Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  By late Sunday afternoon, through a long night and morning, a consensus candidate emerged that seemed ideal, or at least dependably uncorrupt. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Main Directorate for Organised Crime, or GUOP—one of the branches of the MVD that dealt with the Moscow mobs, working with the MVD’s rapid-response units in cases such as contract killings and kidnappings. The colonel’s name was Vladimir Borisovich Rushailo. He had racked up some high-visibility busts.

  Rushailo had a rather roguish reputation. In his early forties, he was seasoned, fearless. His men would run through walls on his order. He was decisive, but also vainglorious. Looking for the big score and a big headline, he hated deskwork; he craved being in the thick of the hunt for criminals. Some said he had an itchy trigger finger. Handed the Weinstock case, Rushailo jumped at the chance to rescue the couple—and, not incidentally, to garner some heavy glory for himself in such a history-making endeavor. That impulse, in fact, seemed to drive him in general.

  Dimitry had heard of Rushailo’s exploits, but he still fretted. He’d heard horror stories about the organised-crime section, about how officers making peanuts and outgunned by the mobs had quit and gone into private ‘security’ jobs with the gangs. Bribes were rampant in the office, battering the force’s credibility with the public. If the gang that had taken the Weinstocks prisoner was audacious enough to kidnap Western businesspeople, was it not plausible that they had laid a foundation of greased palms in law enforcement?

  Nonetheless, there was no time to look for potential pitfalls. Action was required—now.

  It was now 11pm Sunday night in Moscow. Rushailo, a workaholic, was in his office at the MVD. Having been briefed on the gist of the case, Rushailo began to ponder strategies. The mission itself wasn’t problematic, he realised. As unprecedented as the case was, the rub was in ironing out all the conflicting jurisdictions and diplomatic protocols. If the FBI was working on the case in America, they would have to share information with Rushailo’s people—something that would necessitate official authorisation from the American government. Rushailo figured he may as well have been asking for the moon given that the two countries hadn’t worked together in any capacity since World War II. Why would they do so now?

  He thought for a moment. If it couldn’t be done the diplomatic way, there was a simple way: he could go over to the American Embassy and make the request. The very notion made him shudder. Never before had Rushailo or any other high-level Russian intelligence operative entered that longtime enemy outpost. But the groundbreaking aspect of such a visit made him excited as well. Besides, they’d have to hear him out, he figured. If they turned him away, the blood of those Australians would be on the Americans’ hands, not the Russians’.

  Dimitry, tipped off to Rushailo’s intentions by his contacts, decided he would help pave the colonel’s way by alerting the embassy beforehand. Late Sunday night, he made a conference call from Philadelphia to the embassy, with Ian Rayman on the line in Wayne, relating yet again the details of the calls from Yvonne and Danny Weinstock. One of the duty officers took note of the story, but cautioned that they could not take any action on the matter because the FBI had no legal presence at the embassy. In any case, he added, he couldn’t recall a time when anyone there had ever spoken to the Russian police.

  ‘Let me assure you,’ Dimitry told him, ‘that is going to change very soon.’

  Knowing that the Russian colonel would be at the embassy’s door within a few hours, he only wished that he could be a fly on the wall when that fateful moment arrived.

  15

  DAY EIGHT:

  MONDAY, JANUARY 13th

  MOSCOW, WASHINGTON DC, PHILADELPHIA, WAYNE, AND THE DACHA

  ‘A CASE OF INTEREST TO BOTH OF OUR COUNTRIES’

  On Monday morning, Rushailo called a major into his office, the head of the MVD’s organised crime unit named Bryzgalov. They discussed the case and its personnel and paramilitary options, though they could take no action until either the FBI had been granted authorisation to share information or did its part by providing a name, phone number, and location, the bits and pieces that would build a trail to the kidnappers and the Weinstocks. Before wrapping up the discussion, Rushailo had one last end to tie up. ‘This fellow Miasnikov, of SovAustralTechnicka,’ he said. ‘See what you can dig up on him.’

