LUKE HARDING

Three weeks after the killing, I got a letter from British Airways saying, Dear Mr. Harding, we regret to inform you that the plane you were travelling on was contaminated with radioactive poison. If you have any concerns, ring NHS Direct. So I called NHS Direct, and of course you’re in this awful phone hell queue. I eventually hung up, realizing there wasn’t a big plane in option.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is British journalist Luke Harding. After graduating from Oxford University, where he edited the student newspaper, The Cherwell, Luke went on to work at the Evening Argus and the Daily Mail before joining The Guardian in 1996, where he continues to work today. He has lived in and reported from Delhi, Berlin, and Moscow, and has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. In 2014, he was the recipient of the James Cameron Prize for his work on Russia, Ukraine, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, and two of his books on these subjects have been turned into films, The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange, and Snowden with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which was directed by Oliver Stone. More recently, Luke’s book about Alexander Litvinenko, a very expensive poison, was dramatised by playwright Lucy Preble and performed at the Old Vic Theatre, where it won this year’s Best New Play at the Critics Circle Awards. And then there’s his latest book, Shadow State, Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, which is currently residing well-thumbed on my bedside table. Luke Harding, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Thank you, Laura. Great to be with you.

It’s a pretty exciting time to be a foreign correspondent, isn’t it? Was it always this exciting, or has the advent of social media and constant news meant that we now have more detailed access to it?

I think it’s always been pretty exciting. It’s something I long wanted to do. It seemed more fun than sitting at a desk in London. Funny enough, I was rewatching last night the famous Princess Diana Panorama interview, which took me back. I spent a year for The Guardian after her death in 1997, basically following Prince Charles around the world on his jet and his various state trips to places like South Africa and Sri Lanka and Nepal, seeing foreign correspondents literally wearing cream-colored linen suits in faraway places. And I thought, this is what I want to do.

So you wanted to be a foreign correspondent from the very beginning or just once you were following Charles around?

Well, I’d always had a kind of strong drive towards foreign countries. I guess I consider myself an internationalist. I went to an international sixth form college in Wales, studied the International Baccalaureate, spent a year out in India. So yeah, there was a kind of restlessness. I mean, the Germans, they have a great way of conceptualising it because there’s Heimweh, which everyone understands, which is, I guess you can translate as homesickness, the desire to be rooted in one place back with your family and so on. But there’s an antonym to that. The Germans also have a concept called Fernweh, which is the desire to be far away from everyday normality. And throughout my life, throughout my career, I’ve felt Fernweh really, really strongly. And it’s shaped my professional life and it’s shaped my personal life too with my wife Phoebe and our kids. We’ve spent many years living abroad in various countries, learning languages, having experiences and so on. And so I don’t know if that makes me a rootless cosmopolitan, Laura or not, but maybe I am a rootless cosmopolitan at heart.

Well, let’s get started with your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yes. Well, this is an extract from a notebook I kept when I was in Masuri Sharif in northern Afghanistan in November of 2001, covering what at the time looked like the end of the Taliban.

They arrived in darkness, then sat until dawn in the desert. The Taliban’s elite foreign fighters were supposed to fight until the death, but early yesterday morning they packed into five open trucks and three pickups and headed east out of Kunduz in a swirl of choking dust. At 3 a.m. they arrived unannounced on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan’s northern city. They waited. As we set off from Mazar early yesterday, we had no idea they were there. The road out of the city seemed unusually frantic. We passed a checkpoint manned by opposition fighters and dozens of jeeps packed with soldiers. We kept going. And then, 200 yards ahead of us in the desert were hundreds of soldiers in black turbans, sitting placidly among the dunes in neatly spaced groups. Some of them were asleep in black tents. A few were dozing. Others stretched in the morning sunshine. Taliban! my driver shouted. He spun the car around. We paused a moment. The local opposition commander, Gulam Saki, came to talk to us. There are 400 of them. Only 30 of them are Afghan. The rest are foreigners, he said. Some of them are Pakistanis and Chechens. They came overnight from Kunduz. They still have their weapons. They have agreed to surrender. Are there any Arabs among them, I asked? We don’t know, he said. Probably. The Taliban commander, who had been negotiating with his opposite number, the modalities of surrender, tapped on our window. He was dressed in a green turban and a blanket. And his dark eyes seemed streaked with coal. He says it is time to leave, Gullamsaki said. When Mullah Mohammed Omar founded the Taliban seven years ago with only 30 fighters, he could have anticipated neither his movement’s extraordinary success, nor the bleak and rapid manner of its undoing. The Taliban are no longer a pan-Afghan force, merely a small provincial army presiding over a rapidly shrinking southern empire. The utopian experiment that was the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan ended yesterday in a wilderness of shimmering desert and telegraph poles.

