Category: Topical Page 2 of 3

Hollywood vs How it really works

As I mentioned before, we have just moved house down the coast a tad and, even two months in, are still unpacking the various bits and pieces that weren’t regarded as a priority. A while back, after finding them in a box, I did a small piece on the various ID cards and permits I have had over the years and some stories associated with these. Today, while sorting out some of the last unpacked boxes in my office, I came across a box where I’ve kept a lot of my old notebooks. To say it was a trip down memory lane would be an understatement, as incidents and operations long consigned to the mouldy basement area of my brain were suddenly brought back into the sunlight for a retelling. Case in point – a few pages I found in one of the notebooks which I thought I’d share with you, just to give you some idea of how things work for real as opposed to the Hollywood version we’re often presented with.

This story begins several years back with a phone call out of the blue from my friend ‘Mark’ with whom I’d done some pretty intense work with in Africa the year before. A quick hello from Mark followed by an ‘are you busy just now?‘ Then straight into it. Was I up for an immediate deployment to Ukraine? I must admit, I took pause at that, having been watching the Russian invasion the previous few days on the news. But I’d also done a bit of work in Ukraine over the years so had both familiarity and fondness for the country and its people. So, I was definitely interested and asked for more details.

What’s the team? Just me and Mark. Who are we working for? A former special forces chap we’d done some work for before and whom we both regarded as a great guy. What are we doing? Not sure, just get on the ground, get the lay of the land, and see where we can be of best use. Okay, a bit of a fuzzy brief but I’ve had worse, and, like I say, I genuinely liked working for this guy, as did Mark. When do we go? Day after tomorrow. So, a day and a half to square stuff away and get on a flight to the world’s latest war zone. Cutting short a visit to friends and family in England, my wife and I headed back north.

Some quick research on the hoof and I’d sketched out a basic plan of getting to Eastern Poland and working things out from there. A flurry of phone calls and VTCs in between packing and booking flights, rental cars etc, fleshed out some more of the detail. We also got a steer to prepare for journalists and reporters wanting to be taken to the front lines as some had already approached our employer with this request. With an idea of at least one of the tasks we’d be conducting, we decided to rendezvous near London and grab some body armour, helmets, comms, and other equipment for our media clients.

Just outside London, we took possession of the heavy kit and packed it in preparation for our onward flights. It was then we both had to make a very important, and very personal decision: Do we want to be armed? This might sound like an easy decision to make but it’s not as simple as it appears at first glance. The pros of being armed are obvious; protection for yourself and your clients. A useful intimidation tool if required. The cons, however, are also significant. For one, you are carrying weapons in a war zone and as such, you will be defined as a combatant, no quarter asked or given, particularly from the Russians. Second, the minute it’s discovered that you are carrying guns, you’re not going to be able to talk or bribe your way out of trouble, physical confrontation an almost given. Third, once you make the decision to use a gun, it’s all or nothing, no half measures and no going back.

Also, we’d now been given another role; Extraction. Rescuing civilians trapped in the fighting and getting them to safety. I remember thinking that I was getting too long in the tooth to be cutting about a war zone with weapons. Nowhere near as fleet of foot as I needed to be if things went wrong and I had to escape and evade after a compromise. That my preferred approach would be to recruit a team of fixers and facilitators who we could deploy to the hardest areas. We would manage, direct, and oversee their deployments on our behalf. Thankfully, Mark had come to the same conclusion and we decided not to carry weapons. With that behind us, we headed to Heathrow with a ton of luggage and the familiar mix of excitement and trepidation as we started our journey east.

On the flight, we both noted some familiar faces among our fellow passengers. A chap I recognised, I’d last bumped into on the Syria/Iraq border the last time we’d seen each other a couple of years before. He was a little cagey about the exact nature of what he was going to be doing, as was I, but we swapped numbers in the event that we might be able to help one another at some point. I saw Mark doing the same with someone he knew from a previous contract. This is the norm for work like this where your network is everything. Every one of us at some point reaches out to an individual they think might be able to help or connect them with someone else who can.

After an overnight stay in Warsaw, we picked up a robust hire car in the morning and headed east. We decided to base ourselves around Lublin in Poland so that we could access the Border Crossing Points (BCPs) into Ukraine. Recce them and identify the protocols and restrictions applicable to each. On checking into our hotel in Lublin, it was apparent that a lot was going on. The hotel was bursting at the seams with refugees, security contractors, embassy staff from several European countries.

Oh, and spies.

