MH17

Extract from Killer In The Kremlin, out July 21st

Free to read but if you can support me great

Dusk is falling. I am standing in an endless cornfield in the middle of nowhere in eastern Ukraine, the land rising and falling slowly like a calm sea, looking at the nose of a passenger jet and plane seats and Air Malaysia logos and bodies in black bags being dumped in the back of a bin lorry. Paperbacks and bits of plane seats and luggage and Trunkis, those little wheelie suitcases that you pull a toddler along, litter the cornfield. And every time I see a kid on one of those at Heathrow or Gatwick, I get a flashback and I start to cry.

I am being filmed by Darius Bazargan, a shooter-producer and a good friend. We’ve been in some tough places together but this is the worst by a long chalk. Generally, I can talk the front and back legs off a donkey but right now I am struggling to find some words that make any sense. We got here late and most of the corpses have been located and placed in body bags. As we stand, I count six body bags being loaded into the back of a lorry. The light is dying and I need to come up with words. Darius shoots some B-roll: a woman’s red hat with a black band, a kid’s black-and-white monkey, a part of the airframe bearing the letters: “Impact Resistant Door.”

And then the words pour out: “MH17 came from the west, where the sun is setting over there, from Amsterdam, heading east to Malaysia, and then the lives of nearly 300 people were extinguished.”

Down the hill it gets worse. Here, the mighty aero-engines and the landing gear fell to earth, the ground burnt black, the air thick. I tell the camera: “You can’t see it but the whole place stinks. It stinks of aviation fuel. It stinks of the dead. This is a monstrous crime.”

The Boeing was shot down by a Russian BUK surface to air missile. What happens is the missile flies up at 3,500 miles per hour and rides alongside the target, then explodes, firing hundreds of metal golfball-sized bomblets into the enemy fuselage. The kinetic power of a plane flying at 500 miles per hour does the rest. The rocket-launcher is carried on a primary flatbed truck which tows a massive radar behind it. This particular BUK had been shipped across from Russia to eastern Ukraine into the hands of Putin’s proxy pro-Moscow fighters on a pontoon bridge. The whole BUK unit, flatbed, rocket and radar was too heavy for the pontoon bridge so the Russian Army left the radar on the east bank. That degraded their ability to tell the difference between a Ukrainian fighter and a passenger jet full of holiday makers. They thought they were killing the enemy. Instead, they killed 298 people, Dutch, Malaysians, Australians, British.

Down the track, I got to interview the Dutch far right politician, Geert Wilders. I asked him what has been the single biggest terrorist attack against his country and he said, thankfully, there hasn’t been one. Then I mentioned MH17, where 193 Dutch citizens died. It wasn’t Islamist extremists who killed those people. He didn’t like that but then he is, as I told him to his face, a bit of a fascist.

There is no doubt MH17 was blown out of the sky by the Russian Army. Anti-Kremlin Ukrainians tweeted pictures of the BUK missile launcher on a low-loader pulled by a distinctive grey and yellow lorry cab driving west from the Russian border in the direction of pro-Kremlin held Donetsk from the Russian border. In a chain of photos, you can chart the missile launcher’s progress: at one place it’s pinned against a block of flats with a child’s playground in the foreground; at another past a shop with a distinctive name, For our BBC Panorama investigation, Darius and I went to as many as these sites as possible to geo-locate the route of the lorry.

Pro-Kremlin occupied Donetsk was a dark place, the rebel fighters the dross of the earth, sporting skull and crossbones bandanas like some sick version of Pirate of the Caribbean, cradling their grenades, flying the Confederate Flag from their checkpoints. After the shooting down of MH17, the Kremlin denied any involvement, blah blah blah, but told their proxies to allow the international press to report from the crash site. As the days wore on, the rebels’ courtesy as hosts became more and more strained. One morning the Daily Telegraph splashed a photo of the launch-site, in a field not far from the town of Snizhne, east of Donetsk. Darius and I headed out with a fixer we had been working with for two or three days. We got stopped at the main rebel checkpoint outside Snizhne, the nastiest of the lot. At which our fixer got out his I-pad and asked a heavy with a machine-gun where, exactly, the Russians had fired the missile at the plane. The heavy laughed and told us to go back. We did a U-turn and, one hundred yards on, Darius both separately sacked him on the spot. A good fixer is gold. This one could have had all three of us killed. I liked him as a human being but I wanted him and us to stay alive.

I took a break from the killing, went on holiday with my kids, then returned to Donetsk with shooter-producer Nick Sturdee, a fluent Russian speaker whose great-grandfather, Vice Admiral Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee, sank Admiral Graf Spee’s flagship, the Scharnhorst, off the Falklands in 1914.

