Blowing Up Russia (34 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
Question: Did all the explosions that were planned take place or were several explosions prevented? Were other explosions supposed to take place?
Answer: Naturally. They, according to my operational information, in Penza they wouldn t have been, in Ryazan that is they wouldn t have been caught by employees of the MVD accidentally, then there were supposed to be explosions in Volgograd, in the Stavropol territory, in the Saratov Region, well, that is, basically, where mostly Chechens live (Repeats this.) Saratov& Well, basically, where compact&
Question: What is your position?
Answer: Head of the President s Special Department. At that time I gave proofs of the murder& the Red Cross killing. At that time I was in charge of a special missions detachment, that the Red Cross killing was committed by Deniev s people, who are in Moscow at the present time. Look, and everywhere there&
Interpreter: Adam Deniev&
Answer: And who is an employee, an agent of the special services. He has a GRU identity pass, he has all the identity passes& When we signed the agreement between the FSB of the Russian Federation and the National Security Service, we applied officially to Kovalyov, the head, the then head of the FSB, with proofs, for them to hand
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over Deniev to us, to which Kovalyov answered me that he couldn t hand over Deniev to me since they were very interested in him continuing his work. And our Public Prosecutor of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria repeatedly made official demands to the Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation to hand over Deniev specifically for the Red Cross killing, but we couldn t get hold of him.
Question: Why did Deniev kill the Red Cross people?
Answer: The material when I resigned I left with to our branch, the special service and to the prosecutor s office, our prosecutor s office.
Question: Do you know who killed Fred Koening?
Answer: I know very well. Since he was at my house in the period before the war and at that time and just before he left for the last time, he stayed the night at my house. With several proofs of what was going on in the Russian Republic s filtration camps. After he disappeared without trace, Djokhar Dudaev, the president, was the first president of the Chechen Republic, set up a brigade to search for and locate Koening. As the head of the special service I was a member of the brigade, that is we established that he was last seen on the crossroads at Chechen-U, where the Russian forces were located at that time. With certainty& If today in the Russian Federation& Then the rumor spread that in the Great Martanov district (inaudible) we still haven t found, I m sure, that if the Russian forces enter the Martanov district, if they seize it, they ll definitely find the burial site, that is they re the only ones who know where the burial site is. In 1996 we were contacted by an officer of the Russian Federation saying he could show us the burial site, but he wanted 100,000 dollars. Since we didn t have that kind of money (inaudible). They said to me that he would actually sell the medallion that was on his body.
Question: What do you know about the murder of the employees of the British television company?
Answer: I know. (Inaudible). One of those people was actually abducted. The last time American and German journalists came I (inaudible) we gave them specifically, but to remember everything in my head sort of. From this document a criminal case could be (inaudible). That, you understand, today I can (inaudible) there were loads of abducted people were on the territory of Dagestan, Ingushetia and Northern Ossetia. And they also kept them there. Here the organized criminal groups of all the republics and of our state even had between them some kind of (inaudible). Our criminal groups informed the relatives of this or that person and supposedly accepted responsibility. Specifically I can, for instance Arbi Baraev who everyone thought was villain, that he d carried out all the thefts of people. If you can remember, in Makhachkala 4 Frenchmen were abducted.
Remember? Well that was the Dagestanis who contacted Baraev and asked him to say that these Frenchmen were in Chechnya. For that phone call Baraev received $200,000.
Since Baraev at that time (inaudible). On the border of Chechnya and Dagestan, in Gerzel, Baraev received $3,000,000. He kept 200,000 dollars, gave 2,800,000 dollars to the Dagestanis and the Frenchmen were brought and handed over on the territory of Dagestan. There are very many cases like that. Really? That s the first time I ve heard that. I heard that on the border of Georgia and Chechnya he disappeared supposedly.
There weren t any cases on the territory of Chechnya, it didn t happen that& There was one attempt in August, in September there was one attempt, we immediately arrested those people and in accordance with sharia legal procedure we handed them over for sharia trial.
