8
BODYGUARD TRAINING IN THE RUSSIAN
FEDERATION
BY ROBIN BARRATT
Without doubt, iraq and
Afghanistan have permanently altered the attention private security
and bodyguarding has had in the media, changing forever the
perception the general public has of the industry. Before the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars, the public generally knew very little about
bodyguarding and private security; to most people it was a twilight
world, populated by thugs, gangsters and mercenaries, which they
knew nothing about. However, since the US declared the end of major
combat operations in Iraq in May 2003 and restructuring of the
country commenced, and fuelled by recent kidnappings and
assassinations – of both bodyguards and their clients – the
bodyguarding industry now receives almost daily media attention and
is the subject of frequent articles and editorial, as well as a
fair number of top-quality television programmes. Also, with the
introduction of SIA licensing in the UK, compulsory standardised
training and strict vetting, bodyguarding as a career is now open
to almost anyone with the aptitude and ability, the drive and the
determination, and the right background. As an industry,
bodyguarding has gone from strength to strength; it is no longer
the sole domain of a select number of ex-Special Forces earning
£500 plus per day, bonded by secrecy, mystery and silence.
Bodyguarding is now big business, with corporate takeovers and
multimillion-pound contracts.
But this has only been the case in some Western
countries over the past few years. Prior to 2003, there were only a
handful of other nations, at peace, that had such a high-profile
private security industry. One such country was the Russian
Federation – although many would argue that with the ongoing
conflict in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, and the occasional
terrorist activity in Russia’s capital, the country has never
really been at peace.
Since the fall of communism, private security in
Russia has grown significantly and is now a multibillion-pound
industry. During the years of communism, there were no private
security companies, only special military units set up and funded
by the government for specific and specialised purposes. Because
there was little or no crime and everything was owned by the state,
there was no real need to protect anything, as there was no obvious
threat. And those very few petty criminals who did exist were
generally quickly caught and sent off to the Gulags of Siberia,
where they usually ended their days building roads on a diet of
dried bread.
During communist rule, it was the government who
were the criminals, and they controlled everything anyway. But once
communism fell, it was a free-for-all, and by fuck did you have to
protect what you had. Without protection, a business – any business
– would have had no chance whatsoever of surviving. Even a small
corner shop had to have armed guards standing at the entrance,
nervously eyeing up all and sundry.
I fondly remember the very first Russian nightclub
I visited on one of my very first trips to Moscow. I was in the
country meeting the directors of a company called Centurion VI, at
that time a major player in the private security industry. I was
planning a forthcoming security operation with a banker who I had
been tasked to protect. After a hearty meal at a restaurant that
they said they owned on the outskirts of the city, I was invited on
to a nightclub with a couple of the bodyguards whom I was going to
be working with. Having already sampled the delights of Russian
women, I eagerly agreed, hoping that I could at least see some
wondrous female forms – even if I was in Russia on business and
therefore couldn’t touch . . . well, shag.
The nightclub was behind the now demolished
Intourist hotel at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, a few minutes’
walk from Red Square. As we approached the club, two
menacing-looking doormen stood guard outside, each brandishing
AK-47s. I am not easily intimidated, but even I drew a deep breath
at nightclub doormen with AK-47s and asked myself why were we not
allowed to work the doors with these kind of tools back in the UK –
now can you imagine what that would be like!
The doormen obviously knew the people I was with,
and we were quickly recognised and received a warm, enthusiastic
welcome. I just smiled and nodded eagerly, not understanding a word
and hoping to God that they were really being kind and welcoming
and not planning to decapitate me and sell my remains for a few
roubles to feed the poor beggars found on every street corner. This
was one sad thing that I immediately noticed in the newly
capitalist regime – there were beggars everywhere.
