by Alex Dryden
‘And my father stayed behind in Liechtenstein. He told nobody but me and his wife. He kept it a secret. He hid out in an old shepherd’s hut a few miles over the mountain from here. He came up here in the early evenings of the weekend these men rented the place and stayed in the cover of the trees over there.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the door. ‘There was a lot of security, he told me later, and that was as close as he could get. And he brought a camera with him. These are the pictures he took.’
The farmer separated the three older pictures and turned them round to face Finn.
‘The man on the far right you know. Most of the newspaper-reading public knows him.’
Finn and I bent over the first picture and looked at a tall, grey-haired figure. I recognised him immediately: a very senior, long-serving German politician from the political elite. Then I looked at the third figure from the right and recognised a KGB general, the SVR’s central Asian boss, who liaises with the Uzbeks and their drug cartels. In between these two was a man I didn’t know. Nor did I recognise the others. But Finn seemed to know everyone in the picture.
‘Quite an interesting weekend,’ Finn said.
‘These three pictures were taken in 1989,’ the farmer repeated. ‘And these I took earlier this year, when there was a second meeting here, between the same men.’
The two recent photographs were indeed the same group, shiny in the newness of the pictures.
‘They rented the farm up here for another weekend, fifteen years after they first took it. Maybe they’ve had other meetings, I’m sure they have, elsewhere. But this is what I have.’
He poured another shot of liqueur for each of us and raised his glass.
‘These are the kind of people who run our countries,’ he said. ‘To freedom from such men.’ Finn and I echoed the toast.
‘I don’t know why my father took the original pictures,’ the man mused quietly. ‘It was completely out of character. But I knew I had to do the same this year when they came back after all this time and, if only in memory of my father, I did.’
We left the farmer with the case of money and drove back down the track until we reached the road. Then Finn turned left, towards Germany, and we drove in silence for a while. I had the pictures on my lap, inside the stiff photograph envelope, inside the waterproof bag.
‘I wonder what he’ll do with all that money,’ Finn said, breaking the silence briefly. I guessed at how much of it there was from watching the farmer count the bundles and I was stunned by the cost.
‘He’ll probably hoard it up somewhere like all the mountain men,’ he continued. ‘The Troll, for example. I bet he turns out to be a multimillionaire when he dies.’
Once we were over the border and in Germany, Finn began to talk quietly about the men in the pictures.
‘There’s the German politician. He’s someone who might even become chancellor of Germany. And of course you know the KGB general, Anna. Then there’s a citizen of the former East Germany, a man called Dietz, who’s now a billionaire from his supermarket chains. And next to him to the left is a Swede called Bengsten. He’s an arms manufacturer. The old guy on the far right is an ex-Nazi, former SS. His name’s Reiter. He’s in his early eighties now and still running his business with the same efficiency as he ran his SS unit in 1945. He owns, lock, stock and barrel, the third-largest trucking company in Europe. But Reiter isn’t his real name, of course. He’s one of the brothers of Otto Roth. And finally, the last figure in the picture is Otto Roth himself.’
34
FINN AND I FLEW to Bucharest one early morning in July. He seemed to have very detailed instructions about how to enter Transdnestr undetected. I asked him if it was a route he’d ever used himself, but all he said was that this was one of Willy’s entry points into the Ukraine, through Transdnestr, from many years before when the Wall was still in place. And just a few days before we arrived, Willy had been back to check his old route still worked.
We stayed the night in Bucharest and watched a film and ate at a café in the vast Stalinist square that Ceausescu had built to glorify his empty rule; empire architecture without an empire. On the following day we took another plane, this time to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
The whole operation Finn had planned depended on the arrival and departure times of Reiter’s trucks. If our, or Dieter’s, information was correct, we knew the date of the next shipment that a truck of Reiter’s would be taking out of Transdnestr. What we needed to find out was where it would cross the border into the European Union.
I was accustomed to Finn’s disappearances and he left the hotel in Bucharest at nine o’clock that evening because he’d ‘run out of cigarettes’. The trip to buy them eventually took him over an hour. ‘They didn’t have my brand anywhere,’ he complained when he returned.
Maybe he had met Mikhail there, in Bucharest that night, or perhaps there was a drop arranged between them somewhere in the city.
Over supper that evening, Finn told me what little he knew of Transdnestr and I filled in the large gaps in his knowledge.
‘In London, we call it the Cuba of Europe,’ he said. ‘But I bet it’s much worse than that. Hardly anyone’s even heard of the place. It’s far more obscure than Cuba. Transdnestr doesn’t even officially exist. Even your people in Moscow who support it don’t recognise it as a country.’
The Russian puppet regime, which runs Transdnestr, issues its own currency, but it is not recognised anywhere else; it manages its own borders, even though no borders officially exist. It needs our army, which it calls a peacekeeping force, to maintain control.
‘It’s about the only place left that still looks like the Soviet Union did fifty years ago,’ I told Finn. ‘The 13th Army’s there, but we actually use the place as a secret training camp for the spetsnaz. I’ve trained there myself. But its real importance–i its raison d’être is as a marketplace for illegal arms deals, and as our “offshore” money-laundering centre.’