So you were watching the Taliban surrender. When you went over there, did you know that was what was going to be happening?

No, Laura, I didn’t. I mean, it’s actually the whole episode is quite poignant for me. I mean, just to explain, I was the Guardian’s South Asia bureau chief, so I pitched up in Delhi with my family in 2000, and had been to Afghanistan a couple of times during a period when it had really fallen off the map. Nobody was going there. Nobody was interested. The Taliban were in control. They were running Kabul. Paradoxically, it was relatively safe and secure, and I traveled all around the country writing about culture, writing about education, and so on. And then, of course, after 9-11, Afghanistan became the epicenter of world events, and there was a US-led invasion. And I, like all journalists, spent quite a long time in Pakistan trying to get in, and eventually then drove up through the Khyber Pass up to Kabul. And I kept going. I was told to go to the north and ended up walking through the Salang Tunnel, which is the sort of mountainous tunnel that had been blown up with my flat jacket, managing to pick up a vehicle at the other side, then going up to Mazar. And this particular moment was important. I mean, it was both the end of the Taliban, but also, I’ve done a lot of war and kind of death reporting, if you like, in my career. But what happened subsequently, your extract stops, but the Taliban surrendered, were kept in this sort of Beaujolais-style castle. And after a day or two, they broke out. They broke out. Some of them had actually hidden grenades. They managed to see some weapons. They had a firefight. They killed a CIA officer. The SAS were involved. I, meanwhile, was at the front line. At one point, I was reported dead because I hadn’t been seen. And Newsweek reported that I had been killed. And I went and reported on this kind of gruesome siege. And after about three, four days, the Taliban finally surrendered. And I remember going into the courtyard and counting about 150 bodies of dead Taliban soldiers. I mean, some survived. Some were dying in front of me of hypothermia. They were a mixture. They were the kind of Taliban’s international brigade. And it was strange and it was savage. And it took place against this astonishing Afghan landscape, which is a mixture of kind of desert and high mountain, beautiful sort of turquoise, jade-coloured rivers. And in the midst of this war, this kind of astonishing war where at the time there seemed to be only one outcome, which is the US, the UK would prevail. But of course, what we now know is that the Taliban, my obituary of them, if you like, was premature. And they came creeping back and they now control much of the country. And just the last thing to say is that when I was there, I went back a couple of times after that trip, I sort of had this fantasy that I’d come back with my kids as teenagers, you know, sort of 10, 15 years later, and we would travel around as hippies used to do. Because Kabul used to be on the hippie trail. You go to Afghanistan from Iran en route to India, take drugs and enjoy the good times. And of course, that never happened. And when I got back to Delhi after this experience in Mazar and in Afghanistan, being not dead, I think I probably was suffering from post-traumatic something or other. I mean, war does strange things to you. I mean, first and foremost, it’s terrible for the people, for the civilians who are in it. But as a sort of war journalist, it makes you experience life in quite a hyper way. And coming off that ride, it’s like an adrenaline ride or a sort of drug trip. You do feel kind of quite strange. And it took me a few months, I think, looking back to get back to normal.

So did that put you off going back into something as dangerous as that, back into the middle of things?

Well, actually, I did. I mean, I did a lot of war. I mean, I did all of George W. Bush’s wars in the noughties. So having done Afghanistan and survived and written some dispatches from there, I then did, you know, Baghdad. I was in Iraq until it got too dangerous. And one of my colleagues was kidnapped. And then I stopped going. But I was rotating in and out of Iraq and then subsequently brought on the war in Georgia in 2008, Libya in 2011, then Ukraine most recently in 2014. So, I mean.

So the shock didn’t last that long.

Well, it’s not that. The strange thing is war in a way is, I mean, this sounds perverse, but perhaps enjoyable is the wrong word. But if you’re a writer, if you’re a reporter, it’s very compelling because it’s actually quite easy to report about war. I mean, you don’t need to kind of phone a press officer. You just describe what you see. And the front lines change all the time. So every day you have to kind of drive out, see what’s going on, talk to people, return back and then file your dispatch. And what I tried to do always was not to write about myself, but to write about civilians, innocents caught up in this and the kind of pity of their situation. And am I done with it? I probably am done with it. But if I were asked to do it again, I would probably agree.

OK, time for another offcut. Tell us about this one, please.

Well, this is a clip of a novel or a piece of autofiction I was writing when I was in India during my year out in May, June, April, May 1987.

