Big Miracle (35 page)

As news of the whales spilled over into Europe, Chilingarov could hardly contain his glee. After suffering decades of the Western disdain for its persistent whaling, the Soviet Union was at the receiving end of a golden public relations windfall. Even with the International Whaling Commission's 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, the Soviet Union was still by far the world's single largest harvester of gray whales. At the very moment that Chilingarov got the request to help save the three grays stranded in Barrow, whalers on board rusty old Soviet whaling vessels were scrubbing their bloodstained decks after another productive season plying the waters of the Chukchi Sea hunting gray whales. The hunt was supposed to be limited to subsistence purposes only, but glasnost had unshackled the Soviet media enough for it to report that most high protein low fat gray whale meat was used as feed for Soviet minks sold for top dollars to the dirty capitalists.

The Soviet Union acknowledged at least 169 gray whale kills in 1988. Now, with no strings attached, the USSR was being handed an opportunity to appear before the world as a saver of whalers. Suddenly, by cutting a path through the ice, the Soviet Union could claim to care for whales with the same love and attention it cared for its people. The Soviet Union was invited to save the same whales its commercial whalers would have wanted to harvest. The Soviet Union would reap a nice little public relations windfall. It would win plaudits from people the world over it otherwise did little to impress. It need not have worried about making a good impression with the environmental left—they long admired the Soviets for their painstaking concern for environmental protection. All's fair in love and whaling.

18

The Whales Nearly Bring a Government to Its Knees

David McTaggart's telex appealing for help was the first Arthur Chilingarov heard about the three trapped whales. Yet the Soviet minister immediately grasped the event's striking potential. It was a critical time in his leader's tenure. To date, Communist party chief Mikhail Gorbachev's extensive efforts to transform his empire's external image had proven a great success. But his domestic campaign to resuscitate the moribund Soviet economy was not going so well. He had been unable to shed the shattered legacy of the twentieth century's most anachronistic ideology. The only measurable index Gorbachev managed to increase in his brief reign as Soviet premier was the ever rising and unfulfilled level of his people's expectations.

Mikhail Gorbachev had no choice but to give his subjects their first tiny taste of freedom since the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. His regime was tottering from decades of stultifying sclerotic top-down central planning. Gorbachev did not rise to power in the Soviet Union promising its denizens to dismantle the empire; he did so based upon the promise of Soviet restoration. To keep the winds of carefully managed cosmetic change from blowing into a full-scale counterrevolution required great skill. Skill, as it turned out, which Gorbachev did not possess. It would take Gorbachev time and good luck to keep his tottering wreck from falling to pieces. Gorbachev had neither the time nor did his reforms have the strength to prevent that heap from imploding.

So far, he had won some time through a series of measures aimed at keeping the lifeline of Western support open. At that point, Mikhail Gorbachev and most people in the West—especially in the media—thought it was he who had managed to get the best of Ronald Reagan and achieve a great Soviet breakthrough.

A seasoned diplomat, Chilingarov knew to avoid rejecting the Greenpeace request out of hand. But he didn't want to commit Soviet resources before his government gave him an okay. He wanted to keep his options open. He immediately drafted a reply to Greenpeace dated October 18, the day after David McTaggart's initial cable.

Confirm receiving your telex of 17.10.88. We are trying to take measures for clarifying availability of spare icebreaker with Far East Shipping Company. We will inform you. Regards. Chilingarov. Gosgimet, Moscow, USSR …

The Soviet–Greenpeace collaboration was a natural. While they disagreed about some things, the one issue that mattered most to both of them was U.S. power. They both wanted it weakened.

Campbell Plowden read Chilingarov's telex on Wednesday morning, October 19, the day after President Reagan phoned Colonel Carroll in Prudhoe Bay. Plowden's ecstatic response was soon doused by sobering news. The Soviets were interested, but according to Cindy Lowry, the whales' prognosis was deteriorating. If they were to be saved, the Soviets would have to make up their minds to get to Barrow in a hurry.

