A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  ‘They’re playing a bigger game than us,’ Joanna had said then. ‘We don’t have a vision.’

  Ten years later, her concerns about Vishinsky were more personal. Over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Milton Keynes she said that he had a file on us: the two of us, a supposed team.

  ‘We triggered him; we’re on his radar.’

  She got me access to a copy of the relevant GRU report. It included a picture of us in Kiev’s Navodnitsky Park, together with attempts at establishing our real identities and the nature of our relationship. Not believed to be sexual partners. Yet he had coupled us, before we were together.

  ‘He’s convinced that we were involved in a US-led coup in Ukraine. Refuses to buy genuine democratic yearnings. I think we’ve found his own paranoia.’

  I felt his shadow over us.

  You met him. What did he say?

  He said: People who believe in nothing still believe in oil.

  The rape story had been picked up internationally from one local news site. The originating website was called InformAsia: it was big on graphics and pop music, and drew heavily on social media. It had been set up a year ago, and seemed to survive without much advertising. Some rudimentary searches gave me ten Vkontakte accounts that appeared to have linked to the story almost simultaneously, mostly women, mostly young, with several thousand followers each.

  Where had I seen that website? I found the dating app on my phone, checked the first match.

  You seem interesting. Check out this site – lots of fun there.

  I clicked through to InformAsia, which had put a photo of the victim on its landing page.

  THIRTY

  I spent too much of the night browsing, until I started to believe the region’s entire internet had been gamed. Stories fuelling Russian resentment came up everywhere you looked.

  Fired for speaking Russian. Statue removed. Beaten up on the way to school.

  People in public services were being forced to speak Kazakh rather than Russian; a politician who resisted the new language laws had been assaulted at a rally. Alongside those kinds of stories was a low-level hum of outrage and titillation: mother shamed in Kazakh restaurant; teacher beats pupil; child crucified by Muslims. Meanwhile, on the same sites, the epidemic of homosexuality in the West got good coverage, as did Europe’s spiritual bankruptcy in general. NATO was heading for extinction, Russia ready to bring peace to the Middle East.

  I logged in as Yuri Cherchesov, my Russian sailor, and clicked Like on pictures of ‘Kazakh militias’ targeting Russians in northern Kazakhstan. They posed with horse bows apparently looted from a museum. They urinated on a portrait of Putin from behind blurred pixels.

  Vishinsky’s great insight: propaganda didn’t have to be believed to be effective. No more than pornography had to be believed to make you come. It just had to keep you staring, feed you fantasies.

  Women’s tears, women’s shame, everywhere I looked.

  There were various ways sophisticated cyber operations could enhance information warfare: devices and websites can both be infected so you get steered the right way, websites look real but aren’t, pages shoot up the rankings. I looked for the same phrases or links appearing simultaneously; big waves of people piling in to comment immediately, then repeating the process at regular intervals. I amassed fifty accounts, ten blogs and six websites that struck me as suspect or just heavily anti-West and sent them through to Evotec to see if they could get me anything: matches with previous cyber operations, source IPs, syntactic patterns to see how many people were producing this. Every major military power had units running social media now. NATO and US Central Command had poured millions into it in the last couple of years, but they were playing catch-up. The West couldn’t compete with the office blocks in Moscow and Shanghai filled with young men and women operating their distant personas. You used to be able to watch the syntax: the Chinese skipped plurals; Russian’s a phonetic language so spelling tended to be a weak point. But it was getting more sophisticated on all fronts. Bots came fleshed out, with face shots scraped from Picasa and Flickr. The software existed to create hundreds of these a minute, inserting them into comment threads and forums, interacting with people just like a human. But software couldn’t do everything.

  I called Walker at 8 a.m. and talked information warfare. He said social media was monitored for Vectis by Piper Anderson, the PR company hiring them. Piper Anderson’s CEO, Lucy Piper, was on the ground in Kazakhstan, currently with a trade delegation. I said it could be useful for me to speak to her and he said he’d put a call in.

  ‘Does she know about Joanna?’ I asked.

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  *

  I caught up with the delegation at a Saracen-sponsored School of Business, Law and Management. It had a glossy new visitors’ centre attached, its creamy imitation marble engraved with the message: Energy awakens ancient history. A lot of men circulated with branded name badges: BAE, Glaxo, Whitbread; then some junior ministers, journalists, a university chancellor. I caught a glimpse of the British ambassador to Kazakhstan, Suzanna Ford, slightly dishevelled in a grey skirt suit, laughing and drinking white wine. She turned, met my eyes before I could look away, gave the smile of someone having to smile at everyone. I couldn’t see Piper.

  The new centre displayed fragments of pottery they’d dug up, alongside bad watercolours of a traditional nomad community. At the end was a display regarding wildlife protection, signed off by an organisation I’d never heard of called Clean Caspian. The ribbon had already been cut and hung limply on either side of the entrance. Four silver minibuses waited to transport the delegation back to the Marriott once a group of schoolchildren had finished burying a time capsule for an unspecified future generation to pore over. The capsule was a Tupperware box, and the hole into which it was being deposited had been created in the icy courtyard with the help of a blowtorch and pickaxe. The ceremony was being filmed.

