Alexander Litvinenko

by Blowing Up Russia (lit)

  Official government spokesmen claimed that Babitsky was alive, and that a video recording which confirmed this would arrive in Moscow the next day. In fact, the videotape was handed over to Radio Liberty by persons unknown on the evening of February 8, sooner than promised. One of the Chechens who had supposedly traveled from Chechnya to hand over the tape was wearing an MVD uniform. The video footage showed Babitsky in an exhausted condition.

  Journalists who analyzed the tape said that the way Babitsky was taken by the arms was typical of the police, but that Chechens did not handle people that way. In fact, not even the members of the FSB who were involved in the exchange made any real effort to conceal the falsification. When an FSB department was celebrating the anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghani stan, one of them confessed to Alexander Yevtushenko: You saw the warriors in ma sks. And the one who grabbed hold of Babitsky. They showed it on television. Well, that was me.

  The area where the exchange took place was not far from Shali, which was entirely under the control of federal forces and not far from the village of Nesker-Yurt, also under federal control, where there were federal so ldiers and fortified roadblocks and armored personnel carriers. The people in masks drove off with Babitsky and took him, as it turned out later, to the Chechen village of Avtury. Although this village was not yet occupied by federal forces, the journalist did not by any means end up among resistance fighters. He became a prisoner in the house of relatives of Adam Deniev, well-known for his collaboration with the Moscow author ities (his religious and pro-imperial organization Adamalla had an office in Mosc ow). In this house Babitsky was detained for three weeks, without being permitted to make contact with the outside world.

  On February 23, the kidnappers led Andrei out of the house, ordered him to lie down inside the trunk of a Volga, and drove him to Dagestan. On this day-the anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens-the numbe r of soldiers at federal checkpoints was greatly increased and the residents of Chec hnya preferred not to leave their homes any more than was necessary, but the kidnappers cars-the Volga and the Zhiguli that accompanied it-were never stopped: at each checkpoint, the drivers merely slowed down in order to show some kind of document.

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  In this way, Babitsky was brought to Mahac hkala. Here he was given a passport with someone else s name, but with a professi onally attached photograph of himself (as it turned out later, a blank passport with this number had been issued, perfectly legally, by one of the passport offices of the MVD). The kidnappers demanded that Babitsky should cross the border into Azerbaijan with this pa ssport. But Andrei managed to escape. After returning to Mahachkala, he called his frie nds from his hotel (where he had been compelled to use the false passport) and the world finally found out that the journalist was alive. Then he gave himself over to the Dagestan police.

  Despite the fact that the policemen late r received medals for the rescuing Andrei, Babitsky himself was accused by the authorities of using a false passport, held for several days in a jail in Mahachkala, and later tried, sentenced to a heavy fine, but pardoned&

  For some reason the General Public Prosecutor s Office was not interested in the fact that Babitsky had been abducted, beaten, and tortured, but for the half-dead victim to be using someone else s passport was clearly a serious crime. The passport became the basis for the main charge in Babitsky s case.

  Throughout all of this, of course, the structures of coercion and the officials involved in the Babitsky affair were confident that they could act with absolute impunity, and this confidence was based on the fact that Babitsky s suppression had been sanctioned by the leadership of the FSB.

  Almost all of the partipants in this incident are known. We have already mentioned Deniev s group. The person who arranged Andrei s exchange has also been identified as FSB Colonel Igor Petelin (recognized in the television footage by Novaya Gazeta s military correspondent Vyacheslav Izmailov). And Andrei himself later saw a photograph of one of his kidnappers in the newspaper-as one of the bodyguards of the current president of Chechnya Akhmad Kadyrov.

  In the war in Chechnya, the secret services carried out reprisals against their enemies without the slightest regard for the law. The strange story of the kidnapping of Kenneth Gluck, the representative of an American medical charity, on January 9, 2001, close to the Chechen village of Starye Atagi, led many people to suspect that Gluck had been abducted by the Russian special forces. At a press conference in St. Petersburg on April, 18 2001, Zdanovich made it clear in Patrushev s presence that the FSB had no interest in Gluck s work in Chechnya: the FSB, to put it mildly, has grave doubts about whether Kenneth Gluck was really a representative of a humanitarian organization. After this, Zdanovich claimed that the well known field commander and trader in hostages, Rezvan Chitigov, worked for the CIA in Chechnya.

  It became clear that the FSB regarded Gluck as a CIA agent involved in spying for the United States. This was apparently the reason, the FSB had decided to exclude him from the Chechen republic. First, Gluck was kidnapped and then on February 4, his liberation

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  was stage-managed without any conditions or ransom as a result of a special operation carried out by FSB agents.

  It was absolutely clear to everyone that no special operation had been carried out to free Gluck, and he had simply been set free by his abductors, who had decided not to kill him.

