Red Notice

by Bill Browder

  “Bill, you realize the significance of this, don’t you?” Ivan asked when I was done. “If this happens, it means that we’ll have the US government on our side!”

  “I know, Ivan. I know.”

  This was a huge morale boost, especially to the Russians on the team. As anyone who has read Chekhov, Gogol, or Dostoyevsky will tell you, and as Sergei himself once reminded us, Russian stories don’t have happy endings. Russians are familiar with hardship, suffering, and despair—not with success and certainly not with justice. Not surprisingly, this has engendered in many Russians a deep-seated fatalism that stipulates that the world is bad, it will always be bad, and any attempt to change things is doomed.

  But now a young American named Kyle Parker was challenging this fatalism.

  Unfortunately, a week passed, then two, and finally three without so much as a peep from Kyle. Every day I could see Ivan, Vadim, and Vladimir reverting to fatalistic form, and by the third week even I was being infected with this Russian gloom. I resisted the urge to pick up the phone for fear of scaring Kyle off. As I got further and further from my meeting with Kyle, I grew more and more uncertain that I’d read him correctly.

  Finally, in late March 2010, I couldn’t take it any longer. I dialed Kyle’s number and, as if he were hanging over the phone, he answered on the first ring.

  “Hello?” he said cheerfully.

  “Hi, Kyle. It’s Bill Browder. I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you had any idea when Senator Cardin’s letter might go out? It would make a huge difference for the campaign. . . . In fact, I think it would completely change it.”

  “I’m sorry, but things don’t always work on a schedule over here. But don’t worry, Bill, just be patient. I’m serious about this.”

  “All right, I’ll try,” I said, barely put at ease. “But if there’s anything—anything—I can do to help, then please let me know.”

  “I will.”

  As much as I believed that Kyle was genuinely shocked by Sergei’s death, I thought this talk of being patient was a way of letting me down slowly. I was sure that lots of people in Washington didn’t want sanctions and that in the end there would be no Cardin letter.

  A few weeks later on a Friday, in one of my few moments of doing something unrelated to the campaign, I took Elena and David to the movies at Leicester Square. Perhaps fitting to my situation, it was a political thriller—The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski. As we sat in the dark watching previews and eating popcorn, my phone vibrated. I looked at the number. It was Kyle Parker.

  I whispered to Elena that I would be back in a second and went out to the lobby.

  “Hello?”

  “Bill, I’ve got some good news for you. It’s ready. It’s going to Secretary Clinton on Monday morning.”

  “The letter? You’re doing it?”

  “Yep. We’re just putting the finishing touches on it right now. I’ll send it over in an hour.”

  We hung up. I “watched” the movie but could barely keep track of what was going on. After the film ended, we rushed home and I ran to my computer and printed the letter addressed to Hillary Clinton. Clutching it in both hands, I read it several times over.

  The language was beautiful, succinct, and compelling. Its concluding paragraph read:

  I urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the US visa privileges of all those involved in this crime, along with their dependents and family members. Doing so will provide some measure of justice for the late Mr. Magnitsky and his surviving family and will send an important message to corrupt officials in Russia and elsewhere that the US is serious about combating foreign corruption and the harm it does.

  I called Kyle immediately. “This is amazing. I can’t tell you how much this means to me and to everyone who knew Sergei. . . .”

  “I told you we were going to do it, Bill, and I meant it. It broke my heart when Sergei was killed. I want to make sure his sacrifice wasn’t in vain,” Kyle said, his voice cracking slightly.

  “What happens now?”

  “The letter will go to Clinton on Monday. We’ll post it on the commission’s website as soon as we send it.”

  “That’s great. Let’s speak Monday. Have a great weekend.”

  It took me nearly two hours to fall asleep that night. Was Cardin really going to do this? Could these things be stopped at the last minute? And if it did happen—what would Clinton do? What would the Russians do?

  Monday morning came. I got to the office early, sat at my desk, and opened up the Helsinki Commission website. There was nothing, but London was five hours ahead of Washington so it was reasonable to expect that the letter would be published later in the day.

  I checked again at noon London time, but there was still nothing. As I paced through the office, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one compulsively checking the US Helsinki Commission website. Vadim, Ivan, and Vladimir all had the home page on their screens, but no matter how many times any of us pressed the refresh button, the same page kept coming up.

  Finally, at 2:12 p.m.—9:12 a.m. in Washington—a new page appeared. There, staring back at me, were two mug shots, one of Kuznetsov and one of Karpov, along with Senator Cardin’s letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials involved in Sergei’s death and the tax fraud, and next to each name was his or her department affiliation, rank, date of birth, and role in the Magnitsky case. Cardin was requesting that all sixty have their US travel privileges permanently revoked.

  I fell back into my chair.

  It was real. It was here, right in front of the world’s eyes. Something had finally been done to hold the people who’d killed Sergei to account. As I stared at the screen, a lump formed in my throat. If Sergei was looking down on us, he would see that his heartbreaking prison letters, in which he’d pleaded for help, were finally being heard.

  Within ten minutes, the Russian newswires started reporting the story. Within thirty minutes, the Western press picked it up. By the end of the day a new term had been created and repeated over and over: the Cardin List.