Today was stool analysis. Across the street in the laboratory, a room containing one microscope, a flat tube and a visual display promoting healthy childcare, ramen was to spend the day examining shit. Most of the shit in Kandari was produced by the menfolk of the village on the side of the road. Ramen samples had been wrapped in tea leaves. One of the children had recently been adopted by a large worm and his stomach was swollen like a tire. It was ramen’s job to check that none of the other villagers would go the same way. Through the microscope, air bubbles and algae competed for scrutiny. Some worm eggs showed up in his samples. Ramen marked his observations in a notebook. Later that evening, after rice cakes and coconut stew, ramen took a stroll. Kandari’s main importance was as a chai stop for the buses heading further up the mountains. Men would climb out of the bus into the foreground of the hotel to urinate on the fence round the back and to buy chai. Ramen watched the hotel owner pour the liquid from a dented metal container into a collection of glasses. And then he saw a whaling family group, newly arrived. Inside the clinic, an emaciated peasant was stretched out on the table. The laboratory staff were holding him down. One of them inserted a plastic funnel into his mouth and poured in water. The man had swallowed pesticide. The room smelt of excrement. Ramen watched through the doorway with a crowd from the village. They had come from the chai stall to watch. Under a single electric bulb, a health worker danced around the trembling man checking his pupils. By 9pm, the clinic smelled so badly that the peasant’s new wife, an anemic girl of 17, was carried out by her relatives. Shortly afterwards, the shuddering stopped and the man died. Ramen had never seen death before. He ran out into the street and vomited in the tea bushes. Afterwards, he felt ashamed.

So this was written as fiction. Was this something you observed for yourself when you were in India? Or was this purely a figment of your imagination?

No, no, this happened for real. So I went to India after sixth form and spent about five months in Tamil Nadu near Kodi Kanal, helping out in this kind of medical centre. I think probably I was pretty useless at everything, including stool analysis. That really wasn’t my forte. But yeah, and this was just one of those sort of sad things that happened. But it was the first time, I mean, having just talked about seeing a lot of dead bodies in Afghanistan, it was the first time I had seen someone die at age 18. And it sort of stuck with me. So the incident was there. But also, I mean, I don’t think it’s a great piece of work. And the novel really spluttered out after about 10,000 words. I didn’t complete it. But I guess at that point, I was sort of experimenting with creative writing. I was trying to figure out what genre to write in, actually. And whether you make stuff out completely, whether you lightly fictionalise, what licence you can take with events around you and with reality. And what’s interesting was I did find my genre. And in the end, my genre was nonfiction rather than fiction. And by nonfiction, particularly kind of what you might call, I guess, novelised nonfiction, which is not to say that it’s not true. I mean, everything I write is true. The quotes, the sources, whether it’s Edward Snowden or Putin’s Russia or whatever, it’s all true. But you take novel style techniques to make sure that the reader is engaged and that you’re kind of entertaining and vivid. And I guess I’m sort of playing with detail there. But gosh, would I write another novel? I don’t think I would, actually. And actually, Laura, why write fiction when our reality at the moment is so twisted and strange and surreal? I mean, you know, an orange property developer becomes president of the United States and is currently refusing to leave the Oval Office and pretending goodbye Lenin style that he won. So I think the best stories are true. And that was something that I would later conclude for myself.

Right, let’s have another offcut now. What’s this one?

Oh, well, OK, I’m slightly ashamed of this one. This is from May 1988 from the Oxford student newspaper, the Charwell, where for that term I was John Evelyn, which is the paper’s gossip columnist writing gossip across the university.

Headline. Grass but no oats. Michael Gove’s post-presidential career seems to be going rather limp. As Evelyn was reminded from an intimate source, old stallions don’t die, they just lose their sex appeal. This probably explains Gove’s current macho behavior in his attempt to win back the love of union groupie Marion Gilchrist. Gilchrist packed in poor Gove just as his term as president ended and is now hotly debated by stripling Duncan Penny. Penny, who was recently voted in Corpus as JCR Penis, is another one of those eager union whippets who just happened to get in grunting Gove’s way. At a showdown on Friday night, Gove’s jealousy got the better of him and he scrambled egg all over Penis’s hair. Penis managed to respond by reaching for his fridge and splattering the Honorable Gentleman with a tomato. In a fit of Hulk-Man rage, Gove broke into Penis’s room at two in the morning and firehosed his sleeping body. Unfortunately, Gove somehow was unable to hit the mark and Penny wasn’t aroused. Mr Gove was last seen by Evelyn on Sunday night, car-hopping in Oriole Square. This week, John Evelyn brings you one of the most poncified, absurd anachronisms it has ever been my desire to avoid. Raymond Edwards. Monday Club hack and Bloodsports propagandist. Raymond can often be seen in his bowtie and tails, strolling very straight back through the Union as if he’s got a poker up his arse. The bar staff there hate him so much they spike his drinks. Our hero’s first move when he came to Oxford was to join the Monday Club. But he submitted an article for the Club newspaper which was so far right, even for that society, that it had to be censored by the Club’s president Giles Dixon. Unperturbed, Edwards quickly wangled for himself a post on the Monday Club committee as Beagling Rep, a spurious sinecure invented this term. Poor Raymond has two chips on his shoulder. First, that his name is Ray Edwards, instead of something much grander. The second, that he comes from some gnome hamlet near Blackpool of which nobody’s ever heard. To countenance this, Raymond claims that his father is commander of the Ninth Dragoon Guards, but no one’s ever heard of them either. In fact, Raymond’s connections to aristocracy are so good, he got taken in by an ex-comprehensive school kid who pretended to be Lord Ashcombe one night. Happy Raymond, his moustache quivering, took Lord Ashcombe back to Oriole and offered him his bed for the night. Never mind, Raymond. Find another fox out there and take a hatchet to its ear.

