Alexander Litvinenko
Page 28
Individuals who were arrested while assisting the extortionists to enter the bank included organized crime group members B.B. Khanshev and S.A. Aytupaev, as well as three agents of the Moscow police - Moscow OEP GUVD Senior Operative and Police Major G.F. Dmitriev, GAI Department Chief and Police Major V.I. Pavlov (both armed), and Junior Police Officer I.A. Kolesnikov.
In the course of the interrogation it was established that this organized crime group received substantial assistance in resolving issues of a criminal nature from the consultant of the General Staff Academy of the Russian Federation, Major General Yu.I. Tarasenko, who was paid 5,000-10,000 U.S. dollars monthly by V.D. Novikov. After being interrogated, Tarasenko acknowledged that he had received financial compensation from V.D. Novikov and K.N. Azizbekian, and admitted that he directed officers of the army general staff and police agents to assist the Chechen organized crime group.
On 1 December 1995 the investigative division of the 3rd RUVD TsAO of the City of Moscow filed criminal charge No. 055277 in accordance with statute 148, article 5, of the criminal code of the Russian Federation.
161
162
In the course of the initial investigative, operational and search measures, it was established that, in addition to extortion, the members of the above-named criminal group had committed murders in Moscow and in Chechnya, had stored weapons and munitions at an illegal depot outside Moscow and had moved weapons and munitions from the military depots in the town of Elektrogorsk to areas of military operations in Chechnya.
Since I was one of the leaders of the operation, I played an important role in the uncovering the criminal activity of the Chechen organized crime group. However, already at the beginning of December 1995, I was removed from the case in connection with a work-related background examination, and the weapon I had been issued was recalled. The causes and grounds of the background examination remain unknown to me to this day.
Upon completion of the background examination, an order was issued on 8 February 1996 (No. 034) concerning my punishment for supposedly undermining the operation, although the materials of criminal case No. 055277, the letters of the Moscow RUOP GUVD office, the 3rd RUVD TsAO of the City of Moscow, and the Tver general prosecutor s office, state precisely the opposite.
The members of the commissions, referring to aforementioned indications, reached a fabricated conclusion and determined that in arresting dangerous criminals I had exceeded my legitimate authority. These circumstances served as grounds for my dismissal from work related to uncovering the activities of criminal groups.
According to operational data in my possession, the members of the aforementioned criminal group allocated 100,000 U.S. dollars to blocking the work on the case and declared that they had enough funds to buy the FSB and the MVD and the Ministry of Defense.
A brief comment on the outcome of the opposition offered by Trepashkin at the time of the first edition of this book in 2002. Following his letter to Yeltsin, Trepashkin was dismissed from the service. Zdanovich slandered him in the media, accusing him of being a common criminal. The dismissed officer took the leadership of the FSB to court.
During the court hearings, which lasted for more than a year, the leadership of the FSB planned and carried out two attempts on the lieutenant colonel s life. However, somehow he managed to survive and win his case, in which one of the respondents was Patrushev.
Unfortunately, the new director of the FSB (who was Putin) refused to implement the court s decision, even though it carried the force of law, thereby demonstrating, yet again, the impossibility of reforming the FSB or of combating it on the basis of the existing legislation. In 2003, after the former FSB officer became the lawyer of the sisters Tatyana and Alyona Morozov (whose mother died in an apartment-house bombing in Moscow in September 1999) and offered to represent their family s interests in a case involving the investigation of the terrorist attacks committed by Russian security agencies, Trepashkin was finally arrested.
162
163
There is nothing surprising about the idea of dissolving the FSB. In December 1999, perhaps under the influence of the bombings in Russia, the newspapers carried information concerning a planned dissolution of the FSB. This is what one of the Moscow papers printed: According to well-informed sources, in the next few days. a new armed law enforcement agency may be set up on similar lines to the FBI in the USA. It is presumed that the job of heading up the new structure will be given to an officer with the rank of First Deputy Prime Minister. According to our information, it is planned to appoint the present minister of the interior Rushailo& It is intended to endow the new department with the function of supervising all of the agencies of law enforcement, including FAPSI, the MVD, the FSB, the Ministry of Defense, and so on. The new department will be based primarily on the structures of the MVD. At the initial stage, it will take from the FSB the departments for combating terrorism and political extremism and economic counterintelligence. And if in the future the new department should also absorb the counterintelligence functions, the FSB will effectively cease to exist.
However, gently dissolving the FSB in the MVD is not enough. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation must initiate a full-scale investigation into all of the sensational terrorist attacks, first and foremost into the September bombings, whether they succeeded or were foiled, including the incident in Ryazan, this investigation must be transferred from an FSB due to be disbanded to a specially created agency at the MVD, and the individuals involved in organizing terrorist attacks in Russia must be punished as the law requires.
