The dacha was owned by the SVR, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, but unusually it had never been allocated to a single individual senior officer, probably because it wasn’t quite big or impressive enough for the kinds of intimate gatherings most high-ranking officials liked to enjoy, when they would do a little overtime entertaining one or more of their mistresses, or perhaps sample the professional services of a bevy of carefully selected and fully trained prostitutes.
Working girls had a long history of employment with the KGB as low-level intelligence, and particularly as entrapment, agents. They were known in the trade as ‘swallows’ – an exceptionally apt nickname bearing in mind what they were required to do – while their male equivalents, trained to seduce either men or women, were called ‘ravens.’ Both swallows and ravens were given extensive training in the various arts and techniques of seduction and the operation of so-called ‘honeypots’ or ‘honeytraps,’ where they would entice suitable targets to locations that had been wired for audio and video, and where the subsequent events would be recorded for blackmail purposes.
The dacha was an older construction dating from the early 1970s that had been renovated and updated several times since it had been built. The building didn’t have the appeal of some of its more upmarket neighbours in the Rublevka area near the village of Zhukovka, some 15 miles west of the centre of Moscow, and tended to be employed for more utilitarian functions like awards ceremonies for small numbers of SVR officers, rest and recuperation for agents who had returned from the field, and the questioning of less important defectors. But what it did have that most of its neighbours didn’t was a 15-foot-high steel, concrete and brick wall topped with razor wire that entirely surrounded the building and the acre or so of ground that was a part of the property, and which gave it an extremely impressive level of privacy. The wall ensured that when the double solid steel gates had been closed behind their vehicles, and the senior officials who had been summoned to the meeting climbed out of their armoured Zil and Mercedes limousines with their heavily tinted windows, nobody outside the property could possibly see and identify them. And that was important for several reasons.
It wasn’t just SVR officers who had been ‘invited’ to attend that day. The unwritten guest list included two senior officers from Russian military intelligence, two from the GRU, three naval officers of flag rank, one of whom was a submariner, two senior Air Force officers and another two of matching rank from the Russian Army, one man from the very highest echelons of the FSB, Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoi Federatsii, Russia’s counter-intelligence unit, two senior government officials – a minister and his deputy – and four very senior scientists.
Somewhat analogous to the relationship between the British Secret Intelligence Service – SIS, responsible for espionage outside the United Kingdom – and the Security Service or MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence unit, the SVR and the FSB have frequently worked at cross purposes. Sometimes very cross purposes. The other entity in the mix was the GRU, which had the same remit as the SVR but concentrated on military, rather than civilian, espionage, although there was invariably a high degree of crossover between the two organizations.
To say that the composition of the assembled group was unusual for an ongoing operation was an understatement. Never before had so many specialists and senior officers and officials from such a large number of different organizations and disciplines been involved in a single covert project. But because of the complex and disparate nature of the operation, their individual expertise and experience had been deemed essential for its success.
What they were involved in had been set in train by somebody in the very highest levels of the Russian government, possibly even by the autocratic leader of the country himself, though none of them knew this for certain: they were all just following orders. It was, some of the participants privately thought, exactly the kind of idea that he would have come up with.
The project bore no security classification, nor even a formal name, because it was completely off the books. The SVR was nominally in charge of it, or at least the military aspects, but no filename or even a number had been allocated to it, because once a project was recorded and paperwork generated, there was always the possibility that word about it might spread and potentially leak.
So the very few documents that had so far been produced, because some basic paperwork was clearly essential just to keep track of things like dates and actions, had mostly been handwritten and then scanned onto the hard drive of a laptop computer that was devoid of all means of connecting to any network: it had no built-in network adapter, nor an Ethernet socket nor USB ports, and only a serial port for the scanner. After the documents had been transferred, the handwritten records had been destroyed by shredding and the resulting debris incinerated. Other notes of action had been prepared directly on the computer and saved to the hard disk.
When not being used at one of the infrequent meetings, the computer – which was additionally protected by a 12-digit password known to only two of the people involved in the project – was locked inside a safe that was itself bolted to the wall on the inside of a small closet manufactured entirely from reinforced concrete and with a steel door, located in the centre of the building.
Until about a week earlier the dacha had been permanently occupied by a mixed team of eight SVR and GRU guards, four from each organization, and working in pairs so that there were always two people on watch at any given time. The SVR and the GRU have never entirely seen eye to eye, and so the pairs of guards came either from the GRU or from the SVR, but never one person from each organization.
The new routine was very different. Now the guards were only drawn from the ranks of the SVR, and there were 15 troopers – almost double the previous number – working eight-hour shifts in groups of three, two troopers under the command of a non-commissioned officer, an NCO. The doors to both the dacha and the steel gates in the outer wall were all permanently locked unless a vehicle or person was actually entering or leaving the property. As far as physical security was concerned, it was difficult for any of the participants to envisage any further measures that they could now take.
The meetings were conducted with operational security very much in mind. With the single exception of the SVR general – general’naya – Dmitri Yasov, who was the nominal working head of the project, none of the members of the group were permitted paper or pens during the meetings, and the general only noted down information and decisions that were essential to the progress of the operation. All participants, including the general, were electronically scanned before entering the meeting room – the former library – in the dacha to ensure they were not carrying any form of recording equipment.
But although the project had no official nomenclature, for simple convenience the members had unofficially begun referring to it as the котел проект or the Kotel Proyekt, the Kotel Project, the Russian word meaning a ‘boiler’ or ‘cauldron’.
That day, the project members assembled in the anteroom drinking coffee or tea as their tastes dictated while they waited for the arrival of the last couple of people, the mood clearly subdued, and for good reason. Once the latecomers had arrived and collected their own drinks, they all filed one at a time into the meeting room, passing through the metal detectors and scanners as they did so. When they were all seated, the general – tall and completely bald, and with blue eyes and somewhat delicate features that contrasted with his heavy build – glanced around the long oblong table, then stood up, walked over to the open door through which they had entered, and closed and locked it.
The former library where they met was in the middle of the dacha and surrounded by other rooms, so there was no possibility of eavesdropping by anyone outside of the property armed with a laser microphone or other sophisticated listening equipment. Even so, once the door was locked the general switched on a white noise generator that produced sound at a sufficiently high volume to defeat any hidden microphones. Then he returned to his seat, sat down and opened the lid of the laptop computer in front of him. He pressed the start button and waited for the operating system to load.
Some of the participants had been talking quietly to their neighbours around the table, but as the general resumed his seat with one accord they fell silent and waited for him to speak. He waited until the laptop was running and the single large file entitled действия – Deystviya, meaning ‘actions’ – had opened on the screen in front of him. Then he cleared his throat and again looked around the table.
‘The situation,’ he began in Russian, his voice deep and gravelly, ‘is now critical.’