Alexander Litvinenko

by Blowing Up Russia (lit)

  The exchange took place on August 31, 1999, at 17.00 hours on the administrative boundary with the Chechen Republic, close to the village of Aki-Yurt. Magomet had spent almost a year as a hostage.

  The Varaevs were unlucky. Other well-known Chechen kidnappers have been far more fortunate: Arbi Baraev from Alkhankala (Yermolovka), Rezvan Chitigov, Apti Abitaev, Idris Mekhitsov ( Abdul-Malik ), Aslan Gachaev ( Abdulla ), Doku Umarov, and others. In their cases too, the secret services have been accused of involvement in the abduction of people in Chechnya. In the case of Arbi Baraev, there were substantial clues. According to Ruslan Yusupov, a Chechen who served as an officer first in the Soviet and then in the Russian armies, and was recruited by a member of the FSB in

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  Chechnya, Baraev undoubtedly worked for the Russian secret services, and they, in turn, took care of Baraev and his people.

  In mid-July 2000, Yusupov was approached by his old schoolmate, Magomet S., who said he wanted to contact the FSB and give them some information on Baraev. Magomet at least believed that Baraev was responsible for the abduction of dozens of hostages in Chechnya, including members of the FSB, the president s representative in Chechnya, Valentin Vlasov, and journalists from the ORT and NTV television channels. Baraev was also involved in the murder of Red Cross personnel, three British citizens, and a New Zealander.

  The FSB agreed with Magomet that for 25,000 dollars, he would lead the FSB to the exact spot, where Baraev was due to meet with his Chechen field commanders within the next twenty days. Magomet was told how to contact Yusupov and the deputy head of the district department of the FSB.

  Five days later, Magomet had another meeting with the deputy head of the district department of the FSB. This time, Magomet brought with him one of Baraev s closest associates, Aslakhanov, under the FSB s guarantee of safety. Aslakhanov was on the Russian federal and Interpol wanted lists for taking part in the execution of an Englishman and a New Zealander, for kidnapping Polish citizens in Dagestan, abducting the photojournalist Jacini, and soldiers mothers who were trying to find their sons in Chechnya. Aslakhanov moved around Chechnya with the help of a Chechen MVD identity card in the name of Saraliev. In the course of negotiations, the terms of the deal were changed. Magomet, himself a former guerrilla, and Aslakhanov agreed to hand over Baraev without payment, in exchange for an amnesty.

  Ten days after that, Aslakhanov passed on information about a forthcoming meeting between Baraev and his field commanders, Tsagaraev and Akhmadov, at a chemicals plant in Grozny. Four hours before the meeting, Yusupov received information confirming this report via the deputy head of the district department of the FSB. The meeting between Baraev, Tsagaraev, and Akhmadov took place as planned, but the FSB did not carry out any operation to arrest them. When Yusupov began trying to find out from the deputy head of the district department of the FSB why the operation had been canceled, the answer he received was: If I stick my neck out any farther, they ll have my head and yours. We re only pawns in all this, we don t decide anything.

  After about another ten days, Aslakhanov reported that he and Magomet would have to make a run for it, because Baraev s people had found out everything. Yusupov immediately got in touch with the district leadership of the FSB and set up a meeting.

  When Magomet and Aslakhanov arrived at the meeting place in the nearby regional center, instead of FSB operatives they were met by guerrillas, who shot them down right there in the street. That same day, persons unknown abducted Yusupov s wife and her sister from a bus stop, and took them to the premises of the republican OMON, where they told the policemen that these trollops men are working for the Russians. The women cried and tried to explain that they were married, but no one would stand up for

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  them. Their abductors took them away to some deserted yard, beat them until they were barely alive, and raped them.

  Yusupov contacted the criminal investigation department of the Leninsky District of Grozny and asked them to find the owners of the white Zhiguli automobile 023 VAZ 2126 used by the abductors. The detectives told Yusupov that these people did not live in Grozny, and no one knew them. Shortly after that, Yusupov discovered that the abductors were members of Baraev s brigade, former members of the Chechen OMON, who came from Achkha-Martan, and they had committed a long list of crimes, but since they were Baraev s people, no one was trying to find them.

  A week later, two Chechens from the republican FSB and a Russian member of the GRU turned up to see Yusupov. They told Yusupov that Aslakhanov had been killed because of him, and then beat him up in front of his wife and children, and took him away to a private house in the next city district. An hour later, two of Baraev s guerrillas arrived at the house. From the questions which they put to Yusupov, it was clear that everyone present knew all about Yusupov s work for the FSB. When Yusupov denied collaborating with the FSB, he was beaten again, and the beating was actually administered by Chechens from the FSB. The following day, Yusupov was taken to Grozny and dumped in the rubble. Two days later, he and his family left Grozny.

  The Chechens had a humorous saying at this time: In Chechnya there are three-and-ahalf armored personnel carriers, ten secret services, and one Chechen per square meter.

  They also used to say: Take away the GRU, FSB, and MVD secret agents, and peace will dawn. It was hard to tell just who was working for which Russian special service.

