Death of a Dissident (48 page)

Moscow, September 2002: Speaking on the third anniversary of the apartment house bombings, Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky says that the alleged ringleader, Achemez Gochiyayev, is hiding in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge. He demands his arrest and extradition. However, Georgian foreign minister Iraklii Menagarishvili denies that Gochiyayev is in the country. The head of the Public Commission on the bombings, Sergei Kovalyov, states that if Gochiyayev is apprehended, he should not be turned over to the FSB
.

For about a year after Sasha and Felshtinsky’s abortive trip to Georgia, a PR contest between the FSB and the Public Commission was waged on the back pages of Western newspapers and in a few remaining opposition print outlets and Web sites that Boris and Goose supported. For connoisseurs—some eight thousand visitors daily—the IFCL maintained a dedicated Web site at
www.terror99.ru
. Most Russians, of course, did not use the Internet, and the issue was completely
taboo on Russian TV. But Boris was undeterred. He felt that the power of the story would overcome its narrow casting. The bombings had reached a high level of popular awareness. People talked about them, and so the news spread by word of mouth. And he knew, through countless reports from the Kremlin’s outer circles, that Putin was very anxious about his doings.

Shortly after Gochiyayev’s contact, another middleman approached Sasha and Felshtinsky with a statement from two other alleged perpetrators of the Moscow bombings, Timur Batchayev and Yusuf Krymshamkhalov. They admitted transporting a truckload of the explosive known as RDX to Moscow from a plant in southern Russia, together with a third man, Adam Dekkushev, who was already in Russian custody. Yet, they said, they had never been in touch with Chechen warlords and did not know Gochiyayev. At the time, they believed they were part of a jihadist underground in Moscow. They claimed that someone who posed as a jihad leader had duped them into the operation. They later came to believe he was working for the FSB. He told them that the bomb would be used for attacking “a military or government target,” not an apartment house. Whatever that statement was worth, it contained sufficient detail to establish the authors’ bona fides. They reported that a manhunt for them was under way in Georgia and claimed that the FSB had put a hefty bounty on their heads. It was only a matter of time before they would be caught or killed. Sasha and Yuri promptly reported all of this to the Kovalyov Commission and released it to Novaya Gazeta. Here was more humiliating evidence of FSB ineptitude.

“We do not intend to take part in the PR campaign of some dubious personalities or, all the more, to get engaged in polemics with them,” an FSB spokesman responded. “Litvinenko is the man who tarnished the title of a secret services officer, who committed a crime himself.”

Moscow, October 23, 2002: A group of about terrorists take about eight hundred people hostage at a Moscow theater, demanding of Russian forces from Chechnya. The raid is led by
Movsar Barayev, the nephew of Arbi Barayev, the infamous warlord accused of beheading four Britons in 1998. After a three-day standoff, FSB commandos take the building, using gas to incapacitate the terrorists; 137 hostages die from exposure to the gas. All hostage-takers are killed execution-style by the commandos, even though they offered no resistance
.

Tbilisi, Georgia, December 8, 2002: A suspect in the 1999 Moscow bombings, Yusuf Krymshamkhalov, is apprehended by Georgian security forces after a shootout with a group of rebels. He is extradited to Moscow and transferred to Lefortovo prison. His associate, Timur Batchayev, is killed in the operation. President Putin thanks his Georgian counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, for his assistance in Krymshamkhalov’s capture
.

On January 30, 2003, I flew to Strasbourg, France, to meet with Sergei Kovalyov, the chairman of the Public Commission. I had known him for more than thirty years, ever since both of us were members of the small group of dissidents around Andrei Sakharov. A research biologist like myself, Kovalyov was the founder of the first Soviet human rights committee in 1969. When he was arrested by the KGB in December 1974, I passed reports from his trial to Western correspondents in Moscow. Shortly after that, I emigrated, while Kovalyov spent ten years in prison and internal exile for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Now, at seventy-six, he was one of the few remaining independent voices in the Duma, a former ombudsman in the Yeltsin administration and a top contender for the Nobel Peace Prize as the founder of Memorial, the human rights group that reported on abuses in Chechnya. Kovalyov was in Strasbourg attending the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where he periodically blasted the Russian government on the war. We met in an empty restaurant not far from the Council HQ, over a late dinner with ample amounts of wine. He was twenty years older and I always treated him with unqualified respect. Kovalyov’s dislike of
Boris was widely known. I wanted to see how much we could still cooperate.

