This necessary book starts, as it must, with the Salisbury poisonings two years ago: the attempt by Russian military intelligence, the GRU, to assassinate one of their traitors, Sergei Skripal. They failed but they did kill Dawn Sturgess, an entirely innocent Wiltshire woman, and for a time wrecked ordinary life in a quiet cathedral town. Ludicrously, the two gormless suspects claimed they had gone to Salisbury during a bitter cold snap – the beast from the east – to inspect the cathedral, “famous for its 123-metre spire”.
Then our weird but brilliant nerd army, Bellingcat, went to work on their laptops and scoured Russia’s open and not-so-open media sources, and through dogged deduction managed to out the real names of the two suspects, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.
The critical detail in all this was the method, Novichok, a nerve agent only manufactured by Russia’s secret state. Anyone who has spent time in Russia will know that a hit of this kind could only happen with the say-so of the master of the Kremlin. Two years on, note the failure of western leaders to bring Vladimir Putin properly to account for the Salisbury poisonings.
In Shadow State, Luke Harding’s mission is to explain the reasons for this failure and tell the broader story of how the Kremlin has triumphed in the post-cold war era. Harding, the Guardian’s former Moscow correspondent, knows his snow on their boots. He was effectively expelled from Russia in 2011 for the crime of getting under the Kremlin’s skin, something too many Moscow correspondents fail to do. That episode led to his book, Mafia State, followed by works on the Litvinenko poisoning and on Trump-Russia, the bestseller Collusion. Shadow State reads like a thriller, but he hasn’t made it up.
Six months after the GRU men screwed up in Salisbury, their boss, Igor Korobov, died in mysterious circumstances. Harding interviews a former GRU officer, Viktor Suvorov, who says: “My spy instinct tells me that Korobov was murdered. Everyone sitting inside GRU would understand this, 125%.” If this all feels like a rejected Bond script, one should note Catherine Belton’s story in her book, Putin’s People, that the Russian president spent his formative years as a KGB officer, running far-left terrorists in the Red Army Faction active in West Germany from his base in Dresden in East Germany. Putin is only doing now what he knows best: running infiltration agents to sow chaos in the west.
Harding sets out the evidence that Putin’s best agent could be the president of the United States; that Donald Trump is, perhaps, the biggest, the most powerful traitor in modern history. He talks to Christopher Steele, MI6’s former top officer in Moscow, whose infamous report points to a number of sources saying Trump hired two sex workers to urinate on the bed in the fancy Moscow hotel where the Obamas had once stayed. Trump, when challenged about this, hit back: “I’m a germaphobe.” True, but he could have enjoyed the show while sitting well back.
Harding’s thriller-for-real gets bleaker yet when he sets out the scene for the summit between Putin and Trump in Helsinki in 2018. He writes: “As every sentient human being was aware, Trump denied collusion with Russia. And yet his behaviour with Putin seemed, well, furtive. There was no other word for it.”
Against all the precedents, the White House side took no notes, had no aides and hoovered up the evidence of what Vladimir and Donald talked about. One journalist asked Putin if he or the Russian government had compromising material on Trump. Putin replied that such a suggestion was “utter nonsense” and gave the reporter an eye-roll.
Does the Russian secret state collect sex kompromat? Da, da, da. For example, Shadow State cites the case of Yuri Skuratov, the Russian prosecutor-general, who resembled the man filmed in bed with two sex workers. The secret policeman who went on TV to say the man in the grainy video looked like Skuratov? That would be Putin, just before he became prime minister in 1999.
The storytelling gets murkier when the backdrop moves to Ukraine. Knowing that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was a director of Burisma, a Ukrainian company, Team Trump started creating a case that Joe Biden as Obama’s vice-president had sought the dismissal of a prosecutor who was looking into Burisma. Black is white, white black, the clock is striking 13. Joe Biden and the US ambassador to Kyiv did call for the prosecutor’s dismissal because he was regarded as corrupt and not doing a proper job. When Trump’s shenanigans came to light, the Republican majority in the Senate saved him from impeachment.
The charge against Trump – treason – stands.
If the Kremlin interfered in the US presidential election in 2016, as the CIA believes, did Putin fix the Brexit vote, too? So we thought we voted for Brexit but it was, you could say, Kremxit all along? The ex-MI6 man Steele suggests to Harding he thinks the shadow state did interfere, and he told the British security services that. Then nothing happened. The British state under first Theresa May, then Boris Johnson has ignored the evidence on Kremxit.
Anxieties may be soothed in the unpublished Russia report by parliament’s intelligence committee, but for the last six months, Mr Johnson has sat on it. While the British public is kept in the dark, it’s no consolation that the master of the Kremlin has a working knowledge of everything that might be in it.
John Sweeney is a former investigative journalist for the Observer and Panorama. His thriller, The Useful Idiot, is published by Silvertail Books