Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (39 page)

I looked at Scott and said politely, “These are really great. Thank you very much. But there’s something else I wanted to ask you.”

Scott shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and the assistant peeked up from her notes. “Sure, what is it?”

“Actually, Mr. Scott, I’ve been studying the US statutes and have come across something I think would work very well in the Magnitsky case: Proclamation Seventy-seven Fifty, the one that can be used to ban corrupt foreign officials from coming into America.”

He sat up stiffly. “I’m aware of that order. But how is it applicable here?” he asked defensively.

“It’s applicable here because the people who killed Sergei are obviously corrupt, and therefore would be captured under the proclamation. The secretary of state should ban their entry into the US.”

The assistant wrote feverishly, as if I’d spoken three times as many words. This was not how they had expected the meeting to go. Jonathan Winer had been right.

This was not what they wanted to hear because ever since Barack Obama had become president in 2009, the main policy of the US government toward Russia had been one of appeasement. The administration had even created a new word for it:
reset
. This policy was intended to reset the broken relations between Russia and the United States, but in practical terms it meant that the United States wouldn’t mention certain unpleasant subjects concerning Russia so long as Russia played nice in trade relations and nuclear disarmament and various other areas. Sure, the US government could put a few paragraphs in a report to demonstrate “concern” over human rights abuses, but the main policy was for the United States to do absolutely nothing about them.

I was asking for something completely at odds with this policy, and Scott was suddenly in uncomfortable territory. “I’m sorry, Mr.
Browder, but I still don’t see how Seventy-seven Fifty applies to the Magnitsky case,” he said evasively.

I knew Scott was in a tough spot, but instead of backing down I pushed harder. “How can you say that? These officials stole two hundred and thirty million dollars from the Russian people and then killed the whistle-blower. They’ve laundered all of that money, and now parts of the Russian government are engaged in a massive cover-up. Seventy-seven Fifty is tailor-made for a case like this.”

“But, Mr. Browder—I don’t—it would be impossible to prove that any of these people did any of the things that you claim,” he said firmly.

I tried to keep calm but was finding it more and more difficult. “The two paragraphs you just showed me mention several of these officials by name,” I said pointedly.

“I—I—”

My voice started to rise. “Mr. Scott, this is the most well documented human rights abuse case since the end of the Soviet Union. It’s been independently recognized that a number of Russian officials were involved in Sergei’s death. I’d be happy to take you through it.”

This meeting had gone completely off track for Scott, and now he wanted it to end. He motioned to his assistant, who stopped writing, and stood. I stood too. “I’m sorry, Mr. Browder,” he said, ushering me toward the door, “but I have to get to another meeting. I’d be glad to discuss this with you another time, but I simply can’t at the moment. Thank you again for coming in.”

I shook his hand knowing full well that I wouldn’t be returning to his office anytime soon. His assistant awkwardly escorted me out of the building without saying a word.

I left the State Department frustrated and upset. I wandered east, toward my next meeting near the Capitol, and eventually found myself strolling along the National Mall under slate-gray skies. Two heartland-looking young men, all of twenty years old, in blue blazers with brass buttons and khaki slacks, walked toward me in the middle of a heated discussion. They still had pimples, yet here they were in
Washington playing government. This wasn’t my world. Who was I to think that I had a chance of making things happen in Washington? It had been obvious how little I knew when I met Jonathan, and it was confirmed by this unpleasant meeting with Kyle Scott.

I had several more meetings that day, but went through them in a daze, and none produced any real results. All I could think about was flying back home to London.

Before leaving Washington, I had my last appointment, this one with Kyle Parker at the US Helsinki Commission. This was the same man who had failed to put Sergei’s case in President Obama’s briefing packet back when Sergei was still alive, so I wasn’t expecting a warm reception. I kept the meeting only because Jonathan Winer had made such a big deal about it when we went through my list of meetings.

I remembered Kyle Parker as a man in his early thirties who had weary eyes that appeared to have seen much more than his age suggested. He spoke perfect Russian and had a firm grasp of everything that was going on inside Russia. He could just as easily have worked for the CIA as for this obscure congressional human rights committee.

