Eleven Days of Hell Read online

  Eleven Days of Hell

  Yvonne Bornstein

  A terrifying true story of kidnap, torture and dramatic rescue by the FBI and the KGB. Chechen terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda orchestrate a Moscow abduction, holding westerners Yvonne and her husband Danny hostage for $1.6 million they don’t have. It will take enormous courage and an international rescue effort to bring them home. ELEVEN DAYS OF HELL is the chilling true story of kidnap, torture, rape and survival. Yvonne Bornstein relives the trauma that still has the power to make her shake with fear.

  Yvonne Bornstein

  ELEVEN DAYS OF HELL

  For my mother, Billie.

  I survived this horrific ordeal because I inherited your strength and courage.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Although the events in this book seem in my mind to have happened only yesterday, I could not have written about them until enough yesterdays had passed for me to be able to see those events in the overall perspective of my life. But, just as crucially, it also could not have happened until enough people encouraged me to write it. For this reason, I consider all of the following people my ‘co-authors,’ for without them you would not be looking at the book before you now. I say a collective thank you to all of them, for accompanying me on a journey into uncharted waters and for holding my hand at various points to keep me from drowning. My heartiest, and most heartfelt, appreciation goes to: My parents, Billie and Wally, for their unlimited supply of love and devotion, and for always believing in me. My husband, Sam Bornstein. Through Sam, I found myself. My sisters, Jan and Erica. My beautiful daughters, Romy and Melanie. Rhonda Kohn, my best friend and confidante, who not only stands by me but sometimes has to pull me out of the mud. Mike Carmona, one of the few people I trusted to read the manuscript as it was being written. His valuable feedback helped keep the boat going in the right direction. I am especially grateful to my former husband and the father of my daughter Melanie, Daniel Weinstock, one of the kindest men I have ever known, for reliving the pain of the nightmare so that this book would be factually thorough and accurate. Only Danny could recount in vivid detail his own desperate hours when we were kept apart during those eleven days of hell. He provided documentation that filled in the gaps. I hope that by telling this story, I can ease his pain as much as I eased my own.

  I would also like to express my deepest appreciation and admiration to three men who generously took time from their busy schedules to jolt their memories about events that grow more distant each year. Though I didn’t know it at the time, they were working day and night to save my life. A multiple thank you from the bottom of my heart to Dimitry Afanasiev, Gerry Ingrisano, and James Pelphrey.

  Dimitry, brilliant lawyer that he is, is a practiced orator, yet he is more than that. A humanist, he brought an emotional attachment to saving the lives of two people he didn’t know, which still warms my heart. He also has an expertise in Russian affairs and terrorist activities, and when he traced my kidnappers to Osama bin Laden’s murderous al-Qaeda network, it made my heart pound.

  Gerry is a longtime FBI agent, and James a veteran diplomat. Neither is prone to patting himself on the back; ‘All in a day’s work’ is their motto. Yet they gladly went back and researched their roles in my story. I will never be able to thank them enough for their efforts, but I hope this book makes clear the underlying lesson in the work these men did: Nothing is impossible when people care enough.

  INTRODUCTION

  This book tells the story of eleven days out of my lifetime of forty-eight years, eleven days of terrible events, frozen fear, unimaginable degradation, and constant anticipation. And yet, at the risk of sounding flippant, I can honestly say that the thought of writing this book was just as terrifying in its own way. Actually, the writing of any book would be a challenge for me on the order of climbing Mt. Everest. I would hardly describe myself as a shrinking violet—talking about myself has never been as easy as going out and being myself. I’ve done many things, admirable and otherwise in those forty-eight years, but it has only been recently that I’ve been able to learn what’s inside me that makes me, well, me.

  This book posed an enormous challenge, one much more stringent than merely scaling Everest. It required that I look back at things I had pushed hard out of my memory, never again wishing them to come back in. It also forced me to look so deeply inside of me that it felt like I was performing surgery on myself. Imagine excavating your own liver and you’ll get the point—and a very painful point, I might add. Only in my case, I wasn’t aiming at my liver but something more vulnerable: my innermost feelings.

  In the same way that my ordeal of terror had a happy ending, I am pleased to say the operation went quite well, thank you. Both patient and surgeon are doing fine. In the end, writing all of these pages seemed to have exorcised the pain, if I may be so trite. It was no picnic, but to have gotten through the whole book is the dessert, the Pavlova pie. It really tastes delicious!

  Not that I am pronouncing myself completely cured of the residual fear I’ve lived with for the past twelve years. Far from it. The old saying that goes, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ is not true, at least not for me. Some wounds can never heal. Some are too intimate, too brutal, too dehumanising. That is why it took twelve years for me to even attempt to write my story. Many times during those years, I tried another form of self-surgery, using a home lobotomy kit to numb my memories and feelings. However, there could never have been enough anesthetic to fully numb myself, and not enough bricks and mortar in the world to build a wall high enough around the memories. If I pat myself on the back for writing a whole book, that same patting hand will still tremble when I wake from a nightmare in a cold sweat, as I do often.

