by Ben Stewart
The campaigners wait. Every time a new Skype message pops up from the Russian office it’s quickly scanned as they look for news that the security services are raiding the Dance Hall. But nothing. No raid, no arrests. It takes another day for the Kremlin to react to the letter. But when they do, they play a card from the bottom of the deck.
‘Okay, so the FSB found drugs on the Arctic Sunrise.’
‘What?’
‘Drugs. It’s on the Investigative Committee website. Can you give us a comment? We’re going live with it on the evening news.’
Tatiana Vasilieva, a 23-year-old press officer, lowers the phone and looks around. It’s late, the Dance Hall is emptying, she was about to leave for home herself. The journalist on the end of the line is still speaking, she can hear his voice buzzing from the receiver. And then she hears another phone ringing, and another one. A moment later every phone in the room is ringing and her colleagues are reaching into pockets and bags for their mobiles.
‘I’m sorry, say that again.’
‘I said do you have a statement? We’re going live in ten.’
‘What kind of drugs?’
‘Illegal drugs. That’s what they’re saying.’
Seconds later the BBC’s Moscow correspondent tweets the news. The Skype groups explode with messages.
Aaron Gray-Block: Daniel Sandford @BBCDanielS Russia’s Investigative Committee now saying ‘poppy straw’ and ‘morphine’ found on the @gp_sunrise
‘Jesus Christ,’ Mads Christensen mumbles to himself, staring at his screen. ‘This is bad. This is very bad.’ He unmutes the video link to London and taps the microphone. Eight heads look up. ‘You lot seeing Skype? The Russians are saying they’ve found drugs on board the Sunrise. They’re saying they found morphine and poppy straw.’
Faces duck below laptop screens then surface a moment later with wide, fearful eyes.
‘Holy shit,’ says Ben Ayliffe, shaking his head. ‘That has to be bullshit.’
‘It’s a smear,’ says Christensen. ‘Total bullshit. Morphine and poppy straw.’
‘I mean, poppy straw, that’s crap. There’s no way they found poppy straw on that ship.’
Silence, then Christensen says, ‘What is poppy straw?’
‘Er.’
‘Ummm.’
Ayliffe types the words into Wikipedia, scans the page then looks up at the video screen.
‘Oh man, it’s opium. Raw opium stalks.’
‘Who the hell sails on a ship with raw opium stalks?’
Christensen taps ‘Greenpeace’ and ‘drugs’ into Google News and sees the story is already getting pick-up. Western right-wing media outlets – many of whom have done nothing to cover the story of the Arctic 30 until now – are pouncing on the claim and posting their first dispatches since the arrests, with the prefix ‘BREAKING NEWS’. He unmutes the microphone on the video link.
‘Poppy straw anyone? What is it? Is it medicinal, or is it a recreational drug? We need to know as soon as possible.’
Laura Kenyon: In Russian this phrase that Google translates to ‘poppy straw’ is the same as what we usually mean in English if we say heroin. i.e. referring to the illegal kind of heroin.
‘Oh shit,’ says Christensen. The Room of Doom looks up. ‘Okay, so Laura’s saying the FSB are accusing the Arctic 30 of being on heroin.’
‘Whoa!’
‘Yup.’
They say a lie can go around the world before the truth has even got its boots on, and now the team is in a race against time to catch up with the FSB’s smear and challenge it. The Western media hasn’t used the ‘H’ word yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and the implications for the thirty could be huge. Mads Christensen has a global campaign rolling here, but the FSB is trying to derail it with undiluted bullshit and the media is falling for it.
The campaign hits every Skype group out there, reaching hundreds of people, urgently demanding evidence that the Russian claim is a smear. Seconds later they’re told that morphine is obligatory on all Dutch ships and that it’s kept in the captain’s safe. It would have been illegal for a Greenpeace ship not to carry morphine. But what about the opium? Within a minute they’re being told that the ship was searched by Norwegian drug sniffer dogs before it sailed for the Prirazlomnaya, and a minute after that they’re sent the certificate to prove it. Unless someone on the crew arranged a rendezvous with a poppy straw dealer in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, they can prove the drugs story is a lie.
