Brian Freemantle - Kings of Many Castles

The state visit was crucial for the political future of both leaders, which made maximum public and media exposure as important as the long ago concluded but unannounced nuclear missile defense treaty that was to be its triumphant, reelection assuring climax.

The apparent negotiations had been conducted with the surgical precision befitting the life-saving operation both considered it to be. To establish the impression of nation-protecting intractability, the American secretary of state had very publicly headed the three main delegations to Moscow and received the Russian foreign minister in Washington on a matching number of media-hyped occasions. After each of which they’d made dour-faced statements of insurmountable difficulties, left behind in the other’s capital additional negotiators and on their returning flights personally given unattributable diplomatic briefings that success would be a miracle.

The public event preparations were as perfectly orchestrated. The leaked details-even suggested photographs-of what America’s fashion-icon First Lady had chosen were balanced by those of the Russian president’s equally fashion-conscious and vivacious wife, setting up couture competitions at the Bolshoi, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and the Moscow Arts Theatre as well as at the intended official state banquets.

All of which were featured some way down the list of security considerations that had consumed the American Secret Service and the Russian Presidential Protection division of the Federal Security Service for as long as but far more actively than the time supposedly spent by treaty negotiators.

Both security groups-initially separately but soon in single, protesting voice-were appalled at the completeness of the intended open exposure.

Their argument that the major part of the arrival ceremony be inthe totally-controlled inner courtyard of the Kremlin and not in the open, at the Moscow White House, was impatiently swept aside because of the Kremlin’s most recent association with communism, whose reemerging official political party, the Kommumisticheskaya Partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii, was seriously threatening the president’s second term reelection. The symbolism of the White House, against which Boris Yeltsin sent tanks in 1993 to defeat the communist-led opposition of the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, better suited both presidents. It took a week of persistent argument, finally adjudicated by the chiefs of staff of both leaders, to get the arrival of Air Force One switched from Moscow’s international Sheremet’yevo airport to a much more easily vetted and security-assured military airfield on the eastern outskirts of the city. There was an even more protracted dispute over the joint insistence that the two men, and their wives, should drive into the city in an open-topped car along a previously publicized route which Muscovites would be encouraged to line to cheer and wave pre-issued national flags.

It took a claimed terrorist bomb explosion in a car park just off the route, staged by the Russian security service and blamed on Chechen separatists, to gain the concession of a bullet-proofed glass bubble over the rear of the vehicle, which had to be changed from the intended Zil to an American-imported Cadillac because no such protective fitment existed for a Russian limousine. To compensate for the reluctant abandonment of open transportation both services acceded to an increase in the number of elevated TV camera positions but were again overruled by the chiefs of staff on their demand that the official cavalcade should drive at the traditional high speed along the government-reserved center lane of the approach roads.

A second officially planted bomb literally backfired when the two presidents decided to show their refusal to be cowed by terrorism-and gain the predictable headlines-by having their procession restricted to forty m.p.h. in the lane closest to the flag-waving crowds once they entered the built-up area. A request by three American Secret Service officers to be released from the Moscow detail was rejected with the warning that the protest gesture would be marked on their records. Twenty-four hours before the American president’s arrival the designated route was, however, closed to vehicular trafficand all the drains and culverts checked by explosive-detecting sniffer dogs before all manhole covers were welded into place. By then all political dissidents and separatist group members with checkable police files had been detained in militia custody.

A cloudless, early summer day guaranteed the crowds. Maintaining the pretence of remaining treaty difficulties the American leader, Walter Anandale, declared at the airport arrival ceremony that a breakthrough in the negotiations to completely abandon his country’s already suspended National Missile Defense project was only possible at president-to-president level. His wife was dazzling in pink, with a matching cloche hat. The Russian president’s wife was in powder blue, her hair a blond, unruffled curtain to her shoulders on the windless day.

The immediately following car for the journey into Moscow carried three American and three Russian protection officers in constant telephone and radio contact with others lining the route ahead. One of the Russians was permanently patched through to the shadowing helicopters overhead. They left their car while it was still moving to be in position around the Cadillac when it stopped on Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya, despite the mixed, twelve-man detail already cordoning the podium from which the Russian leader was to respond to the American’s arrival speech.

The ceremony was choreographed as perfectly as everything else. The two women left the limousine ahead of their husbands, to put them slightly at the rear when the two men turned to face the hedge of microphones and television cameras, some on their level and others stilted high above on elevated staging.

The sound of the first shot was only discernible from the sound-amplified replays and several commentators later remarked they were momentarily bewildered by the abrupt red splashes on the pink and blue suits of the First Ladies before seeing the Russian leader clutch his chest and realizing the redness was the man’s blood.

Charlie Muffin, who was watching the live coverage on America’s CNN, said: “Shit!” Natalia had only so far been peripherally involved but his immediate awareness was that it would all change now.

Charlie could never have imagined by how much.

The astonishing footage of the gunman’s seizure was to win the CNN cameraman an international award, which confirmed the importance of being in the right place at the right time more than professional expertise: his elevated position was next in line and only seven meters away from the Russian TV gantry from which the shots were fired. All he had to do was swivel his camera forty-five degrees, point it and adjust the zoom.

There were only two wrestling men on the miniscule, swaying platform, one still clutching the telescope-mounted rifle, the other the Russian cameraman restricted by his equipment harness and the headset link to the control scanner unseen far below. The gunman was slim, eyes wild and virtually unfocused, already dishevelled long blond hair further matted by the fight. He wore soiled jeans and a creased, denim workshirt against which bounced, as they fought, a neck-chained identity disc that appeared the same as that around the cameraman’s neck. The cameraman was an overweight but muscular man at least ten years older and much shorter. Despite the tussle his wispy remaining hairs stayed cemented in place over a reddish bald head. His face was mottled, too, by the frenzy and both arms were blackly tattooed.