Alexander Litvinenko
BLOWING UP RUSSIA
Acts of terror, abductions,
and contract killings organized by
the Federal Security
Service of the Russian Federation
Second Edition
Revised and Enlarged
Foreword to the Second Edition
Foreword to the First Edition
Chapter 1.
The secret services foment war in
Chechnya
Chapter 2.
The security services run riot
Chapter 3.
Moscow detectives take on the FSB
Chapter 4.
Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev (a
biographical note)
Chapter 5.
The FSB fiasco in Ryazan
Chapter 6.
The FSB resorts to mass terror: Buinaksk,
Moscow, Volgodonsk
Chapter 7.
The FSB against the people
Chapter 8.
The FSB sets up free-lance special operations
groups
Chapter 9.
The FSB organizes contract killings
Chapter 10.
The secret services and abductions
Chapter 11.
The FSB: reform or dissolution?
The FSB in power (in place of a
conclusion)
Epilogue
Appendices
Appendix 1: Transcript of the Meeting of
the State Duma Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation,
September 13, 1999
Appendix 2: Transcript of the Plenary
Meeting of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, September 17, 1999
Appendix 3: Statement of the President of
the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, February 11, 2002
Appendix 4: First expert analysis of
Achemez Gochiyaev’s photographs
Appendix 5: Second expert analysis of
Achemez Gochiyaev’s photographs
Appendix 6: Expert assessment of incident
in Ryazan on September 22, 1999
Appendix 7: Expert assessment of
suspected improvised explosive device
Appendix 8: Expert assessment of
explosive device found in Ryazan apartment house
Appendix 9: Testimony of Senior
Lieutenant Alexei Galkin
Appendix
10: Abu Movsaev’s talk with a group of foreign journalists about the testimony
of Senior Lieutenant A. Galkin
Appendix 11: Transcript of Radio Liberty Discussion of Blowing Up Russia
Appendix 12: A. Litvinenko, Y. Felshtinsky. Letter to S. Kovalyov about A.
Gochiyaev’s statement
Appendix 13: Written statement by A.
Gochiyaev, April 24, 2002
Appendix
14: Transcript of the hearings of the Public Commission for the investigation
of the apartment-house bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk and the training
exercise Ryazan in September 1999. TV-bridge Moscow-London, June 25, 2002
Appendix
15: An open letter to the Public Commission by Krymshamkhalov and Batchaev
Appendix 17: Yuri Felshtinsky interview
with Novaya
Gazeta
Appendix
18: Print-out of interview with A. Gochiyaev, August 20, 2002
Appendix 19: A. Litvinenko, Y. Felshtinsky. Questions for A. Gochiyaev
Appendix 20: Statement by Nikita Chekulin
Appendix
21: N. Chekulin. The Terrorist
Attacks of 1999: What Explosives Were Used?
Appendix 22: Y. Felshtinsky. The Hexogene Trail
Foreword to the Second
Edition
On 27 August
2001, several chapters from Blowing Up
Russia were published in a special edition of Noyava Gazeta. Since then, two and a half years have passed. Our
book has been published in Russian and English, and it has served as the basis
for a documentary film, Assassination of
Russia (which has been shown in Russian, French, German, and English in
many countries, including the United States, Australia, Western and Eastern
Europe, and the states of the FSU). To our great disappointment, the film and
the book have both been banned in Russia. Knowledgeable readers could find the
text on the internet, but the print version remained inaccessible to the Russian
audience. An indicative episode from the recent past—the confiscation of a
shipment of copies of Blowing Up Russia
from Latvia on the Volokolamskoye Highway on 29 December 2003—has brought an
end to the life of the first edition. The need for a second edition has become
all the more acute.
However, we felt that we had no right to deny
readers the opportunity to read the original text. The second edition consists
of this text (with minor emendations and additions) and appendices: the most
important and interesting documents that have been collected by us since the
publication of the first edition of the book, as well as the most significant
articles and interviews pertaining to the events of September 1999.
Our hope is that
the second edition will not meet the fate of the first edition. We assure our
readers that we understand what kind of time we are living in and that, if
necessary, we are prepared to publish a third, fourth, fifth... edition.
Alexander Litvinenko
Foreword to the First
Edition
We did not reject our past. We said honestly: “The history
of the Lubyanka in the twentieth century is our history...”
N. P. Patrushev, Director of the FSB
From an interview in Komsomolskaya
Pravda on 20 December 2000, on the Day of the Cheka
The pedigree of the Federal Security Service of
the Russian Federation (FSB RF) scarcely requires any comment. From the very
earliest years of Soviet power, the punitive agencies established by the
Communist Party were alien to the qualities of pity and mercy. The actions of
individuals working in these departments have never been governed by the values
and principles of common humanity. Beginning with the revolution of 1917, the
political police of Soviet Russia (later the USSR) functioned faultlessly as a
mechanism for the annihilation of millions of people; in fact, these structures
have never taken any other business in hand, since the government has never set
any other political or practical agenda for them, even during its most liberal
periods. No other civilized country has ever possessed anything to compare with
the state security agencies of the USSR. Never, except in the case of Nazi
Germany’s Gestapo, has any other political police ever possessed its own
operational and investigative divisions or detention centers, such as the FSB’s
prison for detainees at Lefortovo.
The events of
August 1991, when a rising tide of public anger literally swept away the
communist system, demonstrated very clearly that the liberalization of Russia’s
political structures must inevitably result in the weakening, perhaps even the
prohibition, of the Committee of State Security (KGB). The panic which reigned
among the leaders of the coercive agencies of the state during that period
found expression in numerous, often incomprehensible, instances of old special
service agencies being disbanded and new ones set up. As early as May 6, 1991,
the Russian Republic Committee of State Security was set up with V.V. Ivanenko
as its chairman in parallel to the All-Union KGB under the terms of a protocol
signed by Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and chairman of the USSR KGB, V.A.
Kriuchkov. On November 26, the KGB of Russia was transformed into the Federal
Security Agency (AFB). Only one week later, on December 3, the president of the
USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed a decree “On the reorganization of the agencies
of state security.” Under the terms of this law, a new Interdepartmental
Security Service (MSB) of the USSR was set up on the basis of the old KGB,
which was abolished.
At the same
time, the old KGB, like some multi-headed hydra, split into four new
structures. The First (Central) Department (which dealt with external
intelligence) was separated out as the new Central Intelligence Service, later
renamed the External Intelligence Service (SVR). The KGB’s Eighth and Sixteenth
Departments (for governmental communications, coding, and electronic
reconnaissance) were transformed into the Committee for Governmental
Communications (the future Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and
Information, or FAPSI). The border guard service became the Federal Border
Service (FPS). The old KGB Ninth Department became the Bodyguard Department of
the Office of the President of the RSFSR. The old Fifteenth Department became the
Governmental Security and Bodyguard Service of the RSFSR. These last two
structures later became the President’s Security Service (SBP) and the Federal
Bodyguard Service (FSO). One other super-secret special service was also
separated out from the old Fifteenth Department of the KGB: the President’s
Central Department for Special Programs (GUSP).
On January 24, 1992, Yeltsin signed a decree
authorizing the creation of a new Ministry of Security (MB) on the basis of the
AFB and MSB. A Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs appeared at the same
time, but only existed for a short while before being dissolved. In December
1993, the MB was, in turn, renamed the Federal Counterintelligence Service
(FSK), and on April 3, 1995, Yeltsin signed the decree “On the formation of a
Federal Security Service in the Russian Federation,” by which the FSK was
transformed into the FSB
This long
sequence of restructuring and renaming was intended to shield the
organizational structure of the state security agencies, albeit in
decentralized form, against attack by the democrats, and along with the
structure to preserve the personnel, the archives, and the secret agents.
A largely important role in saving the KGB from
destruction was played by Yevgeny Savostianov (in Moscow) and Sergei Stepashin
(in Leningrad), both of whom had the reputation of being democrats, appointed
in order to reform and control the KGB. In fact, however, both Savostianov and
Stepashin were first infiltrated into the democratic movement by the state security
agencies, and only later appointed to management positions in the new secret
services, in order to prevent the destruction of the KGB by the democrats.
Although, as the years went by, very many full-time and free-lance officers of
the KGB-MB-FSK-FSB left to go into business or politics, Savostianov and
Stepashin did succeed in preserving the overall structure. Furthermore, the KGB
had formerly been under the political control of the Communist Party, which
served to some extent as a brake on the activities of the special agencies,
since no significant operations were possible without the sanction of the
Politburo. After 1991, however, the MB-FSK-FSB began operating on Russian
territory absolutely independently and totally unchecked, apart from the control
exercised by the FSB over its own operatives. This all-pervading predatory
structure was now unrestrained by either ideology or law.
Following the
period of evident confusion, resulting from the events of August 1991, and the
mistaken expectation that operatives of the former KGB would be subjected to
the same ostracism as the Communist Party, the secret services realized that
this new era, free of communist ideology and party control, offered them
certain advantages. The former KGB was able to exploit its vast personnel
resources (both official and unofficial) to position its operatives in
virtually every sphere of activity throughout the vast state of Russia.
Somehow, former
prominent KGB men began turning up at the very highest echelons of power, frequently
unnoticed by the uninitiated: the first of them were secret agents, but later,
they were former or serving officers. Standing at Yeltsin’s back, from the very
first days of the events of August 1991, was KGB man Alexander Vasilievich
Korzhakov, former bodyguard to the chairman of the KGB and general secretary of
the Communist Party, Yury Andropov. The security service of the MIKOM Group was
headed by retired GRU colonel Bogomazov, and the vice-president of the
Financial and Industrial Group was N.
Nikolaev, a KGB man of twenty years’ standing, who had once worked under
Korzhakov.
Filipp
Denisovich Bobkov, four-star general and first deputy chairman of the KGB of
the USSR, who in Soviet times had been the long-serving head of the so-called
“fifth line” of the KGB (political investigation), found employment with
business tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. The “fifth line” numbered among its greatest
successes the expulsion from the country of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn and
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, as well as the arrest and detainment in
camps for many years of those who thought and said what they believed was right
and not what the party ordered them to think and say. Standing at the back of
Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and a prominent leader of
the reform movement in Russia, was KGB man Vladimir Putin. In Sobchak’s own
words, this meant that “the KGB controls St. Petersburg.”
How this all
came about has been described in detail by the head of the Italian Institute of
International politics and Economics, Marco Giaconi, who teaches in Zurich.
“The attempts made by the KGB to establish control over the financial
activities of various companies always follow the same pattern. The first stage
begins when gangsters attempt to collect protection money or usurp rights which
are not their own. After that, special agency operatives arrive at the company
to offer their help in resolving its problems. From that moment on, the firm
loses its independence forever. Initially, a company snared in the KGB’s nets
has difficulty obtaining credit or may even suffer major financial setbacks.
Subsequently, it may be granted licenses for trading in such distinctive
sectors as aluminum, zinc, foodstuffs, cellulose, and timber. These provide a powerful
stimulus for the firm’s development. This is the stage at which it is
infiltrated by former KGB operatives and also becomes a new source of revenue
for the KGB.”
However, the
years from 1991 to 1996 demonstrated that despite being plundered rapaciously
by the coercive state structures (who acted both openly, and through organized
criminal groups under the total control of the secret services), Russian
business had managed, in a short period, to develop into an independent
political force which was by no means always under the full control of the FSB.
Following Yeltsin’s destruction in 1993 of the pro-communist parliament, which
sought to halt liberal reform in Russia, the leaders of the former KGB, who had
gone on to head Yeltsin’s MB and FSK, decided to destabilize and compromise
Yeltsin’s regime and his reforms by deliberately exacerbating the criminal
situation in Russia and fomenting national conflicts, first and foremost in the
North Caucasus, the weakest link in the multinational Russian state.
At the same
time, an energetic campaign was launched in the mass media to promote the
message that impoverishment of the general public and an increase in criminal
and nationalist activity were the results of political democratization, and the
only way to avoid such excesses was for Russia to reject democratic reforms and
Western models, and follow its own Russian path of development, which should be
based on public order and general prosperity. What this propaganda really
promoted was a dictatorship similar to the standard Nazi model. Of all the
dictators, great and small, enlightened and bloodthirsty, the one chosen as a
model was the most personable and least obvious, the Chilean general, Augusto
Pinochet. For some reason, it was believed that if a dictatorship did emerge in
Russia, it would be no worse than Pinochet’s Chile. Historical experience,
however, demonstrates that Russia always chooses the worst of all possible
options.
Until 1996, the
state security services fought against the democratic reformers, since they saw
the most serious threat in a democratic ideology, which demanded the immediate
implementation of radical, pro-Western economic, and political reforms, based on
the principles of a free-market economy, and the political and economic integration
of Russia into the community of civilized nations. Following Yeltsin’s victory
in the 1996 presidential election, when Russian big business showed its
political muscle for the first time by refusing to permit the cancellation of
the democratic elections and the introduction of a state of emergency (the
demands being made by the pro-dictatorship faction in the persons of Korzhakov,
FSO head M.I. Barsukov, and their like) and, most importantly, was able to
ensure the victory of its own candidate, the state security services redefined
the major target of their offensive as the Russian business elite. Yeltsin’s
victory at the polls in 1996 was followed by the appearance, at first glance
inexplicable, of propaganda campaigns dedicated to blackening the reputations
of Russia’s leading businessmen. Heading up the vanguard in these campaigns
were some familiar faces from the agencies of coercion.
Russian language
acquired a new term, “oligarch,” although it was quite obvious that even the
very richest man in Russia was no oligarch in the literal meaning of the word,
since he lacked the basic component of oligarchy, power. Real power remained,
as before, in the hands of the secret services.
Gradually, with
the help of journalists, who were operatives or agents of the FSB and SBP, and
an entire army of unscrupulous writers eager for easy, sensational material,
the small number of “oligarchs” in Russian business came to be declared
thieves, swindlers, and even murderers. Meanwhile, the really serious
criminals, who had acquired genuine oligarchic power and pocketed billions in
money that had never been listed in any accounts, were sitting behind their
managers’ desks at the Russian state’s agencies of coercion: the FSB, the SBP,
the FSO, the SVR, the Central Intelligence Department (GRU), the General Public
Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of defense (MO), the Ministry of the Interior
(MVD), the customs service, the tax police, and so on.
It was these
people who were the true oligarchs, the gray cardinals and shadowy managers of
Russian business and the country’s political life. They possessed real power,
unlimited and uncontrolled. Behind the secure protection of their identity
cards from the agencies of coercion, they were genuinely untouchable. They
abused their official positions on a regular daily basis, taking bribes and
stealing, building up their ill-gotten capital, and involving their
subordinates in criminal activity.
This book attempts to demonstrate that modern
Russia’s most fundamental problems do not result from the radical reforms of
the liberal period of Yeltsin’s terms as president, but from the open or
clandestine resistance offered to these reforms by the Russian secret services.
It was they who unleashed the first and second Chechen wars, in order to divert
Russia away from the path of democracy and towards dictatorship, militarism,
and chauvinism. It was they who organized a series of vicious terrorist attacks
in Moscow and other Russian cities as part of their operations intended to
create the conditions for the first and second Chechen wars.
The explosions
of September 1999, in particular the terrorist attack which was thwarted in
Ryazan on September 23, are the central theme of this book. These explosions
provide the clearest thread for following the tactics and strategy of the
Russian agencies of state security, whose ultimate aim is absolute power. This
book is about the tragedy that has befallen all of us, about missed
opportunities, about lost lives. This book is for those who, recognizing what
has happened, will not be afraid to influence the future.
After the
publication of excerpts from the book in Novaya
Gazeta on 27 August 2001, as well as after the publication of the American
edition of the book in January of this year in New York, we were repeatedly
asked about our sources. We would like to assure our readers that the book
contains no fabricated facts and unfounded assertions. We concluded, however,
that given the current situation in Russia—with many government officials whom
we suspect to have been involved in the organization, execution, or sanctioning
of the terrorist atrocities of September 1999 active in the leadership of the
country—it would be premature to publish the names of our sources. At the same
time, in the very first interviews given by us after 27 August 2001, we
indicated that these sources would be immediately released to any Russian or
international commission formed to investigate the terrorist atrocities of
September 1999. Our position remains unchanged to this day: all of the
materials used in the writing of this book will be given to those who undertake
impartially to discover what happened.
Yuri Georgievich
Felshtinsky was born in Moscow in 1956. In 1974, he began studying history at
the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. In 1978, he immigrated to the USA and
continued his study of history, first at Brandeis University and later at
Rutgers, where he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History). In
1993, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Russian
History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and became the first citizen of a
foreign state to be awarded a doctoral degree in Russia. He has compiled and
edited several dozen volumes of archival documents and is the author of the
following books: The Bolsheviks and the
Left SRS (Paris, 1985); Towards a
History of Our Isolation (London, 1988; Moscow 1991); The Failure of World Revolution (London, 199I; Moscow 1992); Big Bosses (Moscow 1999).
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was born in
Voronezh in 1962. After graduating from school in 1980, he was drafted into the
army and over the next twenty years, he rose through the ranks from private to
lieutenant colonel. Beginning in 1988, he served in the counterintelligence
agencies of the Soviet KGB, and from 1991, in the Central Staff of the
MB-FSK-FSB of Russia, specializing in counter-terrorist activities and the
struggle against organized crime. For operations conducted with MUR (Moscow
criminal investigation department), he was awarded the title of “MUR veteran.”
He saw active military service in many of the so-called “hot spots” of the
former USSR and Russia, and in 1997, he was transferred to the most secret
department of the Russian KGB, the Department for the Analysis of Criminal
Organizations, as senior operational officer and deputy head of the Seventh
Section. He is a Candidate Master of Sport in the modern pentathlon. In
November 1998, at a press conference in Moscow, he publicly criticized the
leadership of the FSB and disclosed a number of illegal orders, which he had
been given. In March 1999, he was arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned
in the FSB prison at Lefortovo in Moscow. He was acquitted in November 1999,
but no sooner had the acquittal been read out in court than he was arrested
again by the FSB on another trumped-up criminal charge. In 2000, the criminal
proceedings against him were dismissed for the second time, and Litvinenko was
released after providing written assurances that he would not leave the
country. A third criminal case was then instigated against him. After threats
were made against his family by the FSB and the investigating officers, he was
obliged to leave Russia illegally, which led to yet another, fourth criminal
charge being brought against him. At the present time, he lives with his family
in Great Britain, where he was granted political asylum in May 2001.
The reader may
find the genre of this work somewhat surprising, something between an
analytical memoir and a historical monograph. The abundance of names and facts
and the laconic style of presentation will come as a disappointment to anyone
hoping for an easy-reading detective story. As conceived by the authors, this
book should be distinguished from superficial journalism and belletristic
memoirs by its intrinsic faithfulness to historical fact. It is a book about a
tragedy which has overtaken us all, about wasted opportunities, lost lives, and
a country that is dying. It is a book for those who are capable of recognizing
the reality of the past and are not afraid to influence the future.
Chapter 1
The FSB foments war in
Chechnya
No one but a total madman could have wished to
drag Russia into any kind of war, let alone a war in the North Caucasus. As if
Afghanistan had never happened. As if it weren’t clear in advance what course
such a war would follow, or just what would be the outcome and the consequences
of a war declared within the confines of a multinational state against a proud,
vengeful, and warlike people. How could Russia possibly have become embroiled
in one of its most shameful wars during the very period of its development
which was most democratic in form and most liberal in spirit? This war required
the mobilization of resources and increased budgets for agencies of coercion,
government departments, and ministries. It enhanced the importance and
increased the influence of men in uniform and sidelined or rendered irrelevant
the efforts made by supporters of peace, democracy and liberal values to
maintain the impetus of pro-Western economic reforms. This war resulted in the
isolation of the Russian state from the community of civilized nations, since
the rest of the world did not support it and could not understand it. A
previously popular, well-loved president, therefore, sacrificed the support of
both his own public and the international community. Once he had fallen into
the trap, he was left with no option but to resign before the end of his term,
and hand over power to the FSB in return for a guarantee of immunity for
himself and his family. We know who it was that benefited from all of this—the
people to whom Yeltsin handed over power. We know how the result was
achieved—by means of the war in Chechnya. All that remains to be discovered is
who set the process in motion.
Chechnya had
become the weakest link in Russia’s multinational mosaic, but the KGB raised no
objections when Djokhar Dudaev came to power there, because they regarded him
as one of their own. General Dudaev, a member of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU) since 1968, might as well have been transferred from
Estonia to his hometown of Grozny,
especially so that in 1990 he could retire, stand for election in opposition to
the local communists, become president of the Chechen Republic, and in November
1991, proclaim the independence of Chechnya, thereby seeming to demonstrate to
the Russian political elite the inevitability of Russia breaking apart under
Yeltsin’s liberal regime. It was probably no accident that another Chechen who
was close to Yeltsin, Ruslan Khazbulatov, would also be responsible for
inflicting fatal damage on his regime. Khazbulatov, a former Communist Youth
Organization Central Committee functionary and a Communist Party member since
1966, had become chairman of the parliament of the Russian Federation in
September 1991.
The history of escalation in the complex and
confused relations between Russia and Chechnya is a theme for a different book.
In any case, by 1994, the political leadership of Russia was already aware that
it could not afford to grant Chechnya independence like Belarus and Ukraine. To
grant Chechnya sovereign status could pose a genuine threat of the
disintegration of Russia. But could they afford to start a civil war in the northern
Caucasus? The “party of war,” based on the military and law enforcement
ministries, believed that they could afford it, if only the public could be
prepared for it, and it should be easy enough to influence public opinion, if
the Chechens were seen to resort to terrorist tactics in their struggle for
independence. All that was needed was to arrange terrorist attacks in Moscow
and leave a trail leading back to Chechnya.
Knowing that Russian troops and the forces of
the anti-Dudaev opposition might begin their storm of Grozny at any day, on
November 18, 1994, the FSK made its first recorded attempt to stir up
anti-Chechen feeling by committing an act of terrorism and laying the blame on
Chechen separatists: if the chauvinist sentiments of Muscovites could be
inflamed, it would be easy to continue the repression of the independence
movement in Chechnya.
It should be
noted that on November 18 and in later instances, the supposed “Chechen
terrorists” set off their explosions at the most inopportune times, and then
never actually claimed responsibility (rendering the terrorist attack itself
meaningless). In any case, in November 1994, public opinion in Russia and
around the world was on the side of the Chechen people, so why would the
Chechens have committed an act of terrorism in Moscow? It would have made far
more sense to attempt to sabotage the stationing of Russian troops on Chechen
territory. Russian supporters of war with Chechnya were, however, only too
willing to see the hand of Chechnya in any terrorist attack, and their response
on every occasion was to strike a rapid and quite disproportionately massive
blow against Chechen sovereignty. The impression was naturally created that the
Russian military and law enforcement agencies, while quite unprepared for the
terrorist attacks, were incredibly well-prepared to launch counter-measures.
The explosion of
November 18, 1994, took place on a railroad track crossing the river Yauza in
Moscow. According to experts, it was caused by two powerful charges of about
1.5 kilograms of TNT. About twenty meters of the railroad bed were ripped up,
and the bridge almost collapsed. It was quite clear, however, that the
explosion had occurred prematurely, before the next train was due to cross the
bridge. The shattered fragments of the bomber’s body were discovered at a
distance of about a hundred meters from the site of the explosion. He was
Captain Andrei Shchelenkov, an employee of the oil company Lanako, and he had
been blown up by his own bomb as he was planting it on the bridge.
It was only
thanks to this blunder by the operative carrying out the bombing that the
immediate organizers of the terrorist attack became known. The boss of Lanako,
who had given his firm a name beginning with the first two letters of his own
last name, was thirty-five-year-old Maxim Lazovsky, a highly valued agent of
the Moscow and Moscow Region Department of the FSB, who was known in criminal
circles by the nicknames of “Max” and “Cripple.” At the risk of anticipating
events, we can also point out the significant fact that every single one of
Lanako’s employees was a full-time or free-lance agent of the Russian
counterespionage agencies.
On the day of
the explosion on the river Yauza, November 18, 1994, an anonymous phone call to
the police claimed that a truck full of explosives was standing outside the
Lanako offices. As a result, the FSB department actually did discover a ZIL-131
truck close to the firm’s offices containing three MON-50 mines, fifty charges
for grenade launchers, fourteen RGD-5 grenades,
ten F-1 grenades, and four packs of plastic explosive, with a total weight of
six kilograms. The FSB claimed, however, that it had been unable to determine
who owned the truck, even though a Lanako identity card was found on
Shchelenkov’s remains, and the explosive used in the Yauza bombing was of the
same kind as that on the truck.
War in Chechnya offered a very easy way to
finish off Yeltsin politically, a fact understood only too well by those who
provoked the war and organized terrorist attacks in Russia. There was, in
addition, a primitive financial aspect to relations between the Russian
leadership and the president of the Chechen Republic: the Russians were
continuously extorting money from Dudaev. It began in 1992, when bribes were accepted
from the Chechens in payment for the Soviet armaments left behind in Chechnya
that year. The bribes for these weapons were extorted by head of the SBP
Korzhakov, head of the FSO Barsukov, and First Deputy Prime Minister of the
Russian Federation Oleg Soskovets. Of course, the Ministry of Defense was in on
the deal. Some years later the naive citizens of Russia began to wonder how all
those weapons the Chechens were using to kill Russian soldiers could have been
left behind in Chechnya. The answer was nothing if not mundane: they were paid
for by Dudaev in multi-million dollar bribes to Korzhakov, Barsukov, and
Soskovets.
After 1992, the Moscow bureaucrats continued
their successful bribe-based collaboration with Dudaev, and the Chechen
leadership continued sending money to Moscow on a regular basis, because there
was no other way Dudaev could resolve a single political question. However, in
1994, the system began to falter, as Moscow extorted larger and larger sums of
money in exchange for political favors relating to Chechen independence. Dudaev
started refusing to pay. The financial conflict gradually developed into a
political standoff, and then a contest of strength between the Russian and
Chechen leaderships. The threat of war hung heavily in the air. Dudaev
requested a personal meeting with Yeltsin, perhaps even intending to tell him
what had been going on. But the threesome, who controlled access to Yeltsin,
demanded a bribe of several million dollars for organizing a meeting between
the two presidents. Dudaev refused to pay and demanded that the meeting with
Yeltsin take place without any money changing hands in advance. Furthermore,
for the first time, he threatened the people who had been helping him strictly
for payment with the disclosure of documents in his possession, which contained
compromising information about the functionaries’ self-serving dealings with
the Chechens. Dudaev believed that possession of these documents was his
insurance against arrest. He could not be arrested; he could only be killed,
since he was an eyewitness to crimes committed by members of Yeltsin’s
entourage. Dudaev had miscalculated. His blackmail failed, and the meeting he
wanted never took place. The president of Chechnya was now a dangerous witness
who had to be removed. So a cruel and senseless war was deliberately provoked.
Let us trace the sequence of events.
On November 22, 1994, the State Defense
Committee of the Chechen Republic, which Dudaev had founded by decree the
previous day, accused Russia of launching a war against Chechnya. As far as the
journalists could see, there was no war, but Dudaev knew that the “party of
war” had already made its decision to commence military action. The Chechen
State Defense Committee which, in addition to Dudaev, included the leaders of
the military and other agencies of coercion, as well as a number of key
governmental departments and ministries, held an emergency session in response
to “the threat of military incursion” into Chechnya. A statement by the State
Defense Committee which was distributed in Grozny, claimed that “Russian
regular units are occupying the Nadterechny district, part of the territory of
the Chechen Republic,” adding that in the days immediately ahead, it was
planned “to occupy the territory of the Naursk and Shelkovsk districts. For
this purpose, use is being made of regular units of the North Caucasus Military
District, special subunits of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, and army
aircraft from the North Caucasus Military District. According to information
received by the State Defense Council, special subunits of the Russian FSK are
also taking part in the operation.”
The Central
Armed Forces HQ of Chechnya confirmed that military units were being
concentrated on the border with Chechnya’s Naursk district, in the village of
Veselaia, in the Stavropol Region: there were heavy tanks, artillery and as
many as six battalions of infantry. It later became known that the backbone of
the forces, drawn up for the storming of Grozny, consisted of a column of
Russian armored vehicles assembled on the initiative of the FSK, which paid for
it and also hired soldiers and officers on contract, including members of the
elite armed forces from the armored Taman and Kantemirov divisions.
On November 23, nine Russian army helicopters,
presumably MI-8s, from the North Caucasus Military District, launched a rocket
attack on the town of Shali, located approximately forty kilometers from
Grozny, in an attempt to destroy the armored vehicles of a tank regiment located
there, and were met with anti-aircraft artillery fire. There were wounded on
the Chechen side, which announced that it had a video recording showing
helicopters bearing Russian identification markings.
On November 25, seven Russian helicopters from a
military base in the Stavropol Region fired several rocket salvoes at the
airport in Grozny and at nearby apartment buildings, damaging the landing strip
and the civilian aircraft standing on it. Six people were killed and about
twenty-five were injured. In response to this raid, the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of Chechnya forwarded a statement to the authorities of the Stavropol
Region pointing out, among other things, that the region’s leaders “bear
responsibility for such acts, and in the case of appropriate measures being
taken by the Chechen side,” all complaints “should be directed to Moscow.”
On November 26, the forces of the “Provisional
Council of Chechnya” (the Chechen opposition), supported by Russian helicopters
and armored vehicles, attacked Grozny from all four sides. More than 1,200 men,
fifty tanks, eighty armored personnel carriers, and six SU-27 planes from the
opposition took part in the operation. An announcement, made by the Moscow
center of the puppet “Provisional Council of Chechnya,” claimed that “the
demoralized forces of Dudaev’s supporters are offering virtually no resistance,
and everything will probably be over by the morning.”
In fact, the
operation was a total failure. The attackers lost about 500 men and more than
twenty tanks, and another twenty tanks were captured by Dudaev’s forces. About
200 members of the armed forces were taken prisoner. On November 28, a column
of prisoners was marched through the streets of Grozny “to mark the victory
over the forces of opposition.” At the same time, the Chechen leadership
disclosed a list of fourteen captured soldiers and officers who were members of
the Russian armed forces. The prisoners confessed in front of television
cameras that most of them served in military units 43162 and 01451 based
outside Moscow. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation replied that
the individuals concerned were not serving members of the Russian armed forces.
In response to an inquiry concerning prisoners Captain Andrei Kriukov and
Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Zhukov, the Ministry of Defense stated that these
officers had indeed been serving in army unit 01451, but they had not reported
to the unit since October 20,1994, and an order for their discharge from the
armed forces was being drawn up. In other words, the Russian Ministry of
Defense declared the captured soldiers to be deserters. The following day,
Yevgeny Zhukov’s father refuted the ministry’s statement. In an interview with
the Russian Information Agency Novosti, he said that his son had left his unit
on November 9, telling his parents that he had been assigned for ten days to
Nizhny Tagil. The next time Yevgeny’s
parents had seen him was in a group of captured Russian soldiers in Grozny on
the weekly television news program Itogi on November 27. When he was asked how
their son came to be in Chechnya, Unit Commander Zhukov refused to answer.
A little later
the following colorful account of the events of November 26 was given by Major
Valery Ivanov, following his release in a group of seven members of the Russian
armed forces on December 8:
“By unit order of the day, all those who had
been recruited were granted compassionate leave due to family circumstances.
For the most part, they took officers without any settled domestic
arrangements. Half of them had no apartments—you were supposed to be able to
refuse, but if you did refuse, when they started handing out apartments you’d
find yourself left out. On November 10, we arrived in Mozdok in northern
Ossetia. In two weeks we made ready fourteen tanks with Chechen crews and
twenty-six tanks for Russian servicemen. On November 25, we advanced on
Grozny... I personally was in a group of three tanks which took control of the
Grozny television center at mid-day on the 26th. There was no resistance from the
Interior Ministry forces defending the tower. But three hours later, in the
absence of communications with our command, we came under attack by the famous
Abkhazian battalion. We were surrounded by tanks and infantry and decided it
was pointless to return fire, since the [anti-Dudaev] opposition forces had
immediately run off and abandoned us, and two of our three tanks were burnt
out. The crews managed to bail out and surrender to the guards of the
television center, who handed us over to President Dudaev’s personal bodyguard.
They treated us well, in the last few days they hardly guarded us at all, but
then there was nowhere we could run off to.”
The impression
given by all this was that the armored column had been deliberately introduced
into Grozny on November 26, so that it would be destroyed. The column was not
capable of disarming Dudaev and his army, or of taking the city and holding it.
Dudaev’s army was at full strength and well-armed. The column could not
possibly have been anything more than a moving target.
Russian Minister of Defense Grachyov hinted that
he had not been involved in the irresponsible attempt to take Grozny. From a
military point of view, Grachyov declared at a press conference on November 28,
1996, it would be entirely possible to take Grozny “in two hours with a single
regiment of paratroopers. However, all military conflicts are ultimately
settled at the negotiating table by political methods. Introducing tanks into
the city without infantry cover was really quite pointless.” But why then were
they sent in?
General Gennady Troshev would later tell us
about Grachyov’s doubts concerning the Chechen campaign: “He tried to do
something about it. He tried to extract a clear assessment of the situation
from Stepashin and his special service, he tried to delay the initial
introduction of troops until the spring, he even tried to reach a personal
agreement with Dudaev. We know now that such a meeting did take place. They
didn’t come to any agreement.” General Troshev, who at this stage was in
control of the second war in Chechnya, could not understand how Grachyov had
failed to reach an understanding with Dudaev. The reason, of course, was that
Dudaev insisted on a personal meeting with Yeltsin, and Korzhakov refused to
set up the meeting unless he was paid.
The brilliant military operation in which a
Russian armored column was burnt out was, indeed, not organized by Grachyov,
but by director of the FSK Stepashin and head of the Moscow UFSB Savostyanov,
who was responsible for handling questions relating to the overthrow of
Dudaev’s regime and the introduction of troops into Chechnya. Those who
expatiated at great length on the crude miscalculations of the Russian military
leaders, who had sent the armored column into the city only for it to be
destroyed, failed to understand the subtle political calculations of the
provocateurs who organized the war in Chechnya. The people who planned the
introduction of troops into Grozny wanted the column to be wiped out in
spectacular fashion by the Chechens. It was the only way they could provoke
Yeltsin into launching a full-scale war against Dudaev.
Immediately
after the rout of the armored column in Grozny, President Yeltsin made a public
appeal to Russian participants in the conflict in the Chechen Republic, and the
Kremlin began preparing public opinion for imminent full-scale war. In an
interview for the Russian Information Agency Novosti, Arkady Popov, a consultant with the president’s analytical center,
announced that Russia could take on the role of a “compulsory peacemaker” in
Chechnya, and that all the indications were that the Russian president intended
to take decisive action. If the president were to declare a state of emergency
in Chechnya, the Russian authorities could employ “a form of limited
intervention, which would take the form of disarming both sides to the conflict
by introducing a limited contingent of Russian troops into Grozny”—exactly what
had been tried in Afghanistan. So, having provoked a conflict in Chechnya by providing
political and military support to the Chechen opposition, the FSK now intended
to launch a war against Dudaev under cover of peacemaking operations.
The Chechen side took Yeltsin’s statement to be
an “ultimatum” and a “declaration of war.” A statement issued by the Chechen
government confirmed that this statement, and any attempt to put it into
effect, were “in contravention of the norms of international law,” and gave the
government of Chechnya “the right to respond by taking adequate measures for
the protection of its independence and the territorial integrity of its state.”
In the opinion of the government of the Chechen Republic, the threat of a
Russian declaration of a state of emergency on Chechen territory expressed “an
undisguised desire to continue military operations and interfere in the
internal affairs of another state.”
On November 30, Grozny was subjected to air
strikes by the Russian air force. On December 1, the Russian military command
refused to allow into Grozny an aircraft carrying a delegation of members of
the Russian State Duma. The delegation landed in the Ingushetian capital of
Nazran and set out overland to Grozny for a meeting with Dudaev. While they
were traveling to the Chechen capital, on December 1, at about 14.00 hours, eight
SU-27 planes carried out a second raid on the Chechen capital, encountering
dense anti-aircraft fire in the process. The planes specifically shelled the
district of the city where Dudaev lived. According to the Chechen side, one
plane was shot down by anti-aircraft defense forces.
On December 2, the chairman of the Duma Defense
Committee and head of the delegation that had arrived in Grozny, Sergei
Yushenkov, declared that reliance on force in Russian-Chechen relations was
doomed to failure. Yushenkov also stated that familiarization with the
situation on the ground had convinced him that negotiation was the only
possible way to resolve the situation that had arisen, and claimed that the
Chechen side had not set any preconditions for negotiations.
