A Very Expensive Poison by Luke Harding

Author:Luke Harding [Luke Harding]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783350957
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2016-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Brenton was an unusually frank diplomat. His reward was a campaign of Kremlin-sponsored harassment: the pro-Putin youth group Nashi picketed his public events, jumped in front of his car, and waved unflattering placards outside the embassy. The placards bore a photo of the ambassador with the word ‘Loser’ stamped in red ink across his forehead.

*

Days after my first break-in I had had my own meeting with MacLeod and an embassy security officer. I’d reported the intrusion to the Guardian and mentioned it to the embassy’s press attaché, who suggested I drop by. The venue for our chat was the embassy’s secure room from which mobile phones were banned. It looked rather like a music studio; a map of the Russian Federation hung on a wall. The room appeared to be the only part of the building which Putin’s security agents were unable to bug.

The conversation was helpful. And demystifying. It turned out the embassy knew all about FSB burglaries. They were Moscow’s worst-kept diplomatic secret, I learned. British and US diplomats and Russian nationals working for western missions found themselves on the receiving end of demonstrative break-ins. So, I later discovered, did Russian opposition activists. Recently, the break-ins had grown more frequent. ‘We don’t talk about it publicly. But no, you’re not going mad,’ the officer told me. ‘There’s no doubt this was the FSB. We have a thick file of similar cases. Generally we don’t make a fuss.’

The FSB’s tactics were weird, to say the least. They included defecating in loos, and not flushing afterwards; turning off fridges while the occupant was away on holiday; and introducing items of low value, like a cuddly toy, which hadn’t been there before. Sometimes a TV remote control would vanish, only to reappear weeks or months later. The same break-in team would install listening devices. Apparently, our flat was now bugged. ‘There’s not much you can do about them. Trying to identify or remove them will merely trigger the FSB’s return,’ the officer said.

On the surface, the FSB’s methods looked like bad-taste practical jokes. Actually, the KGB knew that such tactics – repeated over time – could have a destructive effect. The KGB developed and codified these techniques in the 1960s and 1970s. They had a name: operational psychology.

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, and the KGB’s sister organisation, employed the same tactics against dissidents, church leaders and others. One former Stasi officer told me proudly: ‘We always did it better than the Russians.’ Such methods were wonderfully deniable. It was easy to deride anyone who complained of sprite-like intrusions by unknown third parties as paranoid and mad.

I discovered that Stasi officers had written entire theses about what they called Zersetzung. The word in German means corrosion or decay. The goal of this harassment – in which the state’s hand remained hidden – was to ‘corrode’ a target so he or she ceased all hostile anti-state activity. With me, that appeared to be writing articles on themes the FSB deemed unacceptable. In the GDR, Zersetzung became a pseudo-scientific discipline.

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