Cold Rush

The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North

Martin Breum

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838608149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Diplomacia y tratados

The Arctic is heating up. While China, the US and Russia are militarizing the North pole - sending submarines and ice-breakers - the ice itself continues to recede creating new trade routes and new opportunities for mining gas and oil. What is quietly unfolding in the polar north is a `great game' for territory and for resources, all against the biggest backdrop of all: the destruction of the Arctic caused by climate change.
And then last year things took a strange turn. The Kingdom of Denmark, through its colonial claim on Greenland, declared ownership of the entire European hemisphere of the Arctic. Its claims on a territory larger than Scandinavia overlap over 500 sq. km with Russia's, who have planted a flag on the ocean floor underneath the North Pole.
Investigative journalist Martin Breum has been at the front-line for a decade, and brings this secret story to life. He reports on researchers discovering Russian submarines beneath the ice, spy plane pilots flying over environmental research boats and uncovers the stories of the inhabitants of sleepy Greenland who are waking up to their new place in the universe - between the great aggressive military powers of the world. Thrillingly written, Cold Rush reveals a secret world in which the future of our planet is being decided.

1

DENMARK AND GREENLAND EMERGE AS ARCTIC POWERS

In 2007, with short notice and spurred by a spectacular Russian flag-planting stunt at the North Pole, the Danish government conducts a major diplomatic drive to maintain international co-operation and peace in the Arctic and to pursue its own national interests. The Ilulissat initiative and its results emerge as a milestone in Arctic history, actively backed by Norway, Canada, the United States and Russia. More than ten years later, presidents and foreign ministers from Ottawa, Moscow and Washington will often allude to the Ilulissat Declaration as the agreement that binds them together in the Arctic and shields their favoured power-sharing arrangements in the Arctic from China, the EU or other non-Arctic parties. The following is the story of the Ilulissat Declaration, the peace initiative, and how a second agenda, tacitly introduced by the Danes, surreptitiously took on global significance.

* * *

Suddenly, the signals that were supposed to ensure their safe return to the surface disappear. Captain Anatoly Sagalevitch and his crew in MIR-1, a Russian mini-submarine, are carrying out a perilous deep-sea experiment. For nine years, they have prepared themselves, and now they are in MIR-1, nearly 10,000 feet under the ice at 90 degrees north. They are on their way to becoming the first humans in history to reach the seabed at the geographical North Pole, but in total darkness two-thirds from the bottom they encounter a problem. The signal from the three electronic transmitters at the ocean surface disappears from the computer screen. This signal is supposed to guide them back to the opening in the ice where they descended. Without the signal, finding their way back to the opening might be extremely difficult. The small submarine will not be able to break through and make a new opening in the thick ice of the Arctic Ocean.

When it comes to deep-water expeditions, Anatoly Sagalevitch is one of the world’s leading submarine captains. He was expedition leader of the deep-sea recordings in the blockbuster movie Titanic, and before that he led difficult submarine dives to downed Japanese bombers and sunken German warships. None of this compares to the dive to the ocean floor of the North Pole, a dive to 2.7 miles depth in waters always covered by sea ice. Anatoly Sagalevitch manages the special deep-sea programme at the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, and this ultimate expedition to the ocean floor under the North Pole has been on his mind for more than ten years.

By now the dimensions of the project are remarkable. In the close quarters of Anatoly Sagalevitch’s own submarine, MIR-1, in addition to Sagalevitch himself, we find Vladimir Gruzdev, a multi-millionaire and a member of the Duma, the Russian parliament, and the 67-year-old engineer Artur Nikolajevitch Tjilingarov, who is the leader of the diving expedition. Tjilingarov is one of Russia’s leading Arctic explorers. He is vice-president of the Duma, and close with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

The three men onboard MIR-1 are not travelling alone. MIR-1 is accompanied by MIR-2. MIR-2, which is being piloted by one of Anatoly Sagalevitch’s colleagues from the institute, is also carrying two passengers. Here we find one of Sagalevitch’s old acquaintances, the Australian Mike McDowell, who is running Deep Ocean Expeditions, a travel agency for eccentric deep-sea enthusiasts, and the Swede Frederik Paulsen. The latter of the two has paid a substantial share of the staggering expedition costs. Frederik Paulsen is passionately interested in polar research, and he has previously participated in expeditions to both the North and South Poles. He has funded these expeditions with the fortune he has made as owner of the pharmaceutical company Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

MIR-1 and MIR-2 are descending, and the signals from the transmitters at sea level have disappeared. Now is the time to raise the alarm. Later, Frederik Paulsen tells Russian TV that the three men onboard MIR-2 reckoned that there was about a 50 per cent chance of survival. Ordinary compasses hardly function at this proximity to the North Pole, and radio contact with the research ship, Akademik Feydorov, which has transported the submarines to the area at the North Pole, does not contribute to navigation. But Anatoly Sagalevitch and Artur Tjilingarov onboard MIR-1 are not turning around; they continue their descent, and MIR-2 follows them.

