I went up and paid.
‘One more favour. This woman, Vanessa McDonald,’ I pointed at the name. ‘Presumably you took a photocopy of the ID.’
They found it. The passport matched the name she’d given. In the passport photo she had shoulder-length brown hair. I wrote down the passport number.
‘This mark beside it – the star. None of the others are marked.’
‘She didn’t pay.’
‘Why not?’
‘She just got up and left.’
‘Do you have CCTV footage?’
‘No. The cameras don’t work.’
‘Did the woman seem scared when she was here? In a hurry?’
‘In a hurry.’
‘She was hurt,’ the other one said. He gripped his arm. ‘Maybe injured.’
FOURTEEN
I bought a fresh MacBook from an electronics store in the Keruen mall, unboxed it two floors down in Big Ben Coffee, beneath a painting of the London skyline and the dictum Love Coffee, Love People. I got on the wi-fi, downloaded a Virtual Private Network to mask my identity and ran a search for Vanessa McDonald.
Plenty on open source, but it was the sixth hit that caught my eye: a Telegraph piece eight months ago on blacklisted journalists trying to report from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
The dangers journalists face in Russia have been well known since the early 1990s but concern over a number of unsolved killings has soared in recent months. Now Western writers are reporting threats and obstruction. Those refused entry to CSC countries this year include Martin Yates, Rachel Hodgkinson and Vanessa McDonald.
I searched ‘Vanessa McDonald journalist’. Top hit, curiously, was a right-wing Russian discussion board devoted to media figures deemed unpatriotic. One member had uploaded a crowd photo from the Remembrance Day of Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty, observed in Moscow every December, if not unanimously. Joanna’s face had been circled.
Anyone know this bitch? She caused trouble in Warsaw. Looking for address, phone number.
The individual who posted it gave a name that translated as Russian Truth. A ‘patriot’. It was only their second post. Russian Truth suggested Vanessa McDonald worked for an organisation called Reporters for Human Rights.
This all struck me as the kind of information you put out there if you’re trying to build a cover identity: name and photo ID and backstory. Enough to make Vanessa McDonald real if someone was trying to establish her credentials.
The Telegraph journalist who’d included her name in the article wasn’t one I knew as being a ‘friend of the department’, in Six’s terminology, but the Telegraph was cosy with the intelligence services. It could have been slipped in at any level, including source.
So someone had put work into establishing her cover. If she was playing a campaigning journalist that was good reason not to be too visible. But people would run searches. Hits like this would be convincing. The organisation she supposedly worked for, Reporters for Human Rights, had a website on which it described itself as a ground-breaking organisation using documents and video footage obtained both openly and covertly to tell the stories of people suffering at the hands of oppressive regimes. Our writers and film-makers tap into a network of human rights organisations and workers in the countries concerned, some of them at enormous personal risk, to expose corporate abuse, modern slavery and political violence. No names came up on the site, for obvious reasons, just an email address and a guide to PGP encryption for those who wanted to get in touch with a sensitive story. It got good dirt, some military documents, governmental papers: Standing Rock, Occupied Territories, water disputes on the border of Uzbekistan.
I clicked tabs of the regions where they worked: Belarus, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan. Under Kazakhstan there were images of prisons and oil pipelines, a quote from a UN report on ongoing detentions, a detailed report on the arrests of individuals associated with a charity called Testimony. That was the most recent story.
Testimony were less cagey. Established 1993, their website listed offices in both the old capital and Astana, which was unusual – most of civil society had stayed in the more attractive, bohemian Almaty. That had been part of the thinking behind Astana, perhaps: no one wants do-gooders complicating utopia. Testimony investigated disappearances, unlawful imprisonment and the use of torture. I checked their address.
The office was inside a crumbling building on the unfashionable right bank. It looked like someone had recently put a battering ram through the door. The wooden sheet that had been hammered over as temporary protection prised open easily enough.
Inside it was dark. The few windows were small and dirty. I left the lights off. The linoleum of the hallway floor was blackened where a fire had been started. Water damage had done the rest.
To the left was Testimony’s small office. It had been trashed. Posters, leaflets, ledgers, old filing cabinets opened, one beige PC askew on a desk heaving with paper. There was a sulphurous stink of wet paper and ashes. All the drawers had been opened and rifled, so I took a seat and sifted handfuls of paperwork: it came from lawyers, doctors and journalists, documenting activists who’d been arrested, recording of assaults, threats sent to families. The correspondence gave me staff names and contact numbers.
The director was a woman called Elena Yussopova. I knew the name. She collected evidence of human-rights abuses. A brilliant lawyer and writer, her charity maintained additional offices in Moscow, Grozny and Tashkent, staffed by individuals who’d made their peace, one way or another, with the price on their heads. If you spend your time fighting the violent, powerful and corrupt there are two approaches: be discreet or be very visible. She’d gone for the latter. In truth, neither was going to keep you safe.