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Appendix 11 Transcript of Radio Liberty Discussion of Blowing Up Russia Radio Liberty, Facts and Opinions Host Lev Roytman June 11, 2002 Lev Roytman: Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within is a book that came out in America, in January of this year, in English. Radio Liberty has devoted several programs, under the same title, to a detailed exposition of this book. In August of last year, excerpts from the book were published in the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The Russian original of this book was published in February by the Liberty Publishing House in New York under the title, The FSB Blows Up Russia, with the subtitle, The Federal Security Service - an Organizer of Terrorist Attacks, Kidnappings, and Murders.
The authors of the book are Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel of the FSB, and Yuri Felshtinsky, a well-known historian who will be speaking to us by phone from Boston. In our Moscow studios are human rights advocates Sergei Kovalyov, Oleg Orlov, and Alexander Cherkasov.
Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky! On March 5, after your book had already come out, a French documentary film called Assassination of Russia was shown at a press conference given by Boris Berezovsky in London. The documentary dealt with the FSB s likely involvement in the apartment-house bombings in September 1999. These explosions were the prologue and the pretext for the second war in Chechnya. You describe the FSB on a larger scale as a criminal organization in general.
First of all, is there any connection between your book and the French documentary? And second, your sources - are they verifiable?
Yuri Felshtinsky: The book and the documentary are certainly connected. I was the initiator behind the documentary, and the idea of making a documentary based on the book was mine. Then there s the separate issue of how the whole thing was organized, how a team of French directors was found, and so on. But the connection between the book and the documentary is direct and straightforward. That is the answer to your first question.
And second, to answer your question about the book s sources. In the actual editions - both in English and Russian, as everyone noticed - the sources were not identified. This was done deliberately. I did not wish to make it any easier for the FSB to criticize the book. Because when you identify a source, you give people the option of criticizing not the book itself - and arguing not with the facts presented in it - but with the sources. In other words, as a professional historian, I knew that this book would be much more difficult to argue with if it contained no sources.
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However, at the press conference on March 5, all the reporters who received an English edition of the book were also given a CD. And this CD contained not merely the sources, but the entire factual database on the basis of which the book had been written. And we did this because we wanted all reporters who had the time and interest to explore this issue to see that not one sentence in the book had been made up or pulled out of a hat, that every single word in this book, every single conclusion, had a source, was based on factual materials, on the basis of which I and Alexander Litvinenko arrived at various conclusions.
Lev Roytman: Thank you, Yuri Georgievich. Now, very briefly, about you. You are a historian - American or Russian, it is hard to say which. You defended a doctoral dissertation in 1993 at the Academic Institute in Moscow. Even prior to this, your books and collections of documents edited by you had been published in America. These include The Bolsheviks and the Left SR s, which came out in Paris; Towards a History of Our Isolation (London, 1988); The Failure of the World Revolution (also in London in 1991, and then in Moscow in 1992). And your last book is Big Bosses. In other words, your scholarly reputation is, in essence, impeccable. This is to attest to your scholarly integrity, so to speak.
Now a question for our guests in Moscow. Alexander Vladimirovich Cherkasov, Board Member of the Memorial Society and Coordinator of its Human Rights Center (specifically, the program Hot Spots ). You have lived and worked in Chechnya during the first and now the second war. During my recent stay in Moscow, when you and I met, you were very critical of Litvinenko s and Felshtinsky s book. That was right when we were broadcasting our programs about it, and you were even against these programs.
Your position: first of all, what was the reason for it? (I didn t want to hear your position at the time because, if I may speak as a reporter, I wanted you to stay hot.) That s the first thing: your position. And second, maybe your position has changed after all?
Alexander Cherkasov: You know, now that I ve had an opportunity to become familiar with the entire contents of the book, I can say that it s uneven. It has fragments, chapters, that contain references to sources (or at least references to sources that have now been published). For example, the part about the organization of the bombings in Moscow at the end of 1994. Novaya Gazeta has now published the relevant materials as documents from Moscow municipal court hearings. In other words, they can be double-checked. Or the part about Ryazan, which is quite simply an excellent compilation of materials about the failed bombing attempt.
