Death of a Dissident (27 page)

He pointed out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the eventual mastermind of the September 11 attack, had tried to get into Chechnya in 1997, before he worked with Osama bin Laden. He was not allowed to pass through Azerbaijan. The same was true for at least four of the eventual 9/11 terrorists, including Mohammed Atta. All of them, before going to Afghanistan, tried to enter Chechnya but could not: the place was tightly sealed to outsiders.

“So explain to me, please, how those guys we caught, with their Jordanian passports, not to mention their Arab looks, went to a Russian embassy, got a visa, then flew to Moscow, then to North Caucasus—a trip that required special permission—without the FSB noticing? Impossible!

“And the three Dagestan villages that Stepashin patronized! That was a smart move. We were trying to chase the Wahhabi out of Chechnya, so they gave them refuge in the Russian territory under the FSB’s protection!”

Zakayev was particularly indignant about the hostage industry. The Russian practice of paying ransoms only encouraged renegade warlords and provided them with substantial funds, while the Chechen government was strapped. He claimed that the Russians paid $7 million just for Valentin Vlasov, the Yeltsin envoy who had been captured in May 1998 and was released in November. The Russian secret services had their own network for dealing with the kidnappers. Lt. Col. Daud Korigov, the interior minister of the neighboring
region of Ingushetia, was Russia’s principal intermediary. The overall coordinator of the transactions was Russian Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo.

“It was impossible for us to crack these chains,” complained Zakayev. “There was a real division of labor there: one criminal gang would specialize in taking hostages, another in keeping them, the third would negotiate with the Russians. They were reselling people down these chains like cattle.”

Zakayev complained that there was a high-level conspiracy of silence about ransoms being paid: “The British endorsed it, and the French, too, when their citizens were involved, everybody knew about that. But publicly they denied it.”

Initially, the Chechen government quietly pleaded with the Russians to stop. Then Maskhadov went public and accused the Russian government of abetting kidnappers. He even accused the Russian secret services of being in collusion with the hostage-takers. But the industry continued.

Boris, for his part, explained that when he was deputy secretary of the NSC, the policy was to engage the radicals—at Maskhadov’s own urging. At one point in 1997, Boris personally delivered $2 million of government money to Basayev, who was then the Chechen deputy prime minister in charge of reconstruction. It was all in cash—there were no banks left in Chechnya.

“Later, when I left the NSC, Deputy Minister Rushailo asked me to continue working with him on hostages, because I had a reputation as someone whom the Chechens could trust. I have no regrets about it, we saved at least fifty people, who otherwise would have been killed; most of them were simple soldiers. And believe me, all of this was strictly official, with the full knowledge and consent of the Kremlin.”

Boris refused to confirm that he paid for the release of the two Britons, Jon James and Camilla Carr, in September 1998. He only said, “Sir Andrew Wood, the British ambassador, asked me to help. I checked with Boris Nikolaevich [Yeltsin], and he said, ‘Do whatever is necessary to get them out.’ So I did.”

Boris and Zakayev agreed on one thing: the initial contacts among
the FSB, hostage-taking warlords, and Wahhabi radicals later developed into stronger relationships. In the end, the Russian secret services began running some of the renegade Chechen groups. When the FSB wanted to provoke the second Chechen War, it knew where to turn. Exactly how to do it, however, would require a masterstroke by the FSB director turned prime minister, Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s ascent from Lubyanka to the White House could be properly traced to the birthday party of Lena Berezovskaya on February 22, 1999. Initially the celebration was intended as a small private event for family and the closest friends. But Putin arrived uninvited, surprising not only Lena and Boris, but much of the Russian political set.

Boris’s war with Primus was in full swing, and pundits were taking bets that this time the oligarch might not prevail. Lena and Boris decided against a big party for the first time in years so as not to put people on the spot: for elite Muscovites, Boris was a dangerous liaison.

Two days earlier, they had attended the world premiere of
The Barber of Siberia
, the first Russian Hollywood-style blockbuster, in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. The building was crammed with five thousand of those elite. When Boris and Lena entered the hall, an empty space formed around them as people instinctively moved away.

Their caution was well founded. In the past several weeks a purge of Boris’s empire by Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov had been the talk of the town.

It started with the tax authority leaning on ORT for back taxes.
Everybody
in the country owed back taxes, but ORT was singled out. Then prosecutors, accompanied by TV cameras and Spetsnaz troops in ski masks, raided twenty-four offices and homes in Moscow, all associated with Boris, including the head office of Sibneft. They were ostensibly looking for evidence of illegal wiretapping by Boris’s private security men.

In the beginning of February Glushkov’s entire team was purged from Aeroflot. Skuratov’s office announced that they were starting a criminal probe into the airline’s finances, particularly the role of
Andava, the Swiss company that gathered proceeds from foreign sales of Aeroflot’s tickets.

Boris had no doubt that all of this was part of a strategy by Prime Minister Primakov to taint everything associated with Yeltsin as Russia entered an election year. The problem was, the president did not see it that way. He trusted Primus.

