JANUARY 19
THE TWO UNMARKED GUNMETAL GREY TRUCKS displayed no lights as they moved slowly along the track towards the no-man’s-land of the border zone. After the deliberately roundabout journey from Kursk that had taken four hours instead of the usual two and a half, the trucks had finally reached their first destination, the jumping-off point, and they pulled up just over three miles from the border. The next three miles from here to Ukraine was traditionally accessible only with military or KGB passes.
The muffled engines of the trucks went quiet and the men inside sat in silence, three in each truck, while the dusk drew in around them. It wasn’t a long wait. When the darkness had deepened into a cold January night all six men then stepped out, stood near the trucks blowing on their hands and stamping their feet. But all the time they looked towards the border.
The men wore combat fatigues and, like the trucks, they had no insignia to identify them as officers of military counterintelligence from the Russian 3rd FSB Division. But all the men displayed the word “Patriotiy,” written in black, across the shoulders of their jackets. It was more of a gang slogan, an embroidered tattoo, than any identification. Each man had sewn on the word himself.
As the last of the sun’s light faded from the distant horizon, the vast flat steppe around them absorbed the night and disappeared.
The oldest of the men, a veteran colonel in his forties, pulled open the driver’s door of the first truck and took out a backpack. There were no spoken orders. It was evident they all had their tasks and it had been rehearsed meticulously. The colonel stood for a moment and listened. The night was still. There was no sound to disturb the silence, no wind, no water, no human or even animal presence. The moon was four days old, a thin silver sliver in the eastern sky that offered no light even when the clouds briefly parted. The veteran looked into the blackness. Three miles ahead of them and to the west, now lost in the darkness, was the 1,200-mile-long border that separated Russia and Ukraine.
He checked that there were no lights that shouldn’t be there, no random border patrol vehicles on either side. They should all have been pulled back to let his mission through, but you never knew. The Forest’s chain of command was obsessed with secrecy, even when it was necessary to be open enough to keep away prying eyes. He was looking with his naked eye for lights first of all. He already knew there was no human habitation along this stretch of the border—that was why it had been chosen—and the only lights he could see were the sparsely placed border posts that displayed a few glimmering yellow arc lamps in the far distance. But the border posts were two miles to the north and south of where the trucks were going—where they should be. The colonel spat on the frozen earth. In any case, it was a border that the six men—and their masters in Moscow—believed shouldn’t be there at all. The Patriotiy wanted the border removed so that Russia and the historical birthplace of Old Rus were one again. To the colonel and his men, the darkness and the thinly stretched border posts seemed to exist for the sole purpose of tempting men to cross without papers.
Without a word, the men climbed back into the trucks, and now under the cover of darkness drove a farther two miles down a more derelict cart track this time, and always towards the border.
The mission had been planned in great detail, just like all the others. Four days before this particular night, at Kraznomenniy Street in Moscow, a building secretly owned by Russia’s Interior Ministry, the mission had been laid out before the six men. It was the shortest time line and one that left as little room for error as possible. Three Interior Ministry officials were in attendance. The ministry officials were the formal representatives of the Patriotiy, which was a wide, shadowy grouping of KGB officers that reached from the lowest ranks to the senior leaders of the intelligence services. For the purpose of this meeting at Kraznomenniy, the three officials were all either in or approaching their sixties, all ranking KGB veterans of the Russian war in Afghanistan launched on Christmas Day 1979, and all nursed the anger and resentment of Russia’s intelligence services and special forces at the motherland’s humiliating defeat back then. In the intervening period up to the present day they and their colleagues had ascended the ranks of the ministry, thanks to their KGB backgrounds, and now controlled a powerful clique inside the Interior Ministry, one of Moscow’s more powerful centres of authority. The ageing officials were gifted with powers that ranged from control of Russia’s prisons to censorship of the media, and “special operations” on Russian territory.
And for the purpose of this mission—code-named with utmost simplicity “Repossession”—the independent state of Ukraine, a land with its own culture and language and with an application to join the European Union, was considered by all concerned to be part of Russia’s territory.
Inside the higher echelons of the KGB, the interior ministry clique was openly known as the Patriotiy. But outside it, they were only the subject of gossip in street cafés, rumour and conspiracy theories. The clique was an unofficial branch of Department S however, itself a highly secret body within the KGB responsible for aggressive measures on foreign soil. In the usual arrangement of the structure of Russian dolls regularly adopted by the KGB’s special forces, a discreet distance was placed between the actual perpetrators of terrorist attacks on foreign soil and their ultimate controllers. There were the men on the ground—in this case, the six men. Above them were the Interior Ministry officials. Then came the shadowy figures from Department S, then an irregular KGB committee set up for the purpose that it answered to the head of the intelligence service, then a Kremlin intelligence liaison, and finally the prime minister himself, Vladimir Putin. If anything went wrong with this mission—a high-risk smuggling operation onto another country’s sovereign territory—the six men would simply be declared independent mafiosi out for their own commercial gain. The men were happy enough with that denial, even though it meant they might take a big fall if they were caught.