  Nobody in Russia had heard of Ben Cardin before, but after April 26, 2010, the conventional wisdom in Russia was that this senator from Maryland was the most important politician in America. Russian human rights activists and opposition politicians jumped onto the bandwagon, writing letters to President Obama and the head of the EU supporting the Cardin List. Not since Ronald Reagan had Russians witnessed a foreign politician act so decisively on a Russian human rights issue. The sad fact was that most Russian atrocities were never noticed by the outside world, and in the rare instances that they were, foreign governments almost never reacted to them. But now, all of a sudden, a US senator was calling for sixty named Russian officials to have their US visas revoked for their involvement in a human rights atrocity. It was totally unprecedented.

  While average Russians were celebrating, Putin’s top officials were apoplectic. All of his key lieutenants had used their jobs to become enormously wealthy, and many had done some very nasty things to get rich. In theory, the Cardin List opened the door so that these people could be sanctioned in the future. As far as they were concerned, the list changed everything for them.

  But, at least initially, they needn’t have worried. Back in Washington, the State Department wanted to do nothing in response to the Cardin letter and hoped that by just sitting on the letter and ignoring Cardin, the problem would go away.

  But it didn’t. If the State Department was going to ignore Senator Cardin, then Kyle was going to up the ante. He arranged for me to testify about the Magnitsky case in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives in early May.

  The hearing was scheduled for May 6 at the Rayburn House Office Building, which sits just to the southwest of the Capitol. Completed in 1965, the building is in the stripped-down style of the neoclassical architecture you see all over Washington, although the inside i
s not like other congressional buildings. It has no soaring marble columns or domes or cherrywood panels on the walls. Instead, there are linoleum floors, low ceilings, and chrome details on the clocks and in the elevators.

  I’d never been there before, so I arrived well before the 10:00 a.m. start time in order to get a feel for the place. I entered from Independence Avenue, going through the small security checkpoint manned by a pair of Capitol police. I found my way to room 2255 and had a quick look inside. The large hearing room had a horseshoe dais for the commission members, two long tables for the guest speakers, and an audience gallery behind the speakers with seats for about seventy-five people. The chairman—a Massachusetts congressman named Jim McGovern—hadn’t arrived yet, but aides, staffers, and various others milled around making small talk. I retreated to the hall and went over Sergei’s story in my head.

  When I reentered the room, little papers folded into upside-down Vs had been placed on the speakers’ tables. There were representatives from prestigious human rights organizations—the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and the International Protection Centre—and I felt a bit out of place as a businessman amid all of these professional human rights activists.

  I spotted Kyle Parker, who sat off to one side of the gallery, just as Congressman McGovern entered. McGovern was a congenial man with a prominent bald spot and a pleasant, boyish face. He greeted all the witnesses with a firm handshake and spoke with a Boston accent. I was drawn to him immediately. He asked us to sit, and the hearing commenced promptly.

  The first speaker was an advocate for persecuted journalists in Russia. She read from a statement and was knowledgeable, citing numerous facts and figures about killings and abductions of journalists who’d exposed the crimes of the Russian regime. I was intimidated by both the enormity of her testimony and her grasp of policy issues. I was just speaking about one case, one man, and didn’t even have a prepared statement to read from.

  The next speaker was from Human Rights Watch, and she repeated many of the same points in the litany of Russian rights abuses that her organization had documented. She also referred to a number of notorious cases, including the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova. I remembered both stories well, and I was impressed by this speaker. When she was finished I felt even more inadequate.

  The preppy staffers scattered around the room were less moved. They’d sat through many such hearings and had heard it all before. Their noses were turned downward to tiny screens cupped in their hands, thumbs dancing over BlackBerry keypads, and they’d barely noticed as the first presenter wrapped up and the next one took the stage.

  At last it was my turn. I didn’t have any statistics or spreadsheets or policy recommendations. I just stood uncomfortably, pulling at the cuffs of my jacket, and started talking. I gave a little background on myself and then told the committee Sergei Magnitsky’s deep, dark story. I looked Congressman McGovern straight in the eye, and he returned my gaze. Step-by-step, I told him and the others how Sergei had uncovered the crime, how he was arrested after testifying, how he had been sadistically tortured in prison, and how, finally, he had been killed.

  As I spoke, I noticed that the fresh-faced staffers had stopped tapping away at their BlackBerrys. I concluded my speech by asking the commission to support Senator Cardin in his call to the State Department to impose visa sanctions on Sergei’s killers. In closing, I said, “Sergei Magnitsky is one individual case, but there are thousands upon thousands of other cases just like his. And the people who do these things will continue doing them unless there is some way of challenging them and showing them there is no impunity.”

  I sat and glanced at my watch. My speech had taken eight minutes. I smoothed my hands over the table and looked around. Several people in the room had tears in their eyes, including some of the human rights activists. I waited for someone to speak, but the room remained still.

