The raid was the sort of strong-arm tactic much in vogue in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and not particularly surprising to Westerners doing business there. In fact, it is a testament to the powerful enticement of Russia’s oil and gas reserves that BP still even had offices and employees in Moscow in 2011. The company’s highest-ranking executive in the city—Bob Dudley—had been compelled to flee Russia three years earlier, following months of menacing personal harassment and legal threats. Internal State Department cables later published by WikiLeaks showed that U.S. officials feared for his safety at the time and felt they couldn’t guarantee his protection. There were even credible reports, which Dudley still refuses to confirm, that he was being slowly, progressively poisoned in Moscow. But according to BP’s chief antagonists in Russia, the British oil major had only itself to blame. “BP,” one explained, “is apparently poor at analyzing political situations.”
Rex Tillerson had been “analyzing” the action in Russia for a long time by then, since way back in 1997, when he was the corporate vice president put in charge of Exxon’s fledgling business in Russia. Tillerson’s read, by the summer of 2011, went like this: success in Russia depended almost exclusively on making nice with Vladimir Putin. Like President Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, Putin alone had the power to make most of Exxon’s dreams come true in Russia.
By the time Tillerson left Sochi in 2011 after having put his personal imprimatur on what could be the biggest deal of his life—of Putin’s life, of anyone’s life—he had to know that this performative international handshake was not merely ceremonial; it was the vital determinant of whether a real business partnership was possible in Russia. You get Putin’s buy-in on the deal, or there is no deal, period.
Let us join our hands my dear friends. We won’t get lost if we’re together.
As Rex Tillerson fixed his designs on what Russia could do for ExxonMobil, and what ExxonMobil could do for Russia, he knew there was at least one other Russian hand he would have to grasp to get there. That hand was connected to the very sturdy arm of the man who ruled the Russian energy industry on behalf of Vladimir Putin: Igor Ivanovich Sechin. This was not a comfortable undertaking. Sechin’s firm grip of a handshake, like Sechin himself, suggested a range of contradictory inclinations: from the capacity for true friendship and loyalty, to the capability of inflicting both menace and outright injury. Sechin, just past the age of fifty, was a startling figure to behold in person: a once skinny boy, now grown plump and round in the face, with beady but piercing slate-blue eyes, a billboard-sized forehead, a prominent nose that missed being noble by a pretty wide margin, and a mouth that rested in a perpetual frown. Just as well. When Sechin did smile, he looked like a fairy-tale ogre who had just swallowed a small tasty child. By the beginning of 2012, when Tillerson’s relationship with Sechin was beginning to take on international import, he could read through a decade’s worth of Sechin profiles produced by journalists and government operatives in the West and in Russia and still come to no settled conclusion as to the manner of man with whom he was doing business.
The earliest reporting on Sechin began around 2000, when he stepped into the role as key deputy to newly elected President Putin. Biographical details of the forty-year-old apparatchik were thin. The Russian media offered only vague reports of Sechin’s early career as a linguist for the KGB. He specialized in French, Spanish, and Portuguese and did stints as a translator in Mozambique and Angola in the 1980s. According to a widely circulated allegation by the security firm Stratfor, Sechin’s assignments were not confined to translation or to Africa. He was, Stratfor said, “the USSR’s point man for weapons smuggling to much of Latin America and the Middle East.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sechin returned to his hometown of St. Petersburg and leaned on a network of security-minded former KGB colleagues for help in monetizing the sundry professional skills he had acquired.
He settled on a job with the former KGB hand and then deputy mayor Vladimir Putin, quickly gleaned that his new mentor prized loyalty above all else, and set to proving himself a faithful and indispensable servant. “He treated Putin as a god before Putin was a god,” the head of the Russia-based National Energy Security Fund would explain. Sechin took pains to demonstrate a canine-level obedience to Putin, always doing more than what was asked of him—from carrying Putin’s duffel bags and briefcase to providing muscle sufficient for his boss’s personal protection. Putin and his family took note. When Putin’s wife and daughter were involved in a car crash in 1993 and unable to reach Vladimir, Mrs. Putin summoned Igor Ivanovich Sechin instead. He proved himself once again.