Up in the bedroom after supper, Finn laid out various maps of the region on the bed. Google Earth was of little use and he had an air map and another map of Willy’s from ‘a hundred years ago’, Finn said, which was probably the most useful. They showed a flat plain. To the east was the Ukrainian steppe, with Odessa on the Black Sea a mere seventy miles away: to the west was Moldova, to which Transdnestr actually belongs by international law, even though it is ignored by those who run the enclave and by Russia itself. Hence the Russian ‘peacekeeping’ force.
‘The way we control the place is by giving it free oil, gas and electricity,’ I told him. ‘The army’s there to exercise control and to ensure the necessary muscle is there if needed. Essentially the enclave’s run by our own people: former Russian special forces and KGB officers. Most of them were stationed in the Baltic republics before eighty-nine, before the Wall came down. And most of them are wanted by Interpol for crimes committed before the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’ve all changed their names now, of course.’
‘Another bad fairy tale,’ Finn said. ‘A make-believe state.’
‘Make-believe but real. There’re two thousand square miles of flat steppe and cultivated fields, from which everyone except the nomenklatura chisels a meagre livelihood for forty dollars a month,’ I said. ‘Essentially the SVR runs the economy. There are two main companies and they control everything. They’re both overseen by the self-styled “president” of the enclave. The boss of the first company is a senior commander of the MVD branch of the KGB. The second company makes arms and is controlled directly from Moscow, mainly from the Russian Ministry of Defence, but it also makes arms on the side for illegal export.’
‘And Reiter’s trucks go to one of these two companies?’ Finn asked.
‘They have to. Apart from these two companies there’s nothing else in the place except second-rate vegetables.’
We studied Willy’s map and Finn traced with his finger a small road back westwards from the so-called ‘capital’, Tira
spol, a city with no airport, towards the River Dniester, which separates the enclave from Moldova.
‘The river protects its borders, and Willy says the bridges are well guarded,’ Finn said. ‘But a river’s a river. It’s porous. This is where we cross.’
He pointed to a lonely stretch midway between two bridges.
‘There are patrols along the banks, of course, but Willy has a good record. He’s crossed here half a dozen times in the past when it was more closely guarded. He’s given me an updated study of how their patrols behave, what we can expect.’
Finn and I left Chisinau at midday and took a bus to within six miles of the river on the Moldovan side of the border and began to walk. It was a beautiful afternoon, larks sang, motionless, over the cornfields, and we stopped and ate a picnic we’d bought before we left. Then we set off again in the late afternoon.
When we were little more than a mile away, we sat on a small grassy hill surrounded by fields planted with sunflowers. It was pleasantly warm; the summer temperature lulled us.
A woman working in the fields, or maybe she was a gypsy from a camp nearby, stopped and offered us some kvint, the local brandy. We drank and exchanged nods and smiles. I didn’t want to speak Russian in front of her. We told her we were Ingliski. When she’d gone, we took the precaution of walking in the opposite direction we’d been heading, until nightfall. Then we retraced our steps to the river.
About two hours after darkness descended we reached the river and walked along the bank of the Dniester for another four and a half miles southwards, along the Moldovan side. Finn saw the small hut disguised with branches for the purpose of duck shooting that Willy had used in the past. Next to the hut, under a small cover of woven branches, was a skiff that was tucked into the bank and tied to a wooden post. It was just as Willy had described it to Finn. Two oars tied by a new rope were attached on the inside of the skiff.
There was no moon and in nearly complete darkness I slung my small backpack into the skiff and untied it from the post. Finn said the current would take us automatically to the centre of the river. I lay down inside and Finn lay on top of me. He pushed us off from the bank with his foot and we were away.
Willy was right. The current bounced off this side of the river and took whatever floated into the centre of the stream. Once we’d reached the centre of the river, we’d have to propel the boat, and using just one oar, over the stern like a gondola, Finn fought for several minutes to push us beyond the fast-flowing central stream to where the current moved us slowly over towards the far side. After about a mile, with us both lying in the bottom of the boat and Finn struggling with the oar, I sensed we were heading slowly towards the opposite bank to the place where we intended to land.
Here, the river curved away in the opposite direction and the current was in our favour again, taking us towards the bank. We drifted with our heads below the sides of the skiff.
On this bend in the river, there was thick woodland and, according to Willy, no observation post for half a mile on either side. We drifted until the skiff bounced along a high bank and Finn grabbed an overhanging branch. We lay in the boat and waited, listening for dogs or shouting or warning shots, and catching our breath. Slowly, Finn crawled over the side of the skiff and half swam, half pulled himself with the branch to the bank. I threw my backpack to him when he’d climbed up the bank and followed him. We collected stones to put in the skiff and sank it. Finn tied the painter on to a branch that dipped beneath the water; we’d be returning another way, but it was a good precaution if things went wrong.
We waited at the edge of the wood under cover until we could be sure no sentries were close or troop manoeuvres were taking place nearby and then crossed a dust track into some fields of vines. They provided the cover we needed to reach a road on the far side of several fields, where we could wait out of sight for a bus that came sometime after dawn.