Public opinion was still on the side of the
Chechens, but the leadership of the FSB had become absolutely convinced that it
could be manipulated by the use of acts of terrorism blamed on the Chechens. On
December 5, the FSK informed journalists that foreign mercenaries had surged
across the state border into Chechnya and, therefore, “activity by the
terrorist groups being infiltrated into Russia today cannot be ruled out in
other regions of the country as well.” This was the first undisguised
announcement by the FSK that acts of terrorism with “a trail leading back to
Chechnya” would soon begin in Russia. At this point, however, they still spoke
of Russia being infiltrated by foreign agents, a ploy drawn, no doubt, from the
pages of the old Soviet KGB handbooks.
On December 6,
Dudaev declared in an interview that Russia’s policy was creating a rising tide
of Islamic sentiment in Chechnya: “Playing the ‘Chechen card’ may bring into
play the global interests of foreign Islamic states, who could make it
impossible to control the development of events. A third force has now emerged
in Chechnya, the Islamists, and the initiative is gradually shifting over to
them.” Dudaev characterized the mood of the new arrivals in Grozny with the
words: “We are no longer your soldiers, Mr. President, we are the soldiers of
Allah,” and summed up: “the situation in Chechnya is beginning to get out of
control, and this concerns me.”
As though in reply to Dudaev, Russian Minister
of Defense Grachyov held a public relations exercise which took the external
form of a peacemaking gesture, but in reality, provoked a further escalation of
the conflict. Grachyov proposed that the Chechen opposition headed by
Avturkhanov, which was financed, armed, and staffed by the FSK, should disarm,
on condition that Dudaev’s supporters would agree to give up their weapons at
the same time. In other words, he suggested to Dudaev that the Chechens should
disarm unilaterally (since there was no suggestion of the Russian side
disarming). Naturally this proposal was not accepted by the government of the
Chechen Republic. On December 7, Grachyov had a meeting with Dudaev, but the
discussions proved fruitless.
On the same day in Moscow, the Security Council
held a session devoted to events in Chechnya, and the State Duma held a closed
session, to which the leaders of the government departments responsible for the
armed forces and other agencies of law enforcement were invited. However, they
failed to show up at the Duma, because they did not wish to answer the parliamentarians’
questions about who had given the orders to recruit members of the Russian
armed forces and bomb Grozny. We now know that the Russian military personnel
were recruited by the FSK on Stepashin’s instructions, and that the directives
to bombard Grozny were issued by the Ministry of Defense.
On December 8, the Chechen side announced it was
in possession of information that Russia was preparing to advance its forces on
to Chechen territory and launch an all-out land war against the republic. At a
press conference, held at the State Duma in Moscow on December 9, the chairman
of the Duma Federal Affairs and Regional Policy Committee and chairman of the
Republican Party of Russia, Vladimir Lysenko, announced that in that case, he
would table a motion in the Duma for the Russian government to be dismissed. On
December 8, the Working Commission on Negotiations for the Settlement of the
Conflict in the Chechen Republic managed to broker an agreement between the
representatives of President Dudaev and the opposition, under which
negotiations were due to start in Vladikavkaz at 15.00 hours on December 12.
The Russian federal authorities’ delegation to the negotiations was to have
consisted of twelve members led by the deputy minister for nationalities and
regional policy, Vyacheslav Mikhailov. The delegation from Grozny was to have
numbered nine members, headed by the Chechen minister of the economy and
finance, Taimaz Abubakarov. From the opposition there was to have been a
three-man delegation led by Bek Baskhanov, the public prosecutor general of
Chechnya. It was provisionally agreed that the main problems to be discussed at
the negotiations between Moscow and Grozny were halting the bloodshed and
establishing normal relations. Negotiations with the supporters of the Chechen
opposition were only supposed to deal with questions of disarmament.
All this increased the chances of peace being
preserved, and left the “party of war” with very little time until December 12.
In effect, the announcement by the Working Commission for the Settlement of the
Chechen Conflict determined the date on which military land operations began.
If the peace negotiations were due to start on December 12, the war had to be
launched on December 11. The Russian leadership acted accordingly: on December
11, land forces crossed the demarcation line into the Chechen Republic, and for
the first few days, Russian military reports spoke of the absence of any real
resistance or any losses.
By December 13,
Soskovets had already determined his main lines of action, and he informed
journalists that the total cost of implementing measures to normalize the
situation in Chechnya could amount to about a trillion rubles. (This was the
sum that would first have to be allocated from the budget, so that it could be
systematically embezzled.) He said that the government’s first priority was to
get the aid delivered to the population of Chechnya, and special attention
would be paid to ensuring that it was not wasted or stolen (we now know for
certain that no aid ever reached Chechnya, and all of it was wasted and
stolen).
Soskovets emphasized that members of the Chechen
diaspora, living in Moscow and other Russian cities, should not be considered
potential terrorists. Note this phrase. So far, nobody had even dreamed of
regarding the members of the Chechen diaspora as potential terrorists, and
there had not actually been any terrorist attacks. The war with Chechnya was
still not even regarded as a war, but something more in the nature of a police
operation, and there had not yet been any serious casualties. Yet, for some
reason the First Deputy Prime Minister seemed to think it possible that the
Chechens might organize acts of terrorism on Russian soil. Soskovets’ remark
that no discriminatory measures would be applied to the general mass of Chechen
citizens, and that the federal authorities were not even considering the
enforced deportation of Chechens, was clearly a suggestion from the “party of
war” that war should be waged against the entire Chechen people throughout the
whole of Russia, including by both discriminatory measures and enforced
deportation.
Lieutenant-General Alexander Lebed, commander of
the 14th Russian Army in Pridniestrovie (the region along the Dniestr River in
Moldova), fiercely opposed the “party of war,” because he understood perfectly
well what Soskovets was hinting at and the price Russia would have to pay. In a
telephone interview from his headquarters in Tiraspol, he declared that “the
Chechen conflict can only be resolved by diplomatic negotiations. Chechnya is
repeating the Afghanistan scenario point for point. We are risking unleashing
war with the entire Islamic world. Solitary fighters can go on forever burning
our tanks and picking off our soldiers with individual shots. In Chechnya, we
have shot ourselves in the foot exactly as we did in Afghanistan, and that is
very sad. A well-reinforced and well-stocked Grozny is capable of offering long
and stubborn resistance.” Lebed reminded everyone that in Soviet times Dudaev
had commanded an airborne division of strategic bombers capable of waging war
on a continental scale, and that “fools were not appointed” to such posts.
Beginning on
December 14, Moscow was transferred to a state of semi-military alert, and
Muscovites were deliberately frightened with the prospect of inevitable Chechen
terrorism. The agencies of the Ministry of the Interior stepped up their
protection of the city’s vital installations, and FSK personnel worked to
improve their security. A large number of state institutions were guarded by
police patrols armed with automatic weapons. The Ministry of the Interior
announced that this was all a response to the threat of terrorist groups being
sent to Moscow from Grozny. The first suspected Chechen terrorists began to be
sought out. On the evening of December 13, the Chechen Israil Getiev, a native
and resident of Grozny, had been arrested for setting off New Year firecrackers
outside the Prague restaurant on New Arbat
Street and detained at the station of the Fifth Moscow Police Precinct. At
this stage, announcements like this could still raise a smile, but on December
14, it was suddenly announced that after less than three full days of military
operations, “casualties on both sides are already in the hundreds.” It was all
getting beyond a laughing matter.
On December 15, the true scale of the operation
being launched was revealed. Advancing on Grozny, alongside subunits of the
Ministry of the Interior, were two general army divisions from the North
Caucasus Military District and two assault brigades at full strength. Chechen
territory was also entered by composite regiments from the Pskov, Vitebsk, and
Tula divisions of the airborne assault forces (VDV), with 600 to 800 men in
each. In the region of Mozdok, disembarkation had begun of composite regiments
from the Ulyanovsk and Kostroma divisions of the VDV. Grozny was being
approached along four main lines of advance: one from Ingushetia, two from
Mozdok, and one from Dagestan. The Russian forces were preparing to storm the
city. On the Chechen side, according to information from the Russian Ministry
of the Interior and the FSK, more than 13,000 armed men had been assembled in
and around Grozny.
Yeltsin was
moving towards the edge of an abyss. A session of the Security Council, held
under his chairmanship on December 17, reviewed a plan for “the implementation
of measures to restore constitutional legality, the rule of law and peace in
the Chechen Republic.” The Security Council made the Ministry of Defense
(Grachyov), the Ministry of the Interior (Viktor Yerin), the FSK (Stepashin),
and the Federal Border Service (Nikolaev) responsible for using every possible
means to disarm and destroy illegal armed formations in Chechnya and to secure
the state and administrative borders of the Chechen Republic. The work was to
be coordinated by Grachyov. This was the day that marked the end of Russia’s
liberal-democratic period. President Yeltsin had committed political suicide.
On December 17,
the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that from 00.00 hours on
December 18, units of Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry forces would be
obliged to take decisive action, and make use of all means at their disposal to
re-establish constitutional legality and the rule of law on the territory of
Chechnya. Groups of bandits would be disarmed and, if they offered resistance,
destroyed. The Ministry of the Interior statement claimed that the civilian
population of Chechnya had been informed of the urgent need to leave Grozny and
other centers of population in which rebel groups were located. The Interior
Ministry strongly recommended foreign citizens and journalists in the zone of
hostilities to leave Grozny and make their way to safe areas. (Despite the
warnings from the Russian leadership, most of the foreign journalists remained
in Grozny, and at The French Courtyard Hotel where they stayed, rooms were in
as short supply as ever.)
On the same day, Soskovets announced to the
world that President Dudaev had been summoned to Mozdok to meet a Russian
government delegation headed by Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Yegorov and FSK
director Stepashin. Soskovets stated that if Dudaev did not come to Mozdok, the
Russian forces would take action in accordance with the regulations for the
elimination of illegal armed formations, and he also announced that expenditure
on the operations over the preceding week amounted to sixty billion rubles by
the Ministry of the Interior and 200 billion rubles by the Ministry of Defense.
Four hours before the deadline expired, at eight
in the evening on December 17, Dudaev made his final attempt to avert war and
wired the Russian leadership that he would agree “to start negotiations at the
appropriate level without any preconditions and to lead the governmental delegation
of the Chechen Republic in person.” In other words, Dudaev was again demanding
a personal meeting with Yeltsin, but since Dudaev persisted in his refusal to
pay any money for such a meeting to be arranged, his cable went unanswered.
At nine in the
morning on December 18, the Russian forces blockading Grozny began storming the
city. Front-line air units and army helicopters delivered “precision blows
against Dudaev’s command post at Khankala near Grozny, the bridges over the
Terek River to the north and also against maneuverable groups of armored
vehicles.” An announcement from the Temporary Information Center of the Russian
High Command stated that following the destruction of the armored vehicles, the
plan was for the forces blockading Grozny to advance and proceed with the
disarmament of illegal armed groups on the territory of Chechnya. President
Yeltsin’s plenipotentiary representative in Chechnya announced that Dudaev now
had no choice but to surrender.
On December 18, Soskovets, having been appointed
to yet another post as head of the Russian government’s operational
headquarters for the coordination of action taken by agencies of the executive
authorities, informed the press that in Grozny “they are studying the
possibility” of carrying out terrorist attacks aimed at military and civilian
targets in Central Russia and the Urals, and also of hijacking a civilian
passenger plane. The First Deputy Prime Minister’s astonishingly detailed
information was, in fact, an indication that terrorist acts could be expected
within a few days.
On December 22,
the press office of the Government of the Russian Federation announced that
Chechens were blowing themselves up in order to throw the blame for the
explosions on to the Russian army. The statement issued read as follows:
“Today at 10 in the morning a meeting was held
under the chairmanship of first deputy chairman of the government Oleg
Soskovets which was attended by members of the government, members of the
Security Council, and representatives of the President’s Office. The meeting
discussed the situation which has arisen in the Chechen Republic and the
measures being taken by the president and the government to restore
constitutional legality and provide economic assistance to the population of
areas which have been liberated from the armed formations of the Dudaev regime.
Reports made by those present at the meeting indicate that last night
operations to disarm the armed bandit formations continued, and bombing raids
were carried out against their strongholds. The city of Grozny was not
subjected to bombardment. However, the guerrillas made attempts to imitate the
bombardment of housing districts. At about one in the morning, an office
building and an apartment block were blown up. The residents, both Chechen and
Russian, were not given any warning of the planned attack. The imitation of
bombardment was undertaken in order to demonstrate the thesis of ‘a war being
waged by the Russian leadership against the Chechen people.’ This thesis was
proclaimed yesterday in Dudaev’s ‘appeal to the international community.’”
In other words,
the Russian government’s press office attempted to blame the Chechens for the
destruction by Russian forces of an office building and apartment block
containing civilians.
Initiated by
Soskovets, this announcement couched in Stalinist prose was made public one day
before the explosion between the stations of Kozhukhovo and Kanatchikovo on the Moscow circular railroad (there
were no casualties and no terrorists were found).
December 23 is
the date which can be regarded as the beginning of the FSB’s terrorist campaign
against Russia. From then on, terrorist attacks became a commonplace
occurrence.
Chapter 2
The secret services run
riot
It is worth noting the way in which the press
office of the Russian government described the terrorist attack carried out on
December 23: “Information has been received concerning the dispatch to Moscow
[from Chechnya] of three experienced guerrilla fighters, including one woman,
who have instructions to assume the leadership of groups of terrorists sent
here previously. A group of foreigners who were seeking contact with guerrillas
from Grozny has been detained, and a number of radio-controlled explosive
devices they were carrying have been confiscated, together with twenty
kilograms of TNT and sixteen radio-controlled anti-personnel and anti-tank
mines. On the night of December 23, the rails were blown up on one section of
the Moscow circular railroad. Another bomb was rendered harmless. Measures are
being taken to identify sabotage groups active in Moscow and the Moscow
Region.”
No investigation of any acts of terrorism was
carried out. The picture was clear enough anyway: first the Chechens sent
“sabotage groups” to Moscow and the Moscow Region; then they sent three
experienced guerrilla leaders to help them; and finally, a “group of
foreigners” was brought in to help them from abroad with TNT and bombs
(apparently they were carrying the bombs on their persons as they entered the
country). The result of all these complicated preparations was a terrorist
attack on one section of the Moscow circular railroad, which indicated that the
groups of saboteurs already sent to Moscow and the Moscow Region had not yet
been neutralized (one could assume that the terrorist attacks would continue).
Everything in
the press office statement was absolutely untrue, except for the announcement
that there had been an explosion on a section of the Moscow circular railroad
on December 23. The modus operandi suggests that this attack was also carried
out by Lazovsky’s people. In any case, it is impossible to regard as mere
coincidence the fact that only four days later yet another terrorist attack was
carried out in Moscow. At nine in the evening on December 27, 1994, Vladimir
Vorobyov, a free-lance FSB agent and employee of Lazovksy’s company Lanako, who
came from a long line of military men (in 1920, his grandfather had been in
charge of the Arsenal arms plant in Tula), and had a Candidate degree (i.e.
Ph.D.) in Technical Sciences and was employed at the Zhukovsky Academy (on the
development of a new anti-missile defense system), planted a remote-controlled
bomb in a bus at a bus stop on Route 33 between the All-Union Economic
Exhibition (VDNKh) and the Yuzhnaya subway station. There were no passengers on
board the bus when the bomb exploded, and the only casualty was the driver,
Dmitry Trapezov, who suffered severe bruising and concussion. Trolley buses
standing close by were lacerated by shrapnel.
Vorobyov’s boss, Lazovsky, worked not only for
the FSK, but also for the SVR, where his controller was the experienced
officer, Pyotr Yevgenievich Suslov, who was born in 1951. Lazovsky was one of
his secret agents. Suslov officially quit the intelligence service and went into
business in 1995, after which he made repeated journeys to war-torn Grozny,
Baghdad, Teheran, the Arab Emirates, and other countries in the Middle East. In
fact, Suslov was organizing extra-legal reprisals. In order to carry out
missions involving acts of coercion and killings, he hired qualified former
operatives from special units, in particular from the special missions unit of
the First (Central) Department (PGU) of the KGB of the USSR, known as Vympel,
who possessed advanced sniper’s skills. Vympel’s officers were involved both as
instructors and front line operatives, and a special Vympel Fund was even
established to finance this work. The chairman of the fund was a criminal
“boss” well known in Russia, Sergei Petrovich Kublitsky (his underworld nickname
was Vorkuta). Suslov was the vice-chairman. At the same time, Suslov was also
chairman of the board of directors of the “Law and Order Center” regional
social fund (Moscow, Voronkovskaya Street, 21).
Suslov
maintained extensive contacts in the state’s departments of law enforcement and
agencies of coercion, including the leadership of the FSB. Operational data
obtained through the Central Office of the Interior for the Moscow Region
indicates, in particular, that Suslov maintained close contact with
Major-General Yevgeny Grigorievich Khokholkov, head of the Long-Term Programs
Office (UPP) established in summer 1996, which provided the basis for the
establishment in 1997 of the FSB’s Office for the Analysis and Suppression of
the Activity of Criminal Organizations (URPDPO), more commonly known as the
Office for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations (URPO). Alexei Kimovich
Antropov, a graduate of the intelligence school of the External Intelligence
Service, was a sector head in the Third Section of the URPO, specializing in
the struggle against internal terrorism. Both Lazovsky and Suslov were on good
terms with Antropov.
It is worthwhile
examining in greater detail this secret department of the FSB with its long,
incomprehensible title that is impossible to remember and was frequently
changed to prevent the public penetrating its veil of secrecy. The Office for
the Analysis of Criminal Groups was established in order to identify and then
neutralize (liquidate) sources of information representing a threat to state
security. In other words, to carry out extra-judiciary killings, acts of
provocation and terrorism, and abductions. One of Khokholkov’s deputies was
major-general N. Stepanov and another was the former minister of state security
for the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, A.K. Makarychev. The UPP possessed its
own external surveillance section; its own security consultant, Colonel
Vladimir Simaev; its own technical measures section, and two private detective
and bodyguard agencies called Stealth and Cosmic Alternative. The latter
specialized in bugging pagers and mobile phones and other technical operational
measures, while Stealth had a legendary reputation.
A private bodyguard and detective agency which
changed its name periodically, just like the UPP, Stealth was registered as a
business in 1989, at the very dawn of perestroika by a resident of Moscow
called Ivanov, who was an agent of the Fifth Department of the KGB of the USSR
(which subsequently became Department Z). Ivanov was used in the struggle
against internal terrorism, and his line of contact was with a member of
Colonel V.V. Lutsenko’s department, which had provided operational support for
the establishment and activities of Stealth. With the assistance of Lutsenko,
who used the private bodyguard firm to resolve personal rather than operational
matters (the free provision of various types of protection, or “roofs,” for
commercial organizations), during the period from 1989 to 1992, Stealth
developed extensive contacts in the criminal underworld and the sphere of law
enforcement, becoming one of the most well-known security agencies in Russia.
Following his discharge from the special
agencies in 1992, Lutsenko took control of the detective and bodyguard firm,
which he re-registered with himself as one of the partners. Lutsenko’s solid
connections in various departments of the former KGB, in combination with the
exodus from the Russian security services of large numbers of experienced
operatives who also maintained their own well-tested contacts and networks of
agents, meant that Lutsenko was able to hire highly qualified professionals to
work in Stealth.
From his old
area of operations (the struggle against terrorism) Lutsenko had retained
reliable contacts with representatives of the former Ninth Department of the
KGB (protection of high-level national leaders). This made it possible for him
to contact Korzhakov, Barsukov and their entourages and offer them the services
of Stealth, under his management, to assist the SBP and FSK in the less
traditional forms of struggle against organized criminal activity.
His suggestion
met with approval, and a general plan of action was rapidly developed with
input from Korzhakov’s first deputy, General G.G. Ragozin. The program
envisaged the use of criminal and extremist organizations, individual
criminals, and retrained military personnel from the special missions
department of the GRU of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Interior,
and the FSB to undermine and break up criminal groupings and physically
eliminate underworld “bosses” and leaders of criminal organizations.
In practice, everything turned out according to
that eternal Russian principle: “we wanted to do better, but things turned out
the same as always.” Stealth provided a “roof” for a range of commercial
organizations and carried out various kinds of operations to put pressure on
criminal and commercial competitors, up to and including contract killings. In
support of this activity, Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Trofimov arranged for any
possible criminal investigations of the bodyguard firm by the agencies of law
enforcement and the security forces (the FSB, Ministry of the Interior, the tax
police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office) to be neutralized. The heads of all of
these state departments were informed of the contents of the initial program
for which Stealth had been set up, and an understanding was reached that their
agencies would not investigate Stealth’s activities.
Stealth used the Izmailovo organized criminal
group as its strike force, but gradually the financial influence of the group
and the infiltration of its personnel transformed Stealth into the Izmailovo
group’s “roof,” or cover, and Lutsenko became its puppet leader. Other private
security companies, such as Kmeti and Cobalt, also found themselves in the same
situation. All of them were exploited to implement the existing program for
combating organized crime by non-traditional means. They became implicated in a
series of well-known contract killings of criminal leaders, businessmen, and
bankers. The operatives who carried out these murders were hired killers from
free-lance special agency groups. As a rule, all of the operations were planned
and carried out in a highly professional manner, with the subsequent elimination,
if necessary, of the hired killers themselves and the individuals who provided
their cover. There was no prospect of investigations into this kind of crime
ever producing a trial. Any criminals involved in the crimes, who happened to
be detained, simply didn’t live long enough to get to the court.
In time, Stealth developed into an efficient
bodyguard and detection organization, equipped with a wide range of technology,
including special items and weapons (some of them illegal), with a payroll of
up to 600 individuals. Approximately seventy percent of its personnel consisted
of former members of the FSB and SBP, and about thirty percent were former
members of the police force. Stealth was transferred to the UPP when it was set
up in 1996, although it did maintain a certain degree of autonomy.
The main
principle on which the UPP operated was “problem-solving”: if there’s a
problem, then a solution must be found. Clues to the existence of this
operating principle can be found in Pavel Sukhoplatov’s memoirs, published in
Moscow in 1996, which happen to be the favorite reference text of the UPP’s
leaders. The murder of the president of Chechnya, Djokhar Dudaev, provides a
good example of the problem-solving approach to the achievement of a combat
goal. The people who organized this killing were also involved in setting up
the UPP.
In a certain
sense Dudaev’s murder was a contract killing, but in this case, the contract
was put out by the leadership of the state. The oral, but nonetheless official,
order to eliminate Dudaev was given by Russian President Yeltsin. The
prehistory to this decision is vague and mysterious. Some time after May 20,
1995, informal negotiations began between the Russian and Chechen sides on a
cessation of military operations and the signing of a peace agreement. On the
Chechen side, the negotiations were organized by the former General Public
Prosecutor of Chechnya, Usman Imaev, and on the Russian side by the well-known
businessman, Arkady Volsky. The Russians tried to persuade the Chechens to
capitulate. On behalf of the Russian leadership, Volsky offered Dudaev the
chance to leave Chechnya for any other country on his own terms (as Yeltsin put
it: “anywhere he wants, and the farther from Russia the better”).
The meeting with
Dudaev was far from pleasant for Volsky. Dudaev felt he had been insulted, and
he was in a fury. Volsky was probably only saved from immediate measures of
reprisal by his parliamentary status. Imaev was not spared Dudaev’s wrath
either; soon afterwards he was accused of collaborating with the Russian secret
services. Having been withdrawn from the negotiation process and demoted, Imaev
returned to his native village of Kulary, where he turned pious and began
preaching the norms of Muslim Shariah law. The Russian authorities made no
attempt to prevent Imaev from travelling to Istanbul and Cracow, where the
Chechens felt secure enough to engage in open anti-Russian propaganda. Dudaev
expressed concern about Imaev’s journey. Imaev returned to Chechnya shortly
before the Chechen president was assassinated and was last seen at a Russian
fortified position near the village of Kulary, where he had gone for a meeting
with representatives of the federal authorities. Imaev told the men who
accompanied him on the way to Kulary that he would be back in a week. He and
the people who had been waiting for him flew off in a helicopter to an unknown
destination, and he was never seen again.
However, the
negotiations begun by Volsky and Imaev did have a sequel: Dudaev was able to
reach an agreement with Moscow on halting military operations. For the
appropriate decree, Dudaev was asked to pay another multi-million dollar bribe.
He paid the money so that no more people would be killed for nothing, but no
decree calling a halt to military operations emerged. The people in Yeltsin’s
entourage had “dumped” the Chechens.
Then Dudaev
ordered his lieutenant, Shamil Basaev, either to get the money back or arrange
for the beginning of peace talks and the halt to military action, for which
money had already been paid over. Basaev came up with a novel idea. On June 14,
1995, he attempted to coerce Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Soskovets into honoring
their debt by seizing a hospital in Budyonnovsk, with more than a thousand
hostages. After all, this was a serious business deal he was trying to close!
Responding to Basaev’s occupation of the
hospital, the Russian special operations squad Alpha had already taken the
first floor of the building and was on the point of freeing the hostages and
disposing of the terrorists, when Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, who had
undertaken to mediate, judged correctly that the Chechens had been “dumped out
of order.” He promised to start peace talks immediately, insisted on a halt to
the operation to free the hostages and guaranteed Basaev’s men an unhindered
withdrawal to Chechnya. There was another chance to liberate the hostages and
eliminate Basaev’s men on their way home, with the interior forces special
subunit Vityaz standing by, simply waiting for the order. However, the order
was not given: Chernomyrdin had given Basaev certain guarantees, and he had to
keep his word.
On July 3, 1995, President Yeltsin signed the
decree that Dudaev had paid for, No. 663: “On the stationing of agencies for
the military management of communications, military units, institutions, and
organizations of the armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of
the Chechen Republic.” On July 7, Yeltsin signed a second decree detailing the
procedure for implementing the first.
After the
seizure of the hostages at Budyonnovsk the Kremlin bureaucrats added Shamil
Basaev’s name to Dudaev’s in their list of undesirable witnesses. They decided
to eliminate him with the assistance of a specially established combat
operations unit, commanded by the head of the Third Section (Intelligence) of
the Military Counterintelligence Department of the FSB of the Russian
Federation, Major-General Yury Ivanovich Yarovenko.
At the same time, a combat operations group was
set up under the command of Khokholkov (in Chechnya, he worked under the
pseudonym Denisov) in order to eliminate Dudaev. The group included a captain,
first rank, Alexander Kamyshnikov (the future deputy head of URPO), and a
number of other officers. It was stationed at the military base in Khankala.
Chechen nationals were also brought into the group, such as Umar Pasha, who had
previously served in Dagestan, and following Dudaev’s elimination was promoted
and transferred to Moscow. Also used in the operation was the air arm of the GRU,
which had two planes for targeting rockets on beacons in radiotelephones.
Dudaev’s ordinary phone was successfully switched for one with such a beacon.
On April 22, 1996, Dudaev, his wife Alla, and
several companions set out from the settlement of Gekhi-Chu in the
Urus-Martansk district of western Chechnya, where they had spent the night, and
made their way into the woods. Dudaev always moved out of settled areas when he
needed to make phone calls, because it was harder to get a fix on his position
away from centers of population. There was no unbroken forest cover in that
area, only scrub with occasional trees. Alla began preparing a meal, while the
men stood off to one side. Dudaev didn’t allow them to come close to him when
he was talking on the phone, since there had already been one case of an
air-strike against him while he was making calls, but on that occasion the
rocket had missed.
This time,
however, Dudaev spoke on the phone for longer than usual (they say he was
talking with the well-known Russian businessman and politician, Konstantin
Borovoi, who stayed on the line to Dudaev until he was cut off). A guided
missile from a Russian SU-24 assault plane, targeted on the signal from
Dudaev’s satellite phone, exploded close to Dudaev, and his face was burned a
yellowish-orange color. The car was brought up, they put Dudaev on the back
seat, and his wife sat beside him. Dudaev was unconscious, and he had a wound
behind his right ear. He died without regaining consciousness. The State
Defense Committee of Chechnya entrusted the arrangements for his funeral to
Lecha Dudaev, the Chechen president’s nephew. Dudaev’s burial place can only
have been known to a very narrow circle of individuals, including Zelimkhan
Yandarbiev, who succeeded Dudaev as the chairman of the State Defense Committee
and acting president of the Chechen Republic until the election of 1997, when
Aslan Maskhadov was elected as president. According to Chechen sources, when
Alla, the president’s widow, and Musa Idigov, the president’s personal
bodyguard, were arrested at the airport in the town of Nalgik, Dudaev’s remains
were hurriedly reburied at a new site. Since Lecha Dudaev was killed during the
second Chechen war, there have been no official sources which can say where
Djokhar Dudaev is buried.
The elimination of Dudaev was probably the most
successful operation carried out by Khokholkov and his group. Khokholkov
himself was nominated for the order of “Hero of Russia” for successfully
completing his mission, but he preferred the post of head of the newly founded
UPP, with the rank of major-general.
In the summer of 1996, after the
Korzhakov-Barsukov-Soskovets group had fallen from power and General Lebed had
been dismissed from his post as secretary of the Security Council, Stealth
could no longer count on support from state structures and was left entirely
under the control of the Izmailovo criminal group. Lutsenko’s only remaining
serious contacts at state level were now in the UPP-URPO, which was headed by
General Khokholkov. The absorption of organized criminal groups into the
state’s agencies of coercion had seemed a natural and logical step to the
leadership of the FSB. Unfortunately the logic of events tended more and more
frequently to draw the secret services into purely criminal activity. In theory
this tendency should have been countered by the USB of the FSB, but in
practice, the USB was incapable of maintaining the fight against mass crime
committed with the direct connivance or participation of the FSB and the SBP. The
only hope left was the single remaining law enforcement agency, the criminal
investigation department (UR). In January 1996, thirty-eight-year-old Vladimir
Ilyich Tskhai, “criminal investigation’s last romantic,” was transferred to
MUR, the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department.
Chapter 3
Moscow detectives take on
the FSB
Tskhai was made
head of the Twelfth Section, which specialized in solving contract killings,
and only ten months later, he was already the deputy chief of MUR (Moscow
Criminal Investigation Department). He had previously worked in the Central
Criminal Investigation Department (GUUR) of the Russian Ministry of the
Interior. Tskhai was regarded as being an exceptionally hardworking and
talented detective. “He was a born detective, and there’ll never be another
like him,” was what his friends told us. “Tskhai was easy and interesting to
work with,” said Andrei Suprunenko, especially important cases investigator for
the Moscow Public Prosecutor’s Office. “A competent and decent man. One of the
romantics. He provided the link between the operatives and the investigators,
he believed that even the most complicated cases could be untangled...”
It was Tskhai
who succeeded in exposing the group that produced fake identity cards from the
departments of coercion. In that case, FAPSI contributed the efforts of its
USB, under the leadership of Colonel Sergei Yurievich Barkovsky. In an article
which was evidently commissioned by the FSB, the Moscow journalist, Alexander
Khinshtein, wrote that Lazovsky himself oversaw the production of false
documents, and that was why his people had cover documents from the FSB, FAPSI,
GRU, and MO. However, this was not the case. Lazovsky had absolutely nothing to
do with the business of forging official identity documents, which Tskhai
uncovered. Naturally enough, Barkovsky doesn’t even mention Lazovsky in his
version of events and names entirely different people as the organizers. Here
are Barkovsky’s own words:
“Even the
specialists found it rather difficult to distinguish the fakes from genuine
documents. Sometimes the quality of the ‘dud’ was actually better. Expert
analysis showed that there was clearly just one workshop involved. Following a
whole series of operational and investigative measures four, very far from
ordinary people were detained. One was the former deputy head of a section of
the KGB of the USSR, who had become the head of a firm with the attractive name
of Honor. Another was the head of one of the printing shops in Moscow and the
former head of the printing shop of the administration of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU). Detained together with
them was a former FAPSI lieutenant who had been involved in processing passes
during his period of service. It is assumed that the idea of producing
counterfeit documents must have been his. And there was one very talented
engraver.”
From Barkovsky’s account, it follows that the
forgeries were not produced by bandits, but by a former member of the
nomenklatura, the Soviet professional elite (from the administrative apparatus
of the CC CPSU) and a member of the secret services (FAPSI). If that is the
case, the possibility cannot be excluded that the laboratory for producing
high-quality forgeries was also set up with the permission of the FSB and
FAPSI, and controlled by them.
Let us get back
to Lazovsky. The liquidation of his group during the period from February to
August of 1996, was the greatest success achieved by the Twelfth Section of
MUR. The personnel of Lazovsky’s group were not organized on local territorial
lines like ordinary criminal groupings. Lazovsky’s brigade was international,
which was a pointer to its distinctive nature. Working under Lazovsky were
Chechens and people from Kazakhstan and gunmen from groups based in towns close
to Moscow. Marat Vasiliev was a Muscovite, Roman Polonsky was from Dubna, and
Vladimir Abrosimov was from Tula, Anzor Movsaev was from Grozny... The brigade
was very well equipped, too.
Lazovsky had
been on the Russian federal wanted list from 1995, for offenses under article
209 (“banditry”) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. He was accused
in connection with a number of different episodes. For instance, in December
1993, Lazovsky’s group killed the guards who were transporting cash for the
MMST Company, and 250 thousand dollars were stolen.
At the same, time there were disputes between
Lanako and the Viktor Corporation over deals involving deliveries of oil
products. On January 10, 1994, persons unknown (obviously working for the
Viktor Corporation) shelled the automobile of Vladimir Kozlovsky, a director
and chairman of the management board at Lanako, with a grenade thrower. (The
first syllable of Kozlovsky’s surname had provided the third syllable of the
name Lanako.) Barely two days later, on January 12, a bomb exploded outside an
apartment belonging to one of Viktor’s managers with such massive controlled
force that the steel door was hurled into the apartment and clean through the
next wall standing in its way. It was purely a matter of luck that no one in
the apartment was hurt. The explosion, however, triggered off a fire in the
apartment block, and neighbors were forced to jump from the windows. Two of
them were killed, and several other people were injured.
On January 13, persons unknown turned up at
Lanako’s Moscow premises, at corpus 3 of 2 Perevedenovsky Lane, where insult
swapping with Lanako staff was followed by an exchange of gunfire. Ten minutes
later, two busloads of OMON officers (the special operations police brigade)
arrived at the Lanako offices, where they overcame armed resistance and took
the office by storm (it was only by good luck that there were no casualties).
They then proceeded to ransack the premises, arrest about sixty people, and take
them away to the station, where they were recorded on videotape. After that,
almost everyone was allowed to go. The only persons still detained at the
station the following day were four bodyguards who had firearms in their
possession when they were arrested. They were later tried, but received
surprisingly lenient treatment for a shoot-out with the police. Two were
released by the court, and two were given one year’s penal servitude.
On March 4, 1994, a full-scale battle broke out
in the Dagmos Restaurant on Kazakov Street between Lazovsky’s gunmen and
members of a Dagestan criminal organization, with about thirty men involved
from each side. The final tally was seven dead and two wounded. All of the dead
were members of the Dagestan group.
On June 16, 1994, three members of the Taganka
criminal group were mowed down by machine-gun fire near the offices of the
Credit-Consensus Bank. Lazovsky had demanded that the bank pay him
two-and-a-half billion rubles in interest on a sum of money over which the bank
was in dispute with the Rosmyasmoloko firm, and the bank had turned for help to
the Taganka group, its “roof.” The battle was sparked off by the Taganka
bandits’ refusal to pay Lazovsky.
Lazovsky committed one of his most brutal crimes
on September 5, 1994. That year, arguments had flared up between Lazovsky and
his partner, the joint owner of the Grozny Oil Refinery, Atlan Nataev (whose
surname had provided the second syllable of Lanako’s company title). Nataev was
last seen at about ten o’clock in the evening on September 5, close to the
Dynamo subway station, in a dark-blue BMW 740 which belonged to Lanako. He was
with two bodyguards, Robert Rudenko and Vladimir Lipatov, who disappeared with
him. Lazovsky did not bother to report the disappearance of his colleagues to
the police.
By
circumstantial coincidence, on September 7, the head of the Regional Department
for Combating Organized Crime (RUOP), Vladimir Dontsov, escorted by ten men
wielding automatic weapons, carried out an “operational inspection” at the
Lanako offices. During the search Moscow, RUOP’s personnel discovered a certain
quantity of unlicensed arms, in particular “TT” pistols intended for resale on
the illegal market. However, the find was not treated as seriously as it should
have been, and no arrests were made.
