01x04 - Episode 4

[bunniefuu]

DOGS BARKING

This program me contains

some strong language.

Alone in my cell

like, day and night

were passing by,

I couldn't even tell the difference.

It was impossible to sleep.

I had nightmares.

And then I would wake up

and realise,

"Ah I'm in a prison cell

in Russia."

And that would actually make

waking up a nightmare.

It was an incredibly daring mission.

It needed to be clone.

But the plan, I think

you could say, went to sh*t.

MACHINE g*nf*re

High drama on the high seas tonight.

Russian forces have seized

control of a Greenpeace ship.

It felt like being in the middle

of a James Bond film.

15 years stuck in a Russian prison.

How did I get here?

Dealing with Putin,

this was a different game

altogether.

It's like a ticking time b*mb here.

How the hell are we going

to get them out?

BREAKFAST TV NEWS STYLE MUSIC

Greenpeace in the past has thrived

on this sort of publicity, but

they may have just bitten off a bit

more than they can chew this time.

Yeah, it does look as

if the Russians

have at least considering making

an example of the activists.

When Russia's equivalent of the

FBI say that they're opening

a piracy investigation, you know

things could be getting serious.

It's a very serious charge with

a very serious jail term attached.

"Going down.

"Doors opening."

Seeing our friends in those cages

and hearing reporters

saying that they were going to be

jailed before a trial for piracy,

facing potentially ten

to 15 years in jail,

I felt immediately tense

and scared for them.

This is going to require

a monumental effort to get them

and us out of this situation.

Very soon after

kind of watching it on TV,

suddenly I get a call from my boss

and he said, like, "Can you

"just take over the media campaign

and can you start straight away?"

And f*cking, like,

impostor syndrome kicked in.

I just thought, "f*ck, I don't know

if I am good enough to do this."

It was just really heavy.

But you can't really say no.

I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I'll do it."

I said yes because some

of my friends were in jail

and I felt it could have been me

on that boat.

I had been asked to join

the Prirazlomnaya action,

but couldn't go on it.

You know, there was this

kind of alternate reality where

I was in that jail.

So, I just wanted to do everything

I could to help get them out.

And who replaced you on the ship?

Uh, Alex Harris.

To be treated like a criminal,

it felt unjust.

I couldn't process facing

15 years of my life

stuck in a Russian prison.

Whilst we were awaiting trial

judge sentenced us to

a minimum of two months

in a pre-trial detention centre.

They take us in a van in the dark.

As it drives

around the streets of Murmansk

all your senses are kind of alert

to what's going on around you.

Couldn't believe the situation.

Eventually, we pulled up outside

what I assume is the prison.

I can hear the inmates

just shouting.

Ancl I just remember

going through like,

these big pair of doors into this

courtyard.

DOGS BARKING

You could feel the fear

inside that prison.

Told to walk down the corridor.

Told that a step to the left would

be considered an escape attempt.

A step to the right would be

considered an escape attempt.

They were totally clear,

you would get beaten.

I'm strip-searched.

Felt degrading.

It's a massive

violation of your privacy.

And I was just taken by the guards.

And I remember seeing this cell

with like some sort of bunk bed,

but I was alone.

That's when I started to freak out.

All the men had to share.

We weren't put in with

each other, though.

It's hard to describe to you

just quite how scary that is,

trapped in a cell with

serious criminals.

The officer opened

the door of my cell

and as I walk in, no-one's there.

Ancl I'm instantly so relieved

that I'm not with a

with another inmate.

I kind of feel a bit

safer, in that respect.

But at the same time,

when they shut the door behind you,

and you can feel it vibrate,

and how heavy that door is

you feel completely

and utterly trapped.

DOGS BARKING

BICYCLE BELL RINGS

NEWS REPORT: Greenpeace believes

its best hope of putting

pressure on the Russian authorities

is to mount a global campaign.

And this basement in the Islington

office is the UK nerve centre.

Hey, Copenhagen, are you there?

Yeah, we're here.

The team that was working in London,

we're now Mission Control.

We just have to come in every day

and do our best to try to get

them out, and that's fully

what we intend to do.

