A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  ‘Going to write about this?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to find some young Kazakh writers, people writing about now. Can you recommend any?’

  ‘Of course.’ She recommended a writer and said she knew her personally. I repeated the writer’s name to memorise it. Aliya’s friends were wrapping up for the cold, eyeing the outside in a way that made me think of sniper fire. Craig Bryant drifted into view on the far side of the room. He saw me, lifted a glass. I saw him consider approaching.

  ‘You should get back to your friends,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you.’ We shook hands again. I began to move away, then stopped. ‘Aliya?’ She turned. ‘I’m fairly new to this place. Would you possibly meet me again? Chat some more?’

  She pulled a face, as if this was distasteful, or awkward.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I’m very busy.’

  ‘Of course. I understand. No obligation.’ She made a final appraisal of me, then gave me her number.

  ‘It’s been a pleasure, Aliya,’ I said. She nodded, and was gone by the time Bryant made it over.

  ‘Get lucky?’

  ‘It’s nice to meet some locals.’

  ‘I can find you more. What are you up to tonight?’ Bryant asked. ‘There’s a bar just opened in Yesil district called Insomnia.’

  I might have ended up accompanying him to Insomnia if my phone hadn’t buzzed with a text: a landline to call.

  Lieutenant Shomko answered.

  ‘The woman you are looking for,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  We agreed on the sauna.

  ‘Room 303,’ the woman said when I got there.

  ‘Security cameras—’

  ‘Already off.’

  The room was dimly lit; candles, a bowl of condoms. He was standing beside the window. He had a laptop and a flash drive. He stank of cigarettes. A TV showing a music channel, on mute: Russian hip-hop, silent pool parties. I put the sound on.

  ‘I can’t do any more for you after this,’ he said.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘I need money.’

  ‘I’ll give you money.’

  ‘Now.’

  I handed him his envelope. He transferred the notes to his wallet, inserted the flash drive, opened a file. It was CCTV footage: a static shot of a broad, black Mercedes S-Class on a six-lane road. The backdrop looked like Astana: tower blocks and snow. Next shot you knew it was Astana because the car turned in through the gates of the Gazprom office. Time stamp: 11.31 a.m., 25 November. One day before the wireless dead drop in the mall, two days before Joanna went missing.

  ‘Who is it?’

  He clicked to another shot, seventeen minutes earlier. The car was parked on a back road, someone in a parka with the hood up approaching it. He zoomed in. You could just about see a face beneath the hood. It was Joanna.

  She appeared to climb into the car. It pulled out while the door was still closing.

  Shomko went over to the window and checked the street outside.

  ‘The car’s registered to an individual called Aleksandr Kolobkov,’ he said. ‘He’s a fixer for a man called Vladislav Vishinsky.’

  I looked again at the images, starting to feel uneasy.

  ‘A fixer?’

  ‘The driver has been identified as Viktor Trunenkov, former special forces soldier now working for Vishinsky.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘This is why you are hunting her, no?’

  A car door slammed outside. Shomko peered down.

  ‘Customer,’ he said.

  We both listened to the customers arrive, and kept listening until the showers came on.

  ‘Where does the car go?’

  ‘We don’t know. Did you know she was working for the Russians?’

  ‘That’s not what this says.’

  ‘I deserve a bonus, no?’

  ‘There’s a lot of ways of forcing someone into a car. They don’t all involve guns.’

  ‘Blackmail.’

  I clicked back to the car shots. ‘What cameras are these from?’

  ‘The earlier pictures are from a police security camera. The ones on the alleyway are from a camera belonging to the Keruen shopping centre.’

  ‘You took them from the systems yourself?’

  ‘No. Someone else did.’

  ‘Seen the original footage?’

  ‘This is original footage.’ He took the envelope out of his pocket and counted the notes.

  ‘What about the man who was shot on Malakhov Street?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he found out what she was really up to.’

  ‘What does the investigation say?’

  ‘I have heard nothing about the investigation, except that people want to find the English woman.’