  After the Babitsky case, the FSB no longer bothered to use conspiratorial methods, having come to believe in its own absolute impunity. The reality of the Gluck case was no less obvious. Everybody could tell that Gluck had been abducted by the FSB. That s why the whole business of Gluck s capture and release was so strange, Zdanovich declared at one of the press conferences. It would be hard to disagree with him. When one and the same organization kidnaps someone and then liberates him, it really does look rather strange.

  Against this background, the story of the kidnapping by GRU operatives of, former chairman of the Chechen parliament, Ruslan Alikhadjiev, seems almost natural and lawful. Having been a successful field commander during the first Chechen war, Alikhadjiev did not take part in the military operations of 1999-2000. In mid-May 2000, he was detained in his own house in Shali. According to local people, the arrest was carried out by agents of the General Staff GRU, who took the former speaker of parliament to Argun, where his trail went cold.

  After May 15, not even Alikhadjiev s lawyer, Abdulla Khamzaev, ever saw him again.

  Khamzaev said that he made repeated inquiries at various levels concerning the fate of his client, but was never able to meet with him. Information emerged from the Public Prosecutor s Office that a criminal investigation had been initiated into Alikhadjiev s disappearance under article 126 of the Criminal Code (abduction). The Prosecutor s Office had not initiated criminal proceedings against Alikhadjiev and, consequently, had not sanctioned his detention. The MVD knew nothing about what had happened to Alikhadjiev. On June 8, 2000, Khamzaev was notified by the FSB that Alikhadjiev was not in the FSB s Lefortovo detention center. Khamzaev did not receive any answer to his inquiry from the General Public Prosecutor s Office. Finally on September 3, the radio station Moscow Echo reported that Alikhadjiev had died of a heart attack in Lefortovo, and his family had already been officially notified of his death.

  The abductions of Chechens in Chechnya by federal agencies of coercion in order to punish them, extort ransom or kill them were almost heroic exploits that went uninvestigated and unpunished. The police of the October Temporary Department of Internal Affairs in Grozny, led by Colonel Sukhov and Major V.V. Ivanovsky, was suspected by journalists and public figures of abducting and killing about 120 inhabitants of Grozny and other regions of Chechnya. The corpses were presumed to have been dumped in the basement of a building on territory which was guarded by the October Temporary Department of Internal Affairs. The policemen later blew up this building, in order to cover up their crimes.


  The organization of security sweeps in order to abduct Chechens and extort ransom for the release of hostages, became an everyday event, a part of life in wartime. Cases are

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  even known of Russian officers selling Russian soldiers to Chechen bandits as slaves, and then declaring them deserters.

  The war in Chechnya has made human life cheap in Russia. Brutal killings and trade in slaves and hostages have become the norm. Tens of thousands of young people have gone through the war. They will not be able to return to civilian life.

  Chechnya is the FSB s workshop, the training ground for the future personnel of the Russian secret services and freelance brigades of mercenary killers. The longer this war goes on, the more irreversible its consequences become. The most frightening of them is hatred. Chechen hatred of Russians. Russian hatred of Chechens. This conflict was created artificially by the coercive agencies of Russia, mainly the Federal Security Service.

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  Chapter 11

  The FSB: reform or dissolution?

  All according to plan!

  Youth slogan invented by Putin s PR-team Why blame us, you who know everything? For evil, all is according to plan, even a clean conscience.

  Vladimir Vysotsky For the sake of objectivity, we should point out that attempts to reform the FSB from within have been made by isolated individuals in the system, but they have not been successful. On the contrary, efforts made by individual FSB officers to maintain the honor of the ranks of the special agencies and the crushing defeat suffered by heroic individuals in this war have only served to demonstrate, yet, again, that reform of the FSB is impossible, and this agency of the state must be abolished. One of the many documents which make this clear is a letter addressed to Russian President Yeltsin on May 5, 1997, long before the bombings of the apartment buildings. Since in the first edition of this book we published this letter without its author s knowledge or consent, we felt we had no right to give his name. However, by the time of the second edition a significant change has taken place in his life: he has been arrested. For this reason we have made the decision to publish his name. The author of the letter to Yeltsin was former FSB colonel and lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin. Trepashkin was arrested in Moscow in 2003 on the fabricated charge of illegal weapons possession and divulging state secrets (espionage). He is still in prison.

  On the unlawful activities of a number of officials of the FSB RF Dear Boris Nikolaievich, Circumstances oblige me to appeal to you personally in view of the fact that the director of the Federal Security Services Colonel-General N.D. Kovalyov, and other leaders of the FSB RF are taking no measures to deal with the problems of state security in Russia raised by myself in reports and statements, which I have forwarded to them beginning in

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  1996.