After a quick call to Rome to verify he had permission to reply, Plowden penned the following appeal:

Confirm receiving your telex of 18.10.88. A hovercraft barge is being towed to Barrow to attempt a rescue. It has been delayed several days. We don't know when it will arrive or how well it will work. Whales are very stressed. In case this rescue does not work, we urgently need to explore alternatives. Thank you for your efforts to check availability of spare icebreaker. Regards, Campbell Plowden Whale Campaign Coordinator; Greenpeace International.

The cable came over Chilingarov's telex machine just past midnight Moscow time on October 20, day five of Operation Breakout. A few hours after Chilingarov read Greenpeace's latest communication, the deicers arrived from Minnesota to relieve the whales' late-night deathwatch. Like the whales' condition, the chances of Soviet involvement would quickly improve. By Thursday morning, October 20, news of the stranded whales had more than crossed the Atlantic, it had already begun to involve Western Europe. With an ear pressed firmly against the Western heart, the Soviets knew the whales were big news. If they help could save the icebound trio, they could scoop up some of the spoils, if there were any, and if they mattered. Campbell Plowden and Greenpeace knew this, too, and used it to great effect.

For years, Greenpeace International lobbied hard against commercial whaling by Norway and Iceland. With the stranded whales now in the headlines, Plowden saw the same opportunity Chilingarov did: a chance to shape a small part of history. The phones at every Greenpeace office in Europe were ringing. People from Italy to Ireland wanted to know how they could help save the three whales trapped in a place none of them had ever even heard of. European environmental activists were beating down Greenpeace's doors, waiting to be organized. Of course, Plowden realized there was no way they could help the three whales in Barrow—but maybe they could help other whales by putting pressure on governments doing business with the few nations that continued to hunt for a few of them.

No matter how you sliced it, the three whales did manage to strand themselves at an opportune moment. If ever there was a time to exert pressure on whaling countries this was it. One of those countries was Iceland, a tiny island nation in the North Atlantic home to only a quarter million people on a geologic winter wonderland halfway between Europe and North America.

Iceland's people prided themselves on what they thought was their model society. They had much to be proud of; a highly industrialized society with virtually none of the social strains found in other Western countries. Iceland suffered very little from crime, drugs, or homelessness and suffered not at all from racial tensions. It sounds impressive until one learns that Icelandic law at that time barred anyone without non-Icelandic “blood” from either citizenship or long-term residency.

While Icelanders liked to think of themselves as being everyone's superior, their lucky fate and current prosperity was largely dependent on the United States. American involvement started in 1941, five months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when a U.S. naval task force was dispatched to the island to protect the critical North Atlantic seaways that then served as the difference between life and death for Great Britain. Iceland, long isolated and neglected now became the epicenter of a titanic struggle for the survival of freedom against Nazi tyranny. If the Germans could cut British lines of communication across the Atlantic, the war would end in a German victory.

Adolf Hitler several times toyed with the idea of a descent upon the island and laid preliminary plans for it; but to forestall such a move British troops, soon joined by a Canadian force, landed in Iceland on May 10, 1940. Icelandic annoyance with the British and Canadian garrison, and British losses in the war, which made a withdrawal of the Iceland garrison seem desirable, plus American concern for the Atlantic sea lanes, all combined to bring Iceland within the American defense orbit.

By early 1941, the British were stretched to the breaking point. Winston Churchill's decision to send 50,000 troops to Greece meant already precarious British positions everywhere else became even more vulnerable. Britain's 20,000-man garrison in Iceland had to be thinned at the very moment German U-boats started attacking the unprotected Canadian shipping lanes west of the island. Desperate for relief, the British agreed to transfer its facilities in Iceland to the United States. It was that presence and the protection the United States provided that husbanded Iceland's peaceful emergence as one of the world's richest countries.

