The Deceivers

by Alex Berenson

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to hit you.”

  A choked snort. “Don’t make me laugh, John. It hurts.” Shafer briefly fell silent. “Ask me what I was doing in Dallas.”

  “We have to do it this way?”

  No answer.

  “What were you doing in Dallas?”

  “Following a hunch about something weird the feebs turned up but couldn’t put together. I was right.”

  “Of course you were.”

  “Ahmed Shakir’s girlfriend said he was arrested a few months before he went Boom! FBI checked the arrest records, didn’t find anything. They decided she was wrong. But I interviewed her, and I’m telling you someone arrested him. And there’s a waitress at one of the bars where Shakir dealt coke who thought he got caught in some kinda sting, too. He went out one night, didn’t come back, she never saw him again. Her exact words to me were: Everybody gets tagged sooner or later.”

  Wells could almost feel the FBI badge in his hand. He and Coyle had solved half the puzzle. Shafer had given them the rest. The Russians hadn’t been working with the Islamic State. They’d figured out how to make their own terrorist attacks.

  Wells shivered like an arctic wind had snuck south and infiltrated his hotel room. At their best, if best was the word, the Russians played the intel game with an exquisite and precise cruelty, inducing paranoia in the innocent and guilty alike.

  The Kremlin liked poison as a murder weapon for just this reason. Opponents had a tough time staying focused when they had to worry that any meal might kill them. Exploiting weakness was another Kremlin specialty, and the FSB agents had found the perfect victim in Ahmed Shakir. They’d arrested him, then given him a fake route to freedom.

  Shafer mistook Wells’s silence for disbelief. “Trust me, John. Somebody has a file on this guy, we just need to shake it out. They pushed him too hard, he went nuts. Now they’re trying to hide it.”

  “No. They weren’t real cops, Ellis.”

  “This guy had been dealing a while, no way someone could have faked him.”

  “What if it was a team? With twenty million dollars?”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Let me call you from a sat phone.” Wells didn’t trust unencrypted lines for this call.

  For once, Shafer didn’t argue.

  “I feel like I got hit in the head again,” Shafer said when Wells was finished. “But it fits. They, quote, arrest, unquote, Shakir, tell him to lure his cousins into an attack . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “We tell no one, John. When we’re ready, we stovepipe it straight to Duto.”

  Wells understood. What they’d found was worse than a Kremlin–Islamic State conspiracy. The Russians were killing Americans. They’d put Duto in a terrible place. If Duto openly accused them, the public would want war. But if he kept the truth secret, the Russians might think they’d won.

  Then Shafer sighed. “We’re missing something. We’re already helping them in Syria. Maybe not as much as they want, but the risk on this is off the charts. There’s another endgame here, even if we can’t see it.”

  Shafer, always thinking ahead. He was right. The Russians wouldn’t risk war just for Assad.

  “You think this thing in Missouri is part of it?” Wells said.

  “If it is, it’s got to be a different con. The key with Shakir was that they blew him up before he could tell anyone what was really happening. They didn’t do that with the sniper. He’s still out there. Which means they think they can control him for as long as they need him.”

  More logic Wells couldn’t fight. “Reassuring.”

  “So when do you meet the banker?”

  “Still working on it.”

  “Hope it’s before next Sunday.”

  18

  MOSCOW

  Moscow lay five thousand miles away and eight time zones ahead of Missouri. The difference meant the reports of Luke Hurley’s shooting reached the Kremlin just after 9 p.m. local time, snow falling on the famous onion domes, the air a balmy four degrees below zero. By midnight, terrorism had taken center stage as a possible motive. Sergei Fedin, the president of the Russian Federation, called the White House.

  The President is in emergency meetings, the chief Oval Office scheduler told his Kremlin counterpart. He’ll try to call before he goes to bed. Midnight here, seven a.m. tomorrow in Moscow. Best he can do.

