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

NINETEEN

The appeals go on, the process grinds forward, always with a sense of impending, inevitable rejection. But the Kremlin does not only have the thirty in its sights.

Mads Christensen has sources telling him an FSB raid on the Greenpeace office in Moscow is a real possibility. Bank accounts will be shut down. Staff will be arrested and charged with complicity in the action. Any doubts about the veracity of the information fall away when the rental contract on the Russian office is cancelled with just three weeks’ notice. It’s a typical tactic familiar to Russian opposition groups. A decision is taken to start pulling out the foreign staff in Russia, even Daniel Simons, who’s leading the legal response team in Murmansk.

In Moscow, on the balcony outside the Dance Hall, the head of Greenpeace Russia, Sergey Tsyplenkov, tells Laura Kenyon – a Canadian campaigner – what the sources are saying. The Investigative Committee is compiling a list of people it will potentially be investigating, and he assumes her name is on it. It’s too risky for her to stay here. As a foreigner she’s exposed. It’s time to go.

Simons and Kenyon leave Russia. Everybody else waits for the Kremlin to make its move.

The following day nothing happens, but rumours of an assault on the Moscow office are swirling like confetti. Now sources inside the Russian government are warning that the crackdown is imminent, that the office will soon be shut down and staff arrested. Instead of bringing this saga to a close, it seems there is an appetite in the Kremlin to escalate.

Late in the afternoon Mads Christensen taps the microphone on the video link between London and Copenhagen. He asks Ben Ayliffe and the head of the media team to get on a secure line.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘we’ve got a source, a really good one, someone who knows what’s happening at the top level. I don’t want to say who this is, and you don’t need to know, but they’re telling us it’s going to happen. Maybe as soon as tomorrow. Office shut down, bank account closed, staff picked up by the FSB. We need to do something. Something that makes them stop and think. We need to make some kind of intervention so the PR hit they think they’ll take – inside and outside Russia – makes the FSB think again.’

Ben Ayliffe and his colleague lock themselves in a room with a bag of pastries and a pot of coffee and thrash through ideas. Ayliffe leads the team organising demonstrations, vigils and petitions around the world. He’s a twelve-year Greenpeace veteran with a passion for cricket, bird watching and shutting down polluting infrastructure using peaceful direct action. It should have been him on that ship but he hurt his back and Dima took his place.

Just over an hour later they have something for Christensen. It’s a draft of a letter to Putin from Kumi Naidoo. Not much in itself, but this letter has a twist. It includes a serious offer by Naidoo to swap places with the Arctic 30.

‘But we need to send it tonight,’ Ayliffe tells Mads Christensen. ‘Moscow is four hours ahead and we need to hit the morning news there.’

Christensen rings off and reads through the letter, then he calls Kumi Naidoo.

‘Mads.’

‘Kumi, hi.’

‘Hi.’

Silence.

‘Mads, are you there?’

‘Yeah. So, er… we have an idea.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, we’re trying to find something so morally powerful that the FSB can’t shut us down, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And we think… we think maybe you could offer yourself up. In exchange for the others, I mean. It would sort of be sacrificing you on the altar of saving the Russian office. I mean, I know it’s crazy, but what do you think?’

And Naidoo comes straight back. ‘Sure.’

‘Really?’

‘Yup.’

‘Are you absolutely sure about this? Because once you say yes, they could call our bluff. You know that?’

‘It’s fine, let’s do it. I’ve actually been thinking the same thing for a while. I’ve been playing it over in my head for a week. I’m the boss, the buck stops with me. If I could swap with those guys in jail I would. Let’s do it.’

Kumi Naidoo has been jailed before. When he was fifteen years old he joined the national student uprising against apartheid rule in South Africa. Kids across the country were walking out of school and taking to the streets to protest racist rule. Naidoo became a leader of the uprising, he was jailed, released, and forced to live underground. Eventually he had no choice but to leave the country. His offer to take the place of the thirty is a serious one.

The letter to Putin is delivered to the Russian ambassador in The Hague, the campaign sends out a press release, and the next morning it’s a major story in the Russian media. Putin’s spokesman says the President has read the letter but is powerless to intervene in Russia’s independent judicial system. Around the world – but most importantly in Russia – it’s known that Kumi Naidoo has made a personal offer to Putin to take the place of the Arctic 30.

