Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Sixteen

A court in St. Petersburg sentenced Professor Smith (* note 1) to three years imprisonment for the crimes he had been found guilty of. The British national had been granted the speediest of trials and it was one where he had little rights within. Justice for historical revisionism which defamed the Russian people, like it was for those charged with corruption and treason, was only going to have one outcome. That outcome was to be found guilty and to be punished accordingly. The history lecturer who had openly stated that Soviet soldiers during the Great Patriotic War had committed war crimes – the rape of tens of thousands of women & girls in Germany being foremost among them – was only one of many caught up in this latest crackdown which was a small part of a campaign of whipping up nationalistic feelings nationwide. His was the most high-profile case though with Professor Smith being an international figure. He had said these things before Putin, ruling by decree in all but name, had declared such comments to be a crime. This retroactive punishment was therefore the highlight of foreign attention upon the issue of the detention of Professor Smith. Russia was breaking with so many international norms with this behaviour. Other dictatorial regimes would have been a bit more creative and tried to hide behind lies with regard to procedural matters in doing something like this. Putin was doing no such thing. There were dozens of cases such as this where the actions taken by the Soviet Union and the modern Russian Federation which had been criticised in academia and the media afterwards were reacted to with arrests made and prison sentences given to those who had made such statements. The corruption charges against others, plus the treason accusations with regard to those supposedly behind the Medvedev assassination, were also working their way at rapid pace through the courts. There were other foreign nationals caught up in this though they in almost all other cases concerned those from former Soviet states. The Briton given three years in prison for something such as this, and the manner in which it was done, shone the international spotlight on Russia though. There had been a flight of foreign nationals out of Russia following Putin’s declaration of martial law and this only increased with events such as the conviction of Professor Smith. Many countries made public statements decrying such an act and once again urged their citizens to leave Russia. Few consulates in cities other than Moscow where Western diplomatic facilities where remained open now and at the embassies in the capital, there was only skeleton representation after non-essential staff and all family members had left. Employees of non-governmental organisations and businesses which were left operating within Russia generally followed this advice. Russia wasn’t a safe place to be for Westerners to be.

The Brown government in London protested as much as it possibly could to what happened with Professor Smith. The whole thing was recognised fully for what it was. This was highlighted in public statements, comments to the media, and remarks made in Parliament. Nothing could be done for him though. The pressure was kept up to keep international attention on Russia while at the same time make sure that no other Briton ended up facing a similar fate. In response, the prime minister had his government expel a multitude of Russian diplomats and instructed his foreign secretary to begin an extension to international efforts to punish the Kremlin for the actions taken here and with other issues. Miliband got to work on that though by this stage there were few things left that could be done where there would be multinational agreement to act any further than already done. Russia was still exporting oil and gas but that was limited and ‘complications among allies’ meant that it would continue to do so to several countries for the time being. At the same time, there were further matters when it come to Russian activities which concerned the Brown government. The exile community centred on London – those who had been in Britain for some time and the new arrivals – continued to make a lot of noise as well as engaging in disputes between themselves. They had the attention of the media plus many members of Parliament and quite honestly revelled in that too. The prime minister referred (in private) to the two groupings as ‘Berezovsky’s mob’ and ‘Nemtsov’s circle’. There were others but these were the two primary gatherings of Russians who used London as a base of operations to not just speak out against the Kremlin but actively plot and scheme against Putin to bring him down. Outside of these exiles themselves, they had their supporters and their critics. Among the latter, there was a lot of open displeasure from the critics at the actions taken by the exiles, especially Berezovsky’s mob. Saying and doing what they did naturally attracted the attention of Moscow. Kozak really was a far different character from his predecessor Lavrov: the new foreign minister issued threats against these people in response to their open talk of regime change. Moreover, he also repeated earlier warnings over the ‘dire consequences’ which Britain would suffer if any of these plotted actions spoken about took place with a base of operations for them being London. Some of those diplomats expelled from the Russian embassy were suspected of spying upon these exiles while another was strongly suspected to be preparing to kill Berezovsky within days of his forced expulsion from the country. Both groups of exiles were considered by the Brown government to be in very real danger. At Heathrow Airport, another suspected Russian hitman, this time without diplomatic cover and posing as a Belorussian tourist, was detained and put back on a flight to Moscow. MI-5 and the Met. Police found numbers of their officers pulled from anti-terror tasks to safeguard the lives of these opponents of the Kremlin. For one of those police officers, the end result for him personally would be fatal.