  In recent years, organized criminal groups have been attempting to infiltrate the FSB RF by any possible means. Initially, the most common approach was to establish relations with individual members of the FSB RF and engage in criminal activity under their protection ( roof ). And then these groups moved on to delegating their members to join the ranks of the FSB RF. They are accepted for service via acquaintances working in the personnel departments or as section leaders.

  1996.

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  The infiltration of members of criminal groups into the ranks of the FSB RF was particularly intensive under M.I. Barsukov and N.D. Kovalyov. Under these leaders, a number of members of the Solntsevo, Podolsk, and other criminal groups were taken into the service& In order to ensure their safety the right people were promoted to key posts. At the same time, a number of professionals with extensive operational experience were dismissed without due cause. All of this took place with the connivance of former personnel section officer N.P. Patrushev.

  The actions of FSB RF leaders, Barsukov, Kovalyov, and Patrushev, are intended to force professionals out of the structures of the FSB RF in favor of criminal elements. For instance, when Patrushev was appointed to the post of head of the Internal Security Department of the FSB RF, instead of combating criminal groupings, he began to persecute members of the FSB, professionals with long experience of the fight against crime, and forced them to resign from the security agencies. As a result, the department ceased pursuing cases against armed criminal groups.

  At the present time, former head of the Internal Security Department of the FSB RF Patrushev has been transferred to the post of head of the Administration and Inspection Department of the FSB RF, and Kovalyov has replaced him by Zotov, concerning whose connections with criminal organizations a lot of information has been supplied to the FSB. Prior to this appointment, Zotov supervised the anti-terrorist center, which had almost no successful operational activities to its name, while at the same time terrorist acts were being committed and continue to be committed on all sides and in Moscow alone large amounts of illegal weapons and munitions are in circulation. It was Zotov who, in December 1995, made special efforts to block the progress of a case dealing with a Chechen organized criminal group. According to operational sources, Zotov was given a present of a foreign-made jeep-style automobile by one of the groups, which he sold on his appointment to a general s post in order to conceal the fact.

  Kovalyov has appointed a number of officers to general s posts without regard for professional ability or services in the field, but on the basis of acquaintance and loyalty to the director. For instance, in August 1996, a Long-Term Programs Department was established within the FSB RF. This department, directly subordinate to FSB RF director Kovalyov, absorbed a considerable number of professional personnel from other sections.

  However, no one in the FSB knows why Kovalyov maintains this department, since its aims and objectives and the functional responsibilities of its personnel have yet to be defined. In, effect the Long-Term Programs Department of the FSB RF does nothing to combat crime, but guarantees the safety of non-state organizations (such as the Stealth Company and others). Nonetheless, friends of Kovalyov-Khokholkov, Stepanov, and Ovchinnikov-have been appointed to general s posts in the Long-Term Programs Department. The first two have already also received their general s epaulettes.

  Khokholkov and Ovchinnikov had both previously been investigated by the Internal Security Department of the FSB RF. The first maintained close relations with bandits and accepted monetary remuneration from them, so that he could afford to lose as much as 25,000 U.S. dollars in a single night at a casino&

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  The bandit Stalmakhov, who is well known to the RUOP GUVD of the city of Moscow, stated in conversation with one of our sources that since 1993, the members of his group, which included a number of former employees of the KGB USSR, had engaged in smuggling activities. Their criminal activities were covered up in exchange for monetary remuneration by highly placed members of the FSB RF, including generals of the Economic Department of the FSB, Poryadin and Kononov, Moscow Region UFSB General Trofimov, and director of the FSB RF, N.D. Kovalyov, was informed of this. In February 1994, in my capacity as senior investigator for especially important cases of the Investigative Department of the MB RF, I detained nine automobiles ( wagons ) containing contraband goods with a value of more than three million U.S. dollars. Due to measures taken by the officials named above, the contraband was released and stored at the factory Hammer and Sickle, from where it was subsequently illegally sold. A number of trumped-up claims were made that I was involved in extortion, which made it impossible for me to work on locating the contraband goods.

  Likewise alarming are the leaks of operational information from the FSB RF to criminal organizations.

  Head of the FSB RF N.D. Kovalyov (and before him, M.I. Barsukov), and department heads Patrushev and Zotov, are thwarting efforts to curtail the criminal activity of organized groups guilty of committing serious crimes, in particular efforts to curtail the criminal activity of Chechens in the city of Moscow& An operation that re
lied on available materials led to the arrest of members of a Chechen organized crime group involved in the extortion of 1.5 billion rubles and approximately 30,000 U.S. dollars on the premises of the commercial bank Soldi. Those arrested included V.D. Novikov;

  L.M. Bakaev; and also K.N. Azizbekian, head of the security agency Kobra-9 ; Colonel G.U. Golubovsky, group leader in the general staff of Russian Army; Senior Police Lieutenant V.V. Uglanov, an operative of the Moscow OBPSE GUVD.