  ‘I told you to get information from the investigation.’

  ‘I got you information about the woman you want. Five thousand dollars, you said.’

  ‘Who gave you these? I need a name, otherwise this means nothing.’

  ‘He is trusted.’

  ‘Not by me. I don’t buy this.’

  ‘You don’t pay?’

  ‘I don’t believe.’

  ‘So you were fucking her and she deceived you. Now she’s fucking some Russian.’ He spat. ‘I am sorry for your heartbreak. Don’t fall in love with spies.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I locked the door of the room when he’d left. If there was any truth in his theory it was too much to contemplate; it would be the universe inverted, and I resisted opening the door on that possibility because it would be overwhelming. If this was some sophisticated attempt at framing her then I felt sick at the efficiency, and deeply wary of my involvement. It would explain the suspicion on me and Tom Marsh, on anyone she was close to or came into contact with. It might explain the closing down of Building D’s operation, and her running to Kazakhstan.

  I looked again at the stills.

  Images are powerful because they suggest you don’t have to think. Here’s truth. But there’s always a story behind them. In the story behind the disappearance of Joanna Lake there was an email to me. Catalyst.

  One woman getting into a car. I enlarged it on the screen as if an answer would appear. It was her; no force, everything to suggest she knew what she was doing and wanted to make it discreet.

  You recruit someone to the intelligence services because of their confidence and cunning, and then train them to lie for their country. They elect to transfer these skills to a private company working for the energy industry. You ask: could they ever lose their moral bearings? Go rogue?

  But not for Vishinsky. Not in a million years. Surely.

  In my experience, you’re working for whoever keeps you alive. I found Sergei Cherenkov’s card, wondered what he knew about all this. I was still holding it when I noticed the music videos had been replaced by grainy footage. People stampeded through a shopping mall. Behind them walked a calm, young-looking man, strolling with an automatic rifle.

  People dived into shops, pulling doors closed. The man strolled past abandoned benches, fountains, potted palm trees. It cut to a news presenter reading an autocue: Sunlight shopping mall, St Petersburg.

  I clicked through channels. Most were showing the same footage. Initial reports said eight people had died, twenty wounded. The attacker had been shot by police. He was Kazakh.

  I left the sauna, returned to my hotel and went online. A video by a group called the Islamic Movement of Kazakhstan had gone up, claiming responsibility. It showed five Kazakh-looking men in combat fatigues with Korans and AK-47s. The landscape was semi-arid, a low chain of dusty green mountains in the background. Could have been Iraq, could have been Syria. Could have been southern Spain. It was turning up everywhere, along with their statement: We demand that Russia ceases all activities in the Middle East and Central Asia. U
ntil Russian troops and their proxies withdraw from all Muslim lands we will wage war against you wherever we find you. You come to our land, we will come to yours.

  The leader spoke calmly, directly to camera, in Kazakhinflected Russian. A black flag billowed slowly behind him. Shadows lined up. His lips synced with the words.

  Kazakhstan was secular, but there were 16 million inhabitants, and at least some were unemployed young men with access to YouTube. One hundred and fifty or so had headed to Syria over the last couple of years. Wars leak. One or two were going to make it back. I’d come across Central Asian fighters, though not as many as from the UK. I’d come across fighters from most countries, from the land of YouTube: men and women who’d walked out of their homes, out of work, taking in the drab surroundings a final time as the words of a video echoed: Look around as you sit in comfort and ask yourself if this is how you want to die. I should know something about walking out of your life into someone else’s war.

  Once you’ve gone, you’ve gone. For most jihadis, returning home meant prison and torture. Life is different when you can’t go home. You start dreaming of new things, changing the world so it fits you again. It’s an all-or-nothing situation. And when you’ve been a commander of armed men, saluted and cheered, it’s hard to go back to being a mechanic or a hairdresser.

  Walker called. ‘Seen this?’

  ‘I’m watching.’