Mrs. Putin’s hubby was more or less running St. Petersburg by then and profiting enormously from his position. The deputy mayor, for one instance, cut a side deal with the city that made him and his friends the dominant gasoline suppliers in all St. Petersburg. As Putin rose in power and possessions, Sechin rose to leader of the siloviki, a master among Putin’s myrmidons. “It’s no secret,” the Russian mathematician and political analyst Andrey Piontkovskiy has written, “that Putin’s political philosophy and favorite concepts—managed democracy, administrative vertical, dictatorship of law, a ‘control’ shot to the back of the head, etc.—are close to this group.”
When Putin headed off to Moscow in 1996 to work in the Yeltsin administration, Sechin accompanied his boss. “I liked Sechin,” Putin wrote as a matter of obvious fact in his autobiography. “He asked to go along. I took him.” Four years later, fate would have it, Sechin found himself deputy chief of staff to the president of the Russian Federation, his good friend Vladimir Putin. “I somehow unexpectedly ended up in the Kremlin,” he told a reporter in a rare interview in 2010. “There is a special feeling here that this place is holy and deeply significant. There is a very good aura here.”
Sechin might have been Putin’s closest confidant, and his number one loyalist, but he was a nobody to the Kremlin watchers in Russia’s newly free press in 2000. “When he first arrived in Moscow no one took him seriously,” says the well-connected commentator Stanislav Belkovsky. Sechin used his relative anonymity to great advantage. While Putin evolved into a more public and more charismatic leader, Sechin lurked out of sight, but always nearby. Sechin acted as the president’s jealous sentry and, when needed, his enthusiastic attack dog. And he did it from deep in the shadows. “During Putin’s first presidential stint, the joke doing the rounds in Moscow was that Sechin didn’t actually exist,” a reporter from The Guardian wrote. “US diplomats mischievously suggested he was a sort of urban myth, a bogeyman invented by the Kremlin to instil fear.” Sechin was called, at various times in his early career in Moscow, “the Gray Cardinal of the Kremlin,” “Darth Vader,” and simply “the scariest man on Earth.” Said one former U.S. Defense Department official who specializes in Russia, “Sechin is one of the most brutal, cynical, thuggish figures in all the Kremlin. He is like Putin, only Putin can turn on the charm.”
Sechin never made a peep to improve his reputation or defend his honor in those early years. He was chiefly concerned with Putin’s honor, and with the Kremlin’s honor, and with Russia’s honor. By those measures, he judged his stint in the Russian Federation’s Office of the President an incontrovertible success. When Vladimir Putin was forced to step away from the presidency in 2008 (the Russian constitution provided that nobody could serve more than two consecutive terms), Sechin and the rest of the siloviki took enormous pride in the fact that while in office they had rescued the motherland from Yeltsin’s disastrous economic debacle. “Tumbling into the abyss, post-Soviet society grasped at the security services for support and clung to them for dear life,” one of Sechin’s cohorts wrote in an op-ed for a leading Moscow newspaper in 2007, near the end of Putin’s second term. “We saved the country from falling over the edge. This imparts meaning to the Putin era and historical merit to the Russian president.”
Sechin was counted a key player in that save
. He was also an emblem of that save. The success of the Putin era as exemplified by Igor Sechin depended less on genius and wisdom than on pitiless drive and sheer grit. Throughout his eight years of service in the president’s office, Sechin was often first in and last to leave. “No one else in the administration, for instance, took the time to accompany the president to the airport and meet him there on his return, but Sechin did,” the Russian author Mikhail Zygar writes in All the Kremlin’s Men. “Insiders say that Sechin is like a cyborg. He can go without sleep for days on end and works standing up; it’s even said he cured himself of cancer.”