I spent the rest of that evening huddled in a smoky
corner with four slightly insane-looking, chain-smoking,
vodka-swilling, pissed Russian bodyguards, who thought it was
terribly funny to unholster their weapons, swirl them around their
fingers, gunslinger style, while shouting ‘cowboy’ at the top of
their voices and pointing them at the other extremely scared
customers. Needless to say, by the end of the evening we were the
only ones left in the club, apart from a bevy of the most gorgeous
girls, who were either dancing in front of us or cuddled up around
with their tits hanging out and tight shorts up their arses. They
were all so beautiful and were obviously paid to stay late and
entertain us – but I never saw one rouble pass hands that evening,
so I have no idea who paid for what, or if in fact anything was
paid for. That was Moscow in the early 1990s.
Moscow is undoubtedly addictive; anyone who has
been there will almost certainly agree. At first, you enter the
country with trepidation and apprehension – after all, Moscow
is Moscow: corrupt and criminal, crazy and callous – but you
then have to be dragged screaming back to the airport a few days,
or weeks, or months, or years, later. To this day, I still believe
that there is nowhere like it in the world, but back then when
everything was new and exciting, when you could do anything and
there was little or no accountability, Moscow was simply
fantastic.
Shortly after joining the Worldwide Federation of
Bodyguards (WFB) as an international trainer, we decided to set up
and run a training course in Moscow. After a few years of coming
and going, I had developed quite an extensive network of unique
contacts within the security industry. If you wanted armed
bodyguards with machine guns, I could do it. If you wanted to
blue-light it down the middle of major highways, I could do that
for you too. If you wanted someone to disappear, no doubt that
could also be arranged. Killed someone and got caught with the
still-smoking gun in your hands? No worries. In fact, in societies
like those, almost anything could be arranged and sorted for a fee
– nothing was impossible.
Centurion VI employed mainly Russian ex-Special
Forces personnel. As a Russian Special Forces soldier, when you
left the army there weren’t that many options available – you
normally went into bodyguarding or you joined the criminal
fraternity as an assassin or extortionist, earning twice the money.
Paradoxically, ex-Special Forces soldiers were often protecting
clients against ex-Special Forces assassins.
During my visits on contract to Moscow, I had got
to know some of the bodyguards quite well, and when I mentioned
that the WFB wanted to run a close protection training course in
Moscow, they jumped at the chance. The WFB was growing rapidly, and
its reputation was developing. I asked the ex-KGB director of
Centurion if he knew a facility or base where we could run the
first course. He grinned knowingly – he knew of a very good base
which we could use, no problem. On my next visit to Moscow, all
would be arranged.
Returning to England after even the shortest of
trips to Russia was never easy. I went from running a bodyguarding
operation or involving myself in a corporate and usually very
interesting investigation to working back on the doors – it was the
only job I could do that allowed me the time off to go to Moscow.
That was one of the good things about the doors: I would just need
to telephone the security company and tell them that such and such
weekend or week I would not be available to work, and they would
always quickly find a replacement. This was before SIA licensing,
so doormen were relatively easy to find. I didn’t mind working the
doors, and it helped pay the bills, but I always yearned to get
back to Moscow.
My next trip couldn’t come fast enough, and about
two months later I was on the plane back to Russia with the sole
intention of finding a training camp and setting up a WFB close
protection training course. I only had four or five days – it was
all the money the WFB had to finance the trip – and a lot to do. I
had to look for a suitable training camp, arrange a date, negotiate
fees, find instructors, fit the Russian style of training into the
WFB’s Western style of security operations, find accommodation for
the students, arrange transportation and slide myself gracefully
into the knickers of at least a couple of gorgeous Russian girls –
a requirement on every trip.
I made my own way from the airport to the Ukraine
Hotel, a Russian hotel boasting four stars, but this meant
maybe two stars by Western standards. I was on a tight
budget, so instead of being robbed blind by the taxi drivers that
hound passengers as they exit Sheremetyevo International Airport, I
decided to join the hoards of Russians and take a minibus.