But the problem is that Novaya Gazeta initially made three chapters of the book available to the Russian reader: a chapter about the Chechen war, a chapter about the bombing in Ryazan, and a chapter about other episodes, other bombings, based on sources that cannot be verified, that we have no opportunity to verify.
The events of the first Chechen war actually happen to be reasonably well-known to my colleagues and, to some degree, to me as well. And precisely in this chapter the authors repeatedly stretch the facts and give strained interpretations in order to prove their
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premise. It s clear that Mr. Felshtinsky didn t make it all up, that he got it from certain sources. Evidently, he used them rather uncritically.
Sometimes this even places my colleagues, for example, in a false position. It turns out they didn t know what they were doing in Budyonnovsk. It will soon be seven years since the events in Budyonnovsk. The book gives one account of what happened there.
And since we can t analyze the whole book now, it would be useful to show on the basis of certain episodes that other accounts are, on the whole, possible.
Let me correct myself. Obviously, the book is necessary. It has to be read - just as many other books have to be read - and then argued with. But the arguing has to start right now, in order to separate the truly provable and proven elements from the uncritical repetition of accounts circulating in the press, in Russia or abroad.
Lev Roytman: Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov, member of the Government Duma, Chairman of the Memorial Society. Sergei Adamovich, during the first Chechen war you were the head of the so-called Kovalyov group. This was a commission of observers from human rights organizations in the zone of military operations in Chechnya. You, too, were in Budyonnovsk (since we re talking about Basaev, about the capture of the hospital in Budyonnovsk). June 14 is the anniversary of this event, which in my view was a terrorist attack, pure and simple. Now you are the chair of the Public Commission investigating the circumstances of the fall 1999 bombings in the cities of Russia, which is the main subject of Alexander Litvinenko s and Yuri Felshtinsky s book The FSB Blows Up Russia.
Question: The facts presented in this book - despite the fact that not all of them are documented (we ve heard the author, Yuri Felshtinsky, give his reasons for not documenting all of them) - however that may be, are these facts of use to you in your investigation?
Sergei Kovalyov: You see, we undoubtedly need the book. It is more than useful. It is simply indispensable. Nonetheless, I completely agree with the comments made by Cherkasov.
Let us take Budyonnovsk again, for example. This is just one episode, but, incidentally, an episode that I would consider highly representative. The authors hypothesis is as follows. A bribe was received in return for an agreed-upon truce, a bribe in the millions.
The Chechens were, roughly speaking, abandoned, the money was pocketed, and the truce was buried. And then Dudaev orders Basaev to organize an attack, which is either supposed to lead to peace or to bring the money back. This is the premise and it is, shall we say, incredibly naive. And then the subsequent events in Budyonnovsk are narrated as follows. The special forces have almost taken over the hospital, Basaev s fighters are just about to be destroyed, and all of a sudden Chernomyrdin unexpectedly remembers that it s important to stick to the deal, wants to re-establish good faith on the part of Moscow, and issues orders to halt the operation.
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Nothing like this ever happened. I don t know if any money was exchanged. That s something I don t know about. It s hard to believe that it was, but I can t prove anything.
But what I know for sure is that no Chernomyrdin ever stopped an OMON attack. The attack was repulsed, the attack was checked, the hospital wasn t captured, the main victims were the hostages, not the rebels. And that s the moment when we finally managed to reach Gaidar. Gaidar entered into negotiations with Chernomyrdin, and Chernomyrdin directed me to form a delegation for talks with Basaev, which is what happened. As far as the negotiations are concerned - which took place in parallel between Volsky on one side and Imayev on the other (not just them alone, of course) - these official negotiations had actually already begun when our buses were leaving Budyonnovsk.
Lev Roytman: Thank you, Sergei Adamovich. So you cast doubt on Yuri Felshtinsky s and Alexander Litvinenko s account. Of course, we will ask Yuri Felshtinsky to state his own position in a moment.
