Spy or Savior? (Page 2)

Anderson was not the only journalist interested in putting the story together. PBS's Frontline series produced an excellent documentary. Much of it, with additional source material such as audio clips of interviews with Cuny, articles and memos he'd written, and articles about him, can be found at www2.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny.

As Anderson and others convincingly argue, a preponderance of the evidence does suggest that a group of Chechens killed Cuny and his colleagues in or near Bamut. But was concern over nuclear deterrence really the motive? And did the order really come from Dudayev? Cuny was well and favorably known to the senior Chechen leadership, particularly after his scorching critique of Russian culpability for the war in an April 1995 article he had published in The New York Review of Books shortly before returning to Chechnya. That, and Cuny's frequent media appearances on top-rated shows, offered the possibility of additional, priceless publicity for the Chechen cause. In addition, through Cuny, the Chechens were about to get substantial humanitarian aid from a politically powerful billionaire. It only stands to reason that the Chechens who killed him must have convinced themselves that he wished to do them harm that superseded tangible proofs of the help he offered.

One explanation for this mental calculus is speculation that the Russians planted the notion that Cuny was a spy. Russia had the real motive for removing Cuny, after all. Anderson rules out a Russian false-flag operation on the grounds that, because of its detailed nature, the Chechen intelligence allegedly "incriminating" Cuny as a spy and his colleagues as Russian agents could have been produced only after Cuny's detention. Fair enough--but what if a local Chechen intelligence officer, duped by Russian disinformation, clumsily tried to fabricate an exculpatory rationale after carrying out the execution of Cuny and his party? Anderson's conclusion relies much too heavily on a single shaky source who puts Dudayev in Bamut at the time Cuny disappeared.

Something Anderson doesn't mention was pointed out to me by Paul Goble, a friend of Cuny's and the area expert from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Chechen culture, based upon a Sufi version of Islam, holds that there are two kinds of knowledge: ordinary knowledge to which everyone has access and hidden knowledge for the elite. With a gnostic perspective, and in a nightmare wartime environment, people become particularly susceptible to the kind of disinformation that may have surrounded Cuny. Fearing that the Russians would arrange his death after the New York Review piece, Goble pleaded with Cuny not to return to Chechnya. Between Scott Anderson's analysis and Paul Goble's, I side with Paul, though I am not fully persuaded. At the very least, I think that since Cuny gave his life to help the Chechens, we should reserve judgment on the worst allegations against them absent any hard evidence.

There remains the question of what Cuny was doing in Bamut and whether it is at all likely he was a spy. The road through Bamut was not the logical, the easiest or the safest way to Grozny. His driver was from there, so one explanation could be that the driver just wanted to pass by home; but this seems rather feeble and would not hold up in Cuny's priorities. Anderson is right, I think, in his observation that the only credible reason for Cuny to go to Bamut was to check on the nuclear warheads story. Indeed, in our last conversation I remember Cuny saying, seemingly out of the blue, that everything was for sale in Chechnya, "including nuclear missiles." "Armed!?" I asked, thinking it was nonsense. "Yes!" he averred, but he didn't elaborate and I didn't pursue it. Anyhow, the missiles were on his mind just before the trip, which somewhat corroborates the supposition. But then what explains his interest? Anderson does a good job of laying out the range of possibilities: Cuny was a paid, deep-cover official of the US government; a government-directed but unpaid, unofficial agent; or a regular source with unique, highly prized access to areas of interest. Anderson suggests that the reality was a fuzzy combination of the latter two. I concur. I asked Cuny about this once, and he vigorously denied working under deep cover. (If he had been, he would of course have denied it; nevertheless, I believed him.)

Many did think Cuny was a paid, clandestine government agent. Others, including sometimes members of his own family, wondered. Two of his undertakings in particular seemed hard to explain without recourse to obscure government powers. First, after the Gulf War, Cuny--practically single-handedly--expanded the militarized zone of Operation Provide Comfort by several hundred kilometers, making possible the safe return to their homes in less than a hundred days of approximately 400,000 Iraqi Kurds. It must be understood that without Cuny they would not have gone home in 1991 and very well might still be refugees parked on the Turkish-Iraqi border. How Cuny managed this is an epic tale in itself--suffice it to say he talked local US military commanders into helping while turning a deaf ear to their superiors. Although the top brass were incensed, they could not argue with Cuny's overnight success, for which they received the credit. Then, in Sarajevo for Soros, Cuny miraculously got his cargoes priority on United Nations C-130 relief planes (entirely filling many flights), got huge flatbeds of equipment past Serbian "customs authorities" and built an ingenious water-treatment plant that was impervious to shelling, replacing the one destroyed by the Serbs. Nobody could understand how it was done.

Cuny had a special gift, a genius really, for figuring out local quirks of how things were implemented. With this quality--combined with an unusual willingness to sacrifice his own comfort in sharing the living conditions of those he sought to help and increased hobnobbing with the military in the last decade of his life, which lent an additional air of mystery--he fit the part of the perfect spy. But Cuny loved the limelight, while most real spies, of course, are anonymous.

Having discovered a note written when Cuny was 30 in which he lays out for himself a multitude of grandiose ambitions, Anderson uses it as a central refrain in recounting Cuny's life, playing back snippets at various milestones. It is a useful device, perhaps, in establishing his driven personality, and it does help put in perspective the tall stories Cuny told and that others told about him. But a focus on ambition gets in Anderson's way when describing a critical personal transition for Cuny that culminated in the early nineties: from fieldwork involving natural disasters to work involving relief in the midst of war, or "complex emergencies." In the former he was largely, even completely, in control. In the latter he was a smaller player in an opaque political process, frequently forced to rely on his own and others' abstract judgment. Cuny lived for the moment; he was, through no fault of his own, not a strategic thinker.

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