Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (47 page)

Putin needed to come up with something that didn’t involve money or the military but that would still upset America.

That idea surfaced on December 11, 2012, when I was in Toronto to advocate for a Canadian version of the Magnitsky Act. That night I was giving a speech to a group of Canadian policy makers and journalists. During the question-and-answer session, a young female reporter stood and asked, “Today, members of the Russian Duma
¹
announced that they are proposing a law that would permanently ban the adoption of Russian children by American families. What is your comment, Mr. Browder?”

It was the first I’d heard of this. I had a hard time processing the question, but after thinking about it for a moment, I responded, “If Putin is putting Russian orphans in the middle of this, it’s one of the most unconscionable things he could possibly do.”

This move complicated my psychology. Up until that moment, my fight with the Russians had been black-and-white. Picking sides was entirely straightforward: you were either on the side of truth and justice or you were on the side of Russian torturers and murderers. Now, by coming to the side of truth and justice, you might be causing harm to Russian orphans.

Putin’s proposed ban was significant because over the last decade Americans had adopted over sixty thousand Russian orphans. In
recent years Russia had restricted most American adoptions to sick children—those with HIV, Down syndrome, and spina bifida, among many other disorders. Some of these children wouldn’t survive without the medical care they would receive from their new American families.

This meant that in addition to punishing American families who were waiting for Russian children to join them, Putin was also punishing, and potentially killing, defenseless orphans in his own country. To say that this was a heartless proposal doesn’t even qualify as an understatement. It was evil, pure and simple.

Putin had hit his mark. He’d found something that Americans wanted and that he could take away without any threat of retaliation. More than that, he’d found a way to create a moral cost for supporting the Magnitsky campaign.

While Putin expected a bad reaction from the United States, he had no idea what kind of hornet’s nest he’d stirred up in his own country. One can criticize Russians for many things, but their love of children isn’t one of them. Russia is one of the only countries in the world where you can take a screaming child into a fancy restaurant and no one will give you a second look. Russians simply
adore
children.

This didn’t stop Putin, though. The adoption ban law was given its first reading in the Russian Parliament on December 14, the same day that President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act into law.

The initial blowback inside Russia came from the most unexpected quarter. After the law was proposed, some of Putin’s most senior confidants started to break ranks. The first was Olga Golodets, the deputy prime minister for social issues, who told
Forbes
that if this law was passed, “children with serious illnesses who require expensive operations will lose the opportunity to be adopted.” Then Anton Siluyanov, Russia’s finance minister, tweeted, “Logic of tit for tat is wrong because children will suffer.” Even Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who carried out some of Putin’s most odious policies around the world, said, “It is not right, and I am sure that eventually the Duma will make a balanced decision.”

Because Putin ran such a tight ship, given this unprecedented display of dissent I started to assume that he must not be behind the adoption ban himself. I hoped and prayed that was true and that cooler heads would prevail. Defenseless children had to be taken out of this fight.

Putin rarely projects his intentions and is one of the most enigmatic leaders in the world. Unpredictability is his modus operandi. While he does this to keep his options open, he also never backs down from a fight or shows any weakness. Therefore, it was impossible to predict what he was going to do, but we were about to get a clearer view when Putin took the podium for his annual four-hour press conference on December 20, 2012.

This stage-managed production had animated backdrops and banks of lights, and many of the questions were softballs lobbed from either state-sponsored or self-censored journalists. Even though unexpected things rarely happened at these events, I knew that this would be the first time Putin would show his cards on the adoption ban.

I watched it on a live feed at the office. Vadim and Ivan joined me to see what Putin had to say and to translate. The first question came from Ksenia Sokolova, a journalist from a Russian glossy magazine named
Snob
: “In response to the American Magnitsky Act, the State Duma adopted restrictive measures against US citizens who want to adopt Russian orphans. . . . Does it not bother you to have the most destitute and helpless orphans becoming a tool in this political struggle?”

Putin shifted at his huge, angular desk and deflected as well as he could. He tried to look cool, but right off the bat the event had gone off script. “This is undoubtedly an unfriendly act towards the Russian Federation,” he said. “Public opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of Russians do not support the adoption of Russian children by foreign nationals.” He then went into a long ramble about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret CIA prisons, as if America’s faults somehow made Russia’s own abhorrent actions acceptable.

Three hours into the press conference, six of the fifty-odd questions asked of Putin had been about Sergei Magnitsky and the Russian orphans, and he was visibly angry.

Finally, toward the end of the event, Sergei Loiko of the
Los Angeles Times
stood up and said, “I’m going back to Sergei Magnitsky because you talked about it. Russia has had three years to give an answer”—he was referring to the investigation of Sergei’s death—“what happened? What about the stolen two hundred and thirty million dollars that went to the police? That money could have been used to rebuild orphanages.”

The hall erupted in applause. Putin was stunned. “Why are you all clapping?” he demanded. Putin had never experienced anything like this—the press was in open revolt. Everyone thought these things, but no one ever said them. Putin finally lost control. He lowered his voice, furrowed his brow, and said, “Magnitsky did not die of torture—he was not tortured. He died of a heart attack. In addition, as you know, he was not a human rights activist but a lawyer for Mr. Browder, who is suspected by our law enforcement agencies of economic crimes in Russia.”

My heart skipped a beat. I knew that when my name passed Putin’s thin lips, my life had changed forever. In the past, Putin had always steadfastly refused to mention my name. He’d been publicly confronted twice by reporters and always referred to me as “that man.” He never dignified his enemies by mentioning them by name. But no longer. Hearing Putin say my name had a chilling effect, and I braced myself for whatever was going to come next.

