Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (35 page)

“I did not consider Magnitsky sick,” Ivan Prokopenko, the head of the detention center where Magnitsky was being held, told the commission. “Prisoners often try to pass themselves off as sick, in order to get better conditions. We are all sick.”

However, having reviewed this testimony against those of the doctors and other officials, one of the commission’s investigators, Zoya Svetova, stated: “I had the impression that Magnitsky died because of doctors’ negligence, because they thought he had invented his illness. . . . Now I have the frightening feeling that it was not negligence but that it was, to some extent, as terrible as it is to say, a premeditated murder.”
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Then–Prime Minister Medvedev launched a number of investigations. One found, not surprisingly, that the charges against Magnitsky were fabricated; another accused two doctors of criminal negligence. A sawmill foreman was convicted of involvement in the crime ring. Medvedev promised further investigations. “It is an incident that needs
a very thorough investigation,” he said. “First of all, what really happened and why he was taken into custody, who was behind that, what deals were clinched by both those he represented and by the other side. I have asked the prosecutor general and Ministry of Interior to work on that.”
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But to date, no investigations have been conducted on the eight most senior officials involved in the case.
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Hermitage CEO William Browder began lobbying Washington to take strong action against Russia. In December 2012, the U.S. House and Senate passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which condemned Russian human-rights abuses and barred individuals accused of such abuses—such as those in the Magnitsky affair—from traveling to the U.S., owning property here, or using U.S. banks.
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(Unfortunately, barely more than a year after the Magnitsky Bill was signed, the Obama administration is already backing away from its promise to tighten the sanctions. In December 2013, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes announced, “We are not anticipating adding new names to the [Magnitsky list]—certainly by the end of the year or in the near future, early next year.”
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As the
Wall Street Journal
pointed out, it’s not as if Russia’s human-rights record has miraculously improved in the meantime. In an interview, Rhodes provided a clue: He praised Moscow’s role in making a deal with Syrian President Assad over his chemical-weapons stockpile.
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The 2012 passage of the Magnitsky Law set off a diplomatic row between the United States and Russia. The Russians, in turn, banned Americans accused of human-rights violations from entering Russia and also passed a law ending U.S. adoption of Russian children. “It is strange and savage to hear human-rights claims from politicians of the state that officially legalized torture and kidnappings all over the world in the 21st century,” said the Russian Foreign Ministry.
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The ugliness of the case continues, as shown by the recent death of Alexander Perepilichny, a Russian whistleblower involved in it.
Perepilichny was found dead in Surrey, England, in November 2012. He was wearing running clothes and appeared to have died of a stroke, but he was 44 and healthy, and an autopsy proved inconclusive. He had approached Hermitage Capital with documents relating to the fraud that Magnitsky had uncovered. Perepilichny feared for his life and had sought refuge in Britain in 2009. At the time of his death, he was helping Swiss investigators research systematic fraud in the Russian tax system.
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This kind of intimidation is not confined to businessmen; it has also been used to silence adversaries in the intelligence wars. Particularly in Russia, the law of the jungle applies to spies who cross the Kremlin.

SECRECY AND LAWLESSNESS IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA

Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko was an agent in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB. He worked in the divisions of counterterrorism and organized crime. In 1998, he was assigned to a special undercover unit tasked with clandestine assassinations of mob bosses and terrorist leaders. But he told Russian reporters that he learned the FSB unit was not in fact focused on catching criminals. Instead, his missions that year had included the assassination of whistleblowers, kidnapping and ransoming the brother of a billionaire hotel owner, and attempting to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, a powerful oligarch.
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Based on Litvinenko’s statements, the FSB fired its top official and replaced him with a reformer named Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko tried to persuade Putin that the FSB had been penetrated by criminal elements, but he sensed that Putin wasn’t interested. Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, said that he came home one evening, after meeting with Putin, and said: “This new guy’s not right. He has a limp handshake, he doesn’t look me in the eye. He’s so paranoid he’s brought his own
driver from St. Petersburg. He’s not interested in clearing up corruption.” Litvinenko’s phone lines were bugged that very evening.
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Litvinenko was soon arrested, along with Alexander Gusak, his department chief. They were sent to Lefortovo prison, which Litvinenko described as “a place that crushed you spiritually.”
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No sooner were they cleared of one charge than another would emerge. Months later, Litvinenko was released, but he was forbidden from leaving Moscow. In August 2000, he managed to arrange for a “vacation” on the Black Sea with his wife and son. With the help of Berezovsky, whose life he had saved, Litvinenko managed to secure his escape. In November, he arrived at Heathrow Airport.
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The British provided aliases for Litvinenko and his family. He began to wage battle against the FSB, accusing the organization of transporting drugs, training terrorists, and perpetrating acts of terror that the government tried to pin on Chechen rebels. He published several books, although his evidence was circumstantial and widely dismissed. His timing was bad: After the September 11 attacks of 2001, the world—and especially the West—was not sympathetic to accusations against Putin, our ally in the War on Terror.
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In 2006, Litvinenko fell into the trap that would kill him, when he agreed to meet with Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB director and prisoner of Lefortovo. Lugovoy offered some documents to Litvinenko, which he promised might be useful. The precise details of the two men’s meetings in London remain unclear.
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On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko became desperately ill. He first came down with severe gastrointestinal symptoms; later, his hair fell out and his skin turned yellow. He was hospitalized and soon afterward suggested that he had been deliberately poisoned. Police tried fruitlessly to discover the cause of his illness. A few weeks later, Litvinenko died of what had turned out to be poisoning from Polonium-210—an extraordinarily rare radioactive isotope. Workers
at a specialized lab at the Ministry of Defense had determined the cause of his illness just three hours before his death.
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Two days before he died, Litvinenko composed a chilling note that later appeared in the media.