The campaigners wait. Every time a new Skype message pops up from the Russian office it’s quickly scanned as they look for news that the security services are raiding the Dance Hall. But nothing. No raid, no arrests. It takes another day for the Kremlin to react to the letter. But when they do, they play a card from the bottom of the deck.

‘Okay, so the FSB found drugs on the Arctic Sunrise.’

‘What?’

‘Drugs. It’s on the Investigative Committee website. Can you give us a comment? We’re going live with it on the evening news.’

Tatiana Vasilieva, a 23-year-old press officer, lowers the phone and looks around. It’s late, the Dance Hall is emptying, she was about to leave for home herself. The journalist on the end of the line is still speaking, she can hear his voice buzzing from the receiver. And then she hears another phone ringing, and another one. A moment later every phone in the room is ringing and her colleagues are reaching into pockets and bags for their mobiles.

‘I’m sorry, say that again.’

‘I said do you have a statement? We’re going live in ten.’

‘What kind of drugs?’

‘Illegal drugs. That’s what they’re saying.’

Seconds later the BBC’s Moscow correspondent tweets the news. The Skype groups explode with messages.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Mads Christensen mumbles to himself, staring at his screen. ‘This is bad. This is very bad.’ He unmutes the video link to London and taps the microphone. Eight heads look up. ‘You lot seeing Skype? The Russians are saying they’ve found drugs on board the Sunrise. They’re saying they found morphine and poppy straw.’

Faces duck below laptop screens then surface a moment later with wide, fearful eyes.

‘Holy shit,’ says Ben Ayliffe, shaking his head. ‘That has to be bullshit.’

‘It’s a smear,’ says Christensen. ‘Total bullshit. Morphine and poppy straw.’

‘I mean, poppy straw, that’s crap. There’s no way they found poppy straw on that ship.’

Silence, then Christensen says, ‘What is poppy straw?’

‘Er.’

‘Ummm.’

Ayliffe types the words into Wikipedia, scans the page then looks up at the video screen.

‘Oh man, it’s opium. Raw opium stalks.’

‘Who the hell sails on a ship with raw opium stalks?’

Christensen taps ‘Greenpeace’ and ‘drugs’ into Google News and sees the story is already getting pick-up. Western right-wing media outlets – many of whom have done nothing to cover the story of the Arctic 30 until now – are pouncing on the claim and posting their first dispatches since the arrests, with the prefix ‘BREAKING NEWS’. He unmutes the microphone on the video link.

‘Poppy straw anyone? What is it? Is it medicinal, or is it a recreational drug? We need to know as soon as possible.’

‘Oh shit,’ says Christensen. The Room of Doom looks up. ‘Okay, so Laura’s saying the FSB are accusing the Arctic 30 of being on heroin.’

‘Whoa!’

‘Yup.’

They say a lie can go around the world before the truth has even got its boots on, and now the team is in a race against time to catch up with the FSB’s smear and challenge it. The Western media hasn’t used the ‘H’ word yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and the implications for the thirty could be huge. Mads Christensen has a global campaign rolling here, but the FSB is trying to derail it with undiluted bullshit and the media is falling for it.

The campaign hits every Skype group out there, reaching hundreds of people, urgently demanding evidence that the Russian claim is a smear. Seconds later they’re told that morphine is obligatory on all Dutch ships and that it’s kept in the captain’s safe. It would have been illegal for a Greenpeace ship not to carry morphine. But what about the opium? Within a minute they’re being told that the ship was searched by Norwegian drug sniffer dogs before it sailed for the Prirazlomnaya, and a minute after that they’re sent the certificate to prove it. Unless someone on the crew arranged a rendezvous with a poppy straw dealer in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, they can prove the drugs story is a lie.

Christensen’s London-based media team bashes the information into a press release. In Amsterdam Daniel Simons watches the words appearing in real time on a Google doc and gives them legal sign-off as each sentence appears. They’re desperate to get something out before the media accuses their friends of stashing heroin on the ship. Then twenty minutes after the FSB released its statement Greenpeace are sending out theirs, rebutting the smear in forensic detail and castigating the FSB for stooping so low.