The senior official, a KGB general from the ministry, had convened the meeting on a day in early January when an intense snow flurry that developed into a blizzard had dusted then clogged Moscow’s chilled streets. The sky had then cleared, the sun had appeared, and, for a moment, the city seemed to dangle the promise of spring before its inhabitants. Icicles that formed on the eaves began to melt and occasionally fell dangerously from the eaves of high buildings, exacting their usual, fatal toll on unwary pedestrians. But by the evening of the day of the briefing, winter had exerted its grip once more.
In his introduction to the six men, the general echoed the words of Russia’s prime minister Putin almost exactly two years before, in April 2008.
“Ukraine is not even a state,” he stated. In the ornate wood-panelled room in the secret government building on Kraznomenniy Street, the general thus gave the men the righteous cause for their mission—a terrible injustice done against them personally and against the integrity of Russia. Like Putin before him, the general explained to the six men that Ukraine consisted partly of Eastern Europe and was partly a gift from Russia—mistakenly made—in 1991. Now, in the depths of the winter of 2010, it was time to redress this terrible wrong.
Sitting at an oversize and heavily built polished desk under the Russian eagle, he told them: “Your mission is crucial to the future greatness of Russia and a decisive step in atoning for past mistakes.” Words like “justice” and “atonement” were central to the hurt suffered by Russia’s elite spy community and to the mythologising of Russia’s mission. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was the birthplace of Russia a thousand years before, the cradle of Russian civilisation.
But the general didn’t mention that this mission, which the six men were to perform, was just one of tens, perhaps hundreds, of similar operations. For the six men, it was as if they, and they alone, stood between Russia’s historical greatness and another humiliation similar to the ones they believed they had already suffered. For them, it was a chance to begin the reversal of a process of retreat that had seared the Russian soul for more than twenty years.
Three of the six men had been released early from prison for the mission, including the colonel commanding the mission. But they had been given the lightest of sentences for conducting illegal killings, massacre, and torture in the Chechen wars. Theirs had been a new type of Russian show trial whose purpose was the opposite of the usual show trials. It was in order to find their innocence—or lack of culpability—not guilt, while at the same time appeasing Western calls for justice in Russia to be free and fair. First, then, their trials were a pretence for Western observers that justice in Russia was working. But in reality they were a clear signal that things were back to how they had been under the Soviet Union. No matter what offences they had committed, the KGB would look after its own, welcome them back into the fold after their derisory short sentences, and then swiftly promote them through the ranks.
The other three men were fully paid-up officers of the Vympel group, the special forces team engaged in “social warfare” based at the Forest.
After the general laid out the broad purpose of the mission and the historical rightness of it, he departed and left his two lieutenants to lay out the details on the ground. It was, in essence, a straightforward smuggling mission across the lightly guarded border between Russia and Ukraine. The porous borderlands between the two countries were regularly travelled by commercial smugglers who transported anything from pork fat—a delicacy beloved by Ukrainians—to nuclear materials. The lieutenants from the ministry brought out maps and grid references; set out times, distances and moon phases; and, finally, the methods of communication with a team of two or perhaps three men on the other side of the border in Ukraine.
Out on the steppe, the advancing night had turned the temperature to well below freezing. The leader of the six men nodded to the driver in the first truck and the vehicle pulled up a second time, now just a mile from the border. The truck behind pulled up in line. The leader stepped out, looked inside the truck, and motioned silently to the two men remaining. In the second truck, a similar silent order was given. The six men descended, opened the muffled rear doors of the trucks, and waited again. Either they would be met tonight on the far side, or they would return on the following night, and then the night after that, until a way was clear.
The leader now withdrew a pair of Baigish night vision binoculars from inside his pack and surveyed the terrain between the trucks and the border. He was no longer looking for anything as obvious as lights. The land between him and the border was a flat expanse of grass steppe that stretched across to the other, Ukrainian side. In both directions he therefore had a wide and long field of view. The lake that straddled the border was to their left. They had no need of maps. Everything was contained inside the colonel’s head. When he was satisfied they were alone, that no unlit human presence lay ahead of them, he signalled without words to the men.
Two ramps were slid out of the rear of the trucks. From each truck a light amphibious vehicle was then wheeled down the ramps. Each vehicle was fully loaded and fitted with electric engines. As the colonel swung the binoculars across the terrain a second time, the other five men checked the batteries on the vehicles for the third or fourth time that evening and gave the strapping that attached the loads a final twist. The leader then let the binoculars hang on its strap, stepped back into the truck, and opened a metal case. He took out a computer, opened it up, and tapped in a code. Then he waited. There was a pause of maybe seven to ten minutes. Finally, he received the coded response they were hoping for. So it would be tonight. He shut down the computer, removed the hard disc, and placed it in a lead-lined box.
The electric engines on the amphibious vehicles were switched on, and the men climbed aboard. In almost total silence they then headed into the blackness, towards the lake and the border.