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

FIVE

At the Greenpeace office in Moscow, a ping pong table has been rolled into the main meeting room to accommodate the numbers of people working on the campaign to free the Sunrise crew. The room was requisitioned and turned into a crisis response centre the morning after the ship was seized. A light-fixture resembling a chandelier hangs from the ceiling and the floor is a smooth polished wood, so the team dubs it the Dance Hall. But right now it feels more like a bunker. Twenty staff crowd in from six in the morning until past midnight, organising lawyers for the moment when the ship arrives in Murmansk.

But from the first moment they’re swamped by a full-frontal propaganda assault. The protest was a terrorist attack, the activists are CIA operatives, they were acting as stooges for Western oil companies, the pod could have been a bomb. The lies come from all corners of the Russian establishment – from journalists, ministers, the security services, and from the state-owned oil company, Gazprom.[5]

In Amsterdam – where Greenpeace International is based – the organisation’s digital campaign team is looking to mobilise global public opinion. A conversation on Skype sees the first use of a phrase that will soon become the name of an international drive for the crew’s freedom.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace legal chief Jasper Teulings is working with Moscow to assemble a team of lawyers for Murmansk. From the first moment it’s clear to him that the organisation is in serious trouble. He’s a lawyer himself but he knows this isn’t about the law, and that’s what scares him. Greenpeace is facing what he calls ‘a lawless, cowboy situation’.

He telephones his colleague Daniel Simons, a Russian-speaking lawyer who’s on a romantic holiday in Venice, and asks him to fly to the Russian Arctic immediately. Next he contacts the foreign ministry in Amsterdam (Greenpeace ships sail under the Dutch flag) and pushes them to bring a case before an international maritime court to demand the release of the Sunrise and her crew. But this is the official Russian–Dutch year of friendship: huge trade deals are planned, a state visit to Moscow by the Dutch king is just weeks away.[6] Surely Teulings can’t expect all that to be put at risk over an Arctic oil protest?

Two days after commandos raided the ship, a man claiming to be a reporter turns up at the Moscow office asking for a tour of the building. Staff there soon become suspicious. It’s the way he’s dressed and the questions he asks when he interviews them. ‘And who ordered the protest at the platform?’ ‘How does your hierarchy work?’ They think the man is probably from the Federal Security Bureau. FSB agents have a certain style and this guy is an archetype. He’s wearing a white shirt and a black leather jacket, and he has what one campaigner calls ‘a Bill Gates type of haircut’.

The man says he’s going to the toilet then disappears. A few minutes later he’s found wandering alone along a corridor. Eventually he leaves. And from that moment onwards the Moscow team discusses sensitive issues on an outdoor balcony. They’re convinced they’ve been bugged.

In Copenhagen the executive director of Greenpeace’s Scandinavian operation, Mads Christensen, has been handed leadership of the global campaign to free the arrested activists. Christensen is forty-one years old, the son of a cinema owner, a graduate in political science and the only national leader in the Greenpeace world to have started in the actions department – the team that organises and executes protests. Two years ago he jumped into the water in front of an icebreaker to delay its journey to join Shell’s exploratory Arctic drilling operation off Alaska. He is tall, slim, with blond hair and black, thick-rimmed glasses.

Straight away it’s clear to him that Greenpeace is in ‘deep, deep shit’. This is going to need an international campaign of indefinite length. He spends a day putting a team together, recruiting experienced staff from across the organisation, and the next morning they walk away from their old jobs and devote themselves to the release of the Arctic 30.

Christensen’s first, most urgent task is to get organised in Murmansk before the Sunrise docks. The crew is going to need more than just lawyers. Appointed to lead the ground team is 38-year-old Belgian Fabien Rondal, a Russian-speaking former roadie for Rage Against the Machine.

‘You need to get there as soon as possible,’ Christensen tells him. ‘We’re thinking the ship will be there Tuesday or Wednesday and we need you and your team in place before then. I can’t tell you when you’ll be able to come home. Nobody knows what happens next.’