Unlike most other international airports worldwide,
there are no trains or decent coaches from Sheremetyevo into
Moscow. If you don’t have a car waiting for you, you either have to
pay the equivalent of at least £50 for a taxi, or squeeze onto a
minibus with 12 or so other passengers for about 50p! Travelling in
a minibus is definitely not for the faint-hearted. There is no room
for luggage, so you sit with your bags on your lap, there is no
heating, the bus is crammed and to pay you pass your money down the
line of passengers to the driver while he negotiates the traffic
and your change and screams back at the one poor soul who hasn’t
paid yet – how on earth he knows how many people are on the bus and
who has or has not paid, I don’t know.
The airport is about 30 minutes’ drive to the
outskirts of Moscow, where the minibuses stop – you then have to
get a metro to your final destination. Faced with this daunting and
occasionally scary journey, most Westerners on a corporate budget
happily pay the taxi fare, but I was different – I wasn’t on a big
budget, and anyway I despised the smelly, corrupt, soliciting taxi
drivers and the Mafia gangs behind them that take most of the money
the drivers ‘steal’ from the foreigners.
The Ukraine Hotel is a colossal Stalinist building
that sits on the west bank of the Moskva River at the far end of
the glitzy, neon-dotted Novy Arbat street and directly opposite the
Russian government’s White House. It is ironic that during the cold
war both the US and Russian governments had headquarters named the
‘White House’ – although it was the Americans who built theirs
first, the Russian version not being completed until 1965. One of
the ‘Seven Sisters’ that dot the Moscow landscape, the Ukraine
Hotel was built in the 1950s to demonstrate the expertise and glory
of the Soviet regime. With more than 1,000 rooms over 30 storeys,
the hotel is not particularly comfortable but reasonably priced
compared to Western hotels – although it is not particularly cheap,
either. Although things are slowly changing, it is a big problem
that there are no reasonably priced, decent Western-style hotels in
Moscow. You can either stay in a Russian-style hotel for £30 to £40
a night, but with terrible service and the phone ringing
consistently with strangely accented girls offering you a little
extra comfort for a few extra dollars, or in a first-class Western
hotel costing at least £150 to £200 a night! There is little choice
in between.
Wrapped in a warm woolly scarf and thick coat, with
my shapka (furry Russian hat) pulled tightly down over my
ears, I stood on the steps of the hotel the following morning
waiting for my lift. It was cold, about minus ten, and snowing
heavily. Winter in Moscow is tough. It decimated the Germans during
the Second World War, and before that Napoleon’s army, and today it
still kills many people, especially beggars, who are frequently
found frozen to death in derelict buildings or huddled in doorways
in the grimy backstreets far away from the splendour that is
central Moscow. Unlike the West, where people on the streets tend
to be alcoholics, drug addicts or the mentally ill, beggars in
Russia are the old, the poor, the disabled – ‘normal’ people simply
unable to cope.
As I watched huddled figures racing in and out of
the hotel foyer, a black BMW glided into the parking area. ‘Good to
see you, my friend,’ said Alex, jumping out of the back of the car
with his outstretched hand. I had met Alex on my first-ever job
with Centurion and over time had got to know him quite well. Alex
had been Gorbachev’s own personal bodyguard for much of his
presidency and joined the Presidential Protection Team after
serving as an officer in Alpha Unit – Russia’s equivalent of the
SAS. Alex never spoke much about his experiences in the military or
by Gorbachev’s side; in fact, he never spoke much at all. He was a
hard, imposing-looking man with cold eyes that you just knew had
witnessed some wild and probably not particularly nice things. A
few years later, I was to learn that Alex had left Moscow to settle
in a warm, quiet country somewhere in the Mediterranean. I was told
that he had to leave, as he knew too much about what went on
within the higher echelons of the corrupt and frequently brutal
Russian government.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘You will see. We have found a very good base for
your training. Yes, very good.’ He seemed pleased with himself. I
really hoped that the camp was going to be OK, as we already had
about seven or eight students lined up for training back in the UK,
all trying to thrust their deposits into my hand. Training in
Russia was definitely going to be a unique, once-in-a-lifetime
experience, and we felt sure that we could find at least ten
students for the first course, probably a lot more. However, I had
so little time in Moscow, finding something else during that visit
would have been impossible and funding other trips extremely
difficult.