The State Duma must draft and approve as a matter of urgency a law of inspection and promulgation, which prohibits former and current members of the agencies of state security from occupying elected positions or state posts for the next twenty-five years, and obliging all former and current members of the organs of state security to retire by a deadline agreed with a commission especially established for this purpose. This decree of the State Duma must also extend to the current president of Russia and former head of the KGB Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
163
164
The FSB in power (in place of a conclusion) The Federal Security Service has now succeeded in getting its own candidate elected president. When Putin spoke on the anniversary of the founding of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission on December 20, he began his address to his colleagues by saying that the FSB s assignment had been completed-he had become the Prime Minister of Russia.
The restoration of the memorial plaque to Andropov on the Bolshaya Lubyanka building which houses the FSB, a toast to the health of Stalin with the leader of the Russian communists Zyuganov, bombings in residential buildings and a new war in Chechnya, the passing of a law making it legal once again to investigate individuals on the basis of anonymous denunciations, the promotion to positions of power of FSB generals and army officers; and finally, the total destruction of the foundations of a constitutional society built on the admittedly frail but, nonetheless, democratic values of a market economy, the strangling of the freedom of speech-these are only a few of the achievements of Prime Minister and President Putin during the initial months of his rule.
To this must be added the militarization of the Russian economy; the beginning of a new arms race; an increase in the smuggling and sale of Russian weapons and military technologies to governments hostile to the developed nations of the world; the use of FSB channels for the smuggling of narcotics under the control and protection of the FSB from Central and Southeast Asia to Russia and onwards to the West.
Future historians will have to answer the question of who was responsible for the brilliant succession of precisely planned moves which brought Putin to power, and who it was that proposed Putin as a potential candidate to the first president s intimate entourage, which in turn presented the former head of the KGB to Yeltsin as his successor. But perhaps even more astonishing is the fact that Stepashin and Primakov, the two candidates for th
e role of successor who preceded Putin, also came from the structures of coercion. Yeltsin was amazingly stubborn in his efforts to hand over his post to someone from the agencies of state security.
In the year 2000 elections, the Russian voters were faced with a delightful list of candidates: the old KGB-man Primakov, who confidently boasted that if he came to power he would put 90,000 businessmen (i.e. the entire business elite of Russia) in jail; the young KGB-man Putin, who before he was elected emphasized the need to continue Yeltsin s policies; and the communist Zyuganov, whose future actions could easily be predicted.
In order to jail 90,000 businessmen, Primakov would have had to arrest sixty people every day, including weekends and holidays, throughout his four-year term as president.
The young KGB-man Putin promised to be less bloodthirsty. Perhaps the election campaign was deliberately scripted by someone on the principle of good cop/bad cop?
The bad cop Primakov voluntarily withdrew his candidacy, following a crushing defeat in
164
165
the elections to the State Duma. That only left the young KGB-man and the communist.
It was the same kind of black-and-white choice as in 1996, and Putin won. He has not entirely disappointed the people s trust. At least he appears not to be working at a rate of sixty people a day, unless you count the whirlwind of terror and anti-terror and the war in Chechnya. But Putin undoubtedly deserves the title of tyrant, since he deliberately destroyed the initial shoots of self-government in Russia with his very first decrees, and he now exercises that transparent form of arbitrary rule, which the Russian people know as bespredel (literally- without limits ). He is perfectly described by the definition of a tyrant given by the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary of 1989: a ruler whose power is founded on arbitrary decision and violence.
Russia, however, is an unpredictable country-this is the only thing which we know for certain about it. And it may prove to be a source of strength more powerful than the clenched fist of the secret services.
165
166
Epilogue
An organization is considered to be a terrorist organization if at least one of its structural components participates in terrorist activities with the consent of at least one of the governing organs of this organization&
The organization is considered to be a terrorist organization and is subject to liquidation on the basis of a court decision.
Upon the liquidation of any organization determined to be a terrorist organization, the property belonging to it is confiscated and appropriated by the government.
The Federal Law of the Russian Federation on combating terrorism Enacted by the State Duma on 3 July 1998. Approved by the Council of the Federation on 9 July 1998. Signed by President B.N. Yeltsin on 25 July 1998.
At midnight on September& of the year 20& , the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia was disbanded by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation in a truly historical decision which marked the beginning of a new era in the development of democratic institutions in Russia. In view of this Decree s obvious importance, we have decided to present the full text of the Decree to our readers.
Decree of the President of the Russian Federation On the dissolution of the following agencies of state security: the Federal Security Service, the External Intelligence Service, The Federal Secret Police Service, the Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information.