  Minutes later, at around 8am, the two officers, clad in dark business suits and hounds tooth overcoats, climbed into a department staff car. With Bryzgalov at the wheel, the twenty-minute drive from the Ministry headquarters at 5 Ivanteevskaia Street to the US Embassy complex at 19 Chaykovskovo Street was easy. Even for roughriders like them, the weight of the moment was a bit daunting, their chests thumping under their coats. Rushailo wondered aloud if they would even be allowed through the embassy gate. Only two years ago, the KGB was supplanted.

  Back then, by implication, the Weinstocks would have been goners, their plight unable to bridge the wide gulf between Russian and American intelligence orbits during the Cold War. Although KGB records had been sealed so as not to stain any ex-agents’ reputations, it was entirely plausible that both Rushailo and Bryzgalov had KGB backgrounds. Yet now, only a few years on, they may have wondered if during the course of this case they might run into some of their old confederates who were now on the opposite side of the law. If so, that would be beyond irony.

  It wouldn’t be the first time they had pondered the eventuality of pulling the trigger and taking out people they knew. Such was life in post-Communist Russia. Indeed, as the car made the turn onto Chaykovskovo Street, Rushailo pointed out a shambling three-level building that sat directly across the road from the embassy. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld, he knew rogue ex-KGB agents were still using the building, to monitor calls in and out of the embassy, and possibly conversations in bugged offices. By going into the embassy, would Rushailo be dropping information to the wrong people? It was just one complicating factor of this bizarre case.

  Upon reaching the grounds of the enormous embassy, the car stopped at the main entrance gate. When an attendant approached, Rushailo rolled down the window and displayed his police credentials. In broken English, he uttered a sentence that would have profound international impact.

  ‘We are here to discuss with you a case of interest to both of our countries.’

  The attendant was at a loss, never having heard an entreaty of this kind from a Russian official. Not knowing who should handle it, he told Rushailo to wait in the driveway while he summoned a duty officer from the political affairs sector, who quickly came out and escorted the two Russians past the guardhouse and through the front doors. Inside, they were patted down and told to place their handguns on a table. A metal-detecting wand was circled around them. Rushailo and Bryzgalov looked at each other with wan smiles, sharing the same thought: So this is how common criminals are made to feel.

  It was, surely, a strange vibe all around. Here were two high-level Russian intelligence officers—who likely were the subject of a couple of dossiers on file somewhere in this building—on turf that was only recently off-limits to men with their murky background. Old suspicions were not about to die so soon. The Americans’ innards growled as the pair strolled about the embassy floors, no doubt taking mental notes about what they saw.

  Ushered into an office in the political affairs division, the gazes of embassy personnel trained hard on them, they sat side-by-side facing five American diplomatic officers and a translator. What, Rushailo was asked, did he want from them to help get these two people rescued? His answer was simple, yet exceedingly complicated and sticky from the diplomatic worldview: official authorisation to receive proprietary information that the FBI would elicit in those phone calls from Moscow. Based on that information, Rushailo’s elite police unit could roust the gang and free their hostages.

  Rushailo had the Americans over a barrel, and he knew it. How could they refuse? Doing so would leave them with blood on their hands should the Weinstocks be
killed. Damn, these two guys look so goddamn smug, the Americans thought. They’re really enjoying themselves. Hell, they’re acting like they own this place!

  Indeed, when the meeting ended, Rushailo and Bryzgalov all but floated out of the office. The epic visit was over, a half-hour interlude that is still the only one of its kind—yet one rarely if ever spoken of by embassy denizens. To this day, for those who were there or who later heard about it, the meeting on January 13, 1992, has a kind of ephemeral quality, more like fiction than fact. Though rightly proud of their role in the story, there is a palpable unease about the day the Russians penetrated those pristine walls.