We drove for about two hours, first through the
centre of the city towards the outer ring road, and then north-east
through the suburbs, past the miles and miles of bleak,
sombre-looking high-rise apartment blocks. The city turned into
country, and the country turned into remoteness, and we turned off
down a snow-covered track between walls of thick pine trees. The
place was barren and desolate except for deep tracks in the snow,
where heavy tank-like vehicles had recently passed.
Then, all of a sudden, the pine forest ended,
turning, it seemed, into a huge dark-green metal wall, topped with
layer upon layer of barbed wire that stretched as far as the eye
could see. We continued down the track with the wall on one side of
us and the snow-covered pine forest on the other. After a few
minutes, the car slowed and turned into a recess in the wall that
had been virtually impossible to see from the road. A soldier
popped his head out of a steamy cabin, looked at us, inspected the
car and without even emerging from the warmth of his sanctuary
pressed a buzzer, at which point large metal gates slid open
sideways, allowing us to drive into the army barracks.
‘This is where I trained,’ Alex said to me proudly.
‘This is Alpha Unit’s training base. It will suit you very well for
your training, no?’
I was gobsmacked. How the fuck was a non-military
foreigner allowed onto a Russian Special Forces training camp? As
we drove towards what looked like the offices, we passed a few
soldiers darting here and there, a tank, an armoured personnel
carrier, and two of the most menacing-looking gate guards holding
sub-machine guns that I have ever seen in my entire life. They were
obviously extremely pissed off at having to patrol the front-gate
area in sub-zero temperatures, and if looks could have killed, I
would have been long dead.
As we parked and got out of the car, a man dressed
in winter fatigues emerged from the barracks to greet us. His name
was Ivan Medvedev, and he was the commander of the base. Behind him
were two more menacing-looking soldiers, who stood to attention and
kept a close eye on me as we were all introduced. Ivan was friendly
and smiled, while the soldiers looked as though they were going to
tear me to pieces. Who on earth would think about messing with the
Russian Special Forces?
After going into the office and sipping strong,
black, sweet tea, Ivan proudly showed me around a few of the
buildings on the base. We first went to the kennels. I didn’t know
that the Russian Special Forces kept dogs, but they did, mainly to
guard the base, but they also had a small special team to search
buildings. I was introduced to Svetlana, the woman who ran the
kennels, and she looked as butch and dog-like as the animals she
was looking after. We then walked to the barracks where the
soldiers lived. It was really basic, more like a prison than an
army barracks, again confirming my initial impression that the
Russian Army are a hard bunch of fuckers – you have to be
hard to live in the conditions they lived in. Paint was peeling off
the walls, the rendering was falling away, the heating and hot
water, I was told, was sporadic at best. Surprisingly, though, each
soldier had a small private room with bed, bedside table, wardrobe
and chair. There was also a small communal area in every dormitory
with tea, coffee, etc., and there was a larger communal area in the
main building. There was also a rusty, antiquated gym and shower
block, but it was all extremely basic.
As we wandered around, I noticed that there was
only a handful of soldiers lounging around. Most, we were told,
were either off base training in Chechnya or ‘in your country
killing spies’. Ivan laughed heartily and slapped me on the back
when he said this. He was joking, right?
The main building was as basic as the dormitories,
with lecture rooms, a communal area populated by worn-out, frayed
chairs, an antiquated old television and little else. I couldn’t
imagine spending years of my life living in these conditions. It
was too cold to spend long outside, so we wandered over to the
indoor firing range, where the soldiers who had silently
accompanied us demonstrated various fire and movement techniques
with their old Russian-made Makarovs. Apparently, the Russian
military and police officially stopped using these weapons in 1991
when communism collapsed but many were still kept and used for
training, as they were extremely simple to operate and very
reliable.
