Chapters (58)
- Cover
- Also by Oliver Harris
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- FIFTY
- FIFTY-ONE
- FIFTY-TWO
- FIFTY-THREE
- FIFTY-FOUR
- FIFTY-FIVE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
‘On 22 February 1999, the eve of Russia’s annual Defenders of the Fatherland holiday, the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the creation of a new information operations force combining cyber troops and propagandists. They had sophisticated means of tracking the morale of rival military forces. The internet allowed them to extend this to entire nations. Their sensitivity to national psyches allowed them to craft tailor-made psychological campaigns. Vishinsky’s GRU textbook even advised different approaches to waging psy warfare on different NATO members: “abstract-logical” propaganda for the Germans, visuals for the French and Americans, etc. Around the turn of the millennium it stopped being simply a tool of Kremlin policy and began to affect the policy itself. Vishinsky was advising Putin directly.
‘It was around this time Putin changed his tone. No longer a pragmatic realist when it came to world affairs, now he became Mr Nationalist. He got an ideology: reclaiming the former Soviet Union. Vishinsky produced speeches and propaganda along these lines and it played well. It was a narrative, a national goal: make Russia great again. It secured access to a lot of oil and gas. And he had persuaded Putin that they could compete, thanks to this new unit.’
Joanna talked through the dawn, but never told me what she intended to do about all this, or who she was working with at Shefford and what they had to do with Vishinsky. So I had no idea how a man shot in Astana might or might not connect to it all.
Budget hidden in Requirements and Production, but huge. Staff size one hundred and twenty. Some definitely came from GCHQ. Others were academics … The security set-up suggests it was operational. It wasn’t just producing papers.
Closed down. Someone inside Six saw to that. I was curious about where their sympathies lay.
The report from air traffic control gave us Vishinsky landing at a military airfield in Koyandy, north of Astana, at 10 a.m. on 22 November. I opened my laptop, checked what had been trending on Kazakh social media in the last twenty-four hours. The President’s daughter had been chalked up as judge on SuperstarKZ; the regional governor of Mangystau had proposed bird watching as a potential tourist attraction; a Russian woman had been raped in northern Kazakhstan, close to the Russian border.
Several news sites carried high-definition photos of the victim’s face, bruised and tear-stained. Her name was Yulia Vectisishina, and she lived in Schuchinsk. A lot of people with Russian surnames were sharing the story across various platforms, connecting it to an attack a few miles away in Petropavl, a majority-Russian village, where a cultural centre had been burned down.
The woman was Russian, the rapists were alleged to be ethnic Kazakh. People were posting photos of angry crowds. They held signs that said: Kazakhstan is Russia.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘How directly does the Kremlin direct this unit?’ Walker asked.