This is a story I’ve never told before.
I once appeared on Russian state TV. The subject was spies.
I’d been writing about Russia in my novels and for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal since Brezhnev was in charge. RT TV is a propaganda outlet for the Russian government that used to be broadcast live from a slick American-style TV studio in New York City around the world—even, I was told, into Russia. This was in June 2010, and I’d been asked to come discuss the arrest of 10 Russian “sleeper agents” in the U.S.
I’m not sure what mischievous instinct came over me—maybe it was knowing that, being on a propaganda medium, there were things we weren’t supposed to discuss—but, during the interview, I decided to talk about how corrupt the Russian secret services—the G.R.U., the F.S.B., and the S.V.R.—were under Vladimir Putin. I also referred to sources I had in the C.I.A. who confirmed my allegations.
What could the Russians do to me, after all? I thought with a kind of glee. I was in Manhattan.
The anchorwoman tried to cut me off several times, but I kept going, until finally, in exasperation, she abruptly ended the segment.
I was never invited back on.
A few months later, one Monday morning, I went into my office on Commonwealth Avenue, a few blocks from where I live in Boston. Sitting down at my computer, I reached for my mouse and noticed it was missing. Annoying, and hard to work without. I looked around, wondering if it had slid onto the floor or somehow gotten misplaced by the cleaners, but no luck.
I called my assistant and asked her if she knew where my mouse might be. She said she had no idea, but why didn’t I just use hers? I went to her desk, but hers was missing, too. Even stranger. It seemed that someone had been in my office and for some reason had filched the computer mice, and maybe valuables, although I realized I didn’t really have anything of value there worth stealing, apart from maybe my backup drives. That was when I noticed that those were missing, too.
So I called a private-investigator source, who was also a friend, and asked him to help me make sense of a break-in where nothing of monetary value was taken except my computer-backup drives and, for some reason, my mice.
And how, I wondered, could anyone have gotten into my office in the first place? It was located on the fifth floor of an apartment building, and in order to enter the building, you had to punch in a numeric code on a keypad-entry system on the front door. To get into my office (a converted apartment), you had to then unlock another door.
My P.I. friend asked me to take pictures of the building’s access-control system and the locks on my office door and e-mail them to him. A few minutes after I did, he replied with a link to the keypad-entry system’s owner’s manual, which included the owner’s override code—which still worked, I quickly determined. And the lock on my office door, he told me, could be picked by any competent security professional in a matter of minutes, at the most.
So that took care of the how. Leaving only the why, or the who. I called an intelligence expert I knew who specialized in Russian matters and left him a voicemail telling him what had happened. I expected to be ignored—this guy worked on Russian organized crime and had far more important things to worry about than a break-in in the office of a Boston-based thriller writer. But half an hour later he called back and asked if he could come over to speak with me.
When he arrived at my office, he sat down and immediately asked if I remembered appearing on Russian state TV, talking about the Russian security services. “You talked about how corrupt the G.R.U. is,” he reminded me. “How corrupt Putin himself is.”
I told him I remembered well. He shook his head, smiling. “Maybe not so wise,” he said dryly. He told me that the G.R.U. and the S.V.R. had long arms and weren’t averse to occasionally operating within the borders of the U.S. It meant that once in a while they engaged the services of Russian émigrés in the United States to do their dirty work. They knew people who were skilled at black-bag jobs and could be relied upon to do them discreetly and efficiently.
But why target me, a mere writer?
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “You embarrassed the G.R.U. You pissed them off. Plus, you mentioned that you had sources within the C.I.A. They probably wanted to know more about those sources. That’s why they took your backup drives.”
“O.K.,” I said. “But why take the mice?”
He paused, smiling. “So you’d know they’d been there,” he said.
He knew I’d been to Russia a number of times and advised me not to return. The Russians were always looking for American citizens to arrest on trumped-up charges. So when I wrote a Moscow sequence in my latest novel, The Oligarch’s Daughter, I followed his advice, opting instead to interview Russians who lived in Moscow and Americans who had recently visited.
Under Putin—who bristled when a U.S. president dismissed Russia as a “regional power”—the Kremlin seems determined to flex its reach, even if that means swiping the mice of an ink-stained wretch in Boston. It’s true that whenever I sit down at my desk, I think about the missing backup drives. But here’s the thing about efforts to intimidate writers: they just give us more to write about.
Joseph Finder is the author of 17 suspense novels