  For the two Russian officers, however, there was a giddy sense of accomplishment. As they collected their guns and walked back to their car, savouring every step, they knew they had accomplished what they came there for. The rescue mission would have a Russian face. It was their stage now.

  But that meant they were under the gun, too. Failure was not an option.

  Once the Russians were out the door, the authorisation request made its way up the embassy ladder, headed by Ambassador Robert Strauss. As it happened, only days before, January 3rd, the United States officially established diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation. That would make all the difference in the world, lending urgency to the request. By mid-afternoon Monday, the international telephone and telex lines to Washington DC crackled. The Justice and State Departments deliberated the request, scouring the file on the case as well as archival microfilm looking for any case through the years similar to this.

  While nearly everyone agreed to approve the embassy’s request for FBI assistance—something that had never been requested before—intense and frequently heated discussions bubbled, debating whether the Russians could possibly lift classified FBI operating procedures. Some hard-liners were dead set against giving the Russians so much as the time of day. They just couldn’t be trusted, they swore. Should we really let them know how good—or bad—our call-tracing technology is? We’d be playing ball with KGB people under a different name. They’d be asking us prying questions. More than one department head repeated the same line like a mantra: ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Besides,’ some of the same critics demurred, ‘how believable is this crazy story anyway about Australians being held hostage over some fertiliser sale? Even the Australian government doesn’t believe it. Maybe these Weinstock people just want to dig up some money.’

  For now, pending further events, it was decided to let the family handle things on its own. The FBI would continue recording the calls from Moscow. The bureau would have a channel open to the embassy. But as for the Russians sharing information, well, they said, let’s think about it some more.

  In Moscow, where it was almost midnight now, Rushailo was chafing that no word had come from the embassy that he could contact the FBI. Danny Weinstock, he knew from Dimitry Afanasiev, would be making the next call to America sometime that night. If only Rushailo could get his hands on the information that would come from that call, he could move, maybe even ending this thing tonight. Instead, he and his men sat in the MVD, not knowing where to go. They could take a flyer and stake out this Grigory Miasnikov fellow at the office on Chekhova Street. But he found it implausible that the kidnappers would go there again, for a third time. If it turned out to be a dead end, it would tip off the gang that the cops were on their tails. That could be disastrous to the Weinstocks. But if they weren’t at Chekhova Street, where were they? Damn, if only he could get some information from those uncooperative Americans.

  Rushailo was spitting mad, feeling completely betrayed. Suddenly, he wasn’t envisioning headlines about him busting the gang; the headlines he imagined were of the corpses of the Australian couple being found off some desolate road. What fools, those Americans! he thought. Do they know they’re sending these people to their death?

  He could only put his itchy trigger finger to work on his telephone touchpad, calling the only person whose number he did have in America, Dimitry Afanasiev, who after hearing Rushailo’s tirade also expressed disgust at the paralysis of the Americans.

  Dimitry’s understanding was that the US Embassy in Moscow seized up in bureaucratic shock and went into a slumber waiting for instructions from Washington that weren’t forthcoming. So everything stopped on the Americans’ part.

  The Russians, though, were not in the mood to wait. They wanted to do something, get the wheels turning. They were desperate to get information from the FBI. Right from the beginning, people in the MVD had asked Dimitry to put them in direct touch with the FBI, but the FBI man, Gerry Ingrisano, refused to deal with them directly because he had no orders from above to establish direct links with the Russians.

  Ingrisano knew of Dimitry through Dr Rayman. Ingrisano knew of his contacts in Russia. They spoke, briefly, but nothing came of it. There was nothing he could do to pass information to the Russians. His hands were tied. There was nothing the embassy could do, nothing anybody in an official capacity could do, not the Americans, not the Australians. Nobody.

  On Dimitry’s part, he had no choice but to become involved. He would have to mediate between Dr Rayman and the Russians. If he didn’t do this, they would get nowhere. Those people would never come out of it alive. The truth of the matter is, once Dimitry became involved, neither the FBI nor the American Embassy had a clue about what was going on. They may have thought they were doing something important toward the rescue of the Weinstocks, but they weren’t. It was out of their hands.

