Red to Black

‘There’s the German politician. He’s someone who might even become chancellor of Germany. And of course you know the KGB general, Anna. Then there’s a citizen of the former East Germany, a man called Dietz, who’s now a billionaire from his supermarket chains. And next to him to the left is a Swede called Bengsten. He’s an arms manufacturer. The old guy on the far right is an ex-Nazi, former SS. His name’s Reiter. He’s in his early eighties now and still running his business with the same efficiency as he ran his SS unit in 1945. He owns, lock, stock and barrel, the third-largest trucking company in Europe. But Reiter isn’t his real name, of course. He’s one of the brothers of Otto Roth. And finally, the last figure in the picture is Otto Roth himself.’

34

FINN AND I FLEW to Bucharest one early morning in July. He seemed to have very detailed instructions about how to enter Transdnestr undetected. I asked him if it was a route he’d ever used himself, but all he said was that this was one of Willy’s entry points into the Ukraine, through Transdnestr, from many years before when the Wall was still in place. And just a few days before we arrived, Willy had been back to check his old route still worked.

We stayed the night in Bucharest and watched a film and ate at a cafe in the vast Stalinist square that Ceausescu had built to glorify his empty rule; empire architecture without an empire. On the following day we took another plane, this time to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.

The whole operation Finn had planned depended on the arrival and departure times of Reiter’s trucks. If our, or Dieter’s, information was correct, we knew the date of the next shipment that a truck of Reiter’s would be taking out of Transdnestr. What we needed to find out was where it would cross the border into the European Union.

I was accustomed to Finn’s disappearances and he left the hotel in Bucharest at nine o’clock that evening because he’d ‘run out of cigarettes’. The trip to buy them eventually took him over an hour. ‘They didn’t have my brand anywhere,’ he complained when he returned.

Maybe he had met Mikhail there, in Bucharest that night, or perhaps there was a drop arranged between them somewhere in the city.

Over supper that evening, Finn told me what little he knew of Transdnestr and I filled in the large gaps in his knowledge.

‘In London, we call it the Cuba of Europe,’ he said. ‘But I bet it’s much worse than that. Hardly anyone’s even heard of the place. It’s far more obscure than Cuba. Transdnestr doesn’t even officially exist. Even your people in Moscow who support it don’t recognise it as a country.’

The Russian puppet regime, which runs Transdnestr, issues its own currency, but it is not recognised anywhere else; it manages its own borders, even though no borders officially exist. It needs our army, which it calls a peacekeeping force, to maintain control.

‘It’s about the only place left that still looks like the Soviet Union did fifty years ago,’ I told Finn. ‘The 13th Army’s there, but we actually use the place as a secret training camp for the spetsnaz. I’ve trained there myself. But its real importance–i its raison d’etre is as a marketplace for illegal arms deals, and as our “offshore” money-laundering centre.’

Up in the bedroom after supper, Finn laid out various maps of the region on the bed. Google Earth was of little use and he had an air map and another map of Willy’s from ‘a hundred years ago’, Finn said, which was probably the most useful. They showed a flat plain. To the east was the Ukrainian steppe, with Odessa on the Black Sea a mere seventy miles away: to the west was Moldova, to which Transdnestr actually belongs by international law, even though it is ignored by those who run the enclave and by Russia itself. Hence the Russian ‘peacekeeping’ force.

‘The way we control the place is by giving it free oil, gas and electricity,’ I told him. ‘The army’s there to exercise control and to ensure the necessary muscle is there if needed. Essentially the enclave’s run by our own people: former Russian special forces and KGB officers. Most of them were stationed in the Baltic republics before eighty-nine, before the Wall came down. And most of them are wanted by Interpol for crimes committed before the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’ve all changed their names now, of course.’

‘Another bad fairy tale,’ Finn said. ‘A make-believe state.’

‘Make-believe but real. There’re two thousand square miles of flat steppe and cultivated fields, from which everyone except the nomenklatura chisels a meagre livelihood for forty dollars a month,’ I said. ‘Essentially the SVR runs the economy. There are two main companies and they control everything. They’re both overseen by the self-styled “president” of the enclave. The boss of the first company is a senior commander of the MVD branch of the KGB. The second company makes arms and is controlled directly from Moscow, mainly from the Russian Ministry of Defence, but it also makes arms on the side for illegal export.’

‘And Reiter’s trucks go to one of these two companies?’ Finn asked.

‘They have to. Apart from these two companies there’s nothing else in the place except second-rate vegetables.’

We studied Willy’s map and Finn traced with his finger a small road back westwards from the so-called ‘capital’, Tiraspol, a city with no airport, towards the River Dniester, which separates the enclave from Moldova.

‘The river protects its borders, and Willy says the bridges are well guarded,’ Finn said. ‘But a river’s a river. It’s porous. This is where we cross.’

He pointed to a lonely stretch midway between two bridges.

‘There are patrols along the banks, of course, but Willy has a good record. He’s crossed here half a dozen times in the past when it was more closely guarded. He’s given me an updated study of how their patrols behave, what we can expect.’

Finn and I left Chisinau at midday and took a bus to within six miles of the river on the Moldovan side of the border and began to walk. It was a beautiful afternoon, larks sang, motionless, over the cornfields, and we stopped and ate a picnic we’d bought before we left. Then we set off again in the late afternoon.

When we were little more than a mile away, we sat on a small grassy hill surrounded by fields planted with sunflowers. It was pleasantly warm; the summer temperature lulled us.

A woman working in the fields, or maybe she was a gypsy from a camp nearby, stopped and offered us some kvint, the local brandy. We drank and exchanged nods and smiles. I didn’t want to speak Russian in front of her. We told her we were Ingliski. When she’d gone, we took the precaution of walking in the opposite direction we’d been heading, until nightfall. Then we retraced our steps to the river.

About two hours after darkness descended we reached the river and walked along the bank of the Dniester for another four and a half miles southwards, along the Moldovan side. Finn saw the small hut disguised with branches for the purpose of duck shooting that Willy had used in the past. Next to the hut, under a small cover of woven branches, was a skiff that was tucked into the bank and tied to a wooden post. It was just as Willy had described it to Finn. Two oars tied by a new rope were attached on the inside of the skiff.

There was no moon and in nearly complete darkness I slung my small backpack into the skiff and untied it from the post. Finn said the current would take us automatically to the centre of the river. I lay down inside and Finn lay on top of me. He pushed us off from the bank with his foot and we were away.

Willy was right. The current bounced off this side of the river and took whatever floated into the centre of the stream. Once we’d reached the centre of the river, we’d have to propel the boat, and using just one oar, over the stern like a gondola, Finn fought for several minutes to push us beyond the fast-flowing central stream to where the current moved us slowly over towards the far side. After about a mile, with us both lying in the bottom of the boat and Finn struggling with the oar, I sensed we were heading slowly towards the opposite bank to the place where we intended to land.

Here, the river curved away in the opposite direction and the current was in our favour again, taking us towards the bank. We drifted with our heads below the sides of the skiff.

On this bend in the river, there was thick woodland and, according to Willy, no observation post for half a mile on either side. We drifted until the skiff bounced along a high bank and Finn grabbed an overhanging branch. We lay in the boat and waited, listening for dogs or shouting or warning shots, and catching our breath. Slowly, Finn