by Noel Hynd
The Orange Revolution was a series of protests and political events in Ukraine from November 2004 to January 2005, in the immediate aftermath of the run-off vote of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election.
The 2004 presidential election in Ukraine had featured two main candidates. One was sitting Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, supported by Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president. The opposition candidate was Viktor Yushchenko, leader of the Our Ukraine faction in the Ukrainian parliament, also a former prime minister.
The election, which Cerny had observed personally, was held in a highly charged atmosphere, with Yanukovych and the outgoing president’s administration using their control of the government for intimidation of Yushchenko and his supporters. In September 2004 Yushchenko suffered dioxin poisoning under mysterious circumstances. While he survived and returned to the campaign trail, the poisoning undermined his health and altered his appearance dramatically.
“To this day, Yushchenko’s face remains disfigured,” Cerny added without emotion. Orange, he continued, was originally adopted by the Viktor Yushchenko’s insurgent camp as the signifying color of his election campaign. “Later the color gave name to an entire series of political terms, such as the Oranges for his supporters. When the mass protests grew, and especially when they brought about political change in the country, the term Orange Revolution came to represent the entire series of events.”
Protests began on the eve of the second round of voting, Cerny remembered, as the official count differed markedly from exit-poll results. The latter gave Viktor Yushchenko an eleven percent lead, while official results gave the election win to Yanukovych by three percent.
Yanukovych’s supporters claimed that Yushchenko’s connections to the anti-incumbent Ukrainian media explained this disparity. But the Yushchenko team publicized evidence of many incidents of electoral fraud in favor of the government-backed Yanukovych, events witnessed by many local and foreign observers.
The Yushchenko campaign publicly called for protest on the dawn of election day, November 21, 2004, when allegations of fraud began to spread. Beginning on November 22, 2004, massive protests started in cities across Ukraine. The largest, in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, attracted a half million participants, who on November 23, 2004, peacefully marched in front of the headquarters of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, many wearing orange or carrying orange flags, the color of Yushchenko’s campaign coalition.
“I remember them chanting, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians filling Kiev’s Independence Square on the evening of November 22. ‘ Razom nas bahato! Nas ne podolaty! ’ ‘Together we are many. We cannot be defeated.’ ”
Emerging from a sea of orange, the mantra signaled the rise of a skilled political opposition group and a determined middle class that had come together to stop the ruling elite from falsifying an election and hijacking Ukraine’s presidency.
The Ukrainian capital, Kiev, was the focal point with thousands of protesters demonstrating daily. Nationwide, the democratic revolution was highlighted by a series of acts of civil disobedience, sit-ins, and general strikes organized by the opposition movement.
Over the next seventeen days, through harsh cold and sleet, millions of Ukrainians staged nationwide nonviolent protests. The entire world watched, riveted by this outpouring of the people’s will in a country whose international image had been warped by its corrupt rulers. The nationwide protests succeeded when the results of the original run-off were annulled, and a revote was ordered by Ukraine’s Supreme Court.
Under intense scrutiny by domestic and international observers, the second run-off was declared to be “fair and free.” The final results showed a clear victory for Yushchenko. Yushchenko was declared the official winner and with his inauguration on January 23, 2005, in Kiev, the Orange Revolution had peacefully reached its successful conclusion. Similarly, by the time Yushchenko’s victory was announced, the Orange Revolution had set a major new landmark in the post-communist history of Eastern Europe, a seismic shift westward in the geopolitics of the region.
“Now, in terms of an impending presidential visit, particularly with a new president in office, normally we have a bigger planning stage. But the president is adamant. Political statement, diplomatic statement. All the usual bull. It means we have the normal three months of preparation and only one month to do it.”
“How do I fit in?” she asked.
“Rather perfectly,” he answered. “Your c.v. is very impressive,” he said. “You should see some of the people I’ve had to prep. Dumb as doorknobs would be both an understatement, as well as an insult to the world of doorknobs.” He paused. “So. Would you be willing to accept a temporary assignment to Ukraine?”
She sighed. “Only if you talk me into it,” she said.
“Well, the Ukrainians are wonderful people, warm and much deserving of any help we can bring them. They’ve been oppressed for centuries, most recently by Soviet Russian Communism. Fascinating place, rich in history and culture.”
“Keep going,” she said.
He paused, taking a glance down at her c.v. again. His tone changed.
“Look,” he said. “The assignment will call on your previous experience in undercover work. It presupposes an ability to learn functional Ukrainian in one month and have the pre-existing knowledge of Russian. So this, right here, is your opportunity to get out of jail free.”
“How?”
“You can avoid the assignment by being unable to pass the basic language requirement in Russian. Follow what I’m saying?”
“Yes. But I’m fluent in Russian and everyone who knows me knows that.”
“We have two other agents we can interview. They’re not as qualified as you, but it’s an imperfect world. We can talk to them.”
She pondered it for a moment.
“I came here this morning with the intent of declining this assignment,” she said. “But it’s also not in my nature to back away from challenges.”