  There were persistent rumors that, in addition to Arbi Baraev, the Akhmadov brothers from Urus-Martan worked for the Russians. Local residents said that until just recently, the Akhmadov brothers and Arbi Baraev had been living in their own houses. During the second Chechen War, Baraev twice held boisterous weddings in his house in Alkhankala.

  The Akhmadovs and Baraev traveled around the republic quite openly in their own automobiles without encountering any problems, when their documents were checked at roadblocks. Privates on guard at the roadblocks saluted Baraev as he passed. In the summer of 2000, it became known that the Akhmadov brothers carried FSB identity cards. The UFSB agent for the Urus-Martan district, Yunus Magomadov, may well have been sacked for leaking information and exposing the identities of secret agents.

  Baraev was involved in the FSB s work on printing counterfeit dollars in Chechnya.

  From the very beginning of the Chechen campaign, the printing of counterfeit dollars had been transferred to Chechen territory, so that if the printing works were exposed or discovered, the blame for the crime would fall on the Chechen leadership. One of Baraev s printing works was discovered in April 2000 (the house in which it was located belonged to Baraev s relatives). The dollars were shipped to the central regions of Russia via Ingushetia and exchanged at a rate of thirty to thirty-five cents.

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  The counterfeit notes were very high-quality; it was virtually impossible to identify them using the detectors in operation in the ordinary treasury bureaus, specialized equipment that only banks possessed was required. A large proportion of the profits earned was used to pay fighters their salaries or buy weapons and ammunition. The counterfeit dollars also circulated outside Russia. It is believed that in the last few years up to ten billion counterfeit dollars might have been put into circulation, i.e. about 10,000 dollars for every Chechen. It makes no sense to assume that Baraev alone was responsible. It is more likely that Baraev was simply used as a cover for the business of producing counterfeit notes, which was organized by the FSB.

  Diplomatic, but entirely unambiguous, hints at Baraev s collaboration with the FSB were given by the president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, at a press conference held on July 6, 2000. When asked who was responsible for the recent attack on a military column in Ingushetia, Aushev replied: The column in Ingushetia was attacked by Arbi Baraev s detachment. There is, by the way, one thing which I do not understand: Arbi Baraev is based in the village of Yermolovka, and any of you who have been to Grozny know that is almost a subur
b.

  That s where he is, I think he has married for the fifth time. So fine, there he is, and everybody knows where he is. It seems to me that the joint forces group needs to take rather more decisive action, especially as Baraev is attacking army columns& I know that Arbi Baraev, according to my information is located, in Yermolovka, which& you know it s not really a problem to resolve this. I was saying recently he got married yet again&

  And our Federal Security Service Office knows that. Everybody knows it.

  The well-known civil rights activist and Duma deputy Sergei Kovalyov was more frank: Let us take one of the most important dealers in human beings, a young scoundrel, probably quite an audacious one. Let us forget that absolutely everyone in the northern Caucasus says: Arbi Baraev? But he s a KGB agent! All right, so these are confident claims, but they can t be verified. But there are a few riddles here. A few months ago, everybody knew that he was living not far from Grozny in the village of Yermolovka. He got married there for the nth time, as permitted by Islam, and was living with his young wife. The commander of the federal forces was asked: Why don t you take Baraev? He replied with a true soldier s naiveté: if they tell us, we ll take him . So why don t they tell him?.. We had meetings with Chechen members of parliament. One of them, a very reliable and well-respected man, told us that one of his relatives, who had recently come down from the mountains, arrived in Yermolovka. And then a so-called clean-up started. His documents weren t in order-what was he to do? Well-wishers told him: Go to Baraev s house, no one will touch you there . He went to Baraev s, and the clean-up just passed him by.

  It was apparently through the GRU or MUR that information was leaked to the press to show that the Akhmadovs and Baraev had protectors in very high places. A number of Moscow newspapers published material stating that Baraev was in Moscow in August 2000, and stayed in a house on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It had been ascertained that Baraev

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  met with highly placed Russian officials and apparently the cars, which had pulled up at the entrance to Baraev s apartment, included one bearing the number of head of the president s office, Alexander Voloshin.

  Possibly president Aushev s statement and the scandalous articles about Baraev s stay in Moscow provided the decisive argument in support of those who wished to eliminate Baraev. The details of his death remain unclear to this day. Supposedly he was killed in his home village of Alkhankala some time between June 22 and 24, 2001, in the course of an operation, which some sources claim was carried out by a division of MVD and FSB forces, while according to other sources it was a GRU special detachment consisting of Chechen nationals. According to information provided by State Duma deputy, MVD General Aslanbek Aslakhanov from Chechnya, Baraev was killed in a blood feud by people whose relatives he had himself killed.

  If Baraev had lived, his testimony could have been highly damaging to a number of highly placed officials, as well as members of the secret services and the military. There was nobody who wanted Baraev alive and capable of telling tales which would cast light on so many murky dealings. A dead Baraev could be blamed for any number of things&

  If Baraev was the most famous of the kidnappers, Andrei Babitsky, a journalist from the American Radio Liberty, was one of the most unusual victims. Despite the obvious difference between Babitsky s case and other cases of abduction, it provided new proof of the Russian secret services involvement in abduction.

