© Vasantha YogananthanMukhtar Ablyazov in Paris
In 2009, a fugitive Kazakh oligarch arranged a meeting in London with the head of an international private intelligence agency.
Mukhtar Ablyazov, a slim man in his mid-forties with receding hair, a delicate mouth and a flinty gaze, had fled to the UK earlier that year as the Kazakh government prepared to nationalise his bank. So much money had gone missing from that institution that Ablyazov's enemies would call him the Bernie Madoff of the steppe.
But the chess-playing billionaire was also one of the few members of the Kazakh elite who had dared to cross
Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former Soviet republic's ruler since 1989. The allegations of grand looting were, Ablyazov maintained, merely a vendetta waged by a regime that was itself gorging on stolen wealth. He had broken the code of loyalty - a transgression that Nazarbayev would not, he believed, allow to pass unpunished. "I saw the spies around me and I wanted to hire a group to counter what the spies were doing," Ablyazov told me recently.
The man that Ablyazov was to meet was Ron Wahid, the Bangladeshi-American founder of Arcanum Global. Wahid swathes Arcanum in mystique - its name comes from the Latin for secret - but he also likes to show off his political connections.
On the walls of his Knightsbridge offices hang signed photographs of him with three US presidents.
Comment: Oh for the days when the Guardian wasn't (always) a failing piece of garbage spouting govt propaganda.
They didn't just target left-wing movements/leaders: they targeted anything and anyone that could cross divides and "unify and electrify people".
This evil practice of culling, corrupting or otherwise containing leaders embodying noble virtues, by the way, is why Americans have no real 'resistance', and certainly no 'messiah', at a time when they most need one.
They have Trump, who means well, but he's not exactly cut out for the job.