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

THIRTEEN

It was a spring afternoon in 2010, three and a half years before commandos seized the Arctic Sunrise. BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform was gushing tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day,[42] and a group of Greenpeace campaigners were meeting in a Turkish restaurant in north London to discuss their response to the unfolding disaster.

John Sauven, the executive director of the UK office, surprised his colleagues by saying the reaction shouldn’t even focus on BP or the Gulf Coast. From the inside pocket of his jacket he pulled a page from the Financial Times and unfolded the sheet of pink paper on the table. He’d circled a story detailing the plans of a British company, Cairn Energy, to explore for oil off the coast of Greenland.

‘Imagine if a Deepwater Horizon happened in the Arctic,’ he said. ‘What we’re seeing in America would be nothing compared to that. Arctic oil, that’s where the frontline is. That’s where we need to be.’

He said the lack of sunlight and the near freezing sea temperatures off Greenland meant oil spilled into the Arctic wouldn’t break down in the way it did in the warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico.[43] When Deepwater Horizon suffered a blowout, the only way to plug the leak was to drill a relief well (a process that eventually took many weeks, by which time several million barrels of oil had been spilled[44]). But in the Arctic, when the winter ice returns, the sea is covered in a sheet of white that would prevent the drilling of a relief well, meaning a blowout could see oil leaching into a fragile marine ecosystem for months,[45] even years. That oil would then gather in a black toxic soup under the ice and be carried by the currents around the pole, to eventually be deposited in pristine waters many thousands of miles away.

Sauven folded up the sheet of newspaper and proposed a plan. He said he wanted to requisition one of the Greenpeace ships and sail it north to challenge Cairn’s drilling programme. He wanted to use direct action to halt the company’s operations for as long as possible.

Greenpeace had already been campaigning in the Arctic for fifteen years. Activists had confronted BP’s Northstar drilling operations in Alaska; Greenpeace ships had documented climate change impacts off Greenland and Svalbard; and Mads Christensen’s team in Scandinavia had campaigned against the industrial fishing fleets taking their destructive methods to the Arctic.

But it was Deepwater Horizon that provided the spark for a new wave of action. With the world’s oil giants moving into the melting waters above the Arctic Circle, Sauven got his way and the Greenpeace ship Esperanza sailed north to confront the new Arctic oil rush.

That summer Greenpeace played a cat-and-mouse game with the Danish navy – still the governing power in Greenland. The activists outpaced the Danish special forces RHIBs and occupied the underside of the Cairn platform, forcing a temporary shutdown.

The following year Greenpeace returned to Greenland, this time with Frank Hewetson leading the logistics operation. He hung a pod and two occupants from another Cairn oil platform, halting exploratory drilling operations for two days. After the Danish navy removed the pod, Frank led a team of eighteen activists who scaled the platform and presented a petition to the captain containing fifty thousand names calling for an end to Arctic oil drilling. Frank and the others were arrested and helicoptered to Greenland, where they were jailed for two weeks.

WikiLeaks had just published a quarter of a million cables from US embassies across the world. They showed how the scramble for resources in the Arctic was sparking military tensions in the region – with NATO sources worried about the potential for armed conflict between Russia and the West. The cables showed the extent to which Russia was manoeuvring to claim ownership over huge swathes of the Arctic. One senior Moscow source revealed that a famous 2007 submarine expedition by the explorer Artur Chilingarov to plant a Russian flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole was ordered by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.

Another cable detailed the lengths to which the USA was going to carve out a strong position in Greenland, and the concerns Washington had over Chinese manoeuvring on the island. Tensions within NATO were also exposed, as Canadian leaders privately expressed disquiet in the cables over the Western alliance’s mooted plans to project military force in the Arctic in the face of perceived Russian aggression. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was quoted by diplomats as saying that a NATO presence in the region would give non-Arctic members of the alliance too much influence in an area where ‘they don’t belong’.[46]

For an earlier generation the Arctic was the stage for Armageddon. Across the vast silence of the frozen north, two superpowers had ranged their armadas of nuclear warheads against each other’s cities. The skies above the pole were the shortest and quickest route to bring about the end of human life on Earth. And now, for a new generation, the Arctic was again the stage on which their future would be decided. A military build-up was under way as the oil giants prepared to colonise one of the last unclaimed corners of the Earth.

