‘Harry’ was my main interrogator. An officer in the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, he was a tall, well-educated man who wore battle dress, brown cowboy boots, had a wide-ranging knowledge of London and spoke perfect English with only a ghost of a Russian accent. I never saw his face. He was always masked during the interrogations.
“What is your rank and duty?” was the first question Harry asked, facing me across a narrow wooden table, his arms folded on the surface, another masked man on his left and a bodyguard on his right. I sat before them on a wooden stool.
Harry wondered, not unreasonably, how it was that if I was supposed to be in Russia on a cultural visit attending a glassblowers’ symposium in St Petersburg, as my visa and accompanying documentation suggested, I had instead been caught by a patrol of Russian paratroopers on the west side of Chechnya, en route to meet separatist fighters while carrying satellite gear in a black Volga with a mysterious Bangladeshi and a young American.
I could explain all this, I assured him. Harry was keen to listen. So keen that he made me repeat my explanation time and time again, tripping me up on the minutest contradictory detail, for three days and nights until I was flown away in a helicopter for more interrogations elsewhere.
Putin’s surging popularity
The world was a very different planet then. Memories of being arrested and interrogated by the FSB in Chechnya that distant October of 1999 belong to a past era of war and politics, and perhaps youthful fortune too.
Vladimir Putin was Russia’s energetic new prime minister at the time, his popularity surging on the back of launching a second war against separatists in Chechnya after a wave of terrorist bombings in Moscow and other cities.
Western leaders were already keen to meet him, wanting to explore whether Putin’s playbook reading of democracy was for real. Indeed, just four months after Harry began my first interrogation session while Russian shellfire pounded Chechen villages further up the road, the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, met Putin in the Kremlin. By then the former spymaster and director of the FSB was Russia’s acting president. Albright was cautious but nevertheless called Putin a “can-do” person, while President Clinton described him as “someone the United States can do business with”.
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The British were less guarded. One month after Albright’s visit, Tony Blair, the prime minister, at the peak of Labour’s “ethical” foreign policy, flew to meet Putin in his home city of St Petersburg. Blair arrived with his wife, Cherie, and spent the day with Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, visiting the Tsarist Summer Palace. That evening the Blairs went to the opera with the Putins, attending a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the Kirov. A month later Putin came to London, met Blair at No 10 and then the Queen at Windsor Castle.
Perhaps luck seemed more enduring back then too. Reckless chance could sometimes be forgiven. Getting arrested by Russian paratroopers in Chechnya during a high intensity war; lacking the right credentials in a country where the mechanisms of arrest were very smooth but those of release were tediously slow; accused of spying; interrogated repeatedly by masked FSB officers — even in combination, that all these factors could somehow have been surmounted seems impossible now, the gift of a different era.
Nevertheless, one thing held as true then in Chechnya as now in Ukraine. Russia’s two wars in the small breakaway republic showed how the might of the Russian army, humiliated in the initial steps of invasion by bold and aggressive defenders, could regather itself and plough onwards, grinding ahead on will and the heavy metal wheels of war machines, the value of life the cheapest expenditure of all.
Psyched out by Elvis songs
“Do you like Elvis?” Harry asked me suddenly during my first night of captivity.
“Uh, yeah,” I responded dully. No one faults the king.
It was about 2am. I was sitting on a wooden stool in a paratroopers’ outpost, tired from the barrage of questions I had received in the previous hours. Harry, wearing his trademark balaclava, produced a tape recorder from under the table and pressed play. Star shells and flares illuminated the darkened Chechen plain outside, bathing the battlefield in a weird purple glow, punctuated by shining trails of tracer fire and the flashes of field guns.
“Love me tender, love me true,” Elvis crooned, as thunderous Russian artillery shook the night.
“So, Anthony,” Harry began again, leaning forward. “Let’s go back to the beginning one more time…”
From the bowels of the Russian war machine, Harry was psyching me out.
Harry knew a lot about me by then, but all I knew of him was that he was 30, an officer in the FSB and had learnt English in a “special school”. Or so he said.
Our first meeting was by that roadside in Chechnya on October 28, 1999, as I stood guarded by Russian paras while my clothing and belongings were searched.
“You can call me Harry,” he had said with just the flicker of a smile. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk.”
