FOR TWO WEEKS Finn criss-crosses southern Europe, from the Russian châteaux on the Côte d’Azur to private banking halls in Geneva, to a small and poor canton in Switzerland. His final stop, before departing the mainland of Europe on Bride of the Wind as the equinoctial storms set in, is Tegernsee where he discreetly sets up his hideaway in the pink house under the name of a brass-plate company domiciled in the Caribbean, which he had quietly created for himself while working in London. He is laying the ground for the work ahead.
The network he sets up could be described as ramshackle. It consists of one or two angry, self-pitying Russian billionaires, both wanted for imprisonment in Siberia; of money-laundering prosecutors and Swiss bankers; disgruntled KGB agents engaged in clan warfare; foreign intelligence malcontents from various countries; figures from the political fringes of the European Union who’ve been passed over for promotion or who are afraid of where the European Union is treading in its relations with Russia; private investigators, like Frank, who know the ins and outs of Europe’s clearing banks and offshore shell companies; and others on the fringes of the intelligence world, one or two of whom provide a small but significant insight into Finn’s quest, and the rest who talk a lot and say nothing. Many of these contacts have private motives, or grander geopolitical ideas that either crush them under the weight or distort their reason. A few are good, clear, honest people. These Finn treats as family.
He begins on that August night, after a day on trains bound for the south, at a party in Antibes, thrown by an acquaintance from Moscow in the 1990s. Boris Berezovsky, until a little over a year before the senior figure among the seven bankers who ruled Russia, is now firmly in exile in one of his many homes in the West, the grand Château de la Garoupe, where he nurses his dreams of a triumphant return.
On this night, however, Finn isn’t after information. He wants some of this cash that washes the Côte d’Azur more brightly than the phosphorescence on its beaches. What he wants is funding. Here, among the Russians disenchanted with Putin, he will find the cash that will pay for the lease in Tegernsee and fund the subsequent years of his investigations.
But he goes to Berezovsky’s party for a second reason. He knows his presence in the house of Putin’s enemy will filter back to Moscow, the Forest and the Kremlin. Even Berezovsky can’t invite two hundred and fifty guests without there being an informer among them. So Finn goes along to lay the ground for his reunion with me. He wants us, at the Forest, to know exactly where he is. He knows that they will send me after him.
Whether he finds any of the funds he needs from Berezovsky or from one of the many other billionaires, multimillionaires and also-rans at this party- or whether he takes a hat round and gets a sub from more than one of them- he doesn’t say.
But the next night he has dinner at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo with one of the guests from the night before. He is a Russian oil baron, Gennady Liakubsky, and Finn meets him along with one of Liakubsky’s cronies from the Russian underworld, and another man.
And this is where we at the Forest begin to pick him up on our radar. One of our SVR agents on the Côte d’Azur is a real-estate agent who deals in many of the high-end properties the Russian rich are buying. He has been at the party where Finn appeared and has put a tail on him.
And so I knew Finn was dining with Liakubsky and his mob friends that night.
Within twelve hours we had the photographs of this dinner back with us at the Forest; Liakubsky, in the company of a Russian mafioso recently released from prison and known as Yakutchik- ‘the little Yakut’–and another man, a Russian trader living in Geneva who calls himself Danny.
Finn is sitting at a private table at the Hermitage in Monte Carlo with five waiters for the four of them, who are drinking thousand-dollar bottles of wine decanted and poured by a sixth waiter. Finn is laughing and toasting with a billionaire thief and the best of the Russian underworld.
He’s in his element, relishing this role that will later that night or the next day engender that curious brand of guilt and sorrow that is always mixed with pride.
He’s telling filthy jokes and indulging in the back-slapping bonhomie with the best of them. But it is an unhappy union of a disgraced British spy and two thieves and a murderer, disguised as a convivial supper between colleagues.
‘I am taking their money; money stolen off the backs of the Russian people. These people stole it from other thieves and murderers, but ultimately it comes from the poor, the old, the veterans of war and Communist persecution. It comes from industrial production from the factories and mines and oilfields constructed from the blood and death of Stalin’s slaves. The thousands of pounds’ worth of wine we are pouring down our gullets like Coca-Cola is the blood of those men and women who worked under the lash fifty, sixty years ago to construct an industry which has been stolen from their children and their grandchildren.
‘This is Putin’s great public relations coup- to focus on such thieves as these- while silently seizing their ill-gotten gains, not for the benefit of the people who made it, but for a new set of oligarchs, the KGB, which is now taking shape in the Kremlin.
