The same day, the military court of the Ryazan garrison pronounced sentence on the head of the field supplies depot of the Ryazan Institute of the VDV, A. Ashbarin, for stealing more than three kilograms of TNT, with the intention of selling it for three thousand dollars. Although the appropriate article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation stipulated a sentence of from three to seven years imprisonment, the soldier was fined 20,000 rubles.
Clearly, stealing TNT-hexogene mixture in small amounts was difficult. In contrast, removing it by the truckload was easy, but only with the appropriate permits, which meant you were bound to leave a trail, and a trail like that might lead back to the FSB.
After the bombings, numerous representatives of the Russian military-industrial complex stated that such a large amount of explosives could only be stolen with the connivance of highly-placed officials. On September 15, the head of the MVD s Central Office for Combating Organized Crime (GUBOP), Vladimir Kozlov, confirmed that the explosion on Guryanov Street had not been caused by a homemade pyrotechnic mixture, but by industrial explosives.
So in order to throw pushy journalists and conscientious criminal investigation officers off the scent, the FSB had fed the media its story about hexogene as a diversionary ploy; in actual fact, they said, the explosive used was ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer. The point was that ammonium nitrate could have been bought, transported, and stored quite openly.
It made good bombs, and if hexogene, TNT, or aluminum powder was added, it became a really powerful explosive. It was true, however, that it required a complicated detonating device, a device not every terrorist would be able to work with.
Why was the hexogene story used initially? Because the houses were blown up by one group of FSB officers, the explosive was analyzed by a second and the propaganda (or public relations, to use the current term) surrounding the event was handled by a third.
The first group carried out the terrorist attacks successfully (with the exception of Ryazan). The second easily determined that they had used hexogene. The third suddenly realized that hexogene is produced in Russia at restricted military plants, and it was a simple job to determine exactly who had bought the hexogene which had been used to blow up the houses, and when it was bought. At this point, panic set in. In three days, all
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the material evidence (the bombed houses) was removed, and stories were urgently planted in the media about ammonium nitrate. On March 16, 2000, the first deputy head of the Second Department (for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Combating Terrorism, i.e. Department K) and the operations and investigation department of the FSB, Alexander Dmitrievich Shagako, told a press conference that the explosive used in absolutely all the bombings in Russia had been identified, and that explosive was nitrate: I d like to observe that as a result of criminalistic investigations carried out by FSB experts, Russia has received confirmation that the composition of the explosives used in Moscow and the composition of the explosives which were discovered in the basement premises of the house on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, and also the composition of the explosive substances which were discovered in the town of Buinaksk on September 4 in an unexploded ZIL-130 automobile, they are identical, i.e. the composition of all of these substances includes ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, in some cases hexogene has been added, and in some cases TNT has been added&
All that remained was to determine where the nitrate in Moscow and the other Russian cities had come from. Shagako and Zdanovich, who was also at the press conference, dealt successfully with that problem. Were there any cases of theft of these explosives from state plants where they are produced using specific technologies? Zdanovich asked and then answered himself: I can say straight away that there were not, or at least the investigation is not in possession of any such information.
It is impossible to determine who has bought and sold nitrate for nefarious purposes.
There is just too much of it all over the country, including in Chechnya. Small amounts of TNT, hexogene, and aluminum powder could have been stolen by anybody from any military depot (a matter on which, with the assistance of the FSB and the Central Military Prosecutor s Office, several reports appeared in the media). In misinforming public opinion concerning the composition of the explosive, the FSB was trying to deflect suspicions that it had planned and carried out the terrorist attacks. All that still needed to be done was to find a warehouse of chemical fertilizers somewhere in Chechnya. It turned out that it had also already been dealt with, which was very timely, since it allowed the investigation to be completed a few days before the presidential election: In this connection I would also like to point out to you, said Shagako, that two months ago employees of the Federal Security Service in Urus Martan discovered a center for training demolition operatives. On the territory of this center five tons of ammonium nitrate were discovered. At the same site trigger mechanisms, identical to the mechanisms which were used in the explosions I listed earlier, were also discovered&
The trigger devices discovered in the ZIL-130 automobile in the town of Buinaksk and also the trigger devices discovered basement premises on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, in the course of criminalistic analysis they were proved to be identical. In all of these trigger devices, a Casio electronic watch was used as a delay mechanism. In all of these trigger devices, light diodes of identical design were used, the electronic circuit boards, even the colors of the wires which were used for welding, they re the same color in all the mechanisms. In this connection I wish to point out that several days ago,
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employees of the Federal Security Service in Chechnya discovered several trigger mechanisms among the possessions of guerrillas who had been killed while attempting to break out of the encirclement of the city of Grozny. Investigations carried out by specialists of the Federal Security Service demonstrated that the trigger mechanisms removed from the ZIL-130 automobile in Buinaksk, and the trigger mechanisms removed from Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, the design of them all is the same. They are all identical with each other& In March in the settlement of Duba-Yurt, an isolated building was discovered, in which literature in Arabic on mine-laying and demolition and military training instructions were discovered, and in addition in the same premises, instructions for the use of a Casio watch were discovered. This kind of watch, as I told you earlier, was used by the criminals in all of the bombings listed above. In March in the settlement of Chiri-Yurt, an isolated building was discovered which was surrounded by an iron fence inside which fifty sacks of ammonium nitrate were sighted, identified, and discovered, that s something in the region of two-and-a-half tons.
