The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  On New Year’s Eve, the Russians resumed their ground offensive, pushing most Chechen fighters out of the city by the end of February 1995. Grozny was left in ruins, with thousands of civilians dead. The violence and brutality of the conflict was heavily and openly covered by a still largely independent Russian media.

  Back in the embassy, Ambassador Pickering asked me to take stock of the debacle for Washington. In a January 11, 1995, cable entitled “Sifting Through the Wreckage: Chechnya and Russia’s Future,” I laid out our preliminary thoughts.6 “The Chechen crisis…has already laid bare the weakness of the Russian state and the tragic flaws of its first democratically-elected President.” We worried about what all this meant for the future of reform in Russia, and whether this might trigger more separatism in other republics. The ineptitude of the Russian military left a powerful impression. “Probably even more than the loss of civilian lives which has so exercised Moscow’s liberal intelligentsia,” the blundering performance in the initial assault “has led Russians, and especially elites, to question Boris Yeltsin’s competence to govern.”

  The cable argued that step-by-step over recent months, Yeltsin and his advisors had blundered further into a quagmire, with bad policy choices begetting worse ones. “The tragic irony is that the same mulish stubbornness that produced Yeltsin’s greatest triumphs may now prove to be his undoing.” While it was now too late for Yeltsin to recover the heroic democratic mantle he once wore, it was still not too late (assuming no catastrophic deterioration of his health) for him to maintain enough of his authority to limp along. He still appeared to retain support among political elites in Russia’s regions, where the Chechen crisis so far did not have the resonance that it had in the capital. Blunders in Chechnya had severely tested military discipline, but it did not yet appear to be at the breaking point.

  In Russian foreign policy terms, however, Chechnya had become a growing, self-inflicted disaster. The consequences for Russia were varied but uniformly bad—“isolating it internationally, exposing its weakness to other former Soviet states over which it seeks influence as well as to attentive regional powers like Iran, China, and Turkey, and playing into the hands of former Warsaw Pact states who will seek to accelerate the process of NATO expansion.” In Moscow, it was hardening attitudes about the United States and its allies. “Russians across the political spectrum already feel an acute sense that the West is taking advantage of Russia’s weakness, and that is likely to become more rather than less pronounced as a result of the deeply embarrassing experience in Chechnya.”

  The mood was hardening in Washington too. President Clinton had suffered a resounding defeat in the November 1994 midterm elections, with newly ascendant Republicans questioning many of his foreign policy assumptions, including about Russia. The administration itself was initially sympathetic to Yeltsin’s predicament in Chechnya, with Vice President Gore comparing it at one point to the American Civil War, and Secretary of State Christopher calling it “an internal Russian affair.”7 Pickering was persistent in trying to explain how flawed that line of thinking was, but later noted with some frustration that “there was very little interest in the notion of whether the Russians actually provoked some of this or not.”8

  As fighting in Chechnya continued through the spring of 1995, the administration’s attitude finally sharpened. Christopher warned Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev in Geneva in late March that the Chechen war was “foolhardy” and “tragically wrong.” Meanwhile, pressure in Congress mounted to cut off or reduce aid to Russia, which then amounted to nearly a billion dollars annually. While the White House managed to forestall those efforts, we made clear from Moscow that we should not “overestimate the leverage that assistance gives us. Many Russian politicians, reformers included, would not mind an opportunity now to tell us to take our aid and shove it.”9

  Events in Chechnya continued to chip away at Yeltsin’s waning authority. In June 1995, a daring Chechen commander, Shamil Basayev, led a group of rebels north, out of Chechnya and into the neighboring Russian region of Stavropol. Bribing their way through Russian military checkpoints until they ran out of cash, Basayev and his fighters seized some sixteen hundred Russian hostages in a hospital in Budennovsk. Yeltsin was en route to a G-7 summit in Halifax, Canada, as the attack unfolded. Rather than return immediately to Moscow, he left Prime Minister Chernomyrdin to handle the crisis. Negotiating directly with Basayev in a series of dramatic telephone calls, Chernomyrdin agreed to allow Basayev and his men to drive back to Chechnya with some one hundred hostages, freeing the remainder in Budennovsk. Once safely back in the mountains south of Grozny, Basayev released all those he had forced to accompany him. We reported from Moscow that “some in the Russian government thought at first that Budennovsk would be a plus at Halifax—an opportunity to show critics in the West that the Yeltsin regime had been right all along about what it was dealing with in Chechnya. The hostage crisis turned out instead to be a mortal embarrassment, painfully demonstrating Yeltsin’s detached and erratic leadership and once again exposing Russia’s weakness.”10

