Alexander Litvinenko

by Blowing Up Russia (lit)

  The management of Novaya Gazeta attempted to find out why exactly it had found itself in such serious conflict with the FSB. Novaya Gazeta journalists actually asked some members of that department to analyze the situation for them. The reply received by the newspaper is nothing if not frank; This kind of activity by the state against a publication undoubtedly indicates that you have entered forbidden territory and stepped on someone s toes. It could be that you were undesirable witnesses to one of the less fortunate episodes in the internal squabbles between the secret services. If this did happen, none of the opposed groups within the system will confirm it. It is in all of their interests to conceal it. They are clearly apprehensive that new living witnesses to the preparation of the Ryazan events may turn up.

  By this time, the provincial town of Ryazan had become a place of pilgrimage for foreign journalists. As Pavel Voloshin wittily remarked, Ryazan will soon have as many foreign journalists per head of population as Moscow. All the five-star rooms in the local hotels

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  were now occupied by foreign correspondents, and all of them, together with their camera crews, were besieging the local police, the FSB, and even the MChS. So the UFSB and UVD in Ryazan received orders from Moscow to break off contacts with the press. Some officers who had already given interviews hastily took back what they had said. In the Ryazan departments of law enforcement, an internal investigation into leaks of information was begun. And Bludov answered all of the journalists questions with a terse No comment.

  To a man, the residents of the house in Ryazan changed their minds about taking the FSB to court, although no one was convinced the FSB was innocent. Police and FSB officers visited house number 14/16 repeatedly and tried to persuade people not to sue the organizers of the exercise. Even General Sergeiev came, asked them not to complain, and apologized for his colleagues in Moscow. When on September 20, NTV broadcast a report on the imminent first anniversary of the woeful incident, one of the woman said: That date s coming up soon, and I just feel like leaving home. Because I m afraid, God forbid, that they ll mark the anniversary with another exercise like the first one.

  Personally, I have my doubts it was an exercise. I have my doubts. They treated us like scum, said another woman living in the house. If only they d at least told us early in the morning it was an exercise, but it was only two days later& We don t believe it was an exercise. I don t believe it was an exercise, said Ludmila Kartofelnikov. How can they mock people like that? On the eighth floor of our house an elderly woman couldn t carry her paralyzed mother out, and she was evacuated on her own. The way she sobbed afterwards in the cinema! The hero of the events in Ryazan, Alexei Kartofelnikov, also had his doubts: On that day no one explained to us that it was an exercise. And we don t believe it was. That s the way it is here-if something blew up, it was a terrorist attack. If they disarmed it, it was an exercise.

  The residents of the ill-fated Ryazan apartment house were not the only ones who raised doubts: the Russian press did as well. If the authorities convincingly prove, wrote Versiya, that it was specifically Chechen terrorists who bombed the buildings with people sleeping inside, then we will-if not approve-then at least understand the cruelty with which our troops came down on the cities and villages of Chechnya. But what if the bombings were not ordered by the Chechens, by Khattab, by Basaev, by Raduyev? If they did not order them, then who did? It is frightening to imagine& We already understand that we cannot simply declare that the bombings were organized by the Chechens.

  Finally, many foreign specialists voiced their doubts as well. Here is what William Odom had to say in response to a question about the causes of the war in Chechnya: In my opinion, Russia has fabricated a pretext for this war itself. There exists quite convincing evidence that the police orchestrated some explosions in Moscow. They were caught trying to do the same in Ryazan-and tried to represent their actions as an exercise. I think that the Russian regime has fabricated a whole series of events planned in advance in order to shape Russian public opinion and steer the country in a direction that is unacceptable to most Russians.

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  Moving beyond the bounds of the law, the FSB based its actions not on the Constitution of the Russian Federation, not even on the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, but on its own political preferences as expressed in formal orders and verbal instructions. The arbitrary lawlessness into which Russia has been plunged has come about above all because the secret services have worked in a planned and deliberate manner to undermine the legislative foundations of Russian statehood in order to create chaos and the conditions which would allow them to seize power. In this war, the secret services most terrible weapons were the free-lance special operations groups, which they organized and controlled right across the country.

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  Chapter 8

  The FSB sets up free-lance special operations groups Free-lance conspiratorial military operations groups consisting of former and current members of special armed forces units and the structures of law enforcement began to be set up in Russia in the 1980s. Russia has about thirty state departments of armed law enforcement, and military operations sections were set up within each of them. It is hard to say whether this development was deliberately organized or spontaneous. It is, however, obvious that the FSB tries to have its own people everywhere, and even if it does not always organize the groups in the formal sense of the word, it has controlled their activity to a greater or lesser degree from the very beginning. The story of the establishment in the Maritime Territory of the group headed by the brothers Alexander and Sergei Larionov is an instructive example.