At the end of 1998 and into early 1999, Yeltsin, consumed by bouts of sickness and depression, was apathetic and indecisive. He was bitter that his former favorites, “the young reformers” and their banker friends, had let him down by designing enrichment schemes at the time of a critical fight with the Communists. He was wary of relying on the secret services. As he wrote in
Midnight Diaries
, in Primakov he saw a kindred soul, a reform-minded former Soviet boss who saw the light of democracy. His original understanding with Primakov was that they would jointly retire in 2000 after transferring power to a new generation of reform-minded politicians.

Boris, on the other hand, understood Primakov’s true colors earlier than many, perhaps because of earlier clashes with him over Aeroflot.

There were precious few around Boris who were determined to stop Primus and still had a fighting spirit, among them, former chief of staff Yumashev, Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, Roma Abramovich, and Alexander Voloshin, the economic adviser to the president. Collectively, they became known as “the family.” Boris was somewhat of a guru in the group; he was at least a decade older than the others.

The influence of “the family” on the president was never as great as pundits believed. Yeltsin did not allow himself to be manipulated, and he always considered his options. To complicate things, he personally disliked Boris, who was the driving force of the group, and he preferred to filter his advice through Tanya-Valya.

Roma Abramovich was the youngest and newest “family” member. In late 1997, he had asked Boris for an introduction to Tanya-Valya, and they immediately hit it off. He became their favorite social companion. Boris was happy about this. At one point he told Roma, “I can work with them, but I cannot live with them, like inviting them for a weekend or going out on a boat. But it is important that you do it.” By then, both Boris and Roma had acquired yachts
and properties on the Côte d’Azur, retreats from the pressures of Moscow.

“I don’t mind living with them at all, if it’s good for business,” smiled Roma. Boris knew that under the surface of Roma’s shy, sympathetic demeanor lurked a calculating, shrewd loner, with a sharp grasp of human weaknesses and a great talent for networking. Both of them knew pretty well that in the internal dynamics of “the family” there were those with clout and those with money; somebody had to pay for the boat trips. They both had money, but Roma was better at taking care of mundane matters. Before long, all monetary and many other “technical” details of “family” life fell under Roma’s domain. He got things done.

There was a sixth, aspiring member of “the family,” FSB Director Vladimir Putin. Boris saw him several times after his appointment, and Tanya-Valya strongly supported him. After their initial spat over Litvinenko’s allegations, Boris and Putin’s relationship improved, primarily because they had common enemies. Primus hated Putin and wanted his own man to run Kontora, “a real professional” from the old cadre of KGB intelligence. Every time Primus came to see Yeltsin—often in a hospital—he asked for Putin’s head.

Nevertheless, there was no chemistry between Boris and Putin until the day he showed up at Lena Berezovskaya’s birthday. His security guard gave Boris twenty minutes’ warning that the FSB director was on his way to the dacha. At first, everyone thought there was some kind of emergency, but when Boris went out to meet the guest he saw a huge bouquet of roses emerging from the automobile door ahead of the diminutive spymaster, as his security detail stood in a semicircle.

Boris was surprised.

“Volodya, I am very touched, but why do you need to complicate your relationship with Primakov?”

“I don’t care,” said Putin. “I am your friend and I want to show it. To third parties, in particular. They want to make you a pariah, but I know that you are clean.”

Many years later in London, Boris still believed that Putin was sincere in his birthday gesture. “He did not have any ulterior motive in
coming. At the time, I was not among Yeltsin’s favorites. Primus was. The last thing Putin needed was to give Primus grounds to say that we were conspiring together.”

Our conversation took place after Sasha’s death. I found Boris’s statement about Putin’s sincerity incredible. Boris’s views did not match: How could Putin, a selfless friend showing solidarity with Boris in his time of need, also be the instigator of Sasha’s murder? One of the two must be false.

“That’s the whole point!” Boris exclaimed, with his mathematician’s joy of solving a puzzle. “I thought about it a lot. Has anyone betrayed you in your life?”

“Some,” I responded.

“Have you wished them dead? Wanted them killed, literally?”

“Why, no!”

“That’s the difference! Putin is an exemplary team player, totally dependable. How could he possibly be a murderer? And then I understood. These KGB people, they do have a moral code, but it is different. They are trained to be loyal to the death, and, at the same time, they believe that disloyalty is punishable by death. To him, Sasha was a traitor. Sasha tried to explain this to me, but I did not pay attention before it was too late.”

And so from the day of Lena’s birthday, Putin became a full-fledged member of “the family,” and his skills proved indispensable with the urgent problems at hand: parrying Skuratov’s assault and convincing the president that his prime minister was plotting to grab power and steer the country back into the Soviet past.

Nobody knows for sure how the fateful video originated. Boris said that he learned about it when it was already an open secret in the Kremlin. In
Midnight Diaries
Yeltsin says that a “pornographic tape” appearing to feature his prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, “got into the hands” of Chief of Staff General Bordyuzha at the end of January. Yeltsin wrote that Skuratov’s “friends … among bankers and businessmen” were the ones who “made use of the prosecutor’s soft spot.”

The Moscow tabloid
Argumenty i Fakti
hypothesized in an editorial that the poor quality of the black-and-white video suggested that it was the work of the secret services, because “they were the only ones who would not have a budget for new equipment.”

The insightful journalist-parliamentarian Yuri Schekochihin, in a story in
Novaya Gazeta
, said that the man who made the film was one of the prosecuter’s own staff who later surfaced in the Kremlin.