Yeltsin continued to build his samoderzhavie. In mid-1996, when General Barsukov’s old affiliation with the KGB became too notorious, Yeltsin replaced him with a less-known KGB officer: General N. D. Kovalev. In August 1998, Yeltsin appointed the chief of his espionage service, former KGB General Yevgeny Primakov, as prime minister and gave him the task of transforming Russia into a “managed democracy,” whose “democratic institutions” were to become “representative of the state: loyal, obedient, and indebted to those who have chosen them.” The Kremlin even invented a word for this form of democracy: dogovorosposoniye, meaning, roughly, “deal-cutting.”18
Soon, however, Yeltsin realized that the former chief of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, who had also become an oligarch, intended to run for the Kremlin himself. Therefore, in May 1999, Yeltsin fired Primakov and appointed in his place a more devoted KGB officer: General Sergey Stepashin. He had spent most of his life conducting counterrevolution operations in remote parts of the country for the KGB.
By that time the Kremlin was reporting more and more often that Yeltsin was suffering from a “cold.” Colds have historically proved lethal for the country’s rulers. (Former presidents Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov were dead within weeks after catching “colds.”) The Kremlin soon acknowledged that in fact Yeltsin had the “flu,” which later proved a euphemism for multiple bypass heart problems.
Medical technology since the fall of Soviet Union had improved, for the leadership at least. Yeltsin, however, caught one more “cold,” reported at first as a post-sauna chill, which turned into a two-month bout of pneumonia. Another presidential stagnation set in.19 One Moscow newspaper speculated that a putsch against the ailing Yeltsin was in the making.20 Fearful of overthrow, and of having to go down in history as having dismembered the Soviet Union, the weakened Yeltsin put his whole fate in the hands of his political police.
General Pacepa’s former office in the Soviet bloc sported a banner that said, all in upper case letters, “CAPITALIST ESPIONAGE REPORTS HISTORY. WE MAKE IT” Russian intelligence services are not defensive in operation, as Western intelligence services are. Its tsars, communist or otherwise, use their intelligence services to run the country and to elevate themselves. Yeltsin followed that rule. In August 1999, he sacked Stepashin and appointed a new prime minister: Vladimir Putin, a twenty-five-year KGB veteran who spoke two foreign languages and had a more diversified experience. Having spent the last eight years of his intelligence career in East Germany, his KGB activity was little known in Russia.
In 1999 Pacepa and his wife, an American writer, visited the bleak Stasi headquarters containing the Soviet–East German “House of Friendship,” a KGB unit, in Dresden, East Germany, to see where Putin was “Europeanized.” According to the Gauck Commission—a special German panel that researched the files of the Stasi headed by Lutheran minister Joachim Gauck, who later became president of unified Germany (2012–2017)—Putin was always surrounded by Stasi guards with machine guns and police dogs. KGB propaganda by contrast implied that Putin’s experience had been that of a latter-day Peter the Great, touring the parlors and ballrooms of gay Paree. In reality, Putin’s job was to secretly recruit East German engineers as KGB agents and send them to the West to steal modern technologies.
The combination of Putin’s personal ambition, Yeltsin’s health collapse, and the latter’s likely fear of being accused of dismembering the Soviet Union may have convinced the weakened Yeltsin to put his entire fate in the hands of his Russian political police.
A KGB COUP IN THE KREMLIN
With the abolition of the Communist Party and the opening of the borders, Russia has been transformed in complex ways. The barriers the Kremlin spent seventy years erecting between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, as well as between individual Russians, might have come down. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had a unique opportunity to cast off that peculiarly Russian instrument of power, its political police, the Okhrana, created by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. The Russian people proved as yet not ready to seize that opportunity.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, our old KGB counterparts must have been chortling in their graves when KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin installed himself as Russia’s president at the end of a quiet KGB coup. Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected president in the history of Russia, announced his forced resignation before a gaily decorated Christmas tree and a blue, red, and white Russian flag with a golden eagle. “I understand that I must do it and that Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new intelligent, strong, energetic people.”21
Yeltsin then announced that he had signed a decree “on the execution of the powers of the Russian president,” stating that under Article 92 Section 3 of the Russian Constitution, the function of the Russian president shall be performed by Vladimir Putin starting from December 31, 1999.22 Putin then signed another decree pardoning Yeltsin, who had been accused of massive bribery schemes, “for any possible misdeeds” and granting him “total immunity” from being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned) for “any and all” actions committed while in office. Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a state dacha.23
Quid pro quo, most of the Western media noted. In reality, it was a quiet KGB palace coup.
Now it was back to the future. In keeping with Stalinist traditions, Russia’s schoolbooks released in September 2000 said of the unknown Putin: “This is your president, the one responsible for everything in this country…. He is not afraid of anything. He flies in fighter planes, skis down mountains and goes where there is fighting to stop wars. And all the other presidents of other countries meet with him and respect him very much.” On December 31, 2000, the anniversary of his coup, Putin resurrected Stalin’s national anthem with new lyrics by Sergey Mikhalkov, then eight-seven, who had been Stalin’s official lyricist.