Answer: Naturally. They, according to my operational information, in Penza they wouldn t have been, in Ryazan that is they wouldn t have been caught by employees of the MVD accidentally, then there were supposed to be explosions in Volgograd, in the Stavropol territory, in the Saratov Region, well, that is, basically, where mostly Chechens live (Repeats this.) Saratov& Well, basically, where compact&
Question: What is your position?
Answer: Head of the President s Special Department. At that time I gave proofs of the murder& the Red Cross killing. At that time I was in charge of a special missions detachment, that the Red Cross killing was committed by Deniev s people, who are in Moscow at the present time. Look, and everywhere there&
Interpreter: Adam Deniev&
Answer: And who is an employee, an agent of the special services. He has a GRU identity pass, he has all the identity passes& When we signed the agreement between the FSB of the Russian Federation and the National Security Service, we applied officially to Kovalyov, the head, the then head of the FSB, with proofs, for them to hand
187
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over Deniev to us, to which Kovalyov answered me that he couldn t hand over Deniev to me since they were very interested in him continuing his work. And our Public Prosecutor of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria repeatedly made official demands to the Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation to hand over Deniev specifically for the Red Cross killing, but we couldn t get hold of him.
Question: Why did Deniev kill the Red Cross people?
Answer: The material when I resigned I left with to our branch, the special service and to the prosecutor s office, our prosecutor s office.
Question: Do you know who killed Fred Koening?
Answer: I know very well. Since he was at my house in the period before the war and at that time and just before he left for the last time, he stayed the night at my house. With several proofs of what was going on in the Russian Republic s filtration camps. After he disappeared without trace, Djokhar Dudaev, the president, was the first president of the Chechen Republic, set up a brigade to search for and locate Koening. As the head of the special service I was a member of the brigade, that is we established that he was last seen on the crossroads at Chechen-U, where the Russian forces were located at that time. With certainty& If today in the Russian Federation& Then the rumor spread that in the Great Martanov district (inaudible) we still haven t found, I m sure, that if the Russian forces enter the Martanov district, if they seize it, they ll definitely find the burial site, that is they re the only ones who know where the burial site is. In 1996 we were contacted by an officer of the Russian Federation saying he could show us the burial site, but he wanted 100,000 dollars. Since we didn t have that kind of money (inaudible). They said to me that he would actually sell the medallion that was on his body.
Question: What do you know about the murder of the employees of the British television company?
Answer: I know. (Inaudible). One of those people was actually abducted. The last time American and German journalists came I (inaudible) we gave them specifically, but to remember everything in my head sort of. From this document a criminal case could be (inaudible). That, you understand, today I can (inaudible) there were loads of abducted people were on the territory of Dagestan, Ingushetia and Northern Ossetia. And they also kept them there. Here the organized criminal groups of all the republics and of our state even had between them some kind of (inaudible). Our criminal groups informed the relatives of this or that person and supposedly accepted responsibility. Specifically I can, for instance Arbi Baraev who everyone thought was villain, that he d carried out all the thefts of people. If you can remember, in Makhachkala 4 Frenchmen were abducted.
Remember? Well that was the Dagestanis who contacted Baraev and asked him to say that these Frenchmen were in Chechnya. For that phone call Baraev received $200,000.
Since Baraev at that time (inaudible). On the border of Chechnya and Dagestan, in Gerzel, Baraev received $3,000,000. He kept 200,000 dollars, gave 2,800,000 dollars to the Dagestanis and the Frenchmen were brought and handed over on the territory of Dagestan. There are very many cases like that. Really? That s the first time I ve heard that. I heard that on the border of Georgia and Chechnya he disappeared supposedly.
There weren t any cases on the territory of Chechnya, it didn t happen that& There was one attempt in August, in September there was one attempt, we immediately arrested those people and in accordance with sharia legal procedure we handed them over for sharia trial.