If the terrorists had really used ammonium nitrate, the RUOP investigators would not have looked for hexogene on Dakhkilgov and Sauntiev s hands, they would have focused on nitrate. The police looked for hexogene on the hands of their detainees, precisely because the official conclusion which the experts had provided to the investigation was that hexogene was used to blow up the houses. No subsequent expert analysis could have been more accurate, including the repeat analysis which was later carried out by the investigative agencies of the FSB and made public in March 2000, just a few days before the presidential election. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in March 2000, a few days before the presidential election, the FSB was deliberately dispensing misinformation.
On September 13, 1999 in Moscow, Luzhkov signed three sets of regulations which contravened the Constitution and the laws of the Russian Federation. The first of them proclaimed the re-registration of refugees and migrants in Moscow. The second document demanded the expulsion from the capital of people who violated the regulations on registration. The third put a halt to the registration in Moscow of refugees and migrants. On the same day, the governor of the Moscow Region, Anatoly Tyazhlov, signed instructions for the arrest of individuals who were not registered as residents of Moscow or the Moscow Region
. Of course, none of these regulations made any mention of Chechens, or even of Caucasians On September 15, joint police and military patrols were introduced in Moscow, and the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation was launched throughout Russia with the participation of the forces of the Ministry of the Interior. Muscovites were not yet aware that the wave of terror in the capital had ended at this point. Now it was the turn of the provinces. Early in the morning of September 16, an apartment block was blown up in Volgodonsk in the Rostov Region. Seventeen people were killed.
At an extraordinary session of the Council of the Federation held in camera on September 17, with the participation of the Prime Minister and the armed forces and law enforcement ministries, the Council approved a proposal for the creation of civil
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security councils in the Russian regions. Chairman of the Council of the Federation Yegor Stroev remarked that the senators intended to offer a political assessment of events and put forward concrete economic and social measures in the conflict zone, including measures in support of the civilian population and the army. The speaker of the house remarked that the explosion in Volgodonsk strengthened the senators mood on the need for more decisive and hard-line action for the struggle against terrorism.
Stroev did not accuse the Chechens of the terrorist attacks, but he quite obviously drew a connection between the conflict zone in Dagestan and the struggle against terrorism.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin delivered a report to the extraordinary session of the Council of the Federation. As measures of defense against terrorism he proposed establishing a safety cordon along the entire Russian-Chechen border and also intensifying the aerial and artillery bombardment of Chechen territory. In this way, Putin declared the Chechen Republic responsible for the terrorist attacks and called for military action to be taken against Chechnya.
At the conclusion of the session, Putin declared that the members of the Council of the Federation had supported action of the most hard-line character by the government for resolving the situation in the northern Caucasus, including the proposal to introduce a quarantine around Chechnya. Answering questions from journalists, Putin emphasized that preemptive strikes have been delivered and will be delivered against bandit bases in Chechnya, but that the possibility of introducing Russian forces into the territory of the Chechen Republic had not been discussed.
Putin emphasized that the bandits must be exterminated, no other action is possible here. By bandits Putin meant the Chechen army, not terrorists. In other words, the government had settled for a single account of the bombings, the Chechen version, and was willing to use the bombings as an excuse for war.
The leaders of the various regions of the North Caucasus understood that Russia was setting up a new war against the Chechen Republic. On September 20 at a meeting in Magas in Ingushetia the president of Ingushetia, A. Dzasokhov, and the president of northern Ossetia, R. Aushev, supported A. Maskhadov s suggestion that talks were needed between Maskhadov and Yeltsin. Dzasokhov and Aushev also intended to arrange a meeting between the president of Chechnya and Russian Prime Minister Putin in Nalchik or Pyatigorsk no later than the end of September 1999. All of the leaders from the North Caucasus were supposed to attend the meeting.
