Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  The prime minister offered Gunnarsson a deal. If Gunnarsson could hold off until Thursday, the prime minister would announce a permanent ban on commercial whaling. The six-month-old boycott was on the verge of success. On Sunday, October 23, it looked as though one of the four remaining whaling nations was about to stop whaling permanently.

  The news was reported in all the Icelandic media and hailed as a great step forward. Since the International Whaling Commission’s 1986 ban on commercial whaling, public opinion polls showed whatever their sponsors wanted them to show. Environmentalists brandished data showing an increasing majority favoring a ban on whaling. But opponents produced their own results showing an equally large number of Icelanders against an end to whaling if it meant capitulating to the “economic terrorism” of the boycotters.

  The arms of the whaling lobby reached high into the government.

  Next to the prime minister, the most important cabinet post was the minister of Fisheries, a post held by a Halldór Ásgrímsson, Iceland’s most ardent whaling advocate. Ásgrímsson was in France when he heard about the prime minister’s deal. He was livid. How could the prime minister unilaterally announce a whaling ban? Since when did national policy get determined by the prime minister alone? Ásgrímsson fired off an angry cable to the prime minister and returned immediately to Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital. He promised to oppose the proposed ban with all the force he could muster. For Ásgrímsson, the issue wasn’t Iceland’s economy, it was his nation’s sovereignty.

  Ásgrímsson had powerful allies. Chief among them was Foreign Minister Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson. He was in the United States introducing Iceland’s new government to American officials. Planned just days in advance, Hannibalsson’s visit coincided with the height of the whale rescue. The foreign minister of a country that slaughtered whales for commercial gain was on a state visit to a nation spending millions of dollars to free them. Surveying the American political landscape the week of October 21 to 28, all he could do was lament the abysmal timing of his trip.

  Foreign Minister Hannibalsson’s most important meeting was with Secretary of State George P. Shultz. As his nation’s top spokesman, the foreign minister was exposed to the concerns of allies like the United States. Whaling was invariably at the top of the list. With or without the Barrow stranding, he was sure to hear Secretary Shultz’s appeal for Iceland to stop it. But now, it was likely to be the only item discussed during the thirty-minute session.

  Hannibalsson was acutely conscious of his uncomfortable situation, even before he was handed a telex from the Reykjavik Foreign Ministry. In it was the startling news of German boycotts and the prime minister’s announcement that Iceland would halt whaling.

  He knew the fisheries minister, Halldór Ásgrímsson, must be furious. Ásgrímsson said he would fight the decision and hoped Hannibalsson would join him. Just as the State Department was preparing a statement to laud Iceland’s decision, the embassy of Iceland urged State to delay congratulations until the reports could be confirmed. Hannibalsson met Shultz in his Foggy Bottom office and in no uncertain terms told him that the prime minister’s announcement, precipitated by the German boycotts, had pitched his new government into a crisis the degree of which could not yet be determined. By Thursday, October 27, Operation Breakout’s second-to-last day, it seemed another government collapse was imminent.

  The ferocious reaction of his two top ministers presented Prime Minister Steingrimur Hermannsson with an unwinnable situation. If he dug in his heels for a fight, his government would almost certainly topple. If he backed down, he could retain his post but would be left even weaker than before. To save his own neck, the prime minister backed down. The October 27 deadline came and went, his promise to Gunnarsson unfulfilled. Iceland may have been back in the whaling business, but only at great cost. For Campbell Plowden and the cause he fought for, it was a huge victory. A government was forced to abandon what it thought a great national enterprise; not to mention some sovereignty—all because of three whales in Alaska.

  This element of the whale rescue went virtually unreported in the U.S. press. Americans were so obsessed by their own interest in the whales, they did not even notice their resounding impact on real people’s lives halfway around the world.