Yelena Bonner, the widow of Nobel Peace Prize–winner Andrey Sakharov, called the revived Soviet anthem a “profanation of history.” Putin disagreed: “We have overcome the differences between the past and the present.”24 In his own way, Putin was right. During the Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. Now the KGB—rechristened FSB—is the state.
CHAPTER 9
AS RUSSIAN AS THE BALALAIKA
By June 2003, some six thousand former KGB and Red Army officers held important positions in Russia’s central and regional governments. Among them: Vladimir Putin, president of Russia; Dmitri Medvedev, prime minister; Sergey Ivanov, defense minister; Vladimir Osipov, head of the Presidential Personnel Directorate; Viktor Vasilyevich Cherkesov, chairman of the State Committee on Drug Trafficking1 and former chief of the KGB’s infamous Directorate V, in charge of crushing internal dissidence.2 That year, Sergey Lavrov, KGB Academy graduate and now Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, was named Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations and president pro-tempore of the UN Security Council.
To Ted Koppel of ABC television, Putin explained that he needed the KGB and Red Army men to root out graft. “I have known them for many years and I trust them. It has nothing to do with ideology. It’s only a matter of their professional qualities and personal relationship.”3 This was a half-truth. Filling governmental positions with undercover intelligence officers was as Russian as the Kremlin’s onion domes. Until 1913, Roman Malinovsky edited Pravda. He was recruited by the Okhrana as an undercover agent while serving a jail term for theft and burglary. Erasing his criminal record, the Okhrana infiltrated him into Lenin’s Communist Party, where he gradually rose to the position of chairman of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma.
The entire Soviet bloc was run with deep-cover intelligence officers. In the 1970s, during a meeting held with foreign trade officials, Romanian prime minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer whispered into Pacepa’s ear: “Do you know what would happen if you smeared shit over every undercover officer of yours in this building?” Maurer did not wait for an answer: “This whole huge damn place would stink
of shit from cellar to attic!”
In 1978, a couple of weeks after Pacepa was granted political asylum by President Jimmy Carter, Romania unleashed the greatest political purge in its communist history. The Western media reported the event widely. Ceausescu demoted four Politburo members, fired one third of his cabinet, and replaced twenty-two ambassadors, all deep-cover intelligence officers whose military documents and secret pay vouchers Pacepa had regularly signed off on.
A new Cold War began to unfold between KGB-run Russia and the West just minutes after the Aug. 8, 2008, opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, at which world leaders, including President George W. Bush, had gathered. Russian tanks rolled across the Russian border into Georgia. “War has started,” Putin announced. With a straight face, he claimed that the government of Georgia was harassing Russian “peacekeepers” in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia. The Kremlin, he said, was pledged to “protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, no matter where they are located,”4 and therefore Russia must commandeer Georgia.
On Sept. 11, 2002, hordes of KGB officers gathered at the Lubyanka, the infamous headquarters of the newly renamed FSB, shockingly to celebrate the 125th birthday of Feliks Dzerzhinsky—the mass killer who had created the Soviet political police. (They did not gather in sympathy with the American tragedy of the previous year.) At the event, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny, Pacepa’s former colleague, groused to the gathering: “I think a goal was set to destroy the KGB, to make it toothless.”5
Official Russian propaganda photographs had depicted President Putin posing as a “Tarzan,” with a knife under his belt or a Kalashnikov in his hand for years. On September 11, 2014, another clutch of former KGB officers gathered at the Lubyanka. They celebrate this date every year. But that year President Putin also announced the resurrection of an elite Interior Ministry special forces unit, using Stalin’s title for it, the Dzerzhinsky Division.
This must raise a question. Is it a pure coincidence that the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, which killed almost three thousand people (and the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on September 11, 2012) took place on the birthday of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, which is now celebrated every year in Russia? Putin’s policies, his uses of terrorism and war, can only make one suspect his hand.
Intimidating Putin’s enemies through political killings and Nazi-style invasions of foreign countries are other reasons to suspect the KGB’s hand in the bloody September 11 and Benghazi attacks. In 2006, six years after defecting to the United Kingdom, former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko told the West that he had brought Abu Musab Al Zarqawi to Russia to be trained as a terrorist by the KGB/FSB in 1996–976 and that he had learned that Zarqawi had formed al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—now called ISIS. Former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who defected to the U.S. in 2006 and is a regular guest on Voice of America, testified that Litvinenko “was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zarqawi’s presence in Russia while he was trained by FSB instructors.”7
The revelation that Al Zarqawi was a secret KGB/FSB operative has been ignored by our politicians—but not by the Kremlin, which savagely murdered Litvinenko with Polonium-210, a radioactive element used as a neutron trigger for nuclear weapons, in retaliation for his disclosures. In 2007 the United Kingdom called for Russian citizen Andrey Lugovoy (a former KGB officer) to be extradited to the UK on charges of murdering Litvinenko. Russia declined. Lugovoy overnight became a member of the Russian Duma, thus receiving parliamentary immunity.
In 2008, a new cold and potentially bloody war was in the making. Putin invaded Georgia.8 In February 2014, Putin then annexed Crimea while denying that “democratic Russia” had anything to do with the unmarked, masked armed forces trying to ignite civil war in Ukraine, which caused the Ukrainians to refer to them sarcastically as “Martians.”9 The gunmen were identified by U.S. experts to be Russian Special Forces.