Having been involved in clandestine operations for the better part of my career, it was easy for me to identify the spies among the myriad personalities we encountered. This however, was probably the first occasion I can recall where the spies weren’t too bothered that you knew who they were. Sure, they trotted out the usual cover story of some vague embassy political appointment or role, but left it at that, no further details given. An acceptance that, while unsaid, we knew who they were. The reason for this was twofold; speed, and unity of purpose. The invasion was unfolding fast in real time so nobody had the luxury of waiting until conditions were right before acting. And second, every nationality in the area was united in their mission to rescue colleagues or civilians from the fighting. Information and intelligence was being shared and swapped over tables at the bar and in the conference rooms. Spies sharing contact details with contractors like us who were able to move freely and faster than they could. Quid pro quos agreed upon and reciprocated. We made close connections with a couple of intelligence officers from one of the Baltic countries where I had worked previously and had daily discussions in a conference room where we helped them with some real time intelligence we were getting from our nascent network. They reciprocated with introductions to other individuals working in areas we were interested in. Special forces, local intelligence Assets, local law enforcement, all super helpful for our understanding of the threat and freedom of movement conditions.

Over the course of a few days, Mark and I spent every waking hour networking with whoever would talk to us up and down the border. We both reached out to anyone we thought might be able to help us and came up with some terrific contacts who had access to significant networks of their own. One cracking individual I knew was already running some heavy operations and, true to form, when I reached out, he was only too happy to help.

We recruited a personal friend I’d known from previous work in Poland as our interpreter/fixer/facilitator, and she became a major force multiplier for our tiny team. We spent a lot of time on the border, chatting with guards at the checkpoints, learning the means and methods of entering and leaving Ukraine. This is key in operations such as ours, the right permits and paperwork the difference between getting people out safely or having them trapped at the border with no ability to make it across.

We’d also begun putting together our extraction team, a network of savvy individuals we would run into the hot zones on our behalf. They were already carrying out similar activities on an ad hoc basis but we moulded them into a solid team with all the assets required to run successful extraction operations. An additional bonus was the real-time intelligence they were providing us as eyes and ears on the ground. This enabled us to get accurate intelligence to our media clients and have them amend their travel plans according to the corresponding threat level. A further, more sobering aspect of this was seeing the graphic, first-hand photos and images from our team’s phones as they operated in and around Russian positions.

It reminded me of how right Mark and I had been in not being armed and deploying to areas where, even with our experience, we would have had serious trouble moving around unnoticed.

Entering Ukraine for the first time, it was incredible to see a country under invasion and preparing itself to repel the invaders as best they could.

In the west of Ukraine, tens of thousands of refugees were passing through the rail and bus stations of Lviv as they made their way to the Polish border. All women and children with hardly any males present in the huge throngs. This made the sight all the more poignant, seeing families ripped from their homes and lives and being forced to flee with only what they could carry.

Trains running at night without lights so as not to be targeted by Russian aircraft. Each carriage crammed with people standing cheek to jowl and sometimes taking as long as 48 hours to make the journey from Kyiv to Lviv. Think about that; a mother with kids crammed into a dark, boiling, sweaty train carriage for up to two days as a war rages around them, rumour and speculation filling the void of accurate information. The fear and terror of not knowing if you would ever see your husband again, or indeed, even your home. Of not knowing what you were going to find on the other side of the border other than safety for you and your children.

This is a photo of a couple of pages from one of my Ukraine notebooks. I remember Mark and I had just left a meeting with a fixer in a cafe in Lviv when we got a call to arrange a fast-notice extraction. Mark took the call and I made the notes, substituting names and ages to mask identities in the event that we were stopped and searched while Mark got us back across the border. You can see from the rushed notes that there were quite a few complications to this extraction.

First there was the issue of the man, a serious medical condition and with limited medication due to the fact all infrastructure in their local area had been destroyed and looted by Russian troops. He would also require an exemption from fighting certificate to get him through any Ukrainian checkpoints as they were arresting males suspected of desertion or avoiding the mandatory conscription. We overcame this by identifying a friendly contact in the Ukrainian military who could get an Army doctor to produce the relevant document and source some medication. Second, was the presence of young children and some of the considerations we needed to implement for their safety and the attrition of a long journey through dangerous territory. The writing at the bottom of the left page that says 3 more PAX? refers to the request from the family that another 3 individuals be factored into our plan for the extraction in the event they could make it. Another vehicle, driver and security, fuel, food, accommodation to source and be ready in the event it was needed.

Again, on the hoof, Mark and I put our plan together. We knew the area the family were trying to leave, east of Kyiv and the Dnieper River, but by speaking to them we learned that they could get to an uncontested area without too much trouble. This area was pretty quiet in regards to fighting and Russian presence and would be easier for our team’s ingress and egress than the family’s home turf. We offered up the choice of Kyiv or Lviv as the in-country safe staging area, from where the family could choose where they wanted to go, but then settled on Lviv and getting them into Poland for full extraction and safety.