It emerged later
that Nataev, Rudenko, and Lipatov had been kidnapped by Polonsky and
Shchelenkov, and taken to a dacha in the Academy of Science’s suburban
settlement outside Moscow. Nataev was killed, and his corpse was beheaded. Then
the corpse and the two bodyguards were driven to the peat bogs in the Yaroslavl
district, where Rudenko and Lipatov were also beheaded. All three bodies were
buried in the peat, from which they were recovered in 1996 by members of MUR.
The identity pass of a General Staff officer was discovered on Nataev’s corpse.
On September 18,
Nataev’s brother arrived in Moscow in a state of alarm. Lazovsky summoned him
to talks at a parking lot on Burakov Street, which belonged to his uncle,
Nikolai Lazovksy. The owner of the parking lot sent his bodyguards home so that
there would be no witnesses, and when the second Nataev, arrived Shchelenkov,
Polonsky, and Grishin met him with a hail of bullets from automatic weapons,
pistols and even a sawn-off shotgun. Nataev returned fire fourteen times, and
before he was killed himself, he managed to gun down Polonsky and Grishin. The
exchange of fire was so intensive that several cars in the parking lot caught
fire. When the police arrived on the scene, all they found were pools of blood
and spent cartridges. A few minutes later, news reached them from an emergency
ambulance station where doctors had Polonsky’s body (six unknown persons had
blocked off Korolenko Street with their Volga automobile, stopped an emergency ambulance,
and handed over Polonsky to the medics).
Lazovsky’s group was also responsible for the
killing of the general director of the Tuapsi Oil refinery, Anatoly Vasilenko,
an old business associate of Lanako, who was shot in Tuapsi shortly before a
meeting of the partners in the refinery. According to operational information,
not long before the shooting, Lazovsky had taken a charter flight to Tuapsi for
a meeting with Vasilenko (Lazovsky was met at the airport by members of the
Tuapsi FSB), and had apparently failed to reach an understanding with him.
Lazovsky was also suspected of the abduction in 1996 of State Duma deputy Yu.A.
Polyakov, but this case remained a “loose end” that was never tied up.
It is obvious that no attempt was made to bring
in Lazovsky before Tskhai was transferred to MUR. No attention had been paid to
Lanako after the Yauza bombing, primarily because it was an FSB outfit.
According to MUR, almost all the members of Lazovsky’s group used “cover
documents” which were not fakes, but the genuine item. This led MUR operatives
to draw the correct conclusion that Lanako had close links with the secret
services, especially as Lazovsky himself took part in operations to free FSB
personnel who had been taken prisoner in Chechnya.
MUR, which at
that time was headed by Savostianov, repeatedly observed and even detained
senior Lanako personnel in the company of FSB officers. Lazovsky’s personal
bodyguard and his firm’s security service were headed by a serving officer from
the Moscow Department for Illegal Armed Formations of the UFSB, Major Alexei
Yumashkin, who employed FSB officers Karpychev and Mekhkov (on one of the
occasions when Lazovsky was arrested, they produced their FSB passes and were
released, together with Lazovsky). Lazovsky’s close friend and comrade-in-arms,
Roman Polonsky, used to carry in his pocket the identity card of a member of
the GRU and General Staff officer. When Polonsky was shot down at the parking
lot on Burakov Street on September 18, he had a Ministry of Defense GRU holster
on his belt and a GRU identity card in his pocket.
In February 1996, MUR operatives traced Lazovsky
to an apartment on Sadovo-Samotechnaya Street in Moscow, which belonged to an
individual by the name of Trostanetsky. Lazovsky and his bodyguard Marcel
Kharisov were arrested in the yard of the building as they got into a jeep,
which was being driven by Yumashkin (who was also immediately detained). Tskhai
arrested Lazovsky in person. He himself had obtained the sanction for his
arrest and the search warrants, since no one else wanted to get involved in the
case. When searched, Lazovsky was found to be carrying 1.03 grams of cocaine
and a loaded “PM” pistol, while a revolver, a grenade, and a shotgun were
removed from Trostanetsky’s apartment. Kharisov was also discovered to be
carrying an unlicensed “TT” pistol. He and Lazovsky were taken to the FSB’s
detention center at Lefortovo, where they refused to answer the investigator’s
questions. Yumashkin was taken away by the UFSB duty officer.
In addition to MUR, Lazovsky’s case was also
dealt with by the First Section of the Department for Combating Terrorism (UBT)
of the FSK of the Russian Federation, where it had been handled since 1994 by
Major Evgeny Makeiev, a senior operations officer for especially important
cases. The head of the First Section at that time was Alexander Mikhailovich
Platonov. Even then, the operatives understood just who Lazovsky was and who
stood behind him, which was why Platonov warned Makeiev that it was a difficult
and complicated case, gave him a small separate office to share with just one
colleague on the ninth floor of the newly refurbished old Lubyanka building,
and asked him not to discuss the contents of the operational report with any
one. The colleague who found himself in Makeiev’s office was Alexander
Litvinenko, one of the authors of this book, who first learned from Makeiev
that the Moscow Department of the FSB had been transformed into a gang of
criminals.
Makeiev worked in a highly conspiratorial
manner. As a rule, he himself was the only member of his section who attended
joint operations meetings with MUR, carrying a MUR identity pass as a cover. In
1995, Platonov was removed from operational duties and Lieutenant Colonel
Evgeny Alexandrovich Kolesnikov (who is now a major-general) became the new
head of the section. Kolesnikov joined the FSB from the FSO after Barsukov was
appointed head of the FSB in June 1995. Further work on the case of Lazovsky’s
group was blocked. The only person who would now sanction any measures
concerning Lazovsky was the deputy section head, Anatoly Alexandrovich Rodin,
who was appointed in Platonov’s time. Then Rodin and Makeiev were both
dismissed.
In its
investigations into Lazovsky and Lanako,
MUR identified six Moscow UFSB operatives as being involved in Lazovsky’s gang.
Journalists got wind of this and on November 11, 1996, Novaya Gazeta published the text of a letter of inquiry written by
its deputy senior editor, Yury Shchekochikhin, a deputy of the State Duma:
“Copies: Minister of the Interior of the Russian
Federation A.S. Kulikov; Public Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation
Yu.I. Skuratov; Head of the Office of the President of the Russian Federation
A.B. Chubais.
“The Security
Committee of the State Duma of Russia has received a letter addressed to me
from a high-ranking officer of the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian
Federation. The letter claims, in particular, that ‘recent times have seen the
emergence of a tendency for organized criminal groupings to merge with members
of the agencies of law enforcement and the secret services.’ In order to be
able to confirm or refute the conclusion drawn by the author of the letter, I
request you to reply to the following series of questions.
“1. Are the following people named in the letter
listed among the personnel of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region: S.N.
Karpychev, A.A. Yumashkin, E.A. Abovian, L.A. Dmitriev, A.A. Dokukin?
“2. Is it true
that since last year Sergei Petrovich Kublitsky, who has a criminal record and
is now the president of the firm Vityaz, which specializes in oil operations,
has been using as his personal bodyguards members of the UFSB for Moscow and
the Moscow Region, S.N. Karpychev and S.N. Mekhkov, and that on several
occasions they have accompanied him to meetings with the management of the
Tuapsi Oil Refinery and representatives of the firm Atlas, which holds a
controlling interest in the refinery?
“3. Is it true that investigators from the
Public Prosecutor’s Office of the city of Krasnodar have made several attempts
to interview as a witness to the murder of a director of the Tuapsi Oil
Refinery one Major A.A. Yumashkin, an employee of the UFSB for Moscow and the
Moscow Region, who also provides personal security services to M. M. Lazovsky,
the leader of an inter-regional criminal grouping, but that they been unable to
do so? How accurate is information that since 1994, Major A.A. Yumashkin has
been Lazovsky’s intimate business partner and that they have on several
occasions traveled together to Tuapsi and Krasnodar, where they have jointly
decided matters relating to the oil business?
“4. Is it true
that on February 17 of this year, employees of the UFSB of the Russian
Federation for Moscow and the Moscow Region, A.A. Yumashkin, S.N. Karpychev,
and S.N. Mekhkov, were detained together with S.P. Kubitsky and M.M. Lazovsky
by employees of the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation? If so,
then how true is it that after the FSB identity cards presented by Karpychev
and Mekhkov had been checked, they were both released? Were the leadership of
the FSB of the RF and First Deputy Minister of the Interior of the RF
Lieutenant-General V.I. Kolesnikov informed that employees of the UFSB for
Moscow and the Moscow Region had been detained? It is true that the prisoner
Lazovsky is suspected by agencies of law enforcement and the Office of the
Public Prosecutor of the RF of involvement in a number of contract killings? Has
the prisoner Kublitsky been questioned at the request of specialists from the
law enforcement agencies of the Krasnodar Region who are investigating the
murder of the director of the Tuapsi Oil Refinery?
“5. Is it true
that on October 16 of last year, employees of the Moscow RUOP detained A.N.
Yanin, born 1958, a resident of Moscow, and that the documents confiscated from
him included a check for luggage checked in at the left luggage office of the
Central Airport Terminal? Is it true that members of the police discovered in
Yanin’s luggage five AKS-74U automatic
weapons not registered in the card index of the MVD of the RF, five magazines
for the AKSes, 30 5.45 caliber, and three 7.62 caliber cartridges? Is it
accurate to assert that these arms had been confiscated from criminal groups
and, according to official documents, were kept at the premises of the UFSB for
Moscow and the Moscow Region? Is the information correct, according to which
after investigator Sholokhova initiated criminal proceedings against A.N. Yanin
at the ‘Airport’ Criminal Police Service [SKM] under the number 1646 in
accordance with article 218 4.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation,
two employees of the Service for Combating Illegal Armed Formations and
Banditry of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region arrived at RUOP and that
one of them, Colonel Edward Artashesovich Abovian, obtained the release of the
prisoner Yanin from custody? If this is so, did Colonel Abovian, in insisting
on Yanin’s release, have any basis for asserting, and did he, in fact, assert
that he was carrying out instructions from his immediate superior, General
Semeniuk, and that First Deputy Director of the FSB of the RF and head of the
UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region, General Trofimov, was aware of this?
Does Colonel Abovian have free access to the special technology and armaments, which the UFSB for Moscow
and the Moscow Region has at its disposal? What connection, if any, exists
between colonel Abovian and the commercial activities of the Mosinraschyot Bank
and the Tver Beer Combine?
“6. Is it true that on October 17 of this yea,
employees of the ROOP of the Northern District of the City of Moscow detained a
BMW 525 automobile with detachable number plates 41-34 MOK, which had
previously been used by S.P. Kubitsky, whom I have already mentioned and who is
better known in criminal circles as ‘Vorkuta’? Did the automobile contain a
driver who was carrying no documents and three passengers who showed the ROOP
employees identity cards for employees of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow
Region in the names of captain L.A. Dmitriev and Warrant Officer A.A. Dokukin,
following which they were released?
“Yours sincerely,
Yury Shchekochikhin,
Member of the Security Committee of the State Duma
of the Russian Federation”
Abovian, the FSB colonel working in the section
for combating illegal bandit groups who is mentioned in Shchekochikhin’s
inquiry, was Lazovsky’s controller at the FSB.
On November 23, 1996, First Deputy Minister of
the Interior Vladimir Kolesnikov, sent Shchekochikhin a reply via the Duma
committee in which he stated: “Indeed... in the course of operations undertaken
in Moscow to capture armed criminals in addition to Lazovsky, the persons
handed over to the agencies of the Ministry of the Interior included
individuals who presented identification from the agencies of law enforcement
and other state services... Under the present state of measures taken, Lazovsky
and the other accomplices stand accused of more than ten premeditated murders
in various regions of Russia...”
Kolesnikov
avoided giving direct answers to the specific questions raised by
Shchekochikhin in his inquiry. There was nothing to do but wait for the
criminals to be brought to trial.
FSB director
Kovalyov had two meetings with Shchekochikhin. At the end of the year,
Shchekochikhin received two replies from him, essentially identical in content.
One was secret and has remained in the archives of the State Duma.
Shchekochikhin made the other, open reply public:
“The Federal
Security Service has carried out an internal investigation into facts and
circumstances presented in the Duma deputy’s letter of inquiry in Novaya Gazeta... Investigations have
determined that the actions of the [UFSB employees] involved certain deviations
from the requirements of departmental regulations which, in combination with a
lack of practical experience and professionalism, could well have served as the
cause of the incident which has attracted your attention. In this regard,
particular concern is occasioned by the fact that a conflict occurred between
the members of two departments which engage in operational and investigative
activity in the criminal environment. Nonetheless, despite this regrettable
misunderstanding, the main goal was achieved, since Lazovsky’s gang was
neutralized...”
Kovalyov’s “particular concern” was not
occasioned by the collaboration of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region
with organized criminal groups, terrorists, and underworld “bosses,” but by the
actions of MUR employees under Tskhai’s leadership. As for the actual employees
of the UFSB, Kovalyov discerned in their behavior no more than “certain
deviations from the requirements of departmental regulations.” From his own
point of view Kovalyov was right. He saw no difference in principle between
members of the secret services and Lazovsky’s gunmen, and so he genuinely could
not understand the reasons for Shchekochikhin’s indignation. Shchekochikhin
believed that the representatives of the people, in the persons of members of
the State Duma, and the agencies of state security, fight together against
bandits and terrorists. However, Kovalyov knew that the FSB and the
extra-departmental agencies of coercion, which the people call bandits and
terrorists, actually wage their struggle against the very people represented in
the Duma by Shchekochikhin and others like him.
Naturally, no
internal FSB inquiry was ever held, and nobody was dismissed. Abovian was
apparently given a new name and retained in service. No records of any
investigations were submitted to any court or military tribunal. A reply was
received from the first deputy senior military prosecutor, lieutenant-general
of justice G.N. Nosin, to the following effect: “On the basis of the results of
an investigation concerning the officers of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow
Region mentioned in the letter, the instigation of criminal proceedings has
been rejected.” In reply to an inquiry from a correspondent of the Kommersant newspaper concerning
Yumashkin, the Moscow UFSB gave the honest answer that Yumashkin had been
carrying out a special mission to monitor the activities of Lazovsky’s group.
In 1997, however, Major Yumashkin was finally exposed and became a key figure
in criminal proceedings concerning contract killings, which were initiated by
the Tagansky District Public
Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Moscow. Since even his involvement in
organizing contract killings was apparently part of his special mission,
Yumashkin continued to serve in the Moscow UFSB, and in 1999, he was promoted
on schedule to the military rank of lieutenant colonel.
The only person
to suffer as a result of Shchekochikhin’s inquiry was the head of the Moscow
UFSB and deputy director of the FSB of Russia, Anatoly Trofimov, who was
removed from his post in February 1997. Sergei Yastrzhembsky, press secretary
to the president of Russia, declared that Trofimov had been removed “for gross
irregularities exposed by an inquiry conducted by the Accounting Chamber of the
Russian Federation and dereliction of duty.” It is widely believed, however,
that Trofimov was simply made a scapegoat.
According to another version of events, Trofimov
was dismissed because he attempted to do something about the substance of
Shchekochikhin’s inquiry. Supposedly, having read the letter of inquiry,
Trofimov summoned one of his deputies and ordered him to draw up the paperwork
for the dismissal of all the members of the FSB who were mentioned in it. His
deputy refused. Trofimov then suggested that he should submit his resignation.
In the end, the scandal surrounding the arrest of two of Trofimov’s
subordinates was exploited to have Trofimov himself dismissed. The two were
arrested for dealing in cocaine by MUR and the Central Department for the
Illegal Circulation of Narcotics. Trofimov was sacked two days after the media
reported the arrest of drug dealers carrying the identity passes of officers in
the Moscow UFSB.
It should be emphasized that the question of the
involvement of particular FSB officers or of the FSB, as a whole, in terrorist
activity, which had been attributed to the Chechens, was not raised either in
Shchekochikhin’s letter inquiry or in the replies given by various officials.
The court did not pass a guilty verdict on any of the members of the coercive
departments who were suspected, according to Kolesnikov, of a total of more
than ten murders. On January 31, 1997, Lazovsky and Kharisov appeared before
the Tver court in a trial, which lasted only three days. They were accused of
possessing weapons and drugs and of forging FAPSI and MO documents. Not a
single prosecutor or judge so much as hinted at terrorist attacks and contract
killings. The accused’s lawyers demonstrated quite correctly that no forgery
had been committed, since they had carried genuine identity documents for
agents of the secret services and agencies of coercion, and so the charge of
forging documents had to be dropped. The case materials contained no
information at all about the use of forgeries by the accused (which was in
itself weighty evidence of the interfusion of the structures headed by
Barsukov, Kovalyov and Lazovsky). The count of possessing and transporting
dangerous drugs was also dropped—so that Lazovsky and Kharisov would not have
to be charged under such a serious article of the Criminal Code.
Lazovsky’s lawyer, Boris Kozhemyakin, also tried
to have the charge of possessing weapons set aside. He claimed that when they
were arrested, Lazovsky and Kharisov were with UFSB employee Yumashkin, with
whom they had spent a large part of the day, that both Lazovsky and Kharisov
were engaged in carrying out certain tasks for the secret services, and that
was why they had been given weapons and cover documents. (When he was arrested,
UFSB agent Yumashkin was also found to be in possession of a cover document, a
police identity card.) However, for some reason, the question of collaboration
between Lazovsky and Kharisov and the secret services failed to interest judge
Elena Stashina, and representatives of the UFSB refused to appear in court,
with the result that the accused were in any case found guilty of the illegal
possession of weapons, and sentenced by an impartial court to two years’
imprisonment and a fine of forty million rubles each. When he heard the
sentence, Boris Kozhemiakin said, he had been counting on a more lenient
verdict.
Lazovsky served his time in one of the prison
camps near Tula together with his co-defendant and bodyguard Kharisov (which is
strictly forbidden by regulations). While in the camp, he recruited new members
for his group from among the criminal inmates, studied the Bible, and even
wrote a treatise on the improvement of Russia. He was released in February
1998, since the time he spent in custody, while under investigation, was
counted against his sentence.
Meanwhile, in
1996, Russia had lost the war in Chechnya. Military operations had to be halted
and political negotiations conducted with the Chechen separatists. There was a
real threat that the conflict between two nations, which had cost the secret
services so much effort to provoke, might end in a peace agreement, and Yeltsin
might be able to return to his program of liberal reforms. In order to
undermine the peace negotiations, the FSB carried out a series of terrorist
attacks in Moscow. Since terrorist attacks, which didn’t kill or maim had
failed to make any impression on the inhabitants of the capital, the FSB began
carrying out attacks which did. Note, once again, how well the supporters of
war timed their terrorist attacks, and how damaging they were to the interests
of supporters of peace and the Chechens themselves.
Between nine and
ten in the evening on June 11, 1996, there was an explosion in a half-empty
carriage in a train at the Tulskaya station of the Serpukhovskaya line of the
Moscow subway. Four people were killed and 12 were hospitalized. Exactly one
month later, on July 11, a terrorist bomb exploded in a number twelve trolley
in Pushkin Square: six people were injured. The following day, July 12, a
number 48 trolley on Mir Prospect was destroyed by an explosion: twenty-eight
people were injured. Information about the “Chechen connection” of the
terrorist attacks was actively disseminated throughout Moscow (even though no
terrorists were caught, and it was never actually determined whether they were
Chechens or not). Before even a provisional investigation had been conducted,
the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, declared at the site of the second trolley
explosion that he would expel the entire Chechen diaspora from Moscow, even
though he had no reason to suspect that the explosions were the work of the
diaspora, or even of individual Chechen terrorists.
However, this
second wave of terror failed, like the first, to produce any sharp swing in
public opinion. In early August 1996, guerrilla fighters battled their way into
Grozny, and in late August, the
Khasaviurt Accords were signed by Security Council Secretary A. Lebed and the
new president of Chechnya, Aslan
Maskhadov. The supporters of war in Chechnya had lost, and terrorist attacks in
Moscow came to a halt—until the FSB launched a new operation designed to spark
off another Chechen war.
It is hard to
tell just which of the FSB’s operatives organized the explosions in Moscow in
the summer of 1996. Lazovsky was under arrest. It is clear, however, that the
FSB had a choice of many similar structures, and not just in Moscow. On June
26,1996, the newspaper Segodnya
published a commentary on the FSB’s criminal organization in Petersburg, which
consisted “primarily of former members of the KGB.” Having set up several
firms, in addition to what might be called “clean” business dealings the ex-KGB
men also managed the trade in hand-guns, explosives and drugs, dealt in stolen
automobiles and imported stolen Mercedes and BMWs into Russia.
The explosions in Moscow could, however, have
been set up by members of Lazovsky’s group who were still at large. In fact,
there is very good reason for believing this to be the case.
In February
1996, MUR agents arrested a certain Vladimir Akimov outside the pawnshop on
Moscow’s Bolshaya Spasskaya Street for trying to sell a “Taurus” revolver.
Akimov turned out to be Lazovsky’s former chauffeur. Under the influence of
reports in the media about the new wave of terrorist attacks on public
transport in Moscow in June and July 1996, Akimov began providing testimony
about an explosion in a bus on December 27, 1994. “Today, here in detention
center 48/1, and seeing the political situation on the television,” Akimov
wrote, “I consider it my duty to make a statement on the explosion of the
bus...” In his statement he claimed that on December 27, he and Vorobyov had
set out to “reconnoiter” the VDNKh-Yuzhnaya bus stop in a Zhiguli automobile.
They noted possible lines of retreat. On the evening of the same day, Akimov
and Vorobyov left the Zhiguli not far from the stop at the end of the bus route
and went back to Mir Prospect, where they boarded the number 33 bus, a LiAZ.
When there were just a few passengers left in the bus, Akimov’s testimony
continued, they planted a bomb with forty grams of ammonite under a seat the
right rear wheel. When they got out at the last stop, Akimov went to warm up
the engine of their car, and Vorobyov used a remote control unit to set the
bomb off.
On the morning
of August 28, 1996, retired Lieutenant Colonel Vorobyov had been arrested by
Tskhai, as he was on his way to a meeting with an FSB agent and taken to the
MUR premises at 38 Petrovka Street, where, if the judgment of the court is to
be believed, he told the entire story to the Moscow detectives without
attempting to conceal anything, including the fact that he was a free-lance FSB
agent. Shortly thereafter, Akimov withdrew his testimony, even though it had
been given in writing. Vorobyov then also withdrew his testimony. The Moscow
City Court, under presiding Judge Irina Kulichkova, evidently acting under
pressure from the FSB, dropped the charges against Akimov of complicity in a
terrorist bombing and sentenced him to three years imprisonment for the illegal
sale of a revolver. Since the guilty verdict was pronounced in late April 1999,
and Akimov had spent three years in custody while under investigation, he left
the court a free man.
Vorobyov was sentenced to five years in the
prison camps. The case was held in camera,
and not even Vorobyov’s relatives were allowed into the courtroom. As his
employer, the FSB gave Vorobyov a positive character reference that was
included in the case materials. In his final address, Vorobyov declared that
the case against him had been fabricated by parties who wished to blacken the
name of the FSB and his name as a free-lance agent of the special service.
Vorobyov described the sentence as “an insult to the special agencies.” Later,
the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation reduced Vorobyov’s sentence to
three years (most of which Vorobyov had already served by that time). In late
August 1999, Vorobyov was released, despite the fact that Akimov and the
investigators believed that he had been involved in the terrorist attacks of
1996. The FSB had demonstrated yet again that it would not abandon its own
agents and would eventually obtain their release.
Tskhai also learned about the involvement of
Lazovsky’s group in the summer explosions from one other source, Sergei
Pogosov. In the late summer and early fall of 1996, an operational source
reported that a certain Sergei Pogosov was living in the center of Moscow on
the Novyi Arbat, not far from the bookstore Dom Knigi and the Octyabr cinema in
a huge penthouse apartment with a floor area of 100 or 150 square meters. His
firm’s office was located in the ground-floor apartment of the same block.
According to information received, Pogosov was directly linked with Lazovsky
and his gunmen and financed many of Lazovsky’s undertakings. Pogosov’s telephones
(home number 203-1469, work number 203-1632, and mobile number 960-8856) were
tapped and monitored for two weeks on the instructions of the First Section of
the Antiterrorist Center (ATTs, the former UBT) of the FSB. From conversations
overheard, it became clear that Pogosov was paying Lazovsky’s legal fees and
was preparing a large sum of money to pay bribes for his release.
This operational
information was relayed to Tskhai, who personally obtained permission from the
Public Prosecutor’s Office for a search of Pogosov’s flat and office as part of
the criminal investigation into Lazovsky’s case. A few days later, the search was
carried out jointly by the Twelfth Section of MUR and the First Section of the
ATTs of the FSB of the Russian Federation (Platonov’s former subordinates),
lasting almost right through the night. Under Pogosov’s bed, a sack was found
containing 700 thousand dollars. No one tried to count the rubles, which were
lying everywhere, even in the kitchen in empty jars. Cocaine was also found in
the apartment (Pogosov’s girlfriend was a drug addict). The search at Pogosov’s
office on the ground floor turned up several mobile phones, one of which was
registered to Lazovsky. Pogosov and his girlfriend were taken to the police
station, but that very day a member of the Moscow UFSB drove round to the
station and collected them. The police did not confiscate the money. The tax
police said that it had nothing to do with them and didn’t even bother to turn
up. No criminal case was brought in connection with the discovery of cocaine.
Apparently nobody was interested in Pogosov or his money.
Knowing the way things were done in the Russian
agencies of coercion, Pogosov expected that the people who had come to search
his apartment would just take him away and kill him, so he attempted to save
himself by giving a written undertaking to cooperate (under the pseudonym of
Grigory). Pogosov told one of the operatives about Lazovsky’s connections in
the Moscow UFSB and the kind of activity in which he was involved. Pogosov had
heard from “Max” that his brigade was not a group of bandits, but more like a
secret military unit, that Lazovsky handled tasks of state importance, and
there were people like him in every country. Pogosov said Lazovsky was a state
assassin who eliminated people according to instructions, and organized acts of
sabotage and terrorism. Lazovsky himself only carried out instructions, and he
got those from the top.
Concerning the
money, Pogosov said it was for Lazovsky, and he was only an intermediary.
Pogosov’s legal cover for his activities was importing ‘Parliament’ cigarettes
into Russia, which generates quite a good income in itself. Pogosov said that
he expected Lazovsky to be freed soon, since he hadn’t broken down under
questioning, he hadn’t given anyone away, and had behaved “with dignity.”
Pogosov sincerely recommended not interfering with the activities of Lazovsky’s
group and said Tskhai would have serious problems if he tried.
A few days after Pogosov was released, he had
his second and final meeting with the operative who had recruited him. First of
all, Pogosov offered money for the return of his note about collaboration. He
said that his controllers in the Moscow UFSB were extremely displeased about
his note and had told Pogosov to “ransom” it. His controllers had also made
direct threats against Tskhai.
Pogosov’s
written undertaking was not returned, and the offer of a bribe was not
accepted. The following day, the recruitment of agent Grigory was officially
reported to the chief. A few days later, the phone rang in the office of the
operative who had recruited Pogosov. The caller spoke from the Moscow UFSB, on
behalf of their own chief, politely recommending that Pogosov should be left in
peace and threatening that if he weren’t, there would be an investigation into
money that had supposedly been stolen during the search at Pogosov’s apartment.
The operative never saw Pogosov again and never received any secret information
from him. On April 12, 1997, at the age of thirty-nine, Tskhai died suddenly
from cirrhosis of the liver, although he didn’t drink or smoke. Presumably he
was poisoned by the FSB, because he had discovered the identities of the true
leaders of Lazovsky’s group and realized exactly who had organized the explosions
in Moscow. Poisons of a type that could have been used to kill Tskhai were made
in a special FSB laboratory, which according to some sources was located at 42
Krasnobogatyrskaya Street in Moscow. The same building is also said to have
been used for printing the high-quality counterfeit dollars used by the FSB to
pay for contract killings and other counterintelligence operations. The
laboratories had been in existence since Soviet times (the dollars were
supposed to be printed in case of war).
On April 15,
1997, a funeral service was held for Tskhai at the Cathedral of the Epiphany,
and he was buried at the Vagankovskoe Cemetery. After Tskhai’s death, the
investigation into Lazovsky’s group deteriorated into a series of sporadic
episodes. At MUR, Lazovsky’s case supposedly became the responsibility, by
turn, of Pyotr Astafiev, Andrei Potekhin, Igor Travin, V. Budkin, A. Bazanov,
G. Boguslavsky, V. Bubnov, and A. Kalinin, and it was also dealt with by the
investigator for specially important cases of the Department for the
Investigation of Banditry and Murder of the Moscow City Public Prosecutor’s
Office, Suprunenko, who first interrogated Lazovsky as early as 1996.
When he was released in February 1998, Lazovsky
bought himself a luxurious mansion in an elite rural housing estate at
Uspenskoe in the Odinovtsovsky district of Podmoskovie (the area round Moscow),
which was reached by way of the Rublyovskoe Highway, and then set up a fund
“for the support of peace in the Caucasus” under the title of Unification, in
which he took the position of vice-president. Lazovsky continued his
collaboration with the secret services. He was kept under observation following
his release by Mikhail Fonaryov, an officer of the Criminal Investigation
Department of the Moscow district GUVD, but no details are known of his
activities during this period.
Chapter 4
Nikolai Platonovich
Patrushev
(a biographical note)
Whereas during
the first Chechen war of 1994-1996, the state security forces had simply been
attempting to forestall Russia’s development towards a liberal-democratic
society, the political goals of the second Chechen war were far more serious:
to provoke Russia into war with Chechnya, and to exploit the ensuing commotion
to seize power in Russia at the forthcoming presidential elections in 2000. The
“honor” of provoking a war with Chechnya fell to the new director of the FSB,
Colonel-General Patrushev.
Patrushev was born in Leningrad on July 11,
1951. In 1974, he graduated from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute and was
assigned to the institute’s design office, where he worked as an engineer. Just
one year later, in 1975, he was invited to join the KGB, completed the one-year
course at the Higher School of the KGB of the USSR, specializing in law, and
joined the KGB’s Leningrad branch. There, he served as junior operations
officer, head of the city agency, deputy head of the regional agency, and head
of the service for combating smuggling and corruption of the KGB Department for
Leningrad and the Leningrad Region. By 1990 he had risen to the rank of
colonel. Until 1991, he was a member of the Communist Party.
In 1990 Patrushev was transferred to Karelia,
where he initially served as head of the local counterintelligence department.
In 1992, he became the Karelia’s Minister of Security. In 1994, when the
Leningrader Stepashin became director of the FSK, he called Patrushev to Moscow
to serve as head of one of the key divisions in the Lubyanka, the Internal
Security Department (USB) of the FSK of the Russian Federation. The USB of the
FSK was counterintelligence within counterintelligence, the section which
gathered compromising information on the FSK’s own personnel. The head of the
FSB had always been the FSK/FSB director’s most trusted ally, reporting to him
directly.
By moving Patrushev to Moscow, Stepashin saved
him from the consequences of a serious scandal. In Karelia, Patrushev had
gotten into difficulties over the theft and smuggling of precious Karelian
birch timber, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Petrozavodsk had initiated
criminal proceedings against him, although he had initially only been a witness
in the case. In the course of the investigation, facts had emerged which
virtually proved his guilt as an accomplice. It was at this moment that Stepashin
transferred Patrushev to a very high position in Moscow, well beyond the reach
of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Karelia. Fortunately for Patrushev, the
head of the UFSB for the Republic of Karelia, Vasily Ankudinov, who could have
told us a great deal about Patrushev and Karelian birch, died at the age of 56
on May 21, 2001.
In June 1995, Mikhail Barsukov replaced
Stepashin as head of the FSK. In the summer of 1996, Nikolai Kovalyov replaced
Barsukov. Neither Barsukov nor Kovalyov regarded Patrushev as their own man and
did nothing to promote him. Then Vladimir Putin, who knew Patrushev from
Leningrad, became the head of the president’s Central Control Department (GKU)
and invited his old acquaintance to become his first deputy. Patrushev moved
over to Putin’s team.
Patrushev’s subsequent rapid professional ascent
is linked with Putin’s own rise. When Putin became first deputy head of the
Kremlin Administration in May 1998, he promoted Patrushev to the vacant
position of head of the president’s GKU. In October the same year, Patrushev
returned to the Lubyanka, initially as Putin’s deputy, a post to which he was
appointed by Yeltsin in a decree of July 25, 1998, and later as First Deputy
Director of the FSB.
On March 29,
1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin secretary of the Security Council of the Russian
Federation, while leaving him in position as director of the FSB, and on August
9 the same year, Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister of Russia. In summing
up the first few months of his administration, Novaya Gazeta wrote: “Long, long ago in a highly democratic country
an elderly president entrusted the post of chancellor and Prime Minister to a
young and energetic successor. Then the Reichstag went up in flames...
Historians have not yet given us an answer to the question of who set fire to
it, but history has shown us who benefited.” In Russia, however, “an elderly
Guarantor [of the Constitution] entrusted the post of prime minister to a
successor who had yet to be democratically elected. Then apartment blocks were
blown up, and a new war began in Chechnya, and this war was glorified by
arch-liars.”
These events which shook the entire country were
also linked with the ascendancy of one other man: on the day Putin became Prime
Minister of Russia, Patrushev was given the directorship of the FSB. People
with inside knowledge claim that Putin had no choice but to promote Patrushev,
because Patrushev was in possession of compromising material about him. On
August 17, 1999, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev was appointed director of the
Federal Security Service of Russia. And then it began...
When someone commits a crime, it’s very
important to catch them while the trail is still hot.
Nikolai Patrushev—about the
events in Ryazan. Itogi, 5 October
1999
In September
1999, monstrous acts of terrorism were perpetrated in Buinaksk, Moscow, and
Volgodonsk.
We shall begin
with the terrorist attack which could have been the most terrible of them all,
if it had not been foiled. On September 22, something unexpected happened: in
Ryazan, FSB operatives were spotted planting sugar sacks containing hexogene in
the bedroom community of Dashkovo-Pesochnya.
At 9:15 p.m.,
Alexei Kartofelnikov, a driver for the Spartak soccer club who lived in the
single-entrance twelve-story block built more than twenty years earlier at
number 14/16 Novosyolov Street, phoned the Dashkovo-Pesochnya office of the
Oktyabrsky Region Department of the Interior (ROVD) in Ryazan and reported that
ten minutes earlier, he had seen a white model five or seven Zhiguli automobile
with the Moscow license plate T534 VT 77 RUS outside the entrance to his
apartment block, where there was a twenty-four hour “Night and Day” shop on the
ground floor. The car had driven into the yard and stopped. A man and a young
woman got out, went down into the basement of the building, and after a while
came back. Then the car was driven right up against the basement door, and all
three of the people in it began carrying some kind of sacks inside. One of the
men had a mustache and the woman was wearing a tracksuit. Then all of them got
into the car and drove away.
Note how quickly
Kartofelnikov reacted. The police were
less prompt in their response. “I spotted the model seven Zhiguli as I was walking
home from the garage,” Kartofelnikov recalled, “and I noticed the license plate
out of professional habit. I saw that the regional number had been masked by a
piece of paper with the Ryazan serial number ‘62’. I ran home to phone the
police. I dialed ‘02’ and got this lazy reply: ‘call such-and-such a number.’ I
called it, and it was busy. I had to keep dialing the number for ten minutes
before I got through. That gave the terrorists enough time to carry all of the
sacks into the basement and set the detonators... If I’d gotten through to the
police immediately...the terrorists would have been arrested right there in
their car.”
When they arrived at 9:58 p.m. Moscow time, the
policemen, commanded by warrant officer Andrei Chernyshov, discovered three
fifty-kilogram sugar sacks in the basement of a residential block containing
seventy-seven apartments. Chernyshov, who was the first to enter the mined
basement, recalled:
“At about ten,
we got a warning call from the officer on duty: suspicious individuals had been
seen coming out of the basement of house number 14/16 Novosyolov Street. Near
the house we were met by a girl who told us about a man who had come out of the
basement and driven away in a car with its license plates masked. I left one
officer in front of the entrance and went down into the basement with the
other. The basement in that house is deep and completely flooded with water.