  The Chechen conflict continued in bloody fits and starts until the summer of 1996, when a more enduring cessation of hostilities was agreed upon. It reignited a few years later, providing Vladimir Putin with his chance to put a much different mark on Russian leadership, but the impact of that first brutal war would be felt in Russian politics and Russian attitudes toward the wider world for many years to come.

  * * *

  * * *

  NOTHING BROUGHT THE brutality and chaos of the Chechen conflict into sharper relief for us in the embassy than the tragic case of Fred Cuny. I met Cuny only once, when he came to see Ambassador Pickering in Moscow in late February 1995. Six foot three, wearing cowboy boots and speaking in a quiet Texas drawl that oozed self-confidence, Cuny was a magnetic presence. He had already built an international reputation as a humanitarian relief expert, the “master of disaster” who had worked his way through acute danger from Biafra to Iraq. Most recently, he had braved the bombardment of Sarajevo to help restore the water supply for trapped civilians.

  Cuny explained to Pickering that he had just returned from two weeks in Chechnya, and had traveled widely in Grozny and to besieged towns and villages in its vicinity, on behalf of George Soros and his foundation. He painted a sobering picture. He was particularly concerned about the plight of thirty thousand mostly elderly, mostly ethnic Russian civilians surrounded by fighting in southern Grozny. Living in burned-out buildings and bomb shelters, many suffering from pneumonia, most people there were not cooking for fear of drawing Russian shelling, and most food was eaten raw. The fighting was still intense, and humanitarian convoys couldn’t reach Grozny’s southern neighborhoods. Cuny said those trapped there “could soon be dropping like flies.”11 He described his contacts with local Chechen commanders as well as Russian forces, and indicated that he planned to return to Chechnya in about a month. Pickering thanked him for his insights and Cuny agreed to stay in touch.

  Cuny went back into Chechnya on March 31. His goal was to broker an agreement for humanitarian access, so that trapped civilians could be extracted safely and supplies could be delivered. Cuny was accompanied by two Russian Red Cross doctors, a translator, and a Chechen driver. They headed first toward the Chechen-held town of Bamut, southwest of Grozny, where Dudayev was believed to be headquartered. When Cuny and his team reached Bamut, Dudayev wasn’t there. They tried to drive east, but on April 4 were apparently detained at gunpoint by Chechen intelligence forces on the outskirts of the village of Stary Achkoi. Later that day, Cuny’s Chechen driver reappeared in Ingushetia, with a brief message from Cuny noting that he had been taken into custody but was “ok” and expected to be back shortly. That was the last message from him, and neither he nor the Russian doctors or translator were ever heard from again.

  Fred Cuny’s disappearance set off a four-month search that occupied much of the embass
y’s energy and attention, and eventually drew the personal engagement of President Clinton. Our efforts on his behalf reflected an important dimension of what American diplomats do overseas. Few such efforts, however, were as dramatic or intense as the search for Cuny.

  As the weeks and months passed, there were tantalizing rumors that Cuny and his colleagues were still alive, somewhere in the murky world of wartime Chechnya. Pickering tasked me with managing the day-to-day embassy effort to find him. We pressed senior Russian officials repeatedly for more information and help conducting a serious search. They promised a lot, and delivered very little. Our contacts on the Chechen side were limited, but we worked hard to use intermediaries in the government of Ingushetia to find out more. Cuny’s son and brother, along with some of his staff and representatives of Soros’s foundation, spent considerable time in Ingushetia that spring and summer and made a number of courageous trips inside Chechnya in pursuit of leads.