Greenpeace launched a campaign to create a legally protected sanctuary in the uninhabited region around the pole – an area where oil drilling and industrial fishing would be banned. A scroll signed by three million people in support of the sanctuary was planted on the seabed four kilometres beneath the pole, next to Chilingarov’s Russian flag. Attached to the scroll was a ‘Flag for the Future’ designed by a Malaysian child in a competition open to the youth of the world.

In summer 2012 Greenpeace activists confronted the Prirazlomnaya platform for the first time. It wasn’t pumping oil yet, but it was exploring for it. Six activists, including Sini Saarela and Greenpeace global chief Kumi Naidoo, scaled the side of the rig. They spent hours hanging off the Prirazlomnaya before being forced down by the spray from a freezing water cannon.

That same month, Arctic sea-ice cover reached its lowest level in recorded history. In summer 1979, there had been seventeen thousand cubic kilometres of sea ice at the Arctic,[47] spread out over an area the size of Australia. A generation later, there were just four thousand cubic kilometres left.[48] Scientists can’t pinpoint precisely when the summer sea ice will disappear completely, but there will very possibly be open water at the North Pole in the lifetimes of those activists who’d just scaled the Prirazlomnaya.[49]

But what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. It’s the planet’s air conditioner. That white sheet of sea ice reflects incoming solar radiation, keeping the globe cooler than it otherwise would be. As the ice melts, that sheet is replaced with dark water, which absorbs the sun’s heat, warming the planet and melting more ice. It’s like the difference between wearing a white or a black T-shirt on a baking day. So as temperatures rise, the ice melts, which causes more warming, which melts the ice. And as the ice melts the oil companies are moving north to drill for the oil that caused the melting in the first place.

Reasonable people have concluded that this is possibly insane.

Cairn Energy came up dry in the Arctic and pulled out.[50] Their operations were not helped by those two waves of Greenpeace direct action. But Gazprom was still trying to strike oil, and so was Shell.

The Anglo-Dutch energy giant – ranked the number two oil company in the world by size – sank $5 billion into its Alaska offshore programme.[51] But Shell was unable to explain how it would properly deal with an oil spill. The clean-up operation in the Gulf of Mexico required tens of thousands of people and 6,500 boats,[52] but when Shell published its plan for dealing with a blowout in the Arctic it featured a host of ‘solutions’ that were improbable, even farcical. Recognising that detecting pollution under the ice is almost impossible, the company proposed to deploy a dachshund called Tara, supposedly to sniff for spilled oil. The plan featured a photograph of Tara wearing an attractive red and green singlet and a GPS tracking collar.[53]

A senior official at a Canadian firm specialising in oil-spill response said, ‘There is really no solution or method today that we’re aware of that can actually recover [spilled] oil from the Arctic.’[54]

In July 2012 Shell’s Arctic drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, ran aground on the Alaskan coast.[55] The company’s oil spill containment system was so badly damaged in testing that a US government official revealed that it had been ‘crushed like a beer can’.[56] When the Noble Discoverer’s engine caught fire the man in charge of Shell’s Arctic operation, Pete Slaiby, told the BBC, ‘If you ask me will there ever be spills, I imagine there will be spills.’[57] Then on 31 December 2012 Shell’s Arctic oil platform, the Kulluk, hit heavy weather in the Gulf of Alaska and ran aground after attempting to transfer to a different port, partly to save money on a tax bill.[58]

Bowing to public pressure, Shell announced it was suspending its Arctic operation.[59] That left Gazprom. Putin’s oil giant announced that it was determined to become the first company to pump oil from the icy waters of the Arctic.

The Prirazlomnaya was by now thirty years old. Its base had spent years rusting in a shipyard before being moved to Murmansk and capped with the scrap parts of a decommissioned North Sea rig.[60] Against Arctic Council guidelines, Gazprom refused to publish its plan to clean up any spill.[61] A short summary – posted on its website before being removed by the company[62] – revealed that Gazprom was ill-equipped to clean up a spill on the scale of Deepwater Horizon.[63] But that summer they were going to drill again anyway.