The Ukrainian government irrefutably proved the day after the event that Russian separatists, armed and trained by Russian foreign intelligence, had shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 on board. The Kremlin insinuated that the U.S. might have done it.10
Putin’s Russia is as if postwar Germany were run by former Gestapo who openly deplored Nazi Germany’s demise as a “national tragedy on an enormous scale,” brought back “Deutschland Über Alles” as the national anthem, built dozens of new secret cities dedicated to nuclear bomb production, unleashed an Anschluss to rebuild the German-Austrian Empire, and invaded neighboring countries—Georgia and Ukraine. It is precisely how Hitler started World War II.
Meanwhile, all efforts to bring the former KGB to account for the millions of souls it murdered in Soviet Russia and abroad are met with howls of protest from Putin. Their fates are still locked up behind the walls of Lubyanka. Hundreds of thousands of former KGB officers, informants, and collaborators are still shielded by a veil of secrecy. “In Russia today, nobody is willing to recognize the horrendous crimes of the past,” said Valeryia Dunayeva of the Russian human rights group Memorial. Her mother had been framed as a spy and shot; her father had died in a Siberian gulag after twenty-five years there of political imprisonment. “There are 17,000 of us who lost both parents in Moscow alone, but the authorities simply pretend we don’t exist.”11
KGB DEZINFORMATSIYA MOVES INTO THE KREMLIN
On August 12, 2000, the Kursk, one of Russia’s newest nuclear submarines, sank to the floor of the Barents Sea, killing all 118 people on board. Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, immediately deployed KGB-style dezinformatsiya to minimize the political damage by keeping the disaster secret or denying it as long as possible, minimizing its damage, and—when the truth came out—blaming the enemy. At first Putin kept the disaster a secret, allowing him to finish his summer vacation at the beach. When the Western media reported on the disaster, Putin tried to minimize it by announcing that the crew of the submarine were still alive and that a special navy team was working to save their lives. Soon, the world learned that in fact the Russian navy had neither the technical means nor the expertise to carry out any such rescue operation. The Kremlin then alleged that the United States, its traditional enemy, might have caused the disaster. Russian Minister of Defense, former Soviet General Sergey Ivanov, claimed that on August 17, 2000, the Russian navy had intercepted an American submarine signal leaving the site of the Kursk’s crash and suggested it might have collided with the Kursk.12
Several Western governments, realizing that Russia did not have the technical capability to rescue the Kursk, offered help. The Kremlin refused to accept it. Newspapers around the world accused the new Russian government of being “still in the grip of the morally outdated Soviet ideology” and failing to make “human lives the primary concern.”13 “The Russian elite’s reflexes have not changed in the past 10 to 15 years,” charged one.14 One columnist made a direct appeal to Putin: “As Putin watches the crisis reach its nadir from his distant holiday home on the shores of the Black Sea, he must remember that his country is now a very different place from the oppressive and secretive one dominated by his communist predecessors. It is time the prime minister [sic] brought Russia in from the cold.”15
Reluctantly, President Putin accepted a foreign offer of help. The first Norwegian divers reached the Kursk on August 20 and found no one alive, though the Kremlin, in order to calm public opinion, had just reported signs of life from the submarine. Lying was its first reflex.
In the fall of 2001, the Kursk was raised from the ocean floor by two Dutch salvage companies. Experts established that it sank due to a leak of hydrogen peroxide in the submarine’s forward torpedo room, causing a torpedo warhead to explode that in turn triggered the explosion of a half dozen other warheads.
President Putin awarded the Order of Courage to all the deceased crew and made the submarine captain a Hero
of the Russian Federation but never acknowledged the Russian avalanche of lies to cover up the disaster.
There is nothing unusual about this response. The use of dezinformatsiya to conceal and lie about killings and national calamities goes all the way back to the tsars. One day in 1839, a storm sank a fleet of boats crossing the Gulf of Finland from St. Petersburg to view an illumination display put on by Tsar Nicholas I at his summer residence of Peterhof. Marquis Astolphe de Custine (a visiting French nobleman who became famous after publishing his diary about his trip) wrote: “Today two hundred people are admitted to have been drowned; some say fifteen hundred, others two thousand. No one will ever know the truth, and the papers will not even mention the disaster—that would distress the Czarina and imply blame of the Czar.”16
The art of dezinformatsiya was also famously deployed in the Kremlin’s handling of the Chernobyl disaster, 147 years after the unacknowledged fiasco at Nicholas I’s fête. On April 26, 1986, an explosion ripped apart one of the four water-cooled nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. The official record as of today is that twenty people died fighting the fire, 135,000 others were evacuated, and an area within a radius of thirteen miles was declared a “forbidden zone.”17 In spite of its dimensions and its danger for all of Eastern Europe, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev kept the disaster a secret. Only when the Swedish government announced that it had detected fallout from the explosion did Gorbachev admit a “small” nuclear accident. But he said the reactor’s core had immediately been sealed off with air-dropped cement.
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