  We set up our own informal outpost in Ingushetia, manned on a rotating basis by several of my colleagues. President Clinton raised the Cuny case with Yeltsin in May, as did Vice President Gore during his visit in June. I traveled to the region twice, and met at length with President Ruslan Aushev of Ingushetia both times. He insisted that he and his government were “working overtime” in the search.12 “We have scoured the republic of Chechnya and even gone into Georgia to investigate a rumor that Cuny had been taken across the frontier,” he told me. “Unfortunately, it did not check out.”13

  At one point, a report emerged of a corpse that resembled Cuny at a hospital in the rebel-held town of Shatoy, well south of Grozny in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountain range. Philip Remler, an American diplomat serving in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) peace mission in Grozny, volunteered to drive down to Shatoy and try to verify the report. A white flag fluttering on the front of his OSCE vehicle did not prevent a Russian tank from firing several rounds at him.

  At the tiny hospital in Shatoy, Philip huddled with a local doctor as the badly decomposed body was brought out to be examined. Dusk was falling, and the lights in the makeshift examination room were flickering. Philip used his satellite phone to get me on the line in Moscow. Relying upon a medical record that his family had shared with us, I described Cuny’s distinguishing physical characteristics, including a metal surgical pin in one of his thighs. Philip confirmed that the body was that of a tall man. In a calm voice, with the sound of Russian shelling audible in the background, he said decomposition had rendered most other features indistinct, but it was clear that there were no pins in either leg. It wasn’t Cuny.

  In August, after exhausting every possible lead, the Cuny team concluded that it was most likely that Fred had been killed early in April by Chechen forces in western Chechnya, soon after his initial detention in Stary Achkoi. The family gave a press conference in Moscow and ended their search. The embassy shared the family’s judgment about Fred Cuny’s fate. Based on what we had heard from a variety of Ingush and Chechen sources during the course of our four-month search, we noted in a cable to Washington that “we suspect (but cannot prove) that there were rumors spread prior to Fred Cuny’s last entry into Chechnya that would have fed Chechen suspicions.”14

  We suggested that such stories “were originated or fanned” by the FSB, the Russian successor organization to the Soviet Union’s KGB. We added that “the FSB was well aware of Cuny’s earlier travels in Chechnya” and his previous meetings with Chechen military commander Maskhadov. There were also reports circulating in March in western Chechnya that the two Russian Red Cross doctors accompanying Cuny were FSB agents. The FSB had ample incentive for a disinformation campaign, given the tensions swirling across Chechnya in those months, and their interest in discrediting the Chechen fighters. Such a disinformation effort, we wrote, “would not necessarily have been coordinated in Moscow (if the FSB had been well-coordinated, it might not have gotten into such a colossal mess in Chechnya in the first place).”

  After months of painstaking effort, we came to a straightforward conclusion: Cuny was likely caught in between two intelligence services—the Chechens who pulled the trigger and the Russians responsible for setting the trap.

  The whole tragic episode was wrapped in layer after layer of murkiness and deception. “It may well be that the double-dealing and disingenuousness of virtually all the parties with which we and the Cuny family have been dealing reflect some measure of shared culpability,” we wrote. The hard reality was that “none of this should come as a surprise in the chaotic and often brutal world of the North Caucasus. But Fred Cuny, while no stranger to risk-taking in dangerous situations, still deserved better.” So did the poor Chechen civilians and underfed, undertrained Russian conscripts who were both, in different ways, victimized by a war that wasn’t foreordained in that awful winter of 1994–95. It was another blow to a post-Soviet transition in which problems were already overtaking possibilities. The Chechen debacle was emblematic of a Russia still trapped in its complicated past, struggling to find its way and regain its pride and purpose. And it reinforced the limits of American agency in influencing a future that only Russians could ultimately shape.

