Kompromat

There were legal issues too. In the Federal Republic even ministers of the Interior needed court orders. At least they were supposed to have them. He could just hear the federal prosecutor asking with a sneer, ‘And have you been spying on the chancellor, Dr Friedrich?’

He replaced the phone. Better to wait.

Judging by the latest news bulletins, Helga Brun’s newly announced policy of a Germany ‘open-to-all-comers’ was already receiving a huge thumbs-down from the electorate.

Her star, as Dr Friedrich saw it, was beginning to fade and the effects of today’s speech might sink her altogether.

His own political star, on the contrary, was already rising fast.

When the moment came he would be ready. And he would have the top-secret ‘Mina’ dossier if he needed extra ammunition to fatally wound the political career of the chancellor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Fyodor Stephanov, senior agent at the FSB office in St Petersburg, was still feeling sore from the beating Lyudmila Markova and her team from FSB Moscow had given him. Frankly, he thought they had overdone it. Everyone freelanced a bit nowadays. Given the wages the FSB paid, that wasn’t surprising. He hadn’t realized that just about everybody had been chasing that Golden Shower video. Still, it was off his hands now. Moscow could do what they liked with it. And they no doubt would.

Lyudmila Markova had given him stern warning. ‘Don’t do it again,’ she advised, twisting his neck with a vice-like grip. ‘Otherwise you’ll be in real trouble.’

He took her seriously. She was one tough lady. But he needed to supplement his income.

One evening a week, after his FSB shift had ended, he worked for an outfit known as the Internet Research Agency at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg.

Number 55 Savushkina was a newly built, four-storey office block, which housed upwards of 400 internet trolls. The trolls worked in rooms of about twenty people, each controlled by three editors, who would check posts and impose fines if they found words had been cut and pasted, or were ideologically deviant.

The trolls took shifts writing mainly in blogs along assigned propaganda lines for LiveJournal and Vkontakte, outlets that had literally hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. Artists too were employed to draw political cartoons. Employees worked for twelve hours every other day. A blogger’s quota was ten posts per shift, and each post had to have at least 750 characters.

Bloggers employed at the Savushkina Street office earned approximately 40,000 Russian roubles a week. As far as Fyodor Stephanov was concerned it, it was money for jam. The time would come, he thought, when he might pack in his job at the FSB entirely and become a full-time troll.

In the short time he at been working at 55 Savushkina Street, Stephanov had discovered he had a remarkable aptitude for the task.

He had already begun his evening shift when a new PRIORITY TASK dropped into his inbox.

‘Another one about Ukraine.’ He sighed as he opened the message. ‘Was there anything new to say about Ukraine?’

But when he read the instructions, he saw that the new task wasn’t about Ukraine at all. It was about the German chancellor’s speech and the alleged ‘flood of refugees’ about to invade Europe.

‘Use your imagination!’ the instruction said. ‘Find video footage of refugees climbing barriers to break through border posts; migrants raping defenceless women, setting fire to buildings, and generally running amok.’

The technical support team at 55, Savushkina Street was first rate. You wrote the words; they found the pictures, cutting, splicing and pasting with precision. Take the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, for example. Easy to tie that one to migrants and asylum seekers. Or that lorry in Nice, literally mowing people down on the Promenade des Anglais. Who was responsible for that? Terrorists entering France disguised as immigrants! Cue-in shots of dark-bearded men hurling obscenities at the camera.

That particular evening it seemed the trolls at 55, Savushkina Street were instructed to churn out not just blogs with photos attached, but whole video clips.

Stephanov was given the task of reviewing one such film in its final stages before transmission. The basic commentary was in English since the clip would go out worldwide on RT and other media.

He put his earphones on and listened to the Russian translation: