Kompromat Stinks?

Being a person with both a professional and a morbid interest in kompromat, or compromising materials, Thursday, the day I learned that I had made the Freelance Bureau's "Russiagate" list, was truly a dark day for me.


No, not because of the sudden realization that I had been under surveillance, or the bitter irony of having been on the receiving end of the kind of unsubstantiated material I often used to cite in my Moscow Times columns. Hell, that didn't bother me: My inclusion on the list, after all, means I've become a kind of honorary member of the "Russian elit?," whose members' private lives were, as the bureau put it in its "Russiagate" intro, "scandalously" infringed upon.


And guess whose name comes right after mine on the list?


Berezovsky Boris Abramovich, that's who! BAB and me, together f can it get much better than that?


No, what turned Thursday into Black Thursday was the quality of the kompromat on me. In a word, it stunk.


The spravka on me, which is headlined Iskhodnaya informatsiya, or "initial information," roughly covers a period between the end of 1993 and the end of 1994.


The document details, lovingly and accurately, the entrance-way and other features of the apartment building where I lived that year, not far from Sokol metro station and Peschanaya Ploshchad.


"The indicated apartment is located on the fourth story of an eight-story, three-entrance apartment building, through the second entrance," catalogs the document.


"The door at the [second] entrance is equipped with a coded lock. The indicated apartment is located on the left side of the floor as you get out of the elevator."


The document also accurately identifies my landlady at the time and her son, who owned the apartment, as well as the creepy middleman who arranged the rental (through a Moscow Times ad) and took a cut of the rent f each month.


The landlady, who was wonderfully nice, is described in the document as an employee of the GRU, or military intelligence (while she appeared to me to be retired, she did regale me with some of her adventures while working behind enemy lines during the war).


The middleman is described as being a colonel in the Federal Security Service, or FSB (something I myself suspected at the time f except that the agency was then known as the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service, or FSK).


The document, however, describes me as having been a Washington Post correspondent. In fact, I was The Washington Times' accredited correspondent that year.


It also cites "information of experts close to FSB circles" as saying that I had been an accredited Washington Post correspondent in the 1980s and that both I and "the employee of that newspaper Celestine Bohlen" were "connected to the CIA."


I've only once met Ms. Bohlen, who is a Moscow-based New York Times correspondent. We coincidentally showed up at Moskovsky Komsomolets at the same time on Oct. 5, 1993 f the day after its office was strafed by retreating White House "defenders."


I can assure one and all that I made no attempt to recruit her.


Even more surprisingly f to me, anyway f was the news that in 1993 and 1994, I shared my Peschanaya apartment with my Japanese wife and two children.


Somehow, I don't recall that marriage, but the real mystery is how I managed to squeeze in so much dating while taking care of the wife and kids.


"Bernstein lived at the above address with his family: his wife, a Japanese woman (possibly named Mariko) and two children of school age. Bernstein's wife participated in the activities of foreign religious missionary groups," the file reports.


Interestingly, another foreign correspondent in town, Richard Paddock, bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, has a Japanese-American wife named Mariko and two school-aged kids.


But while I've never met Paddock and I hear he has recently left Russia, those who know him tell me that his wife was hardly a religious proselytizer.


The document also has me meeting the landlady's son, a person I have never met, in Prague, a city I have never visited.


The document is particularly fun when it moves away from addresses and passport numbers and into profiling:


"Bernstein is characterized by his ne gative relationship to the existing system. He had wide connections among citizens of the U.S.S.R., [and] is sociable."


In fact, the Jonas Bernstein described in this document appears to be a composite American-expatriate-journalist type. But the implications of this are devastating f at least to me.


Does it mean that when one or another of my favorite rumor rags quotes a special services spravka saying that Oligarch X has $150 million in a Swiss bank account and an apartment in Trump Towers, that it might actually be referring to Oligarch Y, who has $200 million in a Liechtenstein bank and a villa on the Cote D'Azure?


If so, it's a sad day.


If you can't trust kompromat, who can you trust?


Jonas Bernstein is a senior analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.