Here is the second part of the story about my experiences in dealing with the Russians, this time the return trip in 1995. In the true sense of contrasting the difference between two cities, Part One was more centered on Moscow; the highlights of Part Two center more on St. Petersburg. In that regard, allow me to quote Charles Dickens as he resonates remarkably with our present day situation of political gridlock in the imperial city:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities

Moonrise, St. Petersburg, Russia

In Part One, I recounted my Russian experience as a student at the Naval War College during the summer of 1994.

Following graduation in November of that year, I transitioned to the ONI Detachment with the War Gaming Department. From this organization, it was tradition to assign a mid-grade officer (Lieutenant Commander) to act as the Executive Assistant to the CNO’s Strategic Studies Group (SSG), sort of a mini-Capstone for a dozen senior Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard Captains awaiting flag selection or not, as a facilitator of all things intel and also a step-n-fetch it for all sorts of adminsitrivia such as coordinating travel, finishing the SSG final report, etc.

We had pretty much an unlimited travel budget to carry out our mandated task for the CNO – this time it was to look at the future security environment in 2005 – ten years ahead. While this was a relatively easy lift, it didn’t stop the SSG Fellows from traveling far and wide. We had a new leader that transition year of 1995, ADM James “Boss” Hogg, whom I had met more than a decade earlier when he was then a three-star and COMSEVENTHFLT; he retired several years later as the four-star US MILREP to NATO in Brussels. He was an interesting study in executive leadership – he would not read e-mail nor take phone calls directly, almost a Luddite, claiming they were a distraction. Everything he did was hand-written, very old school. He had disdain for senior leaders who used cell phones and computers. He loved meetings and the longer, the better. He drove the more Type A SSG Fellows (i.e., the two Marine Colonels) crazy by presiding over never-ending debates. I managed to invent admin bullshit to get myself out of most of the extended sessions or when directed to go brew a fresh pot of coffee. God they grew to hate to hear that phrase.

Admiral James R. “Boss” Hogg (USN Ret.)

He acted like a total gentleman but I don’t think he liked me that much. I found him to be a bit snobby and condescending and I will leave it there. What are you supposed to do when you’re an 0-4 and your boss, albeit retired, still thinks, acts, and demands to be treated like he is still an active duty four-star with a direct reporting relationship to the CNO and you don’t?

Suck it up and put up with it, of course – you can always go out back and vomit later.

In order to accomplish our year-long task given to us by the CNO, Boss Hogg had a very ambitious travel schedule and was delighted to learn that I had been to Russia and knew the ground. I was directed to first plan a two-week European trip, with stops in Naples, London, Brussels, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. He also wanted to go to China. We were able to do both, and maybe the China trip will be the source of another Socotra. I dutifully bent to my tasks.

The first thing I did was call the Captain at the War College who had set up our 1994 trip to get his contact info, and in a mind-numbing month of paperwork and overseas calls, I scored both Nunn-Lugar funding for that portion of our trip, made the Russian connections, and the attendant diplomatic approvals, country clearances, etc., for the whole thing. We tried to price commercial airfare and the cost estimates were hideous, not to mention the connections, so the next trick was to secure air transportation, which we did via the SECNAV’s office. We were granted access to a 26-seat Gulfstream-4 (C-20) executive business jet for both of our overseas trips. For the European swing, VR-46 out of Honolulu-Hickam provided us with air services. Their Washington-Andrews VR-48 counterparts would return the favor for our trip to Asia. Their logic being that it would give both squadrons exposure to parts of the world that they would not normally fly.

I could identify with that.

USN C-20 Executive Transport Jet

At the appointed date and time, we mustered at Sims Hall on the Naval War College Campus, loaded our gear into a couple of vans, and drove to T.F. Green Airport just south of Providence, RI, where we met our crew, took pictures, and then departed mid-morning for a long flight to Naples, Italy. This flight was fairly uneventful, except for when we were about an hour out over the Atlantic when the flight crew made the following announcement:

“Look outside the windows and up to the East. We are at Flight Level 510 and the Concorde heading to New York is about to cross over us at Flight Level 720 at over Mach 2.” We crowded around the windows and watched as we got thumped by the iconic aircraft four miles above us trailing smoke, and absorbed the double shock wave from its sonic boom.