Just sayin’.

Nick and I tracked down three eyewitnesses who saw the lorry towing the BUK missile launcher before it brought down MH17. Two witnesses were challenged by a Russian officer in an army jeep who spoke with not a local but a Moscow accent. Later, I told Dutch detectives investigating the massacre about the Russian officer. They flew me over to Schipol Airport to get every detail. I checked with my Ukrainian sources and they were happy to tell the Dutch cops what they knew too. Journalism is not always about the heart-break beauty queen.

The forensic people from the Netherlands and elsewhere found BUK missile warhead fragments piercing the wreckage. Bits of the missile that didn’t explode fell to earth, complete with metal plates showing serial numbers or parts thereof. Bellingcat, the investigative website, made the definitive report on Russian responsibility for MH17. Anyone who doubts it is a fool or a Kremlin troll.

In the spring of 2014 Putin had launched a proxy war against Ukraine, first sending in Russian troops without their normal uniforms or ID, “little green men”, to Crimea, the diamond-shaped peninsula that pokes out of Ukraine into the Black Sea. Crimea is the historical home of the Tartars, a Muslim people, but also a place of quasi-magical power for Russian imperialism. It was during the Crimean War with Russia where British military incompetence in the Victorian era was highlighted by Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of The Light Brigade, but it also true to say that the Tsar’s soldiers were defeated in the end by an alliance of the British, the French and the Ottoman Empire. In 2014, the successor of the tsar had better luck, taking over Crimea with barely a fight. Putin also stoked up tensions against Kyiv amongst the majority Russian-speaking population in the two eastern counties or oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk. There were many people who had no truck with the Russian invasion by proxy but they were outgunned and out-manoeuvred by the Russian secret state. To ram home the message, the Kremlin created two proxy statelests, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republics. In the dark, pro-Kyiv citizens were murdered, tortured or hurried to the safety of free Ukraine.

If you’re a war reporter, your other life follows you around the killing fields. I can’t remember seeing evidence of some truly evil thing without some nagging problem from home. This time, it was down to BBC management. The morning of the day MH17 was shot down, the BBC’s then Head of News, James Harding, announced 400 redundancies but said that people were free to apply for new posts, apart from London-based staff Panorama reporters. Of the four of us, I was the best well-known and so within hours my face and news of my certain redundancy was plastered over the internet. As a reporter, I took pride in knowing what the office gossip was and sensed something like this was going to happen so at the staff meeting I put on a brave face, said I had loved my time on the show, and offered to buy everyone a pint in the office boozer. When the MH17 story broke that afternoon, it gave me proper perspective on the true nature of misfortune and I volunteered to report the story. So when I turned up in Donetsk, all my mates from other news organisations said: “But you’ve been made redundant.” Not yet, I replied.

One time when Nick and I were commuting between the Ukrainian and rebel-held lines Harding phoned. We stopped the car in no-man’s-land while Harding explained that  everyone whose post had been closed was allowed to apply for other jobs elsewhere in the BBC… “James, I’ve got to go,” I said. “Why?” “There’s two men with guns who want to talk to me.” We put our hands up, said sorry to the rebel gunmen, and hurried back to the safety of Free Ukraine.

Later, it came out that the only two BBC programmes with the budget to take on us Panorama reporters, Newsnight and Today, had just filled up all their vacancies. Fancy that. Irritated by this clever “apply for no vacant posts” sequencing, I stood my ground and the National Union of Journalists had my back. For the next two years I got seven redundancy letters which I ignored and BBC management could never quite bring themselves to sack me, less the union go on strike. But the truth was that Director-General Tony Hall and his milquetoasts wanted rid of me and for the next five years I struggled, desperately hard, to prove them wrong. It was like being in an abusive relationship and, inside, I was broken. For the time being, I was still on the BBC’s books. Unless, of course, I was foolish enough to make a mistake.

Old school Donetsk, the one before the Russians stole it in 2014, rocked. My ex and I didn’t care for New Year’s Eves, the random jollity and the enforced fun, felt wrong, so we would pick random places to drop into. One year we hit the Lebanon, in 2012 Donetsk, two years before war destroyed much of it. The city sits atop Ukraine’s coal and iron fields and was founded under the tsars by Welsh mining engineer John Hughes in 1860. Hughes, a force of nature from the valleys, worked his way up from the Welsh iron mills to Millwall in London where he made a fortune iron-cladding the wooden vessels of the Royal Navy. The tsar’s men asked him to come out and forge a factory town in eastern Ukraine. They named it Hughesovka or Yuzovka in his honour. There is a glorious photograph taken in 1860-something of sixty oxen dragging a cylindrical iron boiler across the snow on sledges to the iron and coal city he would establish. He recruited hundreds of Welsh workers and their families to Hughesovka. The city as a western-leaning economic engine started to die with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It became Stalino in 1923 and, the old monster disgraced, Donetsk in 1961.