I’m shaking my head in shame and mortification. I mean, it’s truly embarrassing. I mean, I’ve got to sort of mere culper a bit. I mean, bear in mind, I was young. We all make mistakes when we’re young. And I mean, the prose is abysmal and there’s a lot there to rue. And if anyone is listening who appears, I’d like to apologize for my early student self. Having said all that, the sort of serious point is that, so I was at Oxford reading English at University College between 1987 and 1990. And as a sort of student journalist, I mean, I moved on from gossip and did more serious stuff later on. I came across all the people who are currently in the government. Another pushy fresher, and we didn’t hear that extract, was someone called Jacob Rees-Mogg. I wrote about Jacob Rees-Mogg because he turned up at Trinity College in a Bentley with his nanny wearing a three-piece suit, and his nanny unloaded his luggage out of the back for him. And Gove I met, I was in my first year, Gove was in his third year, was president or president-elect of the Oxford Union, the Student Debating Society, which is a kind of right-wing finishing school. The same kind of Gove you see on your TV screen now, bumptious with a sort of faux politesse, where he’s super polite, but actually it’s a form of high-level sneering, I think, really. And, you know, I saw Gove, Boris Johnson had just left. I didn’t overlap with Johnson, but he was, there was a sort of sulfurous, sort of shiny whiff of Johnson was still there. Other people like Ed Vasey, who was culture minister, I wrote about him in Evelyn and so on. And the serious point, Laura, is that I thought these people had such extreme views. They’re all arch-thatcherites. There was a sort of pantomimic quality about them. They were caricatures. I mean, okay, I treat them in Evelyn as caricatures, but they were quite ridiculous and sort of puffed up with their self-importance. This is sort of age 19, 20, 21. And I confidently assumed that they were going nowhere and that a more talented, more serious, cleverer generation would come along and at some point sort of take power. And how wrong was I? How wrong was I? These people are running government. And they’re not as bright as they think they are, unfortunately. And most of them come from very, very privileged backgrounds. And the years haven’t sort of softened their other extreme views to my mind. I don’t know if all your listeners will agree.

But do you know what’s happened to Raymond Edwards? Do we know about him?

I’m afraid Raymond Edwards has disappeared. I know what happened to him. But Michael Gove, I think, still wants to be prime minister. And I fear that you can’t write go off actually as I mean, how long will Boris Johnson last? We don’t know. But Rishi Sunak is the obvious successor. But I think Gove is better or worse is still in the mix.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdrawer.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. Presumably, you wrote about the other students who became Tory MPs as well, but you only sent me those two bits.

So I wrote about, I mean, David Cameron, funny enough, I think I did have that with David Cameron for one year, but he was not a sort of, he was not a university personality in the same way that Boris Johnson clearly was and Michael Gove was, and so on. But it was a strange time. Up until I went to Oxford, I didn’t really know what conservatives were. And I remember gatecrashing for a laugh with a sort of some fresher, who I scarcely knew, a kind of conservative party, sort of freshers drinks, wearing a Mao cap. It’s the kind of daft thing you do when you’re 19. And to my horror, to discover that it was full. It was absolutely heaving with people who already at a very young age had their eye on politics and had their eye on a career, and were also very keen to make money. I mean, this is the late Thatcher era where greed was good. And many of them did become extremely rich. And I just, to me, it just seemed crazy. It seemed that journalism was everything, and I loved doing student journalism because it was full of other people who wrote, who were bright. But you could be scruffy, and it was very informal. And actually, a lot of people who were on Chowell with me had really starry journalistic careers. Jonathan Friedland was there. Ian Katz, who runs Channel 4, was there. Simon Cooper, who’s a brilliant columnist for the FT, was there. And there were other people as well whom I didn’t know and have come across subsequently, like Carl Cadwallader, my colleague on The Observer, Harry Kunzrew, who’s a fantastic novelist. And also someone called Louis Theroux. I don’t know what happened to him, but he may have done something.