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Appendix 11 Transcript of Radio Liberty Discussion of Blowing Up Russia Radio Liberty, Facts and Opinions Host Lev Roytman June 11, 2002 Lev Roytman: Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within is a book that came out in America, in January of this year, in English. Radio Liberty has devoted several programs, under the same title, to a detailed exposition of this book. In August of last year, excerpts from the book were published in the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The Russian original of this book was published in February by the Liberty Publishing House in New York under the title, The FSB Blows Up Russia, with the subtitle, The Federal Security Service - an Organizer of Terrorist Attacks, Kidnappings, and Murders.
The authors of the book are Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel of the FSB, and Yuri Felshtinsky, a well-known historian who will be speaking to us by phone from Boston. In our Moscow studios are human rights advocates Sergei Kovalyov, Oleg Orlov, and Alexander Cherkasov.
Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky! On March 5, after your book had already come out, a French documentary film called Assassination of Russia was shown at a press conference given by Boris Berezovsky in London. The documentary dealt with the FSB s likely involvement in the apartment-house bombings in September 1999. These explosions were the prologue and the pretext for the second war in Chechnya. You describe the FSB on a larger scale as a criminal organization in general.
First of all, is there any connection between your book and the French documentary? And second, your sources - are they verifiable?
Yuri Felshtinsky: The book and the documentary are certainly connected. I was the initiator behind the documentary, and the idea of making a documentary based on the book was mine. Then there s the separate issue of how the whole thing was organized, how a team of French directors was found, and so on. But the connection between the book and the documentary is direct and straightforward. That is the answer to your first question.
And second, to answer your question about the book s sources. In the actual editions - both in English and Russian, as everyone noticed - the sources were not identified. This was done deliberately. I did not wish to make it any easier for the FSB to criticize the book. Because when you identify a source, you give people the option of criticizing not the book itself - and arguing not with the facts presented in it - but with the sources. In other words, as a professional historian, I knew that this book would be much more difficult to argue with if it contained no sources.
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However, at the press conference on March 5, all the reporters who received an English edition of the book were also given a CD. And this CD contained not merely the sources, but the entire factual database on the basis of which the book had been written. And we did this because we wanted all reporters who had the time and interest to explore this issue to see that not one sentence in the book had been made up or pulled out of a hat, that every single word in this book, every single conclusion, had a source, was based on factual materials, on the basis of which I and Alexander Litvinenko arrived at various conclusions.
Lev Roytman: Thank you, Yuri Georgievich. Now, very briefly, about you. You are a historian - American or Russian, it is hard to say which. You defended a doctoral dissertation in 1993 at the Academic Institute in Moscow. Even prior to this, your books and collections of documents edited by you had been published in America. These include The Bolsheviks and the Left SR s, which came out in Paris; Towards a History of Our Isolation (London, 1988); The Failure of the World Revolution (also in London in 1991, and then in Moscow in 1992). And your last book is Big Bosses. In other words, your scholarly reputation is, in essence, impeccable. This is to attest to your scholarly integrity, so to speak.
Now a question for our guests in Moscow. Alexander Vladimirovich Cherkasov, Board Member of the Memorial Society and Coordinator of its Human Rights Center (specifically, the program Hot Spots ). You have lived and worked in Chechnya during the first and now the second war. During my recent stay in Moscow, when you and I met, you were very critical of Litvinenko s and Felshtinsky s book. That was right when we were broadcasting our programs about it, and you were even against these programs.
Your position: first of all, what was the reason for it? (I didn t want to hear your position at the time because, if I may speak as a reporter, I wanted you to stay hot.) That s the first thing: your position. And second, maybe your position has changed after all?
Alexander Cherkasov: You know, now that I ve had an opportunity to become familiar with the entire contents of the book, I can say that it s uneven. It has fragments, chapters, that contain references to sources (or at least references to sources that have now been published). For example, the part about the organization of the bombings in Moscow at the end of 1994. Novaya Gazeta has now published the relevant materials as documents from Moscow municipal court hearings. In other words, they can be double-checked. Or the part about Ryazan, which is quite simply an excellent compilation of materials about the failed bombing attempt.