I made my way to the Ford House Office Building on D Street, one block away from the train tracks and the interstate. This ugly gray box of a building with zero architectural charm was far from the center of Capitol Hill in arguably the US government’s worst piece of real estate. As I made my way into the building, I couldn’t help but think that this was where they stuck all the orphan congressional institutions that weren’t part of mainstream power circles.

Kyle Parker met me at security and brought me to an underheated conference room with all sorts of Soviet memorabilia displayed on the bookshelves. He sat at the head of the table in an awkward silence. I took a breath to break it, but he cut me off.

“Bill, I just want to say how sorry I am that we didn’t do more to help Sergei last year. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought about him since he died.”

I wasn’t expecting that, and I took a moment before saying, “We tried, Kyle.”

He then said something so un-Washington-like that I still can’t believe it to this day. “When you sent out the tribute to Sergei after he died, I rode the Red Line home reading it over and over. I was heartbroken. You’d just been here four months earlier pleading for help. I cried, right there on the train. I read it to my wife when I got home. She cried too. This murder—it’s one of the worst things that’s happened since I started my career.”

I was stunned. I had never heard anyone in government speak in such an emotional and human way. “Kyle, I don’t know what to say. It’s been the worst thing for me too. The only way I can get up in the morning is to go after the guys who did this to Sergei.”

“I know, and I’m going to help you.”

I took a deep breath. This Kyle was completely unlike anyone I had ever met in Washington.

I wanted to tell him about what had happened at the State Department, but before I could, Kyle launched into a one-sided brainstorming session. “Bill, I want to make a list of every person involved in Sergei’s false arrest, torture, and death. Not just Kuznetsov and Karpov and the other thugs at the Interior Ministry, but the doctors who ignored Sergei’s pleas, the judges who rubber-stamped his detention, the tax officials who stole Russian money. Everyone who’s directly culpable in Sergei’s death.”

“That’s easy, Kyle. We have that information and the documents to back it up. But what would you do with it?”

“I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d organize a congressional fact-finding trip to Moscow and have the US embassy call each person on that list requesting a meeting to discuss the Magnitsky case. I’m not sure many would agree, but it would shock the Russian authorities to no end that the United States is paying such close attention to Magnitsky’s death.”

“I like that idea, but I could see a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t get off the ground. However, we could use the list in a different way.”

“I’m listening.”

I told him about Jonathan Winer, Proclamation 7750, and the meeting with Scott at the State Department.

As I spoke, Kyle wrote everything down. “That
is
a great idea.” He tapped the point of his pen on his notepad. “How did the person at the Department react?”

“Not well. As soon as I said ‘Seventy-seven Fifty,’ he deflected and obfuscated and shooed me out of his office.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’m going to talk to Senator Cardin and ask him to send a letter to Secretary Clinton requesting her to invoke Seventy-seven Fifty.” Kyle paused and looked me straight in the eye. “Let’s see if they treat a United States senator the same way.”

On returning to London I gathered the team to tell them about what had happened in Washington. I knew they needed good news. Everything we’d done inside Russia had gone nowhere. I didn’t try to cheer them up as they took their seats. Instead I just told them the entire Washington story, ending with the idea of visa sanctions and Senator Cardin’s letter to Hillary Clinton.

“Bill, you realize the significance of this, don’t you?” Ivan asked when I was done. “If this happens, it means that we’ll have the US government on our side!”

“I know, Ivan. I know.”

This was a huge morale boost, especially to the Russians on the team. As anyone who has read Chekhov, Gogol, or Dostoyevsky will tell you, and as Sergei himself once reminded us, Russian stories don’t have happy endings. Russians are familiar with hardship, suffering, and despair—not with success and certainly not with justice. Not surprisingly, this has engendered in many Russians a deep-seated fatalism that stipulates that the world is bad, it will always be bad, and any attempt to change things is doomed.

But now a young American named Kyle Parker was challenging this fatalism.

