A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail wrote about a low-ranking British diplomat named James Hudson who was caught on hidden camera by the FSB (formerly the KGB, formerlier the MVD, formerlierer the NKVD, formerliest the Cheka) getting it on with two Russian hookers in a Yekaterinburg brothel. The paper published a couple of frame grabs from the video, but I wanted to check out the raw footage for myself. It looked like one of those classic sex scandals set up to blackmail someone into cooperation, and there’s nothing cooler than being able to watch real spy games in action. So I headed straight for kompromat.ru, Russia’s biggest muckraking/political scandal news site.

If the video doesn’t load,  click here. The only promise we’ll make is that it’s not kiddie snuff porn.

In terms of porn quality, the FSB snake camera crew could’ve done a bit of a better job with composition and timing, but the fact is they didn’t have much to work with. Hudson is a bit of chub, his bitch of an ex-wife said as much: “He let himself go… He never wore glasses and he was thin. I’m glad I got out when I did.” But no one said a damn thing about the hookers being fat, too. What was the FSB thinking sending in such subpar seductresses?

One of them was particularly bad, with a huge blubbery fender swinging from her front end. But for all their principals’ telegenic failings, the spies at least did their homework. Or maybe they just lucked out. Whatever the case, it’s pretty obvious from the video that Hudson is into the chunky chicks. When confronted with two prostitutes, a man will inevitably, subconsciously choose a favorite. Hudson hardly pays any attention to the other hooker in the room, perfectly content rubbing sweaty lard sacks with the one that reminds him of his womenfolk back home; loose, pasty skinbags full of beer and fish ‘n’ chips.

Hudson clearly has a sick side as well, because the only thing he can think of doing with the better-looking whore is to have her sit on his face and jump up and down. Sick, and dangerous. If Hudson keeps up this kind debauchery, he’s gonna end up looking like Baron Harkonnen.

Anyways, I’m getting a bit sidetracked here. I didn’t mean to do a point-by-point sex tape review. I wanted to talk about Russia’s system of kompromat, or “compromising information.”

Russians still like to settle political and business disputes the way men have been settling them since the cave days: with beatings, disappearances, mysterious suicides, strange poisonings, and good old-fashioned summary executions. But these days in Russia you can’t go around offing people like you used to, especially when you’re dealing with high-powered businessmen and politicians. And anyway, Russia is a democratic country now. One must keep up appearances.

This is where kompromat comes in handy. Put simply, kompromat sites are just news aggregators like any other. They collect relevant and interesting news stories, and also offer a service for politicians and businessmen. For a fee, they’ll post a link to whatever story you can provide them, no matter how ridiculously fake or outrageous. If the client doesn’t have his own fake news agency to publish the article, kompromat sites can post it for you on one of the many seemingly legitimate blogs they maintain for just such situations. The more popular a kompromat site, the more money it can charge.

But not every kid off the street can open his own kompromat site. Posting damaging info on high-powered people can quickly get you disappeared without proper protection. No one will come out and admit it, but all of the dozens of scandal sites are backed by some sort of powerful government agency, which uses its kompromat portal to launch smear campaigns against their rivals. Russia has a draconian array of armed government agencies: There’s the FSB (sort of like a FBI-CIA hybrid), the GRU (an elite CIA), the current MVD (federal cops), and the FCS (a mix between border patrol and the FBI); and these are just the top of the pigpile. These groups are always engaged in behind-the-scenes turf wars for businesses, smuggling routes, and government funds.

About a year ago, I did a story on Russia’s answer to Matt Drudge. Sergei Gorshkov founded Russia’s first and most popular scandal site, kompromat.ru. That’s the one I got the sex video from. Back then, his competitors estimated he made somewhere around $1 million USD a year, tax free. He supposedly also had offers to sell his low-tech site for $10 million, but the bastard wouldn’t go below $15 million, firm.

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Read more: america, corruption, gorshkov, journalism, kompromat.ru, Russia, scandal, the atlantic, Washington Post