Things had been comparatively quiet here in Washington until a couple of weeks ago, allowing Gretchen and me to take Saturdays off. But as the planet’s various political herpes sores erupted everywhere upon it once more, like those which appear on nervous, lonely thirty-something women the night before the big two week Caribbean cruise with their prospective Mr. Right, my appointment calendar spilled over into the weekend yet again. My first consultation yesterday was with Dr. Nikolai Mikhailovich Otvali Mudakovich Kisov, a regular client from the Russian Embassy. For years, at intervals of four to six weeks, we have cordially discussed and clinically analyzed trade, environmental, scientific joint venture, natural resource and cultural exchange issues involving Russia, the European Union, the United States and sundry other nations, in an entirely dispassionate and intellectual manner. Other than the occasional genial chuckle, I had, until yesterday, never seen him display any emotion more intense than a highly understandable annoyance with DC taxi drivers. As he stormed into my office and took the chair immediately in front of my desk, however, I could readily see all that had changed.
“Insanity!” Dr. Kisov exclaimed, pounding my desktop with his fist. “It’s total insanity, Tom, complete and utter insanity!”
“What particular insanity are you referring to?” I asked. “There are more flavors of it available at the moment than Baskin Robbins has ice creams.”
“The sanctions,” he exclaimed, “I’m talking about the sanctions!”
“Against Russia,” I surmised, “for its involvement in the eastern Ukrainian crisis?”
“What involvement?” Dr. Kisov challenged. “Peaceful ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine have steadfastly and patiently borne the increasingly unfair, illegal and violent outrages a fascist government in Kiev for decades! Now, they seek to establish an independent nation free from the oppression of a bigoted and corrupt Ukrainian majority, that’s all! And how is that Russia’s fault?”
“Those peaceful ethnic Russians from the eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian airliner with a Russian surface-to-air missile, though, didn’t they?” I noted.
“Tom,” he sadly replied, slowly shaking his head, “I can… comprehend... how Mr. Joe Six-Pack in Peoria might believe such obvious Ukrainian propaganda, but you?”
“Okay,” I continued, “if that bunch of ethnic Russian boneheads who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 with a Russian-made missile, mistakenly thinking MH-17 was a Ukrainian troop transport, didn’t get their Russian-made surface-to-air missile launcher from Russia, where did they get it from?”
“Fairy tales!” Dr. Kisov objected. “Pure fantasy, that is what you are repeating, Tom; you know that, don’t you?”
“In that case,” I needled, “what’s the… real truth?”
“The real truth,” he huffed, “is that the CIA loaded a Malaysian airliner with dead bodies and explosives, and put two covert operatives on board to fly it out of the Netherlands, because human beings were still needed for takeoff and to talk with air traffic controllers on the way to the target. And then, when the airliner was properly positioned to fly over the territory in eastern Ukraine which the ethnic Russian freedom fighters have liberated, the CIA men put the plane on autopilot, set the explosive timers, and bailed out, to rendezvous with fascist Ukrainian secret agents at a prearranged drop zone outside of Kiev and be smuggled from there back to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia for debriefing. And half an hour after their parachutes land those CIA agents in their covert drop zone, the airliner full of corpses on autopilot flies over eastern Ukraine, right over Torez, in the newly liberated Donetsk People’s Republic, only forty kilometers from the Russian border. Then the timers wired to the detonators on two hundred kilograms of high explosives go three… two… one… zero… and then… boom!”
“All to discredit Russia?” I asked.
“Da, pravda!” Dr. Kisov excitedly shouted. “Um… I mean, yes, exactly.”
“But we both know quite well,” I pointed out, “how interdependent the US, EU and Russia are these days. What could the United States possibly gain from having the CIA carry out such an elaborate, macabre and frankly, implausible piece of espionage?”
“Implausible?” Dr. Kisov snorted. “What makes you say that?”
“If I were to state that it’s a premise straight out of a John le Carré novel,” I observed, “then it would be necessary for me to apologize to John le Carré for suggesting he would come up with something so absurd. Maybe I could get away with saying it sounds like something Ian Fleming might have put in a James Bond story, and then taken out when his editor laughed at it.”
“It happens to be,” he bristled, “the official Russian government explanation.”
“Then the official Russian government,” I replied, “needs to take a good creative writing class. I mean, really, wouldn’t something like what you are describing require some sort of… motive? Why, pray tell, would the CIA go to all that trouble to strain US – Russian relations even more than they already are?”