Detective Constable Jones (* note 2) was shot and killed on November 12th. The police officer was with the Met.’s Counter-Terrorism Command – also known as SO15, this element of Specialist Operations dealt with espionage matters too – and was an accidental crossfire victim of a shooting incident between a member of Berezovsky’s mob and a gunman sent by the Kremlin. DC Jones was unarmed when killed. The married officer with two young children received urgent medial attention but died in hospital from gunshot wounds; a bodyguard for the exile in question was also killed in this shootout in leafy Berkshire. As to the gunman, he was an SVR officer who’d entered the country on a false Ukrainian passport and got back out on a Slovakian one despite the best efforts of the British authorities to catch him. The entry and egress concerning him was the only part of this SVR mission which went to plan. Russia’s foreign intelligence agency was playing big with many tasks undertaken ranging from activities in Britain to elsewhere in the world too. That Chappaqua Connection was where it remained having most success yet there had been a recent expansion in scale of operations. The SVR had people in America and others elsewhere throughout Europe. Some were gathering intelligence while others were working to sew discord among the West in their standoff with Russia. Operations were going wrong in many areas despite many assurances given to the Kremlin that they were meeting success. The SVR was punching above its weight: this wasn’t the KGB of the Cold War era in terms of capability no matter how many boasts were made back in Moscow. The shooting in Britain was designed as ‘clean’ operation with a big payoff; that didn’t include the killing of DC Jones. The failure here would have many consequences in international relations though also later down the line for SVR operations through the coming months.


Imprisoning Professor Smith and shooting DC Jones did the Kremlin no favours in more than just Anglo-Russian relations. Britain was absolutely furious and the scale of public anger they whipped up was in many ways similar to what they were trying to achieve at home with their own people. That certainly wasn’t an intention of Putin. Nor was causing the diplomatic actions and military readiness preparations afterwards.

Senior British politicians have the attachment ‘the Right Honourable’ after their name when printed in official documents. To many people, whether they were honourable was a matter of contention! However, the point was that those considered to be such were because they were members of the Privy Council. Members of the government and the top ranks opposition were all technically advisers to the monarch who remained head of state. Membership of the Privy Council wasn’t a sinecure post: it was rather significant. Ministers shared information with their shadows with the other parties on Privy Council terms. This was done because the opposition was meant to be a government-in-waiting and there were things that their leaders should know. What they were informed of wasn’t meant to be used for petty party politics. Through the year, as events in Russia defied all previous worst fears, Brown authorised the extension of information sharing with the opposition through the Privy Council on matters relating to events there which affected Britain; Blair had done the same in the lead-up to the Iraq War. David Cameron and Nick Clegg each agreed to Brown’s request that these matters remain confidential especially since they concerned the highest matters of state. Shadow spokespeople with foreign, defence, home affairs and also national security briefs met with their counterparts from the Brown government or were briefed by civil servants. Despite the promises given by the leaders of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to the Labour leader, there were leaks made from their teams. These were unattributable to those involved and thus came with plausible deniability. Moreover, in several exchanges of unpleasantness behind the scenes, there came counter-allegations that the members of the Brown government were using events concerning Russia for their own end too and making leaks of their own. The acrimony over these leaks brought about an end to much of the information sharing beyond the basics by early November though the shooting of DC Jones the saw a course change and further meeting of Brown, Cameron and Clegg where they all once agreed to cut out the partisanship at a time like this. The country would be going to the polls next year and it didn’t look like before then the Russia issue was just going to vanish into the night. Admiral Lord West, Labour’s minister of state for security & counter-terrorism, established a good working relationship with his Conservative shadow in the form of Baroness Neville-Jones in the aftermath of the killing of DC Jones. At the other end of the scale of what was meant to be non-partisan cooperation on matters of national importance, the relationship between Bob Ainsworth and Liam Fox was fraught with continued acrimony.

Fox was the shadow defence secretary and was informed by Ainsworth ahead of the announcement that the Royal Navy was going to postpone next year’s planned refit of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. This exchange of information was done to build cross-party support. From the Fox camp, there came comment made the very next day in anonymous terms in a newspaper article with regard to Conservative urging to do just this in light of international tensions where Russian military exercises had been conducted in the forceful manner that they had been against Britain. The political interpretation was that the Conservatives were arguing that this should be done and it looked to Labour that once the announcement was made that this was being done, Fox could claim that the Conservatives had forced this to occur. Brown made an angry call to Cameron with the latter denying that this had been the way of things; he said that the Conservatives weren’t playing politics with Britain’s national security. In response, Ainsworth would no longer meet Fox personally and instead do everything through civil servants. He made his announcement to the House of Commons concerning the matter of the Illustrious’ delayed refit and commented that this was a ‘reasonable precaution’. Fox stood up in reply to the statement and questioned whether the government was going to bring the Fleet Air Arm’s Sea Harriers back out of storage and fly them from that carrier and the others in service instead of just the RAF’s ground attack Harriers. That hadn’t been covered in the Privy Council meetings and was a valid question… but it was all politics really. The whole issue over a delayed refit of one small aircraft carrier and which aircraft would fly from it ignited a political storm which on the face of it, it really shouldn’t have. Journalists were then briefed on the background of the dispute between the minister and his shadow here, thus forcing out into the open the whole series of inter-party cooperation behind the scenes on the matter of Britain’s readiness to meet Russia’s aggressive behaviour. In turn, Russia declared the whole Illustrious matter to be ‘provocative’ and a ‘challenge which would be met’. Despite all of this domestic political rancour, the prime minister was meeting with Cameron and Clegg again, plus authorising more disclosures of information to them, before the end of the month once again concerning Russia. This was to do with the late 2009 simultaneous situations in both the Baltic States and the Ukraine.



(* note 1) - fictional person, placeholder name
(* note 2) - as above