  19

  Desperate: Nothing Seems to Work

  That the Icelandic crisis escaped notice in the country that touched it off was a remarkable and unreported story in and of itself. While Iceland’s turmoil went largely unnoticed, it was Iceland after all. Nobody noticed Iceland anyway. But the Soviets paid close attention. The Kremlin’s corridors certainly must have been abuzz with the news from Reykjavik.

  As the story of three trapped whales mushroomed into a worldwide media spectacular, so too did the pressure on the one man everyone thought had the power to free them: Soviet Hydrometeorology Minister Arthur Chilingarov. American environmentalists, long his opponents, had urgently requested his country’s assistance. By the end of Operation Breakout’s first week, Chilingarov didn’t know what to do. He had to make a decision. Would he redirect Soviet icebreakers to Barrow or not? For the past three days, he had promised to try. By Friday, October 21, it was time for an answer.

  Chilingarov had seventy-two hours to decide if there was any compelling reason for the Soviets to assist in the rescue. In the three days since he first learned of the stranding, the story had taken on prominence far beyond its relative importance. He knew the Western media was unpredictable, but he had never seen anything like this. He was at a loss to explain the Americans’ passionate response to the trapped whales.

  A fire of interest had consumed the United States at the very crescendo of a presidential election. When this interest also engulfed Europe, Chilingarov realized the risks of not acting now outweighed the risks of acting. On Thursday night, October 20, Moscow time—Operation Breakout’s sixth day—Chilingarov instructed his ministry to seriously pursue the request. Within hours, word reached Chilingarov that one of the Soviet Union’s largest icebreakers was finishing a six-month assignment deep inside the polar ice cap. It was building Northern Pole 31, a floating polar research station. The ship was only three hundred miles north of Barrow.

  Chilingarov’s office transmitted new orders to Master Sergei Reshetov, captain of the massive 496-foot Admiral Makarov. Reshetov was told that once his float station duties were complete on Saturday, October 22, he must steer his Finnish-built 20,241-ton vessel toward a thick grounded pressure ridge ten kilometers off the coast of Barrow, Alaska, U.S.A.

  Reshetov received the news with resigned frustration; there was little he could do but obey. To the diminutive captain with unkempt strawberry blonde hair, service in the Soviet Merchant Marine precluded dissent. An order was an order, glasnost notwithstanding. Master Reshetov’s job was to carry out his assignments. Six months at sea made Reshetov and his crew more than anxious to return to their home port of Vladivostok. The Makarov left in March 1988 for a six-month tour. Northern Pole 31 took several weeks longer than expected to complete. But instead of heading back to the relative comforts of Siberia, the Admiral Makarov now had a new assignment. On Saturday, October 22, she was to begin pulverizing three hundred miles of thick Canadian and American ice, en route to Barrow, Alaska.

  At 9:11 P.M. October 21, 1988, Moscow time, Chilingarov sent Campbell Plowden the cable that would confirm Operation Breakout’s coup de grace and presage the whales’ eventual rescue.

  We are taking efforts on assisting in whale rescue operations. We are supposed to send for this purpose the icebreaker Admiral Makarov. Hope to receive your assistance for our icebreaker to enter U.S. territorial waters and ice reconnaissance for its optimal routing in economic side of U.S. waters.… We have sent required official note to U.S. State Department. We do not have complete assurance in this venture because of shallow waters for icebreaker in the area of the rescue.… We are also in doubt about whales’ ability to pass through channel made by icebreakers. Regards, Cmde Arthur Chili
ngarov.

  Anxious to get U.S. clearance for the Soviet vessels, Campbell Plowden called the Soviet embassy’s Merchant Marine office in New York. Surely, they know the procedures, Plowden thought. They must process requests like this all the time. The Soviet attache told him that two environmental groups Plowden never heard of had already asked for help. Something about it reminded him of previously unknown Arab guerrilla groups tripping over themselves to claim responsibility for the most recent terrorist atrocity: the World Society for the Protection of Animals and the World Whale Federation based in, of all places, Arizona.