It was a short journey by bus to the border town of Bendery. By mid-morning we had reached the town, with its statues of Lenin still in place, fifteen years after the Soviet Union collapsed. We were two British backpackers, fascinated by this frozen piece of history, on a walking holiday.
The town of Bendery lay further north back upriver from where we’d landed. The capital Tiraspol has some modern buildings paid for with mafia money, and a huge new stadium, but Bendery has very few modern structures. Both cities are museums of Soviet architecture, but thanks to its border position with Moldova, Bendery’s few modern buildings are paid for from legal and illegal cross-border traffic.
The two companies we were interested in, which are effectively Transdnestr’s economy, were both based in Bendery. The first place Finn wanted me to look for Reiter’s trucks was located in the barbed-wire fenced yards of Pribor, Transdnestr’s arms manufacturer, controlled by the shadow state company Salyut in Russia.
We knew we were at the point of no return, illegal entrants into an illegal country, one of us an SVR officer, and the other a British spy. There was nothing we could do now if things went wrong. I’d be escorted to Moscow. And Finn? I didn’t know what they’d do with him, but I doubted he’d choose to be captured alive.
It was in a café, about a mile or so from the Pribor factory, that Finn and I went our different ways. His job was to find a car, mine to enter the factory. A car hire company, if one existed in Transdnestr, was out of the question and he’d have to buy a car with cash.
Both of us were nervous. I saw the rationale behind the practice at the Forest- and I’m sure at MI6- that two people in an intimate relationship were never sent together on an assignment. It was distracting me now. Leaving Finn was uppermost in my mind when I should have been thinking about the job.
‘We could have a coffee, if you like, Rabbit,’ he said. ‘Or we could just go home.’
I put my arms around him and whispered in his ear.
‘I love you, Finn.’
He kissed me, squeezed my hand, and we both turned and walked in opposite directions.
I walked towards the depot without looking back and found a café a few hundred yards from the entrance. It was hard to clear my head. We had several rendezvous, depending on my timing. If I found what we were looking for at Pribor, there followed one set of rules between Finn and me: we would meet in the main square at Tiraspol. If I had to go to the second factory, there would be another day’s work at least. In this event, and with the increased possibility that the authorities would be alerted, we would head for the mountains to the north and wait for the hue and cry to die down before crossing back to Moldova.
I sat and drank a greyish coffee and watched the movement of trucks in and out of the depot’s gates, observing the procedures followed by the drivers and military personnel who checked their papers. After half an hour I had what I needed and I left. Any strip searches of the trucks must have taken place at the border.
I took a bus back a few miles or so along the main road towards Moldova and disembarked at a stop where nobody else alighted and walked towards some trees in a copse away from the road that offered some cover.
When I knew I was unobserved, I took my SVR Colonel’s uniform from my backpack and changed into it. Then I walked back to the road until I saw the truck-stop café just on my side of the river, the Transdnestr side of the border, that Willy had told us about.
There were only trucks in the car park behind the café, no other vehicles. I entered the dingy jerry-built truckstop and found more grey coffee. I took it outside to the area at the back and studied the truck plates and any logos that were visible.
There were three German trucks, all with blue tarpaulins covering their sides and obscuring anything that might identify them easily. Trucks entered and left the park every quarter of an hour or so.
I looked under the blue tarpaulins of the three German trucks but saw no insignia to say any of them were Reiter’s.
I waited for nearly two hours watching trucks enter and leave. Their drivers waited aimlessly in the café, p
resumably for the right time to arrive at their final destination somewhere up the road into Transdnestr.
Finally I saw a German truck enter with the usual tarpaulins covering its sides, and a young man stepped out and walked across the park to the café. Again I looked behind the tarpaulin but saw no logo.
I walked into the café, had another coffee and watched the driver. He was reading a paper and sipping something from a cup that was too hot to drink. He seemed to be in his late twenties, though he looked Russian to me and it is hard with Russian men to tell how old they are; most Russian men look at least ten years older than their real age. He had an open face and he smiled at the silent woman serving coffee and asked for a kvint, just so he could engage her in conversation. He and I exchanged smiles across the room, too, and finally I approached the table and asked him if I could join him. He seemed unimpressed by the uniform or my papers and, as long as I only needed to show my papers to those outside the Russian security services, I knew they would carry all their old influence.
‘What time are you going to the depot?’ I asked him.
‘To Pribor?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘You know more than me, I expect,’ he said, and laughed. I laughed with him and nodded in agreement.
I asked him about his life and he told me that he was scraping a living doing two or three jobs and had a wife and children in Moldova. They’d got out of Russia, and then out of Transdnestr, and he wanted to go west and make a new life for his family. I told him I could help him and asked him what he needed.
‘Asylum and money,’ he said and laughed again. ‘That’s all. I have a cousin in France, working on the roads, but we want to go to America. They say it costs ten thousand dollars to arrange a marriage there. I want to go south, to the heat. My wife, she doesn’t like the Russian cold. The winters in Krasnoyarsk made her cry.’