  Fedin wished he could call Duto’s mobile directly. But he didn’t have the number. The President had never given it to the Russians, presumably to avoid the risk of being hacked. Fedin wondered if Duto was sending him a similar message even before they spoke. I don’t trust you, even if all you’re doing is offering condolences.

  The Russian president wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to Duto so late in Duto’s night. The American had a temper. Then again, exhaustion might loosen his tongue. The Kremlin had heard rumors of Duto’s drinking, though no one had any real evidence other than the bourbon Duto famously offered visitors to the Oval Office. At public events, he was always composed, his suits pressed, ties perfectly knotted. If nothing else, the man could hold his booze, a trait that Fedin respected as much as the next Russian.

  The fact that Duto had spent so many years working for the CIA, the main enemy, didn’t bother Fedin either. At least Duto was no softheaded liberal. After his experience as the station chief in Colombia during the depths of the drug wars, Duto surely knew different countries needed different systems. The so-called virtues of democracy made for chaos in a place like Russia. Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Russians were still serfs in their dark, drunken hearts. They needed strong and capable men—and only men—to protect and lead them. So Fedin didn’t overreact to the squawking of Pussy Riot and Garry Kasparov and the rest, whether they were in Moscow or exile, whether they called themselves journalists or human rights activists.

  Just as long as they didn’t go after the money Fedin and his men had made. Millions, yes. Even billions. So? The average Ivan wanted his leaders to be rich. He gloried in their hundred-meter yachts and London mansions. Even if he never saw them, even if he was never allowed anywhere near them, even if he would have his face smashed in if he looked too long at them, their mere existence gladdened him.

  But the reporters and the other troublemakers didn’t understand. They bleated about theft and corruption. When they sniffed too closely after the money, they had to be put in their place. A year or two in jail wouldn’t do for those. Ten years. Or a beating, the kind that put the recipient in a coma. If those warnings didn’t do the trick, a few grams of lead, strategically inserted into the cerebellum.

  As far as Fedin could tell, Duto understood. He wasn’t afraid to live well, and he accepted the Kremlin could and would rule Russia however it liked.

  So in the months after Duto’s election, Fedin told the others at the Kremlin he hoped he and the American could build a respectful relationship. Even a beneficial relationship. Russia had plenty of men who would invest in Duto’s post-presidential ventures. Or simply pay him millions of dollars to speak at their corporate retreats.

  But Duto disappointed Fedin. Duto insisted on limiting Russia’s influence to its own borders—its ugly, shrunken, post-1991 borders. Like the other CIA men who’d come of age at the end of the Cold War, Duto mistakenly believed the West had won forever, that Russia would permanently be a third-class nation.

  Russia. The world’s largest country, even after territorial losses nearly as big as the United States and China combined. For a thousand years, Russia had saved Europe from the hordes of Asia. And in the twentieth century, Russia saved Europe from itself. More Russians died fighting the Germans for Stalingrad than Britain and the United States combined lost in all of World War II. The British forgot because they never remembered anything that didn’t benefit them. The Americans forgot because they never remember
ed anything, period.

  Thus, Duto refused to see the obvious truth. Russia’s decline in the 1980s had been temporary, the result of low oil prices and a broken political system. No, Russia would never match China or the United States economically. But it had vast natural resources. It had highly trained scientists. It had the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. And a resurgent army. It could hold its own. And it would. It would protect its citizens in Ukraine, no matter what threats NATO made. It would make sure that the bureaucrats in Brussels stopped worrying about expanding the European Union. It would dominate Central Asia.

  But Duto refused to accept the appropriate Russian sphere of influence. He armed the Ukrainian government. He supported the rebels fighting Syria, Russia’s steadiest ally in the Middle East. He tried to destabilize Iran. He set his CIA and NSA dogs on the Kremlin, distracting Fedin’s security forces from their work against the Moscow troublemakers.