  Plowden called Ben Miller, the desert whale saver, to inform him that Greenpeace was involved in getting Soviet support for the rescue. Miller told him his interest sprang from the television and newspaper coverage. A few days earlier, he started lobbying his own State Department contact to request Soviet assistance. Miller told Plowden he was dealing with a man in John Negroponte’s office. Negroponte was the assistant secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. He was the State Department’s highest ranking environmental and scientific foreign service officer.

  Friday afternoon, October 21, Campbell Plowden called Negroponte’s office himself. He left a message urging someone in charge to get back to him as soon as possible. Propping the phone against his ear with his shoulder, he dialed the number for Jim Brange at the National Marine Fisheries Service. Brange wanted to help but told Plowden that the State Department could not issue the clearance without Pentagon approval. Brange and Plowden agreed to pursue different avenues. Brange would work Defense and Plowden could flex his clout at State.

  At the end of the day, Plowden copied the correspondence between Greenpeace and the Soviets and bound them with an oversized paperclip. He asked his secretary to fax the bundle immediately to Cindy Lowry in Barrow. Two reporters were in the manager’s office waiting to use the phone when a three-bell signal alerted them to an incoming transmission. The glossy paper slowly emerged from the fax machine at the Top of the World Hotel. Unable and unwilling to restrain themselves, the unknown moles read the telexes exchanged between Moscow and Washington. Their eyes met in mutual delight. Rumors of Soviet involvement had abounded since early in the week, but the documents transmitted via satellite from seven thousand miles away could confirm it. They shouldn’t have been snooping. Indignity of indignities, they would have to sit on their scoop.

  Although the faxes went unreported, the Russian rumors spread through the Barrow press corps. The race was on. The first agency to report the Soviet decision would have the biggest exclusive since the story broke. But exclusives were hard to come by during Operation Breakout. Cramped quarters in the tiny town and its overwhelming isolation made the concept of confidentiality implausible. The instant one reporter learned something he or she thought consequential, it seemed like someone else was already reporting it.

  Rescue coordinator Ron Morris encountered what he saw as an insurmountable problem the minute he deplaned in Barrow a week earlier. He confronted a growing swarm of media all competing to cover a story that appeared to have only a few exploitable angles. There were only so many ways to photograph the whales. At first, the rescue was simple enough for every reporter to follow.

  Colonel Carroll anticipated a media problem before he left Anchorage. Carroll and his press officer, Mike Haller, knew that the only way to bring order to a frenzied press was to restrict them without overtly trying to limit the flow of information. Prove to them it would be useless wasting energy looking for scoops by making information, pictures, and access immediately available to everyone simultaneously.

  When Carroll got to Barrow with the five-ton concrete bullet, he saw that Search and Rescue Director Randy Crosby had unwittingly created his own fledgling press pool. It started as just a trip or two a day, flying Barrow TV’s Oran Caudle or Russ Weston of KTUU-TV out to the whales. The enterprise grew like the story itself. Crosby’s operation swelled with unimagined activity. SAR went from flying three missions on Sunday, October 16, the rescue’s second day, to more than just four days later. His hastily filled out log sheets were scribbled with the names of more than one hundred different passengers. His equipment and his men were being overworked. He wondered how long it would be before something gave.

  To reporters, his free charter service proved a godsend. Regular and dependable access to the whale site for every reporter averted the battles often associated with heavily saturated media stories. Thanks to Randy Crosby, every media company that came to Barrow could get as close to whales as often as it wanted. Big or small, rich or poor, it made no difference. Operation Breakout was one of television’s most successful equal access stories. The only thing that made coverage of the whale stranding possible in the first place was their propitious choice of location.

  The whales stranded themselves close to a village modern enough to boast a satellite television transmission facility. But once the story exploded, the value of the location was inverted. It wasn’t Barrow’s proximity that saved the whales, now, it was its remoteness. Had the stranding occurred in a location Outsiders thought even marginally accessible, a crushing tide of media would have overrun Barrow. Proper coverage of the story would have been all but impossible. Media relations personnel from every federal agency and news service coming to Barrow to help would only have gotten in the way.

