An unexpected visit to Engels Air Base

Satellite image of bombers at Engels air base near Saratov.

This week Ukrainian drones targeted air bases deep inside Russia. One of them, near Saratov, was called Engels. It was a base I had been to many years ago. My hair was cropped to 5mm – the military standard – and I was wearing a Russian army uniform.

Russia’s Engels military airfield was, for me, an unexpected stop on an unscheduled flight.

From where I stood, my hair cropped to the regulation 5mm of a Russian officer and wearing a borrowed Spetsnaz captain’s uniform, it seemed to stretch on forever, acre after acre of spider-webbed asphalt. Beyond was the Russian steppe, stretching all the way east to the Pacific 4,000 miles away.

I suspect that few outside the Russian military and western intelligence cadres had ever heard of Engels until this week when it suddenly shot to the top of the international newsfeed.

It was there that Ukrainian drones, launched from several hundred miles away, managed to damage two Russian long-range strategic bombers which were apparently being readied for attacks on their cities and infrastructure.

Another drone hit a military airport near Ryazan, nearer Moscow, blowing up an oil tanker and killing three servicemen.

The prominence given the attack, in view of how paltry the destruction was compared to Moscow’s ongoing pulverising of Ukrainian cities, may have seemed puzzling.

But there are fears in western capitals that Ukrainian attacks on Mother Russia proper might just edge Vladimir Putin’s finger closer to the nuclear button, with potentially catastrophic results for us all.

My acquaintance with Engels air base came during my time as the Daily Telegraph’s Moscow Correspondent in the early 2000s. I was on an unsanctioned trip to Chechnya masquerading as a Russian officer.

Both what I saw there, and the circumstances of my arrival, speak volumes about the chaos, corruption and sometimes outright ineptitude of the Russian military, both in terms of what it was then, and, as seems to have been confirmed since February 24th, what it is still, in large part, today.

The series of events that had brought me to Engels had begun almost a year before. On a cold October dawn I had watched as Russian Spetsnaz operatives poured knockout gas into a Moscow theatre and then stormed the building.

Inside were around 50 Chechen hostage-takers, some of them apparently wired up to huge bombs, and more than 800 innocent theatre-goers. When the shooting stopped and a body count was taken all the Chechens were dead, as well as more than 130 of the hostages.

Spetsnaz even then had a fearsome reputation. Their commanders claimed they were the best in the world, as highly-trained and well-equipped as their British and American counterparts, but steeled with something extra - the legendary Russian ability to survive in desperate conditions and on poor rations.

But the problem for me was that Spetsnaz was also intensely publicity-shy. Under Communism the Kremlin had refused to even acknowledge the existence of these men and they were known in the west mostly through spy novels and cold war dramas.

During the storming of the Moscow theatre Spetnaz's counter-terrorist unit Alfa was deployed. I saw them silhouetted against the cold grey dawn, laden down by gas masks, assault rifles and body armour.

But even with the relative easing of animosities between Russia and the West at the time, no western journalist had ever spent time with Spetsnaz in the field.

Getting in with Spetsnaz took me months. My first meeting was with a major in the unit at a cheap restaurant in the Moscow suburbs, arranged by a Russian photographer. There followed several more meetings - not one of them official.

When a higher-up threatened to veto my plan to join a Spetsnaz unit on deployment I bought him a microwave oven and he dropped his objection.

Eventually, one morning in September the following year, I sat shivering, in my uniform, on a huge, trembling military plane flying to the town of Mozdok, the base for operations in Chechnya.

With me was the Russian photographer who had made the introductions and a Spetsnaz major who had agreed, for a fee, to smooth my way.

That morning at a military air base outside Moscow I had walked through the main checkpoint without even having my papers checked.

After that we had talked our way onto a cavernous military transport plane in exchange for two bottles of cognac. The pilots simply changed the manifest.

There were one or two glitches.

Just as we were about to set off in the back of an otherwise empty Antonov 12, the backbone of Soviet military transportation, three men appeared and demanded that they also be allowed aboard.

They were from the Army Propaganda Corps. Their task, they said, was to deliver bundles of newspapers – pro-government of course - and educational books as well as three ping pong tables and half a dozen guitars to Russian soldiers fighting the rebellion in Chechnya.

"Russian military law mandates that every soldier serving in Chechnya enjoy 90 minutes of recreation a week," one of the officers told me. "It is our job to make sure they get it."

I was concerned. In uniform, I could perhaps pass muster for a while. But the propaganda officials were chatty and they would soon cotton on that I was a foreigner. My Russian was fairly colloquial but there was no way I was going to get by as a native speaker. If they reported me for masquerading as a Russian officer there would be hell to pay.