“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” he wrote. “You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty, or any civilised value. You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”
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A British investigation demonstrated that, before his death, Litvinenko had been a paid agent of MI6 and had been preparing to fly to Spain to assist in an investigation into KGB misdeeds. He was also working with the MI6’s Spanish counterpart. Investigators tracked the Polonium-210 back to a hotel where Litvinenko had met Lugovoy, and even to a teacup from which Litvinenko drank. Litvinenko’s associates alleged that the tea was laced with poison. The British government eventually agreed and accused Lugovoy of murdering Litvinenko.
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The Russian government and secret services denied any role in Litvinenko’s death. The British demanded that Lugovoy be extradited to Britain for trial. Moscow refused. The Russians then promoted Lugovoy to a higher military rank and a parliamentary seat, making him immune to prosecution.
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Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, has vocally demanded justice, yet, as time passes, relations between the two countries, badly bruised by the affair, show signs of easing.
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The British government blocked the coroner’s call for a public inquiry, saying that a public hearing would risk exposing sensitive national-security secrets. “Were they trying to protect the Russian state?” Marina asked. An inquest is ongoing, but it will not have the broad mandate that a public inquiry would have commanded.
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Not the least of the questions the case arouses is that of motive. If Litvinenko was working for MI6 or the Spanish government,
was that involvement alone sufficient to earn him a deadly reprisal? Before his death, Litvinenko was preparing to travel to Spain, where he planned to present evidence to investigators of ties between the Russian mafia and the Kremlin. Was he silenced to prevent this information from coming to light? In 2012, testimony revealed a bizarre twist to the story. On his upcoming trip, Litvinenko was set to travel with none other than the man who presumably murdered him—Andrei Lugovoy.
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*****

In March 2012, as the Litvinenko case made its way through the British courts, Russian banker German Gorbuntsov became another high-profile target of a Russian assassination. Once again, the attack took place in London.

Gorbuntsov was a wealthy businessman who had owned a number of Russian and Moldovan banks. Near his home in London’s Canary Wharf, he was sprayed with a semiautomatic machine gun and hit six times, collapsing on the scene. After being placed in a medically induced coma, amazingly, he survived and recovered.
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Gorbuntsov gave extensive interviews detailing what he believed had caused the attack. He had come to Britain, he said, in order to escape his former business associates, whom he believed were trying to kill him. He was shocked when Britain turned out to be almost as dangerous as Moscow: “I thought that in London you are safe, and this kind of thing can’t happen here.”
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In his view, he was targeted because he was preparing to give evidence to Russian prosecutors about a failed assassination attempt on his former business partner, Alexander Antonov, who was shot in Moscow in 2009. Gorbuntsov claimed that common business partners had targeted him and Antonov. “I think it was because I was ready to give evidence,” he said. “They decided that if there is no person, there’s no problem.”
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Gorbuntsov told reporters that several high-ranking Russian officials with ties to Putin had conspired to kill him. While this has not been proved, the case clearly is linked in some way with high-level Russian politics. One of the Chechen hit men who killed Ruslan Yamadayev, an enemy of Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin president, allegedly also shot Antonov.
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Moreover, a source revealed that in the week before Gorbuntsov was shot, Russian prosecutors were planning to fly to the UK to obtain testimony from him about the Yamadayev and Antonov cases. They cancelled the trip without explanation days before the shooting.
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In 2010, Gorbuntsov had claimed that criminal raiders forced him to sign over $1 billion in assets. The raiders boasted of their connections within the FSB as well as the mafia. His protests to the FSB and to police were ignored.
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Russian prosecutors have still not spoken with him, probably because of the ties between his enemies and the Kremlin. “The evidence I have is enough to put them behind bars,” he said. “Of course they have good connections, but I’d like to believe there is justice in Russia.”
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The Gorbuntsov case is another clear illustration of how, under Vladimir Putin, the “new” Russia has retained many of the worst authoritarian and repressive tendencies of its Soviet predecessor. In fact, with the help of modern technologies, the new Russia has honed some of these repressive practices to a degree of sophistication not possible or conceivable in the old Soviet days.

CONCLUSION

For millions of Americans, victory in the Cold War seemed to augur the end not only of the dreaded specter of nuclear annihilation but also of the kind of spying and intelligence theft that the two adversaries had practiced against each other. But just as the Soviet Union’s
demise has not eradicated the challenge of nuclear security, it also has not brought an end to the spy game. Only its nature has changed.

The West’s Cold War victory has opened up a more complex and more challenging, even more dangerous, intelligence landscape. We are in a new phase, for which we have yet to find a doctrinal response. Russian destabilization of Ukraine, for instance, relied heavily on what close observers considered classic KGB tactics, updated for contemporary circumstances. “What we’re seeing are practices and capabilities that are inherent in the Russian intelligence system, but they have been brought back and reinvigorated with new funding and emphasis by Putin,” says Nikolas Gvosdev, a specialist in Russian security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. “Some of it goes back to Soviet times and Soviet intelligence, when there was a great deal of emphasis placed on how you organize front groups to disguise your intentions. Another important element is how you always organize things to give yourself ‘plausible deniability.’”
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Assassinations, as we have seen in Putin’s Russia, have become mere problems of law enforcement—problems with no outcome. Mysteries never quite get solved. The beneficiary, however, is always the Kremlin. In the Cold War era, we would have extended protection to regime critics, promising them a new life and the possibility of freedom and safety. Today, no survivors of such treatment testify before Congress or defect to the West while seeking asylum. Even if they did, they wouldn’t necessarily expect to survive.