The only dry spot is a tiny little storeroom like a brick shed. We shined the
light in, and there were several sugar sacks arranged in a stack. There was a
slit in the upper sack, and we could see some kind of electronic device: wires
wrapped round with insulating tape, a timer... Of course, it was all a bit of a
shock for us. We ran out of the basement, I stayed behind to guard the
entrance, while the guys went to evacuate the inhabitants. After about fifteen
minutes, reinforcements arrived, and the chief of the UVD turned up. The sacks
of explosive were removed by men from the Ministry of Emergencies [MChS] in the
presence of representatives of the FSB. Of course, after our bomb technicians
had rendered them harmless. No one had any doubt that this was a genuine
emergency situation.”
One of the sacks had been slit open, and a
homemade detonating device had been set inside, consisting of three batteries,
an electronic watch, and a homemade detonating charge. The detonator was set
for 5.30 a.m. on Thursday morning. The bomb technicians from the police
engineering and technology section of the Ryazan Region UVD took just eleven
minutes to disarm the bomb, under the leadership of their section head, police
Lieutenant Yury Tkachenko, and then immediately, at approximately 11 p.m., they
conducted a trial explosion with the mixture. There was no detonation, either
because the sample was too small, or because the engineers had taken it from
the upper layers of the mixture, while the main concentration of hexogene might
be in the bottom of the sack. Express analysis of the substance in the sacks
with the help of a gas analyzer indicated “fumes of a hexogene-type explosive
substance .” It is important at this point to note that there could not have
been any mistake. The instruments used were modern and in good condition, and
the specialists who carried out the analysis were highly qualified.
The contents of
the sacks did not outwardly resemble granulated sugar. All the witnesses, who
discovered the suspicious sacks, later confirmed that they contained a yellow
substance in the form of granules that resembled small vermicelli, which is
exactly what hexogene looks like. On September 23, the press center of the
Ministry of the Interior of Russia also announced that “analysis of the
substance concerned indicated the presence of hexogene vapor,” and that an
explosive device had been disarmed. In other words, on the night proceeding
September 23, local experts had determined that the detonator was live, and the
“sugar” was an explosive mixture. “Our initial examination indicated the
presence of explosive substances... We believed there was a real danger of
explosion,” Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Kabashov, head of the Oktyabrsky Region
OVD, later stated.
House number 14/16 on Novosyolov Street was no
chance selection on the bombers’ part. It was a standard house in an
unprestigious part of town, inhabited by simple people. Set up against the
front of the house was a twenty-four hour shop selling groceries. The
inhabitants of the house would surely not suspect that people unloading goods
by the trap door of a twenty-four hour food store might be terrorists. The
house stood on the edge of Ryazan close to an open area, which was known to
local people as “the Old Circle,” on a low rise. It was built of silicate
brick. The sacks of explosives in the basement had been placed beside the
building’s main support, so if there had been an explosion, the entire building
would have collapsed. The next house, built on the soft sandy soil of the
slope, could also have been damaged.
So the alarm was
raised, and the inhabitants of a house in Ryazan were roused from their beds
and evacuated into the street in whatever they happened to be wearing at the
time. This is how the newspaper Trud described
the scene: “In a matter of minutes, people were forced to abandon their
apartments without being allowed to gather their belongings (a fact which
thieves later exploited) and gather in front of the dark, empty house. Women,
old men, and children shuffled about in front of the entrance, reluctant to set
out into the unknown. Some of them were not wearing outer clothing, or were
even barefooted... They hopped from one foot to the other in the freezing wind
for several hours, and the invalids who had been brought down in their
wheelchairs wept and cursed the entire world.”
The house was
cordoned off. It was cold. The director of the local cinema, the Oktyabr, took
pity on the people and let them into the hall, and she also prepared tea for
everyone. The only people left in the building were several old invalids, who
were in no physical condition to leave their apartments, including one old
woman who was paralyzed and whose daughter stayed all night with the police
cordon expecting an explosion. This is how she recalled the event:
“Between 10 and
11 p.m., police officers went to the apartments, asking people to get outside
as quickly as possible. I ran out just as I was, in my nightshirt, with only my
raincoat thrown over it. Outside in the yard, I learned there was a bomb in our
house. I’d left my mother behind in the flat, and she can’t even get out of bed
on her own. I dashed over to the policemen in horror: ‘Let me into the house,
help me bring my mother out!’ They wouldn’t let me back in. It was half past
two before they started going to each of the flats with its occupants and
checking them for signs of anything suspicious. They came to me too. I showed
the policeman my sick mother and said I wouldn’t go anywhere without her. He
calmly wrote something down on his notepad and disappeared. And I suddenly had
this realization that my mother and I were probably the only two people in a
house with a bomb in it. I felt quite unbearably afraid... But then suddenly
there was a ring at the door. Standing on the doorstep were two senior police
officers. They asked me sternly: ‘Have you decided you want to be buried alive,
then, woman?’ I was so scared my legs were giving way under me, but I stood my
ground, I wouldn’t go without my mother. And then they suddenly took pity on
me: ‘All right then, stay here, your house has already been made safe.’ It
turned out they’d removed the detonators from the ‘charge’ even before they
inspected the flats. Then I just dashed straight outside...”
All kinds of emergency services and managers
turned up at the house. In addition, since analysis had determined the presence
of hexogene, the cordon was ordered to expand the exclusion zone, in case there
was an explosion. The head of the local UFSB, Major-General Alexander Sergeiev,
congratulated the inhabitants of the building on being granted a second life.
Hero of the hour Kartofelnikov was told that he must have been born under a
lucky star (a few days later, he was presented with a valuable gift from the
municipal authorities for finding the bomb—a Russian-made color television).
One of the Russian telegraph agencies informed the world of his fortunate
discovery as follows:
“Terrorist bombing thwarted in Ryazan: sacks
containing a mixture of sugar and hexogene found by police in apartment house
basement.
“First deputy staff officer for civil defense
and emergencies in the Ryazan Region, Colonel Yury Karpeiev, has informed an
ITAR-TASS correspondent that the substance found in the sacks is undergoing
analysis. According to the operations duty officer of the Ministry of
Emergencies of the Russian Federation in Moscow, the detonating device
discovered was set for 5.30 Moscow time on Thursday morning. Acting head of the
UVD of the Ryazan Region, Alexei Savin, told the ITAR-TASS correspondent that
the make, color, and number of the car in which the explosive was brought to
the scene had been identified. According to Savin, specialists were carrying
out a series of tests to determine the composition and explosion hazard posed
by the mixture discovered in the sacks... First deputy mayor of the region,
Vladimir Markov, said that the situation in Ryazan is calm. The inhabitants of
the building, who were rapidly evacuated from their apartments immediately
following the discovery of the suspected explosive, have returned to their
apartments. All the neighboring houses have been checked. According to Markov,
it is the inhabitants themselves who must be the main support of agencies of
law enforcement in their struggle with ‘this evil which has appeared in our
country... The more vigilant we are, the more reliable the defense will be.’”
At five minutes past midnight, the sacks were
carried out of the basement and loaded into a fire engine. However, it was four
in the morning before a decision was taken on where the explosives should be
taken. The OMON, the FSB, and the local military units refused to take in the
sacks. In the end, they were taken to the yard of the Central Office for Civil
Defense and Emergencies of Ryazan, where they were stacked in a garage, and a
guard was placed over them. The rescuers later recalled that they would have
used the sugar in their tea, except that the analysis had shown the presence of
hexogene.
The sacks lay at the civil defense base for
several days, until they were taken away to the MVD’s expert center for
criminalistic analysis in Moscow. The press office of the UVD of the Ryazan Region
actually announced that the sacks had been taken to Moscow on September 23. At
8.30 in the morning, the work of removing the bomb and checking the building
was completed, and the residents were allowed to return to their apartments.
On the evening of September 22, 1,200 policemen
were put on alert and a so-called Intercept plan was set in motion. Several
eyewitnesses were identified, sketches were produced of three suspects, and
roadblocks were set up on highways in the region and in nearby localities. The
witnesses’ testimony was quite detailed, and there was some hope that the
perpetrators would be apprehended.
The governor of
the region and the municipal authorities allocated additional funds to the
counter-terrorist offensive. Members of the armed forces were used to guard
apartment blocks, and at night watch was organized among residents in all the
buildings, while a further search was carried out of the entire residential
district, especially of the apartment houses (by Friday, eighty percent of the
houses in the town had been checked.) The city markets were deserted, with
traders afraid to bring in their goods and customers afraid to go out shopping.
According to the deputy mayor of Ryazan, Anatoly Baranov, “Practically no one
in the town slept, and not only did the residents of that house spend the night
on the street, so did the entire 30,000 population of the suburb of
Dashkovo-Pesochnya in which it is located.” The panic response in the city grew
stronger: there were rumors circulating that Ryazan had been singled out for
terrorist attack, because the 137th airborne assault guards regiment which had
fought in Dagestan, was stationed there. In addition, the Dyagilev military
aerodrome, from which military forces had been airlifted to the Caucasus, was
located close to Ryazan. The main road out of Ryazan was jammed solid, because
the police were checking all cars leaving the city. However, Operation
Intercept failed to produce any results, the car used by the terrorists was not
found, and the terrorists themselves were not arrested.
On the morning
of September 23, the Russian news agencies broadcast the sensational news that
“a terrorist bombing had been foiled in Ryazan.” From eight in the morning, the
television channels started broadcasting details of the failed attempt at mass
murder: Every TV and radio broadcasting company in Russia carried the same
story: “According to members of the law enforcement agencies of the Ryazan UVD,
the white crystalline substance in the sacks is hexogene.”
At 1 p.m., the
TV news program Vesti on the state’s
RTR channel carried a live interview with S. Kabashov: “So provisional
guidelines have been issued for the detention of an automobile matching the
features which residents have described. There are no results so far.” Vesti announced that “bomb specialists
from the municipal police have carried out an initial analysis and confirmed
the presence of hexogene. The contents of the sacks have now been sent to the
FSB laboratory in Moscow for definitive analysis. Meanwhile, in Ryazan the
mayor, Pavel Dmitrievich Mamatov, has held an extraordinary meeting with his
deputies and given instructions for all basements in the city to be sealed off,
and for rented premises to be checked more thoroughly.”
And so it turned out that the contents of the
sacks were sent for analysis, not only to the MVD laboratory, but to the FSB
laboratory, as well.
Mamatov answered
questions from journalists: “Whatever agencies we might bring in today, it is
only possible to implement all the measures for sealing off attics and
basements, repairs, installing gratings, and so on in a single week on one
condition—if we all combine our efforts.” In other words, at 1 p.m. on
September 23, all of Ryazan was in a state of siege. They were searching for
the terrorists and their car and checking attics and basements. When Vesti went on air again at 5 p.m., it
was mostly a repeat of the broadcast at 1 p.m.
At 7 p.m., Vesti went on air with its normal news
coverage: “Today, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spoke about the air
strikes on the airport at Grozny.” So while they were looking for terrorists in
Ryazan, Russian planes had been bombarding Grozny. The people of Ryazan were
avenged. Those who were behind the terrorist attack would pay dearly for their
sleepless night and their spoiled day.
Putin answered questions from journalists: “As
far as the strike on Grozny airport is concerned, I can’t make any comment. I
know there is a general directive under which bandits will be pursued wherever
they are. I’m simply not in the know, but if they were at the airport, that
means at the airport. I can’t really add anything to what has already been
said.” Evidently, as Prime Minister, Putin had known something the general
public hadn’t heard yet, that there were terrorists holed up at Grozny airport.
Putin also
commented on the latest emergency in Ryazan: “As for the events in Ryazan, I
don’t think there was any kind of failure involved. If the sacks which proved
to contain explosives, were noticed, that means there is a positive side to it,
if only in the fact that the public is reacting correctly to the events taking
place in our country today. I’d like to take advantage of your question in
order to thank the public of our country for this... This is absolutely the
correct response. No panic, no sympathy for the bandits. This is the mood for
fighting them to the very end. Until we win. And we shall win.”
Rather vague,
but the general meaning is clear enough. The foiling of the attempted bombing
in Ryazan is not a fumble by the secret services, who failed to spot the
explosive being planted, but a victory for the entire Russian people who were
keeping a vigilant lookout for their cruel enemies even in provincial towns
like Ryazan. For that, the Prime Minister expresses his gratitude to the
public.
This is a good
point at which to draw our first conclusions. The FSB subsequently claimed that
training exercises were being held in Ryazan, but this is contradicted by the
following circumstances. On the evening of September 22, after the sacks of
explosives had been discovered in the basement of the apartment building, the
FSB made no announcement that training exercises were being held in Ryazan,
that the sacks contained ordinary sugar, or that the detonating device was a
mock-up. The FSB had a second opportunity to issue a statement concerning
exercises on September 23, when the news agencies of the world carried the
story of the failed terrorist attack in Ryazan. The FSB did not issue any
denial, nor did it announce that training had been taking place in Ryazan. As
of September 23, the Prime Minister of Russia and Yeltsin’s successor in the
post of president, Vladimir Putin, still supported the FSB version of events
and sincerely believed (or at least pretended to believe) that a terrorist
attack had been thwarted in Ryazan.
Let us imagine
just for a moment that training exercises really were taking place in Ryazan.
Could we possibly expect the FSB to say nothing all day long on September 23,
while the whole world was buzzing with news of a failed terrorist attack? It’s
impossible to imagine it. Is it possible to imagine that the Prime Minister of
Russia and former director of the FSB, who, moreover, has personal links with
Patrushev, was not informed about the “exercises”? It is quite impossible to
imagine it, even in your wildest dreams. It would be an open gesture of
disloyalty to Putin by Patrushev, after which one or the other of them would
have had to quit the political arena. The fact that at seven o’clock in the
evening, on September 23, 1999, Putin did not make any statement about training
exercises taking place in Ryazan was the weightiest possible argument in favor
of interpreting events as a failed attempt by the FSB to blow up an apartment
building in Ryazan.
The mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, who has
pretty good contacts among the departments of the armed forces and law
enforcement, was not informed about any FSB “exercises” in Ryazan, either. On
the contrary, on September 23, the Moscow authorities gave instructions for
intensive precautions to be taken to prevent terrorist attacks in the capital,
primarily because in the opinion of representatives of the agencies of law
enforcement, the composition of the explosive found in Moscow and Ryazan, and
the way it was planted, were similar. The Moscow police were given instructions
to thoroughly check all premises, including non-residential, from top to
bottom, and to carefully inspect every vehicle carrying goods into the city. In
Moscow, the events in Ryazan were seen as a prevented terrorist attack.
But the most remarkable thing of all is that not
even Rushailo, who headed the commission for combating terrorism and supervised
the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation, knew anything at all about exercises in
Ryazan. Oleg Aksyonov, head of the information department of the MVD of Russia,
later said: “For us, for the people of Ryazan, and the central administration,
this is a total surprise; it was treated as a serious crime.” On September 23,
in his capacity as press secretary for the MVD, Aksyonov met the press several
times. To Rushailo’s shame, Aksyonov announced that, having familiarized
himself with the situation, the minister had ordered that all the basements and
attics in Ryazan should be checked once again in the space of a day and that
vigilance should be increased. Aksyonov emphasized that the implementation of
the order was to be closely monitored, since “people could pay for a minor
slip-up with their lives.”
Even on
September 24, when he addressed the First All-Russian Congress for Combating
Organized Crime, Rushailo spoke about the terrorist attack that had been
thwarted in Ryazan and said that “a number of serious miscalculations have been
made in the activities of the agencies of the interior” and that “harsh
conclusions” had been drawn. Having pointed out the miscalculations of the
agencies that had failed to spot the explosives being planted, Rushailo
followed Putin in praising the people of Ryazan who had managed to foil the
terrorist attack. “The struggle against terrorism is not the exclusive
prerogative of the agencies of the interior,” said Rushailo. A significant role
in this matter was allotted to “the local authorities and administrations,
whose work, however, also contains significant flaws.” Rushailo recommended to
his audience “the immediate creation of interdepartmental monitoring and that
would travel to the regions to check the implementation of decisions on site
and to provide practical assistance.” He pointed out that in the MVD such work
was already being carried out and there had been definite improvements, such as
the foiling of the attempt to blow up the apartment building in Ryazan. “The
thwarting of new terrorist attacks and the punishment of the guilty parties in
crimes already committed is the main task facing the MVD of Russia at the
present stage,” Minister of the Interior Vladimir Rushailo emphasized with
pride in the one thwarted terrorist attack he already had to his credit—in
Ryazan.
If the minister
himself regarded the Ryazan episode as a foiled terrorist attack, then what can
we say about the regional UVD? The appeals composed in revolutionary style
simply begged to be set to music:
“The war
declared by terrorism against the people of Russia continues. And this means
that the unification of all the forces of society and the state to repel the
treacherous foe is the essential requirement of the present day. The struggle
against terrorism cannot remain a matter only for the police and the secret
services. The most striking possible confirmation of this is the report of an
attempt to blow up an apartment building in Ryazan which was thwarted thanks to the vigilance of the public. On
September 23, in
Ryazan... while
checking the basement of an apartment building a police detachment discovered
an explosive device consisting of three sacks of hexogene and a timing
mechanism set for half-past five in the morning. The terrorist attack was
thwarted thanks to the inhabitants of the building, which the criminals had
chosen as their target. The evening before, they had noticed strangers carrying
sacks of some kind into the basement from a Zhiguli automobile with its license
plate papered over. The residents immediately contacted the police. Initial
analysis of the contents of the sacks showed that they actually did contain a
substance similar to hexogene mixed with granulated sugar. The sacks were
immediately dispatched to Moscow under guard. Following expert analysis, the
staff at the FSB laboratory will give a final answer as to whether this was an
attempted terrorist attack or merely a diversionary ploy.
“In this connection, the department of the
interior for the region wishes to remind citizens yet again of the need to
remain calm and take an organized, business-like approach to ensuring one’s own
safety. The best reply to the terrorists will be the vigilance of us all. All
this requires is to look a little closer at the people around you, pay
attention to strangers noticed in the entrance way, in the attic, or the
basement of your building, to abandoned automobiles parked directly beside
apartment buildings. At the slightest suspicion phone the police.
“Do not on any account attempt to examine the
contents of any suspicious boxes, bags, and other unidentified objects, which
you may find. In such situations you should restrict access to them by other
people and call the police.
“The establishment of house committees to
organize the protection of buildings and surrounding territory during the night
will also serve to reduce significantly the likelihood of terrorist incidents
in our city. Remember, today it depends on every one of us just how effective
the fight against evil will be.”
—UVD Information Group.
Unfortunately
for him, on September 23 ,1999, General Alexander Zdanovich, head of the Center
for Public Relations of the FSB of Russia, was due to appear in the television
program Hero of the Day on the NTV
channel. Thanks to this, we have yet another important piece of evidence that
the FSB was planning to just sit it out and allow the people of Ryazan and the
journalists to swallow the version of events as a failed terrorist attack by
Chechens. It is obvious that prior to Zdanovich’s appearance, the FSB had no
intention of making any statement about “exercises.” Their calculations were
simple enough: the police had not found any terrorists from the FSB or the car.
The story of the thwarted terrorist attack was still working, and, best of all,
it suited everyone, since even Rushailo could claim a share of the credit for
thwarting the bombing.
Zdanovich had,
however, been instructed by his bosses to try feeling out the public reaction
to the fairy tale about “exercises,” in case something went wrong or there was
a leak of information about the FSB’s involvement in the terrorist attack in
Ryazan. Note how gently Zdanovich began hinting that no actual crime had been
committed in the attempt to blow up the house in Ryazan, as if trying to
convince people that there was nothing to get excited about. The press
secretary of the FSB declared that the initial report indicated that there was
no hexogene in the sacks discovered in the basement of one of the apartment
blocks in the city, but that they contained “something like remote-control
devices.” Nor were there any detonating mechanisms, although it was now
possible to confirm that “certain elements of a detonating mechanism” had been
discovered.
At the same
time, Zdanovich emphasized that the final answer would have to be given by the
experts, his colleagues from the FSB laboratory in Moscow, who were Patrushev’s
subordinates. Zdanovich knew perfectly well just what “final answer” would be
given by the FSB experts: it would be the one their boss ordered them to give
(this answer would be communicated to us only after a certain delay, on March
21, 2000, a year-and-a half after the foiled terrorist attack, and just five
days before the presidential election).
But even so, at
the beginning of the program Hero of the
Day, Zdanovich was not in possession of any information to the effect that
the FSB had apparently been carrying out “exercises” in Ryazan. He did not even
hint at the possibility that training exercises might be involved. In his
interview, Zdanovich did express doubts that the sacks contained explosive and
that there was a live detonating device, but there was not a single word about
any possible exercises. This discrepancy was yet another indication that the
secret services had planned a terrorist attack in Ryazan. It is simply not
possible to imagine that the leadership of the FSB had kept information on
exercises already completed in Ryazan a secret from Zdanovich.
The evening of
September 23 brought yet another absurdity. The Novosti news agency broadcast a recording of the NTV interview with
General Zdanovich and announced that the Intercept search plan for the white
VAZ-2107 automobile was still continuing. “A lot of things about this entire
story are unclear.” In particular, the witnesses gave different descriptions of
the color and make of the automobile. Doubts had even arisen about whether the
car’s license plate had been papered over. At the same time, as the press
center remarked, the search for the car was being continued “in order to
reconstruct an objective picture.”
Despite Zdanovich’s assurances that there had
been no explosive or detonating device, the Ryazan UFSB was still unable “to
reconstruct an objective picture.” On September 24, the morning newspapers
carried details of how the terrorist attack in Ryazan had been foiled, but
still no statement from the FSB about exercises.
Not until September 24 did FSB director
Patrushev finally decide to issue a statement about the “exercises” which had
been held in Ryazan. What could have made Patrushev shift tactics in this way?
Firstly, the main clues, three sacks of explosive with a live detonating
device, had been delivered into Patrushev’s hands in Moscow, which was good
news for Patrushev. Now he could substitute the sacks and confidently assert
that the provincials in Ryazan had made a mistake, and the results of their
analysis were wrong. There was also bad news: the Ryazan UFSB had detained two
terrorists.
Let’s lend the FSB a hand in establishing the
“objective picture” which was so zealously concealed from the people. In
simplified form, the most brilliant part of the joint operation, conducted by
the Ryazan police and the Ryazan Region UFSB, went as follows.
Following the
discovery in Ryazan of the sacks containing explosive and a live detonating
device, the Intercept plan had been announced in the city. The senior officer
responsible for public relations (press secretary) of the UFSB of the Ryazan
Region, Yury Bludov, announced that Patrushev’s statement had come as a
complete surprise to the local members of the state security services. “Until
the last moment , we worked across the board in close collaboration with the
police, just as though the threat of a terrorist attack was real, we made up
sketches of the suspected terrorists; on the basis of the results of the
analysis, we initiated criminal proceedings under article 205 of the Criminal
Code of the Russian Federation (terrorism); we conducted a search for cars and
terrorists.”
After the announcement of Operation Intercept,
when the routes out of town were already closed off, the operational divisions
of the Ryazan UVD and UFSB attempted to determine the precise location of the
terrorists they were seeking. They had a few lucky breaks. Nadezhda Yukhanova,
an employee of the Electrosvyaz Company (the telephone service), recorded a
suspicious call to Moscow. “Leave one at a time, there are patrols everywhere,”
replied the voice at the other end of the line. Yukhanova immediately reported
the call to the Ryazan UFSB, and it was a simple technical matter for the
suspicious telephone to be monitored immediately. The operatives had no doubt
that they had located the terrorists. However, difficulties arose, because when
the bugging technology identified the Moscow telephone number the terrorists
were ringing, it turned out to be the number of one of the offices of the FSB
in Moscow.
After leaving
Novosyolov Street shortly after 9 p.m. on September 22, the terrorists had not
risked driving straight to Moscow, because a solitary car is always noticeable
on a deserted highway at night, and the chances of being stopped at a traffic
police post were too high. Any car stopped at night would be noted in the duty
officer’s journal, even if the people sitting in it were members of the FSB or
other secret services, and the next day when the news of the explosion was
announced, the policeman would be bound to recall stopping a car with three
people. If there also happened to be reports by witnesses in Ryazan, they would
pick up the car and its passengers immediately. The terrorists had to wait
until the morning, since they couldn’t leave the target area until after the
explosion had taken place, and their military mission had been accomplished. In
the morning, there would be a lot of cars on the highway. For the first few
hours after the attack, there would be panic. If witnesses had spotted two men
and a woman in a car, the police would be looking for three terrorists, two men
and one woman. One person alone in a car could always give any police cordon
the slip.
That this was the way things really were is
clear from the report of operation Intercept in the newspaper Trud: “By now the situation in Ryazan
had reached red hot. Reinforced patrols of police and cadets from the local
military colleges walked the streets. All road routes out of and into the city
were blocked by the patrols and sentries armed to the teeth and road traffic
police. Miles-long traffic jams had built up with cars and trucks moving to and
from Moscow. They searched all the cars thoroughly, looking for three
terrorists, two men and a woman, whose descriptions were posted on almost every
street lamp post.”
Following
instructions received, one of the terrorists set out towards Moscow in the car
on September 23, abandoned the car in the area of Kolomna, and made his way to Moscow unhindered. One of the terrorists had
now escaped the clutches of the Ryazan police and taken the car with him as
well. Late in the day of September 23, less than twenty-four hours later, an
empty car was found by the police on the Moscow-Ryazan highway close to
Kolomna, about halfway to Moscow. It was the same car “with the papered-over
license plates, which was used to transport the explosive,” Bludov announced.
The car turned out to be registered as missing with the police. In other words,
the terrorists had carried out their operation in a stolen car (a classical
feature of terrorist attacks).
The car had not been dumped near Kolomna by
chance. If it had been stolen in Moscow or the Moscow Region, the police would
have returned it to the owner at his home address, and it would probably never
have entered anyone’s head to think it might be the car used by unknown
terrorists to transport hexogene for blowing up a building in a different
region of the country, in Ryazan. Accordingly, they wouldn’t have bothered to
analyze the contents of the car for microparticles of hexogene and other
explosive substances. The accomplice could go back for the two terrorists left
behind in Ryazan the next day in a standard FSB operational vehicle and take
them to Moscow without any risk of being caught. On the other hand, if it were
discovered that the car found near Kolomna was the one used for the terrorist
attack, the fact that it was abandoned halfway to Moscow would tell the Ryazan
police that the terrorists had gotten away. The cordon in place around Ryazan
would then be relaxed, which would make it easier for the remaining two
terrorists to leave.
So now there were two terrorists left in Ryazan.
From information provided by the Ryazan UFSB, we know that the terrorists
stayed overnight somewhere in Ryazan and didn’t spend the night of September 22
hanging about in the hallways of buildings in a strange and unfamiliar town.
The conclusion must be drawn that the terrorists had arranged places to stay in
advance, even if they themselves were not from Ryazan. In that case, it is
clear that they had time to choose their target, which was far from random, and
to prepare for their terrorist attack. When they were caught by surprise by
operation Intercept starting earlier than expected, the terrorists decided to wait
it out in the town. The arguments in support of this interpretation are as
follows.
It is very
important to note that the leaders of the Ryazan Region were not aware of the
explosion planned for Ryazan (or the “exercises,” as the events are referred to
diplomatically by all the officials involved in them and by employees of the
agencies of coercion). The governor of the region, V.N. Liubimov, announced
this in an interview broadcast live on September 24, when he said: “Not even I
knew about this exercise.” Mamatov, the mayor of Ryazan, was frankly annoyed:
‘They’ve used us as guinea pigs. Tested Ryazan for lice. I’m not against
exercises. I served in the army myself, and I took part in them, but I never
saw anything like this.”
The FSB department for the Ryazan Region was
also not informed about the “exercises.” Bludov stated that “the FSB was not
informed in advance that exercises were being conducted in the city.” The head
of the Ryazan UFSB, Major-General A.V. Sergeiev at first stated in an interview
with the local television company Oka that he knew nothing about any
“exercises” being held. It was only later, in response to a question from
journalists about whether he had in his possession any official document
confirming that exercises were held in Ryazan, that he answered through his
press secretary that he accepted as proof of the exercises the television
interview given by FSB director Patrushev. One of the women living in house
14/16, Marina Severina, recalled how, afterwards, the local FSB went round the
apartments apologizing: “Several people from the FSB came to see us, led by a
colonel. They apologized. They said that they hadn’t known anything, either.”
This is one case in which we can believe the members of the FSB and accept
their sincerity.
The Ryazan UFSB realized that the people of
Ryazan had been “set up” and that the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Russia and
the public might accuse the Ryazan UFSB of planning the explosion. Shaken by
the treachery of their Moscow colleagues, the Ryazan UFSB decided to provide
themselves with an alibi and announced to the world that the Ryazan operation
had been planned in Moscow. There could be no other explanation for the
statement from the Ryazan Region UFSB, which appeared shortly after Patrushev’s
interview about “exercises” in Ryazan. We give the text of the statement in
full.
“It has become
known that the planting on 22.09.99 of a dummy explosive device was part of an
ongoing interregional exercise. This announcement came as a surprise to us and
appeared at a moment when the department of the FSB had identified the places
of residence in Ryazan of those involved in planting the explosive device and
was preparing to detain them. This had been made possible due to the vigilance
and assistance of many of the residents of the city of Ryazan, collaboration
with the agencies of the Ministry of the Interior and the professionalism of
our own staff. We thank everyone who assisted us in this work. We will continue
in future to do everything possible to ensure the safety of the people of
Ryazan.”
This unique
document provides us with answers to the most important of our questions.
Firstly, the Ryazan UFSB had nothing to do with the operation to blow up the
building in Ryazan. Secondly, at least two terrorists were discovered in
Ryazan. Thirdly, the terrorists lived in Ryazan, if only temporarily, and
evidently a network of at least two secret safe apartments were uncovered.
Fourthly, just at the moment when arrangements were in hand to arrest the
terrorists, the order came from Moscow not to arrest them, because the
terrorist attack in Ryazan was only an FSB “exercise.”
In order to
remove any doubts that the UFSB statement was both deliberate and accurate, the
leadership of the Ryazan UFSB repeated it almost word-for-word in an interview.
On May 21, 2000, just five days before the presidential election, when the
failed explosion in Ryazan had been put back on the public agenda for political
reasons by the parties competing for power, the head of the investigative
section of the UFSB for the Ryazan Region, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Maximov,
stated as follows:
“We can only
feel sympathy for these people and offer our apologies. We also find the
situation difficult. We took all the events of that night seriously, regarding
the situation as genuinely dangerous. The announcement about exercises held by
the FSB of the Russian Federation came as a complete surprise to us and
appeared at a moment when the department of the FSB had identified the places
of residence in Ryazan of those involved in planting the dummy (as it
subsequently emerged) device and was preparing to detain them. This had been
made possible due to the vigilance and assistance of the inhabitants of Ryazan,
collaboration with the agencies of the ministry of the interior, and the
professionalism of our own staff.”
It was thus,
twice confirmed in documentary form that the terrorists who had mined the
building in Ryazan were employees of the FSB, that at the time of the operation
they were living in Ryazan, and that the places where they lived had been
identified by employees of the UFSB for the Ryazan Region. This being so, we
can catch Patrushev out in an obvious lie. On September 25, in an interview
with one of the television companies, he stated that “those people who should
in principle have been found immediately were among the residents who left the
building, in which an explosive device was supposedly planted. They took part
in the process of producing their own sketches, and held conversations with employees
of the agencies of law enforcement.”
The real facts
were quite different. The terrorists scattered to different safe apartments. No
sooner had the leadership of the Ryazan UFSB reported in the line of duty by
phone to Patrushev in Moscow, that the arrest of the terrorists was imminent
than Patrushev gave the order not to arrest the terrorists and announced that
the foiled terrorist attack in Ryazan was only an “exercise.” One can imagine
the expression on the face of the Ryazan UFSB officer concerned: most likely
Major-General Sergeiev was reporting to Patrushev in person when he was ordered
to let the terrorists go.
Immediately after he put down the phone,
Patrushev gave his first interview in those days to the NTV television company:
“The incident in Ryazan was not a bombing, nor was it a foiled bombing. It was
an exercise. It was sugar; there was no explosive substance there. Such
exercises do not only take place in Ryazan. But to the honor of the agencies of
law enforcement and the public in Ryazan, they responded promptly. I believe
that exercises must be made as close as possible to what happens in real life,
because otherwise we won’t learn anything and won’t be able to respond to
anything anywhere.” A day later, Patrushev added that the “exercise” in Ryazan
was prompted by information about terrorist attacks planned to take place in
Russia. In Chechnya several groups of terrorists had already been prepared and
were “due to be advanced into Russian territory and carry out a series of
terrorist attacks... It was this information which led us to conclude that we
needed to carry out training exercises, and not like the ones we’d had before,
and to make them hard and strict... Our personnel must be prepared; we must
identify the shortcomings in the organization of our work and make corrections
to its organization.”
The Moscow Komsomolets newspaper managed to
joke about it: “On September 24, 1999, the head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev,
made the sensational announcement that the attempted bombing in Ryazan was
nothing of the sort. It was an exercise... The same day, Minister of the Interior
Vladimir Rushailo congratulated his men on saving the building in Ryazan from certain destruction.”
But in Ryazan, of course, no one was laughing.
Obviously, even though Patrushev had forbidden it, the Ryazan UFSB went ahead
and arrested the terrorists, considerably roughing them up in the process. Who
was arrested where, how many there were of them, and what else the Ryazan UFSB
officers found in those flats we shall probably never know. When they were
arrested, the terrorists presented their “cover documents” and were detained,
until the arrival from Moscow of an officer of the central administration with
documents which permitted him to take the FSB operatives, who had been tracked
down so rapidly, back to Moscow with him.
Beyond this
point our investigation runs up against the old familiar “top secret”
classification. The criminal proceedings instigated by the UFSB for the Ryazan Region in connection with the discovery
of an explosive substance under article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian
Federation (terrorism) was classified, and the case materials are not available
to the public. The names of the terrorists (FSB operatives) have been
concealed. We don’t even know if they were interrogated and what they said
under interrogation. Patrushev certainly had something to hide. “There’s
nothing I can do, guys. The analysis shows explosive materials, I’m obliged to
initiate criminal proceedings”—such was the stubborn reply made by the local
FSB investigator to his Moscow colleagues, when they tried putting pressure on
him. So then, people from the FSB’s central administration were sent down and
simply confiscated the results of the analysis.
On September 29,
1999, the newspapers Cheliabinsky Rabochy
and Krasnoyarsky Rabochy, and on
October 1, the Volzhskaya Kommuna of
Samara carried identical articles; “We have learned from well-informed sources
in the MVD of Russia that none of the MVD operatives and their colleagues in
the UFSB of Ryazan believes in any “training” involving the planting of
explosive in the town... In the opinion of highly placed employees of the MVD
of Russia, the apartment building in Ryazan actually was mined by persons
unknown using genuine explosives and the same detonators as in Moscow... This
theory is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the criminal proceedings under
the article on terrorism have still not been closed. Furthermore, the results
of the original analysis of the contents of the sacks, carried out at the first
stage by local MVD experts, were confiscated by FSB personnel who arrived from
Moscow, and immediately declared secret. Policemen who have been in contact
with their colleagues in criminalistics, who carried out the first investigation
of the sacks, continue to claim that they really did contain hexogene, and
there is no possibility of any error.”
Trying to put pressure on the investigation and
declaring a criminal case classified were illegal acts. According to article 7
of the law of the Russian Federation, “On state secrecy,” adopted on July 21,
1993, “information... concerning emergencies and catastrophes which threaten
the safety and health of members of the public and their consequences;
...concerning instances of the violation of human and civil rights and
freedoms; ... concerning instances of the violation of legality by the agencies
of state power and their officials...shall not be declared a matter of state
secrecy and classified as secret.” The same law goes on to state: “officials
who have made a decision to classify as secret the information listed, or to
include it for this purpose in media which contain information that constitutes
a matter of state secrecy, shall be subject to criminal, administrative, or disciplinary
sanction, in accordance with the material and moral harm inflicted upon
society, the state, and the public. Members of the public shall be entitled to
appeal such decisions to a court of law.”
Unfortunately, it looks as though those
responsible for classifying a criminal case will not be held to account under
the progressive and democratic law of 1993. As one of the residents of the
ill-fated (or fortunate) building in Ryazan put it, they have “pulled the wool
down hard over our eyes.”
Certainly, in March 2000 (just before the
presidential election), the voters were shown one of the three terrorists (a
“member of the FSB special center”), who said that all three members of the
group had left Moscow for Ryazan on the evening of September 22, that they had
found a basement which happened by chance not to be locked; they had bought
sacks of sugar at the market and a cartridge at the Kolchuga gun shop, from
which they had constructed “mock-ups of an explosive device” on the spot, and
“the whole business was concentrated together to implement the measure
concerned... It was not sabotage, but an exercise. We didn’t even really try to
hide.”
