Stanley Johnson - Kompromat

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Hartkopf replied. ‘He may not go for it now, but I don’t think he’ll wait for ever. And he has that Bavarian power base. That always counts for a lot in German politics.’

‘If Mrs Brun goes, Friedrich is the chancellor’s natural successor, isn’t he?’

‘A strong candidate, at least,’ Hartkopf acknowledged.

They had ordered a selection of pastries to follow the main course. Yasonov passed the plate across. ‘Here’s something which might help Dr Friedrich on his way.’

Hartkopf was careful to palm the flash-drive before helping himself to a thick slice of Black Forest cake.

Later that night, sitting in his study at home, Dr Otto Friedrich examined the dossier in detail. He was staggered. There it all was in black and white. The fact that her name hadn’t shown up in the Stasi files the government acquired after the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t necessarily mean that Helga Brun wasn’t implicated. It could just mean she was already in a position to suppress the evidence. But the one file she had not been able to suppress was the one Popov had managed to take back to Moscow when the mission of the KGB’s Dresden office was disbanded.

So what had ‘Mina’ done for the Russians?

‘ Mein Gott! ’ he exclaimed. He had always wondered about the way Helga Brun had come to power, how she had out manoeuvred Hans Bloch, when Bloch was chairman of the CDU. Deed done, Helga Brun herself became party chairman and subsequently chancellor. The whole game plan was laid out in the documents. An extremely rude word escaped his lips almost involuntarily. It was obvious what had happened. Helga Brun may have been following instructions from Moscow for years!

There was one document he still had to study, and this one was Russian. It was labelled ‘Bundestag: Chancellor’s speech’.

‘Good God!’ Dr Friedrich exclaimed again when he opened the file. There it all was in black and white. The full text of the chancellor’s speech which he himself had seen in draft. A diagonal bar across each page said SECRET. How had Popov’s people got hold of that? Only a handful of Cabinet members in Germany had seen it in advance.

He had been furious that morning when the chancellor gave that pledge on the asylum seekers, cursing her for ad-libbing.

‘We can do it! And I promise we will do what we can!’ appeared in bold red type in the document he had up on the screen.

Dr Friedrich picked up the phone. He’d have to report this.

He paused. Who was he going to report it to? To the chancellor? Not likely, given the circumstances. To the minister in charge of security? Well, he was the minister in charge of security. He could hardly report to himself. Who else then?

Another thought occurred to him. People would ask how he came to be in possession of this explosive information. Was he going to admit that a senior Russian official passed a data-stick to his own state secretary concealed in a slice of Black Forest cake?

There were legal issues too. In the Federal Republic even ministers of the Interior needed court orders. At least they were supposed to have them. He could just hear the federal prosecutor asking with a sneer, ‘And have you been spying on the chancellor, Dr Friedrich?’

He replaced the phone. Better to wait.

Judging by the latest news bulletins, Helga Brun’s newly announced policy of a Germany ‘open-to-all-comers’ was already receiving a huge thumbs-down from the electorate.

Her star, as Dr Friedrich saw it, was beginning to fade and the effects of today’s speech might sink her altogether.

His own political star, on the contrary, was already rising fast.

When the moment came he would be ready. And he would have the top-secret ‘Mina’ dossier if he needed extra ammunition to fatally wound the political career of the chancellor.

Fyodor Stephanov, senior agent at the FSB office in St Petersburg, was still feeling sore from the beating Lyudmila Markova and her team from FSB Moscow had given him. Frankly, he thought they had overdone it. Everyone freelanced a bit nowadays. Given the wages the FSB paid, that wasn’t surprising. He hadn’t realized that just about everybody had been chasing that Golden Shower video. Still, it was off his hands now. Moscow could do what they liked with it. And they no doubt would.

Lyudmila Markova had given him stern warning. ‘Don’t do it again,’ she advised, twisting his neck with a vice-like grip. ‘Otherwise you’ll be in real trouble.’

He took her seriously. She was one tough lady. But he needed to supplement his income.

One evening a week, after his FSB shift had ended, he worked for an outfit known as the Internet Research Agency at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg.

Number 55 Savushkina was a newly built, four-storey office block, which housed upwards of 400 internet trolls. The trolls worked in rooms of about twenty people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.

The trolls took shifts writing mainly in blogs along assigned propaganda lines for LiveJournal and Vkontakte, outlets that had literally hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. Artists too were employed to draw political cartoons. Employees worked for twelve hours every other day. A blogger’s quota was ten posts per shift, and each post had to have at least 750 characters.

Bloggers employed at the Savushkina Street office earned approximately 40,000 Russian roubles a week. As far as Fyodor Stephanov was concerned it, it was money for jam. The time would come, he thought, when he might pack in his job at the FSB entirely and become a full-time troll.

In the short time he at been working at 55 Savushkina Street, Stephanov had discovered he had a remarkable aptitude for the task.

He had already begun his evening shift when a new PRIORITY TASK dropped into his inbox.

‘Another one about Ukraine.’ He sighed as he opened the message. ‘Was there anything new to say about Ukraine?’

But when he read the instructions, he saw that the new task wasn’t about Ukraine at all. It was about the German chancellor’s speech and the alleged ‘flood of refugees’ about to invade Europe.

‘Use your imagination!’ the instruction said. ‘Find video footage of refugees climbing barriers to break through border posts; migrants raping defenceless women, setting fire to buildings, and generally running amok.’

The technical support team at 55, Savushkina Street was first rate. You wrote the words; they found the pictures, cutting, splicing and pasting with precision. Take the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, for example. Easy to tie that one to migrants and asylum seekers. Or that lorry in Nice, literally mowing people down on the Promenade des Anglais . Who was responsible for that? Terrorists entering France disguised as immigrants! Cue-in shots of dark-bearded men hurling obscenities at the camera.

That particular evening it seemed the trolls at 55, Savushkina Street were instructed to churn out not just blogs with photos attached, but whole video clips.

Stephanov was given the task of reviewing one such film in its final stages before transmission. The basic commentary was in English since the clip would go out worldwide on RT and other media.

He put his earphones on and listened to the Russian translation:

‘Speaking in Berlin, Chancellor Helga Brun defied critics of her refugee policies by insisting there would be no change to her open-door migration stance.

‘Commentators say that Germany has been rattled by an axe attack on a train in Würzburg, a mass shooting in Munich, a machete attack in Reutlingen and a suicide bomb in Ansbach – all within a week. The attacks left thirteen dead. Three of the attacks were carried out by asylum seekers and one by a German-Iranian who harboured a hatred of Arabs and Turks.