Russians and/or Soviets killing Ukrainians in great numbers is nothing new. In 1933 Stalin’s famine, caused by the forced collectivisation of Russian and Ukrainian farms, led to the deaths by starvation of maybe seven million people, of whom maybe four million were Ukrainian. Nobody knows for sure because nobody counted. Walter Duranty of the New York Times, rubbished reporting about the famine and, thanks to his Uriah Heepism to the Kremlin, got an exclusive interview with Stalin for which “scoop” he won a Putlitzer Prize. To this day, to the shame of the New York Times, the paper has not returned the gong.

Three western reporters told the truth about Stalin’s famine: Fred Beal, an American Trotskyist who had the guts to blow the whistle on evil; Malcolm Muggeridge who was, for a time, the Manchester Guardian’s reporter in Moscow.  and Gareth Jones, whose mother had been a Welsh governess to the children of John Hughes. Beal was ignored by the big papers in the States; Muggeridge was fired by the Guardian; Jones was, wrongly, vilified as a Nazi-sympathiser, and, in 1935, shot dead in China by, I believe, the Russian secret state. In 2011 I made a BBC Radio World Service documentary about Jones which led me write a thriller about his war against fake news in Russia and Ukraine in 1933, The Useful Idiot. Here’s just one scene, a fictional reworking of observed history:

“One hundred feet away stood Lenin, one arm outstretched, his coattails flapping in an iron wind, all of his upper surfaces coated in snow. A woman in black, pitifully thin, carrying an infant, walked up to the statue and knelt before him… She lay the baby down at Lenin’s iron feet and crossed herself, over and over again. A GPU officer on the far side of the square started shouting at the woman, roaring with all the power of his voice but the woman in black ignored him, then unwrapped the baby from its clothes. Only now did Jones realise that the baby was dead.”

This passage from my novel is based on fact. During the height of the famine, mothers would deliberately leave their dead children underneath Lenin statues, making dark mockery of the Soviet regime’s inhumanity. The West did precious little to stop the famine or stand up to Stalin’s tyranny. To be fair, they had Hitler to worry about.

Not quite a century on, the West’s reaction to the invasions of Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk were similarly muted but this time there was no Hitler to counter-balance a monster in the Kremlin. The West set up sanctions but Putin calculated, correctly, that they would be of the light-tap-on-the-wrist variety. The shooting down of MH17 changed the mood music, somewhat, but the West’s essential calculation, that it still had to do business with Putin’s Russia, stayed unchanged.

Time to call the man ultimately responsible for the deaths of 298 people to account.

But first there was a wedding to go to. My niece, Laura, married her bloke Tim somewhere in Home Counties beyond the Northern Line. It was one of those daft weddings where you get a bus at 1.30am and go back to the hotel where you already started hours before. Drink had been taken. I remember having slept for an hour and a half, and then a taxi to Gatwick, a flight at seven o'clock in the morning to Moscow, change of airports and then a second flight to Yakutsk, nine time zones east of London. Prodcuer Nick Sturdee had worked out that Putin was inspecting a museum of mammothology in Yakutsk. Nick said that we would be never be able to doorstep Putin in Moscow – security is too tight – but in the sticks, they sometimes get sloppy.

At the wedding I had enough to drink to kill a small horse.

There is precious little food on the flight to Siberia so when we land I ask if we could get something to eat en route. I wolf a kebab. Hungover, jet-lagged, I do my best to fight the shakes. There is a line of professors of mammothology who seem to be shaking even more than me. I stand next to them in my wedding best, dressed up in my posh suit and green tie and long beard. The President of Russia pimp-rolls into the museum. I guess that Putin thinks I am a professor of mammothology when I jump out of the line of paleolithic boffins and hit him with my question: “What about the killings in Ukraine, sir?”

The Kremlin media pool live inside a pre-fabricated bubble so they all assume (or appear to assume) that the question is baked in to the schedule. They switch on their TV lights for the answer. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, knows better and is furious. The down-table football manager lookalike scowls at me and tries to block Nick Sturdee from capturing what is going on.