  I introduced myself to a man directing proceedings, with cropped ginger hair and a waistcoat, his name badge identifying him as Neil Graff from Piper Anderson Communications. He said Lucy was at the Marriott dealing with a last-minute emergency but I could hitch a ride back to the hotel with them.

  At the Marriott I was directed to a restaurant, dim and low-lit and almost empty, with tables set for the next day. Empty apart from one person.

  Lucy Piper stood alone at the windows, phone to her ear. She wore a white suit, hair up, eyes cool. The screen of a MacBook glowed on the table behind her. She was having a bad day.

  ‘No … I don’t know … It’s worse than we thought.’

  In the low-lit comfort it took me a second to connect her to the figure I’d seen stepping among the former Taliban like some mascara-laden angel of history. There was a lot of paperwork on the table, pinned down with a vape the size of a Colt .44.

  She hung up, put on a professional smile.

  ‘Hey there.’

  ‘Lucy Piper? I work for Vectis. Toby Bell.’

  Her smile turned cooler. She extended a hand. ‘Callum mentioned your name. Another former Commando?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  No suggestion she recognised me. I scanned the visible documents. They had the day’s analytics: Google results for ‘Saracen’, ‘Saracen in Kazakhstan’, ‘Kazakhstan oil’, ‘Kazakhstan corruption’. Critical social media accounts had been mapped geographically. She had a photocopy of a petition launched by Testimony – The lavish trade mission is a green light to political oppression – along with a strategy to quieten it, which looked like it might involve an organisation called the Kazakhstan Business Alliance whose contact number was a London landline.

  Her company was well connected in Westminster, of course, with a muscular lobbying operation involving former politicians and diplomats, and direct lines to the EU and the UN. But it was their dark arts that kept the clients coming: managing Wikipedia entries, controlling their own astroturfed NGOs, manipulating Google results so t
hat the first thing you saw when you searched ‘Saracen Kazakhstan’ wasn’t a woman being dragged from a court room.

  Against this, photos of the local kids burying their time capsule to mark the opening of the Saracen-sponsored law school. British Secretary of State for Industry leads largest-ever trade mission seeking to cement UK–Kazakhstan ties.

  I took a seat.

  ‘Any news?’ she said. ‘On the … situation.’

  ‘We’re working hard. We may have something of a Russian influence operation on our hands.’

  Piper sighed. ‘Russian influence.’

  ‘Have you had issues with any unusual online activity?’

  ‘Issues? Reality is melting. That’s an issue. That’s new terrain. How long have you got?’

  She clicked on a video, turned the MacBook towards me. Five guards in black uniforms surrounded a Daewoo Nexia on a narrow road. They pulled the doors open and dragged three men in T-shirts and jeans out of the car, forcing them to lie face down on the ground. There was a rocky escarpment on one side of the road, a fence on the other. One of the uniformed men pulled a handgun and fired at the men’s legs.

  Title: Saracen Oil’s private army. Posted today, 7,324 views.

  ‘Genuine?’ I said.

  ‘We’re checking. There’s quite a lot of GL5 in the country. The views have doubled in the last couple of hours and it’s just been reposted by a big name in the US. All of which shows you why a story about a woman who turns out to have been spying for a British oil company and got herself caught up in fuck knows what could give us a lot of fires to put out.’

  The source was an account called Miss_P, with a picture of a Disney princess as an avatar.

  ‘They’ve spent eight months tweeting diet tips and inspirational quotes: Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears. Fine. There are make-up tips, a guide to Astana, then, 23 November, Miss P goes in heavy on abuse by Private Security Contractors. She posts on various platforms and gets big amplification.’

  A quick glance at the analytics told me it was the system Vishinsky’s unit had developed. You establish shepherd accounts – active and influential people who kick off a trending topic. For that you need a large number of followers and interaction with high-profile players. Those are difficult to establish, and had to be run by humans, but you only needed a few. Sheepdog accounts follow and are also run by humans. They retweet the stories and riff on them, turning up the heat, making the whole thing go viral. Then come the sheep – the zombie army of bots – helping to amplify it and spread the stories across platforms.

  Up next on Piper’s tour of melting reality was the still image of a young woman sitting in the snow, crying, forked tributaries of blood down her face.

  ‘What happened to her?’ I asked.

  ‘Attacked by police during protests in a town called Semey.’

  ‘Connected to the rape?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  The picture came attached to a report on a citizen journalism website called InfoVillage, apparently hosted in Armenia. Tensions simmer as protests continue.

  Semey was in the north-east of Kazakhstan, close to the border with Russia. Its central square had been occupied, which at minus 10 degrees suggested a serious level of commitment. Origins of the protests were unclear – the report alluded to ongoing refusal by local authorities to allow environmental campaigning or union activities. Last week, three students had been arrested for inciting discord. Rather than quashing things, the situation blew up. Locals were now out in force with photographs of the students and banners demanding justice.

  It didn’t vibe ethnic conflict, more anti-oppression. People were singing. Some of the elders wore traditional Kazakh clothing.