Yeah, I’ve never heard of him. Okay, time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one.

Yeah, well, so one thing you have to do sometimes is write obituaries for people who are still alive. And this is an obituary I wrote a couple of years back for The Guardian for Alexander Medvedev, the now former Prime Minister of Russia.

Medvedev first met Putin in 1990. Putin was head of the Committee for Foreign Relations and Medvedev worked as its adviser. The committee met a couple of times a week in the Smolny Institute, a neoclassical building which Lenin used as his HQ during the 1917 October Revolution. The two men became friends. In 1991, Sobchak was elected mayor and the city reverted to its pre-Bolshevik name, St. Petersburg. Putin, eight years older and with a Soviet worldview, was the dominant figure of the two, a dynamic that would persist. Medvedev served as Putin’s personal lawyer, and when Putin became Russia’s prime minister in 1999, he took key St. Petersburg allies to Moscow with him, including Medvedev, who got a job in the presidential administration. Medvedev was undoubtedly talented, but it was his loyalty that most counted to Putin. Despite his lack of experience, Putin selected Medvedev to run his 2000 presidential campaign. When ailing Boris Yeltsin had anointed Putin as his successor and as Russia’s acting president in the dying hours of 1999, there was little doubt that Putin would win the election. But Medvedev ran the campaign well, showing a capacity for hard work and technical detail. According to the political analyst Liliya Shevsova, Medvedev could be petty, jealous and sometimes unscrupulous, useful qualities in the Kremlin jungle. As Medvedev prospered, he acquired business interests. In 1994, he became a director of the board for a subsidiary of Ilyin Pulp, Russia’s leading paper manufacturer. In 2000, he became chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom. His role appeared to be political oversight rather than management. There have been long-standing allegations of Putin’s personal corruption. Fewer rumours attached themselves to Medvedev, but he was a key player in a system dubbed Kremlin, Inc.

Did you ever meet him, Medvedev?

I didn’t. I didn’t personally meet him. I sat a couple of times in a room with Putin just across the table. I never shook Putin’s hand. You would get summoned from time to time to his dacha residence in northwest Moscow, and you’d invariably have to wait about seven hours until he deigned to show up. But this was one of the central questions that I had to answer when I was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. That was between 2007 and 2011, which was the nature of the relationship between Medvedev and Putin. Putin became president in 2000 after taking over from Boris Yeltsin. Then he did this kind of castling maneuver where he became prime minister. Medvedev took over and did a stint as president. People were curious to know as to whether Medvedev was a real substantive figure or whether he was, as the Americans put it, an elite diplomatic cable, which I wrote about, whether he was Robin to Putin’s Batman. And the brief answer was that he was Robin. And any differences were stylistic rather than substantial. But yeah, I mean, I have to say my stint in Russia, I mean, I’d done Delhi before, I’d done Berlin before and then moved to Moscow.

Was this your choice moving to Russia or was this where you were sent?

It wasn’t really my choice. It was, I remember, in the summer of 2006 when I was in Berlin and the World Cup was going on. And my then boss came out and said to me rather delphically, we think you need a bigger canvas. And what that really meant was, I think, no one has applied for the Moscow job with sending you to Russia. It’s a pretty tough gig, right? I mean, the weather obviously is, it’s rather cold. But also politically, it was extremely chilly as well. And I’ve written, I think, four books about Russia now. The one I wrote immediately after this period was Mafia State. But then subsequently, I wrote A Very Expensive Poison, which you mentioned about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a story that dominated my time there. He was poisoned with a radioactive cup of tea just before I arrived. And I actually flew on one of the planes used to transport radioactive polonium to London by the two assassins. And even three weeks after the killing, I got a letter from British Airways saying, Dear Mr. Harding, we regret to inform you that the plane you were traveling on was contaminated with radioactive poison. If you have any concerns, ring NHS Direct. So I called NHS Direct and of course, you’re in this awful phone hell queue. Eventually, I hung up realizing there wasn’t going to be a polonium option. But essentially what happened was that I tried to write about the Levonenko case, I tried to answer the question about how much money Putin has, answer he’s the richest guy in the world. And I wrote other kinds of stories which displeased the Russian embassy in London and the Russian government. And my reward was, I had a series of, basically was harassed by the FSB, the KGB successor agency which Putin used to run. And we had break-ins at our apartment, demonstrative ones, we were bugged, we were surveilled. I had guys following me around the icy streets of Moscow from time to time and all of our phone calls were listened to. And that was made very obvious. You’d make a joke about Putin and the lion would just go, like this. And then so you make another joke about Putin and on one occasion, Laura, that the KGB left a sex manual by the side of the marital bed when we’d been away on a holiday in Berlin, came back to discover a book on relationships. And they’d bookmarked it to a page on orgasms, how you have a better orgasm. And I was sort of sitting there on the bed reading this. First of all, I had to explain to my wife that it wasn’t my book.