I hit Putin again: “Thousand are dead, Ukrainians Russians, Malaysians, British, Dutch. Sir, do you regret the killings in Ukraine, sir?”

Too many cameras are on Putin for him to duck my questions and he’s a pro, so Peskov’s man-blocking doesn’t work and Nick keeps filming. Putin gives a long and very boring answer in Russian which Peskov translates while looking daggers at me. Putin affects not to speak English but he can and he did. Peskov is so het up by my cheek that he forgets  his English momentarily and Putin steps in to translate for the translator. “Big cities, big cities,” he said. I’d book him.

In the flesh Vladimir Putin is nattily dressed, very short and a dead ringer for an Auton, the ultra-creepy monsters in Dr Who that morph into wheelie-bins and gobble you up and spit you out plastic. His cosmetic surgery is not a great advert for Botox but if you get to be the Master of the Kremlin no-one’s going to tell you your skin-job sucks.

Close up, Putin can be quite the minx. At one point he gives a little pout, turning his plastic face into a moue. It is really strikingly effeminate. There is something a little submissive about his reaction to me. It is odd.

Putin’s face fascinates because it is covered with this plastic sheen, apart from a little bit of skin just under his eyes, the last non-Botox bit. I'm want to touch his face and say, “are you really plastic all the way through?” But that would be the end of me. So I'm fighting this mad compulsion to touch his face and he’s staring at me and I'm staring at him. I'm way taller than him. He's a small man, five foot six, something like that. I'm five foot 11 and a half. But there's another problem. The kebab was squiffy and I'm feeling, “oh my god, I'm going to throw up over Vladimir Putin. Now the Ukrainians would love this, you know, if Sweeney projectile vomits over the President of Russia, I'll never have to pay for a drink in Kyiv again. But the Kremlin muscle is standing directly behind him. They're all looking very angry at me. And I say to myself, please, John, don't throw up over Vladimir Putin. He gets to the end of his long monologue, setting out that the argument that the war in Ukraine is all the fault of the government in Kyiv because of their failure to talk to the (Kremlin-backed proxies) people in the East.

It's clever because he's using a long speech, giving the appearance of answering my question, while in reality killing proper scrutiny.

I have a follow-up question, “Why are there so many fresh graves of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine?”  but he just turns and, like a piece of ballet, all of the bodyguards stand in front of me, forming a wall of muscle. Peskov glowers at me and Nick and then a big man says, “Come with me”. And we follow the guide downstairs into a basement, down a long corridor, and when we get to the end, we’re put in a room, and there's frosted glass, and in the room, there's coffee and croissants, so things have improved since Stalin’s day. But there’s a click as a key is turned in the lock and we can't get out. Through frosted glass, you can see the shadow of a big man. So things haven’t changed as much as you think since Stalin’s day.

Back in London BBC management are fizzing with anxiety. Why did Sweeney do this. What's happened? Where is he? Our mobile phones don't work because we're in a basement. And after an hour or two, they let us out again.

A little later that day Putin opens some gas pipeline with a Chinese deputy prime minister. And I start walking closer to the stage where Putin and I get within 200 feet of him when one of the Russian goons comes up to me in the crowd and hand-chops me in the guts, discreetly, so no one can see it.

So that is what it's like to doorstep Vladimir Putin. But I didn't throw up over him. I regret it now. To be honest, I wish I had.

The evidence is compelling that when I confronted Vladimir Putin about MH17, the President of Russia, by blaming the tragedy on Ukraine, told me a big fat lie.  James - Jim - Fallon is a neuroscientist who studies murderers, psychopaths and dictators and is professor of psychiatry at the University of California and has made a study of Putin’s mind, body and soul. I recorded an interview with him for the Taking On Putin podcast. The prof and I hit it off so I shall call him Jim.

First of all, Jim sets out that he has never had the opportunity to do a direct diagnosis, face to face. But he has gone out of his way to talk to people who have dealt with Vladimir Putin and this includes a former president of Ukraine, a former Prime Minister of Chechnya, big players in Belarus and other countries who have spent time with Putin over the years. Jim listened to his sources and logged Putin’s “personality traits, the ones that everybody agrees on. So I put them together and tried to determine from afar, by trait analysis, if he fits any of these pernicious personality disorders, especially psychopathy and also narcissistic personality disorder.”

I ask Jim to explain some of these traits that he’s looking for.

“Psychopaths are very good at lying. Most people, when they're lying, they have tells, tics. They have all sorts of tells that people can read. The thing is, if you don't care about morality, if you don't really deeply believe what you're doing is immoral, you don't have those tells. They don't think what they're doing is immoral or wrong. They don't have the tells. So they are very glib liars. And they have no problem with it. You can't get them on lie detectors. And even the police or people around them will say, well, he is innocent and he's telling the truth because they have no tells.”