The violence was like nothing I had seen before
Of the many wars I have seen, two have loomed above all others in terms of malice, sense of threat and fear: Chechnya was one of them. It was the Godzilla vs Kong of wars, the fanatical bravery of one side matched only by the remorseless brutality of the other.
Recollections of covering the first 1994-96 Chechen war still pressed close the day I was arrested and encountered Harry in the early weeks of the second conflict.
The scenes of violence there were like nothing I had seen before: rolling barrages of Russian artillery; airstrikes; corpses everywhere; savage fighting. Some memories from that place never really went away. In the bitter January of 1995, reporting from the side of the Chechen rebels in the republic’s capital city, Grozny, I had stumbled into the aftermath of a direct hit by a Russian shell on a group of elderly people queueing for bread. The mutilation of their bodies was worse than anything I had previously seen. Some were dismembered; others reduced to lumpen smears. One man, a leg severed and the other a brush broom of shreds, had pleaded for help. I knelt in the snow and held his hand for a while, then staggered away and let him die in peace. There was little else I could do. The roads were cut, the bridges down and the hospitals burnt.
In the same incident, a woman unhinged by the trauma of the moment had assailed me using her dead husband’s leg as a club. It had been blown off at the thigh and she held it at the ankle, swinging it at me in rage. I could still see her, leg in hand, for days afterwards in my mind, burnt in like the print of a lightbulb on my retina long after I closed my eyes. Sometimes I see her still, her revulsion at my presence in her moment of hell more disturbing than the swinging of that bloody leg.
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That, and similar experiences, looped memories of ultraviolence, crashing noise and hideous mutilation through my mind as I reflected on the first war. Yet when I arrived back in Chechnya in the autumn of 1999, my greater fear came from what had happened in the region between the end of that conflict and the start of the second one: an epidemic of kidnap, captivity and execution so virulent that the tiny separatist state had become a virtual no-go area to westerners.
The consent of local people, or a significant element among them, towards the presence of a foreign correspondent in their midst during a conflict is the overriding security consideration of any assignment, far more significant than the brutality of the war. Ukraine, for example, is a relatively safe place for western reporters to work despite the acute level of violence, as Ukrainians like the westerners’ presence, and the epicentre of the fighting is far to the east of a vast country.
Chechnya was the reverse. In the three-year interval between the two wars, the small republic had become a mash of rival criminal fiefdoms. Anti-western sentiment proliferated. Hundreds of foreign jihadis had entered the country, gang warfare and murder were endemic, and Grozny had become the kidnap capital of the world.
Westerners and aid workers were favoured targets. Six Red Cross workers were shot in their sleep outside Grozny in December 1996. A year later, British aid workers Camilla Carr and Jon James were kidnapped, tortured and Carr repeatedly raped during more than a year of captivity. Then in 1998 three British telecoms engineers and their New Zealander colleague working in Chechnya were kidnapped and decapitated, their heads found in a sack by a roadside, murdered by a Chechen warlord named Arbi Barayev.
“There’s no way around it,” Mark Franchetti, the Sunday Times bureau chief in Moscow, widely regarded as the don of foreign correspondents in Russia, had warned me before I returned to Chechnya in 1999. “Whatever your character, whatever your professionalism, you’ll represent nothing more than a sack of ransom money in the eyes of most Chechens.”
Yet The Times had asked me to get into the country fast. Despite it all, I was eager. So, eschewing the slow bureaucracy involved with applying for a press visa, I had applied for a Russian business visa through an agency in London. The process involved flying via Sweden to Moscow, where I arrived a week later, supposedly bound for St Petersburg as a glassblower. No one paid any notice when I instead flew to Ingushetia and drove into Chechnya.
A meeting with Chechnya’s president
For a nervous week, all went well. I linked up with an English-speaking Chechen, Maksharip, whom I had known in the first war, hired six gunmen as escorts, based myself in a village and began to work as best I could. Working alongside me was a friend I had met by chance on the journey there: the American photographer Tyler Hicks, just 30 years old at the time.
First we visited the Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, whom I had interviewed several times during the earlier conflict. The key to our meeting this time was my dog-eared map of Grozny. When we had originally met in February 1995, in another bunker in the capital, Maskhadov — chief of staff to the Chechen guerrilla army at the time — had marked up the faltering lines of his encircled troops on the map on the eve of their withdrawal from the city, which was by then in almost total ruins and under continuous bombardment. Russian shells rumbled the earth above us as he drew on the map. Shamil Basayev, who was to become one of the most infamous terrorists in the Russian Federation and would later claim responsibility for the Beslan school siege of 2004, sat in a corner watching, grinning wolfishly, thumbing bullets into the magazines of his Kalashnikov as the fighting raged outside.