He let a moment pass. “That’s in your c.v. too,” he said.
“So tell me more about the assignment,” she said. “I’ll listen.”
He smiled in response. “Let’s talk about you. It’s one thing to read a c.v., quite another to learn personally about someone who might take an important job.”
“What are you asking for?” she asked.
“Tell me about yourself,” Cerny said. “How you came to be here. How you’re so good as an investigator, with a firearm, and in so many languages. I’m fascinated.”
She opened her mouth to answer. Before she could speak a word, he added one more request. “Explain it to me in Russian,” he said. “I’d like to hear you speak.”
Alex fumbled at first. Not withstanding that souvenir poster in her living room, she hadn’t spoken Russian in years.
But she began.
Her Russian kicked in quickly.
EIGHT
S panish was spoken in my home,” she said. “My mother was from Mexico City and was a devout Roman Catholic. She moved to Southern California in her twenties to marry my father. He was an aircraft worker with McDonnell-Douglas. His parents had been from southern Italy and had come to America in the 1920s.”
“But if he was Italian, they didn’t speak Spanish to each other,” Cerny observed.
“No,” Alex said with a smile. “Of course not. But I used to visit my grandparents, los abuelos mexicanos, during summers. And I loved listening to the Latino pop stations out of Los Angeles and San Diego. By seven years old, I was completely bilingual. Then there was church Bible study. I was raised as a Protestant. My father’s choice to convert-because it was ‘more American.’ But my mom insisted one Sunday a month on taking me to ‘her’ church. It was a traditional Roman Catholic one in Santa Clarita. They spoke Spanish and Latin there. When I first heard Latin, I wanted to study it. My dad didn’t object. He just stayed home to watch the Raiders and Dodgers.”
Cerny laughed. “Sounds li
ke my dad,” he said, still in Russian.
Alex continued. Her father had died in an auto accident in the summer of 1993 when she was fourteen. While Alex settled into her faith and found solace there, her mother settled into an alcoholic depression. Alex buried herself in schoolwork. A year later, her mother’s health worsened. Alex went to Mexico for a year to live with an aunt and their family. Her fluency in Spanish gelled. “I read voraciously in two languages,” she said. “Histories. Biographies. Novellas. Journals about el beisbol or el futbol. Anything.”
She came back overprepared for her own school system, she explained. A local guidance counselor in California had ties to the East Coast. When her mother’s illness worsened, Alex was sent to a rigorous boarding school in Connecticut on full scholarship.
The school allowed her to excel. She branched from Spanish into French. She won a summer internship in Europe. Off she went to work in the rural Camargue region on a ranch in southern France, an area famous for prized bulls, wild ponies, and a pounding summer sun.
“You know what? I turned into a French cowgirl,” she said with a laugh. “And I loved every minute of it. The local people had a wonderfully unique culture. Distinctly Mediterranean. After six weeks, I came home and without even realizing it, I was fluent in a third language.”
“So where did the Italian come from?” Cerny asked.
“That was easy,” she said. “My dad was from Sicily, as I said. I wanted to know about his culture too. I started studying on my own, but since I knew Spanish and French and had had some Latin, it was very easy. I was lucky and won another summer internship the following year, this time in art history and Italian literature.”
Cerny laughed. “I’m not sure how ‘lucky’ that was,” he said. “Obviously you had a gift and studied hard.”
“What’s the old saying?” she asked, stumbling a little and trying to translate into Russian. “ ‘Luck is the confluence of hard work and opportunity?’ I spent three weeks in Rome and another three in Paris.”
She was fascinated at the time, she recalled, by the work of the Italian poet Dante, whose Divine Comedy consigned deathbed confessors to the first circle of Purgatory. She switched into Italian. “During life they made God wait for them. So after death, they must wait for God.”
Cerny blinked. She knew she had him. A personal first for Alex, switching from Russian to quote into sixteenth-century Italian.
Returning to Russian, she described how during her senior year at boarding school, she won a prestigious state university scholarship in California. It was a remarkable achievement, and yet she would always associate her senior year with tragedy. Two days after her eighteenth birthday, one week before graduation, her mother died.
The funeral was in Veracruz. She attended the funeral and missed her own graduation, which at the time barely seemed to matter. She was now on her own. She spent two years at the University of California at Berkeley where she was one of the more conservative students. It was a lonely stretch, by her own admission. She had many acquaintances but made few close friends. She joined a local Episcopal church, formally transferring from her old Methodist church. “It felt more comfortable,” she recalled, “almost as if it were midway between my father’s faith and my mom’s.”
Though she skipped over it here with Michael Cerny, as she entered her early twenties, Alex had transformed from a cute but shy teenage girl into an attractive young woman. She had attained her adult height of five foot seven, but all the sports and training through the years had given her a strong, lean but feminine body. And she had acquired an ample amount of self-confidence and self-assurance to go with it.
