Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

by Ben Stewart

  Get a box of Russian matches and have someone in court for my appeal.

  SEVENTEEN

  It’s 7 a.m. and the Room of Doom is filling up. From somewhere above, the team hears the sound of scraping soles dragging along the metal-grilled floor. Then a groan. The Greenpeace UK chief, John Sauven, is gripping the bannister. He closes his eyes and swallows, then breathes deeply. He’s a tall man with sharp blue eyes and grey stubble on his chin. He’s led the London office for seven years. It was his idea, back in that Turkish restaurant three years ago, to requisition a Greenpeace ship and sail north to challenge the Arctic drillers. He shuffles down the stairs to the Room of Doom.

  ‘John, are you okay?’

  ‘You look ill.’

  ‘Do you want some water?’

  ‘I … I went out with a Russian guy last night,’ says Sauven. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin is wet with sweat. ‘It was a former Kremlin adviser. I was pretty sure he was speaking for the Russian government, he was obviously very well connected. He told me he had fifteen minutes, that was all, so I met him at a hotel next to Buckingham Palace. I was … I … I was going to have tea with him but I got him a Duvel beer, it was strong and he really liked it so he wanted another one. Then he just started on the Scotch, and … and by the end of the evening we must have had about twenty-eight whiskies … God, I feel dreadful … We left at midnight then went back to his house to keep drinking. I was trying to get information from him, who he knew, how influential he was, whether he had any contacts within the Russian government that would be useful for us.’

  He pauses. The team examines him with sympathy.

  ‘Christ, I feel sick … He said there’s this jockeying for power inside the Russian system. He said hardliners, people connected to Gazprom, connected to the military intelligence services, they want to see us punished. And … and there are people who are … you know, who are far more liberal, with connections to the West, who are concerned … Christ, I feel absolutely dreadful. You know, people concerned with Russia’s image in the world. They see the Arctic 30 as negative for Russia, that they can’t win this. Then he told me how pissed off Putin was when he was blamed for Pussy Riot. He got burned, he felt he was personally blamed. On the Arctic 30 he doesn’t want blood on his hands, he doesn’t want people to think he’s responsible, but if … if he’s blamed then he won’t back down, it’s just not his style. So when we want to go in hard we have to go after his economic interests. We’re doing the right thing with Gazprom. But Jesus, those Russians can drink. I haven’t been to bed yet, he kept me up all night, whisky after whisky. I think I’m still drunk.’

  Sauven shakes his head then shuffles off towards the toilet, leaving in his wake the wafting scent of stale booze and a clutch of embarrassed subordinates staring awkwardly at their shoes. He’s spent the past few weeks meeting anybody he thinks can help the campaign. He doesn’t care who he has to speak to. He’s met the ex-CEO of one of the world’s three biggest oil companies, someone he’s sparred with publicly for years, and he’s met someone who knows Putin’s banker. He goes to art dealers who know the wives of oligarchs, and arranges meetings with the heads of hedge funds with Russian investments, seeking advice on how the new Russia functions.

  His efforts are part of a huge behind-the-scenes intelligence operation dedicated to understanding the Kremlin’s thinking. The set-up is run by Sauven, Mads Christensen, Kumi Naidoo and the campaign’s political strategist Neil Hamilton. As head of the global campaign to free the Arctic 30, Christensen is the repository of all the hints, rumours and tip-offs that are coming in from across the world, from meetings with diplomats, foreign ministers, business figures, Russian liberals and even Kremlin officials. Sometimes the best indication of how the campaign is going is a simple glance at the video link to Copenhagen in the early evening to see if Christensen has cracked open a Carlsberg at his desk.