At Greenpeace a team was assembled to organise a return to the Prirazlomnaya. Sini volunteered to climb the platform again. Pete Willcox offered to skipper the expedition. Across the world sailors and activists were emailed and asked if they were prepared to join the Sunrise and sail for the Arctic on a mission to take on Gazprom.

Daniel Simons is being harassed by the secret police.

There’s nearly always a car posted outside his legal headquarters in Murmansk. The two men in the front seats are wearing leather jackets and have Bill Gates haircuts. They take photographs of him and his colleagues, or observe them through the car window before scribbling in notebooks.

One night he’s heading back to the hotel where he’s staying. It’s 1 a.m. He crosses the street and bends down at the car window.

‘I’m going home now. Have a nice evening.’

The man at the steering wheel says nothing. Instead he pulls a pen from the inside pocket of his black jacket and writes something in his little book.

‘Good night then,’ says Simons.

The men stare straight ahead through the windscreen in silence.

Simons has been a Greenpeace lawyer for six years. He’s thirty-three years old and lives in Amsterdam but speaks Russian. After breaking off his holiday in Venice he rushed to Murmansk to recruit a legal team to defend the Arctic 30.

From the day after the Sunrise arrived in Murmansk, the Greenpeace team sees armed men in balaclavas wandering around town. Sometimes the men sit in the lobby of the hotel they’re staying in. Sometimes they follow Simons and his friends in the street. It’s the same guys who were standing guard outside the Investigative Committee that first night.

One night he’s walking home when he hears the sound of crunching grit. He turns around. It’s a taxi. A minute later it’s still there, crawling along the road behind him. He approaches the taxi. The car drives away, but soon afterwards it passes him. Then a couple of minutes later it passes him again. It’s driving in circles around him. His phone rings in his pocket, just for a second before the caller hangs up. Then it rings again. Two different Russian numbers that Simons doesn’t recognise. It’s past midnight. He has a brand-new SIM card. It’s obvious what’s happening here. The FSB is trying to link that SIM card to him, to check what his number is.

Two weeks have passed since commandos stormed the Arctic Sunrise, and by now one million people have written to Russian embassies around the world calling for the release of the crew. An Emergency Day of Solidarity sees 135 protests in forty-five countries across the globe.[64] There are demonstrations in the Russian cities of St Petersburg, Murmansk and Omsk. In Moscow there are pickets in front of the Kremlin and the FSB headquarters, and a protest in Gorky Park attended by the families of Roman, Andrey and the ship’s 37-year-old Russian doctor, Katya Zaspa. Hundreds of people gather at the main harbour in Hong Kong to form a human banner that reads ‘Free the Arctic 30’. In South Africa protesters come together at former apartheid detention centres. In Madrid supporters gather in Puerta del Sol with a replica of the Arctic Sunrise. In Senegal fishermen take to their boats to protest at sea in an act of solidarity. A year earlier they welcomed the Sunrise on its mission to preserve their fishing grounds from Western industrial trawlers. Now they’re returning the favour.

Russian citizens have been officially complaining to the Investigative Committee and the General Prosecutor’s office about the detention of the activists. They have to provide their personal information to make a complaint – their home address and phone number – and that puts them at risk of retaliation from the authorities. Nevertheless, thousands are registering their support for the Sunrise crew.

There are four global hubs from where the campaign is being run – Moscow, London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. In London the Arctic 30 team has set up shop in a basement space at the Greenpeace office, and soon enough it resembles a cross between a teenager’s bedroom and a military command HQ. From 7 a.m. until close to midnight the team sits hunched over computer screens, stuffing various iterations of fructose sugar into their mouths. On the wall there are three cheap clocks above childish hand-drawn flags – British, Dutch and Russian.

The campaigners’ collective mental state is one of permanent kinetic stress, like that moment when the car in front brakes suddenly and a surge of fear floods the very centre of your brain. It’s a constant communal condition, and soon enough their bunker is dubbed the Room of Doom.

The London hub is connected via a permanent video link to Mads Christensen’s office in Copenhagen. Opposite him sits his wife Nora, the leader of the Arctic campaign before the arrests. She is now responsible for overseeing staff across the world working for the crew’s release. The two of them make a formidable team. By 7 a.m. when London switches on the video link, the Christensens are at their desks discussing strategy for the day, having already got their two kids fed, dressed and into school.