The stout-hearted Artur Tjilingarov represents the long Russian tradition of ambitious research expeditions in the Arctic. When a National Geographic reporter later visited him, the journalist noted that Tjilingarov’s office in the Duma was not only decorated with a photo of Vladimir Putin but also with a poster depicting a Russian icebreaker with fangs on its stern, and with a large globe that had been turned 90 degrees so that the poles appeared as the centre of the earth and not as its periphery. According to the bearded Artur Tjilingarov and many other Russians, the mythical epicentre of the Arctic’s ice landscape with all its history, symbolism and strength naturally belongs to the Russian Arctic sphere. Until 2007, they had – like everyone else – accepted that the North Pole was an inaccessibly situated terra nullius, a no man’s land. But in a time when the climate changes alter everything in the Arctic, it is time for Russia to take action.

That is what Artur Tjilingarov thinks in 2007. His motives are clear. On the other hand, the question of what the Russian government wished to achieve with the diving expeditions remains difficult to answer. The submarine expedition led to numerous speculations and analysis in the rest of the world, but a final answer has never surfaced. On MIR-1, Tjilingarov only represented the Russian government indirectly, even though he was vice-president of the Duma and close to the President. Artur Tjilingarov was the expedition leader. He advised President Putin in Arctic matters, but the expedition was mainly funded by private means. The foreign participants had brought the flag of the Explorers Club in New York, and afterwards both Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov and President Putin went to great lengths to explain that the diving expedition had not been Russia’s attempt to conquer the North Pole. Time and again, they have made it clear that the expedition did not change Russia’s intentions of a peaceful delineation of borders in the Arctic. However, to the other Arctic capitals, the signals Moscow was sending in 2007 seemed very alarming.

Later, when Arthur Tjilingarov and the others were on their way home on Akademik Feydorov, President Putin was already applauding the MIR expedition over the phone. In Moscow, the members of the expedition were received with full honours and a military orchestra. Tjilingarov and the two Russian submarine pilots were awarded the highest honorary title of Russia, ‘Heroes of the Russian Federation’. Even the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch of Moscow and all of Russia, applauded the expedition. However, on the outside, the Russian government maintained that the MIR expedition was a private undertaking. Disarmingly, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov explained to the world press that the small amount of mud MIR-1 and MIR-2 brought up from the ocean floor was to be used in a Russian attempt to prove that the Russian bedrock is connected to the ocean floor under great parts of the Arctic Ocean. In this complicated way, Sergej Lavrov tried to explain how Russia would still follow UN legislation on how new borders must be drawn in the Arctic, despite the submarine operation. Denmark, Canada, Norway and the United States follow the same legislation. Already in 2001, Russia had submitted demands to the UN about immense areas of the Arctic Ocean all the way to the geographical North Pole. However, UN experts returned the demand, requesting further documentation, which the Russian have worked on gathering since then.

Did Putin control the submarine operation from the Kremlin? Was the operation evidence that Russia is playing a game where politicians and smooth diplomats are talking about peace, while in reality, Russia is considering a more tangible use of force in the Arctic? In May 2011, the controversial private organization WikiLeaks published a series of previously undisclosed documents adding additional fuel to the flames. According to a report from the American embassy in Copenhagen to Washington, an anonymous Russian diplomat had informed the Americans that Artur Tjilingarov was following orders from Putin’s party ‘United Russia’ when he carried out his dive.

Morten Larsen Nonboe, Danish political scientist and Russia researcher at the University of Oxford, analysed the Russian dive in 2010. He reached an even more complex explanation. His conclusion was that Russia actually wishes to respect the agreements they have made with the neighbouring states about peaceful delineation of borders in the Arctic Ocean. However, he also found that competing groups in Moscow are fighting internally for the Arctic policy of Russia. With another member of the diving team, Vladimir Gruzdev, Arthur Tjilingarov represented the vigorously nationalistic groups in Moscow. These groups are also known by the Russian military and intelligence community. In the eyes of these groups, the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia and all the way to the North Pole forms a natural extension of Russia. At the other end of the spectrum, Foreign Minister Lavrov leads a more pragmatic line, which continuously dominates Russian diplomacy.

Cape Morris Jesup, the rocks at the northern-most point of Greenland, rises farther towards the North Pole than any point in Russia. However, that clearly meant less in Tjilingarov’s equation. He had hired the diver Gennadyi Kadachigov as an adviser on the diving project. In 1968, Kadachigov was the first person to dive underneath the ice near the North Pole. The flag at the bottom is also there to remind the Russians of how Russian pilots and scientists flew to the North Pole in 1948, most likely making them the first people on the actual Pole. In the eyes of Artur Tjilingarov and many other Russians, the case is clear. The North Pole and its vicinity were incorporated into the Russian nation a long time ago. But let us return to actual events.