  Finally, after about twenty seconds, McGovern laced his fingers together and leaned forward. “I have had the privilege of being the cochair of this commission for almost two years, and I have learned an awful lot. We have been inundated with so many statistics and facts that sometimes we lose the human ability to actually feel them, Mr. Browder. That is why I am grateful you were here to talk about the case of Mr. Magnitsky. That is a really tragic story. I think people who commit murder should not have the right to travel here and invest in businesses here. There should be a consequence. So one of the things I would like to do, we will not only send a letter to Hillary Clinton, but I think we should introduce legislation and put those sixty people’s names down there and move it to the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, pass it on the floor, saying to the administration, This is a consequence. You have got to do this, because if you don’t, nothing is going to happen. You have my pledge that we will do that.”

  When the hearing was over, Kyle and I walked out of the room in silence. Had Jim McGovern just promised to introduce a Magnitsky law? Yes, he had. It was so far above my most optimistic expectations that it seemed unbelievable.

  When we got downstairs, I said, “Kyle, do you think Cardin would do the same thing in the Senate?”

  Kyle stopped walking. “Given what just happened, Bill, I can’t imagine that Cardin wouldn’t.”

  Later that afternoon, Kyle called to confirm that, yes, Cardin would be happy to be the original cosponsor in the Senate. All of a sudden, there was a small but real chance of making a US law in Sergei’s name—the Sergei Magnitsky Act.

  However, there was a lot of work between the idea of a law and making it a reality. First we needed an actual document that Cardin and McGovern could introduce. When this was ready, it would have to be approved by committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. After that, it would then go for a full vote in front of each chamber of Congress. If both chambers passed the bill, then it would go to the president for his signature.

  Thousands of draft laws are brought before Congress every year, and only a few dozen actually make their way onto the books. Therefore it was essential that the draft document Cardin and McGovern presented to their colleagues be bulletproof against any potential detractors. Kyle spent that entire summer working on the draft law, and as he did, we developed a close friendship. We spoke every day, sometimes twice a day, as we both learned as much about US sanctions law as we could.

  By early September, a good draft of the bill was ready.

  When Kyle sent it to me, I asked, “How quickly can Cardin schedule a vote in the Senate?”

  Kyle laughed. “It’s not as simple as that, Bill. To get any bill passed in Washington you need bipartisan support. We’re going to need a senior and powerful Republican senator to cosponsor this to get it off the ground. Only then can we begin the process.”

  “Will Cardin find that person?”

  “Possibly, but if you want this to happen quickly, you could try as well. Your personal story with Sergei is very persuasive.”

  I didn’t want to leave it to chance, so after talking to Kyle, I began reviewing the list of Republican senators who might be cosponsors, and one name jumped right off the page: John McCain.

  If there was one senator who could truly empathize with being tortured in prison, it was John McCain. He’d been a navy fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, and when his plane was shot down, he was taken prisoner. He was held and tortured at a POW camp for five years before being freed. He would surely understand the horror that Sergei had experienced and want to do something about it.

  But how on earth was I going to get a meeting with John McCain? Access in Washington is closely guarded, and the more important the person, the more inaccessible he or she is. A whole industry of lobbyists has been built around this fact. When I started asking around for someone who could introduce me to McCain, people looked at me as if I were asking them to give me a million dollars for nothing.

  But then I remembered that I knew one person who might
be able to make this happen. Her name was Juleanna Glover, a tall, attractive woman with wavy auburn hair, impeccable style, and an easy manner. I’d met Juleanna through a mutual friend in Washington in 2006, shortly after my Russian visa had been revoked. She’d invited me to a large group dinner at Cafe Milano, a trendy Italian restaurant in Georgetown. We exchanged cards at the end of the meal, but only when I got back to my hotel and typed her name into Google did I realize I’d been sitting next to one of Washington’s most influential lobbyists.

  Juleanna had quite a résumé. She’d served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s press secretary and then as Attorney General John Ashcroft’s senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group. She was so well regarded that in 2012, Elle magazine named her one of Washington’s ten most powerful women.

  Apparently, after dinner that night she also went home and typed my name into Google and learned about my escalating problems with the Russian government. She called me the next day and offered to help in any way she could, and from that moment we became friends. When Sergei died, one of the first calls I received was from Juleanna and John Ashcroft to express their condolences. “We know how bad you must feel, Bill,” Ashcroft had said. “But you should know that you’re not alone in this. If there’s anything we can do to help you or Sergei’s family, we’ll do it. Just call.”

  Now, I did need help. I needed help getting a meeting with John McCain.

  I called Juleanna and told her the situation. She said that she’d have no problem getting me in with McCain. Was it really that easy for her? We hung up and she called back inside of ten minutes.

  “Bill, Senator McCain will see you at three fifteen on September twenty-second.”

  Yes, for her it was that easy.

  I flew to Washington on September 21, and Juleanna met me at my hotel the next afternoon. We shared a taxi to Capitol Hill, cleared security, and made our way to McCain’s office—Russell 241. Given his stature in the Senate, his office was in a prime location, taking up a series of high-ceilinged rooms. We announced ourselves and were ushered into a waiting room by an assistant. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser—a tall, thin, redheaded man with a friendly grin named Chris Brose—greeted us and made small talk while we waited for the senator. After half an hour, Senator McCain was ready to see us.