  ‘Know anything about IMK?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Thought it was your side of things.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you get any more from your contact?’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I do.’ I hung up, deleted the incriminating footage of Joanna, then I walked to the screen and stared at the grainy shots of the mall shooting. The incident happened around 4 p.m. in St Petersburg, 7 p.m. in Astana. Broke 8 p.m. Now experts had appeared, nodding over videolinks: ‘ISIS has been down on its luck in the Middle East, so it’s going to move its attention to those nations that have tried to defeat it. We’re going to see increasing numbers of these incidents.’

  I clicked to Twitter. The attacker had been named as Bakhtiyar Ibraimov, twenty-one years old, born in Aktobe, Kazakhstan. He’d travelled to Syria in July 2015, where he’d fought with a unit attached to Al-Nusra. Arrived in Russia on a Saudi passport that might or might not have been fake.

  Aktobe was an industrial city; grim prospects. Should have been wealthy with oil, but the lowest incomes tended to be around the oilfields. The disjuncture bred wild and angry dreams. These were the places to watch. There are always two capitals, the one with the power and the one with the resentment: Benghazis, Aleppos.

  From Aktobe to the Al-Nusra Front was far from implausible. Al-Nusra were a tight, effective force in Syria, operating as conventional military or clandestine cells according to need. We’d tried to distance them from Al Qaeda for the sake of some tentative collaboration, but that was a push even for us. They’d been designated untouchable. Their promotional clips usually came through a media outlet, The White Minaret, which posted to a jihadist web forum called Shamoukh al-Islam. This video wasn’t on either.

  Aliya Savinova’s take on events had just gone out: Did the Sunlight attacker have contact with British intelligence?

  That gave me a chill across my back. I clicked the link to her blog. Under an old cartoon of imperial powers gathered around a map, she went to town.

  Experts have no doubt that the events of 9/11 were the handiwork of the CIA. The so-called ‘terrorism’ in the Middle East is also the handiwork of the CIA and Mossad. Therefore why should Kazakhstan doubt other possible crimes of the West?

  It is known that MI6 sent fighters from terrorist groups to Libya and Syria. One insider has said: ‘The dangers of “blowback” were raised but never fully taken seriously.’

  It is Russia that lies exposed to take the brunt of this ‘blowback’, having led the fight against ISIS while the West wavered. Perhaps certain heads in Western intelligence find this convenient.

  The first thing that struck me was the mix of registers. Aside from the quote, which I recognised from an Observer article, the vocabulary wavered. ‘Brunt’, ‘certain heads’ – that wasn’t the style of English I’d seen her using elsewhere. Second thing was the nature of this material, which felt a little close to home.

  Now I watched the IMK videos again. The guns looked like Chinese-made copies of AR-15 assault rifles. China had supplied a lot of knock-off AR-15s to rebel groups in South Sudan. When the Sudanese economy tanked, their government offloaded hundreds to Qatar. Qatar had them airlifted straight to western Turkey for smuggling into Syria. Wars exist in hard-wearing materials, and these circulate. Sometimes that was convenient; Bohren understood all this. But his weren’t the only shady AR-15s around.

  Two hundred and forty IMK videos had been uploaded in the last two weeks. That gave me a lot to trawl. None more than two weeks back, as far as I could tell.

  It looked like they were either trained by IS’s media team or working directly with them. They shared the same slick production techniques: good lighting, careful composition, multiple camera angles. They minimised the colour palette, which made the end result sharper. It was textbook – if anything, it was too textbook. Then there was the music. I had a secret love of nasheeds, the a capellas accompanying every IS video. There were companies deep in Iraq tasked with nothing but churning these out. Over the last couple of years I’d collected examples in Turkish, Uyghur, English, Bengali, French and Chinese. I’d never heard one in Kazakh before.

  They had shiny Toyotas and new body armour. I tried to remember details of the missing cache I’d been questioned about by Alastair Undercroft: vehicles, assault rifles, body armour. I thought through my chaotic exit from Saudi.

  Blowback.