‘And me? How different am I? Here I am taking their stolen money in order to expose this new crime that I so passionately believe is now unfolding in the Kremlin. So, for me, the means justify the ends too. But do they? For me, but not for anyone else?
‘Sometimes, all we need to guard against is our own pious morality. But it’s hard to see that when you’re sitting at the rich man’s table with a bunch of crooks and killers.’
When I see Finn’s picture at the Forest the day after the dinner, I can hardly contain my excitement. He seems so close and I can feel his plan unfolding. The company he’s keeping doesn’t matter. I forgive Finn more easily than he forgives himself. There he is, the man who a little more than a year ago told me I could say he loved me. I smile again at the memory.
The whereabouts of Finn and these photographs of the company he’s keeping are so important to us that they arrive at the Forest a few hours later. It isn’t Liakubsky we are watching. Or the Little Yakut, just released from an American jail. Or Danny, the Russian trader from Geneva. It is Finn. The Forest is watching Finn in the hope he will lead us to Mikhail.
Gennady Liakubsky is thirty-eight years old. He was born in Komi out to the north-east of Moscow in western Siberia where there is nothing but tundra and oilfields, great winding rivers and the herds of reindeer that are still taken from one feeding ground to the next by the dwindling ethnic peoples of this inhospitable region.
As a student in the Engineering School in Moscow, Liakubsky had been a part-time informer for the KGB before perestroika in the 1980s. But then he’d seen the opportunity of marrying his qualifications with the new business opportunities that arose in the nineties. He’d traded on the Moscow stock exchange in any commodity he could get his hands on, but always looked east, where Russia’s money is born, to the oilfields and mines that are strewn across the vast, empty Siberian plains ten time zones wide that reach up eventually a few miles from America in the Bering Strait.
When Yeltsin began to auction off the state’s industrial property in 1996, Liakubsky was one of those who seized their chance. He bought oil production in Komi where his local KGB and mafia connections ensured a smooth transition, then branched out into a gold mine outside Yakutsk, the place where he struck up his partnership with the Little Yakut. A coal mine in the Kuzbass region was added, then iron mines, steel foundries and more oil. Like the others, Liakubsky amassed whatever he could get while the going was good. And like the others, he took his profits out of Russia to the West in a financial drain that has cost Russia up to five hundred billion dollars, all told. Bleeding the country was their insurance against the future.
But when Putin came to power in 2000, Liakubsky, unlike Boris Berezovsky, was one of those who prostrated himself to the new power. His château in France was not an exile’s home. He paid and paid the new administration in the Kremlin, he agreed to Putin’s new injunction to stay out of politics, he repatriated Russian art to St Petersburg from all around the world, and supported Putin’s pet projects in Petersburg. It is said he gave over twenty million dollars to the refurbishment of Putin’s home city and its palaces.
But even after all this, Liakubsky could never feel safe, as long as there were new, more trusted acolytes that Putin wished to put in control of the country’s wealth at the centre of power, in the Kremlin.
We knew at the Forest that Liakubsky, like all of his kind, spent a great deal of his resources amassing kompromat-black propaganda–against Putin and his clique. One day, who knows, possession of the President’s secrets, and those of his allies, might be all that stands between Liakubsky and a Siberian prison camp.
But Liakubsky was not alone in this. They all did it, they all still do it, as long as Putin and his KGB clan tighten the noose around Russia’s throat and are the power to be reckoned with. They support Putin’s political party, United Russia, which is now, six years later, the only real party; they pay up when asked. But always, always they continue their search for insurance.
And Finn, for Liakubsky, is just one more agent of his insurance, one brick in the wall of the kompromat, the black propaganda the oil baron needs. His financial contribution to Finn isn’t even petty cash for Liakubsky.
But we’re not watching Liakubsky, back at the Forest nor the Little Yakut, with his yellowed Asian features pinched from generations of Siberian cold and his string of murders behind him. Nor Danny the Geneva trader. We are watching Finn and I am being briefed to join with him again and find Mikhail, the enemy within.
After some financial arrangement has been reached with Liakubsky, the next morning Finn takes a train to Annecy. But in Annecy, we lose him. As I read now, I see the trail of Finn’s route at the moment it went dead for us.
Somehow and un-recounted by Finn, he makes his way to the Swiss border and, crossing without a passport through the deserted frontier post above Grenoble, he travels to Geneva.