Blowout
Page 26
The second day into the three-week trip, the seas were already rocking, and the weather reports for the next three days promised much worse than the planners had anticipated. The captain probably wished he had been more adamant in his demands to raise the fuel vents on the soon-to-be water-slogged deck of his tug. He had certainly already begun to appreciate the drift of his near future. He wrote in an email to his cohort on the Kulluk that day, “To be blunt, I believe that this length of tow, at this time of year, in this location, with our current routing, guarantees an ass-kicking.”
The full-on ass kicking commenced about seventy-two hours later, not long after the Kulluk’s eighteen-man crew finished its Christmas Day barbecue. “By midnight there were gale-force winds and swells the size of houses,” McKenzie Funk wrote in his New York Times Magazine epic. “Rather than crash forward through the building swells, as other ships might, the Kulluk marked their passage like a giant metronome, pitching and rolling a stomach-churning five, then seven, then 10 degrees off vertical. Six hundred yards ahead, the same waves were bucking the Aiviq, but the two ships were out of sync. The towline between them was slack one moment, then crackling with tension, then slack again.”
The winds continued to blow somewhere between twenty-five and fifty knots for the next day and a half. Swells fifteen to eighteen feet high crashed continuously over the decks of both ships. The big, buoy-like Kulluk continued its maritime version of the twist. The towline between the two vessels sagged and then shot tight. The captain of the Aiviq tried to alter course, but nothing much helped. From 5:30 to 11:30 on the morning of December 27, when the swells rose to over twenty feet, the “wire tensile strength overload” alarm sounded thirty-eight times. The bridge crew, exhausted from twelve-hour watches and from fighting the constant storms, did little to address the problem. Though “experienced in towing operations,” read the Coast Guard’s later report, “they possessed less experience in Gulf of Alaska waters, particularly during the wintertime. This specific lack of experience was displayed during the towing operations on December 27, where the crew took ineffective action to reduce extremes in towline tension during a period of nearly six hours.”
At 11:35 that morning, the overtaxed towline between the Aiviq and the Kulluk snapped, and one 120-ton shackle dropped away to the ocean floor. The crews pulled off the heroic feat of attaching a new emergency towline in just three hours, but the Aiviq emerged from that operation badly damaged. The tug had executed a dangerous U-turn to get back to the Kulluk and taken on huge amounts of the sea in one spectacular roll. A giant steel hook fell from its housing and had to be welded to the deck for safety. Enormous “anchor balls,” somebody told Funk, broke loose and careered around the deck. Even more dangerous, seawater sloshed into those unraised fuel vents. A few minutes before midnight, one of the Aiviq’s seawater-logged engines went down. By three o’clock the next morning, all four engines were drowned lifeless.
Coast Guard helicopters flew in replacement parts, and the Aiviq crew was able to retool and restart its engines. Over the next three days, various Coast Guard boats and a private tug, the Alert, were called in to take turns towing the Kulluk alone or in tandem with the hastily revived Aiviq. When the weather and the weight of the Kulluk weren’t pulling these boats backward or toward shore, the tugs were able to hold steady or plow ahead at about one knot, which is the speed of a baby crawling. Or, more precisely perhaps, the speed of a baby learning to crawl. At Shell’s request, a Coast Guard team executed a dangerous helicopter rescue of the men left stranded on the rocking Kulluk. Because of weight limits, it took three separate trips to get those eighteen trenchermen to safe ground. The upside: the men survived to work another season. The downside: the evacuation of all personnel also left the Kulluk incapable of dropping anchor.
