Blowing Up Russia (23 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
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.
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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.
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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 apartmentblock 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.
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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 Chechen people, Vladimir Putin understands that there are only two things capable of preventing him from becoming president in the elections in March. These are major military failures and losses of personnel in Chechnya, and the recognition that the Russian secret services might have been involved in the bombing of residential buildings which cost about 300 people their lives in September of last year and served as the official pretext for the beginning of the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya.
It is interesting that in connection with the bombings in Moscow neither Lazovsky nor any of his people were questioned, although it would have been reasonable to assume that the people behind these terrorist attacks were the same as those behind the attacks of 1994-1996. Not until spring 2000 did the public prosecutor consent to Lazovsky s arrest.
The people behind Lazovsky-and it is obvious that the most important people standing behind Lazovsky were the Moscow UFSB-decided not to allow Lazovsky to be arrested. According to operational information, Lazovsky was killed immediately after the order for his arrest was issued. He was shot on April 28, 2000, on the threshold of the Cathedral of the Assumption, from a Kalashnikov automatic rifle with a silencer and an optical sight. The four bullets, one of which struck him in the throat, proved fatal. They were fired from a clump of shrubs about 150 meters away. For some reason, the jeep in which Lazovsky s bodyguards constantly followed him around, was nowhere nearby.
The killer abandoned his weapon and went into hiding. Someone took the bloody corpse
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118
to the nearby hospital and put it on a bench. The local police used a doctor from the Odintsovo polyclinic to identify the body. The records of the examination of the murder victim and the inspection of the scene of the incident were drawn up in an extremely sloppy and unprofessional manner, which provided a pretext for claiming that it was not Lazovsky who had been killed but his double.
On the evening of May 22, 2000, a small detachment of guerrillas fell into a trap set by GRU special missions in the region between the villages of Serzhen-Yurt and Shali. The brief battle left ten guerrillas dead and the others were scattered. The dead included thirty-eight-year-old field commander and head of Chechen military counterintelligence, Abu Movsaev, who had interrogated Senior Lieutenant Galkin and probably also possessed other information about the bombings. Local residents said that in May, Movsaev had several times secretly come to spend the night with relatives who lived in Shali. One member of the local authorities had reported this to the UFSB representative, who did nothing about it. When a GRU special missions group had attempted to seize the field commander, the FSB had opposed them. A scandal blew up, and the case was transferred to Moscow, where it was decided to bring Movsaev in. However, he was not brought in alive.
On March 9, 2000, an airplane with nine people on board crashed on takeoff in Moscow.
The nine were Artym Borovik, president of the holding company Sovershenno sekretno, Ziya Bazhaev, a Chechen national who was head of the holding company Alliance Group, two of the latter s bodyguards and five members of the crew. The Yak40 plane, rented by the holding company Sovershenno sekretno about a year earlier from the Vologda Aviation Company via the Moscow Aviation Company Aerotex, should have flown on to Kiev. The report from the commission for the investigation of incidents in air transport stated that the Vologda aviation technicians had not sprayed the plane with special deicing liquid before takeoff and its wing-flaps had only been extended by ten degrees, whereas for takeoff twenty degrees was required. However, on the morning of March 9, it was only four degrees below zero at Sheremetievo Airport, and there had not been any precipitation. There was no need to spray the plane with the Arktika deicing fluid. Furthermore, the Yak-40 could have taken off and flown with its wing-flaps extended by only 10 degrees; the run-up would simply have been longer, and it would have handled a bit sluggishly. Judging from the fact that the plane crashed at about the center of the runway, which at Sheremetievo is 3.6 kilometers long, the plane s run-up was the standard length of about 800 meters. On learning of the tragedy Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko political party and State Duma deputy stated that recently Borovik and his team had been conducting an independent investigation into the bombings in Moscow. We can only guess at what conclusions Borovik would have reached.
Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin had his own opinion on the matter. He believed that the FSB, as an organization, was not directly involved in organizing the terrorist attacks and that the bombings had been ordered by one of the Russian power blocs which was interested in improving Putin s rating. Those who ordered the acts of terror might well have made use of individual specialists from the FSB or the old KGB, but the FSB itself
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119
only became involved in the operation after the fiasco in Ryazan, and it provided a cover story for the failed operation and its organizers.
Of course, this version raises the question of what sort of bloc it was, and who was its leader, if after the failure in Ryazan the entire FSB, and other state departments too, were thrown into the cover story for the failed operation and its organizers. It is clear that only Putin could have been in control of such a bloc and that the Russian power bloc, attempting to improve Putin s rating, consisted primarily of Putin himself, Patrushev, everyone who had striven to unleash war in Chechnya, and those who wished to clench the secret services into a solid fist.