She had her mother’s dark Spanish eyes and brown hair. She dated occasionally but there was never anything serious. She tried smoking but quit quickly. She dabbled in liquor but kept it in moderation. She tried pot once at a party and didn’t care for it or its foggy-headed lifestyle. So she never touched weed again or any harder drugs, either, but she had acquaintances who dabbled in both.
She supported herself through work-study jobs and her scholarship. She played soccer for the freshman women’s team at Berkeley and ran track. After two years, she transferred to UCLA. She selected an undergraduate major in business and finance and found herself surrounded by a coterie of unusual friends. Many students were foreign, Asian and European. Many were American.
Her political views came more into focus at this time too. She disliked the right when it became intolerant and bigoted. She disliked the left when it strayed into cuckooland. She liked to think she was of the reasonable center, able to listen to an argument from either side and make her own judgments accordingly.
At this time, she was also finding that her abilities in language combined with a business major were opening doors for her, not the least of which was even more financial aid for her academics.
“When I was at UCLA,” she said, “I started Russian, then accelerated my study by taking a summer semester in Moscow. It was an exciting place to be, during the Gorbachev era, perestroika, and all that.”
Cerny nodded. “Have any Russian boyfriends?” he asked.
“Is that any of your business?”
“No. Just curious.”
“An American girl in Moscow who spoke Russian?” She laughed. “I got a lot of offers,” she said, “but didn’t accept very many of them. Too much vodka, , too many late nights at the Cafe Pushkin after going to the clubs, can interfere with a girl’s studies.”
He raised an eyebrow in mild disbelief. “Sure,” he said. Then he moved on.
The following summer, she worked in New York for a big time entrepreneur named Joseph Collins. She worked in his international finance section. Her work was so diligent that he took personal note of her. Collins promised her a job after university, if she was interested.
She switched her course of study to a five-year program that led to a master’s. By the time the University of California awarded her an MA, she was fluent in five languages, had a thorough understanding of modern European politics, art, and history, and had a master’s degree in finance.
After UCLA she turned down an offer to return to New York and work for Joseph Collins, who was expanding his business in Latin America. Instead, she wanted to stay in California. She worked for Wells Fargo for eighteen months in one of their international divisions, overseeing hipotecas -mortgages-in the Latin community.
She used her Spanish daily.
“I was bored stiff,” she said. “But I stumbled across a few cases of bank fraud in the mortgage division. So I grew interested in law enforcement. I applied for a job with the FBI.”
“And they hired you,” Cerny said.
“About two weeks later,” she said. “I filled an immediate need.”
The FBI sent her to their academy in Virginia. She excelled at all aspects of her training, from the book-learning to firearms to the bone-crunching unarmed combat.
She advanced quickly. Her linguistic skills were of immense value. She was assigned to Internet rackets and bank frauds in her first years, initially working out of the Newark, New Jersey, office, then moving around the country on a case-to-case basis.
She was socially traditional as an adult, which meant she didn’t have affairs all over the place, same as she had been as a student. But she liked looking good. She wore sharp suits, blouses and skirts that appealed to men. She worked hard at the gym to maintain a good physique. So her clothes flattered her, and she chose them carefully, same as the men she went out with.
In recounting this part of her life to her interviewer, small scenes in her past played out in her mind. She had realized as an adult that her late father had had his quirks. He had not been a faithful churchgoer but he had been a believer nonetheless. At Alex’s twelfth birthday, her father had given her the small gold cross on a delicate gold chain that she continued to wear around her neck. It was the only thing of substance that he had given her that she still owned. As jewelry went, it was modest, more meaningfu
l in what it represented than its actual monetary worth. But she had worn it now for almost eighteen years.
Wear it in good health, he had told her, in good health and in good fortune.
So far, she always had.
And over the years, she had even developed this inadvertent habit of taking the cross between her thumb and forefinger; she would hold it and touch it thoughtfully at times when somehow she sought guidance or when she was deep in thought. For whatever reason, emotional, spiritual, or just plain quirk of habit, it comforted her. The cross was something that had once been in her father’s hand. It represented both his and her beliefs and kept his spirit close.
“Someday,” her dad had once said to her many years ago, “your faith will be challenged. You’ll think it has been destroyed. You’ll think your world has come to an end. That’s when this cross will mean more to you than you’ll ever know. When that happens, find your way back to the cross.”
This advice had come from a casual Methodist who wasn’t the best at showing up for Sunday services. Faith survived, she had concluded, in some strange dark places. It was a conversation she would never forget. Ever since that day, the small gold cross had been part of her.
Sitting in the small office at the State Department, her thoughts came back to the present. As she sat in front of Michael Cerny and concluded her dialogue in rapid now-excellent Russian, she realized she was fingering the small gold cross as she spoke.
If it bothered him, he didn’t mention it. But she knew he had noticed.
“That’s really about it,” she said with a shrug and a smile, switching back to English. “What else can I tell you?”
NINE
E xtraordinary,” Cerny finally said, following Alex back to English.
“Thank you,” she answered. “But let’s get real. I don’t speak any Ukrainian. Drop me down in Odessa and I’d be unable to find either the bathroom or the railroad station.”