We were in this bunker and we ended

up calling it The Room Of Doom,

because that's like kind of

how it felt sometimes.

We even had these

clocks on the wall on time zones.

But, you know, it being us,

it was a bit crap.

So, they were cheap,

mismatching clocks

with some sort of hand-drawn

flags below.

In fact, they looked like a child had drawn

them. In fact, maybe a child did draw them.

Greenpeace hadn't done really

anything on this scale before.

So, we're thinking, "Right, the first thing

we need is a strategy to get them out."

At this point,

they didn't have a name.

Like, what are we going to call

them? Like, what's the hashtag?

And there were all these kind of messages

going around on Skype, it was Skype back then.

And we were bashing around ideas,

"Free the Russian oil rig 30

"No, it just doesn't

have a ring about it."

And then it was like, "Hashtag

Free the Sunrise 30,"

and someone said, "Hang on, Sunrise

30 sounds like a vitamin pill,

"that's not really appropriate."

And eventually, one of the digital

people said, "Hashtag Free the Arctic 30."

And our initial reaction was like,

"Yes!" it just felt right.

They're the Arctic 30.

Great, but, I mean, how the

hell are we going to get them out?

This is politics, rather

than a free and fair trial.

If we're really going to try to

persuade Putin to release them,

and release them soon, we're going

to have to really understand this guy.

So, I dropped a line

to Martin Sixsmith,

a legendary BBC reporter

Martin Sixsmith, BBC News, Moscow.

and I said, "Look, can

I just meet you for a cup of tea?"

He was like, "Yeah, sure."

Yeah, OK.

Ben was asking, "What

are the prospects for these guys?"

I don't think I was very

encouraging.

I started saying, "They are going

to be made an example of,

"because of Vladimir Putin."

So, we then discuss the best

strategy for how to deal with

the Russians.

You could go all out for

a big publicity campaign,

you could whip up the indignation

of the world against Russia.

But I thought at the time it probably

wasn't the best way to go about it.

And he said, "Do you want your guys

to be p*ssy Riot,

"or do you want them to get out?"

Cos p*ssy Riot used their

imprisonment to try to

bring down the Putin regime.

But the result was that there's no

way that Putin could let them out.

Putin is a man who puts a lot

of emphasis on his own reputation.

And the key thing is to be strong.

But his return to the presidency

had sparked a lot of unrest.

The protests against him,

I mean, they shook Putin,

they shook his confidence.

You know, it makes him look weak.

The way that Putin dealt with

the popular unrest was to

look for someone to blame.

And his message to the Russian

people was that Russia is

under threat from dangerous

external forces.

Real and imagined.

And the only person with

the strength to defend Russia is me,

Vladimir Putin.

And therefore, if Greenpeace were

to push him and harry him

through the international media,

he's unlikely to let them go.

If your whole image is

based on being strong,

you can't afford to look weak.

At the time, I thought the best

way to get them out,

was to give him a bit of leeway

and reach the decision on his own

that he should let these people go.

It was a gamble, clearly,

because he might not make

the decisions we want him to make.

But on balance,

it seemed the best strategy.

And this suddenly puts

you in a real bind.

It feels wrong to let

a despot like that off the hook.

But the absolute number one priority

was get them out of jail.

We've got to get every

single step right.

If we f*ck up once,

it could blow everything.

They would be lost for 15 years

in the Russian prison system.

And who knows what kind

of conditions are they

Are they suffering in there?

DOGS BARKING

Every morning you're woken up

DOG BARKING

you'd get one hour of exercise

which I thought naively

was going to be in the yard.

No such luck. It was just into

another cell, and, uh,

you'd get in, walk backwards

and forwards.

Ancl then taken back to our cells

for the rest of the clay.

My cellmates,

they didn't speak English,

and I sure as sh*t

didn't speak Russian,

but, do you know, you

communicate in prison.

When you're in a cell for 23 hours of the

clay with the same guys, you communicate.

Vladimir, he was inside

for double manslaughter.

Ancl my other cellmate,

he ran a taser mugging g*ng.

They were quite serious dudes.

The first cellmate I met,

he was telling me about how

he had been in prison for two years

without charge.