  Reliving those terrible eleven days with pen in hand is one thing; reliving them involuntarily in a dreamlike state and not knowing if it’s real and happening all over again is quite another. Dealing with them—and the unyielding fear that I’m still in danger, that people are lying in wait for me around the next corner—is what psychiatrists get paid for. I know. I’ve paid enough of them. If I can walk alone outside in the glorious sunshine and smile, if I can laugh with my husband or spend time with my beautiful children, it’s a good day. A very good day. There are more of them now.

  In a very real sense, writing the book was a form of therapy, though I take no credit for understanding that beforehand. The idea to write a book came from my current husband, Sam. Though Sam came into my life after the events described herein, he could see from an objective distance how damaged I was as a human being. One consequence of those events had been the collapse of my previous marriage to Daniel Weinstock. Danny, like me, is Australian. Together, we built a thriving, global, commodity barter trade business. We were one of the very few Australian companies to do business in Russia, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. If you are not familiar with this shadowy occupation, these pages will open your eyes. Suffice it to say, we sometimes bent the rules of business and ethics, and partnered up with shady characters that we could never really trust.

  Though we didn’t know it at the time, we fell into a spider’s web of Russian villains that included underworld gangsters, defrocked KGB agents, and half-crazed gypsies from freshly-minted Russian republics given their freedom in the early 1990s. Those who are familiar with post-Iron Curtain events may know the particularly bloody history of one such republic, Chechnya, where bloodthirsty nationalist rebels evolved into the monsters we know today as al-Qaeda. Although my husband and I knew little of this developing history at the time, we may have been known to them. In the early ’90s, terrorist ‘sleepers’ began to practice methods of financing their bloody deeds by kidnapping and extorting Western businesspeople. Like us, most people
had never heard of the sinister group until after that tragic and horrendous September 11th morning of 2001. It certainly surprised me—shocked is a better word—that I may well have been a seminal target of opportunity for Osama bin Laden.

  When Bob Woodward, the reporter who blew the lid off the Watergate scandal so long ago, came out with his inside account of the march to war against Iraq, Plan of Attack, I read with great fascination that the Bush administration’s Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz entertained the theory that today’s terrorists are linked to remnants of old Iron Curtain spy operatives and that unnamed ‘heads of state’ had warned him specifically that al-Qaeda may be working with ex-KGB officers. No offense, Mr Wolfowitz, but I already knew that, having been victimised by those conjoined forces of evil a dozen years ago.

  I can only imagine how many other unfortunate Western businesspeople have been caught in that frightful nexus and suffered a similar—and, sadly, worse—fate than I. For this reason, I live with the fear that the saga did not end, and will not end until the people who kidnapped me finish the job. I have been told that those al-Qaeda sleepers have long memories and an unquenchable thirst for revenge, that once they start something, they will complete it, no matter how many years it takes. I suppose I will forever have that fear. I must live my life in spite of it.

  This book will open your eyes to many things, including the utter breakdown of anything resembling law and order in Russia in the years since the fall of Communism—an ironic consequence indeed, given the wide-eyed expectation of a free and democratic society when the wall came tumbling down. I hope that one of the enlightening elements in this book is presenting this under-reported story, which serves as a critical backdrop to my own.

  All of the diverse and terrifying conditions that surrounded our business and the devolution of Russian society coalesced for me on January 6, 1992, minutes after landing at the airport in Moscow, commencing what would be seemingly endless physical and mental torture by swarthy, greasy men obviously hired to carry out a very detailed plot of abduction and ransom—in our case, $1.6 million. As much as I try, I cannot wash away the faces of those men. They were like masks of death. Worse, I cannot wash away their smell. It is a stench I will never be able to forget.

  In a page-one article in The New York Times dated January 18, 1992, the drama was described, aptly, as something out of the novel Gorky Park, while the lively Australian tabloids played the story with headlines such as, ‘TORTURE HELL IN MOSCOW’ and ‘TERRIFIED TWO THRASHED BY GYPSY SADISTS.’ For Danny and me, unaware of the entertainment value of the abduction, there was only one thing that mattered: survival.

  Only in later years did I become fascinated and riveted by the breadth of the story. Thus, I went to great lengths to reconstruct and retrace the steps and the players of the rescue mission, which I had no idea was even going on at the time. This task required much research that included personal interviews with many people, some merely remotely involved with the case. The filing of the Freedom of Information Act requests initially were met with stalling or outright refusals. Finally, I was allowed to see the sheaf of documents attendant to my case, albeit some had pages with so many sentences stricken by big, black strokes of Magic Marker that almost nothing was left to read. Even so, the clues they provided were priceless.

  I should say a few words about the structure of the text, lest anyone gets confused. My part in the story is related in a first-person narrative. However, there were events I was not part of and therefore did not see occurring; these, as well as some necessary speculation about why those events occurred, how they evolved, and what the motivations of certain people were, are set in italics with descriptive subheads. Certain events involving Danny I learned about only later, from Danny, and I am indebted to him for reliving the story along with me.

