Well, on this particular historic occasion, Helga Brun, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, eschewed platitudes entirely. She was not a tall woman, but that morning she stood very tall indeed.
She looked straight out into the body of the chamber, raising her voice, just as she would raise people’s hopes around the world.
‘Today I pledge,’ she proclaimed, ‘that Germany will play its full part in resolving this crisis. The UN refugee agency has said that the number of people driven from their homes by conflict and crisis has topped fifty million for the first time since World War II. Fifty million! That is unbelievable. This is a situation which cannot be allowed to continue. Germany will welcome those refugees with open arms. We will do what common humanity requires us to do. We already have over one million refugees in Germany. I promise that we will do more, much more. We can do it! And I promise we will do whatever we can!’
While the high-ups were being entertained elsewhere, there was a buffet lunch for officials in one of the Bundestag’s dining rooms. Thomas Hartkopf found himself standing next to a tall, suave Russian.
They had met several times over the last few years, for example at G8 summits. Russia had been expelled or ‘disinvited’ from the G8 in 2014, but it still participated in the annual Munich Security Conference.
The two men found a quiet corner where they could talk.
‘Chancellor Brun went out on a limb this morning, didn’t she?’ Yuri Yasonov commented. ‘If this hadn’t been a special occasion, I feel some hard words might have been said by some of the members. They weren’t keen on the chancellor’s open-ended commitment on asylum seekers, were they?’
‘Not at all,’ Hartkopf agreed. ‘I took a look at my boss, Otto Friedrich, the minister of the Interior. He was purple in the face with rage. That pledge on migrants obviously took him by surprise.’
‘Do you think Friedrich will make a move? Will he stand against Brun in the elections?’ Yasonov asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Hartkopf replied. ‘He may not go for it now, but I don’t think he’ll wait for ever. And he has that Bavarian power base. That always counts for a lot in German politics.’
‘If Mrs Brun goes, Friedrich is the chancellor’s natural successor, isn’t he?’
‘A strong candidate, at least,’ Hartkopf acknowledged.
They had ordered a selection of pastries to follow the main course. Yasonov passed the plate across. ‘Here’s something which might help Dr Friedrich on his way.’
Hartkopf was careful to palm the flash-drive before helping himself to a thick slice of Black Forest cake.
Later that night, sitting in his study at home, Dr Otto Friedrich examined the dossier in detail. He was staggered. There it all was in black and white. The fact that her name hadn’t shown up in the Stasi files the government acquired after the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t necessarily mean that Helga Brun wasn’t implicated. It could just mean she was already in a position to suppress the evidence. But the one file she had not been able to suppress was the one Popov had managed to take back to Moscow when the mission of the KGB’s Dresden office was disbanded.
So what had ‘Mina’ done for the Russians?
‘Mein Gott!’ he exclaimed. He had always wondered about the way Helga Brun had come to power, how she had out manoeuvred Hans Bloch, when Bloch was chairman of the CDU. Deed done, Helga Brun herself became party chairman and subsequently chancellor. The whole game plan was laid out in the documents. An extremely rude word escaped his lips almost involuntarily. It was obvious what had happened. Helga Brun may have been following instructions from Moscow for years!
There was one document he still had to study, and this one was Russian. It was labelled ‘Bundestag: Chancellor’s speech’.
‘Good God!’ Dr Friedrich exclaimed again when he opened the file. There it all was in black and white. The full text of the chancellor’s speech which he himself had seen in draft. A diagonal bar across each page said SECRET. How had Popov’s people got hold of that? Only a handful of Cabinet members in Germany had seen it in advance.
He had been furious that morning when the chancellor gave that pledge on the asylum seekers, cursing her for ad-libbing.
‘We can do it! And I promise we will do what we can!’ appeared in bold red type in the document he had up on the screen.
Dr Friedrich picked up the phone. He’d have to report this.
He paused. Who was he going to report it to? To the chancellor? Not likely, given the circumstances. To the minister in charge of security? Well, he was the minister in charge of security. He could hardly report to himself. Who else then?
Another thought occurred to him. People would ask how he came to be in possession of this explosive information. Was he going to admit that a senior Russian official passed a data-stick to his own state secretary concealed in a slice of Black Forest cake?
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.