I had next seen Maskhadov in August 1996 after he and Basayev had retaken the capital from the Russians in a lightning strike operation. Again he had marked his positions on the same map, this time with a wide circle and a laugh.
So now, back in Chechnya once more, when I asked to see Maskhadov, who had since become president, I handed one of his aides the map and 24 hours later found myself in a bunker with the Chechen leader.
He was grim-faced. With Putin taking control of the war from President Yeltsin’s drunken grasp, a revamped and determined Russian force was advancing on Grozny and Maskhadov’s forces were too beset by internal discord to stop them. Indeed, the ascension of Putin to power in Russia was the focus of Maskhadov’s thoughts that day.
“Russia seeks a new president to replace Yeltsin, and with whom Yeltsin identifies,” he said wearily. “The man chosen is Putin. How better can Putin show how tough and strong he is than by a war in Chechnya?”
Then he marked my map once more. I said goodbye and shook his hand. It was the last time I ever saw him alive.
Each day after that final interview with Maskhadov, the sound of artillery and rocket fire grew louder as the Russians began to pummel not just Grozny but towns and villages across Chechnya. With the threat of kidnap so rife, I was worried as much by the risk of abduction by Chechens as of getting blown up by a Russian shell. Some days the threats coincided.
One night the Russians attacked the Chechen town of Urus-Martan with jets, then hit it with surface-to-surface rockets after dawn. I arrived there with Tyler, Maksharip and our armed escorts to report on the aftermath. Sixteen people had been killed and distraught survivors scrabbled around the smouldering ruins. One missile had failed to detonate and had bored a huge hole deep into the ground, the size of a well. As we stared down this yawning shaft, one of my bodyguards unhelpfully tossed a pebble down it, causing us all to wince and step back.
Then a green van arrived and a group of bearded fighters disembarked, their combat trousers rolled up to their ankles jihadi-style, eyeing us fixedly. There was no discussion among my guards. They simply turned to me, said, “OK, we go now,” and we were in our vehicles and driving away in seconds.
“Not a good place, and not good people,” Maksharip told me. “Arbi Barayev’s people.”
The group that had beheaded the four telecoms engineers 12 months earlier had just checked us out.
A crazy plan — and an arrest
A couple of days later, I left Chechnya and moved into Ingushetia with Tyler for a brief break, as much to interrupt our patterns of travel and reduce the chances of kidnap as anything else. Yet behind us, Russian forces had pushed across Chechnya’s western border, making it more difficult to re-enter and reach the separatist zones.
So when I was given the offer of a ride back into Chechnya from a Bangladeshi, “Mr Amin”, whom I had met by chance in the foyer of a small hotel, I accepted. Mr Amin described himself as a peace envoy for an Islamic organisation liaising with the Chechen leadership in an effort to reach a negotiated settlement to the war. He had travel documents — real or fake, it scarcely mattered — bearing the signature of Vladimir Putin to back his claim and allow him passage through Russian checkpoints. He told me that he was going to Grozny and asked if I wanted to come along.
“The plan sounds so crazed that it might just work,” Tyler remarked, scratching his beard thoughtfully. With this logic, we stepped into Mr Amin’s Volga and set off.
Just a few miles inside Chechnya, driving down a road that had been empty only days before, a group of Russian paratroopers appeared and waved us down. Tyler and I were hauled out of the car and arrested. Mr Amin was left at liberty. Maybe Putin really had signed off on his journey after all.
He was good cop/bad cop all at once
Aside from depriving me of sleep, psyching me out with Elvis, assuring me that I would go to prison, telling me I was a liar and accusing me of espionage, Harry seemed reasonable. He was quite conversational at moments. The interrogations veered between boorish repetition and vague threat to times in which he would offer me a cigarette and ask about life in London almost amiably, as if he were playing good and bad cop all at once.
His question technique was good. During some sessions he would ask about my home life and earlier career, analysing whether I was who I said I was or working under a legend. At other times he would build his questions along the timeline of my arrival in Russia, making me repeat the details again and again to check for discrepancies.