Soon enough the media is running their corrective. Christensen types the words ‘Greenpeace’ and ‘drugs’ into Google News and reads reports saying the only drug found on the Sunrise was medical morphine. The tone of the story has changed. The FSB is being ridiculed. Russian Greenpeace campaigner Vladimir Chuprov – who’d be one of the first campaigners to be arrested in a raid – is quoted saying, ‘Next they’ll say they’ve found a pink zebra on our ship, or maybe an atomic bomb.’

Pavel Litvinov – Dima’s father – is in no doubt about who’s behind the smear. He’s been expecting it. He’s surprised it took them so long. ‘I knew they would play with all these things, with drugs, that they would make it up even if they didn’t find something. It was clear the command would come from Putin that this has to be done. Whatever they want, they will find. So I always had a fear they would say drugs.’

By the end of the day the story has died down. Mads Christensen comes on the video link. ‘Well done everybody,’ he says. ‘I have to say that was extraordinary work. They tried to kill us today, but we stood up to them, we fought back and we survived. Today was a big day. Something important happened. This wasn’t about drugs, this was about something even bigger. We’re having a conversation with the FSB. This is what’s happening, I think. We do something and they react to it, they do something and we react. This drugs thing is clearly a response to the Kumi letter. We sent it yesterday, then today they say they found heroin. Putin got the letter. That was his reply.’

A second day of global action is organised by the global campaign team. More than one hundred events are held in thirty-six countries involving nearly ten thousand people – everywhere from Mount Everest to Bangkok to Naples. The team in Murmansk plans a one-person vigil in the city centre, with a protester posing in a purpose-built cage made from cardboard and tape. The cage is stored in an enclosed yard at the rented building hired by the team as a headquarters.

Tatiana Vasilieva, the Moscow-based press officer, has travelled to Murmansk to help organise the protest. Under Russian law a demonstration involving more than one person requires a licence from the government[77] – a licence she’ll never be granted. The Greenpeace plan is to put a lone protester inside the cage in front of the court building. The journalists attending the next appeal hearings will then see the person in the cage. But on the morning of the protest another press officer rushes into her room and sits on her bed, shaking.

‘What happened?’ asks Vasilieva. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘The cage has been stolen.’

‘What?’

‘An hour ago when the team arrived to collect the cage it was gone. We spoke to the security guard of the building. He gave us the video footage from the CCTV cameras. We watched it and…’

‘What? What does it show?’

‘There were six men, all dressed in black and wearing masks. These men, you can see them, they’re scaling the fence and moving in a straight line. Then they pick up the cage and carry it across the courtyard. They’re either local freaks or the FSB. They have to be.’

Since arriving at SIZO-1 Frank has examined every aspect of his life. He’s raked over the decisions he took over many years, and reconstructed how he ended up on that ship. He wonders if he might have taken a different path. He remembers details of his childhood for the first time in decades. And he thinks about his father. Was he trying to live up to his dad’s reputation? Is that why he joined the ship and sailed to the Prirazlomnaya? He often asks himself the question. He always envied his father because he had a cause, and environmental protection became Frank’s cause. It gave him strength to know what he was doing was important.

Michael Hewetson would have been a formidable supporter of the campaign to free his son, had he still been alive. He was one of the legendary commandos dropped behind enemy lines the night before D-Day to secure Pegasus Bridge – the key strategic goal on which depended the success of the Allied invasion of Europe. The nineteen-year-old was in the thick of brutal battle for ten days before being wounded and shipped back to England, patched up and sent back to Europe, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine.

After the war he became a French teacher. He could never handle loud bangs and wouldn’t have balloons in the house. It took Frank’s mother years to get Michael to walk on the pavement instead of the middle of the road – a legacy of street fighting in Normandy.

Frank knew his father did something extraordinary in the war, but Michael refused to talk about it. In 1991 he returned to Pegasus, and his family came with him. They went to the cemetery. He stopped at a line of graves and broke down. Frank followed after him. They were all eighteen, nineteen years old. Names from Michael’s past. But still he didn’t open up.