  Worst of all, he showed no inclination to remove the sanctions and travel restrictions that the United States had imposed on Russia. Even during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union threatened to destroy each other, they’d respected each other’s leaders. Fedin and the men around him—and their wives and mistresses, too—were tired of having to beg for visas to visit Paris or St. Barts, much less buy houses in London or Los Angeles. They were tired of sneaking around like they were criminals instead of the richest men in the world. They were tired of worrying that the American Treasury Department might try to seize their money, or the Justice Department might seize them.

  The risk was real, as the men of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association had learned in 2015. Americans had quickly forgotten the FIFA arrests. Not Fedin. The prosecution was infuriating. The supposed corruption involved FIFA, a Swiss federation managing its own World Cup tournament. How exactly did the way the Uruguayan Football Association voted in a FIFA election fall under American law? No one in the United States even cared about fútbol. They called it soccer.

  The world’s policeman.

  The phrase sickened Fedin. Whatever his supposed CIA sophistication, Duto had shown himself as dim as his predecessors. No American politician had the courage to tell his people, Russia is our equal. Our partner. These crazy jihadis, they’re the real threat.

  Fedin and the men around him feared they would never find an American leader to make that case.

  Then Eric Birman appeared.

  Fedin heard about Eric’s approach to the SVR deputy chief in Washington a day after it happened. Of course, the Russians had other agents in the American government. But from the first, the Kremlin realized Eric was in a different class. The SVR had targeted him when he left the Joint Special Operations Command and been surprised he did not immediately dismiss the idea of speaking in Russia. But, ultimately, he turned down the offer, and the SVR decided not to touch him for a couple years. Give him time to simmer, grow tired of civilian life.

  Instead, out of nowhere, he touched them.

  The Kremlin quickly dismissed the possibility the CIA was offering Eric as a dangle. From the first, his intelligence was gold. The fact that his cousin Paul was a senator only added to his importance, especially after Paul became an early favorite to challenge Duto. Paul’s rise surprised Moscow. The Tennessee senator seemed absurd, a so-called man of the people who’d spent his life cashing checks.

  In Russia, Paul’s career would have been controlled. The Kremlin stage-managed elections now as thoroughly as it had in the Soviet era. No one wanted a repeat of the 1996 election when a Communist had almost beaten Yeltsin. But the United States wasn’t Russia. Somehow, Paul Birman had broken out. Russians might want to fear their leaders, but Americans seemed to want to like theirs. And Eric was Paul’s closest advisor. For the first time in its history, Russia might have an agent at the very center of American power.

  Still, Fedin knew Paul was a long shot to win the White House. The election was years away. Politicians came and went in the United States. Paul would have to survive a brutal primary and then beat Duto. The threat of terrorism played well with Paul’s base, but most Americans were more concerned with health care and the economy.

  Then the Kremlin’s top spy, Oleg Nemtsov, came to Fedin. Nemtsov headed the FSB, the internal Russian secret service. The SVR—the external Russian spy agency—was the equivalent of the CIA. The FSB was the Russian equivalent of the FBI. Theoretically, the FSB and SVR were equal partners, both descended from the KGB.

  In reality, the FSB was senior. The reason was simple. The men inside the Kremlin feared internal threats even more than they feared the United States. The FSB guaranteed Fedin could sleep without worrying that he’d wake with a pistol pressed to his neck. Further, Fedin and his top advisors all had come out of the FSB. The agency’s importance to the Russian government couldn’t be exaggerated. In many ways, it was the Russian government.

  Thus, the FSB did what it liked, including operating on what should have been the SVR’s turf outside of Russia. The FSB let the SVR handle the grind of conventional espionage and focused instead on what it called leverage campaigns. If Fedin decided to kill a mouthy dissident in London, or ruin an unfriendly French diplomat in Brussels, or give the Russian rebels in Ukraine a hundred surface-to-air missiles and the training to use them, the FSB did the job. Usually, the campaigns were meant to be deniable, sometimes completely secret.

  The plan Nemtsov proposed to Fedin fell in the latter category. If anyone else had suggested it, Fedin would have laughed him out of the room. Then arrested him.