On March 22 (with four days left to the
election), The Association of Veterans of the Alpha Group came to the defense
of the story about FSB exercises in Ryazan, in the person of lieutenant-general
of the reserve and former commander of the Vympel division of the FSB of
Russia, Dmitry Gerasimov, and retired Major-General Gennady Zaitsev, the former
commander of the Alpha group and a “Hero of the Soviet Union.” Gerasimov
declared that live detonating devices were not used in the exercises in Ryazan,
and what was used instead was “a cartridge containing round shot,” which was
meant to produce “a shock effect.” Since the impression produced by the
detonating device really was shocking, from that point of view the “exercise”
had been a success.
In Zaitsev’s opinion, the story that live
detonating devices had been involved in the exercise came about because the
instruments used by the UFSB for the Ryazan Region were faulty. He announced
that members of Vympel had also been involved in the exercise in Ryazan, and
that a special group had left for Ryazan in a private car on the eve of the
events concerned, and had actually deliberately drawn attention to itself. A
cartridge containing round shot was bought in the Kolchuga shop; “The ill-fated
sugar, which some later called hexogene, was bought by the special group at the
local bazaar. And, therefore, it could not possibly have been explosive. The
experts simply ignored basic rules and used dirty instruments on which there
were traces of explosives from previous analyses. The experts concerned have
already been punished for their negligence. Criminal proceedings have been
initiated in connection with this instance.”
The naiveté of the interview given by the
“member of the special center” and the simple-mindedness of the statements made
by Gerasimov and Zaitsev are genuinely astounding. First and foremost, it could
well be true that three Vympel officers did set out for Ryazan in a private car
on the evening of September 22, that they did buy three sacks of sugar and a
cartridge from the Kolchuga shop. But exactly how did they try to attract
attention to themselves? After all, it was sugar they were sold at the market,
not hexogene. What was there to attract attention? A single shotgun cartridge
bought in a shop?
Patrushev evidently also believed that in a
country where sensational murders take place every day and houses with hundreds
of inhabitants are blown up, suspicion should be aroused by people buying sugar
at the market and a shotgun cartridge in a shop. “Everything that the supposed
terrorists planted was bought in Ryazan, the sacks of sugar and the cartridges,
which they bought without anyone asking them whether they had any right to do
so.” A minor point, of course, but now we have a mystery: just how many
cartridges did the FSB operatives buy, one or several? (The purchases could
have been an operation to cover for the real terrorists, who planted quite
different sacks containing explosives in the basement of the building in
Ryazan, sacks that had nothing to do with the Vympel group. In that case, the
Vympel operatives themselves might not have known the purpose of the task they
had been assigned of buying one cartridge and three bags of sugar.)
Finally, Zaitsev deliberately misled his readers
by claiming that criminal proceedings had been initiated against Senior
Lieutenant Yury Tkachenko, the explosives technician at the engineering and
technical section, for conducting the analysis incorrectly, when they had
actually been initiated against the terrorists who had turned out to be FSB
operatives. On September 30, Tkachenko and another Ryazan police explosives
specialist, Pyotr Zhitnikov, had, in fact, been awarded a bonus for their
courage in disarming the explosive device. Incidentally, Nadezhda Yukhanova,
the telephone operator who intercepted the terrorists’ telephone conversation
with Moscow, was also paid a bonus for her assistance in capturing them.
The only thing
that can be said in Zaitsev’s defense is that a technical expert does bear
criminal responsibility for the quality and objectivity of the results of his
analysis, and if Tkachenko had carried out a flawed analysis and issued an
incorrect result, then criminal proceedings would, indeed, have been taken
against him. But as we know, this was not done, precisely because the result
provided by the analysis was accurate: the sacks contained an explosive
substance.
The testimony of the “member of the special
center” and Zaitsev also suffers from serious inconsistencies of time-scale.
The terrorists were spotted near the building in Ryazan only shortly after 9
p.m. On a weekday, they could not possibly have covered the 180 kilometers from
Moscow to Ryazan in less than three hours, and then they still had to select a
building in an unfamiliar town, buy the sacks of sugar, buy the cartridge at
the Kolchuga shop, and put together the mock-up. On a weekday, the market in Ryazan
closes at 6 p.m. at the latest. The Kolchuga shop closes at 7 p.m. So just when
and how was the sugar bought? When was the cartridge bought? When did the
terrorists leave Moscow? How long did the journey take? When did they arrive in
Ryazan?
It is obvious
that the entire story about the evening trip from Moscow by Vympel operatives is an invention from start
to finish. Zaitsev himself provided legally valid proof of this. On September
28, 1999, a press conference was held by members of the departments of law
enforcement and the armed forces in the office of the Kolomna security firm
Oskord, at which the representative of the Alpha Group veterans’ association,
G.N. Zaitsev explained his position with regard to the “incident” in Ryazan:
“Training exercises of this kind make me really angry. It’s not right to
practice on real people!” On October 7, a report on the press conference was
published by the local Kolomna newspaper Yat.
The only conclusion which can be drawn from Zaitsev’s statement is that he had
taken no part in the Ryazan escapade. But with only four days to go to the
presidential election, when all forces were mobilized for Putin’s victory, and
the end justified any means, Zaitsev was forced to appear at a press conference
and acknowledge his own blame and the involvement of Vympel operatives in the
Ryazan “exercise.” Naturally, those who involved Zaitsev in this propaganda
show were not aware of his press conference in Kolomna.
Zaitsev’s false
testimony of March 22, 2000, served to emphasize an extremely important point:
the employees of the secret services will lie if it is required by the
interests of the agencies of state security, if they have been ordered to lie.
Half of the criminals in Russia make themselves
out to be lunatics or total idiots. It’s better that way; you get a shorter
sentence or even simply get off (“What can you expect from a fool?” as the
Russian saying has it). Patrushev calculated correctly that for terrorism
against the citizens of one’s own country, you could get life, but in Russia,
you wouldn’t even get sacked for being an idiot. (In any case, just who could
have sacked Patrushev? No one but Putin!) Not a single employee of the FSB was
sacked as a result of the Ryazan escapade. Indeed, according to Shchekochikhin,
Patrushev was made a “Hero of Russia,” and he has recently been promoted to
four-star general!
Patrushev’s
psychological calculations proved correct. It was more convenient for the
political elite of Russia to regard Patrushev as an idiot than as a villain.
Commenting on Patrushev’s statement about “exercises” in a live broadcast on
the radio station Ekho Moskvy, chairman
of the State Duma deputies’ grouping “The Russian Regions,” Oleg Morozov, said:
“It seems monstrous to me. I understand that the secret services have the right
to check up on what’s being done, but not so much by us as by themselves.” In
addition, he said it was “difficult to imagine yourself in these people’s
places” (in Ryazan) and, therefore, “it wasn’t worth it, there was no way such a
price should have been paid for a check” on the activities of the FSB and the
vigilance of the public.
Morozov declared that it might be possible to
forgive the actions of the FSB, if the FSB promised there would be no more
terrorist attacks. That was, in fact, the main point which he made: Russians
had to be saved from the FSB terror. The subtle diplomat Morozov offered the
terrorist Patrushev a deal: we don’t punish you, and we close our eyes to all
the explosions that have taken place in Russia, and you halt all operations in
Russia for blowing up people’s homes. Patrushev heard what Morozov was saying,
and the explosions ceased. Patrushev was branded an idiot and allowed to remain
at his desk. Perhaps the question of just who turned out to be the idiot in
this situation should be regarded as undecided.
There were some
people who were of the opinion that Patrushev was not an idiot but insane. On
September 25, 1999, the newspaper Novye
Izvestiya carried an article by Sergei Agafonov which, in view of the
circumstances, failed even to offend Patrushev: “I wonder just how accurate an
idea the head of the FSB actually has of what is going on? Does the head of the
secret services have an adequate perception of surrounding reality? Does he not
perhaps confuse colors, does he recognize his relatives? My soul is tormented
by these alarming questions, since there seems to be no possible rational
explanation for the FSB’s all-Russian special training exercise using real
people.” Agafonov assumed that “General Patrushev is seriously unwell” and “he
should be released from the excessive burdens of duty and given urgent
treatment.”
Of course, the
FSB itself could not be unanimous in its attitude to Patrushev’s operation.
After the fiasco in Ryazan, even his own subordinates were prepared to
criticize the head of the FSB (and Patrushev was prepared to tolerate this
criticism abjectly). For instance, the press secretary of the UFSB for Moscow
and the Moscow Region, Sergei Bogdanov, called the “exercise” in Ryazan “crude
and poorly planned work” (if they were caught, their work must have been
crude). The head of the UFSB for the Yaroslavl Region, Major-General A.A.
Kotelnikov, replied as follows to a question about the “exercise”: “I have my
own point of view concerning the Ryazan exercises, but I would not wish to
comment on the actions of my colleagues” (as if there were any way that he
could!).
Note that not a
single acting or retired senior member of the FSB made any attempt at a serious
analysis of the actions of his “colleagues.” The professionals of the armed
services departments left that honorable task to the journalists, who did the
best they could in the face of the attacks made on them by the FSB. They began,
naturally enough, with the sugar.
The three sacks of sugar bothered everybody.
Supposedly, the terrorists from the FSB (but probably it was a quite different
group of FSB operatives) bought the sugar at the local market. They said that
it was produced by the Kolpyansk Sugar Plant in the Orlov Region. But if it was
just plain ordinary sugar from the Orlov Region, why was it sent off to Moscow
for analysis? More importantly, why did the laboratory accept it for analysis?
Not just one laboratory, but two in different state departments (the MVD and
the FSB). And why was an additional analysis carried out later? Surely it
should have been possible to recognize sugar the first time around? Further,
why did it all take several months? It only made sense for Patrushev to have
the sugar brought to Moscow for analysis, if he wanted to take the material
evidence away from his colleagues in Ryazan, and only if the sacks did contain
explosives. Why would Patrushev insist on sacks of sugar being sent to Moscow?
His own men would have made him a laughing stock.
In the meantime,
the FSB press office issued a statement saying that in order for the contents
of the sacks from Ryazan to be checked, they were taken to an artillery range,
where attempts were made to explode them. The detonation failed because it was
ordinary sugar, the FSB reported triumphantly. “One wonders what sort of idiot
would try to explode three sacks of ordinary sugar at an artillery range,” the
newspaper Versiya commented
ironically. Why, indeed, did the FSB send the sacks to the artillery range if
it knew that “exercises” were being conducted in Ryazan, and the sacks
contained sugar bought at the local bazaar by Vympel operatives?
Then other sacks which did contain hexogene were
discovered not far from Ryazan. There were a lot of them, and there was just a
hint of a connection with the GRU. In the military depot of the 137th Ryazan
regiment of the VDV, located on the territory of a special base for training
intelligence and sabotage units close to Ryazan, hexogene was stored, packed in
fifty-kilogram sugar sacks like those discovered on Novosyolov Street. In the
fall of 1999, airborne assault forces (military unit 59236) Private Alexei
Pinyaev and his fellow soldiers from Moscow were assigned to this very
regiment. While they were guarding “a storehouse with weapons and ammunition,”
Pinyaev and a friend went inside, most probably out of simple curiosity, and
saw sacks with the word “Sugar” on them.
The two
paratroopers cut a hole in one of the sacks with a bayonet and tipped some of
the state’s sugar into a plastic bag. Unfortunately, the tea made with the
stolen sugar had a strange taste and wasn’t sweet at all. The frightened
soldiers took their bag to their platoon commander. He suspected something
wasn’t right, since everyone was talking about the story of the explosions, and
he decided to have the “sugar” checked out by an explosives specialist. The
substance proved to be hexogene. The officer reported to his superiors. Members
of the FSB from Moscow and Tula (where an airborne assault division was stationed,
just like in Ryazan) descended on the unit. The regimental secret services were
excluded from the investigation. The paratroopers who had discovered the
hexogene were interrogated “for revealing a state secret.” “You guys can’t even
imagine what serious business you’ve got tangled up in,” one officer told them.
The press was informed that there was no soldier in the unit with the name of
Pinyaev and that information about sacks containing hexogene being found in the
military depot had simply been invented by Pavel Voloshin, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta. The matter of the
explosives was successfully hushed up, and Pinyaev’s commander and fellow
soldiers were sent off to serve in Chechnya.
For Pinyaev himself, they devised a more painful
punishment. First, he was forced to retract what he had said (it’s not too hard
to imagine the kind of pressure the FSB could bring to bear on him). Then the
head of the Investigative Department of the FSB announced that “the soldier
will be questioned in the course of the criminal proceedings initiated against
him.” A female employee of TsOS FSB summed it all up: “The kid’s had it...” In
March 2000, criminal proceedings were initiated against Pinyaev for the theft
of army property from a military warehouse containing ammunition...the theft of
a bagful of sugar! One must at least grant the FSB a sense of humor. But even
so, it’s hard to understand why the Investigative Department of the FSB of
Russia should have been concerned with the petty theft of food products.
According to the engineers in Ryazan, explosives
are not packed, stored, or transported in fifty-kilogram sacks, it’s just too
dangerous. Five hundred grams of mixture is sufficient to blow up a small
building. Fifty-kilogram sacks, disguised as sugar, could only be required for
acts of terrorism. Evidently this was the warehouse which provided the three
sacks, which were later planted under the loadbearing support of the building
in Ryazan. The instruments of the Ryazan experts had not lied.
There was a
sequel to the story of the 137th regiment of the VDV. In March 2000, just
before the election, the paratroop regiment sued Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper had published the interview with
Pinyaev. The writ, which dealt with “the protection of honor, dignity and business
reputation” was submitted to the Basmansky Intermunicipal Court by the
regimental command. The commander himself, Oleg Churilov, declared that the
article in question had insulted the honor not only of the regiment, but of the
entire Russian army, since in September 1999, there had not been any such
private in the regiment. “And it is not true that a soldier can gain entry to a
warehouse where weapons and explosives are stored, because he has no right to
enter it, while he is on guard duty.”
So Pinyaev did
not exist, but he was still handed over for trial. The sacks contained sugar,
but “a state secret had been breached.” And the 137th regiment had not taken Novaya Gazeta to court over the article
about hexogene, but because a private on guard duty has no right to enter the
warehouse he is guarding, and any claims to the contrary were an insult to the
Russian army.
The question of the detonating devices wasn’t
handled so smoothly, either. Despite all of Zdanovich’s efforts to persuade
people to the contrary, the device was genuine and live, as the chairman of the
Ryazan regional Duma, Vladimir Fedotkin, firmly asserted in an interview with
the Interfax news agency on September 24: “It was an absolutely genuine
explosive device, nothing to do with any exercises.”
The detonating
device is a very important formal point. Instructions forbid the use of a live
detonating device for exercises involving civilian structures and the civilian
population. The device might obviously be stolen (and somebody would have to be
held responsible), or it might be triggered by children or tramps, if they
found it in the sack of sugar. If the detonating device was not live, then no
criminal case could have been brought under article 205 of the Criminal Code of
the Russian Federation (terrorism), the case would have been based on the
discovery of the explosive and turned over to the MVD, not the FSB. In the
final analysis, if we are talking about an “exercise,” then the vigilance of
the people of Ryazan was checked to see how promptly they would discover sacks
containing explosives, not what they would do with a detonating device. The FSB
could not have carried out such a check using a live device.
In order to find
out whether this was really true, Novaya
Gazeta turned for assistance to one of its military specialists, a colonel,
and asked him the questions: “Are exercises conducted using real explosive
substances,” and “Are there any instructions and regulations which govern this
kind of activity?” Here is the colonel’s answer:
“Powerful
explosive devices are not used even in exercises involving live shelling. Only
blanks are used. If it is required to check the ability to locate and disarm an
explosive device, a mine for instance, models are used which contain no
detonator and no TNT. Exercises on the use of explosives, of course, involve
the real detonation of quite powerful explosive devices (the specialists have
to know how to disarm them). But...such exercises are conducted in restricted
areas without any outsiders. Only trained personnel are present. There is no
question of involving civilians. The whole business is strictly regulated.
There are instructions covering the equipment required, instructions for
clearing mines, appropriate instructions and orders. Undoubtedly, these are
similar for the army and the secret services.”
It is difficult for the uninitiated to
appreciate the significance of the innocent phrase: “the initiation of criminal
proceedings under article 205.” Most importantly of all, it means that the investigation
will not be conducted by the MVD, but by the FSB, since terrorist activity
falls into the FSB’s area of investigative competence. The FSB has more than
enough cases to deal with, and it won’t take on any unnecessary ones. In order
to take on a case, it has to have very cogent reasons, indeed (in this case the
cogent reasons were provided by the results of the analysis). The FSB
investigation is supervised by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and the search
for the perpetrators is conducted by the FSB jointly with the MVD. A crime for
which criminal proceedings have been initiated is reported within twenty-four
hours to the FSB of Russia duty officer at phone numbers (095) 224-3858 or
224-1869; or at the emergency line numbers 890-726 and 890-818; or by
high-frequency phone at 52816. Every morning, the duty officer submits a report
on all messages received to the director of the FSB himself. If something
serious is going on, such as the foiling of a terrorist attack in Ryazan, the
duty officer is entitled to phone the director of the FSB at home, even at
night. Reports in the media about the FSB and its members are also presented
every day in a separate report.
Within a few days of the instigation of criminal
proceedings requiring investigation by the FSB, an analytical note is compiled
on possible lines of action. For instance, the head of the section for
combating terrorism at the Ryazan UFSB draws up a note for the head of the
Department for Combating Terrorism of the FSB of Russia. This note is then
submitted via the secretariat of the deputy director of the FSB with
responsibility for monitoring the corresponding department, and from there the
note goes to the director of the FSB. All of which means that Patrushev knew
about the discovery in the basement of a building in Ryazan of sacks containing
explosives and a live detonating device no later than seven o’clock on the
morning of September 23. When there are explosions happening everywhere, for a
subordinate not to report to the top that a terrorist attack has been thwarted
would be tantamount to suicide. The foiling of a terrorist attack is an
occasion for rejoicing. It means medals and promotion and bonuses. And also, of
course, public recognition.
This time, the
apparent cause for celebration created a tricky situation. In connection with
the incident in Ryazan, Zdanovich announced on September 24 that the FSB
offered its apologies to the people of the city for the inconvenience and
psychological stress they had suffered as a result of anti-terrorist exercises.
Note that a day earlier, in his interview with NTV, Zdanovich had not
apologized, which means that on September 24, Patrushev must have sent
Zdanovich the directive to write everything off to sheer stupidity in order to
avoid being accused of terrorism.
“General
Alexander Zdanovich today apologized to the inhabitants of Ryazan on behalf of
the Federal Security Service of Russia for the inconvenience they had suffered
in the course of antiterrorist exercises and also for the psychological stress
caused to them. He emphasized that ‘the secret services thank the people of
Ryazan for the vigilance, restraint, and patience they have shown.’ At the same
time, Zdanovich called on Russians to take a tolerant view of the need to hold
‘hard-line’ checks on the preparedness, in the first instance, of the agencies
of law enforcement to ensure public safety, and also on the vigilance of the
public in conditions of heightened terrorist activity. The general told us that
this week, as part of the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation, the FSB had
implemented measures in several Russian cities designed to check the response
of the agencies of law enforcement, including the territorial divisions of the
FSB itself, and of the population to ‘modeled’ terrorist activity, involving
the planting of explosive devices. The representative of the secret services
observed that ‘serious shortcomings had been uncovered.’ ‘Unfortunately, in
some of the cities tested, there was no response at all from the agencies of
law enforcement to the potential planting of bombs.’ According to Zdanovich,
the FSB conducted its operation in conditions as close as possible to a real
terrorist threat, otherwise there would have been no point to these checks.
Naturally neither the local authorities nor the local law enforcement agencies
were informed. Precisely for this reason, the results of the check provide an
accurate picture of the degree to which the security of the Russian public is
guaranteed in various cities in the country. The general emphasized that the
last of these cities to be checked, Ryazan, proved to be by no means the last
in terms of the vigilance of the public, but was, unfortunately, less
successful in terms of the actions of the agencies of law enforcement. The FSB
RF is currently analyzing the results of the checks carried out in order
urgently to introduce the necessary correctives to the work of the agencies of
law enforcement in ensuring the safety of the Russian public. Alexander
Zdanovich assured us that once the results had been summed up and the reasons
for the ‘failures’ in the operation itself explained, appropriate measures
would be taken immediately.”
In this way, the
FSB issued an unambiguous statement that Ryazan was the last city in which
exercises had been conducted. In actual fact, September 23 marked the beginning
of the urgent organization by the FSB (despite Zdanovich’s assurances) of an
absolutely idiotically conceived exercise to check the vigilance of the public
and the agencies of coercion. The press was full of reports of “practice
bombings,” which were quite impossible to distinguish from the hooligan
escapades of telephone terrorists: mock-ups of bombs were planted in one
crowded place after another, in post offices, in public institutions, in shops,
and the following day, the media reported in graphic detail how the exhausted
public had failed to pay any attention to them. This was Patrushev providing
himself with an alibi, attempting to prove that the Ryazan “exercises” had been
only one episode in a series of checks organized across the whole of Russia by
the idiotic FSB.
The journalists had a field day, showering
colorful epithets on the dimwitted FSB operatives who hadn’t caught a single
real terrorist, but kept thinking up stupid war games in a country where real
terrorism was rampant. Headlines such as “FSB baseness and stupidity,” “The
Federal Sabotage Service,” “Land of frightened idiots,” “Man is Pavlov’s dog to
man. Let them hold these exercises in the Kremlin,” or “The secret services
have screwed the people of Ryazan,” hardly even stood out against the general
background. But the “base and stupid” leadership of the FSB demonstrated
remarkable stubbornness, carrying out more and more “practice bombings” and for
some reason failed to take serious offense at the journalists’ new-found
boldness—with only one exception, which was when they wrote about Ryazan.
Here are a few
typical “training exercises” from late September and October 1999.
In Moscow, FSB
operatives checking on police readiness arrived at a police station with a box
on which the word ‘bomb” was written. They were allowed inside, where they left
their package in one of the offices and then left. The box was only discovered
two days later
A mock-up of an
explosive device was planted in a pizzeria on Volkhonka Street in Moscow (it
was not discovered).
In Balashikha
outside Moscow, an abandoned building was selected, and exercises were
conducted in and around it on rescuing the victims of an explosion that had
supposedly already taken place in the building, with the involvement of the
police, the FSB, and the MChS.
In Tula and
Chelyabinsk, there were repeated instances of mock bombs being planted, perhaps
as an exercise, perhaps out of simple hooliganism.
In late October in Omsk employees of the Omsk
Region department of the FSB for counterfeit documents drove a vehicle on to
the grounds of the Omskvodokanal Company without encountering any obstacles,
broke through the company’s triple-level defenses, and “exploded” containers of
liquid chlorine.
In Ivanovo, FSB operatives planted sacks
containing sugar in the basement of a five-story apartment building (they were
not discovered).
Also in Ivanovo,
a mock-up of an explosive device was left in a trolley. Vigilant passengers
immediately spotted the box with wires and handed it over to the driver, who
put it in his compartment and drove around with it all night. Afterwards, he
took the box to the terminus and dismantled it himself.
On another occasion in Ivanovo, a box containing
a mock-up of a bomb was left in a taxi. The driver rode around with it all day
long and then threw it out on to the edge of the road, where it lay for several
more hours unnoticed by passing pedestrians.
On September 22, an explosive device was
discovered in the toilet at the Central Market in Ivanovo. The market was
cordoned off, and all the sales personnel and customers urgently evacuated. The
military personnel who arrived at the market took an hour to work out what kind
of bomb they were supposed to be dealing with. It turned out to be a mock-up.
The law enforcement agencies began trying to identify who was responsible for
such a professional “joke,” especially since the bomb was located in a locked
toilet reserved for the use of a small number of people working at the market.
The entire personnel of the Ivanovo police was thrown into the search for the
culprits. At the height of the operation, spokesmen for the FSB of Moscow
officially announced that an exercise had been conducted at the market. The
mock-up had been planted by Moscow FSB operatives.
In Toliatti, the
Volga Automobile Plant (VAZ) was “mined.” A mock-up of an explosive device was
discovered and disarmed. Also in Toliatti, one of the hotels with about fifty
people inside was “blown up.” One-and-a-half hours was allowed for the
“rescue.” The exercise involved policemen, firemen, the MChS, the emergency
ambulance service, and the gas company. A practice bombing was also held at the
Chapaev Meat Combine. The employee who found the “explosive device” took it
apart and kept the timing mechanism used in the mock-up for himself.
In Novomoskovsk
in the Tula Region an FSB operative disguised as a saboteur gained entry to the
Azot Chemical Combine, wrote the word “mined” on a tank of ammonia, and left
without being observed. Two weeks before the exercise, a spokesman for Azot had
told a session of the regional anti-terrorist commission that Azot did not have
the capability required to guard the plant and also had no money for external
security provision.
Exercises
conducted in St. Petersburg entailed consequences. A truck with a number from
another town, filled with sacks of supposed explosive, was parked in the
special parking lot on Zakharevskaya Street in front of the premises of the
investigative department of the GUVD and UFSB of St. Petersburg and the
Leningrad Region. The “terrorist” vehicle stood there for days without
attracting any attention, although no one had ever seen a truck in the official
parking lot before. The outcome of the exercise was the sacking of the head of
the GUVD of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region major-general of the
police, Victor Vlasov (which was, in fact, the real reason for leaving the
truck in the GUVD parking lot).
Any abortive
terrorist attack or straightforward incident of banditry could now easily be
written off to possible FSB exercises. In early October, the residents were
hastily evacuated from a nine-story house at number 4, Third Grazhdanskaya
Street in Moscow. Someone had found four crates containing 288 mine detonators
on the stone steps leading down into the basement. That was enough explosive to
blow up the building.
According to the
residents, two Zhiguli automobiles had stopped in the yard of their house, and
several hefty men had taken four massive iron-bound wooden crates out of the
trunks of the cars, and left them on the basement steps before leaving again.
Less than two minutes later, the first police units were already working at the
scene. Another fifteen minutes later, the crates were being examined by
explosives specialists from the FSB, and an “exclusion zone” had been
established around the building.
The police were unable to establish who owned
the cars from which the munitions had been unloaded, and they were not able to
create sketches of the sturdy, fit-looking terrorists, either. In addition to
the traditional explanation of the “Chechen connection,” the police officers
conducting the investigation came up with the alternative of a test of
vigilance conducted by the secret services.
The work-rate of
the law enforcement agencies in Ryazan was truly impressive during the days
when Patrushev decided to hold his “exercises” there. From September 13 to
September 22, the Ryazan special units responded to more than forty reports
from local residents of sightings of explosive devices. On September 13, all
the inhabitants of house number 18 on Kostiushko Street and the houses adjacent
to it were evacuated in only twenty minutes. In only one-and-a half hours, the
building was searched from the basements to the attics. The operation involved
VDV cadets, police units, ambulance brigades, employees of the MChS, and OMON
engineers. A similar evacuation also took place from a house on
Internatsionalnaya Street. During this period the editorial staff of the
newspaper Vechernyaya Ryazan and the
pupils of school No. 45 had to be evacuated. Every case proved to be a false
alarm. School children tossed a live RGD-22 shell into one of the entranceways
of house No. 32 on Stankozavodskaya Street out of sheer mischief. There was
also a bomb-clearance operation in the center of the city, on Victory Square.
The suspicious object there proved to be a gas cylinder half-buried in the
ground. In addition to all this, the “Dynamite” and “Foreigner” stages of the
Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation were taking place in the city, with special
detachments checking 3,812 city basements and 4,430 attics three times every
day.
In the afternoon
of September 22, Ryazan received a message from the Moscow FSB that, according
to information received in Moscow, one of the houses on Biriuzov Street was
mined, but which one was not known. In Ryazan, they immediately began checking
all the houses along the street. Thousands of people were temporarily
evacuated, and all the apartments were checked. Nothing was found. It was later
established that it had been a false alarm from a telephone terrorist. Then at
this point, Patrushev decided to check the vigilance of the people of Ryazan
during the night hours.
For a number of
formal reasons, the planting of the sacks in the apartment building in Ryazan
could not have been an exercise. When a training exercise is held, there has to
be a previously determined plan to work to. The plan must specify the manager
of the exercise, his deputy, the observers, and the parties being tested (the
inhabitants of Ryazan, the employees of the UFSB for the Ryazan Region, and so
on). The plan must list the items which are to be checked. The plan must have a
so-called “plot,” a specific scenario for the performance to be given. In the
Ryazan incident, the scenario was the planting of sacks of sugar in the
basement of an apartment building. The plan must define the material
requirements of the exercise: vehicles, money (for instance, to buy three
fifty-kilogram sacks of sugar), food (if a large number of people are taking
part in the exercise), weapons, communications equipment, and coding systems
(code tables), etc.
After all this has been included, the plan is
approved by senior command and only then, on the basis of the approved plan, is
a written instruction (it must be written) issued for the exercise, to be held.
Immediately before the start of the exercise the individual who approved the
plan for the exercise and issued the order for it to be held reports that it is
beginning. After the completion of the exercise, he reports that it is over.
Then a compulsory report is drawn up on the results of the exercise,
identifying the positive outcomes and the shortcomings, individuals who have
distinguished themselves are praised, and miscreants are identified. This same
order lists the material resources consumed or destroyed in the course of the
exercise (in the case of the Ryazan incident, at least three sacks of sugar and
a cartridge for the detonator).
It is compulsory
for the head of the local UFSB to be notified of a planned exercise. He is
directly subordinate to the director of the FSB, and no one has the right, for
instance, to check on Sergeiev’s performance without Patrushev’s permission.
Likewise, no one has the right to check up on Sergeiev’s subordinates, the
employees of the Ryazan UFSB, without Sergeiev’s permission. This means that
Patrushev and Sergeiev must already have known on September 22 about any
“exercises” which were due to be conducted. But Patrushev did not issue a
statement to that effect until September 24, and Sergeiev has never issued one,
because he knew nothing at all about the “exercises.”
Under the terms of its statute, the FSB is only
entitled to check on itself. It is not allowed to check the performance of
other organizations or of private individuals. If the FSB carries out a check
on the MVD (the Ryazan police, for instance), it has to be a joint exercise
with the MVD, and the appropriate officials of the MVD in the center and the provinces
have to be notified. If the exercise affects the civilian population (as was
the case in Ryazan), then the civil defense service and the MChS are also
involved. In all cases, a joint plan of the exercise has to be drawn up and
signed by the heads of all the relevant departments. The plan is approved by
the individual who coordinates all the various agencies of coercion which are
involved in the exercise. Exercises may be made as close as possible to real
situations, such as exercises involving live shelling. However, it is
absolutely forbidden to conduct exercises in which people might be hurt, or
which might pose a threat of damage to the environment. There is a specific
prohibition on holding exercises that involve members of the armed forces and
military units on active service, or ships standing at battle station. If a
frontier guard is on duty at his post, it is forbidden to imitate a breach of
the frontier in order to test his vigilance. If a facility is under guard, it
is forbidden to attack that facility as part of an exercise.
Active service
differs from an exercise in that during periods of duty military goals are
pursued with the use of live weapons. Each branch of the forces (and the
police) has an active service charter which lays everything out in detail. On
September 22-23 1999, the police patrols on the streets of Ryazan were on active service, carrying
weapons and special equipment, which they were entitled to use to detain FSB
operatives planting mysterious sacks in the basement of an apartment building.
Following the series of explosions in Ryazan, the entire police force of the
city was operating in an intensive regime in response to the real threat of
terrorist attacks, which meant that unfortunate FSB operatives involved in
unannounced exercises could quite simply have been shot.
That brings us
to the initiation of criminal proceedings under article 205, which means that
an investigator had issued a warrant for the location and arrest of the
suspects, and that they could have been killed in the process of arrest. The
basis for the instigation of criminal proceedings is clearly defined in the
Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation, which does not contain any
points concerning the instigation of criminal proceedings during exercises or
in connection with exercises. The unfounded or illegal instigation of criminal
proceedings is in itself a criminal offense, as is their illegal termination.
And finally,
exercises cannot be held without observers, who objectively assess the results
of an exercise and then draw up reports on its successes and failures,
apportion praise and blame, and draw conclusions. There were no observers in
Ryazan.
If Patrushev
were to have defied the existing regulations, charters and statutes and dared to
order secret exercises, his action would have had to be regarded as a crime.
Let us start from the fact that Patrushev would have violated the Federal Law
on the agencies of the Federal Security Service in the Russian Federation as
adopted by the State Duma on February 22, 1995, and ratified by the president.
Article No. 8 of this law states that “the activities of the agencies of the
Federal Security Service and the methods and the means they employ must not
cause harm to people’s lives and health or cause damage to the environment.”
Article No. 6 of the law describes the responsibilities of the FSB and the
rights of private individuals at length:
“The state
guarantees the observance of human and civil rights and freedoms in the
performance of their duty by the agencies of the Federal Security Service. No
limitation of human and civil rights and freedoms shall be permitted with the
exception of those cases specified by federal constitutional laws and federal
laws.
“An individual who believes that the agencies of
the Federal Security Service or their officers have infringed his rights and
freedoms shall be entitled to make appeal against the actions of the
aforementioned agencies and their officers to a superior agency of the Federal
Security Service, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, or a court.
“Agencies of the
state, enterprises, institutions, and organizations, regardless of their form
of ownership, and also public organizations and individuals shall be entitled
in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation to receive an
explanation and information from the agencies of the Federal Security Service
in cases where their rights and freedoms have been restricted...
“In a case of
the infringement of human and civil rights by employees of the agencies of the
Federal Security Service, the head of the respective agency of the Federal
Security Service, public prosecutor, or judge is obliged to take measures to
restore such rights and freedoms, make good any damage caused, and call the
guilty parties to account as specified under the legislation of the Russian
Federation.
“Officers of the
agencies of the Federal Security Service who have committed an abuse of power
or exceeded the bounds of their official authority shall be held responsible as
specified under the legislation of the Russian Federation.”
The criminal
acts described in article 6 of the Federal Law on the FSB fall under the
following articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation:
Article 286. Exceeding the bounds of official authority.
Acts committed
by an officer which clearly exceed the bounds of his authority and have
resulted in violation of the rights and legitimate interests of individuals or
organizations... The same action committed by an individual occupying an
official state post of the Russian Federation...with the use of force or threat
of its use; with the use of a weapon or special means; resulting in grave
consequences...shall be punishable by a term of imprisonment of from three to
ten years and deprivation of the right to hold specified posts or engage in
specified forms of activity for a period of up to three years.
Article 207. Deliberate provision of false
information concerning an act of terrorism.
The deliberate
provision of false information concerning a planned explosion, act of arson, or
other actions which constitute a threat to the lives of individuals and a
danger of substantial damage to property...shall be punishable by a fine...or
by imprisonment for a term of up to three years.
And finally,
article 213. “Hooliganism, a gross violation of public order clearly expressive
of disrespect for society...shall be punishable...by imprisonment for a term of
up to two years.”
An officer
occupying an official state post, FSB director Patrushev, issued orders for the
use of special means (sacks with unidentified contents and a shotgun cartridge)
for the forcible exclusion of residents from a building in Ryazan for the
entire night. This absolutely illegal action, which has no basis in any
military or civil charters or statutes, and certainly not in any laws, entailed
grave consequences in the form of damage to health and severe psychological
stress suffered by individuals, specifically the serious cold contracted by one
child whose mother was ordered by the police to take him outside straight from
his bath without any chance to dress him properly, as well as heart attacks and
hypertensive crises suffered by several of the residents.
At least two medical experts provided opinions
concerning the psychological consequences of the “exercise” for the people who
were driven out of their homes. In the opinion of Nikolai Kyrov, head of
administration of the psychotherapeutical support service of the Moscow Public
Health Committee, the residents of the building in Ryazan were subjected to
serious psychological trauma: “It is comparable with what people would have
suffered during a genuine terrorist attack. And people who have survived an
explosion are changed forever; they’ve been taken right up to the boundary
between life and death. The mind never lets go of such significant moments. At
least some time in the middle of the experiment, the inhabitants of the house
should have been informed that it was not a real emergency, but only an
exercise.” Yury Boiko, Moscow’s senior psychotherapist, drew an even gloomier
picture: “The result of uncertainty and fear will be a sharp increase in the
consumption of nicotine, alcohol, and simply food. Part of the public is
already turning for help to non-professionals: people’s interest in all sorts
of sects, magicians, and fortune-tellers is on the increase.” (The penalty on
this charge is from three to ten years, with exclusion from holding office for
three years.)