Just a few years into the first term, Putin chose Sechin—a man with exactly zero experience in the oil industry—to take on a second post in addition to serving as deputy chief of staff to the president: Sechin would now also be chairman of the board of Rosneft, the largest state-controlled oil company in the most lucrative and strategic of all Russia’s industrial sectors. Part of Putin’s thinking in appointing his silovik chieftain to run the state’s best remaining oil asset, according to some after-the-fact analysis in The Economist, was Sechin’s “willingness to inflict pain on opponents.” That willingness, or perhaps natural proclivity, was the guiding principle of Sechin’s run at Rosneft. With an assist from all those very capable American and British and German and French bankers, he managed to devour almost every last bit of Russia’s only technologically capable oil company, Yukos (pause briefly to smile, Igor). He also convinced Putin that their old nemesis, Yukos’s boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, should rot in jail. He was well rewarded for this energetic smash-and-grab reverse privatization. In 2008, when Putin moved over to the prime minister’s office to bide his time until the next presidential election, he made Sechin the deputy prime minister in charge of the energy industry for the entire country.
This promotion required some changes in Sechin’s public profile. The energy sector was the most outward facing of all of Russia’s commercial enterprises. So, for the first time in his career, Igor Sechin was forced into the limelight. An array of Western governments and media outlets took the opportunity to update and flesh out their Sechin entries in their always-evolving Kremlinologies. The U.S. State Department authored an extensive internal report in 2008 titled “Bringing Sechin into Focus.” The preponderance of evidence from confidential informants inside Russia was not complimentary to Sechin. “Lacks a moral center…does not use his power for good…maintains a business empire protected by Putin, and run using bribes, fear and kompromat.” One operator in the Russian oil business insisted the deputy prime minister had piled up a fortune of $14 billion while in office at the Kremlin. A former deputy energy minister posited that Sechin was in over his head in his new job: “The long-term game is not Sechin’s strong suit.” The same critic would later append this statement with a more evocative conclusion. Sechin’s is “not a comprehensive strategy, but rather the spontaneous action of a carnivore, of a crocodile. He sees something and attacks.”
But Sechin was no longer lurking as some mysterious figure in the background. He was out there now, known around the globe. Forbes magazine had ranked him the world’s forty-second most powerful human, one place ahead of President Medvedev (pause briefly to smile, Igor). Time was reserving a place for him on its annual list of the world’s hundred most influential people. The editors could not see the logic of placing him among the Pioneers, Leaders, Icons, or Artists. They instead listed him as a Titan, alongside the music mogul Jay-Z, the television producer Shonda Rhimes, LeBron James, the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, the fashion designer Michael Kors, and the inventor/entrepreneur Elon Musk. “Among the members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, Igor Sechin has always been known as ‘the expansionist,’ ” his profile read. “While others have been happy skimming profits, Sechin was always about conquest.” Sechin’s clever and remarkably potent ace-in-the-hole method of conquest was more finely spelled out in Mikhail Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men than it could be in Time: “He immediately manages to get criminal proceedings started against any potential partner as a backup, as well as to facilitate the negotiating process.”
As Sechin spent more and more time among Western financiers and oil executives—and their legions of corporate communications professionals—he started to see the value in tailoring his personal narrative. Alongside his well-earned “scariest man on Earth” rep, he started to build a counter-story—a more salubrious Igor, signs of whom began appearing in the press around 2012. It was almost enough to launch a creditable dating profile: Igor Ivanovich Sechin. Fifty-two. Very smart. Incredibly hardworking. Exceptionally courteous. Holder of advanced degree in economics. Drink of choice: orange juice. Favorite pastime: hunting. Also enjoys making sausages out of big game animals he shoots himself, riding motorcycles, spending time on his yacht, listening to jazz. “The most important thing in jazz, as in real life, is improvisation,” says Igor. Swipe right, honey.