  Mads Christensen is the epitome of concentrated Scandinavian cool. When he speaks to his core team, his voice is determined but composed. He’s one of those leaders whose demeanour is as important as the decisions he or she makes. Something about him inspires trust and loyalty. It’s not just what he says, it’s how he says it. He projects calm at all times. Even when the campaign is on the back foot, when they are mired in crisis, he’ll be found leaning back in his chair chewing gum with his feet up on the table at the Copenhagen hub, hands behind his head with his eyes closed, pondering how to outmanoeuvre the Kremlin. He wears colourful tank tops that would look ridiculous on most men, but somehow not on him. He has an intuitive understanding of the global media, a gift for strategic legal analysis and no tolerance for bullshit. A rumour circulates that he’s not actually a human being. Instead, it is said, he’s a computer algorithm, and Mads is in fact M.A.D.S. – Massive Automated Decision System.

  He’s running multiple sources across the globe. When contacts tell him who they’re talking to, he can often find their names in diagrams of the Kremlin power structure. But the situation is confusing. Some Russians are telling him not to worry, to just sit tight, that this will all be resolved in a few weeks. But then he has other sources telling him this is going to get nasty, high-level people saying it’s going to be years in jail. Christensen is told Putin is furious with Greenpeace and wants to teach the organisation a lesson.

  Mads Christensen doesn’t know who to trust – the people saying it will be over soon, or the sources predicting years in jail. Everyone wants to be part of a global story and he thinks some of his sources are mixing solid information with their own opinions. And he suspects he’s being fed false intelligence by the FSB.

  ‘There’s an information war raging for sure,’ he tells a core-team meeting. ‘Who to trust and who not to trust, that is the question. It’s making this situation very difficult to analyse.’

  For the campaign’s senior staff, this feels like playing a game of geopolitical chess. On one side of the board is a ragged band of amateur diplomats. Facing them are Putin and his security chiefs. The UK political director Ruth Davis wonders who might teach Greenpeace the rules of this global game, and she emails Martin Sixsmith.

  Sixsmith is a familiar face, for years he was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, the guy who stood in Red Square wearing a thick coat and clutching a microphone as the Soviet Union collapsed. Since returning to London he’s written a series of well-received books about Russia, including Putin’s Oil – an investigation into the fight to control Russia’s energy industry.

  Ruth Davis is forty-six years old with wavy brown hair. She likes to holiday in the Arctic to see the northern lights, but since the ship was seized she’s lived in the Room of Doom with a telephone plugged to her ear as she works her contacts in European governments. She doesn’t expect Sixsmith to reply to her email. He’s a busy man, the author of the bestselling book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. It’s been turned into a movie starring Steve Coogan and Dame Judi Dench and the film has just opened in London. It will later be nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture. So the political director is astounded when Sixsmith writes back saying he has half an hour for her.

  ‘Energy is what Russia’s all about,’ says Sixsmith, sipping on a cup of Darjeeling tea in a hotel bar overlooking central London. ‘Without energy, Russia is nothing. Without oil and gas their economy would be in a dreadful mess, and the regime can only survive as long as the economy is doing well. For the years after Putin became president, things were good – economically I mean – and he was incredibly popular. Then they had a recession and you had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people out on the streets demonstrating against Putin. He knows his own personal fortunes are linked to the economy, and the economy is oil and gas. He’s put all his eggs in one basket and if he drops that basket then he’s in big trouble. So when you guys come along and start protesting against the environmental effects of his energy strategy, then he’s going to be extremely jittery. That’s why you guys are in so much trouble.�
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  Ruth Davis looks up from her notebook. ‘How much trouble?’

  Sixsmith bites a chunk from a shortbread biscuit, spilling crumbs down his shirt.

  ‘Big trouble. You have to understand how important the Arctic has become to Putin. Up until now Russia’s relied on Siberia and this endless supply of oil and gas, but that’s been extensively exploited, they’re sucking it dry, so like the rest of the world he’s looking for new oil, and the Arctic is on his doorstep. Russia was very quick to lay a territorial claim, they said their continental shelf extends right up to the North Pole so the Arctic is theirs. Remember when they planted that flag on the seabed? That’s what that was all about. Then your friends go up there and say the Arctic’s not Russia’s, that the Arctic belongs to everyone, and of course Putin says, “No way.” And now your friends are in jail.’