At 10 a.m. every day, Copenhagen time, there is a core-team meeting. Faces from across the world appear in boxes on the screen: political operatives Neil Hamilton and Ruth Davis updating everyone on their dealings with governments; legal chief Jasper Teulings in Amsterdam giving the latest on his efforts to persuade the Dutch government to bring a case before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea; Rachel Murray, in charge of family liaison, relaying conversations she’s having with relatives of the thirty; Ben Ayliffe discussing plans for demonstrations, vigils and direct actions; James Turner and Iris Andrews in Los Angeles talking about the involvement of filmmakers and celebrities in the campaign; Fabien Rondal with the latest from Murmansk; and the head of the media operation giving details of the massive publicity campaign being orchestrated across the globe.

This team is now manoeuvring a global campaign involving several hundred people working full-time across forty countries. Ensuring they all work to the same political, legal and communications strategies requires a huge effort of co-ordination that is unprecedented in Greenpeace history. The team leaders find themselves on eighteen different Skype chats – online discussion groups for press officers, legal strategists, family liaison, and every other subset of the campaign. The groups are indispensable tools for sharing information and enforcing discipline amid the fear that somebody somewhere might say something that crashes the legal strategy or offends a key national government. All campaigns involve risk, but with the freedom of their friends at stake, the sense of personal responsibility is sometimes overwhelming.

‘We need to make them famous,’ Mads Christensen tells them. ‘We have to make every politician, every journalist, every business leader with investments in Russia, and every man and woman on the street know all about the Arctic 30. But we can’t attack Putin. Not personally. We do that, they’re fucked. We have to get them on TV and on the front pages, but not by hitting Putin. Instead we’re going after Gazprom as a proxy for the Kremlin. If we can cause them enough pain we figure Putin won’t think it’s worth keeping our guys in jail. We need to give Putin a wide turning circle. We need to give him space to backtrack and release them. If this becomes a battle of wills between Putin and the West, we may never get them out.’

At Switzerland’s St. Jakob-Park soccer stadium, FC Basel are about to face Germany’s FC Schalke 04 in a UEFA Champions League group stage tie. Every seat in the arena has been sold, the TV cameras are in position, ready to capture the action for highlights shows that will be watched later that evening by tens of millions of people across the globe. In the sponsors’ VIP boxes, suited executives are sipping on white wine and picking avocado canapés from silver trays, waiting for the game to start.

The evening’s main sponsor is Gazprom. Putin’s oil giant has paid to have its logo emblazoned across pitch-side hoardings at every one of that season’s games, right across Europe. The television coverage is saturated with Gazprom advertisements; the Schalke players are on the pitch warming up in shirts bearing the Gazprom logo. It is a forty-million-euros-a-year[65] effort to detoxify the brand of Russia’s state-owned oil company. And Andreas Schmidt is not happy about it.

‘I used to practise climbing with Kruso,’ he says, ‘and now he was in the Arctic sitting in prison because of Gazprom. We wanted to show the public that what was going on was not right, that Gazprom is doing dirty business up in the Arctic while trying to polish their image in Europe by being a big sponsor. I know Kruso, he’s a friend of mine. I was there because of him.’

Now Andreas is on the roof of the stadium. He and his team rig ropes then roll out a forty-metre banner. ‘We had a little delay – we wanted to start just before the kick-off but we started just after.’ They abseil off the roof, bringing the banner with them, unfurling it as they descend. The players are distracted, the attention of the crowd shifts to the sky, TV cameras spin away from the game. And with a final tug by Andreas, the huge banner catches the wind like a sail and fully unfurls.

The referee looks up. It takes him a moment to understand what’s happening, then he blows his whistle and calls the players off the pitch. Andreas and his team decided that afternoon that if the game was interrupted they would immediately end their protest, so they climb up the ropes and pull in the banner. A few minutes later the game resumes, but not before the cameras have caught images that will soon be broadcast around the world. Including in Moscow.

The next morning activists shut down every Gazprom station in Germany, locking themselves to the pumps.

This campaign can’t go after Putin, but his oil company is fair game.