  * * *

  * * *

  YELTSIN WAS BADLY wounded by the Chechen mess. After a heart attack in the summer of 1995, he looked increasingly incapable, politically or physically, of avoiding a fatal blow in Duma elections in December 1995, let alone running for reelection the following June. The outlook for continued reform at home and the kind of partnership abroad to which both Yeltsin and Clinton still aspired was increasingly uncertain.

  Despite the headwinds, Clinton continued to invest in their relationship, recognizing how central it was to any hope of keeping U.S.-Russian relations on a stable footing. In the face of domestic criticism and unease over Chechnya, Clinton went ahead with a long-planned visit to Moscow in May 1995 to join several other leaders from the victorious World War II alliance to celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of Hitler’s defeat. Clinton knew how much this meant to Yeltsin, and to Russians more broadly. Even a half century later, the wartime sacrifices of the Soviet people, not least the loss of more than twenty million of their fellow citizens, and the pride that came with their indispensable role in crushing the Nazis, were powerful forces.

  Any presidential visit is complicated, but this one was trickier than most, given the fragile policy backdrop. As the “control officer,” I was responsible for coordinating negotiations with the Russians over the schedule and agenda for the visit and supporting Ambassador Pickering and the White House advance team. American presidents don’t travel light. Clinton came with more than two hundred staff and security personnel, and a similar number of journalists. My team tried but failed to persuade the Russians not to have a unit fresh from combat in Chechnya join in the celebratory parade in Red Square. When an enterprising White House press official foolishly tried to forge a few extra credentials for American journalists, Kremlin security reacted with a predictable lack of amusement, but we avoided anything more than a mild scuffle and a few sharp words.

  This was my first extended encounter with President Clinton, and I was impressed. He had a sure touch with Yeltsin, and an equally sure command of substance. Clinton understood Yeltsin’s political constraints—both those imposed on him by Russia’s turbulent weakness and those stemming from his own flawed decisions. “This guy is in a tough spot,” Clinton said to us before heading to see Yeltsin. “We have to give him as much space as we can, because we’re not going to find a better Russian partner.”

  President Clinton delivered a firm message on Chechnya, both privately in the Kremlin meetings and then publicly in a speech at Moscow State University. “Continued fighting in that region,” he said in his televised remarks, “can only spill more blood and further erode support for Russia.” Clinton was gracious with the overworked embassy staff and their families. The genuine appreci
ation that he conveyed in a brief conversation with Lisa and our two daughters, then six and three, helped make up for the long hours I had put in over the preceding weeks.

  In broad foreign policy terms, Yeltsin had two principal concerns during Clinton’s visit. Both would dominate much of the last year of my tour in Moscow—and much of the U.S.-Russian debate for many years to come. The first was maintaining a paramount Russian role among the states of the former Soviet Union. The second was preventing further erosion of Russia’s position in post–Cold War Europe. As we reported in a cable a month after Clinton’s visit, “nowhere are Russian sensitivities about being excluded or taken advantage of more acute than on the broad issue of European security. There is a solid consensus within the Russian elite that NATO expansion is a bad idea, period.” The cable concluded that “it is very clear that the Russian elite sees NATO expansion…and Bosnia as parts of a whole—with concerns about NATO’s role in Bosnia deepening Russian suspicions about NATO and its enlargement.”15

  Preoccupied with domestic issues early in his presidency, Clinton was reluctant to risk much American diplomatic capital in the Balkans, as the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s spawned mounting ethnic bloodshed in Bosnia between the Muslim majority and a Bosnian Serb minority armed and supported by the new Serbian government in Belgrade. By 1994–95, the conflict consumed more attention and energy at the highest levels of the Clinton administration than any other foreign policy problem. NATO air forces gradually stepped up their involvement to help protect Muslim civilians, especially after the massacre of some eight thousand Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995, and a brutal mortar attack on the central marketplace in Sarajevo the following month that killed more than three dozen innocent civilians. A renewed peacemaking effort was led by Richard Holbrooke, then the assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Holbrooke was a brilliant diplomat, whose talents and drive were matched only by his showmanship and sense of self—memorably reflected in an otherwise routine State Department cable noting his arrival in a Balkan capital, puckishly titled “The Ego Has Landed.”