And it was quite upsetting really,

to hear that.

It did reinforce you're dealing

with a society that doesn't

really recognise

the rule of law at the time.

just sitting there, I kind

of felt a bit stupid, really,

getting myself into this.

just thinking about what

happened all the time.

As an engineer on a Greenpeace ship,

you have to put your trust

in the campaign team.

Dima and Frank, people who

call themselves leaders

.. | was so pissed off with them.

You're not allowed on board.

No, no, no, no.

During the action, there was

a sense they were winding

the Russians up a bit.

Not taking the situation

seriously enough.

LOUDSPEAKER: You are a pirate.

LAUGHTER

I had a lot of questions about

how we had ended up where we were.

Maybe we didn't need to have pissed

the Coastguard off quite so much.

Maybe that's why it had escalated

so much.

Did I feel guilt?

No, you know, I really didn't.

When we first arrived in prison,

I am still a bit freaking out.

But in the cell,

I recognise this is kind of cool.

I grew up like, you know,

singing Russian prison songs.

All my paths led to

a Russian prison.

My father was one of the instigators

of the dissident movement,

the opposition to the Soviet regime

throughout the '60s.

When I was six years old,

my whole family went to Siberia,

where my father was sent to

a little village for anti-Soviet

agitation and propaganda.

This is where I went to my,

you know, I started school, really.

My, uh, great-grandfather was locked

up in the Tear's prisons,

because he was fighting for the

revolution together with Lenin

and Stalin, all those people.

So, the prison system, it's been

all around me all of the time.

This is kind of almost like

coming home.

When I heard from some people

that were kind of blaming me,

it was a shock to me.

I was like, "What? Why?!" You know.

"I didn't do this, Putin did this."

There are some beliefs

that Greenpeace members

on the Arctic Sunrise made the

situation worse. Is that possible?

There were moments where

I would find myself

heading down a bit of a spiral.

Questioning the whole

plan from Greenpeace International.

Surely, somebody could have

anticipated the political situation.

Were Greenpeace naive to

send a group of protesters,

and not anticipate that this

would happen to them?

Uh, I don't think so at all.

Perhaps what we did

not fully anticipate

is how fast Putin was changing.

By 2013, we could see

Russia becoming more

and more authoritarian.

But at the time of the protest,

Putin had not locked up any

international

activists for any reason.

We thought he was still trying

to be an accepted part of Europe

and the West.

By this stage,

we'd been isolated for a long time.

We had no contact with

the outside world.

Out of the blue,

two prison staff came to me

and said, "Oh, you make phone call."

Ancl I said, "Yes, please. Yes."

They came back with a sort of

a whole load of tokens.

Ancl so I rang home and

the tokens disappearing at a rate

of knots, I mean, literally, I could

barely keep on feeding them.

It answered,

it was Nell, my daughter.

"Nell, Nell, it's Dad, it's Dad."

Ancl she just bursts out crying,

just immediately bursts out crying.

Ancl I said, " | t's all right, darling.

It's all right, it's all right, I'm OK."

And, and she just kept saying,

"Dad, Dad, Dad," and crying.

At that time, uh, Joe was 13.

Nell was 17.

You can't stop thinking about them.

You can't stop feeling guilty about

putting them through that pain.

And you ream] nope that no

permanent damage has been done.

Ancl meanwhile, these tokens are just

disappearing, and I can see them

going, and I hadn't calmed her down,

I hadn't made her feel better.

I I You know,

and then it just clicked, gone.

Ancl I could just Last thing I just

heard her crying on the other end.

I was pretty broken.

So, we were in this Room Of Doom.

We sat around and thought, like,

"What can we do to

kind of seize the initiative?

"Maybe we could try to do something

so morally powerful

"that it would mean that Russia

would have to act."

And someone came up with the idea

that Kumi Naidoo would offer

himself up in exchange

for the Arctic 30.

Go to jail for them.

He's in charge of the whole

organisation,

and so he's got credibility.

So that was the idea,

that he would write a letter

and say, "I will go to

"jail in their place as collateral,

let them go at this point."

"Great," we thought,

so we, we sat down,

and we bashed out this

letter from Kumi to Putin.