Clearly, political negotiations might have prevented the war and cast light on the terrorist attacks that had taken place in Russia. For this very reason the FSB did everything in its power to prevent the meeting of leaders from the North Caucasus regions taking place.
Before the end of September it was intended to blow up residential buildings in Ryazan, Tula, Pskov, and Samara. As always happens when a large terrorist attack involving groups of terrorists is being planned, there was a leak of information. According to the information we received, it was Ryazan which had been singled out by the terrorists for the next bombing, because of the Ryazan VDV training college, said the mayor of
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Ryazan, Mamatov. This next bombing would be the failed attempt to blow up the house on Novosyolov Street on September 22.
On September 23, Zdanovich announced that the FSB had identified all the participants in the terrorist attacks in Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk. There is not a single ethnic Chechen among them. Not a single one. Following which, of course the FSB general apologized to the Chechen people and the Chechen diaspora in Russia?.. No, nothing of the sort! Instead, with the stubbornness of a classroom dunce, Zdanovich set himself to discover a Chechen connection. To give him his due, he managed to find one. He thought it possible that after carrying out the bombings the terrorists, who had after all been planning their attacks since mid-August, might have had escape routes.
They could possibly have taken refuge in the CIS countries, but it was most probable that they had withdrawn to Chechnya. In short, the Chechens were being bombed because in Zdanovich s opinion the terrorists (among whom there were no ethnic Chechens) had probably retreated to Chechnya. But then why didn t they bomb the countries of the CIS? We have definite sources of information inside Chechnya, and we know what is going on there, Zdanovich emphasized. From 1991 to 1994, the FSK conducted hardly any operational work at all in this republic, but later we did certain work. We know about those people who develop terrorist operations, make the financial input, recruit the mercenaries, and prepare the explosives. Nowadays in our country it s easy to obtain information on how to produce an explosive device, and apart from that there are many people who have fought in the hot spots who have the necessary knowledge and skills.
Many of them have fought in Karabakh, Tadjikistan, and Chechnya. This does not mean that anyone is accusing the population of Chechnya or Aslan Maskhadov. We accuse specific criminals, terrorists who are located in Chechnya. That s where the name the Chechen connection came from, concluded Zdanovich, without actually naming a single specific ciminal.
To use the probable withdrawal of the terrorists to Chechnya as an excuse for launching a war against the Chechen people, while acknowledging that the bombings were not carried out by Chechens, is the height of cynicism. If Putin s government considered it possible to start the second Chechen war because of such a probability, we must conclude that the bombings were no more than an excuse, and the war was an operation planned long in advance at General Staff HQ. Stepashin threw some light on this question in January 2000, when he announced that the political decision to invade Chechnya was taken as early as March 1999, that the intervention had been planned for August-September and that it would have happened even if there had been no explosions in Moscow. I was preparing for active intervention, Stepashin said. We were planning to be north of Terek in August-September. Putin, who at that time was director of the FSB, was in possession of this information.
The testimony of former head of the FSK and former Prime Minister Stepashin does not match the testimony of former head of the FSB and former Prime Minister Putin:
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Last summer we launched a campaign, not against the independence of Chechnya, but against the aggressive impulses which have begun to manifest themselves on its territory.
We are not attacking. We are defending ourselves. And we have pushed them out of Dagestan& And when we gave them a good hiding they blew up houses in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk.
Question: Did you take the decision to continue the operation in Chechnya before the houses were bombed or after?
Answer: After.
Question: Do you know that according to one account the houses were deliberately blown up in order to justify the start of military operations in Chechnya? That is, it was supposedly done by the Russian secret services?
Answer: What? We blew up our own houses? You know& Rubbish! It s raving nonsense! There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such a crime against their own people. The very suggestion is immoral and essentially it s nothing more than an instance of the war of information against Russia.
At some stage
, when the archives of the Ministry of Defense are opened up, we shall see these military documents: maps, plans, directives, orders of the day for air strikes, and the deployment of land forces. They will have dates on them. We shall discover for certain just how spontaneous was the Russian government s decision to start land operations in Chechnya, and whether the General Staff had finished planning the military operations before the first September bombing. We shall ask ourselves why bombings took place before the election campaign and before the incursion into Chechnya (when they were not in the Chechens interests), and ceased following Putin s election as president and the beginning of all-out war against the Chechen Republic (the very time when the Chechens ought to have taken revenge against their invaders). We shall only receive the final and complete answers to these questions and many more after power has changed hands in Russia.
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Alexander Litvinenko Page 18