As New Year’s Eve approached, every boat but the Alert was out of commission, and the weather was taking another ugly turn. The winds gusted up to sixty knots that afternoon, and the swells rose to thirty-five feet, propelling the Kulluk toward shore. The captain of the Alert ordered its two engines cranked up to 100 percent capacity, using all of their 10,192 horses, just to keep the Kulluk stationary. And then the tug’s onboard alarm began to wail. The exhaust manifold was overheating; the two engines were in danger of burning out. The captain of the Alert throttled down to 85 percent power and watched as the great, whale-pleasing blue and white hulk he was towing drifted toward shore. Finally, at 8:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, Coast Guard officials ordered the Alert to release its hold on the Kulluk and save itself. The twenty-eight-thousand-ton drillship—unattached, unmanned, and carrying 143,000 gallons of diesel fuel, 1,000 gallons of aviation fuel, and 12,000 gallons of petroleum product varietals—ran aground on Sitkalidak Island about forty minutes later. The resting spot was about fourteen hundred miles short of Seattle. Thus ended the new learnings; on that remote, rocky shoreline, the great operational excellence demonstration that was the 2012 Arctic drilling season came to a close.
Shell announced a pause in its Arctic offshore drilling program in Alaska a few months later. The company did take another run at the well in the Chukchi Sea, in 2015, and pronounced it a dry hole. Shell would not be back to Arctic Alaska, it announced, “for the foreseeable future.”
Aspiring to renewed superpower status was a tall order for the Putin government in 2013, and the day-to-day slog of doing what it took to keep the Russian banner flying high was wearing on everybody involved, all the way down the line into the lower ranks. Consider Viktor Podobnyy, a twenty-five-year-old agent in Russia’s once-vaunted foreign intelligence service who was finding no great joy in his recent posting. Young Podobnyy was assigned to New York at the end of 2012 under the cover of official attaché to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. Along with his undercover SVR cohort Igor Sporyshev, whose public face was as a Russian government trade representative working in the United States, Podobnyy had an agenda full to bursting. The pair had to do enough “clean” work at Russia’s government offices in New York to avoid the suspicion of watchful American counterintelligence agents. (Sporyshev understood he was likely to draw the attention of the FBI because his father had been a career officer in the Soviet KGB.) Meanwhile, the duo was acting as point of contact for one of the few SVR deep-cover Illegals the U.S. government had not swept up in the 2010 dragnet.
Sporyshev and Podobnyy were also expected to trawl the city’s universities and businesses for well-connected Americans who might be recruited as moles and informants. The chances of enticing a sympathetic professor or banker to turn against the United States were lately proving pretty much nonexistent. There was a slightly greater chance of getting sufficient dirt—kompromat, in SVR parlance—on some American to blackmail him or her to act as an agent for Russia. The more likely scenario was finding a bored and naive young academic or think tank supernumerary who would unwittingly spill useful information. The “useful idiot” seemed like the last great hope of Russian spydom in the United States in 2013.
The gestalt of the whole Russian spying industry in New York was tilting toward demoralized by the time fresh-faced Viktor Podobnyy got to town. It didn’t take long for him to adopt the attitude, too. In the winter and early spring of 2013, Podobnyy and Sporyshev expended hours inside the top secret secure room of Russia’s UN offices on East 67th Street in Manhattan, commiserating about the futility of the agency they dutifully served. Vladimir Putin could drape all the honors available around Anna Chapman and the other Illegals deported from the United States in 2010, but the arrests and public shaming in the West had badly dinged the reputation of the most capable department inside the SVR, Directorate S. No doubt the current batch of U.S.-based SVR agents was watching the first season of the popular new TV show The Americans, which had been inspired by the 2010 revelation of the Russian spy ring embedded in the nondescript suburbs of New Jersey and Massachusetts. The creators, however, had set their drama back
in time, in the 1980s, when the stakes were much higher and the superpower competition more evenly matched.
Young Podobnyy occasionally defended the current state of Russia’s premier espionage program. “First of all, Directorate S is the only intelligence that is real intelligence,” he reminded Sporyshev in one of their safe-room bull sessions in April 2013.
“It was,” the older and more experienced agent reminded him. Not so much anymore. Sporyshev knew full well the lone Illegal he was running in New York City was good for little more than gathering the sort of business intelligence already available to a casual reader of The Wall Street Journal.
“Yeah, I don’t know about now,” Podobnyy relented, with no real fight. “Look, in the States even the S couldn’t do anything. The [FBI] caught ten of them….And then Putin even tried to justify that they weren’t even tasked to work, that they were sleeper cells in case of martial law. They weren’t doing shit here, you understand….I agree that untraditional is more effective, but even the S cannot do anything here.”