“I have absolutely no problem with Berezovsky vintage 2000,” he said, sipping his Côtes du Rhône. “I do have a lot of problems with him prior to that time.”

He was particularly suspicious about Boris’s role at the beginning of the second Chechen War. He wondered if Boris, as a member of the Kremlin “family,” could have been involved in a secret deal with Basayev to invade Dagestan in September 1999 as part of a plot to elect Putin.

“This is just one theory, Sergei Adamovich,” I said. “Another is that the FSB blew up the apartment houses.” I told him what I thought had happened: the Wahhabi were indeed in collusion with the FSB, but the deal was arranged long before Putin. Later it might have evolved into an election-related plot and led to the Moscow bombings. But Boris, I believed, had nothing to do with it.

“But why don’t you grill him yourself?” I suggested. “You chair the Commission on the bombing. All of this is relevant. Why don’t you go to London and interrogate Boris? Our foundation will pay the costs. Unlike Putin, Boris deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

“Putin also deserves the benefit of the doubt,” said Kovalyov.

“This is not what Yushenkov thinks.”

“If we are not fair, people will not believe us,” Kovalyov said.

“There is a paradox here,” I observed. “If he did not blow up those apartments, he deserves fairness. But if he did, he will wage total war on us, yourself included. Once at war, one does not strive for fairness, but for victory. As they say in English, all is fair in love and war.”

It was a déjà vu conversation, of the kind we had had three decades earlier, sorting out the moral dilemmas of life under the Soviets. In the end we reached the same results this time around: Kovalyov would never compromise his standards under any circumstances; I would change the rules of engagement depending on the behavior of the opposition.

In addition to the Commission’s visit to London to interview not just Boris but also Sasha and Felshtinsky, Kovalyov accepted my offer to bring him to Washington to talk to U.S. policymakers. He
also promised to look after Trepashkin. I could not expect anything better.

Kovalyov’s visit to Washington took place from February 10 to 14. As with Yushenkov, it was an exercise in frustration. Remembering the cold shoulder given to Yushenkov, I urged Kovalyov not to stress the controversial apartment house bombings, but to emphasize Chechnya. Here he had ironclad evidence of massive abuses, including death squads, summary executions, kidnapping, and torture—hundreds of documented cases. Russia was preparing to hold a referendum “at the barrel of a gun,” declaring the democratically elected Maskhadov government to be illegitimate and replacing it with a puppet administration led by Akhmad Kadyrov and propped up by the FSB. How could George Bush endorse all of this by calling Putin a democrat and a friend?

I accompanied Kovalyov to the White House to see Tom Graham, who by now had become Bush’s senior adviser on Russia at the National Security Council.

“Sergei Adamovich, I have known you for many years, and I will be undiplomatically frank with you,” said Tom. “Don’t waste your time telling us about Putin. We have no illusions. We know everything you would tell us and maybe more. But we cannot help you. For better or worse, our policy priorities are elsewhere.”

For three days and a dozen meetings, Kovalyov tried anyway, stubbornly repeating his moral charge that American “policy calculations sacrifice other people’s lives—tens of thousands of lives.” His audiences were polite, and uninterested. “This is not a far-sighted policy, it will return to haunt America later on,” Kovalyov warned.

He was described by Fred Hiatt in a
Washington Post
editorial as “a frail old Russian, moving like a ghost whom everyone would rather forget … in a Washington consumed with hard-headed calculations about Security Council votes and European alliances and intelligence cooperation.”

On February 25 Kovalyov and two members of the Public Commission arrived in London to question Boris and his associates. I was not present, but apparently all went well between them. There was not much that Boris and Sasha could add to the bombing case that had not
been said already. But they used the occasion to launch another attack on the FSB, this time related to the theater siege in Moscow the previous October. Boris released a statement urging Kovalyov to look into the newest conspiracy theory: that the FSB might have had a hand in
that
attack. He posed five highly provocative questions: