Table Of ContentELEVEN
DAYS
HOELFL
A terrifying true story of kidnap, torture and dramatic rescue by
the FBI and the KGB
Yvonne Bornstein
For my mother, Billie.
I survived this horrific ordeal because I inherited
your strength and courage.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: The Background
1. The Dacha, Early Morning, Thursday, January 16, 1992
2. Moscow, Early Morning, January 16, 1992
3. Perth, Western Australia
4. Melbourne, 1975–1990
5. Melbourne, 1983–1989
6. Melbourne And Russia, 1989
7. Melbourne And Russia, 1989–January 5, 1992
Part Two: The Eleven Days
8. Day One: January 6, 1992, Moscow and Noginsk
9. Day Two: Tuesday, January 7, The Dacha
10. Day Three: Wednesday, January 8, The Dacha and Moscow
11. Day Four: Thursday, January 9, The Dacha, Moscow, and Wayne
12. Day Five: Friday, January 10, The Dacha and Wayne, New Jersey
13. Day Six: Saturday, January 11, The Dacha, Kaluga, and Philadelphia
14. Day Seven: Sunday, January 12, The Dacha, Philadelphia, and Moscow
15. Day Eight: Monday, January 13, Moscow, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Wayne, and The Dacha
16. Day Nine: Tuesday, January 14, The Dacha, Moscow and Philadelphia
17. Day Ten: Wednesday, January 15, The Dacha, Moscow, and Washington Dc
18. Day Eleven: Thursday, January 16, Moscow and The Dacha
19. Day Eleven: Thursday, January 16, Afternoon and Evening, Moscow
Part Three: The Aftermath
20. Moscow And Melbourne, January–December, 1992
21. Melbourne And Thousand Oaks, California, September 1992–July 2004
Epilogue
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