Christensen’s London-based media team bashes the information into a press release. In Amsterdam Daniel Simons watches the words appearing in real time on a Google doc and gives them legal sign-off as each sentence appears. They’re desperate to get something out before the media accuses their friends of stashing heroin on the ship. Then twenty minutes after the FSB released its statement Greenpeace are sending out theirs, rebutting the smear in forensic detail and castigating the FSB for stooping so low.
Soon enough the media is running their corrective. Christensen types the words ‘Greenpeace’ and ‘drugs’ into Google News and reads reports saying the only drug found on the Sunrise was medical morphine. The tone of the story has changed. The FSB is being ridiculed. Russian Greenpeace campaigner Vladimir Chuprov – who’d be one of the first campaigners to be arrested in a raid – is quoted saying, ‘Next they’ll say they’ve found a pink zebra on our ship, or maybe an atomic bomb.’
Pavel Litvinov – Dima’s father – is in no doubt about who’s behind the smear. He’s been expecting it. He’s surprised it took them so long. ‘I knew they would play with all these things, with drugs, that they would make it up even if they didn’t find something. It was clear the command would come from Putin that this has to be done. Whatever they want, they will find. So I always had a fear they would say drugs.’
By the end of the day the story has died down. Mads Christensen comes on the video link. ‘Well done everybody,’ he says. ‘I have to say that was extraordinary work. They tried to kill us today, but we stood up to them, we fought back and we survived. Today was a big day. Something important happened. This wasn’t about drugs, this was about something even bigger. We’re having a conversation with the FSB. This is what’s happening, I think. We do something and they react to it, they do something and we react. This drugs thing is clearly a response to the Kumi letter. We sent it yesterday, then today they say they found heroin. Putin got the letter. That was his reply.’
Frank Hewetson’s diary
9th October Wednesday
Just seen 20:00 news where the investigation team have claimed to have found ‘narcotics’ on Arctic Sunrise. Morphine of course. In the ship’s hospital in fact. They are trying every trick to use the black arts of propaganda against us. If I wasn’t banged up I’d be laughing.
A second day of global action is organised by the global campaign team. More than one hundred events are held in thirty-six countries involving nearly ten thousand people – everywhere from Mount Everest to Bangkok to Naples. The team in Murmansk plans a one-person vigil in the city centre, with a protester posing in a purpose-built cage made from cardboard and tape. The cage is stored in an enclosed yard at the rented building hired by the team as a headquarters.
Tatiana Vasilieva, the Moscow-based press officer, has travelled to Murmansk to help organise the protest. Under Russian law a demonstration involving more than one person requires a licence from the government77 – a licence she’ll never be granted. The Greenpeace plan is to put a lone protester inside the cage in front of the court building. The journalists attending the next appeal hearings will then see the person in the cage. But on the morning of the protest another press officer rushes into her room and sits on her bed, shaking.
‘What happened?’ asks Vasilieva. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘The cage has been stolen.’
‘What?’
‘An hour ago when the team arrived to collect the cage it was gone. We spoke to the security guard of the building. He
gave us the video footage from the CCTV cameras. We watched it and …’
‘What? What does it show?’
‘There were six men, all dressed in black and wearing masks. These men, you can see them, they’re scaling the fence and moving in a straight line. Then they pick up the cage and carry it across the courtyard. They’re either local freaks or the FSB. They have to be.’
Frank Hewetson’s diary
11th October Friday
Got notice of my appeal being held on 15th Oct. Boris and Yuri are playing backgammon. I can’t do that game. Just found out Boris has another 8–12 years to go but only 2 months left in this facility. Yuri says he has another 5–7. Puts things a wee bit into perspective.
12th October Saturday
I wonder what Nina [his partner] and the kids are doing this weekend. I really miss them. Nell [his daughter] is going through such a growth of maturity, ability and humour that I just can’t help but feel I’m missing out on wonderful times. Every Saturday I miss is a Saturday I don’t get to cycle down to Roundwood Park with Joe [his son] and Pluto [the dog]. It gets me deep down that these days are slowly slipping away from us. I love those two kids so very deeply. I’m so scared at how much they will seem to have grown + changed by the time I get home. These are low moments.