But Iceland was nearing recession in 1988. That year's European economic slowdown was drying up the market for Icelandic seafood that accounted for 80 percent of its exports. To a prosperous nation unaccustomed to sluggish growth, 1988 was a year of crisis, which peaked in September. It was good training for what would befall them two decades later with the banking collapse of 2008. Months of acrimony between the governing coalition's three parties led Prime Minister Thorsteinn Palsson to quit the government and take his twenty-member Independence Party with him. Iceland's new and weak minority coalition was lead by the socialist Progressive party.

Once he moved into the prime minister's chair, Steingrimur Hermannsson's number one objective was to stay there. Imagine that! Keeping his country out of recession was the best way he knew to do that. But just weeks after taking office, he would be confronted by one of the most bizarre crises ever to rock his country. This crisis was triggered not by man, but by three whales trapped in ice on the other side of the world.

Campbell Plowden closely followed events in each of the few remaining whaling nations of which Iceland was one. He knew their strengths, and more importantly, their weaknesses. Like a bloodhound, Plowden smelled a vulnerable new government borne out of crisis, not popular mandate. The stranded whales gave Plowden more than an idea. They gave him the chance to strike against Icelandic whaling. The Barrow whales had mobilized a continent of activists and tens of millions of their supporters. Now they could join the more important battle to end the commercial pillage that pushed the magnificent creatures to the edge of extinction.

After clearing it with his superiors, Plowden sent a cable to Greenpeace's European offices telling them that the best way they could help save the three Barrow whales was to remind their members that the real threat facing whales were not Arctic ice floes, but rusting whaling vessels loaded with rocket propelled harpoons. It wasn't nature that threatened whales. It was man.

By Wednesday, October 19, West German activists seized on the publicity surrounding the three stranded whales and hoped to use it to strengthen a six-month boycott against German companies that did business with Iceland. With news of the Barrow whale stranding, the boycott took off. Looking for a local angle to a remote story, German media started covering the previously obscure Iceland fish boycott. Pickets and protests that had gone on unnoticed for months were suddenly newsworthy. German fish importers were quickly forced to make a decision: stop buying Icelandic products or wait for consumers to stop buying theirs.

Funny that none of those activists ever did much to protest “unofficial” Soviet whaling. Maybe because they admired the Soviet Union's animosity toward the United States?

What was marginal business to West German companies was critical business to Icelandic companies. Tengelmann, the multibillion-dollar West German supermarket conglomerate, then owner of the U.S. retailer A&P, was the first to capitulate to the boycotters demands. The negative image conveyed to the world was all too apparent to Tengelmann's directors. The world was banding together to save three whales while Tengelmann continued to conduct business as usual with a country that hunted, processed and sold them.

On Friday afternoon, October 21, Tengelmann announced that it was cancelling a three-million-dollar contract with Icelandic suppliers to protest that country's whaling practices. Plowden's gamble paid off. One of the largest importers of raw Icelandic shrimp, long a target of the Greenpeace boycott, finally relented. The boycott of Iceland bore its first fruit.

News of the canceled contract rocked Iceland and its new, weak governing coalition. Prime Minister Hermannsson's new government was born in crisis. Three whales struggling for their lives in the frozen waters of Alaska's Arctic threatened to plunge a nation half a world away into political and economic chaos. The Tengelmann contract amounted to less than a quarter of a percent of Iceland's $1.1 billion annual fish exports, but that was just the beginning. Fish was to Iceland what oil was to Alaska: more than 80 percent of its commerce. Without a viable commercial fishing industry, Iceland would crumble.

Almost immediately, other West German companies followed suit. Aldi Supermarkets (they soon after bought A&P themselves) imposed its own boycott. So did NordSea. Adding the new cancellations to the cost of the ongoing American boycotts, Iceland's $7 million commercial whaling industry had already cost the tiny country $50 million, 4 percent of its 1988 gross national product. Hundreds of people lost their jobs within hours of the new cancellations. Prime Minister Hermannsson's new government had to act on a single, well-defined question. Was the revenue from its own small whaling industry worth this price of domestic economic discontent?