  Ruth Davis lays out the strategy, how Greenpeace is giving Putin a wide turning circle, a chance to back down. Is it sensible? Are they on the right track? Sixsmith thinks for a moment then nods.

  ‘Russia is a sort of half-European and half-Asiatic country. And in terms of attitude they’re Asiatic, so not losing face is a really big thing. And the more you back Putin into a corner the more he’ll come out kicking and fighting. You have to give understanding to the dilemma he’s in, you have to give him room to make concessions, the opportunity to back down without losing face.’

  ‘And who’s calling the shots here?’ Davis asks. ‘We assume it’s Putin driving events. He’s making the big calls about where the case goes, right?’

  ‘The move to lock them up will certainly have been dictated by the Kremlin. And in the Kremlin’s terms, it’s actually the right reaction, because the regime is in trouble. There were demonstrations in the streets last year after Putin’s latest inauguration, protests in St Petersburg and Moscow. And what do you do when your regime is in trouble? You look for someone to blame. Traditionally it’s always been the Americans, it’s been the CIA. I bet they’re saying on TV that you guys are funded by the CIA.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Yeah yeah, and they’ll be saying the CIA is funding you in order to embarrass Russia, because the Americans will lose no opportunity to do down the great Russian people. It’s as if the Cold War never ended. Now of course we think that’s ridiculous, and I suspect you don’t get funding from the CIA—’

  ‘If I told you I’d have to—’

  ‘—you’d have to kill me, sure. But in Russian terms it’s the right strategy to adopt, because if you demonise somebody who’s challenged your regime—’

  ‘By the way Martin, we’re not funded by the CIA. The CIA hates us too.’

  ‘I know that. What was I saying? Yes … if you demonise your opponent and show you’re tough with them, like they were tough with Pussy Riot and your guys, then it’s clear that the Russian state is standing up for the Russian people against its external enemies. You, Pussy Riot, the CIA. It’s a political PR strategy and an energy strategy. You need to understand that. Putin’s PR rating rose tremendously around Pussy Riot, people completely approved of that. Okay, so the metropolitan elites in St Petersburg and Moscow might think it’s a bit hard sending those poor Greenpeace protesters to jail, or sending those girls playing their guitars to jail. But in the provinces people love that. Ivan and Masha out in the sticks, they’ll be loving this.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You bet.’

  He looks at his watch. Time is up.

  ‘You have to go?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Ruth Davis folds her notebook. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Sixsmith shrugs. ‘No problem. And don’t worry too much. He won’t keep them in for the Olympics.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, he might. But if he does, he’ll regret it.’

  The campaign is deliberately not talking about Russia’s Winter Olympics, which are scheduled to start in four months. The diplomats are telling Greenpeace that the Sochi Games are Putin’s baby, that he’s so closely associated with them that threatening to push for a boycott or organising protests there would back him into a corner and he’d come out swinging. Phil already used Mr Babinski to smuggle out a design for a Sochi Arctic 30 campaign – the Olympic rings as handcuffs – and Ben Ayliffe, head of the Greenpeace global oil campaign, is working on a strategy document for how the campaign will use the Games if the activists are still inside when they start. But, like Putin-bashing, right now the Olympics are taboo in this campaign.

  Ruth Davis walks to the Tube station, reading back through her notebook, satisfied that their political strategy is the right one but shaken by the confirmation of something she suspected – that they’re not even players at the chessboard, instead they’re on the board, pawns in a much bigger game. The way Sixsmith explained things, Arctic oil is integral to the long-term survival of the Putin regime, it’s Putin’s golden goose and Greenpeace just kicked it.

  The next day Kumi Naidoo makes contact with an influential figure in the Russian opposition movement. Naidoo gives him the codename ‘Bagel’. When a meeting is secured Naidoo’s office tells him, ‘You have to go to the airport to have a bagel,’ and he rushes off to meet the man in an arrivals lounge. Bagel tells Naidoo that Greenpeace must appear strong. If the organisation pleads for the release of the thirty, they’ll never get out. Bagel says he respects how the campaign has been run so far.