A few years ago, Yussopova’s husband, also a lawyer, had been found bloodied and unconscious with a fractured skull in the lobby of their apartment building. He died in hospital two days later. Police declared it the result of a hit and run, and nothing to do with the oligarch he’d been investigating. No one went to prison for it, of course. Since then she’d been outspoken. Was she acquainted with Joanna?
I found Yussopova’s mobile number among the printed emails. She answered with a brisk, ‘Da?’
‘I’m a friend of Vanessa McDonald’s. Is this a good line to talk?’
Yussopova sounded hesitant.
‘Who is this?’
‘My name’s John Sands. I occasionally work with Reporters for Human Rights.’
‘No, it is not a good line.’
‘Can we meet? I am very worried.’
‘You are in Astana?’
‘I have just arrived.’
She gave the address of a café and said she could be there in an hour.
I swung by my hotel, set up email accounts in the names of Reporters for Human Rights and John Sands. I missed having access to Six’s Changeling software which gave you the ability to spoof any email address and send messages under that identity. But sleight of hand got you a long way. The Reporters for Human Rights email address was .org. I set one up at .co.uk. and emailed myself an urgent few lines about tracking down Vanessa. I sent one to myself from Vanessa, backdated to last week, saying everything was going fine and she had spoken to Elena Yussopova. I changed out of the suit into a shirt and jumper.
Unprofessional, I thought. Unprepared. A step closer.
FIFTEEN
Yussopova’s café of choice was in Saryarka district, north of the railway line, where the industrial and poorer residential areas remained. Bare parks showed empty pedestals, snow piled up where the communist heroes would have been. The café sat opposite a war memorial. A statue of a grieving mother towered opposite the grate for an eternal flame, which had gone out. Mounds of chrysanthemums and gladioli lay frozen across a slab of pink marble. A bride and groom posed by the memorial, having their photograph taken, a tradition in this part of the world that had always struck me as odd but also in some ways understandable. Life, death, the realm of s
erious things: the submission of lives to the nation. Her dress was brighter than the snow; the groom wore a scarlet bow tie. After five minutes the newly-weds piled back into a VW people carrier and it sped off towards the next photo opportunity. Elena Yussopova walked in.
I glanced at the street outside. There was a better chance she was being tailed than that I was, but I couldn’t see any new vehicles. She was alone. She was unmistakable, lined face accentuating a hard brightness in her eyes. Her hair was dyed dark red and she looked frail, eaten away by fury. She clutched a phone and a packet of cigarettes, studied the place and clientele as she approached. Then she studied me.
‘John?’
I shook her hand.
‘Thank you for meeting me so quickly,’ I said. ‘This is obviously terrifying for Vanessa’s family. For all of us.’
She took a seat, ordered a coffee. I showed her the emails. Yussopova read them, handed them back.
‘You work with her?’
‘Yes. But more than that, I’m a friend.’
‘When did you arrive here?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘Have you had any trouble?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘No one following you?’
‘No. What’s going on? What’s happened?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘When did you last hear from her?’ I asked.
‘Three days ago. You?’
‘She called on Monday afternoon, around three p.m. UK time.’
‘And she hasn’t gone back to London?’
‘No.’
‘We thought perhaps she’d just left. It was only when your organisation contacted us, saying you’d lost track of her, that I worried.’
So someone else had called; someone else was missing her.
‘Obviously it’s sensitive stuff she was working on,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘How did she explain the project to you?’
‘She said she was making a documentary about Western oil companies in Kazakhstan. She wanted to highlight our work. That is right, no?’
‘Yes. We’ve been amassing evidence of environmental abuses for a long time. Where was she staying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When you spoke to her three days ago, did she say she had any plans? Any concerns?’
‘No. She was excited. She said the project was going well. I think … she had something.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Andrei knows more about it – the communications director, Andrei Nichuskin. He is flying back from Armenia at the moment. Did she not tell you any of this?’ Yussopova asked.
‘She said she had something. I got the impression it was even too sensitive for her to give us details at this stage. She thought our encryption might have been compromised. She was going to tell me in London.’
My cover was limiting how much I could ask while remaining credible. At the same time, I had no networks to draw upon.
‘What happened at your office?’ I asked.
‘An attack. No one has been caught.’
‘When?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘Do you think it connects to Vanessa?’
‘Maybe. But there is no shortage of enemies. Have you told police about Vanessa?’ she asked.
‘No. I take it you haven’t mentioned anything.’
‘As I say, until now I wasn’t sure. And the police may not be on our side.’
‘That’s why I’m here. I wanted to assess the situation first. You haven’t had any contact with the British embassy?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any sympathetic contacts, in police or government? Someone who might be able to help?’
She laughed. ‘Sadly not.’
A man and woman came in, took a table one away from us. I checked the street and saw a black Renault SUV outside the café. It hadn’t been there before.
‘Do you know somewhere more private we can talk?’ I said. Yussopova looked around, understood.