  ‘The signs say things like Put the People First,’ I said. ‘Protect Workers’ Rights.’

  ‘Okay,’ Piper said.

  They looked genuine: home-made, not mass-produced – varying handwriting, different paint and ink. Someone lifted up a Styrofoam model resembling the Goddess of Democracy statue erected by protesters on Tiananmen Square.

  I clicked back to the men being dragged out of the Daewoo.

  ‘Who filmed this?’

  ‘A member of the public.’

  ‘Just passing by? It’s not filmed through a windscreen.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Have the British press picked up any of this?’

  ‘I’m managing to keep them at bay for now.’

  ‘This is a DV camera, not a phone.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I know. The lighting’s off a camera light.’ I listened to the voices in the background, checked the uniforms, then some of the other videos posted which purportedly documented GL5 malpractice: a man in his underwear on a concrete floor, someone on the ground with their head between their knees, someone handcuffed to a trough. ‘At least two of the other videos are from Georgia,’ I said. ‘Shot five years ago at least. You can hear the voices in the background, the accents.’

  Piper nodded slowly, eyes lighting up. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘That’s a Georgian number plate in the background.’

  She grabbed her phone and stood up. ‘Get yourself a drink.’

  Piper wandered over to the window and made a call, touching her forehead to the glass as she spoke.

  ‘We may have some ammunition … Yes, I’ll send that … No, we don’t want to drive more traffic unnecessarily … ’

  I went through her bag. In a thick Gucci wallet I found a swipe pass identical to the one Walker had used to access the Vectis office block. I pocketed it. I went to the bar and helped myself to a beer. She came back thoughtful.

  ‘Do you think your missing colleague connects to all this?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Piper took a hit on the vape, disappeared briefly behind an apple-scented cloud.

  ‘Shit,’ she sighed. Then she turned to me again, flapping a hand at the steam. ‘You’ve been here awhile?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You seem to understand this place more than most people.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘How do you see it?’ She brought up footage of the crowd in Semey. ‘Is this a revolution? That’s what I’m worried about. A Central Asian spring?’

  ‘No. People like the President. They like what he’s done.’

  ‘These guys?’ Piper pointed at a clipping on the table: Kazakh Police Break Up Strikers.

  ‘They aren’t protesting about the President. They want a pay rise. We have strikes in the UK.’

  She nodded. I felt her warming to me and pressed on, trying to imagine what Toby Bell would have said.

  ‘This region’s got failed states all around, and here’s one that’s doubled its GDP, that hasn’t been at war. The population’s generally happy. It’s got religious pluralism.’

  ‘That’s what we tell people.’

  ‘Churches, synagogues. It’s a secular Islamic state: modern, open-minded. Isn’t that the holy grail?’

  ‘Where’s the synagogue?’

  ‘Almaty. There’s even close ties to Israel. You don’t have to draw too much attention to that, but it’s true.’

  ‘Like Turkey used to be,’ Piper said.

  ‘Sure, but less complicated. A young, optimistic Turkey without Kurds.’

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some of the delegation are unconvinced about British involvement here – they see it as high-risk. I could do with them meeting someone articulate, with a few facts at their fingertips. A little brunch to get the British government onside.’

  ‘Brunch is good,’ I said, conscious that I was being swept along by my own acting ability. We swapped numbers. Piper took another suck of vapour, and sized me up.

  ‘You should meet Galina. She’d like you.’

  ‘The President’s daughter?’

 
‘She likes English men.’

  ‘Why not? I’m a sociable guy.’ We shook hands. I stood up. ‘Can I ask a weird question?’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What was in the time capsule?’

  ‘Time capsule?’

  ‘At the ribbon-cutting ceremony.’

  ‘I don’t know. An iPhone, a football shirt, I think. Some poems by local children, their hopes for the future. Why?’

  ‘What are their hopes?’

  ‘Their hopes? I have no idea. It was all in Kazakh.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Stefan messaged that afternoon: Eagle landed.

  I checked that there was no lookout in the Hilton’s lobby, then walked through to the back stairs, up to the room I’d booked for him, and knocked.

  ‘I’m going to get some food,’ I said, using our usual code.

  He opened the door in shorts and a hoody, headphones around his neck. It was good to see him.

  ‘Elliot,’ he said, when the door was closed, gripping my hand. ‘Where the fuck am I?’

  ‘Winter wonderland. I appreciate you stopping by.’

  Stefan kept his hair cropped military-close, a neat beard with the first touches of grey that made his cheeks look more sunken than they were and brought out the blue, insomniac intensity of his eyes. His room already smelled of energy drinks, a chemical undertone to the pine-scented toiletries; curtains closed, TV on Formula One. He had three computers set up in total, a MacBook on the bed, two Panasonics on the bureau: rugged, magnesium-alloy-encased laptops of the kind used by the military. A separate 2 TB hard drive stood on the bedside table, fan whirring, connected to a Wave Box – a portable device that generously bestowed strong, password-free wi-fi to all those within five hundred metres or so. It gave us all of the internet traffic flowing through it – email, instant messages and browser sessions. There was also an array of outfits: workers’ overalls, hi-vis vests, a toolbox.