Death of a Dissident (47 page)

On the night of the first explosion, at Guryanova Street, Gochiyayev was not at home. This, he believed, saved him, because
the police could not find him that night. His partner called him at 5 a.m. to say that there was a small fire at the Guryanova Street location and that he should go there immediately. Luckily, before leaving a short time later, he turned on the news and heard about the explosion. He went into hiding instead.

For reasons that Sasha and Felshtinsky could not explain, Gochiyayev did not provide the name of his partner. However, he gave another important piece of information. It was he himself, he claimed, who tipped off the authorities about the two other locations in Moscow that were rented by his company. After the second explosion occurred on September 13 and his photograph appeared in the newspapers, he realized that he had been set up. Before leaving town he used his mobile phone to call the police, the fire department, and the emergency service to give them two other addresses that he suspected were part of his partner’s plot.

That was an extremely important point, Sasha emphasized. What Gochiyayev said fit with the published reports. Indeed, on September 13 a bomb had been defused in a building in the Kapotnya area. In addition, a warehouse with several tons of explosives and six unused timing devices had been discovered at Borisov Ponds. How the police learned about these sites had never been explained; now Gochiyayev had provided an explanation. If indeed he was the source of the tip, it was easily verifiable because all emergency phone calls are recorded and the telephone companies store all mobile phone calls.

Everyone present at the teleconference knew that it was pointless to ask the authorities to cooperate with the Commission. But Yushenkov’s approach was to generate enough public pressure on the official probe so that the findings of the Commission could not be ignored.

“Sergei Nikolaevich,” Sasha said to Yushenkov, “I see Mikhail Trepashkin sitting there. I suggest that you charge him with verifying Gochiyayev’s claims. If anyone can get to the bottom of it, he will.”

Over the summer of 2002 I spent almost five weeks with Sasha working on his second book,
The Gang from Lubyanka
. About half of that time we spent on the beach: two weeks at the Spanish resort
of Sitges and a week in Italy. The book was in the form of questions and answers, adopted from a series of interviews that Sasha taped throughout the preceding year in London, which had been transcribed. The book retold Sasha’s life from his first visits to the zoo with his grandfather in Nalchik, to the granting of asylum through the good efforts of George Menzies the previous year. Much of the story was devoted to a horrific depiction of the lives and mores of the FSB and to Sasha’s take on the epic battle between the oligarchs and security services in the late 1990s. The final section was an update on the bombing investigation, including the Gochiyayev file.

There was one new item: a video and a transcript, which he brought with him to Spain, depicting an odd episode, adding another bizarre twist to the bombing saga.

The material came from Yuli Rybakov, the Duma deputy from St. Petersburg who was one of the members of the Public Commission. He had retrieved something from the official Duma record: a remark by the speaker, Gennady Seleznyov of the Communist Party, on the morning of September 13, 1999, just hours after the second explosion in Moscow. According to the transcript, Seleznyov interrupted the proceedings with a surprising announcement.

“I have just received a report. According to information from Rostov-on-Don, an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night,” he said.

In response, the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky chimed in, “And there is a nuclear power station in Volgodonsk.”

Yet there had been no explosion in Volgodonsk on that day. A bomb did indeed destroy an apartment house in that southern town, but three days later. Nineteen people were killed.

When the news of the actual Volgodonsk blast reached the Duma chamber on September 16, Zhirinovsky spoke again: “Mr. Speaker, please explain, how come you told us Monday about the blast that occurred on Thursday?”

“Thank you, I have noted your remark,” responded Seleznyov, and promptly turned off Zhirinovsky’s microphone. On the video of the Duma session, Zhirinovsky can be seen gesticulating wildly.

Yuli Rybakov sent an official request to the prosecutor general’s
office asking that Seleznyov be interviewed about the incident. He received no response.

“What do you make of this?” I asked Sasha, as he prepared for a run on the Spanish beach.

“Well, to me it appears that someone had mixed up the order of the blasts, the usual Kontora mess-up. Moscow-2 was on the 13th, and Volgodonsk on the 16th, but they got it to the speaker the other way around. I need to talk to Trepashkin, perhaps he can dig up something on that.”

He donned his baseball cap and went out for a run, looking somewhat like Forrest Gump.

Two weeks later, when I met Sasha at the Milan Airport for our final get-together on
The Gang from Lubyanka
, he brought Trepashkin’s report.

“The man who gave Seleznyov the note about Volgodonsk was FSB,” he announced. “Just as I thought.”

It was not the first time that Mikhail Trepashkin had proven himself to be highly capable. For months I had been hearing his name; Sasha had been promoting him relentlessly as “his man” in Moscow. By then Trepashkin was both a consultant to Yushenkov and the attorney for Tanya and Aliona. Sasha argued that there was no one better than Trepashkin to organize the distribution of
The Gang from Lubyanka
, which I planned to print in Riga and then try to bring into Russia across the Latvian border.