Concorde at Mach 2, FL720 over the Atlantic.

We arrived in Naples a little before sunset and were met by ADM Snuffy Smith’s COMNAVSOUTH NATO folks. There’s probably another Socotra yarn in this story that describes this part of our trip which will also have to wait for later. After a couple of days in Naples, we flew up to London for two days of meetings with MODUK and Ambassador Crowe at the US Embassy, among others, and then we flew back south to spend the weekend in Brussels, which was going to be pretty boring.

The rest of the SSG fellows and me would rather have stayed in London for that weekend; going to Brussels on Sunday afternoon. We were over-ridden on that decision by Boss Hogg, who wanted to go to Brussels so he could have his ass kissed by his old NATO buddies. We tried to drink our way around the Grand Plaza and gorged ourselves on moules and frittes, washed down by the wide varieties and flavors of Lambic. After a couple of days at NATO (which included a side trip to Waterloo and a chance meeting with Senator John Glenn (yes, I shook his hand)), we departed on a fine Fall morning with the leaves changing, headed for Moscow.

Our arrival and reception at Sheremetyevo Airport were much different from the year before – a breeze. Once again, we were ensconced in the Radisson Slavyanskaya, and the ambience with the Russian mafia, their unbelievably hot girlfriends, the armed bodyguards, and the atrium lobby bar were much the same.

It was what had happened outside this American oasis that was stunningly different, amazing. Gone were the homeless people in the park, gone was the trash, the roads were freshly paved, the cops were on duty, and there were no bands of marauding gypsy kids. I wondered where they had gone.

Yuri Lushkov had been elected as Moscow’s mayor the year before on a campaign that promised to clean up the city – and he did. There were construction cranes all over town, and the vibe and hype were on. During the day, we met with many of the same parts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Navy, and other bureaucracies that we had engaged the year before – but this time all of the presenters were PhDs, and they made a point of letting us know that their academic and intellectual achievements were much greater than ours collectively.

Our primary interlocutor was once again Igor Sutyagin, with Sergei Rogov making cameo appearances. Thus passed three days. Having no fear, I found myself out a couple of late nights in some of the trendier Moscow discos, as well as revisiting the great Georgian restaurant from the year before. I got to know the Moscow Metro pretty well, and the stations are as glitzy as advertised. The stations with major rail connections had trains going to places you couldn’t believe. It’s a huge country. As one War College professor who had been part of the START negotiations declared, Russia is “hypnotic.”

Igor Sutyagin as we knew him

Our time in Moscow passed without major incident, and we were driven back out to Sheremetyevo Airport for the relatively short flight to St. Petersburg. Once again, we were billeted in the Kempenski Hotel. This portion of the trip was intended to be strictly mil-to-mil, and our Russian Navy hosts hustled us to meetings at the Baltic Fleet HQ, a meeting with their deputy CNO onboard the Aurora, a jaunt out to Kronstadt for a ship visit and to see the sorry state of their Baltic Fleet rusting at anchor, and group sessions at their Naval War College.

There, I had my full frontal picture taken openly for the second time by Russian intelligence (the first being in Berlin in 1985 in the Pergamum Museum; they also got pictures of me walking down the Ku’damm with bottles of Stoli in each hand). It was clever how they got me – I was stepping off the bus so couldn’t do very much to duck and cover. They also didn’t take pictures of any of the rest of our crew, which was curious.

Our talks with the Russian Navy were very interesting. It was clear that they wanted to engage with us, and didn’t want to lose the special status they had attained during the Cold War. They objected to the idea of being treated as just another country in the EUCOM AOR. The hinted that they were delivering a message from their General Staff as well as their Navy that they wanted to have a close, friendly, even allied-type relationship with us, possibly even to join NATO, and were open to more high-level staff talks/visits on the basis of equality and mutual respect. For what it’s worth, we took that message back to the CNO and JCS staffs and it was roundly rejected.