Since arriving at SIZO-1 Frank has examined every aspect of his life. He’s raked over the decisions he took over many years, and reconstructed how he ended up on that ship. He wonders if he might have taken a different path. He remembers details of his childhood for the first time in decades. And he thinks about his father. Was he trying to live up to his dad’s reputation? Is that why he joined the ship and sailed to the Prirazlomnaya? He often asks himself the question. He always envied his father because he had a cause, and environmental protection became Frank’s cause. It gave him strength to know what he was doing was important.
Michael Hewetson would have been a formidable supporter of the campaign to free his son, had he still been alive. He was one of the legendary commandos dropped behind enemy lines the night before D-Day to secure Pegasus Bridge – the key strategic goal on which depended the success of the Allied invasion of Europe. The nineteen-year-old was in the thick of brutal battle for ten days before being wounded and shipped back to England, patched up and sent back to Europe, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine.
After the war he became a French teacher. He could never handle loud bangs and wouldn’t have balloons in the house. It took Frank’s mother years to get Michael to walk on the pavement instead of the middle of the road – a legacy of street fighting in Normandy.
Frank knew his father did something extraordinary in the war, but Michael refused to talk about it. In 1991 he returned to Pegasus, and his family came with him. They went to the cemetery. He stopped at a line of graves and broke down. Frank followed after him. They were all eighteen, nineteen years old. Names from Michael’s past. But still he didn’t open up.
It was on a family holiday in Spain that Michael finally told Frank about those ten days in Normandy. He said it was terrifying, it was chaotic, at times more brutal than the Russian front. Then he told his son a story he’d never told anyone before. It was day four after D-Day, he was with a colonel when they were approached by resistance fighters. The French had just found two collaborators and said they couldn’t let them go because they were informers. So the collaborators were handed over and the resistance disappeared. The colonel turned to Frank’s father and said, ‘Look, we can’t take them prisoner, we don’t have the capacity. Take them round the back of that barn and finish them off.’ It was an order – an illegal order – but an order. So Frank’s father walked them around the barn. They begged for their lives. He said, ‘You have to run and run now, and if you look back I’m going to shoot you.’ He started screaming at them. ‘Run! Fucking run!’ And they did. They ran. He thought he might be able to shoot them in the back. But he couldn’t do it. He let them go.
Frank never doubted he’d do the same, that he’d disobey the order, that he wouldn’t shoot them. And he still thinks that. He knows that. But this place, SIZO-1, is giving him a lesson in the power of fear. Right now he’s not sure what he’d do to get out of this place, but he thinks he might do things he never thought possible. Because he’s scared. Right now, in this place, he’s scared.
Frank Hewetson’s diary
13th October
The sign of things to come. Snow has fallen and covered the Pig Pen roof, the loudspeaker and the watchtower. It’s going to get much colder.
In countries across the world the demonstrations against Gazprom are continuing. Protesters picket the Albertina museum in Vienna where an exhibition sponsored by the oil giant has been inaugurated by the curators – with great solemnity – as the Gazprom Collection. In Paris an anti-Gazprom protester hangs for a day in a tent suspended from a rope tied to the underside of the Eiffel Tower. At the Barcolana Autumn Cup Regatta, a yacht race in the Gulf of Trieste in Italy sponsored by Gazprom, protesters in a RHIB hold banners calling for Arctic protection as they speed alongside the company’s entrant – the 35-metre Esimit Europa, emblazoned in Gazprom blue, the sail rendered as one huge logo. The declared mission of the Russian yacht is to ‘unite Europe’ but images of security guards in Gazprom-branded tracksuits trying to stab the Greenpeace boat with a knife succeed only in uniting opinion against the company.78
The mother of Gizem Akhan, a 24-year-old activist from Turkey now jailed in SIZO-1, writes an open letter calling on more people to join the movement to free her daughter. ‘They all took a step for the future of this Earth, marched on and stood up for something. We must stand beside them. They must not feel alone.’ Her plea is echoed by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo79 – the association of Argentine women whose children were among the thirty thousand ‘disappeared’ between 1976 and 1983 by the country’s military junta. The same day Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes to the Russian government calling for the release of the Arctic 30. ‘This is not just an Arctic or a Russian issue,’ he says. ‘The impacts of global warming will be most keenly felt in the developing world.’80
Also that day protesters from the pro-Kremlin youth organisation Nashi picket the Greenpeace office in Moscow. Nashi – meaning ‘Ours!’ – numbers tens of thousands of 17–25-year-olds who are dedicated to defending the Putin regime. Its members meet at summer camps across Russia to receive basic military training. The group has been accused of harassing opponents of the Kremlin.