Kontora was hardly indifferent to Trepashkin. In January 2002, shortly after Sasha started calling him from London, the FSB showed up at his door with a search warrant. Later on, when his case file became available to his lawyers, a remarkable document was revealed, which had apparently initiated the investigation. In a letter to the Russian prosecutor’s office, the FSB claimed that Trepashkin entered into a conspiracy with Litvinenko and Berezovsky, on behalf of the British secret service MI5. The purpose of their conspiracy was “to discredit the FSB through alleging that it had organized the 1999 Moscow bombings.” Of course, it was perfectly true that the three
men were working together to investigate the FSB’s role in the attacks, but it was a typical Agency maneuver to suggest that Trepashkin might be guilty of treason by claiming that he was doing it at the behest of British Intelligence.

The January 2002 search at Trepashkin’s home produced nothing, except for one ten-year-old KGB file marked “Classified,” unrelated to the bombings, that had apparently been forgotten in his desk, and a few gun cartridges, which he said were planted during the search. He was promptly charged with divulging state secrets, exceeding official powers, and possessing illegal arms. He was not arrested, however, nor even called in for questioning. He was simply ordered not to leave town without the prosecutor’s permission. “Just to keep him on the hook,” Sasha explained. “They are listening to his telephone so that they know what we are up to, and they will leave him alone for a while.”

Sasha was of the same opinion as I: sooner or later Kontora would crack down on Trepashkin. “But don’t worry,” he said. “He is solid as a rock. He will never break. You can rely on him.”

I did not know what to think. I needed to meet the man personally, to look him in the eye, as George Bush would say.

After my adventures in Turkey I could not go to Russia, and it was useless for Trepashkin to ask for permission to go to a Western country. But thanks to the use of a friend’s telephone, he managed to tell me he could slip out to Kiev for a day.

Unlike Sasha, who joined the KGB in its waning days, Trepashkin had had ten years of distinguished service as a Lubyanka investigator during the Soviet era. His specialty had been the underground trade in stolen art and antiques. In the post-Soviet period, he moved to Internal Affairs and worked directly for Nikolai Patrushev, who later succeeded Putin as FSB director. He investigated corruption in Kontora and the connections of some of its officers to Chechen criminal groups in Moscow. Once, Trepashkin intercepted a planeload of weapons sold by some rogue FSB officers to the rebels, which won him a medal. Yet he broke with Kontora in 1996, when he made
public allegations of corruption. That was how he ended up on the URPO target list. Married for the second time, he had two young children and a teenage boy from his first marriage.

Waiting for him at the President Hotel in Kiev, I recognized him at once: a short, dark-haired man of forty-five, with a perceptive gaze and a reserved smile. He was the complete opposite of Sasha: unemotional, not spontaneous, an introvert. Over several hours of conversation, which continued in a Georgian restaurant, I could not get him to bare his soul, something that had happened instantly with Sasha in Turkey. He avoided reflective talk and ignored all my efforts to draw him into a discussion of the higher reasons behind his self-appointed mission. He would not dwell on politics and did not want to generalize. He behaved as if the apartment bombings were just another crime that he was charged with investigating.

I gave up trying to gauge his deeper motivations. But I wanted to make sure that he understood the limits of what we could do for him if he got into trouble.

“Misha, if I may, do you understand that they will put you in jail if you pursue this?” I asked.

“I am not going to break any laws, Alexander Davidovich. If they jail me, it would be illegal.”

“That’s my point, Mikhail Ivanovich,” I said, acceding to his more formal terms of address. “I have to tell you, I would very much like you to continue, but if you do, you may end up badly, and there is very little that we would be able to do for you.”

“I am not doing this for you,” he said. “I have my clients, Tatyana Alexandrovna and Aliona Alexandrovna Morozova. And also I am working for Sergei Nikolaevich Yushenkov, the Duma deputy.”

The more informal my comments, the more formally he responded. He refused to be initiated into my brotherhood. So be it, I thought. He won’t accept the obvious: that he was fighting the system. He preferred to pretend that he was just solving a crime. Perhaps that was his way of avoiding the truth that for all his life he had served the wrong master. One thing was sure, however: I trusted him. He was after the evidence. To keep my conscience clean I warned him for the last time that he was heading straight to prison if he didn’t
stop, and then we went on to discuss the next matter at hand: getting Sasha’s book to Moscow.

Trepashkin insisted that even though the operation was to be secret, it should be strictly legal: the paperwork accompanying the shipment must be in order, it had to be cleared through Customs, and so on. Of course, I agreed, and kept to myself the observation that none of this would protect him. When we said goodbye I did not expect to ever see him again.

On a rainy afternoon in August 2002, Trepashkin met a truck from Riga with ten thousand copies of
The Gang from Lubyanka
, cleared through Customs at a highway border crossing as “printed material.” He directed the driver to a secret warehouse that he had rented. The next week, the book appeared in kiosks in central Moscow and became a best seller. The former interior minister Anatoly Kulikov announced that he planned to bring a libel suit against Sasha based on his portrayal in the book. Later on that year, two more shipments went through along the same route.