One of the unsmiling soldiers then handed me a
Stechkin pistol and asked me to have a go. It was a while since I
had handled a weapon, and for a few seconds I must have looked a
real arse, staring at the weapon as though it was a pretty pink
bow. The soldier nodded to me knowingly, and I nodded back in
terror – what if I fucking missed the target completely? They stood
and stared as I chambered the first round and, like a complete
arse, missed the target completely! I fired off another eight
rounds, double click to each target, and managed to at least hit
something, although certainly not anywhere near the centre of the
target, as I think everyone around me was expecting. If Alex was
wondering to himself what the fuck was I doing as a close
protection operative, he didn’t show it; instead, he covered my
embarrassment with a gruff, ‘You fucking English with your fucking
stupid gun laws – you really must practise a bit more!’ He then
turned to Ivan and said something in incomprehensible Russian,
which even made the soldiers break a slight smile.
We then returned to the small office and drank some
more tea, which an elderly Russian lady made and poured for us.
Ivan talked to Alex, who translated. ‘You can have this base and
train here about four times a year, maximum. When you want to do
training, you give a month’s notice, and he,’ Alex gestured towards
Ivan, who smiled, ‘will send everyone, apart from the gate guards,
who will not say anything, off the base somewhere – maybe to
Chechnya!’ He laughed. ‘You will give Ivan $2,000 each time you
train, OK?’
‘OK,’ I immediately agreed. This was incredible. I
was going to pay the camp commander of the Russian Special Forces
$2,000 a week to use his camp for WFB training. This could only
happen in Russia – everything is for sale, even an army military
base. Alex later told me that $2,000 was more than the camp
commander earned in one year! As we arranged the dates of our very
first training course in the Russian Federation, I thought briefly
about the poor soldiers who were to be sent off the base, no doubt
to somewhere horrible, while we used their rooms and facilities and
lined the commander’s pockets.
Back at the hotel, I called the WFB and told them
the good news: we had a base, we had weapons, we had accommodation
and food, and we had instructors. It was a recipe for a very
successful course.
Two months later, ten students arrived at
Sheremetyevo Airport. All of them were originally from a military
background: five were English, one was French, two were from
Iceland, one was from Denmark and one came all the way from the
USA. I had arrived a few days earlier to set everything up. I
ordered a minibus, employed a translator, sorted out accommodation
and paid the camp commander in advance, which I am sure made our
stay even better. He was like a child with a new toy, the toy being
our group of naive Westerners coming into his play area.
The students were all undoubtedly hard men. The
Dane and a couple of the Brits had served in Bosnia, the American
was a former marine, and the Icelanders . . . well,
they were Icelanders. However, nothing could have prepared them for
the week ahead. Their jaws dropped in unison when the metal gates
slid open and the minibus drove into the compound. They almost died
with fright when they saw their living conditions and shit
themselves when they were introduced to the two soldiers who were
to be their instructors (alongside Alex and me). All of them wanted
to turn around and go home within a few minutes of arriving, but
none did, and the week was probably one of the best I have ever
spent training. It was incredible, and the conditions paled into
insignificance compared to the quality of the instructors and the
knowledge and skill they showed.
Every evening, after an extremely tough day’s
training, we sat together eating and drinking vodka. The food they
served was basic but plentiful and the vodka cheap and
endless.
After the last day’s training, we headed off into
Moscow city centre and spent the evening at the Swedish-owned Night
Flight on Tverskaya Street – one of the most exclusive whorehouses
in the city. The team had been shocked when they had first arrived
in Moscow, and I wanted to shock them – albeit in a very different
way – on their last day, too. We all got pissed on expensive
drinks, stared up at the knickerless podium dancers and flirted
with the hugely expensive but most incredibly beautiful whores in
Russia. It was a fitting end to a tough
week . . .