Although supposedly aware that an exercise was
being conducted in Ryazan, Patrushev failed to inform the public and the
inhabitants of the building in Ryazan for one and a half days, which is
tantamount to deliberately providing false information concerning an act of
terrorism. (We can settle for the fine on this charge —and then, under the
terms of article 213, add two years for flagrant disrespect for society.)
Let us also note
that, under the terms of part IV of the Statute on the Federal Security Service
of the Russian Federation of July 6, 1998, “the director of the FSB of Russia
bears personal responsibility for the achievement of the objectives set for the
FSB of Russia and the agencies of the Federal Security Service.” Perhaps the
General Public Prosecutor of Russia will take up the case? He has already
rejected the instigation of criminal proceedings for terrorism.
An exercise could not legally have been
conducted using a stolen car. According to the Criminal Code of the Russian
Federation the theft of an automobile is a crime, and a person who has
committed such a crime bears criminal responsibility. Under the terms of the
law on the FSB, the service’s operatives have no right to commit a crime, even
when in pursuit of military objectives. Only the FSB’s own vehicles are used in
operational exercises involving agents (including operational passenger
automobiles, of which the FSB has two full parking lots for its central
administration alone). If one of these cars is stopped by the GAI, for
instance, for speeding on the Moscow-Ryazan highway, or detained by the Ryazan police
because paper has been pasted over the Moscow license plate, obscuring it in a
suspicious manner, the car can immediately be identified as one that is
specially registered. Any policeman will recognize this as indicating that the
car is one of the operational vehicles belonging to the agencies of law
enforcement or the secret services.
Exercises would
have been conducted using operational vehicles. However, the FSB could not use
operational vehicles to commit an act of terrorism. The car might be noticed
(as it was) and identified (as it was). It would look really bad if terrorists
blew up a building in Ryazan using a car registered to the FSB transport fleet,
but if terrorists blew up the building using a stolen car that would only be
normal and natural. On the other hand, if FSB operatives driving in a stolen
car by day (not by night) were stopped for a routine check or for speeding,
they would simply present their official identity cards or “cover documents”
and after that, no policeman would bother to check the documents for the car,
so he would never know it was wanted by the police.
FSB agents on
operational duty often carry a MUR identity card, printed in the special FSB
laboratory as a “cover document.” On the occasion of his arrest, Khinshtein, a
Moscow Komsomolets journalist, famed for his remarkable and far from accidental
knowledge concerning cases residing in the safes of the secret services,
presented MUR identity card No. 03726 of a certain Alexander Yevgenievich
Matveiev, a captain in the criminal investigation department, issued by the
Moscow GUVD. In addition Khinshtein was carrying a special pass forbidding the
police to search his car. When the police asked him where the documents came
from, he replied honestly that they belonged to him and were his “cover
documents.”
If official
identity cards of that kind were found on someone like Khinshtein, one can
imagine what an array of “cover documents” was carried by the FSB operatives
setting out to blow up the building in Ryazan. And if the car’s documents were
checked, and it was discovered to be stolen, they could always say they’d just
found it and were returning it to its owner.
The car in which
the terrorists arrived was the only clue left after the attempt to blow up the
apartment building, the beginning of the only trail that might lead back to the
perpetrators. The car is the weakest link in the planning and implementation of
any act of terrorism. It was only possible to blow up the building in Ryazan if
a stolen car was used.
In conclusion, we would like to quote the
opinion expressed by former Public Prosecutor General of Russia, Yu.I. Skuratov
in an interview with the Russian-language Paris newspaper Russkaya Mysl for October 29, 1999: “I was very much disturbed and
alarmed by what happened in Ryazan. In this case, it certainly is possible to
construct a scenario with the secret services themselves involved in planning
an explosion in Ryazan, and making very clumsy excuses when they were caught
out. I am amazed that the public prosecutor’s office never did get to the
bottom of the business. That’s its job.”
So we are left with no indication that an
exercise was being carried out in Ryazan, except the oral statements of FSB
chief Patrushev, his subordinate Zdanovich, who is bound in the line of duty to
support everything Patrushev says, and several other FSB officers. All the
facts, however, indicate that a terrorist attack was, indeed, thwarted in
Ryazan. Those who commissioned, planned, carried out, and abetted this crime
have yet to be tried and convicted. But since we know the suspects’ names,
positions, work and home addresses, and even their telephone numbers, arresting
them should not be too difficult.
Chapter 6
The FSB resorts to mass
terror: Buinaksk, Moscow, Volgodonsk
The perpetrators
of the terrorist attacks in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk were never found,
and we can only guess at who was behind the attacks by analogy with the events
in Ryazan. In these three towns, the Ryazan-style “exercises” were carried
through to their intended conclusion, and the lives of several hundred people
were abruptly cut short or totally ruined.
In
August 1999, all the members of Lazovsky’s group were at large in society,
including even Vorobyov. At that time, yet another military operation was just
approaching its conclusion in Dagestan, into which the Chechen separatists had
made an incursion. A lot has been said and written since that time about this
Chechen encroachment into Dagestan territory. It has been claimed that the
invasion was planned in the Kremlin and deliberately provoked by the Russian
secret services. The Russian media were full of articles about a conspiratorial
meeting in France, between Shamil Basaev and the head of the president’s
office, Alexander Voloshin, organized by the Russian intelligence agent, A.
Surikov, in France. We are not in possession of enough facts to draw absolutely
definite conclusions. Let us begin with Surikov’s interview.
On
24 August 1999 the newspaper Versiya—a
part of the holding company “Sovershenno sekretno” that was headed by Borovik,
who died in a plane crash together with the Chechen businessman Bazhaev on 9
March 2000—published an interview with Colonel Surikov of the GRU, a person
close to Evgeny Primakov on the one hand and to Yuri Maslyukov on the other.
During the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, Surikov served under Abkhazian Defense
Minister Sultan Sosnaliev. In the course of the war he became acquainted with
Basaev. From then on, he was considered an expert on the Caucausus. In the editorial
note that preceded the inteview, Versiya
reporter that it was Surikov who had organized the “secret meeting with the
head of the president’s office, Voloshin.” Neither Surikov nor Voloshin denied
this statement. Surikov reported that:
Shamil Basaev and Khattab created fortified areas in
Dagestan on a scale not even suspected by the press. They dug trenches, erected
fortifications, established arms and ammunition supply lines from Chechnya.
They also established communication and transportation networks between each
other and Chechnya. The fortified areas are surrounded by mine fields. My
professional opinion is that using artillery and aviation alone, as the federal
troops have been doing in the mountains of Dagestan, is not enough. So far the
federation’s actions have been ineffective and have not caused damage to the
enemy’s forces or fortifications. In order to liquidate the fortified areas, a
ground offensive with air support is necessary...
The federal formations being organized in Dagestan are made
up of odd scraps. Policemen from the Urals, OMON agents from Murmansk, various
components from the Defense Ministry, large numbers of conscripts. According to
my sources, conscripts constitute one third—contrary to the generals’
assurances that conscripts aren’t
sent to Dagestan. It is pointless to talk about “stream-lining” such a diverse
crowd for active duty. There are as
many as thirty generals in the region at the moment, although a single
well-coordinated regiment would be sufficient to liquidate the Chechen
fighters. And with coordinated activity and unified command in place, a single
colonel could be in charge of the entire operation. At the moment, all of these
generals are simply making a huge mess of the chain of command since they
belond to different departments.
Therefore, in the current situation a military operation
would cause great casualties among our soldiers and policemen. I would predict
that 300-400 of our men would die in an attack, and we already have
approximately 250 dead and wounded. Despite the generals’ assertions to the
contrary, the Chechen fighters have suffered minimal losses—about 40 people.
They might lose about as many in an assault. .In general, reports about losses
on the Chechen side—thousands killed in one day—remind me of reports from the
Chechen War of 1995-1997.
Our generals evidently fail to take into account the fact
that Shamil Basaev is an experienced guerrilla fighter who became an expert in
sabotage long before the war in Chechnya. He went through a complete training
course in one of the Russian intelligence agencies. This was during the peak of
the Georgian-Abkhazian war. At that time, Moscow took a cowardly stance, and
instead of acting in defense of Abkhazia, where a genocide was taking place,
the only thing that the Russian forces did was to offer unofficial assistance
to the volunteer detachments that went off to war. Pavel Sergeevich Grachev,
who was Minister of Defense at the time, pretended not to know about this. And
one fourth of these volunteers, who came to fight in Abkhazia, were Chechens.
And their leader was Shamil Basaev.
Basaev is now making significant tactical improvements to
the military actions in Dagestan. He’s holding down a fortified area in
Botlikha, but this is merely a diversionary maneuver. He’s starting to
establish a guerrilla movement. Along with sabotage, this is the most effective
means to conduct a war in a forested mountainous region. Now his tactics
consist in short attacks on columns of federal forces, organizing ambushes,
mining roads, shelling strategic targets with RPGs....
The Kremlin knew that Dagestan was about to be invaded by
the Wahhabists. They could not not have known it. They were warned about it by
the secret services. Even “Versiya” wrote about it. So why did they blow it?
Because there are people in the Kremlin who seriously believe that individuals
such as Basaev can be paid to do anything that Moscow tells them....
On the whole, the Russian secret services also slept through
Basaev’s invasion of Dagestan. Because our secret services are now at that
stage of decay when it becomes hard to deal with direct obligations on account
of business commitments. They’re only capable of bulldozing reporters like Pasko, and even then
unsuccessfully. The situation in the Caucauses can still be salvaged. But
there’s no one to salvage it.
What is remarkable is
not that Surikov gave Versiya an
interview, but that his interview was given three weeks after Versiya’s publication of the original
materials about the meeting between Voloshin and Basaev. Had Surikov thought
that Versiya’s earlier article did
not correspond to reality, he would have either refused to grant Versiya an interview or else made use of
the opportunity to refute it.
Versiya’s original article was titled “The
Agreement.” It was published on 3 August 1999:
A luxurious villa in the French town of Beaulieu, situated
between Nice and Monaco, has been watched by the French secret services for a
long time. The villa belongs to the international arms dealer Adan Khashoggi.
And although nothing can be said against Khashoggi from the perspective of the
French criminal code, the Saudi billionaire has a suspicious reputation.
“Versiya” was informed about the heightened interest in
Khashoggi by a source in the French secret services whose name we will not
publish. He is a professor of political sicence and at the same time an expert
in Russian defense, security, and organized crime issues. He frequently speaks
out in the press and takes part in investigative reporting. He works under
contract for French government agencies, including French counter-intelligence.
This source has reported that the French put the villa under
close surveillance at the beginning of July, when the Venezuelan Banker Alfonso
Davidovich moved in there with his young black secretary. In the Latin American
press, Davidovich is described as a money launderer for the left-wing insurgent
organization FARC ( Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), which has
been engaged in a military conflict with the official authorities for several
decades. FARC’s principal source of funds is believed to be the drug trade.
It soon turned out that one of Davidovich’s rather frequent
visitors was a certain French businessman of Israeli-Soviet origin, the Sukhumi-born
53-year-old Yakov Kosman. In a short while, Kosman arrived at the villa with
six people who had come through Austria with Turkish passports. One of these
Turks was identified by the secret services as Tsveiba, who had at one time so
distinguished himself in the Georgian-Abkhazian war that he is still charged
with war crimes by the authorities in Tbilisi, including massacres of the
civilian population. All six moved into the villa and did not leave its
premises for three weeks.
Finally, the secret services were able to observe Kosman
together with Tsveiba and one other guest—presumably an Abkhazian—departing for
the local airport in Nice. At the same time, two people arrived at the airport
in a private plane from Paris. One of them—Sultan Sosnaliev—had been the
Abkhazian Minister of Defense during the years of the Georgian-Abkhazian war
and effectively the number two man in the republic after Vladislav Ardzinba.
The second person who came out of that airplane was another individual from
Sukhumi—Anton Surikov. During the years of the war in Abkhazia, Surikov had
served under Sosnaliev. Operating under the assumed name “Mansur,” he was
responsible for organizing acts of sabotage. Subsequently, under his real name,
Surikov occupied a key post in the administration of Evgeny Primakov, although
his official title was merely assistant to First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri
Maslyukov. Both of them proceeded to the villa in Beaulieu.
In the middle of July, two days after the couple’s arrival,
the private Biritish yacht “Magia” arrived in the port of Beaulieu from Malta. Two “Englishmen” came
ashore from the boat. If their passports are to be believed, one of these
“Englishmen” was a certain Turk by the name of Mehmed, formerly a consultant to
the Islamist Prime Minister of Turkey Erbakan, a rather influential figure in
Turkish, Middle Eastern, and Causasian Wahhabist circles. The second person, to
the surprise of the secret services, was the well-known Chechen field commander
Shamil Basaev. Incidentally, he had also at one time been Sosnaliev’s deputy
and headed the Chechen forces in Abkhazia. The French became alert and
intensified their surveillance. And for good reason. Late in the evening, on an
airplane belonging to one of Russia’s oil companies, a man arrived at the Nice
airport. The man was balding, had a beard, sharp eyes, and bore a strong
resemblance to the head of the Kremlin administration. After passing through
French passport control, this individual looked around intently. He was dressed
in a formal suit, with a suitcase and without any bodyguards. The balding man
calmed down only when he saw the people who were there to meet him—two
Abkhazians and Surikov. All of them got inside a Rolls-Royce and drove off to
the villa in Beaulieu.
That whole night, something went on at the villa. The
villa’s security was especially vigilant, and there was so much magnetic
radiation in the area surrounding the villa that cell phones within a radius of
several hundred yards stopped working. In the morning, the same Rolls-Royce
drove off to the airport and the person who resembled Voloshin flew back to
Moscow. During the following day, all of the guests at the villa departed.
It should be noted
that Versiya turned out to be
remarkably unyielding, even stubborn, in insisting on the theory that the
invasion of Dagestan in August 1999 was organized by Russian secret services.
In particular, on 29 February 2000, a few days before the deaths of Borovik and
Bazhaev and the presidential election that brought Putin to power, the newspaper
published an article titled “Khasbulatov’s Conspiracy”:
After Khasbulatov informs the Kremlin about the coup d’etat
being prepared [in Chechnya], the head of the president’s office Alexander
Voloshin, according to certain sources, hurries to a meeting with Shamil Basaev
in France. This meeting is organized for Voloshin by Anton Surikov, a GRU
colonel close to the authorities, or more concretely, close to the circle of
Evgeny Primakov, the former head of federal intelligence. Immediately after the
talks in France, Shamil Basaev invades Dagestan. Then come the apartment-house
bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities. And then the second Chechen
campaign. That is how wars start.
The bibliography of
the meeting between Voloshin and Basaev would not be complete without a
reference to “Conspiracy-2,” the final article in this series. The article was
published—again in Versiya—on 2 July
2000, after Putin’s election victory, outside the context of any election
campaign. It represented an expanded version of the earlier article,
“Conspiracy,” with new excerpts:
The meeting supposedly took place at the villa of the
international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in the village of Beaulieu near Nice
on 4 July 1999.... Earlier, sources in the French and Israeli secret services,
which had provided this information, reported that “there exists a video of the
meeting at the villa in Beaulieu.” However, they offered no evidence. At the
end of June, “Versiya” received a large mail envelope without a return address.
The envelope contained a photograph of three men. Pictured on the left was an
individual resembling Anton Surikov, assistant to former First Deputy Prime
Minister Yuri Maslyukov. Pictured in the middle was a person bearing a very
close resemblance to the head of the Kremlin office, Alexander Voloshin—balding
and with a similar beard. Next to these two individuals was a squatting person
wearing shorts—balding, but with a more substantial beard. After some time,
“Versiya” received a phone call, and the caller, without introducing himself,
said: “This is a photograph of the meeting between Voloshin and Basaev.
Voloshin is easy to recognize. Basaev is the bearded man on the right..”.. The
unidentified caller specified that the photo was printed from a still-frame,
and that the recording was made on an analog videocamera....
At the time of the meeting, Surikov was a consultant to the
general director of RSK “MiG.” At
present he is still working with Maslyukov, but now heads the Committee on
Industry, Construction, and Scientific Technology in the Duma....
According to verifiable information from the French and
Israelis, the private British yacht “Magia” arrived at the Beaulieu port from Malta on July 3. Two passengers disembarked. If their
passports are to credible, one of these “Englishmen” was a certain Turk by the
name of Mehmet.... The second person, to the surprise of the intelligence
officers, was Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev....
Late in the evening of July 4, a man arrived at the Nice
airport in a private plane belonging to one of Russia’s oil companies. The man
was balding, with a small beard, sharp eyes, and resembled the head of the
Kremlin office....
Whether by coincidence or not, some time later— in
August—Shamil Basaev’s group invaded Dagestan. The resignation of Prime
Minister Sergei Stepashin soon followed. He was replaced by the former head of
the FSB. After this, federal troops successfully repulsed the attack on
Dagestan, and in pursuit of the Chechen fighters, once again entered rebellious
Chechnya. The “anti-terrorist operation” in the Chechen Republic has been going
on since that time and is unlikely to end in the near future. It should be
noted that different sources have given different explanations of the purpose
of the visit to Beaulieu by
individuals resembling Voloshin and Basaev. According to one hypothesis, the
subsequent invasion of Dagestan constituted a public relations stunt within the
framework of the operation “Heir.” According to a contrary hypothesis, the man
resembling the head of the Kremlin office had learned from the Russian secret
services about Basaev’s intentions and had asked individuals who had once
worked with him—presumably Anton Surikov—to arrange a meeting with Basaev, in
order to attempt to prevent the invasion.
Ilyas Akhmadov, the Chechen minister of foreign
affairs in the government of Aslan Maskhadov, believed that the operation in
Dagestan was provoked by Moscow:
“The leadership of Chechnya has condemned the
Dagestan campaign. For us this is really a big problem. But remember what
happened in July, when the Russian army destroyed our fortified position and
then an entire battalion of Russian soldiers invaded our territory. Surely,
that is provocation? Pilgrims from Dagestan came to Basaev and asked him to
free them from ‘the Russian yoke,’ then when he began the campaign, they began
saying on television that they didn’t want it, and they wanted to live in
Russia. It’s an obvious set-up.”
According to Abdurashid Saidov, founder and
former chairman of the Islamic Democratic Party of Dagestan, from 1997 onwards,
following the adoption by the Dagestan Parliament of its famous law “On the
struggle against Islamic fundamentalism,” members of the religious minority
(the Vahhabites) were deliberately forced out of Dagestan into Chechnya.
Persecution and threats of physical violence simply made it impossible for
Vahhabites to live in Dagestan. At the same time, the Dagestan leadership was
well aware that the Vahhabites would be greeted with open arms in Chechnya. Once
forced out of Dagestan into Chechnya the Dagestan Islamists joined the
opposition and were prepared in time to return to Dagestan in the new capacity
of rulers of the state. Rumors of a forthcoming invasion from Chechnya had
circulated in Dagestan in 1997 and 1998, at a time when Russia had left the
borders with Chechnya in the Tsumadin, Botlikha, and Kazbek districts of
Dagestan exposed. Active members of the radical Dagestan opposition moved
freely between the territories of the two republics, but there was no reaction
from the FSB, which at that time was headed by Putin. It is possible that the
retinue of the leader of the Dagestan Islamist radicals, Bagaudin, who had
sought refuge from pursuit in Chechnya, included provocateurs operating on the
orders of certain Russian departments of coercion, and they were the ones who,
when the right moment came, pushed Bagaudin, and through him Basaev and
Khattab, into the invasion of Dagestan.
From May to June
1999, every market trader in Grozny already knew that an invasion of Dagestan
was inevitable. For some reason, only the Russian secret services knew nothing
about it. From July, there were several hundred armed Dagestan Vahhabites in
the Dagestan village of Echeda in Russia, where they had dug themselves in and
reinforced their positions in the inaccessible ravines on the Russian border
with Chechnya and Georgia. Long before the arrival in the Tsumadin Region of
the Islamist rebels, the area was bristling with weapons. In late July, at the
height of a fuel crisis in the region, heavy tankers delivered fuel, tons at a
time, to the guerrilla camps in the hills above the very windows of the UVD and
UFSB of the Tsumada district. The FSB failed to react, because the prospective
armed conflict between the Chechens and the Dagestanis would be to the
Kremlin’s advantage.
At the same
time, Bagaudin was receiving encouraging reports from his agents: “There’s no
one in Tsumada apart from policemen, and they won’t go against their own. We’ll
be in the regional center in no time at all. This is your home region, the
people are waiting for you, support is guaranteed, so push on!” And Bagaudin
fell into the trap. On the eve of the invasion, Basaev actually suggested joint
operations with Bagaudin, but the offer of help was refused, so that Basaev and
Khattabi were forced to act separately, advancing in the direction of Botlikha,
which was most opportune for the Russian leadership, indeed perfectly timed for
the organizers of Putin’s election campaign. At this precise point in time,
Russia was hit by an unprecedented series of terrorist attacks.
The motivation
behind the September attacks was provided by the FSB itself. An official
information release from the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow region, formulated
the goals of the terrorists, who blew up apartment houses in Moscow in
September 1999, as follows: “One of the main explanations under consideration
by the investigators was the perpetration of a terrorist attack intended to
destabilize the situation in Moscow, intimidate the public, and influence the
authorities into taking certain decisions, which are in the interests of the
organizers of the attack.” The very same idea was formulated in the language of
satirical polemic by the newspaper Vechernyaya
Moskva: “The terrorists’ main aim is to create a heinously oppressive
atmosphere in society. To make me turn coward so that I slap my neighbor from
the Caucasus across the face, and he pulls out his dagger, and then it all
starts... So that the party of idiots can emerge from underground, and the mass
arrests can start—only don’t ask what party this is, and where this underground
is located.”
It’s clear enough which kind of “particular
decisions” the authorities could be influenced into taking by the bombings, and
which kind they could not. The explosions could easily result in a decision to
introduce troops into Chechnya. But there was absolutely no way terrorist
attacks could produce the decision the Chechens wanted on granting Chechnya
formal independence (by this time it had already achieved informal
independence). In other words, the bombings were needed by the Russian secret
services, in order to start a war with Chechnya, but not by the insurgents in
Chechnya to encourage the legal recognition of their independent republic.
Future events confirmed that this was indeed the case: the war began, the
secret services came to power in Russia, and Chechen independence came to an
end. And all as a result of the terrorist attacks carried out in September.
On August 31, a
trial bombing took place in the Okhotnyi Ryad shopping center on Manege Square
in the center of Moscow. One person was killed, and forty were injured The
government immediately put forward the “Chechen connection” as an explanation,
although it was hard to imagine that the Chechen terrorists would attack a
shopping complex where the director was the well-known Chechen, Umar
Djabrailov. The person later arrested for planning and carrying out the
terrorist attack was “a certain Ryzhenkov,” who according to the FSB “impersonated
an FSB general.” In fact, however, as early as 1996, Nikolai Vasilievich
Zelenko, head of military intelligence in General Rokhlin’s 8th Army Corps, had
reported to the FSB that FSB General Ryzhenkov was “definitely working” for
terrorists.
Military intelligence engages in operational
activity, both inside and outside Russia, and it has its own staff of secret
agents. The 8th Army Corps was stationed at Volgograd, had fought in Chechnya,
and was especially active in recruiting agents among the Chechens. Shamil
Basaev underwent training at the GRU firing range in Volgograd before the
conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia, and it was military intelligence that
trained him. If Zelenkov had learned something about who was behind the bombing
at the Okhotnyi ryad shopping complex, and about Ryzhenkov, he certainly must
have reported it to General Rokhlin, who was chairman of the Defense Committee
of the State Duma. At the time, however, Ryzhenkov was not detained. On the
contrary, it was Zelenko who was arrested.
Zelenko had served almost all of his time in the
army in the Caucasus. He’d been in all the hot spots: Karabakh, Baku, Tbilisi,
Abkhazia, Dagestan, and Chechnya. He only missed out on Grozny itself, because
he had been seriously wounded. FSB employees turned up to see Zelenko twenty
days after he’d had a heart operation at the Burdenko Hospital in Moscow. They
accused him of possessing an unregistered pistol and planning to kill a certain
businessman, and they took him as far away from Moscow as possible, to the
prison in Chelyabinsk.
So why was
Zelenko arrested? Rokhlin was on good terms with the head of the FSB’s military
intelligence at the time, Vladimir Ivanovich Petrishchev, and would have been
obliged to report to him any information received from Zelenko. That was when
strange things started to happen: first Zelenko was arrested, and then on July
3, 1998, General Rokhlin was murdered.
The FSB itself effectively confirmed that the
arrest of Zelenko, the murder of Rokhlin, and the terrorist attacks in Russia
were all interconnected. All of the cases were handled by the same investigator
from the office of the Public Prosecutor General, N.P. Indiukov, who had a
great deal of experience in the investigation of cases fixed, in which it was
important to make sure that the investigation was directed along a false trail.
Indiukov was appointed to conduct the investigation into the case of Tamara
Pavlovna Rokhlina, who was accused of murdering her husband. The various stages
of this great masterpiece of Russian jurisprudence are well known. Tamara
Rokhlina was arrested after the general’s murder, and in November 2000, she was
sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. In December, the length of her sentence
was halved. On June 7, 2001, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation
quashed Rokhlina’s conviction, and on June 8, she was released from custody.
Indiukov made no attempt whatever to investigate claims that the general had
been killed by three unknown men wearing masks.
However, the most remarkable thing in all of
this is that Zelenko’s case, following his arrest on completely unrelated
charges of common criminal activity, was also investigated by Indiukov, and
that the case never even reached the courts. Zelenko was quietly released
without any publicity following General Rokhlin’s death.
These strange
killings, dubious investigations and deliberately provoked incursions into
foreign territory provided the background to the blowing up of a residential
building in the district of Buinaksk in Dagestan. Sixty-four of the building’s
residents were killed. This terrorist attack was deliberately linked with the
defeat of the Chechen rebel detachments in Dagestan, even though there were no
Chechens among the perpetrators of the attack, and those accused of planning
the bombing claimed that they were innocent. On the same day, a ZIL-130
automobile loaded with 2,706 kilograms of explosive was found in Buinaksk. The
car was in a parking lot in a region containing residential buildings and a
military hospital. An explosion was only averted thanks to the vigilance of
local people. In other words, a second terrorist bombing in Buinaksk was foiled
by members of the public, not the secret services.
During the night
of September 8-9, the nine-story apartment house at number 19 Guryanov Street
in Moscow was torn apart by an explosion. The blast killed ninety-four people
and injured 164 more. The first account put forward was an explosion due to a
gas leak. The following day, the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region announced
that “the collapse of the third and fourth entranceways was induced by the
detonation of about 350 kilograms of a high-explosive mixture. The explosive
device was located at ground floor level. Physical and chemical investigation
of items removed from the site of the occurrence revealed traces...of hexogene
and TNT on their surfaces.”
It was apparent
immediately after the first bombing of an apartment block that the attack was
the work of professionals, not so much from the actual implementation of the
terrorist attack itself as from its planning and preparation. A massive
terrorist bombing, which involves the use of hundreds of kilograms of
explosive, several vehicles, and a number of people is hard to put together in
a hurry. Many former and serving members of the secret services including, a
former GRU employee, retired Colonel Robert Bykov, believe that the terrorists
must have shipped the explosives into Moscow in several batches over a period
of four to six months. Modeling of terrorist attacks has shown that it would
have been impossible to prepare for an explosion of this type any quicker. The
model was constructed to take account of all the stages of the operation:
finalization of the contract, making initial calculations based on the plan of
the building, visiting the site, adjusting the initial calculations,
determining the optimal composition of the explosive, ordering its manufacture,
making final calculations adjusted according to the actual composition of the
explosive, renting premises, and shipping in the explosive, etc. This meant
that the preparations would have had to begin in the spring of 1999. During
that period, the Chechens could not have been preparing terrorist attacks in
response to the counter-offensive by Russian forces in Dagestan, since the
Chechens had not yet made their own incursion into Dagestan territory.
Rumors about imminent terrorist attacks had been
circulating long before the first explosions occurred. On July 2, 1999, the
journalist Alexander Zhilin obtained possession of a certain document dated
June 29, 1999. He believed that it originated from the Kremlin and that the
leak had been arranged by Sergei Zverev, deputy head of the president’s office,
which was why he was removed from his post.
The contents of
the document were baffling, but even so Zhilin. passed it on to Sergei
Yastrzhembsky, vice-premier in the government of Moscow. Yastrzhembsky,
however, failed to react to it (some time later Yastrzhembsky left Luzhkov’s
administration, which is hardly surprising; however, he was then taken on by
Putin, which really is surprising). If the document had been published after
the explosions, everyone would have believed it was a fake produced after the
fact. But the newspaper Moskovskaya
pravda went ahead with the publication of the document under the headline
“Storm in Moscow” on July 22, before the explosions had occurred:
“Confidential
“Certain information concerning plans with
regard to Yu.M. Luzhkov and the situation in Moscow.
“The following information has been received
from reliable sources. One of the analytical groups working for the president’s
office has developed a plan for discrediting Luzhkov by means of acts of
sabotage intended to destabilize the public mood in Moscow. The plan is known
by the planners as ‘Storm in.’
“According to
our sources, the city can expect serious upheavals. For instance, it is planned
to carry out sensational terrorist attacks (or attempted terrorist attacks)
against a number of state institutions: buildings of the FSB and MVD, the
Council of the Federation, the Moscow Municipal Court, the Moscow Arbitration
Court, and a number of buildings. The abduction of well-known people and
ordinary citizens by ‘Chechen guerrillas’ is envisaged.
“A separate
chapter is devoted to ‘armed criminal’ activities directed against commercial
organizations and businessmen who support Luzhkov. The order has been given to
dig up and also manufacture ‘operational’ material on Kobzon, Gusinsky, and the
Most-Media group, Djabrailov, Luchansky, Tarpishchev, Tarantsev, Ordjonikidze,
Baturina (Luzhkov’s wife), Gromov, Yevtushenkov, P. Gusev, and others. In
particular, incidents in the close vicinity of Kobzon’s office and [the
company] ‘Russian Gold’ have supposedly gone off according to the plan in
question. The purpose is to create the firm conviction that the businesses of
those who support Luzhkov will be destroyed and that the safety of his
confederates themselves is not guaranteed.
“A separate program has been developed in order
to set the organized criminal groups active in Moscow against each other and
provoke war between them, which the authors of the report believe will, on the
one hand, create an intolerable crime wave in the capital and, on the other
hand, provide a screen for the planned terrorist attacks against state
institutions in the form of a settling of accounts between criminals, and
general chaos.
“These ‘measures’ pursue several goals: creating
an atmosphere of fear in Moscow and the illusion of entirely unfettered
criminal activity; initiating the process of removing the present head of the
UVD of Moscow from his post; instilling in Muscovites the conviction that
Luzhkov has lost control of the situation in the city.
“In addition,
according to information from our sources, while all of this is going on, the
press will be swamped with information about who in the government of Moscow
has links with the mafia and organized crime. The particular individual
represented as the major controller for organized criminal groups will be Mr.
Ordjonikidze, who will be linked in the press, amongst others, with Chechen
criminals ‘who have been granted use of the Kiev railway station, the
Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel, the shopping complex on Manezhnaya Square,’ etc.
Material will be placed in the ‘red’ and ‘patriotic’ press about the domination
of Moscow by people from the Caucasus, about their wild excesses in the capital
and the damage done to the security and material welfare of Muscovites. The
statistics on this are already being put together in the MVD. In addition, the
same channel will be exploited for materials already fabricated concerning
‘Luzhkov’s links with international Zionist and sectarian organizations.’”
Several days
before the explosions took place State Duma deputy Konstantin Borovoi had a
meeting with a GRU officer who gave him a list of the names of participants in
a terrorist attack. Borovoi immediately passed on the list to the FSB, but his
warning met with absolutely no response. Borovoi believes that he was not the
only channel through which the secret services received warnings about imminent
terrorist attacks, but no measures were taken to prevent them. It would be
possible to dismiss Borovoi’s opinion if it only it did not coincide with the
opinion of one of the most famous Russian specialists in sabotage and terrorist
activity, retired colonel and former GRU officer Ilya Starinov. He declared
that it was simply impossible for his department not to have known about the
planned explosions. This fatal disregard by the FSB of warnings of imminent
terrorist attacks can only be explained by the fact that the FSB itself was
planning the attacks.
One of the
organizers of the explosions in Moscow was FSB Major Vladimir Kondratiev. On
March 11, 2000, he sent a letter of penitential confession entitled “I bombed
Moscow!” via the internet to the electronic publication FLB of the Free Lance Bureau at the Federal Investigative Agency.
It should be emphasized at this point that, as patriotic citizens should, the
employees of the FLB site immediately
informed the FSB about the letter, and its contents were reported to Patrushev.
Two computer specialists from the FSB promptly arrived, downloaded the letter,
and promised to get to the bottom of the whole business. No one ever saw them again.
Here is an extract from that letter:
“Yes, I was the
one who blew up the house on Guryanov Street in Moscow. I am not a Chechen or
an Arab or a Dagestani, I am a genuine Russian, Vladimir Kondratiev, a major in
the FSB, a member of the top secret Department K-20. Our department was set up
immediately after the signing of the Khasaviurt Accords. We were set the task
of planning and carrying out operations to discredit the Chechen Republic, so
that it would not receive international recognition. For this purpose, we were
granted very extensive powers and access to virtually unlimited financial and
technical resources.
“One of the
first operations we planned and carried out successfully was called Kovpak. It
essentially consisted in our traveling round all of Russia’s [penal] colonies
and recruiting criminals (preference was given to individuals from the
Caucasian nationalities), assembling them into groups, giving them weapons and
money, and then transporting them to Chechnya, and setting them free with a
single specific goal, to abduct people, in particular foreigners. And it should
be said that our pupils handled it very well.
“Maskhadov and his people were traveling all
round the world, trying in vain to obtain foreign support, and at the same
time, foreigners were disappearing in their republic. The most effective points
of this operation were the abduction and murder of British and Dutch engineers,
carried out on our orders.
“In June last year, our section was set a new
task, provoking general hatred in Russia for Chechnya and the Chechens. We
worked up some ideas through the effective use of brainstorming. One of our
brainstorming sessions produced several ideas, including distributing leaflets
with threats from the Chechens throughout the country, murdering the country’s
favorite singer Alla Pugachova, blowing up apartment buildings, and then
throwing all the blame on to the Chechens. All of these suggestions were
reported to the leadership of the FSB, which selected the final one as the most
effective, and gave the ‘go-ahead’ for its implementation.
“We planned bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk,
Ryazan, Samara, as well as in Dagestan and Ingushetia. Specific buildings were
picked, the explosive was selected, and the amount calculated. The operation
was given the code name ‘Hiroshima.’ I was made directly responsible for its
implementation, since I was the only explosives expert in our section, and I
also had quite a lot of experience. Although in my heart, I did not agree with
the idea of blowing up apartment blocks, I could not refuse to carry out the
order, because ever since our section was set up, every member of it has been
put in a situation, which means he has had to obey any order. Otherwise, he was
simply silenced for all eternity. So I carried out the order!
“The day after
the bombing, I went to the site of the operation, intending to assess its
implementation and analyze the results. I was shaken by what I saw there. I
have already mentioned that I had blown up buildings before, but they were not
people’s houses, and they were not in Russia. But here I’d blown up a Russian
house and killed Russian people, and the Russian woman weeping over Russian
corpses were cursing the one who’d done this in my own native language. And
standing beside them, I could physically feel the curses enveloping me, sinking
into my head and my chest, filling my body, infusing every cell. And I realized
that I WAS CURSED!
“Going back to
the section, instead of reporting on the implementation of the operation, I
wrote out a statement requesting to be transferred to another section on
grounds of mental and physical exhaustion. In view of the state I was in, I was
temporarily suspended from all operations, and the second bombing, which was
planned for Monday, was entrusted to my partner. To make sure I couldn’t do
anything to prevent it, they decided quite simply to eliminate me.
“On Saturday, in
order to be alone and think over what I should do and gather my thoughts, I
went out of town to my dacha. On the way, I felt the brakes fail in my car,
which I had always taken good care of and which had never let me down.
“I realized they
had decided to get rid of me in the classic way used in my department, and I
did exactly what we’d been taught to do in such situations and drove the car
into water, since there happened to be a small river on my route, and that very
day, I used operational channels to get out of Russia.
“Now I live
thousands of kilometers away from my homeland. My documents are in order—I am
now a citizen of this small country. I have a non-Russian name, and no one here
has any idea who I really am. I know that the FSB is capable of anything, but I
hope my colleagues will not find me here.
“In my new
country, I have set up a small business, I have money, and now I can live here
in peace for the rest of my days. So why am I writing all of this to you and
risking exposure? (Even though I have taken precautions by having the letter
sent from a third country by a third party.)
.”..I have
already mentioned Samara as one of the towns planned for a bombing. The victims
there were to have been the residents of a house on Novovokzalnaya Street.
Although I think it is possible that after the failed attempt to blow up the
building in Ryazan, our section might have
completely given up operations like this, even
so I consider it my duty to warn you about it.”
Following the
publication of Kondratiev’s letter in the internet, the Association of Alpha
Veterans issued a denial just a few days before the presidential elections,
stating among other claims that there was no section
K-20 in the
secret services. It is, therefore, worth our while to take a moment to trace
the history of Department K’s creation.
Back in 1996, an Anti-Terrorist Center (ATTs)
was established in the FSB on the basis of the Department for Combating
Terrorism. The ATTs included an operations department (OU), which built up
information on terrorists and tracked them down, and a Department for the
Defense of the Constitutional Order (Department K), the former Fifth Department
of the KGB, which built up information on political and religious groups,
organizations, and dissidents. Later, the ATTs was transformed (or rather
simply renamed) into the Department for Combating Terrorism and the Department
of Constitutional Security (Department K). On August 28,1999, before the
September wave of bombings began, it went through yet another transformation,
becoming the Department for the Protection of Constitutional Order and
Combating Terrorism.
These numerous
reorganizations should not be regarded as simple coincidence. In restructuring
various “departments” and “offices,” the FSB was simply attempting in the most
primitive manner to cover its tracks. In the face of such frequent
transformations, it seemed absolutely impossible for any outsider to figure out
who was in charge of what, who gave the orders, and who was subordinate to
whom. These complicated and confusing titles, so similar to each other, were
created quite deliberately. All this also served to throw journalists off the
scent. In reality everybody stayed in his own job, and to this day, officers of
the state security service sit in their offices on the seventh and ninth floors
of the building at number 1 Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, just as Sudoplatov sat
there in Stalin’s time. Nothing has changed.
The head of the
new department was Vice-Admiral Herman Alexeievich Ugriumov, who died in his
office in Khankala in Chechnya on May 31, 2001. Immediately after his death,
information began to circulate that Ugriumov had committed suicide. It was
reported that a man dressed in civilian clothes had entered Ugriumov’s office
at 1 p.m. and left half an hour later. The vice-admiral supposedly shot himself
fifteen to twenty minutes after that.
If former members of the Fifth Department of the
KGB were entrusted with the task of combating terrorism and defending the
constitutional order of democratic Russia, we may be sure that the only
business conducted by Department K was organizing terrorist attacks and
opposing democracy. As Sobchak (the mayor of St. Petersburg) said, these were
people for whom the words “legality” and “democracy” simply had no meaning.
“Nothing exists for them except orders, and for them laws and rights are a mere
hindrance.” Does this mean that apart from the secret section K-20 mentioned by
Major Kondratiev, there were at least another nineteen special groups?
Remarkably
enough, even state security agents believed that the terrorist attacks were the
work of the FSB. Erik Kotlyar, a journalist at the newspaper Moskovskaya pravda, described one particular instance in an article of February 10,
2000: “Last fall I happened to have a meeting with a member of a super-secret
service... And this is what he told me: ‘That evening I got back late. There
was no one at home. My wife, daughter and mother-in-law were at the dacha. I’d
just cracked some eggs into the frying pan, when there was a deafening
explosion outside the window. Lumps of glass came flying straight into the room
together with clouds of fumes and dust! I dashed out onto the landing, my
neighbors were out there in a panic. For some reason they were trying to call
the lift. I shouted at them: “Go down the stairs, the lift might fall.”..‘I
dashed out on to the street, and there was almost nothing left of the middle
section of the house opposite! . . The next day I got answers to a few
questions and made a firm decision: I’m taking my family out of Russia, it’s
dangerous to live here, and I’ve only got one daughter!’ ‘But it was the
Chechens who planted the bombs in Moscow...’ ‘The Chechens had nothing to do
with it,’ he said gesturing his hand angrily.” Kotlyar drew the conclusion that
his acquaintance knew something.
On September 10, the governor of the Altai
Territory, Alexander Surikov announced that “the explosions in Moscow were due
to echoes from Dagestan,” but that the people who were interested in terrorist
attacks were in Russia and in Moscow. Surikov proposed holding an extraordinary
session of the Council of the Federation (SF) to discuss the declaration of a
state of emergency in the country.
During the night
of September 12-13, the newspaper Moskovsky
komsomolets set up for printing an article entitled “The secret account of
a bombing.” It attempted to analyze what had happened.
“Chechen guerrillas took no direct part in the
preparations for the terrorist attack. To judge from the general picture of the
explosion, the bomb was planted by specialists who had been trained in Russian
secret service departments. It also happens that all the previous terrorist
attacks, with trails generally supposed to lead back to Chechnya, were carried
out according to exactly the same scenario: a car bomb exploding close to a
building. The car is usually parked in front of the intended target only a few
hours in advance. The detonator is equipped with a timing mechanism. Even if
the car bomb is discovered, explosives experts have only a matter of minutes to
disarm it (as they did last Sunday outside the military hospital in
Buinaksk)... This love of car bombs is very easy to explain. Explosives are
very expensive nowadays, and terrorists pay for every kilogram of TNT or any
other substance in cash. And planting the bomb at the target even one day
before the deadline is fraught with the danger of failure, the risk of the bomb
being discovered is too great... However, the general picture of the explosion
on Guryanov Street suggests that it was planned by people who are not used to
economizing, i.e. members of the secret services... Experts have determined
that the main charge in the house on Guryanov Street was planted in the rented
premises of a shop on the ground floor. And moreover, the explosive was there a
long time before the explosion took place. The criminals were evidently wasting
no time on trifles, and if the explosive were discovered the attack would
simply have been transferred to another district of the capital. This tactic is
similar to the use of the secret addresses so beloved of secret services the
whole world over. When one of them is exposed, the operation simply takes place
in a different area. During the days of the USSR, specialists capable of
carrying out such a terrorist attack served in both the KGB and the Second
Central Department of the General Staff (better known as the GRU).”
In other words, Moskovsky Komsomolets was hinting, ever
so gently, that the FSB was behind the bombings.
On September 12, the Moscow police received a
phone call from the inhabitants of house number 6/3 on the Kashirskoe Chaussee:
“Something’s not right in our basement,” the concerned members of the public
reported. A squad of policemen arrived. At the entrance to the basement, they
were met by a person they took to be an employee of the district housing
management office (REU), who told them that everything was in order in the
basement, and “our people” were in there. The policemen lingered at the door to
the basement for a while without going in and then went away again.
Early next
morning, just as the edition of Moskovsky
Komsomolets with the article “The secret account of a bombing” was being
delivered to Moscow’s news kiosks, the eight-story building at number 6/3
Kashirskoe Chaussee was blown into
the air, the same building where the polite “REU employee” had spoken with the
policemen outside the entrance. He had been right, everything in the basement
was in order—for a terrorist bombing.
A few days
later, Moskovsky Komsomolets attempted
to track down the resourceful “REU employee”: “I had a meeting with the housing
managers of the Kashirskoe Chaussee district,”
the newspaper’s correspondent related. “As yet we are unable to work out which
REU employee had covered for the man who subleased the premises in the basement
of house number 6 ‘on the sly’. No one admits to it. It’s either an engineer or
foreman or a district manager.” Neither the “REU employee” nor those who sublet
the basement were ever found.
By 2 p.m. on September 13, the rubble of the
house which was bombed on the Kashirskoe Chaussee had yielded up 119 dead
bodies and thirteen fragments of bodies. The dead included twelve children. The
experts quickly established that the two Moscow explosions were absolute
identical in nature, and the composition of the explosive was the same in both
cases. A thorough check of buildings, attics, and basements was launched. At
one address, number 16/2 on Borisovskie Prudy Street a cache of explosives was
discovered. Together with the hexogene mixture and eight kilograms of plastic
explosive, which was used as a detonator, they also found six electronic timers
made from Casio wristwatches. Five of them were already programmed for specific
times. All the terrorists had to do was take the timers to their sites and
attach them to the detonators. One of the mined houses was on Krasnodorskaya
Street.
The last house they were planning to destroy was
the one on Borisovskie Prudy Street, at five minutes past four in the morning
of September 21. It is remarkable that the FSB, which was hunting terrorists in
Moscow, chose not to set an ambush at Borisovskie Prudy Street to apprehend the
terrorists—who undoubtedly would have sooner or later come for the
detonators—but instead hurried to inform the criminals via the mass media that
the cache at Borisovskie Prudy Street had been discovered. It is absolutely
impossible to assume that the FSB’s announcement about the discovery of the
secret terrorist cache was an accident. Not even a beginning investigating
officer could have made such a mistake.
The information about the explosives discovered
after the terrorist attacks and the quantity discovered was not consistent. In
Moscow, they found thirteen tons of explosive. There were three or four tons in
the house on Borisovskie Prudy Street, even more at a cache in the district of
Liublino, and four tons in a car shelter in Kapotnya. Some time later, it was
discovered that six tons of heptyl (a rocket fuel of which hexogene is one of
the components) had been taken from the Nevinnomyssk Chemical Combine in the
Stavropol Territory. Six tons of heptyl could have been used to produce ten tons
of explosives. But there’s no way to process six tons of heptyl into ten tons
of explosives in a kitchen, a garage or an underground laboratory. The heptyl
was evidently processed at an army depot. Then the sacks had to be loaded into
a vehicle and driven out under the eyes of the guards, with some kind of
documents being presented. So transporting the material required drivers and
trucks. Overall, an entire group of people must have been involved in the
operation, and if that’s the case, information must have been received through
the FSB’s secret agents and the agents of military counter-intelligence.
The explosives
were packed in sugar sacks bearing the words “Cherkessk Sugar Plant,” but no such plant exists. If “sugar” had been
carried throughout the whole of Russia in sacks like that, especially with
counterfeit documentation, the chances of discovery would have been too great.
It would have been simpler to draw up documentation for the “sugar” from a
plant that actually exists. Several conclusions can immediately be drawn from
this fact, for instance, that the terrorists wanted to point the investigation
in the direction of the Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, since it was obvious
that sooner or later, at least one sack from the “Cherkessk Sugar Plant” would
fall into the hands of the investigators; also that the terrorists were not
afraid of transporting sacks with a false name and documents into Moscow, since
they were clearly quite certain, both they themselves and their goods were
safe. Finally, it is reasonable to assume that the explosives were packed in
the sacks in Moscow.
It would have
been hard to finance the terrorist attacks without leaving any tracks. The
intelligence services must have heard something, at least about a large sale of
heptyl or hexogene from the depots, since no one would have given terrorists
explosives for free. Only the agencies of state security or military officers
could have gotten hexogene from a factory or a store without paying for it.
Such were
precisely the conclusions reached by many reporters and specialists, trying to
figure out the clever plan by which the hexogene could have been delivered to
Moscow. The plan turned out to be exceedingly simple, since it had been worked
out by the FSB itself. It consisted of the following steps.
On 24 October 1991, the scientific research
institute “Roskonversvzryvtsenr” opened in Moscow. The institute was located in
the center of the city—Bolshaya Lubyanka 18, building 3—and it was created for
the “utilization of convertible explosive materials in national agriculture.”
The head of the institute from 1991 to 2000 was Yu.G. Shchukin. In reality, the
institute was a cover, a front—a link between the army and the “consumer”—and
its business was illegal trade in explosives. Hundreds of thousands of tons of
explosive substances, mainly TNT, passed through the institute. The institute
purchased explosives from the military for utilization and conversion, or from
chemical factories for “research.” It then sold explosives to consumers, which
included real and legitimate commercial enterprises, such as the Belorussian
government enterprise “Granit.” Naturally, the institute had no right to sell
explosives. But for some reason no one seemed to notice, including the heads of
the security agencies, least of all Patrushev.
Among the numerous large contracts for shipments
of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT and TNT charges, brokered by the
institute between the supplier (the army) and the consumer (the commercial
enterprises), there occasionally appeared small orders for one-two tons of TNT
charges. These orders contained detailed descriptions of the obligations of
both sides, although the sale of a ton of “goods” brought no more than
$300-350, barely enough to cover trucking expenses. In reality, these small
orders for the delivery of “TNT charges” were contracts for hexogene shipments.
Through the institute hexogene was purchased from the army and delivered to the
terrorists for the bombing of buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities.
These deliveries were possible only because Yu.G. Shchukin’s scientific
research institute “Roskonversvzryvtsenr” had been created by the secret
services, and the terrorists who received the “TNT charges” were agents of the
FSB.
And so... The
hexogene, packed in 50-kilogram sacks labeled “Sugar,” was stored in the only
place where it could have been stored—in military warehouses, guarded by armed
soldiers. One such warehouse was the warehouse of the 137th Ryazan Airborne
Regiment. One of its guards was private Alexei Pinyaev. For the price of TNT
charges—namely, 8900 rubles per ton (roughly $300-350)—the institute purchased
hexogene from the military warehouse, nominally for research. In the invoices
the hexogene was treated as TNT. Order forms were made out to “recipient”—the
link between the institute and the terrorists. In the order forms the TNT
charges went under the innocent label A-IX-1. Only an extremely narrow circle
of people knew that the label A-IX-1 denoted hexogene. It is possible that the
go-betweens who drove the hexogene out of the military warehouses in their own
vehicles did not know about it.
The small
shipments of “TNT charges” (hexogene) transported from the military warehouses
literally vanished (were given to the terrorists). In the overall flow of
hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT charges, small orders in the range of
$300-600 were impossible to trace.
Reporters have
tried to understand how exactly the terrorists transported the hexogene across
the expanse of Russia. But there was no need to transport it. The hexogene was
used were it was found. Thus, the hexogene from the warehouse of the 137th
Ryazan Airborne Regiment was used on Novosyolov Street in Ryazan. The hexogene
from the military warehouses outside of Moscow ended up in Moscow... The system
was ingeniously simple. Everything had been foreseen, except, perhaps, entirely
accidental omissions, which, certainly, were not worth taking into account: the
observant driver Alexei Kartofelnikov, the curious private Alexei Pinyaev, the
fearless Novaya Gazeta reporter Pavel
Voloshin. And what was absolutely impossible to foresee was the departure for
London, with douments and video footage in hand, of FSB agent and member of the
consultation board of the State Duma commission for fighting corruption N.S.
Chekulin, who, as fate would have it, served as director of the
“Roskonversvzryvtsenr” institute in 2000-2001.
Meanwhile, after
two buildings had been bombed, the checks on housing in the capital continued.
In a single day, the Moscow police checked 26,561 apartments. Special attention
was paid to non-residential premises on the ground floors of buildings, basements
and semi-basements, in other words to places that are often used for storage.
The number of such premises checked was 7,908. Public buildings were also
checked: 180 hotels, 415 hostels, and 548 places of entertainment (casinos,
bars, cafes). The work was conducted under the pretext of a search for those
suspected of involvement in the terrorist attacks in Moscow. Taking part in the
checks were 14,500 employees of the GUVD and 9,500 members of the interior
ministry’s armed forces, including a separate operational division (the former
F.E. Dzershinsky Division). Employees of the MVD and GUVD worked twelve hours a
day with no days off.
Premises in which the terrorists had planted
bombs were identified. According to the official version of the investigation
(which may have absolutely nothing in common with the truth), they had been
rented by Achimez (Mukhit) Shagabanovich Gochiyaev (Laipanov). The genuine
Laipanov was a native of the Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, who had been
killed in a road accident in the Krasnodar Territory in 1999. The dead
Laipanov’s documents became “cover documents” for the real terrorist. A former
GRU employee, who spent all his life building up a network of secret agents
abroad, commented: “This kind of practice is the usual approach employed to
legalizing agents in all the secret services in the world. It’s a classic,
described in all the textbooks. It’s as though the dead man is granted a second
life.”
As early as July 1999, Gochiyaev-Laipanov had
inquired at one of the Moscow renting agencies on Begovaya Street and received
information about forty-one premises. After the first explosion, thirty-eight
of the premises were checked by investigators to see if they contained
explosives.
“Laipanov’s”
young partner was also identified. The FSB claimed that he was Denis Saitakov,
a twenty-year-old forced emigrant from Uzbekistan and former novice at the
Yoldyz Madrasah (Islamic Seminary) in Naberezhnye Chelny in Tatarstan, who had
a Russian mother and a Bashkiri father. The FSB believed that during the
preparations for the terrorist attack, he and “Laipanov” rented a room in the
Altai Hotel and telephoned firms that rent out trucks. Although on the second
day after the attack, the KGB of Tatarstan, at Moscow’s insistent request,
began looking for Saitakov, no one in the KGB of Tatarstan was convinced that
Saitakov was involved in the bombings. In any case deputy chairman of the KGB
of Tatarstan, Ilgiz Minullin, emphasized that “no one can declare Saitakov a
terrorist until his guilt has been proved... At the present time, the agencies
of state security are not in possession of any facts which indicate the
involvement in terrorist attacks in Moscow...of students of the Yoldyz
Madrasah.” The KGB of Naberezhnye Chelny also issued a statement, indicating
that accusations against inhabitants of Tatarstan of complicity with terrorists
were groundless, and that the Tatarstan KGB had no information indicating the
involvement of residents of the republic in the bombings.
The terrorists who set up the September
explosions followed the line of least resistance. First they used their “cover
documents” to rent several basement and semi-basement premises, including the
ones on Guryanov Street and the Kashirskoye Chaussee. Then they moved in the
explosives, stacking sacks of sugar and tea and packages of plumbing supplies
around the crates of hexogene (at least that’s the way they did it on Guryanov
Street). The targets for sabotage were ideally selected. The chances of
encountering the police in front of buildings in the unfashionable dormitory
districts are not usually very high, and usually there are no caretakers in the
entranceways. Starinov announced that “the location of these buildings and the
environment around them met the two conditions most essential for terrorist
bombers—vulnerability and accessibility.”
The terrorists
planted the right amount of explosive required for the total demolition of
their targets. The saboteur Starinov believed that the bombings could have been
carried out by three men. The terrorists seemed to have been well-trained, not
just in sabotage, but also in intelligence work: they knew how to avoid
surveillance and live under assumed identities. Even a year’s course at the
very best special training center is not long enough to learn all of this. So
it seemed that Muscovites had fallen victim to professional terrorists. And the
only professional terrorists working in Russia were in the structures of the
FSB and GRU.
Petra
Prohazkova, a Czech journalist who was interviewing Khattab at the time of the
bombings, remembered Khattab’s astounding reaction to the announcement of the
terrorist attacks in Moscow. His face suddenly assumed an expression of genuine
fright. It was the sincere fright of a front-line soldier who realizes that now
he’s going to get the blame for everything. Everybody who knows Khattab agrees
that he is no actor and could not possibly have feigned astonishment and fear.
The Chechens
knew it was not in their interests to carry out any terrorist attacks. Public
opinion was on their side, and public opinion, both Russian and international,
was more valuable to them than two or three hundred lives abruptly cut short.
That was why the Chechens could not have been behind the terrorist attacks of
September 1999. And the Chechens must be given credit for always denying their
involvement in these bombings. Here is what Ilyas Akhmadov, minister of foreign
affairs in Aslan Maskhadov’s government, had to say on that point:
Question: In France you talk as though everybody
knows that the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk were set up by the
Russian secret services... Do you have any proof?
Answer: Of
course. Throughout the last war, we never showed the slightest inclination for
that sort of thing. But if it had been organized by Basaev or Khattab, I can
assure you that they wouldn’t have been shy about admitting it to Russia.
What’s more, everybody knows that the failed bombing in Ryazan was organized by
the FSB...I myself served in the army as a demolition officer at a military
proving ground, and I know perfectly well what a great difference there is
between an explosive and sugar.”
Here is the
opinion of another interested party with whom it is hard to disagree, the
Chechen minister of defense and commander of the presidential guard, Magomed
Khambiev:
“Now for the explosions in Moscow. Why are the
Chechens not committing acts of terrorism now, when our people are being
annihilated? Why did the Russian authorities pay no attention to the hexogene
incident in Ryazan, when the police had detained a member of the secret
services with this explosive? There’s not a single piece of evidence for the
so-called Chechen connection in these bombings. And the bombings were least of
all in the interest of the Chechens. But what is hidden will certainly be
revealed. I assure you that the perpetrators and planners of the bombings in
Moscow will become known, when there’s a change of political regime in the
Kremlin. Because those who ordered the bombings should be sought in the
corridors of the Kremlin. These bombings were necessary in order to start the
war, in order to distract the attention of Russians and the whole world from
the scandals and dirty intrigues going on in the Kremlin.”
Suspicions arose
that the bombings were being carried out by people attempting to force the
government to declare a state of emergency and cancel the elections. A number
of politicians rejected the idea: “I don’t agree with the statements of certain
analysts who connect this series of terrorist attacks with somebody’s
intentions to declare a state of emergency in Russia and cancel the elections
to the State Duma,” declared former Russian minister of the interior Kulikov in
an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta
on September 11. The Chechens could not have had any interest in presidential
elections or the declaration of a state of emergency in Russia. In 1996, it was
the Korzhakov-Barsukov-Soskovets group and the secret services standing behind
them that supported the cancellation of the election. So who was attempting to
provoke the declaration of a state of emergency in 1999?
Minister of Defense Igor Sergeiev thought it
possible that military patrols might appear on the streets of Moscow. “Soldiers
could take part in patrolling the city together with the MVD’s forces,” he
declared to journalists after a meeting with Boris Yeltsin. The military had
been “set the task” of participating in the protection of the public against
terrorist activity, Sergeiev stated. He also said that the GRU was “working
intensively” to identify all possible contacts between those who had planned
the explosions in Russian towns and international terrorists (a hint at foreign
saboteurs!). The use of soldiers to protect peaceful citizens against
terrorists looked rather like the introduction of military law. Igor Sergeiev
spoke out “for the introduction of wide-reaching anti-terrorist measures and
anti-terrorist operations.” In other words, the Russian Ministry of Defense was
calling for war against an unnamed enemy, but, in fact, it was clear to
everyone that he was calling for a war against Chechnya.
The final
decision on all of these questions remained with President Yeltsin. The secret
services, however, had practically unlimited opportunities for filtering or
falsifying the information presented to the president. This was confirmed in an
interview given on November, 12, 1999 by Edward Shevardnadze, the president of
Georgia and former head of the Georgian KGB, when he spoke about the Chechen
problem: “Reference is usually made to the fact that the GRU has information of
this kind. I know what information the GRU has historically used, how it is
assembled, how it is reported at first to the General Staff, then to the
minister of defense, then to the Supreme Commander. I know that there is
large-scale falsification.”
Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, another
well-informed contemporary politician, who was a presidential candidate in the
2000 election, formulated his doubts differently. When Primakov was asked for
his comments on the terrorist attacks in Moscow, he said that he thought the
Moscow bombings would not be the end of the matter, there could be more
explosions right across Russia, and one of the reasons for the situation that
had arisen lay in the links between people in the agencies of law enforcement
and the criminal underworld.
In effect, Primakov admitted that bombings in
every part of Russia were the work of people connected with the secret
services. This was also confirmed by Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze in
an address broadcast on national television on November 15, 1999: “Already at
the meeting in Kishinev, I informed Boris Yeltsin that his secret services had
contacts with Chechen terrorists. But Russia does not listen to its friends.”
Diplomatic etiquette did not permit a more forthright statement. The president
of Georgia could not say that by “Chechen terrorists” he simply meant
terrorists.
It is obvious, however, that Shevardnadze
suspected the Russian secret services of committing the bombings. Information
in his possession even suggested that the Russian secret services had been
involved in two attempts on Shevardnadze’s own life. In order to avoid making
unsubstantiated claims, we can quote the former director of the United States
National Security Council, retired Lieutenant-General William Odom. In October
1999, he stated that Prime Minister Putin and his entourage from the military
were using this Chechen campaign to put Shevardnadze under severe pressure.
They had already made one attempt to dismember Georgia by taking Abkhazia and
southern Ossetia away from it and now, Odom said, they wanted to exploit the
Chechen events to position their forces there, which was opposed by the current
president of Georgia. Beginning with Primakov’s term as Prime Minister, the
Russian government had made at least two attempts on Shevardnadze’s life. The
Georgian leadership had provided the governments of a number of foreign
countries with convincing evidence of this. Primakov himself was personally
involved. He had used secret agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service
in Belorussia, and in May an attempt was made with his knowledge on the life of
Shevardnadze and several members of his entourage. The American government is
in possession of tape-recordings of conversations made by the actual killers
involved in the attempt. A year before that, a first attempt to kill
Shevardnadze was made, not by amateurs, but by genuine professionals,
well-prepared military groups who could only have been trained in Russia. There
is, in addition, a mass of material evidence collected at the scene of the
crime which confirms all of this.
What
Shevardnadze hesitated to say about the bombings in Moscow was openly stated by
Lebed, in answer to a question from the French newspaper Le Figaro: “Do you mean to say that the present regime is behind
the bombings?” The general replied: “I’m almost convinced of it.” Lebed pointed
out that the force that could be discerned behind the bombings of residential
buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk was not the Chechen terrorists, but “the
hand of power,” that is the Kremlin and the president, who were “up to their
necks in shit,” totally isolated, and together with Yeltsin’s “family” had
“only one goal, to destabilize the position in order to avoid elections.”
On September 14,
the FSB and MVD issued the statement for which the FSB had carried out the
bombings: Zdanovich announced that the agencies of law enforcement had no doubt
that the series of explosions from Buinaksk to a house on the Kassirskoe
Chausse in Moscow represented “a large-scale terrorist operation launched by
Basaev and Khattab’s guerrillas in support of their military action in
Dagestan.” Igor Zubov, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, confirmed the
suggestion: “We can now state without the slightest doubt that Basaev and
Khattab are behind these bombings.”
The statements
by Zdanovich and Zubov did not reflect the true situation. A day later, the
head of GUBOP MVD of Russia, Vladimir Kozlov, announced that “a number of
people involved in these terrorist attacks have been identified,” and explained
that he meant a group of terrorists with connections in Moscow and the regions
and towns surrounding the capital. Kozlov did not even mention Chechnya or
Dagestan. Zdanovich was openly disseminating false information.
The FSB’s conclusions did not sound convincing,
and the attempts of the security forces to capture the culprits looked
farcical. In the atmosphere of anti-Chechen hysteria in Moscow a few days after
the second explosion, members of the FSB and GUBOP arrested two suspects for
the terrorist attacks, and their names were immediately made public, without
any concern for possible prejudice to the investigation: they were
thirty-two-year-old Timur Dakhkilgov and his father-in-law, forty-year-old old
Bekmars Sauntiev.
Timur Dakhkilgov
was an Ingushetian who was born in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and lived
there in the city’s Tram Park District, before he moved to Moscow. He was a
dyer in the Krasny Sukonshchik Textile Combine. On September 10, immediately
after the terrorist attack on Guryanov Street, Sauntiev went to see the Dakhkilgovs
and said that they all had to go to the northern Butovo police station for
re-registration.
At the station,
Timur Dakhkilgov and his wife Lida were photographed, their fingerprints were
taken, swabs were taken from the palms of their hands, and they were released.
Soon after the second bombing, MVD operatives turned up at Sauntiev and the
Dakhkilgovs’ apartments, said that there were traces of hexogene on Timur
Dakhkilgov’s hands (he was a dyer, after all!), and arrested him. There was no
hexogene on Sauntiev’s hands, so, instead, they found a revolver under his
bath, and discovered traces of hexogene on the handle of the door to his flat
(on the outside, that is, in the stairwell).
The suspects were questioned for three days.
Sauntiev was later released and the pistol found in his apartment was
apparently forgotten. Timur Dakhkilgov was taken to the MUR premises on
Petrovka Street, where he was accused of possessing explosives and terrorism.
The entire process was reported openly on television, and Rushailo even
reported to the Council of the Federation that a terrorist had been caught.
According to
Dakhkilgov, three investigators worked with him, but they were never introduced
to him, and they never called each other by name. To himself the suspect called
them Old Man, Ginger, and Nice Guy. The latter earned his nickname by never
actually hitting Dakhkilgov. The interrogation lasted for three days, after
which Dakhkilgov was transferred to the FSB detention center at Lefortovo.
It was very important for the FSB to keep
Dakhkilgov in prison for as long as possible, since the Ingushetian was their
only justification for the “Chechen connection.” They began working on
Dakhkilgov in his cell, in ways which he knew nothing about. An inside agent
who was supposedly an “authoritative” criminal was planted in the cell with
him. The agent won the Ingushetian’s confidence, and Dakhkilgov told him the
circumstances of his case, saying that he had nothing to do with the bombings.
Some time later, Dakhkilgov was released. An analysis of the swab taken from
his hand had confirmed the presence of hexane, a solvent used at the fabric
combine for cleaning wool. There was no hexogene on his hands. The “Chechen
connection” had been broken. But the war with Chechnya was now already in full
swing, so Dakhkilgov had not spent his time in prison in vain.
On March 16,
2000, when the leadership of the FSB was giving an account to the public of
progress made in investigating the September bombings, one of the journalists
asked the deputy head of the investigative department of the FSB, Nikolai
Georgievich Sapozhkov: “Can you please tell me why Timur Dakhkilgov spent three
months in prison as a terrorist?” The reply given by Sapozhkov, who had already
spent several months investigating the terrorist attacks as a member of a group
of many dozens of investigators, depressed the journalists, since it made it
clear that the investigation was following a false trail:
“I can explain.
There was direct testimony against him from the people who brought the sugar
and the explosives to Moscow...”
“So they gave
his name?”
“No they...I
mean it was direct testimony, they identified him by sight as a man who had
helped to unload those sacks. Afterwards, you know, when we did a more
thorough... Well, you know that he had hexogene on his hands, and then the
other details which at the time unambiguously provided a basis for treating him
as a suspect. Later we did a very thorough job on the Dakhkilgov connection. We
had to check everything out again and present him for identification in a calm
situation. And we were convinced that the features by which he’d been
identified, they were for Slavic persons identifying so-called Caucasians, but
they raised doubts for those who had identified him, and by thorough
investigation and establishing his alibi, we reached the conclusion that he was
not involved in this crime. The case was considered jointly with employees of
the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and they agreed with our conclusions.”
We must apologize
to our readers for the quality of Sapozhkov’s language. What Sapozhkov had
planned to say was as follows. When the investigators arrested Dakhkilgov and
began showing him to the residents of the bombed houses, so that they could
decide whether he was the one who had planted the sacks of explosive with the
timers and detonating devices, the residents, to whom all Caucasians look the
same, identified him as a man involved in the terrorist attacks. They “did a
thorough job” on Dakhkilgov (we know that they interrogated him, beat him,
tortured him, put polythene bags over his head, choked him, and planted an
agent in his cell). The most important thing for them was to drag out the whole
process as long as possible. After three months, Dakhkilgov was not needed any
longer, and with the consent of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, he was
released, and the case against him was closed.
So Dakhkilgov
spent his time inside for two reasons. Firstly, the crowd identified him as one
of the culprits, and secondly, hexogene was supposedly found on his hands. But
the FSB managed to get its explosives confused. Soon after, the bombing reports
began appearing in the media that “according to the FSB the hexogene story is a
diversionary ploy. In actual fact, in all of the bombings the terrorists used a
different explosive substance.” Western commentators pointed out that the
rubble of the houses bombed in Moscow was cleared and removed with lightning
speed (for Russia, in only three days) These suspicious-minded foreigners thought
that anyone in Russia working as diligently as that must be covering up their
tracks. In any case, the FSB’s ploy was merely for public consumption. The
terrorists themselves knew perfectly well what explosives they used and there
was no point in concealing the components of the explosives from them.
The question of exactly what was used as an
explosive in the September bombings should not be regarded as still unanswered.
Hexogene was produced in Russia at restricted military plants. “Hexogene is
carefully guarded, and its use is carefully controlled” was the assurance given
in September 1999, at the Russian research and production enterprise Region,
where they worked with hexogene. At the plant, they were convinced that any
leak of hexogene from secret defense plants, known only by their numbers was,
virtually impossible.
Since hexogene
was used by the terrorists in large quantities, it would have been easy to
determine just who had bought or been given the substance, especially since the
experts could always determine exactly where any particular batch had been
produced. It was impossible for tens of tons of hexogene to have been stolen.
Thousands of tons of TNT-hexogene mixture were kept at military depots and in
the warehouses of munitions factories for inclusion in rocket warheads, mines,
torpedoes, and shells. But hexogene extracted from finished munitions had a
distinctive appearance, and extracting it was difficult and risky. Here are a
few examples.
On October 8,1999, one of the Russian information
agencies announced that the Central Military Prosecutor’s Office had instigated
proceedings against a number of officials in the central administration of the
anti-aircraft defense forces (PVO). The senior military prosecutor, Yu. Demin,
stated that over a period of several years, high-ranking military officers had
abused their official positions by forging and falsifying documents, in order
to steal spares for a range of antiaircraft rocket-launchers, which were sold
to commercial companies and private entrepreneurs. Just a few of this group’s
many criminal escapades had cost the state a total of more than two million
dollars. It is easy to imagine what kind of “commercial organizations and
private entrepreneurs” bought stolen spare parts for rocket-launchers. It is
quite obvious that without the involvement of the FSB and the GRU, it would not
have been possible to continue stealing the PVO’s technology over a period of
several years.
On September 28, 1999, employees of the Ryazan
Department for Combating Organized Crime (UBOP) arrested the head of an
automobile repair shop in an air-strike technology depot, twenty-five-year-old
Warrant Officer Vyacheslav Korniev, who served at the military aerodrome in
Dyagilev, where bombers were based. At the time of his arrest, he was
discovered to be in possession of eleven kilograms of TNT. Korniev confessed
that the TNT had been stolen from a military depot, and that a group of
employees to which he belonged had extracted it from FAB-300 high-explosive
bombs that were stored outdoors at the depot.
The same day,
the military court of the Ryazan garrison pronounced sentence on the head of
the field supplies depot of the Ryazan Institute of the VDV, A. Ashbarin, for
stealing more than three kilograms of TNT, with the intention of selling it for
three thousand dollars. Although the appropriate article of the Criminal Code
of the Russian Federation stipulated a sentence of from three to seven years’
imprisonment, the soldier was fined 20,000 rubles.
Clearly, stealing TNT-hexogene mixture in small
amounts was difficult. In contrast, removing it by the truckload was easy, but
only with the appropriate permits, which meant you were bound to leave a trail,
and a trail like that might lead back to the FSB. After the bombings, numerous
representatives of the Russian military-industrial complex stated that such a
large amount of explosives could only be stolen with the connivance of
highly-placed officials. On September 15, the head of the MVD’s Central Office
for Combating Organized Crime (GUBOP), Vladimir Kozlov, confirmed that the
explosion on Guryanov Street had not been caused by a homemade pyrotechnic
mixture, but by industrial explosives.
So in order to
throw pushy journalists and conscientious criminal investigation officers off
the scent, the FSB had fed the media its story about hexogene as a diversionary
ploy; in actual fact, they said, the explosive used was ammonium nitrate, a
fertilizer. The point was that ammonium nitrate could have been bought,
transported, and stored quite openly. It made good bombs, and if hexogene, TNT,
or aluminum powder was added, it became a really powerful explosive. It was
true, however, that it required a complicated detonating device, a device not
every terrorist would be able to work with.
