On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace (2024) s01e04 Episode Script

1
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 shit.
MACHINE GUNFIRE
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 bomb 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 fucking, like,
impostor syndrome kicked in.
I just thought, "Fuck, 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 Pussy Riot,
"or do you want them to get out?"
Cos Pussy 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 fuck 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 shit
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 gang.
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 kill 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.