It is 2 August 2007, and the two submarines have been heading for the bottom for four hours. At 08:00 that morning, two cranes onboard the Akademik Feydorov hoisted the submarines through a hole in the ice found by the assisting nuclear-powered icebreaker Rossiya close to the North Pole. The sea ice surrounding the hole spreads hundreds of kilometres in all directions. Despite the summer heat, the ice keeps a thickness of somewhere between one and two metres. In some places it is even thicker. Deep underwater, the two pilots are no longer aware of the exact position of the submarine, but they continue towards the bottom. The echo sounder on MIR-1 is being used to guide them downwards. When the green blips on the onboard screen of the echo sounder show 200 metres to the bottom, Anatoly Sagalevitch turns on the external projectors as well as the pump, which blows ballast water from the tanks of the submarine, making it sink slower. A rough landing can mean an abrupt finish to the adventure. In his own account of the dive in the magazine Sea Technology, from where the details of this narrative originate, Anatoly Sagalevitch describes how he now, at exactly 12:11, for the first time in human history, glimpses the ocean floor.

The depth recorded shows 4,261 metres from sea level. Sagalevitch is suddenly aware that he is now the first person to see the bottom of the North Pole. However, strictly speaking, the sight is not particularly interesting. ‘The bottom is flat and covered in muddy sediments’, he writes. ‘The deserted landscape is populated by an average of one to two small, white actinaria (sea anemones) per square meter.’ After approximately one hour, MIR-2 arrives and the two submarines start gathering samples of the ocean floor. In reality, the samples have limited scientific value, but along with water samples and other data collected by Akademik Feydorov along the way, the samples from the ocean floor ensure that Sergej Lavrov can subsequently call the expedition a part of the scientific contribution by Russia. Several metal casings from MIR-1 are placed on the ocean floor. Future pole-divers will be informed of those aboard MIR-1 and MIR-2 by enclosed messages in the casings, exactly like the beacons left on the bedrocks by polar explorers on land with messages for their successors and to mark who was there first.

After approximately one and a half hours at the bottom, the expedition completes the deed, which subsequently will go down in history. Only a few hours later it will be broadcast on TV screens worldwide, including in numerous government mansions. Anatoly Sagalevitch, who refers to himself as the pilot, describes the course of events: ‘Now there was only one task left: to plant the flag of the Russian Federation at the bottom. In order to plant the titanium flag, the pilot moved MIR-1 from the mud and placed the flag in the manipulation arm. Carefully, the pilot placed the flag construction at the bottom, and the bottom part partly disappeared in the sediments. Thereafter, the flag was hoisted one metre above the bottom.’

That is all Anatoly Sagalevitch writes about the flag. He is busy thinking about the hole in the ice, four kilometres closer to the sun. However, a picture of the flag, which shortly afterwards paraded around the world, is taken. The picture is taken through the transparent front part of MIR-1. It shows the android arm with the prehensile claw, which has just loosened its grip on a metallic flagpole, as well as the bottom part partially buried in the fine layer of mud on the ocean floor. The projectors of MIR-1 illuminate the flag in such a way that its top white stripe casts light back into the camera lens. At a depth of 4,300 metres, a titanium flag does not flicker. It is stock-still. Thus, the message cannot be misconstrued: Russia was here!

After the placement of the flag, the submarines are directed towards the surface, steered solely by Anatoly Sagalevitch’s intuition. His best estimate is that the stream has led MIR-1 and MIR-2 approximately one and a half kilometres away from the positions of Akademik Feydorov and Rossiya at the surface. The first ten minutes of the ascent are hair-raisingly slow. The colossal water pressure holds firm on the submarine, but after a brief while, they rise approximately 30 metres per minute. At 14:35, the submarines pass the depth of 3,000 metres, and to the relief of the two crews, the signals from the surface are now back on the monitors. Anatoly Sagalevitch assumes that the signals have been disturbed by an underwater mirage. A false reflection of the ocean floor is not unknown at these depths. Sagalevitch determines that the submarines have moved approximately 1,300 metres from Akademik Feydorov. This is quite close to his estimate.

For yet another while, they rise through the column of water, and then they are up. The submarine dive to the North Pole has taken less than eight hours. On 2 August 2007, in the late afternoon, the whole thing is over. Not long after, Artur Tjilingarov speaks energetically to the awaiting TV cameras onboard. ‘We are delighted to have been at the ocean floor, where no one has been before. No humans for millions and billions of years – I do not know how many. We reached the point by the North Pole, and there we planted the flag of Russia.’ A new page had been turned in the history of the Arctic.