“It’s not Russia’s relations with the United States the CIA is seeking to ruin,” he countered. “The CIA wants to ruin Russia’s relations with the European Union!”
“And why,” I prodded, “would the CIA want to do that?”
“Natural gas!” Dr. Kisov thundered. “Think about it! You and I have worked on natural gas issues between Russia and the EU many times, haven’t we? If the CIA can manufacture an incident like that airliner crash, the United States can use it to pressure EU countries to initiate sanctions, such as cutting off their purchases of natural gas from Russia. And what happens then? The EU countries will have to buy the natural gas they need from the United States!”
“That’s your motive for this alleged CIA plot?” I gasped. “That the US is conniving to push Russia out of the European natural gas market?”
“Yes,” he curtly nodded, “it is.”
“But doing that,” I pointed out, “would make natural gas prices in the United States go up – in an election year. Are you saying the Democrats so stupid, they would abuse the power of the Executive Office to order the CIA to do such a thing as you suggest – even if huge oil and gas companies were backing them, which, for the most part they in fact are not? With both chambers of Congress up for grabs on the first Tuesday in November, why would the party that controls the White House want to see the voters’ heating bills go through the roof in October? It seems to me, they’d be doing everything they could to avoid that happening, not spending millions of dollars and breaking half the international laws on the books trying to cause it. ”
“Well, it’s always possible, I suppose,” he allowed, “that maybe the Ukrainian armed forces shot an airliner down with one of their missile launchers, in order to discredit Russia.”
“Except,” I rebutted, “that there is absolutely no evidence the Ukrainians had a missile launcher capable of reaching an aircraft at jet liner altitude anywhere in range of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, nowhere even near the impact zone, actually, and quite a bit of evidence that the Russian separatist militants…”
“Oppressed ethnic Russian freedom fighters!” Dr. Kisov interrupted.
“I say ‘militants’ you say ‘freedom fighters,’ be that as it may,” I conceded. “Whoever any randomly selected person might conceive them to be, those benighted cretins actually bragged about shooting down a Ukrainian troop transport aircraft on the Internet. Then they figured out it was a civilian airliner – there’s an audio transcript of that...”
“Forged by fascist Ukrainian secret service operatives,” he asserted, “and swallowed whole by the gullible Western media!”
“All right,” I relented. “No point in going around and around on this issue – it’s obvious we aren’t going to get anywhere. It could be the question of what brought MH-17 down will never be answered. At least we know where the wreckage is, which is more than can be said for MH-370, anyway. I guess anybody contemplating a trip on Malaysian Airlines had better call their local suicide hotline first. But tell me, why are you so adamant about this? Why does it matter so much to you that anything could have happened, except a Russian missile launcher shooting the plane down?”
Dr. Kisov blushed a deep crimson. “Tom, I have a confession to make. The person who sold the Russian freedom fighters that rocket launcher is my brother-in-law.”
“Really?” I wondered aloud. “Did he get a good price for it?”
“Not particularly,” Dr. Kisov confided with a rueful murmur. “He told me he could have gotten over twice as much selling it to Muslim separatists in Chechnya, but he knew that if Putin caught him doing that, he’d be in some deep bubbling… um… borscht. On the other hand, if he sold it to people Putin likes, he’s not going to get caught. Or at least that’s what he thought, until those idiots Putin likes used it to shoot down an airliner full of Dutch holiday travelers and internationally famous AIDS researchers. You see, Tom, it’s even more complicated for me. Your Joe Biden, he went to Ukraine and told them that the US will push the EU for sanctions on the Russian banking system. They’re talking about freezing assets, and I know for a fact that if a Russian oligarch tries to take his billions out of the EU right now, they’re stalling him. That money’s not going anywhere, Tom. But it has to go – back to Russia, so the oligarchs can continue to perpetrate… um… I mean… operate… their… you know… enterprises.”
“And how do you know that?” I inquired.
“Because,” he whispered, leaning close across my desk, “one of those oligarchs is my brother-in-law.”
“And you’ve got heartburn about the Russian natural gas market,” I suspiciously probed, “because?”
“Because,” he admitted with a huge, embarrassed sigh, “my uncle is a Gazprom executive.”
“Goodness gracious, Nikolai,” I chided. “Just look at this family of yours! Your cousin sells Russian military equipment on the black market, your brother-in-law is one of Putin’s Russian oligarchs, and your uncle is an executive in Russian Gazprom, the most corrupt criminal energy enterprise in the world.”
“Exactly,” he shrugged. “How do you think I got a job as a diplomat working at the Russian Embassy in Washington DC?”