This defeatist attitude invited a certain sloppiness in SVR tradecraft among its New York team. In fact, it’s only possible to quote Sporyshev and Podobnyy verbatim from that particular April 2013 safe-room conversation, along with many others, because those forlorn Russian spies—surprise!—were being recorded. Every time. Sporyshev and Podobnyy had usefully and idiotically and unwittingly carried FBI listening devices into their star chamber—literally into the supposed top secret, secure communications facility at the Russian UN mission. In fact, everything they did in New York, for years, was watched and recorded and pored over by the FBI, unbeknownst to the two spies.
The G-men who were listening in must have developed some sympathy for these two Russian sad sacks. They complained. A lot. Sporyshev, for instance, seemed tormented by his inability to recruit any useful American businesswomen. “There was a positive response without feelings of rejection,” was about as good a report as he could make. “I have lots of ideas about such girls but these ideas are not actionable because they don’t allow you to get close enough,” he explained in the safe room one day.
Podobnyy took some time in that particular session to whine about his growing irritation with the most promising American contact he had made. Podobnyy had struck up a conversation three months earlier with a young, aspiring New York businessman at a symposium on the worldwide effects of the shale boom. The American, Carter Page, seemed heaven-sent to Podobnyy back on January 18, 2013. Here was a forty-one-year-old graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who told people he had been a staff-level research fellow on the House Armed Services Committee in the early 1990s. He was also an avowed Russophile; he even spoke Russian, or tried to. His recent PhD dissertation focused on governance in the energy industry in oil-rich Central Asia’s former Soviet states. New York University’s Center for Global Affairs had signed up Page as an adjunct assistant professor. He was teaching a course there, he explained to Podobnyy, called “Energy in the World.” And the almost assistant professor was more than just an academic. His two passions, Page would say, were “business development and international relations.” He had worked at the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch a decade earlier and had risen to the position of chief operating officer of its Energy and Power Investment Banking Group. He remained an avid follower of the Russian energy sector. His chief interest in early 2013 seemed to be the state-owned natural gas monopoly, Gazprom. “I was an adviser for them for many years,” Carter Page liked to say.
Natural gas was Page’s self-described obsession in the months around his impromptu meeting with the young attaché to the Russian mission in New York, and this new acquaintanceship with Podobnyy seemed to inspire him. On March 13, 2013, less than two months after meeting Podobnyy for the first time, Page reserved the name for a new company he was incorporating: Global Natural Gas Ventures LLC. He registered the company in Oklahoma several weeks later. Its official headquarters of record was, conveniently, just four miles down the road from the Chesapeake Energy campus. The idea of the venture, it seemed, was to promote natural gas as the clean fuel alternative of the future—just as Aubrey McClendon had been doing for years. That this idea was a tad stale by 2013 didn’t shake Carter Page’s resolve. The wheels in Page’s head didn’t turn with a great deal of velocity, but they exhibited real stamina. When he met again with Podobnyy over a Coca-Cola in New York that March, Page’s chief interest was in making himself the point of contact between Russian and American natural gas interests. At least that’s the way it sounded in Page’s explanation to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence member Mike Quigley during questioning in 2017.
“So you two talked about Gazprom?” Quigley asked.
“It definitely came up, yes,” said Page. “It was me generally talking about some of the things I had been discussing with Chesapeake Energy.”
This meeting with Podobnyy, Page told Quigley just by the by, also presented an excellent chance to practice his Russian-language skills with an actual Russian. “I told him that I had previously worked with [Gazprom] and that I know that they are similar to Chesapeake Energy in the United States. With the glut of natural gas that there is across Texas, Oklahoma, and around the world, people such as Aubrey McClendon, who I knew at the time was the CEO and founder of Chesapeake Energy, they were looking for new ways to increase natural gas demand. And Russia, coincidentally, at the same time was also looking to do that and also had made objectives of increasing the use of natural gas in vehicles.” Listening to Page talk to the congressman, one could imagine Podobnyy’s frustration. Carter Page had a tendency to make a lot of words but rarely herded them toward any discernible meaning.