"Do something quick," I whispered to Sergei, my Spetsnaz helper.

Without a moment's hesitation he walked up to the officer in charge of the propaganda contingent, stared him in the eye, and, tilting his head towards me, said: "He’s from MI6. Secret operation. Not a word to anybody."

The officer's eyes opened wide, then he opened his mouth and shut it again. After that, as we flew across European Russia, the three men didn't say a word to me. Only the officer in charge winked conspirationally if I happened to catch his eye.

Soon, however, I had a bigger problem. News came back from one of the pilots on the flight deck. "We've been diverted to Engels,” he said. “Orders from the very top. We have to pick up a special consignment. Top Secret."

I looked at Sergei. He just motioned for me to keep calm.

A half hour later we landed at a deserted runway amid flat fields. The day was hot. The plane came to a halt, the back opened and we all stepped out. And then I watched mesmerised as several military staff cars began snaking their way across the tarmac towards us. It was the local Top Brass.

Behind them there was a strange-looking vehicle driven by a Russian squaddie. A sort of a light lorry with a trailer, it was bristling with electronic equipment and antennas.

"The pilots say it’s the latest top secret Russian weapon," Sergei whispered to me. "They're sending it to Chechnya to try it out."

Now I was getting properly worried. If I had been found out before it would have probably ended with a trip to the Lubyanka for questioning and possibly an expulsion order. Embarrassing, both for me and my newspaper, but not terrible. But now I was in the presence of a highly-classified weapons system. And I didn’t fancy the prospect of a long stretch studying Russian grammar in a Siberian slammer.

"Sit tight and don't say a word," Sergei whispered to me. "Not a f…ing word." He knew that if I was rumbled he was coming down with me.

When the generals arrived, they climbed out of their vehicles and stood in a line. They then made a show of inspecting the equipment and nodded their heads approvingly.

I stood stock still and didn’t move a muscle. Finally, one by one, they climbed back in their jeeps and departed.

But now we had a top secret weapons system that had to be flown to Mozdok. First off, all the propaganda supplies were in the way. They would have to be moved. Then there was the problem of getting the lorry onto the plane.

"Come on, comrades," the propaganda chief said. "The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can be on our way."

So I walked over, picked up a bound bundle of newspapers, carried it down the loading ramp and placed it carefully on the tarmac. They all burst out laughing.

"No, no, no,” Sergei said. “That's not how you get things done in the Russia military."

And with that he picked up one of the guitars and simply flung it off the plane onto the tarmac. I heard the strings break and the neck crack. The others began to follow suit, tossing more supplies off the cargo deck and onto the asphalt.

Within half an hour the airplane was surrounded by a mess of broken guitars, ping pong tables with bent legs and chipped edges, and swirling sheets of newspaper. The boxes carrying the books had split open and were spilling out their contents.

Next we turned our attention to loading the new secret weapon. But there was a problem - it wouldn't fit. The plane we were on may have been huge, but the load was just too tall.

"We'll have to leave it," I said finally to Sergei when we had tried everything we could think of.

"No way. Orders are orders," Sergei replied.

So we kept at it. Finally, by deflating the tires until they were completely flat and using a winch, we managed to load the rear half of the unit into the very back of the cargo hold of the plane. But the front section still wouldn’t go.

Since the front and the rear could only function in concert it seemed a pointless victory to me. But my colleagues were unconcerned.

"We tried," one of the propaganda men said. "No one can say we didn't try."

We ended up flying the rear half of Russia's newest electronic weapons system to Mozdok in the north Caucasus, and leaving the front half on the asphalt in Saratov, hundreds of miles away. I have no idea if they were ever reunited. What was left of the propaganda supplies came with us too.

What happened next - when I finally got to Chechnya and talked my way into spending a week with a Spetsnaz unit - is another story.

But as I watched the news headlines this week showing satellite photos of Saratov airfield, I couldn’t help but smile at all those who had claimed that the Russian military was among the sharpest and most muscular in the world.

Perhaps from outside Russia it had seemed that way, or through rose-tinted glasses from the Kremlin.

But from my vantage point as I climbed on board a Russian military cargo plane carrying half a weapons system, a bunch of broken ping-pong tables, smashed guitars, dog-eared books and crumpled newspapers it was a mess.

Money and equipment alone, it seemed, were not going to change a culture of larceny, brutality and indifference that had permeated the Russian military for decades.

And, judging from what we hear today from the new eastern front, I doubt that culture has changed much in the intervening years.