Death of a Dissident (21 page)

I remember talking to Boris at that time, concerned that the conflict would bring down the government, boosting the Communists and nationalists. Why such a fuss about a phone company for Gusinsky?

He gave me an angry look: “That’s not the point. I don’t care whether Goose gets it or not. And it’s not about fair play: any outcome would have been fixed. It’s about whether Tolya [Chubais] can have it his way because he decided that he is the state. Fucking Bolshevik.”

As the row deepened, it became obvious that the fight was not between Gusinsky and Potanin. They were just surrogates for the two epic figures of Yeltsin’s reign: Chubais and Berezovsky, the ultimate technocrat and the supertycoon. It was a political clash of opposing views on the role of the oligarchs in the new Russia.

According to Boris, the oligarchs who emerged from the Davos
Pact had to remain major players in Russian politics for years to come. It was their historic mission. They are the natural opponents of the Communists and secret services, he said. They are intrinsically pro-democratic and they can get things done. They are the best guarantors of freedom. In other words, what is good for LogoVAZ is good for Russian democracy.

Chubais believed just the opposite: businessmen should stick to business. Oligarchs, who had been created by the state’s largesse in the first place, should be tightly controlled and even subordinate to the state. Remarkably, in less than two years, Chubais’s views had turned 180 degrees, from sermons of laissez-faire capitalism to praise of state control.

Looking back, this was the point where my disagreement with George Soros took root. I was squarely on Boris’s side. George was with the “new” Chubais.

Russia, I tried to explain to George, had no tradition of freedom. Its democratic institutions were still weak. There was no middle class or civil society. For centuries, Russia’s troubles came from unrestrained power in the Kremlin. In this context, any alternative center of power that could counterbalance the state, even the self-serving oligarchs, were agents of progress. They substituted for the missing institutional checks and balances.

To George, however, Boris was the incarnation of unrestrained capitalism, the evil he took on in his Western crusades. He looked at Russia through the prism of his article “The Capitalist Threat,” published that year in the
Atlantic Monthly
, where he asserted that “the main enemy of the open society … is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”

Moscow, August 19: NTV President Igor Malashenko discloses that his station paid over $1 million to free five journalists kidnapped in Chechnya three months earlier. Deputy NSC Secretary Berezovsky confirms that ransoms were paid for other captives as well. Chechnya’s uneasy peace is marked by further hostage takings by warlords’ gangs.

While the Kremlin’s crony capitalism continued its merry-go-round, there were more sinister changes afoot in the special services. In late August 1997, the career of Sasha Litvinenko took an unexpected turn when he was transferred to a mysterious supersecret department known as the URPO, the Division of Operations against Criminal Organizations. He would now work under a man whom he had been charged with investigating.

It happened after an argument with his boss at ATC, General Volokh. Sasha had just returned from an operation when Volokh called him in.

“I have a report that your people shot and wounded a suspect. Tell me what happened.”

Sasha explained that his group was arresting a dangerous criminal, a drug dealer with several murders on his record, who tried to flee. One of his officers fired three warning shots, as prescribed by FSB training, and then hit him in the leg. The suspect was apprehended and brought to a hospital.

Volokh was enraged. He yelled that the last thing he needed was a news story about FSB agents shooting people in downtown Moscow. He ordered Sasha to suspend the officer in question. But Sasha yelled back, slammed the door, and went straight to the office of the FSB director, Nikolai Kovalev.

Kovalev had known Sasha for years. He had a habit of dealing directly with rank-and-file officers, bypassing the layers of command. Sasha was among those whom he would see without notice.

Sasha argued his case to Kovalev. There were no complaints from the prosecutors. Everything had been done by the book. There was no reason for an investigation. He could not let his officers be railroaded. Finally, Sasha threatened to resign.

Kovalev heard him out and did not disagree. He listened to Sasha’s praise of his team, agreeing that they were “good people, a strong team,” and then dropped a bombshell: “I am transferring you to the URPO. You will report to Colonel Gusak. I already spoke to
him, he will take you.” Alexander Gusak was a former colleague of Sasha’s at the ATC.

Sasha was stunned. How could he work in the URPO, when some months ago he had brought Kovalev a file implicating its commander, Gen. Evgeny Khokholkov?

