Blowing Up Russia (14 page)
Authors: Alexander Litvinenko
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Terrorism, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Violence in Society, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Murder
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.
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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 majorgeneral 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 Anti71 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
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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:
72
73
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&
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.
69
70
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 majorgeneral 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 Anti71 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
70
72
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:
72
73
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&
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