I tell Jim about my doorstep of Putin about MH17, how he lied so smoothly.

“Yeah, I've seen that clip, it's very typical of all psychopaths and also people with narcissistic personality disorder. They have a similar type of presentation. So when I say they're glib, they're not thinking about the impact, the negative impact of the lie that's going on. So they're very smooth and fast about it because there is no conflict in them. Plus, if you believe what you're doing is ultimately the moral way to go, you think you have moral superiority. So not only are you glib, you have no tells that you're lying. You don't care. People can't tell you're doing this and this becomes a practice trait from childhood. So they become professional liars. You can't tell by looking at it. They believe it. Another part of these personality disorders is blame externalisation. They're always ready to blame what they do on somebody else. They always have a case ready for the blame. It's like: ‘Well, you did it.” Psychopathic murderers will say, ‘Well, there was a gun there, and I was holding it, but that person deserved to die and the bullet came out.’ It's very strange, because they don't connect themselves with the crime. And they've done this all their lives. So, listening to you talking to Putin and him glibly saying it was basically their fault, that’s a trait of a psychopath right there.”

So as far as the smooth liar goes, Putin ticks the box. What are the other traits that you're looking for in a psychopath?

“Well, a grandiose sense of self. This tremendous confidence in the self, in your own self-identity: they all have that. So they are very convincing, very confident, they have grandiose ideas about themselves. They have what is called fearless dominance. This is somebody who's got such balls, such guts, they are willing to take great chances. And psychopaths are very good at taking chances.”

There is one other factor neuroscientist, dictator expert and bourbon fan Jim Fallon suspects may be in play in Putin’s psyche.

Jim Fallon suspects may be in play in Putin’s psyche.

“First of all, every psychopath, and almost all the dictators I've ever studied, have all had very troubled early lives. They were abused, abandoned, especially between two and three years old. All of them except for Pol Pot. He's the only one out of the hundreds of them. That's true for Putin. In his early life, he was abandoned, abused, bullied. He was a petty street criminal. And so he fits that pattern of abandonment and abuse, of having early epi-genetic environmental abuse, that permanently fixes somebody with these personality disorders.”

I tell Jim that I have one source who told me that Vladimir Putin was sexually abused as a child. Jim’s sources echo mine: “they all said that he was abused and abandoned early on, in his first two to three years.” I return to the disputed story that Putin was a bastard, abandoned by his natural mother in Georgia. But Jim has a fascinating but different take.

“The most consistent story was the abandonment and the abuse primarily happened in Leningrad. I heard the Georgian story.”

This raises the possibility that Putin was abandoned by his natural mother, not in Georgia, but somehow in Leningrad. Jim continued: “This is a similar to other psychopaths. There's something unexplained, some unanswered question because the person themselves will deny it or somebody in the family will deny the real story, to protect the family. You get this problem in court cases and in biographies of psychopathic killers. They will always protect the secret. So you get you always get this denial thing, ‘No, I was brought up fine.’ But in reality someone brought up after their mother abandoned them, raised in an environment that's abusive, this is a very common thing with psychopaths. So there's always this question of exactly what happened. So which one is the most true story? The one I heard most consistently is that the abandonment and abuse occurred very early on.”

We don’t know the whole story. But we do know that Vladimir Putin exhibits multiple signs of being a psychopath: smooth lying with no tics; fearless dominance; blame externalisation; unexplained early life.

One last point from my American psychiatrist pal but you might want to skip this bit. I thank Jim for talking to me and then he tells me he has watched my challenges to Trump, Putin and says this: “You got a lot of balls man. You really have fearless dominance. You're able to walk up to these guys and say, ‘what the fuck?’ and that's a psychopathic trait you have but it works and it's important.”

“So, you're saying that I'm a psychopath?”

“No, you have a couple of good psychopathic traits, not the whole set. Watching some of your stuff and looking at your history, you're ‘Come on, fuck with me! Fuck with me!’ That's fearless dominance. You have it. You make other psychopaths very nervous.”

Busted.

The shooting down of MH17 by a Russian surface to air missile in 2014 was the moment when I thought that Vladimir Putin had shot his bolt, that this time he had gone too far, that this time the West would finally stand up to him.

And about that, I was wrong. The West’s appeasement of the Kremlin continued, as before.

This is an extract from Killer In The Kremlin, to be published on July 21st.