And I think, do you know?

It read really well.

And then we stopped and said,

"OK, we'd better ask Kumi."

It's like, "Yeah, we actually

We better ask Kumi about this."

BLEEPING

Before they could even tell me

the full idea, I said,

"I get it and I'm on board."

I felt a deep sense of moral

responsibility for the people

that were there in prison.

I was not prepared to just send

other people to take risks,

without I myself taking the risk.

So, we got the letter

delivered to the Russian

embassy in the Netherlands.

And then we sat, and we waited

to see what would happen next.

But when news did come in, I mean,

it couldn't have been worse.

We've just learned that

the investigative committee has

said that drugs were

found aboard the Arctic Sunrise.

To be specific,

poppy straws and morphine.

You know, all these heads come

up from laptops, and it's like

"What?!"

The drama continues in this case.

What's going to happen next is

very much open to debate.

The investigative committee,

they're saying that heroin

has been found on the ship.

It was an effort to present us

as people just completely

unworthy of sympathy anywhere.

This is a legal aspect

as well, you know,

there could be serious charges here.

There was news that they'd

found drugs on the ship.

It felt like they were trying

everything to portray us in a bad way.

It was so ridiculous.

As if we're all

a bunch of weed smoking

hippies on a Greenpeace ship.

But the truth, it didn't matter.

I was a KGB officer for 10 years

responsible for Moscow

and Moscow region.

This story, it was a really, like,

profound risk to our campaign,

and we absolutely have to k*ll this.

We knew we didn't have long before

it becomes conventional wisdom.

And we need to prove that drugs

could not have been

found on the Arctic Sunrise.

And suddenly we realised that

ship was searched by Norwegian

sniffer dogs before it left

to go to the Russian oil rig.

And we had a certificate

to prove it.

It was bullshit.

It was like, "Go, go, go!"

Quickly, we wrote

this press release.

"No drugs on Arctic Sunrise."

We attach the certificate

at the end.

And it was just this mad frenzy.

"Yes, who's got it? Now, email.

Go. Bang. Send. Out. Boom!"

And you're like

Greenpeace has dismissed Russian

claims of finding narcotics and

equipment with a possible miliary

use on board their detained ship.

In about half an hour,

the narrative's changing a bit.

It was actually turning on how

the Russians were smearing us.

There was this other

aspect afterwards.

Look, something big just

happened there, we are

in this game of geostrategic

chess with the Kremlin.

If you didn't realise it until now,

then we need to realise it.

We make a move, they make a move.

And we need to be really, really smart

about how we play this game with them.

Being locked up, I was starting

to suffer psychologically,

emotionally.

I felt a mixture of anxiety

and guilt.

I felt responsible

for the entire action.

I felt deep in my heart the enormity

of all 30 of us being incarcerated.

The pressure certainly was starting

to weigh down on my shoulders.

I was then summoned

for an interview.

Ancl I got led into this room.

My lawyer was there.

And there was these two guys.

These guys were quite senior

detectives in the FSB.

Ancl I sit down, and I see there's

a letter from Nina, my partner.

I'm like, "Oh, fantastic!"

Ancl I'm, I open it,

I'm just about

Ancl they come

and they just rip it out of my hand.

It's heartbreaking.

Ancl I remember saying to myself,

" | 'm not going to cry in front of these guys.

I am not going to cry in front of these guys."

But suddenly, I have this awful,

awful feeling inside

and I'm really upset,

and I start

Start rocking backwards

and forwards.

Ancl my lawyer says,

"Oh, hang on a minute.

"Can you open the windows?

He's having trouble here.

I just keep looking at this letter

and I really,

really want to read this

letter from my partner.

The whole feeling inside that room

started to change.

Ancl the next thing I knew,

they called the ambulance.

So, we got

We got news from Murmansk

that Frank

Er They said he had

a heart attack.

And just everyone was so,

so upset by it.

Are we actually going to lose

someone?

You just imagine, it's a

bolt from the blue for his kids.

There was a sense that they

were in trouble in there.

We hadn't got them out

and there wasn't a sense that

we were getting anywhere.

Maybe whatever happens,

30 don't come out of there.