Was it in English or Russian?

It was in Russian. Still got it. I would wave it around, but it’s a podcast, so I can’t. And it was kind of clear what the message was. The message was we were watching you. The British Embassy had told us that there was probably video surveillance in our bedroom. So we were watched having sex for three and a half years. And eventually I was deported, kicked out in February 2011. But the reason I sort of say all this is two reasons. One, it gave me an insight into sort of thuggish, really Soviet KGB mentality of the people in power in Russia still. They’re still there. And two, when it came to Donald Trump and allegations which kind of burst four years ago into the public domain that he had been secretly filmed in a five-star hotel in Moscow cavorting with two prostitutes. It was clear to me that of course they would have a Trump film because that’s what the FSB do. KGB did it as well. They spy, entrap, hound, try and blackmail, compromise foreign guests, particularly Americans and Brits. And so it was a really kind of dark period. I mean, I loved Russia. I still love Russia. I learned Russian, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I had a Russian lesson two days ago via Skype. But it really sort of shaped my professional destiny and my career as a writer. Not because I’m an obsessive, but just because Russia plays an outside role in world affairs and co-contributed to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

We’ll be talking more about that with a later clip, but let’s move on now and have one more off-cut. What’s this one?

Well, we’re going backwards again. This is from 1987, summer of 1987. It’s a piece I wrote for a travel writing competition in the independent newspaper, which was new at that point before going up to Oxford.

Even for Canton, 90 fen an hour for hire seemed expensive. The boyish glee of the old man who ran the stall overflowed as he straightened up a bike. I did not have long. The light was fading and the city could soon be reduced to a perspective of ideograms. The Pearl River cut a huge path to the right of where I pedalled, home to a muddle of tugs and black marketeers. I suffered inevitable ambush from a cry of, Change money! and swerved into a bizarre thickening of peasants and neglected bicycles. It appeared that Ching Ping Market had thrived for centuries without discovery. I pushed inside a crowded, split-roofed passageway defined by whitewashed walls and wooden trestles. Nonchalant cellars in flimsy western shirts and slacks squatted nearby and watched over the procession of city-dweller and peasant diffusing through the complex. Some aimlessly absorbed the atmosphere like myself. Others had something more definite in mind. A middle-aged woman topped with straw hat thrust her hands into a basket and withdrew four unhappy frogs. The quartet was strung together and carried off, patterning the air with an elegant geometry of leg kicks. Yet the true tenants of the Xiping market were not really human, more a reflection of the earthy creativity of the Chinese mind. Everything and more was there. Angular roots like purple truncheons, beans, rice, branches of white flesh, liqi, fish drawn and quartered, bodies laid out for purchase next to smiling heads, eels losing faith with their upper halves on the street floor, turtles, some old, some flat-backed and struggling, others sedentary, all resigned to their ineluctable soup bowl fate, goldfish chased by boys with nets, dried brown forms of squid hung up like martyred prophets, slated, crumpled and humiliated, terrapin housed in blue plastic bowls, wild umbrella forms of fungi, broilers hung lamenting between wooden bars, cats, they’re not as pets, blue-necked singing birds, shark fins dried and set up like trophies, and a solitary, somewhat melancholy, fat-winged owl in a cage. It was a feast, albeit briefly encountered.

So you were in China when you wrote this. This was the same year when you wrote the piece in India, is that right?

Yeah, I was doing my sort of classic middle class kind of round-the-world thing, and so after four and a half months in India, I moved on to Hong Kong where I stayed with friends, and then went into sort of mainland China. And one of the reasons I included this clip was, we don’t know precisely where the coronavirus came from, but the strong suspicion is it came from one of these wet markets where you’ve got lots of live animals, and you’ve got lots of people all kind of packed together in a rather kind of steamy environment. And so I sort of thought of this. And also, I guess the other thing about this piece is that it’s, by the way, it’s not a great piece of writing. I mean, it’s slightly too elevated and pretentious. I mean, that’s something as a kind of writer you have to dial down. I mean, the longer you do it, the more you realise that the answer is very often a sort of simplicity. And if you can choose between being elaborate and sherry and being clean, it’s always better to choose sort of clean. So I write somewhat differently now, but I guess I was ambitious. I mean, I sort of set this off with the independent in the full expectation that I would win this competition. Of course, I didn’t. And in fact, it was a kind of early life lesson because having got my first from Oxford, I’d edited Charwell and I sort of thought that all these doors would be open to me. And actually, aged sort of 22, I had a kind of massive pile of rejection letters from a whole number of people, including the BBC, applied for their training scheme, didn’t get it, applied for it. Everyone wanted to work on The Independent at that time because it did photographs so beautifully and so well. And they had an internship which all the student journalists I knew applied for, and none of us got it. And I subsequently discovered the editor’s niece got it. But I guess the moral is that for anyone, whatever stage they’re at, whether they’re kind of a young person setting out or whether they’re, you know, in their 50s trying to get their first novel published, that perseverance is important and also being quite robust. I mean, if it doesn’t work out, that doesn’t mean you’re no good, you can’t write. It just means you need to kind of keep trying or put one project to one side and try another one. And I think eventually with some good fortune, you’ll get there.

