The Times Story of a Russian Officer's Desertion and Front Stories
An excerpt from one of the most ambitious stories in The Times Magazine’s history.
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Credit...Elinor Carucci for The New York Times
Today, The New York Times Magazine published one of the most ambitious stories in its long history — an account of a Russian military officer’s desertion and escape. Sarah Topol spent over a year and a half investigating the Russian military and reporting in eight countries across four continents.
In the story, the officer — identified by a pseudonym, Ivan — feigns a serious back injury to escape the front in Ukraine and eventually defect. He uses a cane to make that story convincing. Now, he must retrieve his passport, which is locked with other officers’ passports in the H.R. office of his base in Russia. Each passport has a paper slip in it, logging various personal details. He buys a fake version of the passport online: good enough to fool the military, but not to fool anyone at the borders he needs to cross.
So Ivan devises a plan to get his hands on the real one — and swap it with the fake. Here’s how he does it.
(By Sarah A. Topol
I’m a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.)
Ivan knew the office from years of worthless paperwork and reports. The H.R. manager sat at a desk on the right side of the room. Next to him was a six-foot-high metal safe with three drawers. They were unlocked with a key. The passports were kept in folders inside the drawers.
To complicate matters, Ivan could use only one arm — the other would be holding the cane as part of his act. So he had to walk in, with his cane in his left hand, take the passport out of his pocket and somehow swap it for the fake. He would also need to remove the paper slip from the original and place it into the duplicate before returning it. How could he do all that with just one hand?
The H.R. manager’s desk faced the room. Ivan would have to find a way to reach into his pocket while holding both the cane and the passport. No, that wouldn’t work. He would need to find a way to sit down, put down his cane so he could have two free hands and then reach into his pocket — but that motion could be seen from the side or the back.
Ivan thought maybe he could hide the passport up his sleeve. At home, he put on his uniform and practiced — the passport was bulky, bigger than his wrist. Someone could notice.
Ivan sat down at his kitchen table to think. He attended meetings with a Moleskine-type notebook; maybe he could take the notebook as if he were coming from some mindless meeting. He carried it in his right hand. What if I take it, open it and slip the passport inside? When he tried it, he realized that the notebook bulged a bit — you could see something smaller sandwiched inside the larger book easily. Just imagine if it slipped out and there were two identical passports on the ground?
He sat down again to think. What if I cut a hole in the notebook and put it in there?
Ivan took out a knife and carved a hole in the center of the notebook’s pages. He left blank pages at the back, so if anyone asked him to write something down, it would still be usable.
He practiced how he would do it. He would walk into the office; to his right, the H.R. manager would be seated facing the room. “Privet! Can I have my passport, please? I need to write something down for my wife,” Ivan rehearsed. The guy would turn, open the safe, and hand Ivan the passport.
Ivan would take the passport with his right hand — the same one holding the notebook — and walk over to a table he knew was on the other side of the room. He would sit down and lean his cane against the table. Keeping his original passport in his right hand, he would open the notebook with his left, his fingers flipping the cover to reveal the duplicate passport in the hole. Ivan would pull out the duplicate with his left hand and insert the original passport with his right.
When he was done, Ivan would close the notebook from the back and pick it up tightly by the binding in one hand with the duplicate passport on top. He would return it to the duty officer the same way he had taken it and walk out, leaning on his cane.
He spent a night and a day at home practicing the movements. He timed it, until he could do it fast, almost with his eyes closed. He wanted it to be quick, muscle memory, so he wouldn’t stumble or shake if he were nervous. The trick wasn’t just in the double-handed swap, but in moving the pages and cover backward and forward with his fingers simultaneously, like a difficult piano piece.
Once he mastered the movements, Ivan spent a week casing the H.R. office, determining when it was the least busy. He learned that the usual senior human resources officer had left for the front — and that in his place was a green young lieutenant whom Ivan outranked.
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