  But Nemtsov wasn’t anyone else, and Fedin knew better than to laugh. They’d worked together for thirty years, starting in the KGB’s station in Prague in the 1980s. They’d watched Czechs fill Prague’s streets to protest their Communist rulers and the Russian overlords behind them. As the protests grew bolder, Fedin and Nemtsov waited for Mikhail Gorbachev to order the Red Army to break the demonstrations, as it had done in 1968. But Gorbachev knuckled under instead of killing a few protestors and restoring order. The Poles, the East Germans—they understood the lesson. All those Soviet tanks and soldiers didn’t mean anything because the men who commanded them wouldn’t use them.

  Within a few months, Russia lost Eastern Europe.

  That experience, and the miserable decade that followed, taught Fedin and Nemtsov the value of order. Order was the foundation of society, more important than freedom, even more important than law. When people couldn’t leave their homes for fear of being attacked, when businesses couldn’t open their doors for fear of being robbed, a society was hardly a society at all. Political order was just as important. Better to have one strong leader, even a cruel one, than gangs fighting for power in the streets.

  Fedin and Nemtsov hung tight, stayed out of politics, built a core group of a hundred or so officers inside the FSB. Good men. Rough and fearless. Russian patriots, not seduced by the West’s supposed superiority. They bided their time as the chaos spiraled and vodka destroyed Boris Yeltsin. Finally, at the end of the nineties, with Moscow near anarchy and the economy collapsing, the rich men came to them and begged for help, begged for the FSB to do what only it could do.

  Fedin was happy enough to oblige, on one condition. Make me president. An audacious demand, but the oligarchs didn’t have much choice. Anyway, Fedin knew they saw him as a figurehead, no different than Yeltsin. We have the money, the companies, the media, our own bodyguards and banks, let him pretend to rule.

  But Fedin knew they were wrong. He and Nemtsov had an iron alliance. Once Fedin led the FSB inside the Kremlin, it would never leave.

  He took over in 2000. Within two years, he’d consolidated control of the government, putting his own men in the judiciary, the Interior Ministry, the army. He broke the gangs and the terrorists, quelled the violence in the streets. For a while, he left the oligarchs alone. As long as they were making money, they wouldn’t notice what was happening in
side the Kremlin.

  Meanwhile, he made sure the voters knew he was more than the heir to Yeltsin and Yeltsin’s weakness. He went on raids with Special Forces units to kick down the doors of Chechen gangs. He rode horses on the steppe and fly-fished in the Urals, every catch he made televised. He greeted the cosmonauts when they returned from the International Space Station. He stood in front of a mock-up of a new aircraft carrier and promised it would join the Russian navy while he was president. The Moscow wags joked that he would need to be a hundred before Russia had the money. But then, the Moscow wags laughed at everything he did. They thought he was a cartoon. Super Sergei, they called him, in English. Fedin didn’t care. The people, his people, lapped up his every move. In the next election, in 2004, he won by a landslide, seventy percent of the vote. No need for vote fraud.

  Finally, the billionaires realized what had happened. But, by then, they were too late. Fedin no longer needed them. He went after them one by one. Breaking them was easier than he expected. Every one of them was a thief. Without exception. Russia had no clean fortunes, no great inventors creating world-changing businesses. The first generation of oligarchs had simply scooped up state-owned companies during the years when the state barely existed. Ever since, their companies had disrespected the Kremlin, failing to pay even a kopek in taxes.

  Fedin gave them a choice. Become partners with the state, with his state. Pay their share. And, more important, give him and his men a piece of their enterprises. Or lose everything. The oligarchs scoffed. They thought they were above the law. Yet they thought the law would protect them, that their Moscow attorneys would bury the courts in paper. They thought Fedin wouldn’t want to scare away Western investors by coming after them too hard. They were wrong in every way. Fedin used the judges they no longer owned to take their networks and banks and oilfields. If they argued too much, he sent them to prison or forced them into exile.