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An American Arms Designer’s Dramatic Escape From Russian-Occupied Mariupol
U.S. arms designer stopped bathing, rubbed chocolate under his fingernails as part of his attempt to evade capture
By Thomas Grove
In February, John Spor, a U.S. arms designer, received a predawn call from a senior U.S. military officer urging him to immediately leave the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, his adopted home for more than a decade. The Russians were advancing across the border, said the man, an active duty officer who was an acquaintance and acting in his own capacity.
“It’s already too late,” Mr. Spor responded.
Cruise missiles were raining down on Mariupol and Russian troops had swarmed Mr. Spor’s high-end neighborhood, leaving him stranded in his three-storey home overlooking the sea.
The 60-year-old U.S. nuclear physicist has owned companies that provided technology to some of the biggest U.S. defense firms, including laser-guided targeting platforms for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Abrams tanks.
In Mariupol, he had enjoyed some degree of local fame, boasting that he made parts for “American bombs.” He got married to a local woman in 2008 and spent more and more of his time in Ukraine until moving there. He built a comfortable life—he had just finished an extension on his house—while continuing to work with U.S. defense contractors from Mariupol.
In the midst of the Russian invasion, Mr. Spor’s prominence was now a problem. Word soon spread among his family in Ukraine that Russian agents were searching for him by name. He feared that, given his weapons background and U.S. nationality, the Russians would view him as a valuable target, potentially as proof that the U.S. was helping Ukraine arm itself.
“The Russians knew I was there, and very quickly I was already starting to reconcile with the idea that there was no way out of this,” he said.
In early February, President Biden urged Americans to leave Ukraine, warning that U.S. troops wouldn’t rescue them. In recent years, tens of thousands of Americans had settled in Ukraine. Many, like Mr. Spor, had married and integrated into the local culture.
Mr. Spor’s escape from behind enemy lines represents a handful of the most dangerous cases of rescued Americans to have emerged so far. After the U.S. Embassy relocated from Kyiv to Poland, many Americans were stuck in Ukraine and left on their own, forced to rely on their own wits or the good will of donor-funded nongovernmental organizations.
In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Mr. Spor repeatedly suggested to his wife and her extended family to go to Poland or a safer area in Ukraine. Each time, they found a reason to stay, and Mr. Spor decided he didn’t want to leave without them.
During the first days of the invasion, Mr. Spor and his wife, Svetlana, survived on a full fridge of food and the house’s 2,000-liter reserve of water as bombs rained on the city outside.
“Sometimes you’d hear the bombs so close the ground would shake,” he said.
In text messages to his sister, Lauri Weigle, who lives in Lake Jackson, Texas, he relayed the city’s deteriorating situation during the Russian siege. By mid-March, the Red Cross warned Mariupol had become a humanitarian disaster.
“90% of the housing in Mariupol has been damaged or destroyed,” he wrote on April 11.
Five days later, he shared his growing fear of getting detained by the Russians. “If you know that I have been found, raise hell with the U.S. Embassy so that I don’t get disappeared,” he wrote to her.
In an effort to stay hidden, Mr. Spor bounced between his own house and those of his wife’s relatives. By late March, he learned from neighbors that he had only just missed Chechen fighters who had been to his house looking for him.
When the Chechens went to his house a second time weeks later, he asked his sister to contact the U.S. authorities to get him out.
“It’s not safe here anymore,” she said she remembered him saying.
After contacting the State Department, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. consulate in Poland directed Ms. Weigle to several private agencies, including that of Bryan Stern, a Navy Reserve officer who had helped evacuate hundreds of Ukrainians from Russian-controlled areas, many of them out of Mariupol.
Mr. Stern had worked on evacuations in Afghanistan when Kabul fell to the Taliban. With his newly founded Project Dynamo organization, he had already exfiltrated Americans from Ukraine, including one who had been detained in the Russian-occupied region of Kherson on suspicion of being a spy.
However, the Russian assault on Mariupol made it exceedingly difficult to spirit an American through the dozens of checkpoints that stood between the city and Ukrainian-held territory.
After an email introduction, Mr. Stern talked to Mr. Spor for weeks from different phones, using a set of passwords and phrases to communicate in part in code.
By then, Mr. Stern, whose group is funded largely by private U.S. donors and whose mission was mainly to rescue Americans in Ukraine, had already helped hundreds of Ukrainians out of occupied Mariupol. He had learned which checkpoints were the hardest to get through, where the risk of being interrogated was the highest and which ones were most likely to search phones. That information would help Mr. Stern guide Mr. Spor out.
However, the limited cellphone coverage made it difficult for the two to speak, forcing Mr. Spor to search every couple of days for a spot near Mariupol where he could find a few bars of reception on his LG phone and Kyivstar SIM card.
“It was a crapshoot, and every time you went out you ran the risk of getting searched by soldiers,” said Mr. Spor. More than once, soldiers stopped him, Each time he kept his mouth shut and his eyes down, and each time it worked.
Mr. Stern, who was based in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, decided to transform the charismatic Texan into a nondescript man, with new, fake papers and a pair of old crutches that he smuggled into the city through drivers and intermediaries.
At Mr. Stern’s direction, Mr. Spor moved from safe house to safe house. He practiced using the crutches. Mr. Stern told Mr. Spor to stop bathing, brushing his teeth or shaving so that soldiers would wave him through checkpoints rather than stop to question him. “It wasn’t pretty,” he recalled. “I had to smell bad and I had to be dirty.”
“We had to transform John Spor visually and emotionally right down to the crappy shoes with dog doo on them. I wanted him to look like crap,” said Mr. Stern.
Mr. Stern explained to Mr. Spor which buses to take and how to behave at the checkpoints, which would be manned by local pro-Russian separatists, Russian soldiers or intelligence officers.
On the morning of June 21, Mr. Spor awoke in one of the Mariupol safe houses Mr. Stern had arranged and rubbed chocolate under his fingernails to look like dirt. At each checkpoint, Mr. Spor feigned sleep. The few times he was woken up, he fumbled long for his documents while mumbling to himself.
Finally, after nearly 30 checkpoints, Mr. Spor got out of a white van to be greeted by Mr. Stern on Ukrainian-controlled territory. His sister was waiting for him across the border in Poland. His wife was later spirited out of Ukraine to Spain.
Once Messrs. Stern and Spor, accompanied by armed guards, arrived at a safe location, Mr. Spor, unshaven, unkempt and in dirty clothes, called his sister from Mr. Stern’s phone.
“Well, I got out,” he said.