Sound advice. Well, we’ve now come to your final offcut. Tell us about this one.

Well, this is a piece I wrote recently in October of 2020 commissioned by the Guardian of Foreign Desk about Donald Trump after he got COVID and we thought he might die. I mean, now that seems unlikely. He hasn’t died. He’s still very much with us. But quite often in journalism land, you have to write pieces in case something happens and it doesn’t happen. I mean, I also read a piece about Joe Biden becoming president, which has been published, but this one hasn’t and wasn’t.

Well, let’s hear it now.

Hold for Trump death or defeat. For the next almost two years, the workings of Mueller’s team stayed secret. The prosecutor was simultaneously Washington’s most present personality, endlessly discussed, and a ghost. From time to time, his office issued indictments. These were against 26 Russians, including GRU hackers, and Americans, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Attorney Michael Cohen, and others. Mueller’s report, delivered in spring 2019, was a disappointment, at least to liberal Americans who hoped it might sweep Trump from power. It identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, but didn’t find a criminal-level conspiracy. The most significant backchannel to Moscow involved Manafort, and his one-time Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik. In a series of clandestine meetings, Manafort gave Kilimnik internal polling data, including in the Rust Belt states, which proved crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory. The two men behaved like spies. They used burner phones, encrypted chats, and a secret email account, with messages shared in drafts. Mueller identified Kilimnik as a career Russian intelligence officer. His employer was the GRU. What Kilimnik did with the information he got from Manafort is unknown. He refused to cooperate with the FBI and is in Moscow. Mueller’s report had many shortcomings, an excess of legal caution, and a failure to meet face-to-face with Trump. Its biggest, arguably, was a lack of Russian witnesses. In August, the Senate Intelligence Committee published its own report. It said Manafort’s willingness to pass confidential material to Kilimnik was a grave counterintelligence threat. And it gave some credence to the Steele Moscow allegations, noting that an FSB officer was stationed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel and had a live video feed, including from guests’ bedrooms. In the end, Russia didn’t interfere in the 2020 election in the same sweeping and systematic way as in 2016. Probably it didn’t need to. The Kremlin’s goals of exacerbating political chaos in America and deepening civil strife had already been achieved. Rightly or not, Moscow viewed Trump as the perfect candidate to destroy US democracy, with his victory Russia’s own.

You are an expert, really, on the Trump-Putin connection. That’s sort of your specialty, isn’t it? What did Russia want from Trump, and did they get it, do you think?