  After the start of the second Chechen War, the military authorities in Mozdok refused to give Babitsky accreditation. The requirement for administrative accreditation was unlawful, since a state of emergency had not been declared in Chechnya, and no zone of anti-terrorist operations had ever been declared. According to a decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, unpublished enactments of the Russian government or the military departments of state, which infringe the rights and freedoms of the citizen, are to be regarded as null and void. On the basis of this understanding of Russian law, Radio Liberty correspondent and Russian citizen, Andrei Babitsky, traveled to Chechnya in defiance of the administrative prohibition. In late December 1999, he came back from Grozny to Moscow for a few days, bringing with him video footage which was later shown in the program Itogi on the NTV television channel. On December 27, he returned to Grozny, and on January 15, 2000, he was preparing to travel back to Moscow.

  On his way out of Grozny on January 16, close to the Urus-Martan intersection on the Rostov-Baku highway, Babitsky and his Chechen assistant were detained at a roadblock manned by the Penza OMON. The statement made by the investigator of the Public Prosecutor s Office claimed that it was a member of the UFSB who searched Babitsky and confiscated his belongings. This provided documentary proof that Babitsky was arrested by the UFSB. He was later handed over to the Chechen OMON, where one of the OMON commanders, Lom-Ali, personally beat him up, after which he handed Babitsky over to Fomin, the head of the FSB department in Urus-Martan.

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  Babitsky was officially arrested under a decree on vagrancy, and he was sent to the detention camp at Chernokozovo in order to establish his identity. There, Babitsky was beaten again and forced to sing for hours under torture. In video footage shown on television on February 5, the traces of the beatings were clearly visible. In contravention of the Criminal Law Procedural Code, no report was drawn up of Babitsky s arrest in Chernokozovo. He was denied the right to see his relatives or have a meeting with his lawyer (as stipulated in article 96, part 6 of the Criminal Procedural Code). The General Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation did not bother to answer queries from lawyers, including those from the famous lawyer, Henry Reznik. Nor was any reply forthcoming to a inquiry about Babitsky from Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov.

  Babitsky s colleagues began looking for him on January 20, but since the Russian authorities denied that he had been detained, it was a week before anything became clear.

  On January 27, the authorities announced that Babitsky had been arrested, because he was regarded as a suspect and had been detained for ten days (ending on January 26).

  The Public Prosecutor s Office was planning to accuse Babitsky of an offense under article 208 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ( Organizing an illegal armed formation or participating in such a formation ). If our guys have got your friend, and I think they have, then that s it, curtains, you won t be seeing him again. Nobody will.

  Sorry to be so blunt, Alexander Yevtushenko, a correspondent of the newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda, was told by an old acquaintance who was an FSB officer.

  On February 2 at Chernokozovo, a package was accepted for prisoner Babitsky.

  However, the investigator, Yury Cherniavsky, would not permit a meeting with Babitsky, hinting that he would be released in four days. The journalist s release was demanded by Radio Liberty, the Council of Europe, the U.S. State Department, the Union of Journalists, and civil rights activists (including Andrei Sakharov s widow, Elena Bonner). In negotiations with U.S. Secretary of State Albright, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov stated that acting president Putin personally had the situation under control.

  At 4 p.m. on February 2, the prosecutor of the Naur District of Chechnya, Vitaly Tkachyov, announced that Babitsky s preventive detention had been replaced by a signed undertaking not to leave Moscow, where he was on the point of being sent from Gudermes. Later, the press secretary of the Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation, Sergei Prokopov, announced that Babitsky had been released on February 2. (Only later did it emerge that Babitsky was not released, and he spent the night of February 2 in a motorized cell, a truck used for transporting detainees. At three o clock the following afternoon, with barely a sign of embarrassment, Yastrzhembsky declared that after being freed, Babitsky had been exchanged for three prisoners of war. Then he corrected himself and said it was for two.) Since Babitsky was wearing a shirt that had been sent to Chernokozovo on February 2, the obvious conclusion w
as that he had been handed over on February 3. No one in Chechnya knew the Chechen field commanders, to whom Moscow claimed Babitsky

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  had been handed over in exchange for captive Russian military personnel. President of Chechnya Maskhadov declared that he did not know where Babitsky was. And no one had seen the exchanged Russian soldiers.

  In actual fact, apart from Babitsky all the individuals involved in the exchange were members of the FSB. One of them, a Chechen working for the FSB, had helped to hoodwink Babitsky, and when Babitsky realized what was going on, it was too late. In an interview on NTV on the evening of February 8, Russian Minister of the Interior Ivan Golubev announced that he had made the decision to exchange Babitsky. But another official tried to convince journalists that the exchange had been a local initiative, and the Kremlin was looking into who was responsible for what had happened, because the Babitsky affair was working against Putin.