democratic Russia had become a friend, and this was no time to threaten that amity.
In Vauxhall Cross concerns of this kind had strengthened Scarlett and Murdoch’s hand in pushing for more resources, and getting the CX reports produced by his section taken more seriously around Whitehall.
Even early in 1999 it had become apparent that change could be afoot in Moscow. Growing doubts were being expressed about Yeltsin’s health and fitness to run for reelection in 2000, and a power struggle to succeed him was beginning. Many fancied Yevgeni Primakov, another former KGB man, and after the 1991 coup, director of the newly created foreign espionage arm, the SVR.
In April 1999, a tape allegedly showing Russia’s chief prosecutor, Yuri Shkuratov, cavorting naked with prostitutes found its way onto Russian TV. It was a classic example of kompromat, blackmail material gathered (or as was claimed in this case, faked) by the old KGB to destroy someone or control them. It ruined not only Shkuratov but also the fortunes of his good friend and political ally Yevgeni Primakov, who withdrew from the presidential race.
How had this kompromat been created and found its way to the TV channel RTR? Remarkably, a journalist was told by someone working at the station, the tape had been hand-delivered ‘by a man who looked like the head of the FSB’. Whether or not it was him, Putin followed up his special delivery by publicly calling on Shkuratov to go.
Visiting the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in May 1999, the FSB boss was asked by journalists about rumours of coup plots. Was he planning one?
‘Why would we need to organize a coup d’état?’ Putin replied. ‘We are in power now. And who would we topple?’
‘Maybe the president?’ a reporter replied.
‘The president appointed us,’ came Putin’s answer. It looked to many like he was already in control. Just a few months later, in August, Yeltsin installed Putin as prime minister, putting him in a position to succeed him as president.
What followed later that summer produced anguish among Russian democrats and paved the way for Putin’s succession to the presidency. A series of bombings of Russian apartment blocks, claiming hundreds of lives, was blamed on Chechen separatists, triggering a large-scale military operation into the breakaway republic.