Stanley Johnson - Kompromat

Mark Cooper let it run on. The way he saw it, Barnard deserved to suffer, for being careless, if for nothing else. But he realized that it was time to call a halt. They’d all had their bit of fun. It wasn’t every day you had ministers, or former ministers, in the dock wondering where the next blow was coming from.

‘I’m going to get the technicians in here now. I’ve just heard they’ve finished their analysis of the video.’

He pressed a buzzer beneath the table and two young men, one bearded, the other clean-shaven, entered the room.

‘Gentlemen, don’t keep us waiting. Are these tapes fake or not? If they are fake, fabricated or whatever, can we prove it? If the man in question looks like Mr Barnard, talks like Mr Barnard and fucks like Mr Barnard, can we plausibly say this is not Mr Barnard? If we can’t say – and say convincingly – that it’s not Mr Barnard, then the tapes can show up anytime, anywhere with devastating effect.’

‘I’m sure that my wife could be of some help,’ Barnard interjected, in a still small voice. ‘When Melissa had calmed down, eventually, she told me that she realized all along it couldn’t be me. “Wow, Edward.” she said. “I’d love to think you could do all that, but I know you can’t!” ’

It was a feeble joke but it served to defuse the tension. On the crucial issue, the verdict of the young technicians was clear. The tapes were fake.

James the Beard explained: ‘The images of the two Russian ladies are genuine, no doubt about that. The image of Mr Barnard in the lift is genuine, though he is – it must be said – looking a bit worse for wear. The three of them appear to walk seamlessly into the room. But they don’t actually enter the room. Mr Barnard enters the room by himself.’

‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’

‘We got in touch with Moscow as soon as those tapes came in to us. Our people there know the Kempinski well, and it’s not the first time they’ve asked our contacts for some CCTV output from the hotel. On this particular occasion, we knew the day Barnard had been there, we knew the time, we knew the hotel floor, and the number of the room: the CCTV clips they sent over to us earlier today tell the whole story. Barnard gets out at the 8th floor, but the two Russian ladies go on up to the 12th floor, the penthouse suite.’

‘And?’ Mark Cooper pressed him. ‘What next?’

‘There is no next,’ the other young man chipped in. ‘Mr Barnard goes to bed alone and wakes up alone. There are no shenanigans of any kind.’

Edward Barnard felt so relieved he could have cried. Disaster had for a time loomed, but now help was at hand. ‘So who’s the chap in bed with the two Russian ladies, pretending to be me?’

‘He’s not pretending to be you, Edward, for heaven’s sake. He’s doing whatever he’s doing, then someone takes that image and makes out it’s you.’ Mark Cooper sounded irritated. Didn’t these politicians understand what they were dealing with? They used to say the camera didn’t lie. Balderdash. The camera lied all the time. You could scramble the pixels just like you could scramble eggs.

‘Well, who is he then anyway?’ Barnard persisted. ‘I know who was in the penthouse at the Kempinski that evening.’

Mark Cooper raised a warning hand.

‘I think we had better leave that question for the time being.’

The meeting went on for another hour. These were Britain’s top security officials. They couldn’t afford to leave stones unturned or avenues unexplored.

Eventually Mark Cooper summed things up. ‘We need to consider how the Chinese acquired that tape. If the tape was made by the Russians officially, as it were, say by the KGB/FSB, then why would they have passed it to the Chinese? Why would they help the Chinese discredit our friend, Edward Barnard, when Edward’s actions, namely to help the Leave campaign, appear to be in Russia’s interest? Isn’t it more probable that the Chinese spy network in Russia – and that is a very substantial network indeed – got hold of the tapes from some freelance source and then spliced it all together with a view to persuading Barnard here to jump ship of his own accord and ditch the Leave campaign? Which by any reckoning could be a fatal blow for that campaign and very good news for China. So they try a little gentle persuasion instead. Does that make sense? It does to me.’

Barnard had had enough. They could speculate as much as they liked. It wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever the Chinese thought they might be doing by making that tape, they had picked the wrong man.

If he had been sure, when he was talking to Minister Zhang in Xian that he was on the right path, he was doubly sure now. A line from Shakespeare came to mind. Macbeth, surely? ‘ Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going .’

Good old Shakespeare, he thought, as he picked up his notes, you could always rely on the Bard for a pertinent quote.

Mark Cooper walked out with him.

‘We’re taking another look at the Kempinski,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to track down those two Russian women. Whatever they put in your drink could have been very dangerous. Glad it wasn’t polonium, anyway.’ Cooper put out his hand. ‘By the way, I wanted to tell you we haven’t made much progress with that other file you brought back. The home secretary’s rather sitting on it. Some of the emails to and from Number 10 seem to be genuine, not fakes, as we supposed. We’ve got a bit more digging to do.’

‘Dig away,’ Barnard urged. ‘But please let me know when and if you turn something up.’

‘Your car’s waiting for you in the underground car park,’ Cooper said. ‘We can’t have you leaving through the front door. The opposition keeps very close tabs on the comings and goings here.’

‘And who’s the opposition in this particular case?’

‘Good question. We’re still trying to work that one out.’

Bud Hollingsworth leaned back in his upholstered chair in the director’s private viewing-room in CIA in Langley, Virginia, with the remote control unit in his hand.

‘All set?’ he inquired.

Wilbur Brown, director of the FBI, who had driven out to Langley earlier that afternoon for a meeting with his counterpart, nodded. ‘Good to go,’ he said.

Hollingsworth pressed the button on the remote.

‘I won’t tell you how we acquired the footage we are about to see. I’ll just say that the FSB is a bit more porous than its predecessor, the KGB, used to be.’

Wilbur Brown nodded. If Hollingsworth wanted to protect his sources, he had no problem with that. In spite of all the changes in the organization of US security in recent years, the broad lines of demarcation between the CIA and the FBI remained fairly clear. The CIA concentrated on gathering, analysing and reporting on intelligence from abroad; the FBI devoted itself to counter-intelligence, notably the threats arising on home turf. So how the CIA went about its job in, say, the Russian Far East was, as far as Wilbur Brown understood the ground rules, their job, not his.

The first couple of minutes of the film showed the Russian president Igor Popov’s helicopter landing in a cleared area in the forest. The next shots showed Popov in combat gear moving through the trees.

‘The Russians call this the “ taiga ” or boreal forest,’ Hollingsworth explained. ‘Mile upon mile of pine, spruce, larch and birch. You can see Ronald Craig walking fairly closely behind Popov. Behind Craig, there’s that Brit, I believe his name’s Barnard. Ed Barnard, or something like that.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard about Barnard,’ Wilbur Brown said. ‘Used to be environment minister in the UK government. Met up with both Popov and Craig at Popov’s World Tiger Summit. Then they all went off to the Russian Far East to try to see the Amur tigers in the wild. We’re not sure quite what Barnard’s relationship with the Russians is. Some kind of “useful idiot” I suspect. We’re looking into that. So is MI5, I hear.’