I had nothing to hide. Maksharip, the Chechen who had translated for me, had remained in Chechnya with his own people, so I did not have to worry about his treatment, which would have been much worse than mine. Indeed, Harry probably had me figured for exactly who I said I was, but in Russia the questions of guilt or innocence are largely irrelevant to whether someone ends up in prison or not, and the issue of my misleading glassblower’s visa remained awkward.
Harry knew London expertly, either due to having spent time there or through having studied it intensively. However, he was so rigorous in his knowledge that he could not accept the natural gaps in my own awareness of the city. During one interrogation he cited my inability to name all the boroughs bordering Westminster as proof that my claim to live there was a lie.
“How can you forget Brent?” he scolded, smirking behind his balaclava.
Between interrogation sessions I was held in a field tent with a platoon of special forces, surrounded by artillery positions. These troops appeared genuinely amused by the presence of Tyler and me. We slept, as they did, on planks on the ground, huddled around a wood stove wrapped up in thick greatcoats, and ate their thin stew and bread three times a day.
“Good guns, shit food, not enough water,” one of them told me of his army as he cleaned his silenced assault rifle.
At times they were friendly, at others distant. Whenever I wanted to piss, I was marched out to a field and had to do it at gunpoint in case I used the chance to run for it.
Overall they seemed a tough, capable group. Few seemed to care one way or another for the war in Chechnya, in spite of the propaganda to which they were being subjected.
Their own officers, like most of Russia’s media, told them daily that there were no civilians left in Grozny and that all Chechens, apart from terrorists, wanted Russian troops to take over the state again so that they could live peacefully.
“I just do this for the money,” one of the soldiers, Nicolai, told me as I struggled to understand the rules of a card game named “Russian fool”. His wage of 1,500 roubles (£37.50) a month was considered a reasonable pay packet by Russian standards at the time, although he said it was barely enough for his wife and six-month-old son, who lived in Moscow. He was 24 and had been in the army since he was 18, first as a paratrooper, then in an anti-terrorist special unit.
“Russia is stuck halfway between the old communist system and capitalism,” he explained, “so our economy is totally screwed up. It is not a question of wanting to be a soldier or not. It is a question of doing whatever you can to have enough money to get by.”
However, Harry and the other FSB officers I encountered knew exactly what they wanted out of the war. “We lost it last time,” he told me bluntly, “and this time we are going to win it.”
‘You will probably go to jail’
The last time I saw Harry he had hinted that I might be moved elsewhere, and asked if there was anything I wanted. I asked for some vodka and a ride to the front line. He just laughed, asked more questions and said I would probably go to jail.
On the third day of detention, with the fighting moving deeper into Chechnya, Tyler and I were loaded into a helicopter. Inside there was a teenager at the machinegun in the nose cone, dressed from head to toe in black with a leather flying cap and blue sunglasses, along with two pilots and three soldiers. The machine started up into the air, hovered briefly, then swooped away northwards.
Below us, scores of tank tracks crawled over a landscape pitted by shell explosions, while two villages burnt furiously to the east. The helicopter’s nose dipped as the machinegunner strafed unseen targets, the chattering of his fire scarcely audible above the throb of the rotors. It was quite a ride. Tyler and I grinned at each other like boys, the way men always smile in helicopters.
The smiles ended when the helicopter dropped us in Mozdok, the main Russian base in the north Caucasus, a dull grey sprawl of malicious officialdom and Cold War shadows. Here we were received with overt hostility, bundled into a car and driven to a new interrogation centre.
Separated from Tyler again, I found myself seated in front of a military intelligence colonel who was patting my passport from one hand to the other, sneering.
“Your passport has now disappeared,” he said, sliding it into a drawer, his voice little more than a whisper. “Without it you have no identity. You do not exist. And that is what we can do to you if we wish — make you disappear.”
The questioning began again. At nightfall they handed Tyler and me back to the FSB. This time we were held in a cell in an FSB building and taken out from time to time for further questioning.
The interrogation rooms were a strange mix of minimalism and the vestiges of a half-dead system. In some rooms the chairs were screwed to the floor. In others, a portrait of Lenin stared down from the wall. Every surface seemed grimy and the place had a musty stink, which, if not exactly similar to the stale urine and sweat of prison, suggested a slow, wretched decay.