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.
114
115
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.
115
116
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 apartmentblock 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.
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117
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 Chechen people, Vladimir Putin understands that there are only two things capable of preventing him from becoming president in the elections in March. These are major military failures and losses of personnel in Chechnya, and the recognition that the Russian secret services might have been involved in the bombing of residential buildings which cost about 300 people their lives in September of last year and served as the official pretext for the beginning of the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya.
It is interesting that in connection with the bombings in Moscow neither Lazovsky nor any of his people were questioned, although it would have been reasonable to assume that the people behind these terrorist attacks were the same as those behind the attacks of 1994-1996. Not until spring 2000 did the public prosecutor consent to Lazovsky s arrest.
The people behind Lazovsky-and it is obvious that the most important people standing behind Lazovsky were the Moscow UFSB-decided not to allow Lazovsky to be arrested. According to operational information, Lazovsky was killed immediately after the order for his arrest was issued. He was shot on April 28, 2000, on the threshold of the Cathedral of the Assumption, from a Kalashnikov automatic rifle with a silencer and an optical sight. The four bullets, one of which struck him in the throat, proved fatal. They were fired from a clump of shrubs about 150 meters away. For some reason, the jeep in which Lazovsky s bodyguards constantly followed him around, was nowhere nearby.
The killer abandoned his weapon and went into hiding. Someone took the bloody corpse
117
118
to the nearby hospital and put it on a bench. The local police used a doctor from the Odintsovo polyclinic to identify the body. The records of the examination of the murder victim and the inspection of the scene of the incident were drawn up in an extremely sloppy and unprofessional manner, which provided a pretext for claiming that it was not Lazovsky who had been killed but his double.
On the evening of May 22, 2000, a small detachment of guerrillas fell into a trap set by GRU special missions in the region between the villages of Serzhen-Yurt and Shali. The brief battle left ten guerrillas dead and the others were scattered. The dead included thirty-eight-year-old field commander and head of Chechen military counterintelligence, Abu Movsaev, who had interrogated Senior Lieutenant Galkin and probably also possessed other information about the bombings. Local residents said that in May, Movsaev had several times secretly come to spend the night with relatives who lived in Shali. One member of the local authorities had reported this to the UFSB representative, who did nothing about it. When a GRU special missions group had attempted to seize the field commander, the FSB had opposed them. A scandal blew up, and the case was transferred to Moscow, where it was decided to bring Movsaev in. However, he was not brought in alive.
On March 9, 2000, an airplane with nine people on board crashed on takeoff in Moscow.
The nine were Artym Borovik, president of the holding company Sovershenno sekretno, Ziya Bazhaev, a Chechen national who was head of the holding company Alliance Group, two of the latter s bodyguards and five members of the crew. The Yak40 plane, rented by the holding company Sovershenno sekretno about a year earlier from the Vologda Aviation Company via the Moscow Aviation Company Aerotex, should have flown on to Kiev. The report from the commission for the investigation of incidents in air transport stated that the Vologda aviation technicians had not sprayed the plane with special deicing liquid before takeoff and its wing-flaps had only been extended by ten degrees, whereas for takeoff twenty degrees was required. However, on the morning of March 9, it was only four degrees below zero at Sheremetievo Airport, and there had not been any precipitation. There was no need to spray the plane with the Arktika deicing fluid. Furthermore, the Yak-40 could have taken off and flown with its wing-flaps extended by only 10 degrees; the run-up would simply have been longer, and it would have handled a bit sluggishly. Judging from the fact that the plane crashed at about the center of the runway, which at Sheremetievo is 3.6 kilometers long, the plane s run-up was the standard length of about 800 meters. On learning of the tragedy Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko political party and State Duma deputy stated that recently Borovik and his team had been conducting an independent investigation into the bombings in Moscow. We can only guess at what conclusions Borovik would have reached.
Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin had his own opinion on the matter. He believed that the FSB, as an organization, was not directly involved in organizing the terrorist attacks and that the bombings had been ordered by one of the Russian power blocs which was interested in improving Putin s rating. Those who ordered the acts of terror might well have made use of individual specialists from the FSB or the old KGB, but the FSB itself
118
119
only became involved in the operation after the fiasco in Ryazan, and it provided a cover story for the failed operation and its organizers.
Of course, this version raises the question of what sort of bloc it was, and who was its leader, if after the failure in Ryazan the entire FSB, and other state departments too, were thrown into the cover story for the failed operation and its organizers. It is clear that only Putin could have been in control of such a bloc and that the Russian power bloc, attempting to improve Putin s rating, consisted primarily of Putin himself, Patrushev, everyone who had striven to unleash war in Chechnya, and those who wished to clench the secret services into a solid fist.
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