1. The activities of the agencies of state security of the USSR and Russia from December 1917 to the present are hereby declared to be in contradiction of the laws of the Russian Federation as promulgated in the Constitution of the Russian Federation and contrary to the interests of the people.
2. The following agencies of state security are hereby disbanded: the Federal Security Service, the External Intelligence Service, the Federal Secret Police Service, the Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information.
3. The legal instruments governing the activities of these agencies are declared null and void as of the date of publication of this Decree.
4. Within thirty days from the publication of this Decree, a Public Commission shall be established to investigate the crimes committed by agencies of state security against the state s own citizens both within Russia and beyond its borders. The membership of this commission shall include prominent public figures, civil rights activists, lawyers, deputies of the State Duma, and representatives of the mass media. The chairman of the
166 Epilogue
167
Public Commission shall be appointed by the President of the Russian Federation and shall be accountable to him.
5. All restrictions on access to archives of the agencies of state security are hereby removed. The Public Commission for the investigation of crimes committed by agencies of state security against the state s own citizens is hereby instructed to devise and implement a program for the publication of documents of particular public interest.
6. The records of operations carried out by agencies of state security in relation to persons of Russian or foreign nationality shall be made available to such persons or, if they are no longer alive, to their surviving relatives.
7. Should individuals who have been the subject of operations conducted by agencies of state security consider that the agencies of state security have violated their civil rights and thereby caused them moral and material harm, they shall be entitled under the terms of currently effective legislation to make application to the judiciary of Russia or their country of residence for legal action to be taken against specific members of the agencies of state security.
8. As of midnight January 1, 2002, the agencies of the Ministry of the Interior shall stand guard over all office premises of the agencies of state security and continue to guard them until further notice.
9. The Ministry of the Interior shall appoint a commandant (from the staff of the Ministry) to be responsible for guarding the office premises of the agencies of state security throughout Russia. Agents of the Ministry of the Interior shall rigorously suppress any acts of insubordination by members of the agencies of state security. 10. Within a period of ninety days from the promulgation of the present Decree, the Public Commission for the investigation of crimes committed by agencies of state security against the state s own citizens and the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation shall jointly define the terms for the transfer of a number of the functions of the abolished agencies of state security to the competence of the Ministry of the Interior. 11. The Office of the President shall draft a law of inspection and promulgation applicable to present and former members of the agencies of state security and their agents and shall, within a period of ten days from the publication of the present Decree, forward the draft bill to the State Duma for consideration. Special attention shall be paid in this matter to those members of the organs of state security, whose activities were connected the so-called struggle against dissent. 12. All present and former members of the agencies of state security shall within a period of one month furnish the tax office of the relevant territorial unit of the Russian Federation with a formal declaration of property owned by themselves and their close relatives (including parents, brothers and sisters, and close relatives of husbands and wives, both present and past), the said declaration to include the following: real estate,
167
168
vehicles, accounts in Russian and foreign banks, shares and securities issued by Russian and foreign companies, together with a detailed statement of the sources of income which was used to acquire such property. In the course of the year 2002, the tax authorities of the Russian Federation shall take appropriate measures to verify these declarations and decide upon appropriate action in accordance with procedures specified under the terms of Russian tax legislation.
As from the date of signing and publication of the present Decree until such time as the tax investigations been completed, all individuals and organizations
are prohibited from performing any transactions for the purchase, sale, gift, alienation or mortgaging of real estate, vehicles, shares and securities or the transfer of money from accounts belonging to present or former members of the agencies of state security or their relatives. All such transactions performed during the period specified to which present or former members of the agencies of state security or their relatives are party shall be declared null and void. 13. Until such time as they are discharged to the reserves of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, all military personnel of the agencies of state security shall be bound by the following terms: a) they shall remain at their places of residence; b) within seven days of the publication of the present Decree, they shall register temporarily with the Office of the Interior for the area in which they are registered as resident, for which purpose commissioners shall be appointed from among the officer corps of the Ministry of the Interior; c) within twenty-four hours of the publication of the present Decree, they shall surrender the official personal weapons of their rank, official identity cards, undercover identity papers, keys and seals to the commissioner at the Office of the Interior, together with a detailed account of their workplace and official functions, the titles of their departments and sections, and individual positions; d) until such time as they are discharged to the reserves, military personnel of the agencies of state security must report in person to the commissioner at the Office of the Interior for the area in which they are registered as resident as follows: generals and admirals once every three days; senior and junior officers once every five days; warrant officers, first sergeants, sergeants, and privates once every seven days. The commissioners at the Offices of the Interior shall establish special records for this purpose; e) for violations of these instructions, the officers commanding Offices of the Interior shall impose upon the guilty parties penalties up to and including garrison arrest. Failure to sign in as required shall be regarded as failure to report for duty;