  In the late 1980s, Alexander and Sergei Larionov were assigned to work in one of the largest production associations in Vladivostok, named Vostoktransflot. Once there, Sergei Larionov rapidly became the head of the association s Communist Youth Organization. When the privatization of the association began, the Larionov brothers somehow managed to find enough money to buy, either in person or through their representatives, a large block of shares in Vostoktransflot, and then they registered a security service at the company under the name of System SB. This organization became the basis for the most powerful and violent organized criminal group in the history of the Maritime Territory.

  The Larionov brothers men toured the military bases of the Pacific Fleet, approaching the commanders or their deputies for personnel matters and telling them, they were hiring men due for transfer to the reserve for work in the special units of System SB, which dealt with the fight against organized crime. So after they were demobilized, ex-members of military sabotage groups went to work for the Larionovs. Their group was structured on the same lines as the GRU, with its own intelligence and counterintelligence sections, its own cleaners, its own surveillance brigades, explosives specialists and analysts.

  State-of-the-art equipment was bought in Japan: radio scanners that could intercept pager messages and radio-telephone conversations, bugs, night-vision devices, and directional microphones concealed in a variety of objects.

  The Larionovs brigade worked very closely with the secret services of the Maritime Territory, primarily with the naval intelligence service of the GRU. Contracts for the elimination of criminal bosses came from the local UFSB. The Larionovs own analysts identified seven such bosses who headed groups which controlled businesses in Vladivostok. The brothers decided to take them out and take over the businesses for themselves.

  The man at the top of the list was a bandit with the underworld name of Chekhov. Two liquidators from the Larionovs brigade set up an ambush on a road outside the city and

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  raked Chekhov s automobile with automatic weapons fire. When the driver leaped out of the car, he was killed by a shot to the head, and the wounded boss was taken into the low hills, doused with petrol, and set on fire.

  An explosive device of massive power was thrown i
nto the bedroom of another condemned man. The target escaped unhurt, but the entrance hall of the apartment building collapsed, and four innocent bystanders were killed.

  In 1993, conflict arose within the group. One of its leaders, Vadim Goldberg, and his allies kidnapped Alexander Larionov, took him out to the forest, and killed him by stabbing him dozens of times with knives. When he learned his brother was dead, Sergei Larionov went into hiding. Late in 1993, all the members of the band, including Sergei Larionov and Goldberg, were arrested by police detectives. At one of his first interrogations, Larionov declared that he wouldn t say anything yet, but he would tell everything he knew at the trial: everything about System SB and its controllers in the secret services. To prevent this from happening, Larionov was killed. He was being held in the Vladivostok detention center No. 1, in a solitary cell under heavy guard. While, Larionov was on his way to another interrogation a prisoner called Yevgeny Demianenko, who had been behind bars for nineteen years, was led into the corridor in the opposite direction. As Demianenko passed Larionov, he pulled out a point and killed Larionov with a single blow.

  The acts of vengeance against Larionov continued after he was dead. In 1999, persons unknown attempted to blow up his flat with his wife inside it, but she was not hurt. Some time later, a hired killer shot Larionov s lawyer Nadezhda Samikhova. Rumors circulated in Vladivostok that the secret services are getting rid of witnesses. The public prosecutor s office certainly took a suspiciously long time to bring the case to court. The investigation lasted for several years, and charges were only brought on January 14, 2000. The criminal case against the Larionovs group amounted to 108 volumes, but there were only nine accused in the dock. Three of them left the court as free men, because the time they had spent in detention was counted against their sentence. The others were given jail sentences of eight to fifteen years (Goldberg himself received a fifteen-year term).

  There is good reason to believe that the brigade of the well-known Samara criminal boss, Alexander Litvinka (known by the underworld nickname of Nissan ), worked for the FSB. Litvinka lived in Ukraine. In the early 1980s, he arrived in Samara and, following a series of armed robberies, he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment.

  He emerged from the penal colonies as a boss and was given the nickname of Nissan for his love of Japanese automobiles. Having acquired the support of Samara bosses, such as Dmitry Ruzlyaev ( Big Dima ) and Mikhail Besfamilny ( Fiend ). Litvinka set up his own brigade, which was founded on former karate players who were strict teetotalers and obeyed orders unquestioningly.

  Litvinka was soon involved in a war for control of the Volga Automobile Plant (VAZ). In early 1996, a meeting between representatives of two Samara criminal groupings was

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  held at the Dubki Hotel. When the negotiations had been successfully concluded, four unknown persons shot the assembled delegates using Kalashnikovs. Four underworld bosses and one legitimate villain were killed. Litvinka was identified as one of the assailants, and he was arrested shortly afterwards. A month later he was released from jail, and no charges were brought against him. From that moment on, no one in criminal circles doubted that Litvinka worked for the secret services, and he was declared an outlaw at one of the thieves councils. To avoid being killed, Litvinka left the Samara Region and only appeared there on rare occasions, usually to carry out another contract killing of a gangland boss. It seems clear that Litvinka was responsible for the killing of Ruzlyaev in Samara in 1998 and of the boss Konstantin Berkut in 1999.