Back when the war began, in September 1994, Khokholkov, a heavyset man with huge arms who was nicknamed “the Bull,” ran a section in the ATC Division of Operations, a position equivalent to Sasha’s. But after the war, he was unexpectedly promoted to general and appointed to run the brand-new URPO.

Khokholkov’s sudden rise did not please the ATC director of operations, General Vyacheslav Volokh, who was Sasha’s—and formerly Khokholkov’s—boss. He believed that Khokholkov’s new division would compete with his own.

Through the grapevine Sasha had heard about an argument between Volokh and Khokholkov related to the latter’s sudden riches, when Khokholkov bought himself a posh restaurant and a dacha. Khokholkov refused to explain himself to Volokh, telling him to keep his nose out of his personal affairs. In midsummer 1996, Volokh had called Sasha in and told him to “dig up everything that there is on Khokholkov.”

Sasha started digging. Sure enough, he was able to unearth allegations that Khokholkov might be linked with organized crime figures in Uzbekistan, where he had been stationed before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Then a source at the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that the Organized Crime Unit of the Moscow City Police claimed he had some explosive material on Khokholkov, dating back several years. The allegation was that he had been videotaped in the company of major crime figures. It was no surprise to Sasha that the police might claim to hold such material on Khokholkov without using it. The Moscow police were notoriously corrupt. If it existed, the tape could be useful as an insurance policy to keep the URPO off their backs.

Then came Sasha’s September 1996 raid in Moscow and its infamous Lebed files. One of them was a GRU file on Chechnya that contained much about Khokholkov. At some point before the war, Khokholkov spent four months undercover in Germany, posing as an American businessman in an operation personally controlled by the previous FSB director, Mikhail Barsukov. Foreign operations were not part of FSB’s charter; it was supposed to deal only with domestic security, while work abroad was normally conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR) or Military Intelligence (the GRU). But this operation had to do with a purely domestic issue: a multimillion-dollar purchase of electronic security equipment for the presidential offices in the Kremlin.

Thanks to this operation, Khokholkov established close ties with Alexander Korzhakov, who at the time was head of Kremlin security. The reason the assignment was top secret was to avoid American export restrictions on the technology that Korzhakov sought. It may also have been kept secret to avoid attention to a second purchase by Khokholkov: the American system that could guide a missile to a land target by homing in on a particular kind of signal, such as that of a satellite telephone. It was the system that was used to assassinate Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen president.

This information, by itself, did not raise any red flags for Sasha. After all, securing the Kremlin and assassinating the leader of a wartime enemy were both well and good, in his eyes. But the report went on to allege that millions of dollars were misappropriated in the operation. Whether it was true or not, this allegation of course was just what Sasha needed as part of his assignment to “dig up anything he could” on Khokholkov.

Backed by his superiors, Generals Volokh and Trofimov, Sasha brought his findings to the FSB director, Nikolai Kovalev. Kovalev thanked him and said that he would take it from there. But nothing happened. Khokholkov continued to build up URPO, his new secret division, and Sasha felt frustrated yet again.

And now Kovalev was ordering him to go to work under Khokholkov’s command!

“Don’t worry about Khokholkov,” said the director, obviously
amused at Sasha’s bewildered look. “I want my own man in that division. So you will come in and report if you notice anything fishy. That’s an order.”

Within the FSB, the URPO enjoyed considerable autonomy. It employed about forty opers and had its own car pool, technical support services, a SWAT unit, and agents. It was headquartered in a separate unmarked building away from Lubyanka HQ. Before long Sasha realized that the URPO’s mission included carrying extrajudicial actions against suspected criminals.

Most URPO members were veterans of Chechnya, and indeed the very concept of the URPO emerged from the Chechen experience: in extraordinary circumstances, law enforcement must be capable of acting outside of the law. Sasha did not like it. Perhaps in wartime such excesses could be written off as collateral damage, but Russia had not invoked war powers in Chechnya. The army’s presence there was always viewed as a law enforcement operation.

Once the law enforcement agencies were allowed to kill and torture Chechens with impunity, it wasn’t difficult to use the same approach against organized crime figures back at home.

As Sasha told me, URPO’s approach to recruitment was to seek out opers with bloody records. One of its officers, for example, was reinstated in the service after doing time for killing a rape-murder suspect whom he had had to release for insufficient evidence. More senior URPO officers had “wasted” four Dagestan gangsters who had the misfortune of trying to extort money from a store that belonged to the son of an ex-KGB boss.