The updated portrait of Sechin included enough pointillist dollops that, if you squinted just right, showed a humble and soft-spoken self-made man who had not forgotten where he came from. He and his twin sister, it was reported, were raised in St. Petersburg by a single mother who worked on the line at a metals factory to make ends meet—and those ends rarely met. The fridge and the cupboards in the Sechin household were often bare. “He was interested in money and a career for money from the beginning to exit this nightmare,” one of his classmates told reporters. She described Igor as a skinny and shy youth, entirely unexceptional, except in his determination to study long, hard hours to make up for his middling intelligence. Even when Sechin attained real wealth—he was reputed to make around $25 million a year as chairman of Rosneft—he didn’t flaunt it. “I don’t know what he would do with the money,” remarked an American banker who worked on deals with Sechin. “The guy is always in the office, morning to night.” Sechin was lauded for preferring the efficiencies of a crowded minibus to the luxuries of a limousine and for his small-d democratic tendencies. “Sechin’s courtesy,” read a U.S. State Department cable that was leaked at the end of 2010, “is especially evident when dealing with helpers to whom many others in Russia’s elite would barely give a passing glance—doormen, drivers, guards, etc.”
Turns out, Sechin was possessed of certain charms after all, if you looked hard enough for them. Leaving aside Igor’s whole menace vibe, Rex Tillerson was charmed on a number of fronts. First off, clearly and unavoidably, Tillerson was charmed by the fact that Sechin was the gatekeeper to the finest semi-available oil and gas properties in the entire world. But at a personal level, Tillerson appreciated that Sechin let it be known that he respected Tillerson for his toughness and his staying power. The Texan hadn’t allowed ExxonMobil to be bullied in early partnership deals in Russia as executives from Shell and BP had been. “Exxon, because they’re so big, they have this swagger,” a former American diplomat in Russia explained to the New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins years later. “They told the Russians, Fuck you. And the Russians backed off.” Another Western oil executive who worked for years in Russia told Filkins, “Sechin wants to be the next Rex Tillerson. The head of the world’s biggest oil company.”
Most charming of all to Tillerson was Sechin’s ability to pull the right levers inside the Kremlin. What Tillerson needed most was an assurance from Sechin that if ExxonMobil and Rosneft went ahead with the Arctic offshore drilling scheme in the Kara Sea, the Russian government would not get greedy and try to confiscate all the profits through taxation or trumped-up lawsuits. Sechin had already persuaded Putin to make public his promise that the Kremlin would help ExxonMobil succeed in Russia, which Putin had done that August day in Sochi. Six months later, in March 2012, Tillerson was still pushing Sechin to persuade Putin to keep taxes on ExxonMobil low and steady.
Tillerson could be pretty sure Sechin had Putin’s trust, because Sechin was always diligent in making sure Putin knew he was trustworthy. Asked by a r
eporter from Reuters if he had any interest in running for president of the Russian Federation in 2012, Sechin at first laughed it off. “I have never heard a more interesting question,” he said. “At least not from the realms of fairy tales and fantasy.” But Sechin thought better of that flip answer after the interview concluded. He wanted it on the record—with no winks and no nods, no possible misinterpretation of light humor—that he would never, under any circumstances, challenge Vladimir Putin. “The question proves so sensitive,” Reuters reported, “that his spokesman calls back hours later asking to suggest another response on a possible Sechin presidential candidature: ‘This is not possible for objective and subjective reasons.’ ”
This was the sort of talk that gave a businessman like Tillerson confidence in his new friend Igor Sechin. If faithful-to-a-fault Sechin was the one making the tax case on behalf of ExxonMobil, Putin would listen. “Sechin is not just Putin’s sounding board,” a member of Putin’s first cabinet once explained. “Sechin is part of his brain cells.”
It seemed all but certain that Putin was going to be climbing back into the Russian presidency at the beginning of 2012, with the loyal and dependable Igor Sechin at his side. Putin’s role in the restoration of Russian honor—as measured by the macroeconomic numbers, which he loved to cite—was a big factor in his reelection campaign. The country had weathered the worldwide storm of the Great Recession and righted itself. It looked to be headed for a spot in the top-five world’s largest national economies. The country’s GDP was growing at better than 5 percent a year again; the gargantuan foreign debt Putin had inherited from Yeltsin had been reduced to negligible. All the happy economic indicators were driven largely by a single industry: energy. Oil and gas, Igor Sechin was proud to say, remained “the locomotive of the Russian economy.”
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