You can see from the notes that extractions rely on knowledge of the region, the security situation, communications, and logistics. Factoring in other vehicles for baggage for example. An overnight hotel in Lviv to allow the family to recover from the stress of days of tense journeys across a hostile landscape. A contingency plan to walk the family across the border in the event that the BCPs closed to traffic which they were prone to do from time to time. Bearing in mind we’d seen traffic queues of up to ten kilometres at the border, some planning for helping a family to walk this distance was required. We also needed to factor in vehicle recovery from the Polish side as some of our team were remaining in Poland for a short break.

And of course, money.

How to get money to the team for vehicles, fuel, food, accommodation, bribes for checkpoints/Russians etc. Nothing would happen without people being paid. And bear in mind, good fixers and facilitators are rare, valuable commodities that are in constant high demand and can easily find another operation to join. I’ve seen it happen and in fact, some members of the team we recruited had jumped ship from a company who couldn’t pay them when required. So, prompt, full payment of agreed funds was essential to keeping our operation moving. Where it wasn’t possible for us to pay our guys directly in cash, Western Union transfer of Euros became the standard method at the time although this would probably end sooner rather than later as the country’s financial infrastructure continued to be targeted by the Russians.

The notes above show an altogether different extraction request. Far greater numbers and with a large American element, hence my point regarding State Department liaison. This was essential in determining both the accuracy of numbers and the identities of those involved. With such a large group of people, transportation was a key issue both in terms of sourcing and which routes would be suitable to move the personnel. As we would be picking up from various locations and not a centralised one, this added greatly to the logistics headache we were experiencing. Where I have blurred a name out, this referred to a key fixer we had used in the past who was now in France but had agreed to jump on board and help with our task. Again, passes, passports, and documentation needed to be in order and you’ll note at the bottom of the page I’ve written TRIM. This is the abbreviation for Trauma Risk Management; having qualified practitioners ready to receive those escaping the fighting and assist with initial counselling and signposting to further help. These people had seen and, for some, experienced, first hand the brutality of the Russian forces and consequently needed more in-depth support than usual.

After a hectic week, our little team decided to put down some roots and rented an apartment in Zamosc, Eastern Poland. A pleasant and very pretty little city that afforded us quick border crossings and easy access to airports and train stations.

We grew very fond of Zamosc and our apartment, particularly when we had some downtime and could cook a communal meal, indulge in a glass of nonsense or two, and laugh about some of the more ridiculous things we’d encountered that day. We became so entrenched here that one of our neighbours in the block complained to us about another neighbour who was leaving cigarette butts in the communal spaces. We began jokingly referring to ourselves as the Zamosc Residents’ Association, making idle threats to produce community newsletters, naming and shaming any neighbours who committed anti-social acts. It was also a source of amusement for us that, whenever we were asked by officials or contacts we’d just met, who we were, we’d reply with a serious expression and sober tone of voice ‘The Zamosc Residents’ Association’. I’m not sure whether it was due to translation or people just not wanting to admit confusion, but it was hilarious to us how the name was never questioned whenever we deployed it.

The Zamosc Residents’ Association continued their work in Ukraine and Poland until the requests for extractions began to ease off. Our fixers and facilitators wanted to pivot towards the sourcing and supply of military equipment to militias, volunteers, and private security details, as well as offering the role of drivers and security escorts. So we made the decision to put the extraction pipeline we’d worked so hard to set up into caretaker mode. Maintained and monitored so that it could be reactivated with minimum notice. This was always going to happen and wasn’t anything surprising for us.

But that didn’t mean we were any less saddened by it.

From arriving in Poland with just one contact’s telephone number, and a vague mission brief all those weeks before, to the stage where we could get anyone out of almost any area in Ukraine, the Zamosc Residents’ Association were rightly proud of our achievements. The team’s hard work, constant communication, and comprehensive logistics all played their part in the setting up of a cracking extraction pipeline.

So, when I see extractions portrayed in the movies as a one-man, armed to the teeth, kill anyone who gets in his way kind of deal, I take it for the entertainment it is designed to be and not an accurate reflection of the reality on the ground. Real extractions take teamwork and a network of talented fixers and facilitators to make them successful. Both my team and our network were talented individuals in their own right and an absolute privilege to work with. I’ve done quite a few interesting things in the private sector but look back upon my time as a member of the Zamosc Residents’ Association with a real sense of accomplishment and fondness for the people I was fortunate enough to have worked alongside.