‘Follow me,’ she said.
We walked to one of the old apartment blocks nearby, a five-storey Khrushchev-era block with thick knots of ice spreading from drainpipes across the pavement like tree roots, making the approach treacherous.
Once inside, we climbed narrow stairs to a triple-locked security door behind which was a surprisingly ornate apartment, with crowded bookshelves and a writing desk covered in leaflets and loose papers and copies of Literaturnaya Gazeta from Moscow.
I wondered if this was where Astana’s intelligentsia gathered. Yussopova went to a small kitchen at the side and put a kettle on. I checked my phone, picked up the emissions of recording devices nearby.
There was a radio on the desk. I put it on to drown our voices. Russian hip-hop. I turned it up. A framed photograph beside it showed a family of four, including a thirty-something Yussopova and her murdered husband. There was an unframed one of Yussopova being dragged away from a protesting group, megaphone in hand. There are good people, then people who will die for the good. It’s a different breed, and one that always fascinated me. Joanna used to joke that I spied on them to find out what morality meant. I wanted to know what made them tick, but I didn’t idolise them. It was a mistake, as a spy, to think you preserved good conscience through being detached, but at the same time, when your job was following the various strings being pulled in all directions, morality came to seem a question of when you chose to turn away. It was an attempt at simplifying, and could start to seem like a form of defence, if only against the unknown. These were just some of the attempts at self-justification I’d made over the years.
Without getting too close to the windows I checked sightlines: nearby apartments with a view, somewhere you might stick a camera. The same black Renault SUV was on the street below – one man sitting in it. Yussopova came back with tea. Then she noticed the music.
‘Did you turn the radio on?’
‘I usually do. We’ve had some serious issues with intelligence companies.’
She nodded.
‘Please, sit down.’
I moved papers to sit on a sagging sofa, balancing my tea.
‘Who exactly did Vanessa meet?’ I asked.
‘She met a lot of people.’ Yussopova assumed I knew most: fellow activists, lawyers, even some oil-company reps.
‘If she had run into trouble with authorities, where might she be held?’
Yussopova shrugged. She listed police stations and prisons. She had no idea where Vanessa would be.
‘But there is a precedent for individuals being held in secret, without due procedure?’
‘Yes, but usually word gets out after twenty-four hours or so.’
‘Did she have a car?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Can I see exactly what she was working on?’
We looked through recent campaign material. It covered disappearances, deaths in detention. There were names and organisations familiar to me from campaigns against labour conditions in the Persian Gulf. The biggest file was marked simply ‘Saracen’. Saracen Oil and Gas Exploration was a UK-registered energy company. The file contained FOI requests, diagrams of governmental connections, lists of UK figures on the board.
Saracen had been bought up by a British fund billionaire called Robert Carter. They’d drilled a few speculative holes and were now excited enough to be looking to expand their role in Kazakhstan: extraction, transportation and more exploration rights were being sought. I picked up a tattered Herald Tribune clipping:
Carter, whose gambles on Central Asia have been increasingly stymied by geopolitics, has made what he describes as a last throw of the dice. Saracen have been in Kazakhstan for six years with little luck, accumulating an estimated 20 million dollars in debt on wildcat drilling. Carter’s hope is that new technology will lead to fresh discoveries. But both rivals and shareholders claim he has paid well over the odds on a quixotic and personal mis
sion.
Saracen weren’t necessarily who you wanted moving in next door. Campaigning literature contained diagrams of corruption, evidence of lobbying in the UK, Brussels and Astana, evidence of slush funds. Then there was the use of private security, a company called GL5 who protected rigs and personnel, and the use of PR companies to cover up human-rights abuses. Finally there was the use of private intelligence firms to spy on Saracen’s accusers.
‘Do you know which private intelligence firms?’ I asked.
‘No. It is very secretive.’
‘Do you think Saracen could cause Vanessa trouble?’
‘They are a British company.’ Yussopova gave another shrug. ‘You would think they have more … British values. But here, everyone becomes different. Now that Saracen has new owners, they are very aggressive.’
I studied a protest flyer depicting a drilling rig spouting drops of blood. Then I looked at the other work lying around: an article about the bribing of local officials, another that focused on online restrictions. Getting shared a lot recently was footage of an incident in which Kazakh police had detained an activist trying to unfold a poster in front of the Presidential Palace. He was expressing solidarity with an independent magazine shut down last month. The editor had been arrested and was now on hunger strike. Testimony were battling governmental censorship to get the story out.
‘Things are starting to happen here,’ Yussopova said.
‘What kinds of things?’
‘A revolution. In expectations, at least.’
‘To an outsider, this seems quite a solid country.’
‘Countries seem solid until they begin to change. Nobody in any of the Arab Spring countries would have predicted those systems could collapse. When there is a powerful police and security service, and a leader who is feared and respected, a lot of people think nothing will change. But systems are much more fragile than we think.’
A Shadow Intelligence Page 11