The usual response was “Fuck them, we won the Cold War. No way are we doing that. They’re a Third World country, why would we want to treat them as equals? Hell, their nukes probably don’t work anymore.” I was dismayed by the great strategic thought and foresight displayed by our senior leaders. I thought their attitude was a mistake then – and just look where we are right now strategically vis-à-vis Russia – really? I think we fucked that up big time.

There was someone else who didn’t want to see us cozying up to the Russian Navy and military in general. That would have been Vladimir V. Putin, former FSB Chief in his hometown of St. Petersburg and at that time the Deputy Mayor and head for international relations, but still likely a wheel at the local FSB.

He decided to send us a message during our return from Kronstadt for a final meeting with the Russian Navy Deputy CNO. We had two medium-sized buses as our transportation. One was mostly for baggage for the 16 people in our travelling party (where I rode), and one for the SSG Fellows, the Admiral, etc. On that final afternoon, we were travelling through a residential neighborhood; I was sitting in the front bench seat of the lead van hauling the baggage, in the middle between the driver and one of the Marine colonels who was getting tired of the endless banter in the second bus. We weren’t wearing seatbelts because there weren’t any.

At this point, we had a bunch of bags filled with gedunk in addition to clothing. We were probably four blocks from the Russian Navy HQ when I heard a car engine burst to life on a side street off to the left, a high rev with tire squeal, and then out of the side street the lead bus got T-boned smack on the driver’s side door by a mid-sized car accelerating at full throttle, I’m guessing it was a Skoda. The impact was tremendous – it knocked the van sideways and the burly driver into my lap, his head just missing cracking me in the skull, and the Marine Colonel banged his head on the C-pillar. Both buses came to a halt, and even though a bit dazed, we got out and assessed the damage.

Podpolkovnik Vladimir V. Putin

The folks in the second bus witnessed the crash, and were pretty gobsmacked, and all trying to talk at once. We pulled the driver out of our bus, got him on the ground, and got someone to administer first aid. It took several minutes but finally the police arrived. There were some suspicious-looking guys loitering around, including the driver of the ramming vehicle (he at least had a seat belt) who seemed to be very fit and just fine. The first problem we had to solve was how to get to the final meeting. Sensing the relative collective paralysis, I took the initiative:

“Everyone’s all right, we have 20 minutes until the next meeting and only about a quarter mile walk to get there. I recommend we put all of the bags in the good bus and then we can walk to the HQ building for our meeting. Our sponsors can get us another bus before we have to go out to the airport.”
The Admiral at this point climbed out of his stupor and declared “That’s a great idea, let’s do it.”

We formed a bucket brigade and had the bags transferred to the good bus in no time. We then walked to the HQ and just made it on time for the meeting, which went well. Afterwards, we were transported back out to the St. Petersburg airport for our long trip home.

Looking back, it was obviously a hit job by the FSB, probably directed personally by our pal Vladimir Putin as the head of “international relations.” It was a naked attempt to harass, intimidate, maim, and possibly kill someone in our group and create an international incident. That we were able to overcome this final difficulty was probably not anticipated by the FSB, but their message was sent and understood. We took this home to Newport, and prepared for our trip to Asia – which I now will have to write about given the current state of our relations with China.

Naval War College, Newport, RI

The return trip was uneventful but due to headwinds, took twice as long. We stopped for gas in Ramstein, and spent the night in Lajes in the Azores, landing in a driving rain storm. Once the storm had cleared, I led a strike team out into to town for Portuguese food, and brought back a big ball of queijo d’lha, a cheese made in Madeira which my wife and I had come to covet when we were in Rota and visiting her home base in Cascais outside of Lisbon.

After almost two weeks away, we touched down at T. F. Green International Airport in Providence and after smuggling my cheese as well as all of our other accumulated swag through Customs; we met our return transit to Newport. MC.

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