It was on a family holiday in Spain that Michael finally told Frank about those ten days in Normandy. He said it was terrifying, it was chaotic, at times more brutal than the Russian front. Then he told his son a story he’d never told anyone before. It was day four after D-Day, he was with a colonel when they were approached by resistance fighters. The French had just found two collaborators and said they couldn’t let them go because they were informers. So the collaborators were handed over and the resistance disappeared. The colonel turned to Frank’s father and said, ‘Look, we can’t take them prisoner, we don’t have the capacity. Take them round the back of that barn and finish them off.’ It was an order – an illegal order – but an order. So Frank’s father walked them around the barn. They begged for their lives. He said, ‘You have to run and run now, and if you look back I’m going to shoot you.’ He started screaming at them. ‘Run! Fucking run!’ And they did. They ran. He thought he might be able to shoot them in the back. But he couldn’t do it. He let them go.

Frank never doubted he’d do the same, that he’d disobey the order, that he wouldn’t shoot them. And he still thinks that. He knows that. But this place, SIZO-1, is giving him a lesson in the power of fear. Right now he’s not sure what he’d do to get out of this place, but he thinks he might do things he never thought possible. Because he’s scared. Right now, in this place, he’s scared.

In countries across the world the demonstrations against Gazprom are continuing. Protesters picket the Albertina museum in Vienna where an exhibition sponsored by the oil giant has been inaugurated by the curators – with great solemnity – as the Gazprom Collection. In Paris an anti-Gazprom protester hangs for a day in a tent suspended from a rope tied to the underside of the Eiffel Tower. At the Barcolana Autumn Cup Regatta, a yacht race in the Gulf of Trieste in Italy sponsored by Gazprom, protesters in a RHIB hold banners calling for Arctic protection as they speed alongside the company’s entrant – the 35-metre Esimit Europa, emblazoned in Gazprom blue, the sail rendered as one huge logo. The declared mission of the Russian yacht is to ‘unite Europe’ but images of security guards in Gazprom-branded tracksuits trying to stab the Greenpeace boat with a knife succeed only in uniting opinion against the company.[78]

The mother of Gizem Akhan, a 24-year-old activist from Turkey now jailed in SIZO-1, writes an open letter calling on more people to join the movement to free her daughter. ‘They all took a step for the future of this Earth, marched on and stood up for something. We must stand beside them. They must not feel alone.’ Her plea is echoed by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo[79] – the association of Argentine women whose children were among the thirty thousand ‘disappeared’ between 1976 and 1983 by the country’s military junta. The same day Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes to the Russian government calling for the release of the Arctic 30. ‘This is not just an Arctic or a Russian issue,’ he says. ‘The impacts of global warming will be most keenly felt in the developing world.’[80]

Also that day protesters from the pro-Kremlin youth organisation Nashi picket the Greenpeace office in Moscow. Nashi – meaning ‘Ours!’ – numbers tens of thousands of 17–25-year-olds who are dedicated to defending the Putin regime. Its members meet at summer camps across Russia to receive basic military training. The group has been accused of harassing opponents of the Kremlin.

Today Putin’s young supporters are carrying banners depicting the faces of famous Russian Arctic researchers above the slogan ‘REAL DEFENDERS OF THE ARCTIC!’ The campaigners from the Dance Hall invite the Nashi protesters to come inside the building to discuss their issues. The Putin loyalists appear uncertain, then agree to the meeting. Inside the office they drink coffee with Greenpeace campaigners who tell them Russia’s Arctic researchers are certainly heroes, but so are the activists in jail for trying to protect the frozen north. The Nashi protesters say little, finish their biscuits and leave.

The next day eleven Nobel Peace Prize laureates write to Putin demanding the release of the thirty, describing the Arctic as a ‘precious treasure of humanity’.[81] They are later joined by two more Peace Prize winners – Lech Wałęsa and Aung San Suu Kyi.[82] Reuters reports that Paolo Scaroni, the CEO of Italian oil giant Eni, which has a multi-billion-euro partnership deal with Gazprom, has asked the Russian company to intervene to free the Arctic 30.[83]

In London John Sauven takes a call from New York. Paul McCartney has heard about the campaign and he wants to help. Putin is a huge Beatles fan, he sat in the front row when McCartney played ‘Back in the USSR’ in Red Square. The Moscow office has been saying for weeks that Paul McCartney is the only person who can get more media coverage than Putin in Russia.

And they’re right. McCartney writes to Putin, and when the letter becomes public the last few paragraphs are printed in newspapers across the country.