Today Putin’s young supporters are carrying banners depicting the faces of famous Russian Arctic researchers above the slogan ‘REAL DEFENDERS OF THE ARCTIC!’ The campaigners from the Dance Hall invite the Nashi protesters to come inside the building to discuss their issues. The Putin loyalists appear uncertain, then agree to the meeting. Inside the office they drink coffee with Greenpeace campaigners who tell them Russia’s Arctic researchers are certainly heroes, but so are the activists in jail for trying to protect the frozen north. The Nashi protesters say little, finish their biscuits and leave.
The next day eleven Nobel Peace Prize laureates write to Putin demanding the release of the thirty, describing the Arctic as a ‘precious treasure of humanity’.81 They are later joined by two more Peace Prize winners – Lech Wałęsa and Aung San Suu Kyi.82 Reuters reports that Paolo Scaroni, the CEO of Italian oil giant Eni, which has a multi-billion-euro partnership deal with Gazprom, has asked the Russian company to intervene to free the Arctic 30.83
In London John Sauven takes a call from New York. Paul McCartney has heard about the campaign and he wants to help. Putin is a huge Beatles fan, he sat in the front row when McCartney played ‘Back in the USSR’ in Red Square. The Moscow office has been saying for weeks that Paul McCartney is the only person who can get more media coverage than Putin in Russia.
And they’re right. McCartney writes to Putin, and when the letter becomes public the last few paragraphs are printed in newspapers across the country.
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Forty-five years ago I wrote a song about Russia for the White Album, back when it wasn’t fashionable for English people to say nice things about your country. That song had one of my favourite Beatles lines in it: ‘Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it’s good to be back home.’
Could you make that come true for the Greenpeace prisoners?
Sincerely yours
Paul
TWENTY
Potatoes are bouncing off the walls like silver balls in a pinball machine. Sini is crouched in front of the window with a bag of them between her feet, occasionally glancing back nervously at the cell door then reaching down and selecting the smoothest and roundest of the hoarded vegetables.
The window is dirty glass, set back with a row of thick bars in front of it, and the only way to open it is to pull the ventilation lever which makes a narrow slit open sideways on. She thought she might be able to drop potatoes through that gap, but she can’t reach it. Instead Sini is bouncing them against the wall, trying to make them rebound at such an angle that they’ll ricochet through the gap and tumble into the courtyard below. But it’s impossible. Most of the potatoes are hideously shaped, they’ve been boiled then left to go cold so they have a springy quality that makes their flight utterly unpredictable. They rebound off the wall at obscene angles, sometimes hitting her in the face or landing behind her on the bunk.
For hours she bounces potatoes. But she can’t get it right. They won’t go through the gap. She leans back against the wall, slides down onto the floor and buries her head between her knees.
Frank Hewetson’s diary
19th October
Most of my GP goodies bag has gone between the 3 of us. Bit miffed the cheese went so quickly as I was quite keen on that. Still, it’s all share and share alike which keeps the cell on an even keel. One of the guards seems to be walking round with a massive wooden mallet. It’s so big it’s comical. Boris + I get the giggles when we see him. At 18:30 tonight will be exactly 1 calendar month since arrest by FSB Spetsnaz.