Yeah, it’s a good question. I’ve written two books on Trump and Putin. One was Collusion, which came out in 2017, and it was the first book on this theme. There have subsequently been very many others. And also, I went back to this in Shadow State, my new one, essentially for two reasons. One, Sergei Skripal got poisoned in Salisbury in the spring of 2018, which was another astonishing misdeed by the Kremlin. But two, Trump and Putin met, you’ll remember Laura, in Helsinki, their famous summit there where Trump is asked point blank whether he believes the Russians hacked the election to help him win. And he says, no, I believe my good friend Vladimir. And it was just a jaw-dropping moment where even people who were pro-Trump thought this was sort of treasonous behaviour. I mean, I’ve looked at this. I mean, I’ve had an awful lot of kind of abuse and trolling from Kremlin bots, from Trump fanatics and so on, who say, look, it’s all a nonsense. There’s nothing to see here. But actually, that’s just not true. Trump has been going to Moscow since the mid-1980s. He was there first in 1987. It’s clear for anyone who knows Soviet espionage, KGB, that there’s a kind of huge file on Donald Trump. And one of the things I dug out, which I write about in my books, is there’s a sort of secret KGB questionnaire, which was leaked by a defector about what the Russians are looking for in a potential Western asset. And you get on the list and it’s things like narcissism, unfaithfulness, greed, poor analytical capabilities. Donald Trump is off the scale. I mean, he’s a kind of dream asset, really. And I’m not suggesting that when he’s logged away in the White House that he puts on a kind of olive green Soviet uniform and prances around in front of a mirror. No. But the point is, he’s so immoral, he’s so kind of me-centered. He is so flawed that he’s a kind of mark. He’s easy to manipulate. And I think what Putin has been doing with Trump throughout this period and their summits and in their private phone calls, we don’t know quite what’s being said, is planting ideas in his head. I think Trump is eminently suggestible. And what Putin, Putin is a kind of Lord of Chaos, he’s the sort of near least in chief. What he’s got from Trump is, you know, Putin hasn’t created divisions in America, they already existed, or indeed in our country, in the UK. But he’s pouring paraffin on the fire. And what we know is there was a kind of huge operation, espionage operation involving Russians pretending to be Americans sitting in a troll factory in St. Petersburg involving career spies and involving this, an actual spy at the heart of the Trump campaign, Russian spy who was getting confidential polling data and passing it back. And so Trump is, the election of Trump, rightly or wrongly, is seen in Moscow as the greatest espionage success in the entirety of KGB and post KGB history. I mean, you know, Moscow can’t believe it. And you might argue that he’s a homegrown monster. I mean, I think that’s right. And a lot of Americans, quite sincerely, clever Americans voted for him last month. But Russia has and does play the spoiler role in the world, where it tries to sort of drag down and corrode Western democracies and back extremist candidates. And Trump is their greatest success. And if somehow he can stay in power despite losing the election, they’ll be even more rejoicing in Moscow. Shampanskoi, champagne clinked, and so on. And part of me thinks, and you heard it here first, Laura, that if it all goes wrong for Donald Trump, if his legal cases pile up and he faces the prospect of jail time, I can see a world where actually he flees the country, where he leaves America, and one place he might end up is Russia.

You think so?

It’s Russia. It’s the one place from where he’s never going to be extradited, where he can just rant and tweet and be a kind of angry, brooding guy in exile, complaining for all eternity about how the election was fraudulently stolen from him, and that actually he’s a winner, not a loser. I mean, it’s a sort of dark fantasy. Almost certainly it won’t happen, but the 21st century has been so strange, as we were talking about earlier. It’s been so wacko that I wouldn’t entirely rule it out.

Well, you heard it here first. Who knows? Listen to this in another two years, five years, seven months’ time, we might be going, look, Luke said that would happen. Right, we’ve come to the end of the show. I’ve got one more question for you. Are there any offcuts you still got that you haven’t shared with us today?

There are more offcuts, yeah, which I haven’t shared. There’s a kind of idea. There’s an idea which I think will never happen and so maybe I could talk about that, which is that I, when I was in Russia, I always wondered about the ghosts, the spies who broke into our apartment. Obviously, we were never there when they did it and there was a wonderful book written by Timothy Gartenash called The File where after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he goes and tracks down the starzy guys who had spied on him when he was a student in East Berlin in the 1980s and discovers to his great delight that they had given him the code name Romeo. In some fantastic sort of post-Putin future, maybe when I’m on my Zimmer frame kind of hobbling along, I just would love to meet the people who basically handed me and followed me around. I mean, I created a lot of work for, I was treated like James Bond. They thought I was some kind of literary MI6 super operative writing this stuff, my books and my articles on the command of Her Majesty’s government. I mean, this was ludicrous. I mean, I took my kids to school on the tram. I didn’t have an Aston Martin. I mean, you know, anyone with an internet connection could read what I was doing. But I’m just curious as to whether these people were sort of true believers in the Putin project or whether they were cynics just doing it to make a living with the women telephone operators who would sit with headphones like we’re sitting now listening to my every phone call about high politics.

But the sex book, though.

Yeah. Who picked the sex book? Where did they get it from? Why did they bookmark it to the orgasm page on 187th? What was the message they were sending, Nora? Was it…

I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, Luke.

Well, a frequency issue, conventionality, I just, I don’t know, I mean…

You could just ask your wife, obviously. She might give you an easier answer.

You know, I just wanted to kind of pull the veil a bit further on that dark world. And who knows? No regime is immortal, no leader lives forever. I mean, there will be a time when Trump is gone, where Boris Johnson is gone, where even Vladimir Putin wants the out-style is done and is gone, and maybe in that space, one could do something and one could write something.

Well, Luke Harding, it’s been absolutely fantastic talking to you. Very, very educational and entertaining. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you, Laura. A pleasure. Go Offcuts Drawer. Great podcast. Love it. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Luke Harding. The Offcuts were performed by Christopher Kent, Lynsey Murrell and Nigel Pilkington, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.