Unfortunately, a week passed, then two, and finally three without so much as a peep from Kyle. Every day I could see Ivan, Vadim, and Vladimir reverting to fatalistic form, and by the third week even I was being infected with this Russian gloom. I resisted the urge to pick up the phone for fear of scaring Kyle off. As I got further and further
from my meeting with Kyle, I grew more and more uncertain that I’d read him correctly.

Finally, in late March 2010, I couldn’t take it any longer. I dialed Kyle’s number and, as if he were hanging over the phone, he answered on the first ring.

“Hello?” he said cheerfully.

“Hi, Kyle. It’s Bill Browder. I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you had any idea when Senator Cardin’s letter might go out? It would make a huge difference for the campaign. . . . In fact, I think it would completely change it.”

“I’m sorry, but things don’t always work on a schedule over here. But don’t worry, Bill, just be patient. I’m serious about this.”

“All right, I’ll try,” I said, barely put at ease. “But if there’s anything—
anything—
I can do to help, then please let me know.”

“I will.”

As much as I believed that Kyle was genuinely shocked by Sergei’s death, I thought this talk of being patient was a way of letting me down slowly. I was sure that lots of people in Washington didn’t want sanctions and that in the end there would be no Cardin letter.

A few weeks later on a Friday, in one of my few moments of doing something unrelated to the campaign, I took Elena and David to the movies at Leicester Square. Perhaps fitting to my situation, it was a political thriller—
The Ghost Writer
, directed by Roman Polanski. As we sat in the dark watching previews and eating popcorn, my phone vibrated. I looked at the number. It was Kyle Parker.

I whispered to Elena that I would be back in a second and went out to the lobby.

“Hello?”

“Bill, I’ve got some good news for you. It’s ready. It’s going to Secretary Clinton on Monday morning.”

“The letter? You’re doing it?”

“Yep. We’re just putting the finishing touches on it right now. I’ll send it over in an hour.”

We hung up. I “watched” the movie but could barely keep track of
what was going on. After the film ended, we rushed home and I ran to my computer and printed the letter addressed to Hillary Clinton. Clutching it in both hands, I read it several times over.

The language was beautiful, succinct, and compelling. Its concluding paragraph read:

I urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the US visa privileges of all those involved in this crime, along with their dependents and family members. Doing so will provide some measure of justice for the late Mr. Magnitsky and his surviving family and will send an important message to corrupt officials in Russia and elsewhere that the US is serious about combating foreign corruption and the harm it does.

I called Kyle immediately. “This is amazing. I can’t tell you how much this means to me and to everyone who knew Sergei. . . .”

“I told you we were going to do it, Bill, and I meant it. It broke my heart when Sergei was killed. I want to make sure his sacrifice wasn’t in vain,” Kyle said, his voice cracking slightly.

“What happens now?”

“The letter will go to Clinton on Monday. We’ll post it on the commission’s website as soon as we send it.”

“That’s great. Let’s speak Monday. Have a great weekend.”

It took me nearly two hours to fall asleep that night. Was Cardin really going to do this? Could these things be stopped at the last minute? And if it did happen—what would Clinton do? What would the Russians do?

Monday morning came. I got to the office early, sat at my desk, and opened up the Helsinki Commission website. There was nothing, but London was five hours ahead of Washington so it was reasonable to expect that the letter would be published later in the day.

I checked again at noon London time, but there was still nothing. As I paced through the office, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one compulsively checking the US Helsinki Commission website.
Vadim, Ivan, and Vladimir all had the home page on their screens, but no matter how many times any of us pressed the refresh button, the same page kept coming up.

Finally, at 2:12 p.m.—9:12 a.m. in Washington—a new page appeared. There, staring back at me, were two mug shots, one of Kuznetsov and one of Karpov, along with Senator Cardin’s letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials involved in Sergei’s death and the tax fraud, and next to each name was his or her department affiliation, rank, date of birth, and role in the Magnitsky case. Cardin was requesting that all sixty have their US travel privileges permanently revoked.