The very next day, the adoption ban was voted on in the Duma, and in spite of Lavrov’s wish that it make a “balanced decision,” 420 members voted for it and only 7 voted against. A week later, on December 28, Putin signed the adoption ban into law. The Magnitsky Act had taken two and half years to become law in the United States; Russia’s anti–Magnitsky Act took two and a half weeks.

The immediate fallout over this new law was heartbreaking. Three hundred Russian orphans who had already met their American
families would never see the rooms that had been decorated for them on the other side of the world. Pictures of these children and their stories circulated throughout the international press. Their prospective parents descended on Capitol Hill, shouting, “We don’t care about international politics, we just care about our babies!” I couldn’t have agreed with them more.

As soon as the adoption ban went into effect, I started receiving calls from reporters, and all of them had the same question: “Do you feel responsible for what’s happening to these orphans and their American families?”

I answered, “No, Putin is the one who is responsible. Only a coward would use defenseless children as human shields.”

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. On January 14, Russian New Year’s Day, people started to assemble on Moscow’s Boulevard Ring carrying placards and homemade signs denouncing Putin. As the protesters made their way along the streets among a heavy police presence, their numbers grew and eventually hit roughly fifty thousand. This was not the usual crowd of politically active people, but instead included grandmothers, schoolteachers, children riding on their fathers’ shoulders, and every other kind of Muscovite. Their signs said things like
SHAME
! and
STOP LYING
! and
THE DUMA EATS CHILDREN
! and
HEROD
! (The law quickly became known as Herod’s Law, which referred to the brutal king of Judea who, to stay in power, had tried to kill the baby Jesus by ordering the massacre of all male infants in Bethlehem.)

Putin generally ignores protests, but he couldn’t ignore this one, because it was big and it focused on saving children. The government couldn’t repeal the law, but after the “March Against Scoundrels” it announced that Russia would invest millions in the state-run orphanage system. I was sure that the money would never find its way to its designated recipients, but it did show how rattled Putin was.

However, this whole affair cost Putin something much dearer than money: his aura of invincibility. Humiliation is his currency—he uses it to get what he wants and to put people in their place. In his mind,
he hasn’t succeeded until his opponent has failed, and he can’t be happy until his opponent is miserable. In Putin’s world, the humiliator cannot, under any circumstances, become the humiliatee. Yet this is precisely what happened in the wake of the adoption ban.

What does a man like Putin do when he is humiliated? As we’d seen so many times before, he lashes out against the person who humiliated him.

Ominously, that person was me.

1
 The lower house of the Russian Parliament.

At the end of January 2013 I found myself back in Davos at the World Economic Forum. On my second day there, as I was trudging through the snow outside the conference center, I heard a chirpy female voice call out, “Bill! Bill!”

I turned and saw a short woman with a big furry hat walking briskly toward me. As she got closer, I recognized her. It was Chrystia Freeland, the reporter who’d broken the Sidanco story so many years ago in Moscow. She was now an editor-at-large for Reuters.

She stopped in front of me, her cheeks flushed by the cold.

“Hey, Chrystia!”

“I’m glad I spotted you,” she said urgently. Normally, she and I would have kissed on both cheeks and caught up, but she apparently had something important to tell me.

“What’s going on?”

“Bill, I just came from an off-the-record briefing with Medvedev, and your name came up.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. I’m not too popular with the Russians these days.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I need to tell you what he said—hold on.” She dug a reporter’s notepad out of her pocket, flipped through the pages, and stopped. “Here it is. Someone asked about the Magnitsky case, and Medvedev said, quote, Yes, it’s a shame that Sergei Magnitsky died, and Bill Browder is running free and alive.” She looked up at me. “That’s what he said.”

“Was that a threat?”

“That’s how it seemed to me.”

Panic pooled in my stomach. I thanked Chrystia for telling me and made my way into the conference center with this ominous information hanging over my head. I continued with my meetings, and throughout the day four other journalists who’d been at the same briefing pulled me aside and repeated Chrystia’s story.

I’d been threatened many times by people from Russia, but never by the prime minister.
¹
I knew my life was in danger, but this ratcheted the danger to a new level. As soon as I returned to London, I called Steven Beck, our security expert, and substantially increased my personal protection.

The threat also indicated the mind-set of Putin and his men. I took it as a signal that they didn’t want to harm me just physically, but in any way they could.

The first bit of this nastiness came when the Russian authorities announced the date that they were going to begin my trial for tax evasion in absentia. They’d been using the threat of this fabricated case for years to try to intimidate me and get me to back down, but the passage of the Magnitsky Act had pushed them over the edge.

Putting me on trial when I wasn’t in Russia was highly unusual. It would be only the second time in post-Soviet history that Russia would try a Westerner in absentia. But that wasn’t the worst part. Their truly unbelievable move was to also try Sergei Magnitsky.

That’s right. They were going to put the man they had killed on trial. Even Joseph Stalin, one of the most zealous mass murderers of all time, a man responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million Russians, never stooped to putting a dead man on trial.

But in March 2013, that is exactly what Vladimir Putin did.

Putin was creating legal history. The last time a dead person had been prosecuted in Europe was in 897 CE, when the Catholic Church
convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers, and threw his body into the Tiber River.

The nastiness didn’t stop there, though. Days before the trial was set to begin, NTV, the state-controlled television station, began aggressively advertising a one-hour, prime-time “documentary” about me called
The Browder List
.

I didn’t even bother to watch it when it aired, but Vladimir called to give me a summary: “It is pure paranoid fantasy, Bill.” He told me that by the time it was over, not only were Sergei and I accused of tax evasion, but I was also responsible for the devaluation of the ruble in 1998; I was guilty of stealing the $4.8 billion loan that the IMF had made to Russia; I had killed my business partner Edmond Safra; I was a British MI6 agent; and I had murdered Sergei Magnitsky myself.