  Fortunately for the whales, their rescuers and those reporters who did make the long journey northward, Barrow did not have the facilities to support the huge entourage that usually accompanies the networks on megastories. There were only so many hotel beds and only so many airline seats in and out of town each day. There were no alternatives. The instant Barrow hung out its NO VACANCY sign, the influx stopped dead. Barrow was full. By Thursday, October 20, day five of Operation Breakout, not even Colonel Tom Carroll could find a place to stay.

  From the jungles of Southeast Asia to the untamed wilds of the Alaskan bush, Colonel Tom Carroll thought he had seen and slept in it all. Then he got to Barrow, a place where he would spend sixteen hours a day but never spend the night. At quitting time, he would hop on an Alaska Air National Guard eight-passenger Otter aircraft and fly 270 miles across the tundra’s numbing void to Prudhoe Bay. He slept in a tastefully decorated room in the ARCO compound now littered with empty coffee cups.

  Since the day Ron Morris arrived, the rescue was recharged at daily early-morning meetings. As the operation progressed in size and prominence, so too did the meetings’ importance. By the end of Operation Breakout’s first week, an invitation to attend was a symbol of access to the man with the operation’s ultimate power. What started as an open breakfast at Pepe’s became a mark of rank. Network producers assigned television crews to wait for the meeting to adjourn so they could pepper the departing participants with questions about the proceedings. But the rescuers were under strict instructions from Ron Morris to direct all media queries to him.

  By Thursday night, October 20, six days after his arrival, Ron Morris wanted changes. He reshuffled his rescue command. Those who didn’t conform to his approach were pushed out. In came the Outsiders, biologists Dave Withrow and Jim Harvey from Seattle’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory, ice experts Gary Hufford and Bob Lewellen from the National Weather Service, and on Saturday, October 22, NOAA’s Pacific fleet commander, Rear Admiral Sigmund Petersen.

  As the Outsiders arrived, the original insiders were left out, Craig George and Geoff Carroll among them. The North Slope Borough biologists who helped keep the whales alive for the five days before Operation Breakout began were no longer invited to the morning meetings, their knowledgeable counsel ignored, their pride hurt. Eskimo Arnold Brower Jr., the man who kept open the whales’ original holes and had successfully cut more than fifty others, became no more than a “native” employee. They stored their resentments for another day.

  The coordinator failed to learn the one critical lesson of Operation Breakout’s first week. Simple technology and native k
nowledge kept the whales alive; elaborate equipment did not. Even those involved in the ill-fated tow of the hoverbarge learned that in the Arctic the low-tech approach is often the best. Taking a cue from Arnold Brower and Malik, Colonel Carroll fell back on the simplicity of the concrete bullet, the most unadorned method yet found for.

  By Friday morning, October 21, the two larger whales appeared in better physical shape than since Roy Ahmaogak first discovered them. The deicers brought from Minneapolis succeeded in keeping half a dozen breathing holes open during the rescue’s most bitter night. The biting winds and encroaching darkness were no match for the compact water circulators. The more reliable the machines proved, the more calm the whales became.

  By Friday morning, the three famous whales began displaying a remarkable attachment to the ever-present massaging jets emitted by the machines. The two larger whales, Siku and Poutu, surfaced within inches of the deicers, rolling playfully in the seductive flow of the “Arctic Jacuzzis.” Blissful, euphoric relaxation quickly replaced their fortnight of stress.

  Arnold Brower and his crews tried in vain to get the whales to make significant moves toward the open lead, now almost five miles away. Brower made an observation that quickly spread from rescuer to reporter and back again. Perhaps, he suggested, the deicers were working too well, so well in fact that they had started to domesticate the once leery whales. What if the ultimate obstacle to the whales’ freedom became the whales themselves?