  Aliya’s blog had been featured on Russian TV: My blog featured on TV!! An obscure Christian Orthodox channel had lifted a map from her website, black arrows indicating the flow of Islamists from the Middle East into Kazakhstan. The channel ran it alongside video of right-wing activists chanting in a Moscow suburb.

  It wasn’t immediately clear what they were protesting against: Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Islam, an influx of Central Asian migrants trying to outrun a collapsing economy. The protest crowd was 90 per cent young men in Adidas and jeans, some sporting black balaclavas or blue medical masks, often football scarves pulled up over their faces; they had esoteric flags involving swords and eagles, fists and crosses. The yellow of Russian nationalism. Moscow, but outskirts. I remembered those places: Yugozapadnaya, Petrovsko-Razumovskaya; vast high-rises and little else. I turned the sound up. There was the predictable chant of ‘Russia for Russians’; one I liked: ‘Sport! Health! Nationalism!’, which sounded slightly less bizarre in Russian, but only just. Then the occasional rendition of ‘Fuck the Jews’ thrown in for good measure. One from the repertoire.

  I called Alexander Turbayevskiy, reporter on Moscow’s Kommersant newspaper, but also closely involved with the Sova centre, a Russian NGO that monitored ethnic hatred. He’d been a corduroy-clad oasis of humane intellect during my stays in Moscow.

  ‘Are you watching what I’m watching?’ he asked.

  ‘How did they get organised so quickly? How did they get permission?’

  ‘It’s the tip of the iceberg. The nationalist parties are suddenly loud and everywhere, especially Rodina.’ Rodina, meaning ‘Motherland’, had been vocal about Ukraine – and even Syria – an anti-West voice set up by Vishinsky’s team. ‘Rodina leaned on the city authorities. Nationalists get to march, it seems. All seventy or eighty of them. There were some attacks afterwards: three men beaten up badly.’

  ‘Online activity?’

  ‘Massive. With an increasingly clear narrative: Kazakh terrorism is a threat, shadowy forces are using Central Asian Islamists to attack Russia.’

  Aliya’s MI6 conspiracy theory appeared on Russian platforms – LiveJournal, VK, the website of the Young Guard of United
Russia – alongside stories about the dangers of Islam. One story repackaged accusations from Ukraine: a Russian boy crucified on the side of a building. In some versions the victim was still alive when he was pinned up, in others locals gathered to collect the blood. References to Odessa had been converted to Karaganda. Slightly more grounded in reality were images of broken gravestones from the west of Kazakhstan. A court in Atyrau had just jailed eight followers of a purist Wahabi sect for destroying a local graveyard. The followers believed that Kazakh traditions of ancestor worship transgressed the rules of Islam. They were shown receiving their sentence in a court of dark green and beige, a line of five men, heads bowed.

  I watched more clips on Vkontakte. A kid no older than fifteen, cheeks red from the cold, said: ‘I came here today because there’s an occupation going on by people from Central Asia. They steal, they’re violent and we need to get rid of them.’ Another interviewee, an older man, called the Kazakhs a terrorist threat and said he’d support any Russian intervention – there was a right to self-defence. I watched him five times, convinced that the shape of his head morphed at the edges as he spoke, the mouth somehow detached from the rest of his face. Authorities in Moscow were looking into how the shooter had got a Saudi passport. Saudi officials denied any form of collusion.

  Aliya had tweeted: They will attack Astana next.

  I looked at the tweet for a long time. Then the comments: Don’t tempt fate. Keep telling it, Aliya. That would wake these jokers up.

  It could have been dismissed like any other online prophecy. Only, she’d been blogging about the dangers of an attack on Russian soil forty-eight hours before Bakhtiyar Ibraimov walked into the Sunlight shopping mall.

  I was building a conspiracy theory of my own.

  I picked up the phone, dialled a number I’d hoped not to use again. Mohammad Reza Nikfar answered promptly. Not many people had this number, and if he’d given it to you it was because he valued your acquaintance.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.