  THE MONDAY CALL

  Ian and Wendy evidently agreed with Dimitry’s low estimation of the FBI. Without informing Gerry Ingrisano, they agreed to feed information about the impending call from Moscow to Dimitry via a second phone line they had in the house. Periodically during the call, Wendy would go to an upstairs bedroom and repeat what was being said on the other line in the kitchen. In turn, Dimitry would have his own second line open to a switchboard at the MVD, where the data would be routed to a department to be processed—phone numbers matched with known underworld figures, addresses, etc.—then relayed to Rushailo, who’d be out in a police cruiser waiting for a location to raid.

  At around 5pm, Ingrisano, Joe McShane, and Tom Cottone arrived at the house and set up the equipment. Ian knew the drill back and forth: Keep the call going. Be natural but persistent. Ask questions. Don’t get angry or confrontational. Stay on an even keel, establish a comfort level, mention the money a lot, that you’re still liquefying assets. Listen hard. Follow up, ask for numbers, places. Where are they being held? Who are they with? How many of them are there? And stall, stall, stall.

  At around 11pm, the maddening wait was at last over. Finally, we were going to make the call to Ian. We were taken from the house and piled into a car waiting outside the door. Oleg was at the wheel, Danny in front, and I was in the back with Boris. Behind us, Robert, Kuzin, and the one they called Orloff followed. The route was the same as the last time, on the same icy roads to Moscow. In an hour, we entered the city’s business district, made the usual turns leading to Chekhova Street, and pulled up in front of number 25, where another car filled with gangsters rendezvoused with our car and the one behind us.

  This was surprising and gave me a tingle of expectation. Could they really be taking us to the SovAustralTechnicka office yet again? Had I been wrong when I had assumed Robert had allowed Danny to leave the office phone as a call-back number only because he would never risk bringing us back there again? Maybe, I thought, I shouldn’t get excited. Maybe everybody was in Robert’s pocket in this town, anyway.

  However, something was different about this visit. This time, Grigory Miasnikov wasn’t standing in front of the building. Evidently, this was important because instead of getting out, Oleg, looking concerned, gunned the engine and took off again. Now my mind really began to percolate with questions. Was Grigory’s absence a signal to the others to scramble? Were things getting too hot? Had they been found out? Had Grigory gotten himself
captured? Was he singing to the cops right now?

  Or did something happen between the different factions of the gang? Had Grigory’s famous arrogance pushed the wrong button? Had he been ‘silenced’? If so, was the fragile solidarity of the kidnappers coming apart after only a week? Would that mean they were now more desperate than ever? Would they even take us to make the call, or just get rid of us and end this ill-conceived caper before the night was out? All these notions flashed through my brain as the car careened down dark and desolate streets.

  Fortunately, it didn’t go to a secluded, wooded area. Instead, it slowed to a stop only about two miles away, in a neighbourhood of rundown, two- and three-storey apartment buildings, in front of a seemingly vacant building. We were then taken out of the car and rushed into a ground floor flat.

  It was a typical Moscow residence—meaning it was a synonym for the words gloomy and depressing—if a bit larger than most of those we had seen. It was, perhaps, a hangout where Oleg did Mob business or a trysting place to cheat on Rae. Musty and unpainted, with an old linoleum floor, there was a living room and a bedroom. The only pieces of furniture in the living room was a solitary wooden stool, a backgammon set on an otherwise bare shelf, and a lamp with no shade.

  Of primary importance to Oleg were the unadorned windows. He kept looking out into the darkness of a courtyard alley as Robert took a telephone from a carry bag and plugged it into a live wall jack, then tapped in another phone with a line-splitter—the kind of thing he seemed to do with such dispatch that it struck me he must have been brought into the gang partly because he knew how to rig a phone to get a call out of Russia at any given time.