Several years later, the Russian flag at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean still stands as an irrefutable mark in the middle of the recent Arctic history. The flag became the beginning of profound considerations in the Pentagon, in the White House, in Ottawa, Oslo – and in the small Danish town of Kirkelte. This was the home of Denmark’s former Foreign Minister, Per Stig Møller, from the Danish Conservative Party. According to him, this was where he woke up one morning, soaked in sweat, shortly after the dive to the North Pole seabed by Artur Tjilingarov. Subsequently, he initiated one of the most pronounced diplomatic moves in the Arctic since World War II.

From his office in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he summoned the head of the ministry’s legal service. He explained to him that he felt convinced that there was an actual risk that the Arctic would develop into the next conflict area of the globe. In Washington, the spokesman for the American Ministry of Foreign Affairs disparaged the Russian dive by saying that he did not know whether the Russians had ‘planted a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bed sheet on the ocean floor’. In Canada, Foreign Minister Peter MacKay reacted: ‘This is not the fifteenth century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say: We’re claiming this territory.’ Behind these rejections was the exact same anxiety that Per Stig Møller felt. All over the world, newspapers and the electronic media followed closely. The components of the story, the North Pole, oil, aggressive Russians, created big headlines.

Canada’s foreign minister Peter MacKay, a conservative, won lasting fame as he vented his frustration in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. ‘This is posturing. This is the true north strong and free, and they’re fooling themselves if they think dropping a flag on the ocean floor is going to change anything.’

In unison, the United States National Security Council and the State Department in Washington called for a series of consultations with participation of the White House. On 6 August 2007, the conservative American research think tank, the Heritage Foundation, published a condemnation of the Russian flag-planting on its website. ‘This latest move by Moscow is also a chilling throwback to the attempts during the 1930s to conquer the Arctic during the years when the Soviet Union was seized by fear and hatred. Stalin and his henchmen executed “enemies of the people” by the hundreds of thousands, after mock trials … today’s expedition is a chilling reminder of the brutal era when millions of Gulag prisoners were sent to the frozen expanses to build senseless mega-projects for the power-mad dictator.’

Few reactions were that shrill, but in Denmark the expedition was also presented within the frame of conflict, commotion and escalation. Even before the Russian submarines had entered the Arctic water, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten wrote: ‘The race for the North Pole has begun. Russia has initiated the race for obtaining the right to the enormous oil resources, which are said to be found below the ocean floor of the North Pole, and which will be recoverable concurrently with the melting of the ice.’

The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs was contacted by the Danish news agency Ritzau Bureau and one of Per Stig Møller’s chief aides tried to pour oil on troubled waters: ‘Planting a flag only has political meaning because it can make the media care. It is our assessment that it will not have any legal significance and it will not alter our possibilities of advancing our claims in the same area.’

Based on this, Per Stig Møller started an initiative, which instantly designated Denmark as a key and adept player in Arctic politics. Possibly, the minister also had an annotation from the intelligence agencies in mind. On 8 August 2007, for the first time since the Cold War and now with strategic bomber aircrafts, the Tuplov TU-95 Bear, Russia resumed routine flights over the Arctic and the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. The planes returned to Russia, but even if no formal rules had been broken, the NATO countries noted the incident with attentiveness.

Per Stig Møller put two and two together – the Russian submarine expedition, Vladimir Putin’s praise of the divers and the undetermined borders in the Arctic Ocean – and he worried. He did not trust the assurances of Russia. When I talked to him in 2010, he explained his thoughts immediately after the Russian dive: ‘It could end up in a political conflict with many protracted negotiations. But it could also end up with the countries saying, “Here we take the law into our own hands.” That was my biggest fear, the Arctic becoming a fait accompli. After all, in that context we are the weak nation. If someone would take the law into their own hands outside of Greenland and say, “We will take this” and then, for example, drill for oil without asking for permission, what could we do? That is why I, as the Danish Foreign Minister, decided on a joint initiative. The needs of neither America nor Russia are similar to ours. It is not the strong one who needs the law. It is always the weak one.’

In the following months and years, this 2007 analysis hid under more conciliatory and diplomatic declarations from Denmark’s representatives. Willingly, they underlined how peaceful the development in the relationship with Russia was, and not until November 2012 was it made clear that the fundamental distrust towards Russia was still thriving. At this time, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service published an analysis of all current threats against Denmark. Herein, the intelligence agents assessed that it was only realistic to assume that Russia would follow the UN rules for delineation of borders in the Arctic Ocean if the process led to the results wished by Russia.

In 2007, Per Stig Møller intervened. He called a high-profile conference for all five states immediately adjacent to the Arctic Ocean. Jointly, and with the attention of the international community, they would, once and for all, call off ‘the fight about the Arctic’. They were to send o...