  On the afternoon of September 23, 2000, Alexander Litvinka was killed in Moscow in the vicinity of house number 27 on Krylatskie Kholmy Street. The shooting was carried out by four men. At the crime scene policemen found four pistols abandoned by the killers: two Makarovs with silencers, a Kedr automatic, and an Izh-Baikal. They also found a Makarov belonging to the victim. The assailants left the scene in a white VAZ2107 automobile. We can only guess at who it was that eliminated Litvinka, FSB operatives or Samara bosses. The well-known Kurgan brigade of Alexander Solonika ( Sasha the Macedonian ), consisting mostly of former and current employees of the Russian secret services and military units, was also run by the secret services, in particular the SBP and FSB. The Kurgan group appeared in Moscow in the early 1990s and was taken over by the leader of the Orekhov group, Sergei Timofeiev ( Sylvester ).

  Timofeiev was an agent of the MB-FSK and maintained close contact with a former officer of the Fifth Department of the KGB USSR by the name of Maiorov, who later headed up one of the security organizations in the Toko Bank. Maiorov regularly visited the head of the Operations Department (OU) of the ATTs FSB, Lieutenant-General Ivan Kuzmich Mironov, the former secretary of the Communist Party organization of the Fifth Department of the KGB USSR, who was now directly responsible for seeking out terrorists.

  In the mid-1990s, major changes began taking place within the Orekhov group, when Timofeiev acquired a rival in the person of Sergei Butorin ( Osya ). In September 1994, Timofeiev was blown up in his Mercedes automobile. Then one by one people loyal to Timofeiev disappeared. Butorin created his own group, which included people from the Orekhov, Kurgan, and Medvedkov criminal organizations. His cleaners included special operations officers from the GRU, MVD, and VDV. Serving members of various military and law enforcement departments appeared in Butorin s entourage, including one lieutenant colonel from counterintelligence (he was later accused of a number of serious crimes, but the charges were dropped).

  In late 1994, three men by the names of Koligov, Neliubin, and Ignatov emerged as the clear leaders of the Kurgan group. The fame of the Kurgan cleaners spread throughout Russia. One of the most famous of the hitmen was Alexander Solonik, but the most active and dangerous killer in the group was called Konakhovich.

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  The Kurgan group fought a bitter war with the Bauman group. According to one of the agents who worked with the Kurgan group, during this war dozens of members of the Bauman brigade were killed, and usually they were first abducted and subjected to extremely cruel torture, including being burned and having their eyes put out before they were eventually finished off. The Kurgan group called the members of the Bauman group the beasts brigade and claimed that it included a lot of Dagestanis. One reason the war was fought was to gain control over one of the firms that sold American automobiles. But the real point was that the tires of these automobiles were used to conceal drugs imported from Columbia.

  The activities of the Kurgan group were monitored by the 12th Section of MUR.

  Operational matters were handled by Oleg Plokhikh. Two members of the Kurgan organization were finally arrested and put away in the Matrosskaya Tishina detention center. In a conversation with his lawyer one of them said that if they used psychotropic drugs on him he might break down and spill everything he knew about a dozen major contract killings, including that of the well-known television journalist Listiev. He asked to be transferred to Lefortovo jail and promised to begin cooperating with the investigation if they would give him definite guarantees of his safety, since the Kurgans had been responsible for many killings, including those of several so-called legitimate villains, which were punishable by death under the unwritten laws of Russian prisons.

  MUR began preparations to move both the detainees, but they were too late. Information leaked out, and both Kurgans were killed during the same night, even though they were in different cells. It was a contract killing of two suspects, whose testimony would have helped to solve a number of other sensational contract killings.

  Solonik was luckier. After his arrest, he was put in a special wing at Matrosskaya Tishina, from where arrangements were made for his flight abroad, to Greece.

  The rout of the Kurgans might have been the direct responsibility of the leader of the Koptev criminal organization, Vasily Naumov ( Naum ), who was one of the MVD s secret agents. At one time, the Kurgans had gained the confidence of the Koptev organization, and then, having
identified almost all of their rivals sources of income, they began doing away with the Koptev brigade s leaders. Realizing just who was responsible, Naumov shopped the Kurgans to the 12th Section of MUR. Then the FSB became involved in the conflict, because it didn t want the Kurgan group, which it ran, to be destroyed, and because it was afraid of information leaking out and causing a scandal.

  The FSB quickly figured out that information on the Kurgans was being supplied to MUR by Naumov, who had close contacts with members of the Kurgan group. They informed the Kurgans of their discovery.

  On January 27, 1997, Naumov, accompanied by his armed bodyguards from the police special operations group Saturn, arrived by car for a meeting with the MUR operations officer who was his contact at the GUVD building at 38 Petrovka Street. He called the officer on his mobile phone, asked him to join him outside, and waited in the car. While the officer was coming downstairs from his office, a Zhiguli automobile pulled in behind