Page did appear to be going out of his way to attract the favor and attention of Russian energy bosses in the spring of 2013. As a fellow at the Center for National Policy, a U.S. national security think tank, Page wrote a blog post extolling the “leadership” of Igor Sechin in “build[ing] bridges” to Western oil companies such as Exxon. While calling out the Obama administration for imposing “excessive restrictions on Russian officials as seen in last year’s Magnitsky Act which was reminiscent of the blacklists of the McCarthy era,” he also lamented Sechin’s uncharitable treatment at the hands of the American press. “The frequently unjustified maltreatment of Russia and its leaders in the US media further engrains long-standing tendencies toward misunderstanding, thereby offering a super-sized cover for equally large policy mistakes by the U.S. government.”
There is no evidence that Page and Podobnyy kept up any serious face-to-face contact in the spring of 2013. They had a spotty email exchange, maybe a phone call or two. By his own account, Page mostly offered the Russian his personal outlook on the state of the global energy industry. This amounted to handing over lecture notes and reading materials Page was preparing for his NYU classes, “only at a much, much lower level. And his eyes were kind of glazing over, frankly,” Page later explained. “My students in class that year were much more engaged and interested. He showed little to no interest at all.”
Podobnyy was growing just as frustrated with Page by April 2013. The spy was sure that Page’s eagerness to make big money in natural gas made him a vulnerable target—a target who might hand over something truly valuable or actionable. But it was also dawning on Podobnyy that calling Carter Page a “useful idiot” was only half-accurate. He wasn’t proving very useful. “[He] wrote that he is sorry, he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back,” Podobnyy reported to Sporyshev on April 8, 2013. “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am.”
Sporyshev was mainly just listening, letting Podobnyy vent. “I like that he takes on everything,” the younger spy continued. “I also promised him a lot: that I have connections in the Trade Representation, meaning you, that you can push contracts. I feed him empty promises.”
“Shit,” Sporyshev chimed in, clearly not happy
about the prospect of getting roped into the Page operation, “then he will write to me.”
Podobnyy told his accomplice not to fret. He wouldn’t drag him into this particular abyss. But you kind of had to feel for these two Russian spies. The stupidities of the Carter Page operation were reminders of what felt like the relentless nothingness of their chosen occupation. They might as well be accountants or chemistry teachers. Two days later, Podobnyy and Sporyshev sounded like men headed for an existential crisis. Good grief! Look at us! This is what it is to be a spy for one of the greatest countries on earth. “I’m sitting with a cookie right now at…the chief enemy spot,” Podobnyy complained to Sporyshev on April 10, 2013. “Fuck! Not one point of what I thought then [when I signed on], not even close. [I thought it would be a little like] movies about James Bond. Of course I wouldn’t fly helicopters, but pretend to be someone else at minimum.”
Sporyshev was in no mood to buck up his protégé. “I also thought at least I would go abroad with a different passport,” he said with a sigh.
* * *
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While Russia’s supposedly elite spy agencies were boring their undercover agents half to death, and the FBI was all over their flaccid recruitment efforts in New York, there was another foreign spying effort under way in the United States. And this one was not only wildly successful; it also seemed like a hell of a lot of fun. The new mystery spy came on the scene in the first week of February 2013, sending stolen electronic correspondence and files, unsolicited, to a handful of outside-the-mainstream media organizations. The hacked files included screenshots of emails exchanged by the family of the former presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. “Puppets of the illuminati,” the hacker called the Bushes—whatever that meant. There were also screen grabs of the fruits of W.’s newest hobby: he was trying his hand at painting. The hacker leaked a self-portrait of W. himself in the shower, and another of him sitting in his bathtub. Alongside its standard run of embarrassing mug-shot photos of disheveled newly arrested celebrities, the website the Smoking Gun wasted no time in uploading the paintings, along with photographs of George H. W. during his recent hospital stay and emails that revealed a few relatively innocuous family secrets.