  I should also point out that the names of some of the characters in the book have been changed for legal reasons. The fact is, certain people simply prefer that their identities not be revealed in a book, and the nature of this book justifies such a concern. Some who committed crimes were, for reasons to be seen, never convicted, or given light sentences without having to own up to the full extent of their crimes. Others committed crimes of omission, failing to prevent crimes they saw.

  These people, who know who they are, live with private guilt. Still others realise the bloodthirsty nature of the people who kidnapped Danny and me, and their sense of retribution. While I gratefully thank the characters who gave their permission to be identified, I wish to see no one become a target of vengeance. Indeed, I share the same fear, every day of my life. However, I want to stress that the factual veracity of the story has not been compromised. Every other detail has been scrupulously verified.

  Although I did survive, my life would break into pieces in the years after my ordeal. Fortunately, the pieces were put back together again by Sam, my husband. Part of his method was to tell me, in no uncertain terms, to forget about my self-pity and confront my devils head on, and to appreciate how good it is to be alive so I could finally drive on down the road instead of spinning my wheels in the mud. As usual, Sam was right, in many ways even he didn’t realise. In challenging myself and in creating my own growth, I hope that others—especially women who read this book—can grow as well, through me. One lesson of my story concerns this currently in-vogue notion of women’s self-empowerment. For me, that’s just a fancy way of saying we can do anything, survive anything, and come away more complete. Never did I believe I could be as strong on the inside as I turned out to be. I may have thought I was, but deep down I didn’t really believe it. Now I do.

  Maybe the best thing I can say about myself is that at least I’m up to climbing Everest now. So, I hope you’ll pardon me if you pass me on the street and you hear me shouting encouragement to myself. All I really would like you to know about me is that the person behind the words on these pages is a lucky and grateful ducky from Down Under who, at age forty-eight (I don’t plan to get any older, or at least admit it), can say she has lived many lifetimes already—and hopefully has several more patiently waiting their turn. And wait they’ll have to do. For me, it’s not one day at a time but one lifetime at a time. The defining moment of my life came on that bleak morning in 1992 when I fully believed I was about to die and prepared myself for death to come. As it turned out, that was the moment when I had just begun to live.

  PART ONE

  THE BACKGROUND

  1

  THE DACHA, EARLY MORNING,

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 1992

  My eyes opened after a fitful few hours of sleep to see a silhouetted figure looming closer through the darkness. Instinctively, my head shot up from the narrow, rickety bed.

  ‘Danny? Is that you?’ I called out.

  Before the last word echoed in the airless room, the answer came as if with a kick in the stomach. When the shadowy wraith got close enough, I saw not the face of my husband, Danny, but rather the tall, bony, meticulously-groomed woman with the ever-present scrunchie around the bun of her dark-brown hair whom I knew only as ‘Rae.’ Her dark eyes darted nervously from side to side as she motioned furiously for me to get myself on my feet. In half-broken English and Russian, she told me to pack whatever belongings I had strewn on the cold, wood floor into the two gray suitcases propped next to the bed and come with her.

  Stumbling out of the rickety bed, I checked my Bulova watch—one of my few possessions that had not been taken from me. It said 3am. Normally, I would be awakened at sunrise, but even before Rae’s appearance, my sleep had been made even more restless by the fact that Danny had been taken from the house earlier on this night, ostensibly to arrange a ransom delivery for our kidnappers. I had been terrified ever since, consumed by frightening illusions that he would never return alive, that something would go wrong, that he would be killed and they’d come back and do the same to me.

  I always kept the harsh light bulb on the ceiling burning when I slept, as I didn’t want to feel a
ny more defenseless than I already was in this house of horrors, but outside, beyond the thick metal bars attached to the windows, it was dark as pitch. Would I live to see the morning?

  I was fully dressed, again as a means of self-defense, as if my now-pilling, blue, cashmere sweater and matching top and pants could be a makeshift suit of armor against the daily beatings I had suffered. Never, for reasons that had become sickeningly clear only two days before, did I ever want to be undressed and naked to the mortal dangers in the horror house that had been my tomb for the past ten terrible days.

  I climbed off the bed, threw everything into the suitcases, and sat back on the bed to slide into my slippers—the only footwear I was left with after my shoes were taken from me. Indeed, sometimes my captors wouldn’t even let me wear the slippers. Instead, if they allowed Danny and me to go outside to relieve ourselves—the pipes in the bathroom in the house were always frozen, making it unusable—we would have to go barefoot, hoping we could get done fast enough so as to avoid hypothermia.

  I felt myself being guided through the piece of hanging cloth that served as a door and out to the landing atop a long set of stairs. I could only carry one suitcase, so I grabbed hold of the heaviest one with both arms and began dragging it down the staircase.

  By now, my sleepiness had receded, my eyes forced open by the adrenaline pumping through my body. Sights and sounds were swirling in my brain. Three steps down, I peered through the funereal atmosphere that hung in the air of the dacha, or country house in Russian, and saw the man I knew as Oleg, who was Rae’s husband, at the far end of the kitchen at the foot of the stairs, hand on hip, leaning against a small table near the television. Ominously, he was shaking his head from side to side as though something was wrong.