  ‘Putin doesn’t respect weakness,’ he says. ‘You must never use the language of begging.’

  Nevertheless, the campaign team starts working on a draft statement, to go in Naidoo’s name, apologising for the protest and undertaking not to return to the Russian Arctic. ‘Just in case,’ says Christensen. ‘It’s not something I ever want us to release, but if we have to, if that’s what it takes to get them out, then let’s at least have something ready.’

  But for the campaign team there is simply no bearable way to write to Putin using the words ‘sorry’, or ‘we apologise’, or ‘we regret’. And, what’s more, if Greenpeace does apologise then some of the thirty will never forgive the organisation, even if it secures their freedom. Their families, on the other hand, will never forgive Greenpeace if they don’t.

  For days they play with the language, but it’s impossible. Eventually Martin Sixsmith is consulted. Does he know any English phrases that sound contrite when translated into Russian but which in English are less cowering? Sixsmith laughs. ‘You know, if it comes to you having to say sorry, you don’t get to write the apology. Putin’s people write it for you. You just sign it.’

  Vladimir Putin grew up in a tiny apartment in Leningrad with a picture of Felix Dzerzhinsky – the founder of the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB – on his bedroom wall. He led a thuggish childhood, getting into fistfights and abusing teachers. ‘I was a hooligan,’ he later admitted – an irony not lost on the numerous opponents of his regime who have been accused of hooliganism, the Investigative Committee’s catch-all charge for political dissent.

  In 1968 – the year Pavel Litvinov lifted the Czechoslovak flag in Red Square – the sixteen-year-old Vladimir Putin applied to join the KGB. He later said he was inspired by the TV show The Sword and the Shield, in which secret policemen broke down doors the length and breadth of Russia to protect the nation from its enemies. The KGB told the boy he was too young to join,66 so instead he went to university to study law and successfully reapplied seven years later. His career progression was pedestrian but he eventually achieved a foreign posting in Dresden in East Germany, from where he witnessed the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989. Before the revolution was over he’d burned so many secret files that he broke the KGB’s incinerator.67

  In 1991 he left the service, although he later said, ‘A KGB officer never resigns. You can join but you can never leave.’68 As Russia slipped into economic and political chaos in the 1990s, Putin worked for the mayor of St Petersburg, securing for himself a reputation as an effective high-level bureaucrat.69 B
y 1997 he was a government official living in Moscow and was taking an advanced economics degree. His dissertation, which extended to 218 pages, cogitated over the role of natural resources such as oil and gas in the Russian economy. The text was later declared classified, but Putin also wrote an article for a mining journal in which he summarised his thoughts. He wrote that Russia’s energy policy – indeed the return of the nation to great-power status – depended on the management of the country’s natural resources, which he valued at $28 trillion. Putin wrote of the urgent need to create Russian oil and gas companies that could compete with Western corporations. The government didn’t need to own them, he wrote, but it should be able to determine their long-term planning.70

  In 1998 President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin to head the FSB – the main successor organisation to the KGB – and a year later made him Prime Minister.71 On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned his office. He’d suffered illness for some time, been drunk at state occasions and epitomised the failures of the post-Soviet nineties. Addressing the nation he said, ‘As I go into retirement, I have signed a decree entrusting the duties of President of Russia to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’72

  Putin published a blueprint for his rule – Russia at the Turn of the Millennium. In it he stated: ‘Russia cannot become, say, the US or Britain, where liberal values have deep historic traditions. Our state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and its people. For Russians a strong state is not an anomaly to be got rid of. Quite the contrary, it is the source of order.’73

  While Russian state communism was dead, authoritarianism was not. Putin instituted a system of state capitalism in which wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of billionaire businessmen who were handed control over the nation’s industries. As long as they did not challenge the regime and allowed the government to benefit from the riches flowing into their coffers, they were left to their own devices. When one of those oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of Russia’s biggest oil company and the country’s richest man, intimated that he might challenge Putin for the presidency, he was jailed on trumped-up charges. His company was broken up and distributed among Putin’s supporters.