THE BOOKSHELF: Spooks’ swayThe Role of Russian Espionage in Re-Shaping the West
Arthur Martirosyan writes that despite “the incomplete evidence, Harding’s hypothesis [the Russia controls Donald Trump and Boris Johnson through money and compromising information] is embraced enthusiastically by many. After all, it may very well be that for lack of direct evidence, the treasonous crime has gone unpunished. It will take time, but above all, political re-configurations in the U.S. and U.K. allowing new investigations to provide proof and refutations, to establish not the intent—which very few argue even in Russia—not the interference—which has been established—but the impact on political processes. This only means that the book will be in high demand for the foreseeable future especially among readers who are seeking data to confirm their conclusion that Putin somehow controls Trump and Johnson.”
Review of Luke Harding, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West (Harper, June 2020)
Luke Harding, a journalist with the Guardian and a prolific author of books, mostly Russia-related, but also about Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, published his latest saga,Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West as a sequel to his earlier text Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win (2017), before the release of the Russia report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the U.K. Parliament (ISC). The primary goal of Harding’s book is to highlight the obvious to the nearly 50 percent of Britons, according to a recent poll, who believe that Russia messed with British democracy, including Brexit, the Scottish referendum and the general elections. But the ISC report, just as Robert Mueller’s investigative report, which Harding called a “historical miss,” came as a disappointment to Harding after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his response had refused to investigate the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 EU referendum for the lack of evidence.
Shadow Stateis one of those books that can be extolled by one political camp and dismissed as a “fake” conspiracy theory by another. Harding tends to the hypothesis that Putin controls both U.S. President Donald Trump and Johnson as stooges through money and kompromat. This hypothesis has generated hype and a significant body of circumstantial evidence, and Harding scrupulously presents every bit of it. One of the central pieces is the dossier on then-candidate Trump, compiled by retired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. (Harding considers Steele to be “the most famous MI6 officer since James Bond,” even though two weeks after his book had been published, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary released declassified documents that raised further serious questions about the reliability of this controversial dossier.)