Why was the
hexogene story used initially? Because the houses were blown up by one group of
FSB officers, the explosive was analyzed by a second and the propaganda (or
public relations, to use the current term) surrounding the event was handled by
a third. The first group carried out the terrorist attacks successfully (with
the exception of Ryazan). The second easily determined that they had used
hexogene. The third suddenly realized that hexogene is produced in Russia at
restricted military plants, and it was a simple job to determine exactly who
had bought the hexogene which had been used to blow up the houses, and when it
was bought. At this point, panic set in. In three days, all the material
evidence (the bombed houses) was removed, and stories were urgently planted in
the media about ammonium nitrate. On March 16, 2000, the first deputy head of
the Second Department (for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and
Combating Terrorism, i.e. Department K) and the operations and investigation
department of the FSB, Alexander Dmitrievich Shagako, told a press conference
that the explosive used in absolutely all the bombings in Russia had been
identified, and that explosive was nitrate:
“I’d like to observe that as a result of
criminalistic investigations carried out by FSB experts, Russia has received
confirmation that the composition of the explosives used in Moscow and the
composition of the explosives which were discovered in the basement premises of
the house on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, and also the composition of
the explosive substances which were discovered in the town of Buinaksk on
September 4 in an unexploded ZIL-130 automobile, they are identical, i.e. the
composition of all of these substances includes ammonium nitrate and aluminum
powder, in some cases hexogene has been added, and in some cases TNT has been
added...”
All that remained was to determine where the
nitrate in Moscow and the other Russian cities had come from. Shagako and
Zdanovich, who was also at the press conference, dealt successfully with that
problem. “Were there any cases of theft of these explosives from state plants
where they are produced using specific technologies?” Zdanovich asked and then
answered himself: “I can say straight away that there were not, or at least the
investigation is not in possession of any such information.”
It is impossible
to determine who has bought and sold nitrate for nefarious purposes. There is
just too much of it all over the country, including in Chechnya. Small amounts
of TNT, hexogene, and aluminum powder could have been stolen by anybody from
any military depot (a matter on which, with the assistance of the FSB and the
Central Military Prosecutor’s Office, several reports appeared in the media).
In misinforming public opinion concerning the composition of the explosive, the
FSB was trying to deflect suspicions that it had planned and carried out the
terrorist attacks. All that still needed to be done was to find a warehouse of
chemical fertilizers somewhere in Chechnya. It turned out that it had also
already been dealt with, which was very timely, since it allowed the
investigation to be completed a few days before the presidential election:
“In this connection I would also like to point
out to you,” said Shagako, “that two months ago employees of the Federal
Security Service in Urus Martan discovered a center for training demolition
operatives. On the territory of this center five tons of ammonium nitrate were
discovered. At the same site trigger mechanisms, identical to the mechanisms
which were used in the explosions I listed earlier, were also discovered... The
trigger devices discovered in the ZIL-130 automobile in the town of Buinaksk
and also the trigger devices discovered basement premises on Borisovskie Prudy
Street in Moscow, in the course of criminalistic analysis they were proved to
be identical. In all of these trigger devices, a Casio electronic watch was
used as a delay mechanism. In all of these trigger devices, light diodes of
identical design were used, the electronic circuit boards, even the colors of
the wires which were used for welding, they’re the same color in all the
mechanisms. In this connection I wish to point out that several days ago,
employees of the Federal Security Service in Chechnya discovered several
trigger mechanisms among the possessions of guerrillas who had been killed
while attempting to break out of the encirclement of the city of Grozny.
Investigations carried out by specialists of the Federal Security Service
demonstrated that the trigger mechanisms removed from the ZIL-130 automobile in
Buinaksk, and the trigger mechanisms removed from Borisovskie Prudy Street in
Moscow, the design of them all is the same. They are all identical with each
other... In March in the settlement of Duba-Yurt, an isolated building was
discovered, in which literature in Arabic on mine-laying and demolition and
military training instructions were discovered, and in addition in the same
premises, instructions for the use of a Casio watch were discovered. This kind
of watch, as I told you earlier, was used by the criminals in all of the
bombings listed above. In March in the settlement of Chiri-Yurt, an isolated
building was discovered which was surrounded by an iron fence inside which
fifty sacks of ammonium nitrate were sighted, identified, and discovered,
that’s something in the region of two-and-a-half tons.”
If the
terrorists had really used ammonium nitrate, the RUOP investigators would not
have looked for hexogene on Dakhkilgov and Sauntiev’s hands, they would have
focused on nitrate. The police looked for hexogene on the hands of their
detainees, precisely because the official conclusion which the experts had
provided to the investigation was that hexogene was used to blow up the houses.
No subsequent expert analysis could have been more accurate, including the
repeat analysis which was later carried out by the investigative agencies of
the FSB and made public in March 2000, just a few days before the presidential
election. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in March 2000,
a few days before the presidential election, the FSB was deliberately
dispensing misinformation.
On September 13, 1999 in Moscow, Luzhkov signed
three sets of regulations which contravened the Constitution and the laws of
the Russian Federation. The first of them proclaimed the re-registration of
refugees and migrants in Moscow. The second document demanded the expulsion
from the capital of people who violated the regulations on registration. The
third put a halt to the registration in Moscow of refugees and migrants. On the
same day, the governor of the Moscow Region, Anatoly Tyazhlov, signed
instructions for the arrest of individuals who were not registered as residents
of Moscow or the Moscow Region. Of course, none of these regulations made any
mention of Chechens, or even of Caucasians
On September 15, joint police and military
patrols were introduced in Moscow, and the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation was
launched throughout Russia with the participation of the forces of the Ministry
of the Interior. Muscovites were not yet aware that the wave of terror in the
capital had ended at this point. Now it was the turn of the provinces. Early in
the morning of September 16, an apartment block was blown up in Volgodonsk in
the Rostov Region. Seventeen people were killed.
At an
extraordinary session of the Council of the Federation held in camera on
September 17, with the participation of the Prime Minister and the armed forces
and law enforcement ministries, the Council approved a proposal for the
creation of “civil security councils” in the Russian regions. Chairman of the
Council of the Federation Yegor Stroev remarked that the senators intended “to
offer a political assessment of events and put forward concrete economic and social
measures in the conflict zone, including measures in support of the civilian
population and the army.” The speaker of the house remarked that “the explosion
in Volgodonsk strengthened the senators’ mood on the need for more decisive and
hard-line action for the struggle against terrorism.” Stroev did not accuse the
Chechens of the terrorist attacks, but he quite obviously drew a connection
between the “conflict zone” in Dagestan and the “struggle against terrorism.”
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin delivered a report
to the extraordinary session of the Council of the Federation. As “measures of
defense against terrorism” he proposed establishing a safety cordon along the
entire Russian-Chechen border and also intensifying the aerial and artillery
bombardment of Chechen territory. In this way, Putin declared the Chechen
Republic responsible for the terrorist attacks and called for military action
to be taken against Chechnya.
At the
conclusion of the session, Putin declared that the members of the Council of
the Federation had supported action “of the most hard-line character” by the
government for resolving the situation in the northern Caucasus, including the
“proposal to introduce a quarantine around Chechnya.” Answering questions from
journalists, Putin emphasized that preemptive strikes “have been delivered and
will be delivered” against bandit bases in Chechnya, but that the possibility
of introducing Russian forces into the territory of the Chechen Republic had
not been discussed.
Putin emphasized
that “the bandits must be exterminated, no other action is possible here.” By
bandits Putin meant the Chechen army, not terrorists. In other words, the
government had settled for a single account of the bombings, the Chechen
version, and was willing to use the bombings as an excuse for war.
The leaders of the various regions of the North
Caucasus understood that Russia was setting up a new war against the Chechen
Republic. On September 20 at a meeting in Magas in Ingushetia the president of
Ingushetia, A. Dzasokhov, and the president of northern Ossetia, R. Aushev,
supported A. Maskhadov’s suggestion that talks were needed between Maskhadov
and Yeltsin. Dzasokhov and Aushev also intended to arrange a meeting between
the president of Chechnya and Russian Prime Minister Putin in Nalchik or
Pyatigorsk no later than the end of September 1999. All of the leaders from the
North Caucasus were supposed to attend the meeting.
Clearly,
political negotiations might have prevented the war and cast light on the
terrorist attacks that had taken place in Russia. For this very reason the FSB
did everything in its power to prevent the meeting of leaders from the North
Caucasus regions taking place. Before the end of September it was intended to
blow up residential buildings in Ryazan, Tula, Pskov, and Samara. As always
happens when a large terrorist attack involving groups of terrorists is being
planned, there was a leak of information. “According to the information we
received, it was Ryazan which had been singled out by the terrorists for the
next bombing, because of the Ryazan VDV training college,” said the mayor of
Ryazan, Mamatov. This “next bombing” would be the failed attempt to blow up the
house on Novosyolov Street on September 22.
On September 23, Zdanovich announced that the
FSB had identified all the participants in the terrorist attacks in Buinaksk,
Moscow and Volgodonsk. “There is not a single ethnic Chechen among them.” Not a
single one. Following which, of course the FSB general apologized to the
Chechen people and the Chechen diaspora in Russia?. . No, nothing of the sort!
Instead, with the stubbornness of a classroom dunce, Zdanovich set himself to
discover a “Chechen connection.” To give him his due, he managed to find one.
He thought it possible that after carrying out the bombings the terrorists, who
had after all been planning their attacks since mid-August, might have had
escape routes. They could possibly have taken refuge in the CIS countries, but
it was most probable that they had withdrawn to Chechnya. In short, the
Chechens were being bombed because in Zdanovich’s opinion the terrorists (among
whom there were no ethnic Chechens) had probably retreated to Chechnya. But
then why didn’t they bomb the countries of the CIS?
“We have
definite sources of information inside Chechnya, and we know what is going on
there,” Zdanovich emphasized. From 1991 to 1994, the FSK conducted hardly any
operational work at all in this republic, but later “we did certain work. We
know about those people who develop terrorist operations, make the financial
input, recruit the mercenaries, and prepare the explosives. Nowadays in our
country it’s easy to obtain information on how to produce an explosive device,
and apart from that there are many people who have fought in the hot spots who
have the necessary knowledge and skills. Many of them have fought in Karabakh,
Tadjikistan, and Chechnya. This does not mean that anyone is accusing the
population of Chechnya or Aslan Maskhadov. We accuse specific criminals,
terrorists who are located in Chechnya. That’s where the name ‘the Chechen
connection’ came from,” concluded Zdanovich, without actually naming a single
“specific ciminal.”
To use the
“probable” withdrawal of the terrorists to Chechnya as an excuse for launching
a war against the Chechen people, while acknowledging that the bombings were
not carried out by Chechens, is the height of cynicism. If Putin’s government
considered it possible to start the second Chechen war because of such a
“probability,” we must conclude that the bombings were no more than an excuse,
and the war was an operation planned long in advance at General Staff HQ.
Stepashin threw some light on this question in January 2000, when he announced
that the political “decision to invade Chechnya was taken as early as March
1999,” that the intervention had been “planned for August-September” and that
“it would have happened even if there had been no explosions in Moscow.” “I was
preparing for active intervention,” Stepashin said. “We were planning to be
north of Terek in August-September.” Putin, “who at that time was director of
the FSB, was in possession of this information.”
The testimony of
former head of the FSK and former Prime Minister Stepashin does not match the
testimony of former head of the FSB and former Prime Minister Putin:
“Last summer we launched a campaign, not against
the independence of Chechnya, but against the aggressive impulses which have
begun to manifest themselves on its territory. We are not attacking. We are
defending ourselves. And we have pushed them out of Dagestan... And when we
gave them a good hiding they blew up houses in Moscow, Buinaksk, and
Volgodonsk.
Question: Did
you take the decision to continue the operation in Chechnya before the houses
were bombed or after?
Answer: After.
Question: Do you
know that according to one account the houses were deliberately blown up in
order to justify the start of military operations in Chechnya? That is, it was
supposedly done by the Russian secret services?
Answer: What? We
blew up our own houses? You know... Rubbish! It’s raving nonsense! There are no
people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such a crime
against their own people. The very suggestion is immoral and essentially it’s
nothing more than an instance of the war of information against Russia.”
At some stage, when the archives of the Ministry
of Defense are opened up, we shall see these military documents: maps, plans,
directives, orders of the day for air strikes, and the deployment of land
forces. They will have dates on them. We shall discover for certain just how
spontaneous was the Russian government’s decision to start land operations in
Chechnya, and whether the General Staff had finished planning the military
operations before the first September bombing. We shall ask ourselves why
bombings took place before the election campaign and before the incursion into
Chechnya (when they were not in the Chechens’ interests), and ceased following
Putin’s election as president and the beginning of all-out war against the
Chechen Republic (the very time when the Chechens ought to have taken revenge
against their invaders). We shall only receive the final and complete answers
to these questions and many more after power has changed hands in Russia.
Chapter 7
The FSB against the people
So far the
terrorists had not been identified, or rather they had been identified as not
being Chechens. The failed bombing attempt in Ryazan prompted the public to
think that the FSB might be behind the bombings. For the “party of war” this
was just one more indication that a full-scale war in Chechnya ha to be started
as soon as possible. The date of September 24 was no coincidence, for if the
bombing in Ryazan had succeeded, Putin and the heads of all the military and
law enforcement ministries were scheduled to make hard-line speeches in
response.
On September 24, like a chorus in some
well-planned stage performance, Russian politicians began demanding war.
Patrushev announced that the terrorists who blew up the apartment houses in
Moscow were in Chechnya. We know this is a lie. Patrushev did not identify his
sources, since he had none. Patrushev did not offer any proof. His press
secretary Zdanovich had spoken only of the possible or probable withdrawal of
the terrorists to Chechnya (or to the countries of the CIS). But Patrushev
needed to start a war, and so he claimed that Chechnya had been transformed
into a hotbed of terrorism.
Rushailo claimed
that organized crime inside and outside Russia had used the “Chechen bridgehead
to unleash a wide-reaching campaign of subversion against Russia... The
agencies of law enforcement and the armed forces have adequate potential to
defend the interests of Russia in the northern Caucasus... The federal forces
are prepared to mount armed operations.” In other words, the MVD was preparing
to wage war against Chechnya as part of the effort to combat organized crime,
including criminal groups. As though the fight against crime was going
perfectly well on all the rest of Russia’s territory!
The situation in
the northern Caucasus and the possible consequences for Russia were outlined by
the chairman of the SF’s security and defense committee, Alexander Ryabov, in
an interview he gave to the newspaper Segodnia.
In his opinion the world was undergoing a new geopolitical division under the
cover of Muslim slogans. For Russia’s enemies, the most important thing was to
create a weak zone in Russia’s “soft underbelly.” This theory is reminiscent of
the conspiracy of the Elders of Zion, except that this time the elders are
Muslim, not Jewish. “A new geopolitical division of the world” is serious
business. It will take a serious war to sort it out.
The newspaper Vek published an interview with the
vice-president of a collegium of military experts, Alexander Vladimirov, who
expressed the belief that the best solution right now would be a small
victorious war in Chechnya. In his opinion the safety cordon around Chechnya
proposed by Putin was a good idea, but it should be only the first step, since
a cordon for its own sake is a pointless exercise. (Vladmirov’s opinion must
certainly have been noted, since they actually started with the second step,
full-scale war.)
The final, decisive word in support of war was
spoken by Prime Minister Putin in Astan: “The Russian state does not intend to
keep things on hold... The recent unprovoked attacks which have taken place
against territories contiguous with Chechnya, the barbarous acts which have
resulted in casualties among the peaceful population have set the terrorists
not only outside the law but outside the framework of human society and modern
civilization.” Air strikes were taking place “exclusively against the
guerrillas’ bases, and this will continue wherever the terrorists may be
located... We shall pursue the terrorists everywhere. And if, pardon my
language, we catch up with them in the toilet, then we’ll squelch them in the
johns.”
The mood of the public in those days can best be
characterized by the fact that after his inspired phrase about “squelching them
in the johns” Putin’s ratings actually improved. The propaganda campaign
mounted by the supporters of war had produced the desired result. According to
an opinion poll conducted by the All-Russian Central Public Opinion Institute
(VTsIOM) almost fifty percent of Russians were convinced that the explosions in
Russian cities had been carried out by Basaev’s guerrillas and another
thirty-three percent blamed the Vahhabites and their leader Khattab.
Eighty-eight percent of the people questioned were afraid of falling victim to
a terrorist attack. Sixty-four percent were in agreement that all Chechens
should be deported, and the same proportion were in favor of the mass bombing
of Chechnya.
The bombings of
the houses had broken down the resistance of public opinion. A small victorious
war now seemed like the only natural response in the fight against terrorism.
The stupefied country was not yet aware that the terrorists were not Chechens,
and the war would be neither small nor victorious.
Note the
absolutely glaring lack of logic here. The Chechen leadership denies it was
involved in the terrorist attacks. Zdanovich confirms that there are no
Chechens among the culprits, but states that the terrorists have “probably”
gone into hiding in Chechnya. This “probably” is enough to fit the terrorists
up with a “Chechen trail,” which in turn provides a pretext for starting to
bomb Chechnya. Aslan Maskhadov declares that he is willing to hold
negotiations. But he is not heard. It is important for the FSB to drag Russia
into a war as quickly as possible, so that the presidential election can be
held against the background of a major armed conflict, and so that after the
new president comes to power, he can inherit the war together with all the
political consequences which it implies, i.e. the president’s dependence on the
structures of coercion. Only through war can the FSB finally seize power in the
country. It is a simple little matter of a conspiracy with the goal of allowing
the former KGB to seize power under the banner of the fight against Chechen
terrorism. On October 4, the coup ended in victory for the conspirators. That
was the day when Russian forces crossed the border of Chechnya. Most of the
population of Russia supported the decision taken by former director of the FSB
and now Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin; director of the FSB, Patrushev; and FSB
general and head of the SB, Sergei Ivanov.
During this
difficult period for the Russian political elite, those who spoke out
decisively against war defined their position. Novaya Gazeta should be named as one of the most principled
opponents of war against the Chechen Republic: “The KGB lieutenant colonel
mouthing criminal jargon who finds himself by some miracle at the head of a
great country, is losing no time in exploiting the effect produced. Any general
or politician planning a military campaign always attempts to minimize the
number of his enemies and maximize the number of his allies. Putin is
deliberately bombing Grozny in order to make negotiations with Maskhadov
impossible, in order to bury all of the regime’s previous crimes under the
bloody slaughter. The outgoing regime is attempting to use the crime currently
in preparation—the genocide of the Chechen people—to bind the entire Russian
people in blood, to make it the regime’s accomplice and hostage. It is still
not too late to call a halt on the road to Russia’s destruction.”
Konstantin
Titov, the governor of the Samara Region, believed that land operations in
Chechnya were a catastrophe for Russia. “I am no believer in purely coercive
methods of resolving global problems. And in Samara I shall never allow the
kind of ethnic purges they have in Moscow.” (Konstantin Titov, of course, was
not aware that during those days full preparations had been set in place for
the bombing of an apartment house on Novovokzalnaya Street in Samara, but the
FSB had halted the terrorist attacks after the fiasco in Ryazan).
The mood of the
apprehensive section of the democratic public at this time was described by the
well-known Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucheren:
“The clearest possible illustration is provided
by the ‘exercises’ conducted by the FSB in Ryazan. This act bears witness to
the most profound degradation, primarily moral, of the Russian secret services.
The secret services continue to think of themselves as ‘a state within a
state.’ Their leaders seem to think that they are not subject to any laws and
act exclusively on the basis of political expediency, as they did in those
glorious times when the agencies organized abductions and political
assassinations in foreign states, created the ‘legends’ for non-existent
anti-Soviet organizations, and wrote the scripts for show trials.
“The numerous ‘spy cases’ of recent years
(Platon Obukhov, Grigory Pasko, captain Nikitin), operation ‘Face in the Snow,’
various unlawful acts committed on the eve of the presidential elections of
1996, such as the attempt to ‘seal up’ the State Duma, the escapade in which
members of the Russian army were recruited for the storming of Grozny by the
forces of the so-called anti-Dudaev opposition in 1994—all of this bears
witness to the fact that unlawful tendencies have remained a part of the
activity of the secret services to this very day.
“One gets the
impression that both the present party of power and the so-called opposition
believe that Russia’s democratic project is dead and buried. The authorities
are not capable of imposing order founded in the law, it is beyond their
ability to build a society governed by law. The alternative to a society
governed by law is a bandit-and-police state, a situation, that is, in which
the actions of terrorists and bandits on the one hand and the agencies of
law enforcement on the other are
indistinguishable either in terms of their objectives or the methods they
employ. Among the public the mass conviction is gaining ground that democracy
has failed to deliver as a form of government.
“And since nothing has come of the democratic
project, many political players are tempted to have done with it once and for
all. So each of them pursues his own goals, but in objective terms the vectors
of their efforts coincide. Some are frightened by the impending redistribution
of property, some wish to avoid responsibility for committing unlawful acts,
some see themselves as the new Bonaparte or Pinochet and are impatient to grasp
the ‘rudder’ with an iron hand.
“Government through democratic institutions has
failed yet again in Russia. A time of rule by means of fear is beginning. A
time of terror by both bandits and the state. Could this perhaps be the present
regime’s ‘political project’ for Russia?”
While Kucheren
formulated the apprehensions of the democratic section of the population, the
goals and plans of the conspirators who successfully canvassed for the invasion
of Chechnya were revealed on March 8, 2000, in the article “The country needs a
new KGB” by State Duma deputy and former head of the SBP, Korzhakov:
“There is one feature of the preparations for
the presidential elections which is of fundamental importance. In
characterizing the number one candidate for the highest state position,
Vladimir Putin, virtually no one expresses dissatisfaction at the fact that his
background is in the secret services, more specifically, from deep within the
KGB. Only a few years ago, it was impossible to imagine such a thing, but now
public opinion is openly sympathetic to a politician who began his career in
one of the secret services. Vladimir Putin’s high rating is testimony first of
all to the fact that people see him, a product of the KGB, as a politician
capable of straightening the country out and organizing the work of all the
power structures so that at long last we can really start to pull out of social
and political crisis. The nomination of a former KGB officer for the highest
state position gives me a reason once again to draw attention to certain
aspects of the activities of the secret services and the roles they play in
general at the present stage of our economic and political development...
“The well-known bombing incidents in houses in
Moscow and other towns in the country which have resulted in the death of
dozens of peaceful and entirely innocent people, the continuing export of the
nation’s wealth, the flourishing corruption in state structures, cases of
slave-dealing and trading in children—all of this provokes the legitimate anger
of our citizens. People ask in bewilderment: where are our secret services,
which exist in order to fight this kind of phenomenon? We have enough manpower
and secret services: the FSB, the MVD, GRU, SVR, FAPSI—all of these are capable
of solving the most complex problems. The real problem is that the secret
services act separately, like an open hand, not a clenched fist.
“There was a time when our democratic society
was terribly frightened by the existence of the KGB. Then they decided to
destroy the ‘monster’ so that it would not be capable of any surprises. It
seemed to some that it would be easier to control the activity of the secret
services that way. However, the control did not turn out quite as they had
intended and the co-ordination of action by the secret services didn’t get very
far. This is confirmed by the textbook mistakes and failures suffered in the
fight against Chechen and international terrorists. Now even the most vehement
opponents of the KGB are beginning to realize that the destruction of that
structure has not produced anything useful. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was right
when he remarked to a small circle of acquaintances that what we need now is
the KGB.
“There is also another real factor. Nobody will
ever voluntarily return our national wealth which has been stolen and exported
to other countries. Not a single foreign special service will pass up a chance
to acquire important secrets in science or other important areas if we do not
block off their access to these secrets. Corruption will continue to exist just
as long as the relevant services, whose job it is to expose bribe-takers,
continue to act separately, each for itself. Stealing from the treasury will
continue just as long as our laws remain humane towards those who love to stick
their fingers into the state purse.
“In supporting
Vladimir Putin’s candidacy for the post of president our people are sending the
authorities a signal, the meaning of which is perfectly clear: it is high time
to gather the secret services together into a single fist and strike out with
it at those who prevent us from building a normal life. Russia needs its own
KGB! The time has come to speak of this without inhibition! Sharing this opinion, I believe that the first step on
the path to the creation of a new Committee of State Security must be the
formation of a Secret services Coordinating Committee attached to the Security
Council and subordinated directly to the head of state. This will make it
possible to formulate the structure of the future KGB and define its functions
and objectives. If the Coordinating Committee were to be set up in the
immediate future it would make possible a more effective solution to the
problem of bringing illegally exported capital back into the country. I say
this with confidence, since at one time the President’s Security Service did
start working along these lines and produced concrete results. The Service
demonstrated in practice that bringing capital back into the country is not
only necessary, but possible if the job is taken seriously.
“A second
high-priority task is the fight against terrorism using specific methods and
means, excluding the use of large-scale armed forces and deaths among the
peaceful population. Nobody doubts that the Chechen and international
terrorists will be destroyed. However, the terrorist threat will not disappear
then. It should not be forgotten that in Chechnya a generation of young people
has already grown up in conditions of war and hatred of Russians. The
aspiration of today’s young Chechen boys to avenge themselves on the
‘offenders’ any way they can will find outlets not just inside Chechnya. It is
no longer possible to use the army to combat local manifestations of terrorism,
such possibilities have been exhausted. The secret services will be dealing
with it.
“A third task is to expose cases of the illegal
privatization of facilities of strategic importance and the contrived
bankruptcy of factories, plants, and mines, so that they could be grabbed as
private property. Experience has shown that we cannot manage without the
participation of the secret services in this work either.”
Kucheren
believed that Russia’s woes were caused by a bandit-and-police state. Korzhakov
claims that all of the misfortunes were due to the lack of a strong hand of
power, since the secret services acted “like an open hand, not a fist.”
Korzhakov suggested clenching the hand into a fist, setting up a Secret
services Coordinating Committee and subordinating it to the secretary of the SB
(FSB general Sergei Ivanov). We can assume that at the head of this new agency
Korzhakov saw himself, since he emphasized that the SBP which he used to head
had been working along exactly these lines and had achieved concrete results.
In other words, Korzhakov acknowledged that he abused his power and exceeded
his official authority, which is regarded as a crime under Russian law and is
punishable by imprisonment (Korzhakov’s formal functions consisted of guarding
the president and members of this family).
This statement
by Korzhakov alone makes it clear what the SBP was doing for all those years
under Korzhakov’s leadership and what Korzhakov himself was doing afterwards as
a private individual with contacts in the structures of coercion. Let us call
things by their real names. Having found themselves outside the structures of
power and discharged from the secret services, Soskovets and the retired
generals Korzhakov and Barsukov, with help from organized criminal structures
which they had formerly used themselves, such as Stealth, attempted to become
involved in the redistribution of property in Russia and establish control over
businesses for purposes of personal gain. Their activities were funded by the
Izmailovo organized criminal group. Underground and operational work was
carried out by various different ChOPs. Information and propaganda backup were
provided by a number of media outlets, either controlled or bought. Combat
support was provided by organized criminal groups and individual fighters from
the ranks of former employees of the special sections of the MO, FSB, and MVD.
Bringing back capital from abroad “a la
Korzhakov” is nothing more than the extortion of money from businessmen living
in Russia. In practice, this meant that having obtained financial information
via the secret services, Korzhakov summoned businessmen to see him, told them
he knew about the money they had exported and demanded that they return the
money to Russia. Only it is very important to understand that the businessmen
did not return the money to the state’s coffers, but to accounts named by
Korzhakov.
Korzhakov also
revealed the political goals of his structure. The first was to subordinate all
the secret services to the President’s Security Service (or his new structure,
the Coordinating Committee). The second was to allow carte blanche for punitive acts throughout the country, i.e.
dictatorial powers. In addition, Korzhakov openly declared that the genocide of
the Chechen people should be Russian state policy. Let us take another look at
what he said: “It should not be forgotten that in Chechnya, a generation of
young people has already grown up in conditions of war and hatred of Russians.
The aspiration of today’s young Chechen boys to avenge themselves on the
‘offenders’ in any way they can will find outlets not only inside Chechnya.” It
seems that Korzhakov wanted to shoot all the “young Chechen boys” everywhere in
Russia so that they would never reach an age when they were capable of avenging
their murdered fathers and ruined homeland.
That Korzhakov’s
appeal “The country needs a new KGB” was not an isolated chance gesture, but a
symptom of a genuine trend was demonstrated in July 2001, by FSB staff member
and director of the Institute for Problems of Economic Security, Yu. Ovchenko.
In a meeting with a small group of journalists, he informed them that a number
of officials “with access to the president” and connections with the structures
of coercion, including deputy director of the FSB Yu. Zaostrovtsev, intended to
change the government’s economic policy fundamentally and move “from an
oligarchic system to a national one.” According to the newspaper “Arguments and
Facts,” Ovchenko literally said the following:
“The secret
services have a particularly important role in the process of de-privatization
and the investigation of illegally exported capital. Control over the process
of the change of ownership must be transferred to the FSB system. The functions
of monitoring the results of privatization must be transferred to Security
Counsel, where the secretary must be a man from the FSB system... In order to
halt any further leakage of capital, the systems of the Central Bank and the
State Customs Committee must be transferred into effective control...
Representatives of the economic security service must be introduced into the
management staff of these agencies and must be in possession of complete
information on resources already exported and capable of talking to the
oligarchs in a language they understand... Even though the proposed
measures...will be extremely popular with the public, their implementation will
require the establishment of state control over the main electronic media. It
would be appropriate to make it illegal for private capital to own controlling
blocks of shares in broadcasting channels and newspapers with a print-run of
over 200,000 copies.”
When asked how
long the plan would take to implement, Ovchenko replied: “Changes will be made
by the end of the year. But it could be sooner if conditions are ripe.”
Society was divided. Some demanded the
construction of new secret services. Others believed that the old ones were
worse than any terrorists. The public was crazed and stupefied by the Moscow
bombings and the escapade in Ryazan. In a country where there were no laws, it
was impossible to do anything anyway. The whole business got no further than
acrimonious newspaper articles. Lawyer Pavel Astakhov tried to submit a
question to the FSB about which operational activities had been the reason for
the infringement of liberty suffered by the citizens of Ryazan, who were sent
out into the street on that cold autumn evening. The FSB referred him to its
own law “On operational and investigative activity.” It turned out that
according to this law, the FSB had the right to conduct exercises wherever it
wanted whenever it wanted, and the people had no recourse against this FSB law.
However, the incident in Ryazan did not in fact
comply with the requirements of federal legislation and exceeded the competence
of the FSB. “The Federal Law on the Federal Security Service” stated that the
activity of the agencies of the FSB “shall be conducted in accordance with the
law of the Russian Federation ‘On operational and investigative activity in the
Russian Federation,” the criminal and criminal procedural legislation of the
Russian Federation and also in accordance with the present federal law.” Not
one of these documents, including the law “On operational and investigative
activity” indicated that exercises could be carried out to the detriment and in
violation of the civil rights of the population at large. And in addition
article 5 of the law “On operational and investigative activity” formally
guaranteed members of the public against possible abuse by the agencies of law
enforcement:
“Agencies
(officials) who engage in operational and investigative activity must, when
carrying out operational and investigative measures, ensure the observance of
the human and civil rights to the inviolability of private life... the
inviolability of the home... It is not permitted to carry out public
operational and investigative activity for the achievement of goals and
implementation of tasks which are not specified in the present Federal Law. An
individual who believes that the actions of agencies engaging in operational
and investigative activity have resulted in the infringement of his rights and
freedoms shall be entitled to make appeal regarding such actions to a superior
agency engaging in operational and investigative activity, a public
prosecutor’s office, or a court of law... If the agency (or official) engaging
in operational and investigative activity has infringed the rights and legitimate
interests of individuals and legal entities, the superior agency, prosecutor,
or judge is obliged under the terms of the legislation of the Russian
Federation to take measures for the restitution of such rights and legitimate
interests and the provision of compensation for damage inflicted. Violations of
the present Federal Law committed in the course of operational and
investigative activity shall be punishable as prescribed by the legislation of
the Russian Federation.”
Zdanovich and Patrushev had, therefore, both
lied openly when referring to Russian law.
Putin and
Patrushev were not allowed to forget the Ryazan incident right up to the
presidential elections. During the night of October 3, 1999, three GRU officers
disappeared without trace in the Nadterek district of Chechnya: Colonel Zuriko
Ivanov, Major Victor Pakhomov, and Senior Lieutenant Alexei Galkin, together
with a GRU employee of Chechen nationality, Vesami Abdulaev. The leader of the
group, Zuriko Ivanov, had graduated from the Ryazan VDV college and gone into
special missions intelligence, serving in the Fifteenth Special Missions
Brigade, which was famous from the Afghan war, and then in the northern
Caucasus military district. He managed the personal bodyguard of Doku Zavgaev,
who had connections in Moscow. Shortly before the beginning of the second
Chechen war, Ivanov was transferred to the central administration in Moscow.
His new duties did not include raids behind enemy lines, but as soon as
preparations for ground operations in Chechnya began, Ivanov was needed in the
zone of conflict.
On October 19 in
Grozny the head of the press center of the armed forces of Chechnya, Vakha
Ibragimov informed the assembled journalists on behalf of the military command
that GRU officers who had gone over to the Chechens had “established contact
with Chechen soldiers of their own initiative” and had expressed the wish to
cooperate with the Chechen authorities. Ibragimov stated that the GRU officers
and their agent were prepared to supply information about the organizers of the
bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk. The Russian Ministry of Defense
called this statement from the Chechen side a provocation intended to discredit
the internal policy of the Russian leadership and the actions of the federal
forces in the northern Caucasus. However, in late December 1999, the GRU
officially acknowledged the death of the leader of the group, Ivanov: the
federal forces were given the headless corpse of a man and the blood-soaked
identity pass of Colonel Zuriko Amiranovich Ivanov (the officer’s severed head
was discovered later). On March 24, 2000, Zdanovich announced that the entire
group of GRU operatives had been executed by the Chechens.
On January 6,
2000, the London newspaper The
Independent published an article by its correspondent Helen Womack entitled
“Russian agents behind Moscow flat bombings”:
“The Independent has obtained a videotape on
which a Russian officer, captured by
the Chechens, ‘confesses’ that Russian secret services committed the Moscow
apartment-block bombings that ignited the latest war in Chechnya and propelled
Vladimir Putin into the Kremlin. On the video, shot by a Turkish journalist
last month before Grozny was finally cut off by Russian forces, the captured
Russian identifies himself as Alexei Galtin of the GRU (Russian military
intelligence service). The bearded captive acknowledges as his own papers
displayed by the Chechens that identify him as a ‘Senior Lieutenant, Armed
Secret services, General Headquarters for Special Forces of the Russian
Federation.’ The Ministry of Defense was checking yesterday whether there was
indeed such a GRU officer. "Even if he exists, you understand what methods
could have been used on him in captivity," said a junior officer, who
asked not to be named.
Colonel Yakov
Firsov of the Ministry of Defense said on the record: ‘The (Chechen) bandits
feel their end is near and so they are using all manner of dirty tricks in the
information war. This is a provocation. This is rubbish. The Russian armed
forces protect the people. It is impossible that they would attack their own
people.’
On the video,
Lieutenant Galkin said he was captured at the border between Dagestan, and
Chechnya while on a mine-laying mission. ‘I did not take part in the explosions
of the buildings in Moscow and Dagestan but I have information about it. I know
who is responsible for the bombings in Moscow (and Dagestan). It is the FSB
(Russian security service), in cooperation with the GRU, that is responsible
for the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow. He then named other GRU officers.
Nearly 300 people died when four multi-story apartment blocks were destroyed by
terrorist bombs in September. The attacks provoked Mr. Putin, appointed Prime
Minister the month before, to launch a new war in Chechnya.
Sedat Aral, a
photographer with ISF News Pictures, said he shot the video in a bunker in
Grozny, where he met Abu Movsaev, head of Chechen rebel intelligence. Mr.
Movsaev said the Chechens could prove they were not responsible for the
apartment-block bombings.
The Russian
public backs the ‘anti-terrorist
campaign’ in Chechnya, which has so boosted the popularity of its author, Mr.
Putin, that Boris Yeltsin has retired early to make way for his chosen
successor. However the war started, the beneficiary is clearly Mr. Putin. The
former head of Russia's domestic intelligence service is now poised to realize
his presidential ambitions.”
Commenting on
the article, BBC correspondent Hazlet confirmed
that the hypothesis of a secret services conspiracy had existed since the time
when the explosions had occurred, since the FSB could have planted the bomb in
order to justify the military operation in Chechnya. In this context, Hazlet
remarked that the authorities had still not provided convincing proof of
Chechen involvement in the bombings, and Shamil Basaev, one of the people
accused of these heinous crimes, categorically denied having anything to do
with them. Hazlet supposed that on the eve of the presidential elections, Putin
could be badly damaged by the scandal over Galkin’s videotaped testimony, since
the popularity of this little-known officer of the FSB had improved
considerably after military operations began in Chechnya.
The French newspaper Le Monde also wrote about the danger to Putin of exposes of the secret services’ involvement in the September bombings: “having reinforced his popularity and emerged victorious in the elections to the State Duma as a result of the war unleashed against the