But the problem is that Novaya Gazeta initially made three chapters of the book available to the Russian reader: a chapter about the Chechen war, a chapter about the bombing in Ryazan, and a chapter about other episodes, other bombings, based on sources that cannot be verified, that we have no opportunity to verify.
The events of the first Chechen war actually happen to be reasonably well-known to my colleagues and, to some degree, to me as well. And precisely in this chapter the authors repeatedly stretch the facts and give strained interpretations in order to prove their
190
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premise. It s clear that Mr. Felshtinsky didn t make it all up, that he got it from certain sources. Evidently, he used them rather uncritically.
Sometimes this even places my colleagues, for example, in a false position. It turns out they didn t know what they were doing in Budyonnovsk. It will soon be seven years since the events in Budyonnovsk. The book gives one account of what happened there.
And since we can t analyze the whole book now, it would be useful to show on the basis of certain episodes that other accounts are, on the whole, possible.
Let me correct myself. Obviously, the book is necessary. It has to be read - just as many other books have to be read - and then argued with. But the arguing has to start right now, in order to separate the truly provable and proven elements from the uncritical repetition of accounts circulating in the press, in Russia or abroad.
Lev Roytman: Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov, member of the Government Duma, Chairman of the Memorial Society. Sergei Adamovich, during the first Chechen war you were the head of the so-called Kovalyov group. This was a commission of observers from human rights organizations in the zone of military operations in Chechnya. You, too, were in Budyonnovsk (since we re talking about Basaev, about the capture of the hospital in Budyonnovsk). June 14 is the anniversary of this event, which in my view was a terrorist attack, pure and simple. Now you are the chair of the Public Commission investigating the circumstances of the fall 1999 bombings in the cities of Russia, which is the main subject of Alexander Litvinenko s and Yuri Felshtinsky s book The FSB Blows Up Russia.
Question: The facts presented in this book - despite the fact that not all of them are documented (we ve heard the author, Yuri Felshtinsky, give his reasons for not documenting all of them) - however that may be, are these facts of use to you in your investigation?
Sergei Kovalyov: You see, we undoubtedly need the book. It is more than useful. It is simply indispensable. Nonetheless, I completely agree with the comments made by Cherkasov.
Let us take Budyonnovsk again, for example. This is just one episode, but, incidentally, an episode that I would consider highly representative. The authors hypothesis is as follows. A bribe was received in return for an agreed-upon truce, a bribe in the millions.
The Chechens were, roughly speaking, abandoned, the money was pocketed, and the truce was buried. And then Dudaev orders Basaev to organize an attack, which is either supposed to lead to peace or to bring the money back. This is the premise and it is, shall we say, incredibly naive. And then the subsequent events in Budyonnovsk are narrated as follows. The special forces have almost taken over the hospital, Basaev s fighters are just about to be destroyed, and all of a sudden Chernomyrdin unexpectedly remembers that it s important to stick to the deal, wants to re-establish good faith on the part of Moscow, and issues orders to halt the operation.
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192
Nothing like this ever happened. I don t know if any money was exchanged. That s something I don t know about. It s hard to believe that it was, but I can t prove anything.
But what I know for sure is that no Chernomyrdin ever stopped an OMON attack. The attack was repulsed, the attack was checked, the hospital wasn t captured, the main victims were the hostages, not the rebels. And that s the moment when we finally managed to reach Gaidar. Gaidar entered into negotiations with Chernomyrdin, and Chernomyrdin directed me to form a delegation for talks with Basaev, which is what happened. As far as the negotiations are concerned - which took place in parallel between Volsky on one side and Imayev on the other (not just them alone, of course) - these official negotiations had actually already begun when our buses were leaving Budyonnovsk.
Lev Roytman: Thank you, Sergei Adamovich. So you cast doubt on Yuri Felshtinsky s and Alexander Litvinenko s account. Of course, we will ask Yuri Felshtinsky to state his own position in a moment.
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