There was no particular logic or pattern with these new interrogators. Unlike Harry, they just shunted us from one interrogation to another, so that it seemed as if we were repeatedly being questioned by a variety of men who never communicated among themselves to build on what had been learnt by the previous one. Some seemed drunk and offered vodka during the questioning. Harry had never raised his voice. By contrast the lead interrogator of the new group, a chubby officer in a cheap suit named Sasha, sometimes yelled at me during interrogations. Every request to call the British embassy was ignored.
On the fifth day at about 4am, as I slept on the cell floor two FSB men suddenly rushed in to question me again. They frogmarched me in dramatic B-movie style out of the cell and down the corridor towards an interrogation room, but in a comedic moment encountered two of their colleagues moving another detainee in the opposite direction. There was not enough room for everyone to jostle past each other in the narrow space available, so I was pushed into an office to one side. The door was locked behind me as my captors spoke with their colleagues outside about some or other FSB matter.
As I stood in the empty office room, dishevelled, tired, annoyed, stinking of BO and vodka, from down the corridor I could hear Sasha’s voice screaming questions at Tyler.
“You will answer my questions,” Sasha shouted from a distant interrogation room.
“I’m sick of your bullshit,” Tyler yelled back.
Peering around the room in this moment of relative solitude, I noticed an inkstand, an in-tray and a half-full bottle of vodka on a desk in front of me. An angry thought crystallised. I listened again to the voices of my guards outside, just to be sure that their conversation was not at an end. Then I stepped quickly forward towards the vodka and, watched with a baleful stare by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from the portrait on the wall, I seized my moment of cheap defiance. It was hardly sophisticated, and certainly did not count as revenge. Yet somehow it made up for never doing well at school.
Would Putin have known I was being held? For sure
Our release came suddenly the very next day. I have no idea who secured my freedom, though a diplomat later told me with gleeful cynicism that I was lucky to have been arrested with an American. More likely, it served everyone’s interests to let us go. Russian, American and British officials were already in advanced discussions, arranging meetings with Vladimir Putin in that faraway time of transient détente, and their intelligence services were co-operating in identifying jihadi training camps in Chechnya. It would have soured the mood to have a British and American journalist in jail.
Would Putin have been made aware of the presence of a British and an American reporter held by the FSB? For sure. Would he have authorised our release? It’s unlikely we would have been freed without this signature.
Later in the morning a new FSB officer arrived, a more intelligent and sophisticated man than the night-shift thugs. We were each allowed to make a phone call. I rang the Times bureau in Moscow.
“Tell the embassy I’m being treated like a dog by the FSB in Mozdok,” I complained, ever the moaner.
Twenty minutes after that call, the FSB officer took Tyler and me to breakfast at a restaurant, and half an hour later we were put in a taxi and sent back to Ingushetia. I flew out of Moscow three days later with a seven-year visa ban and never returned.
Putin becomes president
The cycles of fate treated the main protagonists involved in the war very differently after that. Just two months later, on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin became Russia’s acting president after the sudden resignation of Boris Yeltsin. His popularity cemented by the Russian invasion of Chechnya, in March the following year Putin easily won the presidential election and was inaugurated in May 2000. He has been Russia’s ruler ever since.
The fortunes of the Chechens were harsher. The second war in Chechnya was to continue for nearly ten more years until the last remnants of local resistance were crushed. No accurate figures of casualties have ever been released, but estimates of civilian dead vary between 50,000 and 80,000, with separatist forces and the Russian military each losing between 8,000 and 10,000 fighters, although much higher figures have also been suggested.
Among the dead was President Maskhadov, killed during an FSB raid on his hideout in 2005. Shamil Basayev died when an ammunition cache, possibly booby-trapped, detonated in 2006. Arbi Barayev, the extremist warlord wanted for scores of kidnappings and the murders of the telecoms engineers, was slain during a Russian special forces raid in 2001. Local Chechens refused to allow his body to be buried in his village.
I have no idea, of course, what happened to “Harry”, or even who he was. The world in which we met was very different from the one today, though some constants remain, Putin chief among them.
Yet despite the years and mixed fortunes, the memories of it all still hold close, and are frequently revisited in Ukraine. I won’t forget that small moment of uncouth victory while locked in an FSB office in Mozdok on my way to an interrogation either. After all, not everyone can boast that the FSB drank their pee.
