Alexander Litvinenko
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Yushenkov: This question has already been asked.
El País: Already been asked? I m sorry. But is this man from the FSB or not? (Audience laughter.) Felshtinsky: The last time Sasha answered, so I ll answer now. You see, what we ve shown you, what we ve received, is, I repeat, the first and so far the only written testimony of Gochiyaev s that we possess. I repeat: the assumption was - for Gochiyaev evidently, and for us of course - that this contact would continue.
On what grounds did Gochiyaev choose not to reveal the man s name (which we were very interested in, and believe me, this question was posed repeatedly, stubbornly and insistently) - I cannot now say. But as Alexander explained, to determine this man s name is a couple of days work for any investigator.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta: I have a question for the members of the Commission. Sergei Adamovich, you said that you re making use of official inquiry requests - sending letters to various agencies, government offices. I d like to know concretely: to what agencies, and how do they react? Are they receptive? Who tries to ignore you, and who [& ]?
Kovalyov: You see, I deliberately said that today there won t be any details about this issue. Probably, there won t be any details for quite a while. Why? I ll tell you. We re not limiting ourselves to isolated inquiry requests. We re engaged in an active correspondence. I have some experience from the 60s-80s, if you like. Not every response& You make a report about the correspondence only once you clearly understand that the correspondence is over, that everyone s position has been established and will not change. Then you can present it before the public.
Yushenkov: Some people have given very detailed answers.
Kovalyov: The most substantive and detailed answer came from the Minister of Education, Mr. Filippov.
Yushenkov: Simply about hexogene. About that research institute.
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As I understand it, there are no more questions. Our thanks to the reporters. Thank you, Alexander, Tatyana, Yuri. Sergei Adamovich, we ll conclude this part of the meeting for today, yes? Do the members of the Commission have any questions? When will we have our next meeting? [& ] Yes, fine. Respected reporters, thank you. Maybe we ll call a break and then meet in here? All right, so we ll call a break for the Commission members. Thank you, Alexander, Tatyana, Yuri. Goodbye.
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Appendix 15 An open letter to the Commission for the Investigation of the Bombings of Apartment Blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk by Krymshamkhalov and Batchaev Esteemed Commission!
By force of circumstances we have found ourselves accomplices in a crime that took the lives of almost three hundred people. We are referring to the terrorist acts of September 1999 in Moscow and Volgodonsk.
Since then we have been declared wanted criminals at the federal and international levels and been obliged to hide from the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation.
Since September 1999 the special services of Russia have undertaken repeated attempts to arrest us or eliminate us. As a result of the statement made recently by Gochiyaev and ourselves in recent times these attempts have become more determined. It seems that in the near future our fate will indeed be arrest or death.
These are the reasons why we wish precisely at this time to address you in an open letter.
1. We confess to being accomplices in the terrorist acts that took place in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999.
We declare that neither Khattab, nor Basaev, nor any of the Chechen field commanders had any connection whatever with the terrorist acts of September 1999.
We met Khattab and certain field commanders for the first time only after we had fled to Chechnya to evade pursuit by the Russian agencies of law enforcement following the terrorist acts.
2. We are accomplices in the terrorist acts at the very lowest level of execution, and we have no involvement at all with the actual explosions. We were only involved in transporting sacks, which we believed to contain explosive, for temporary storage and for subsequent use to blow up administrative buildings of the special services and military buildings, not apartment blocks.
We did not expect that the explosions would take place where the sacks were stored, in the basements of apartment blocks. We did not know the time when the terrorist acts were to be carried out.
Having learned of the explosions we fled to Chechnya.
3. Not being Chechens by nationality, we were sincere supporters of the Chechen people s struggle for independence. It is precisely these views of ours which allowed the
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people who were really behind the organization and execution of the terrorist acts in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999 to recruit us to take part in the organization of the terrorist acts. Today we understand that we were used blindfold and that in 1999 we did not understand who our commanders actually were and for whom we were actually working.
Today we understand this and we know. It has taken almost three years to come to terms with what happened, to gather the information and the proof of who actually stood behind us.
Many of those who took part in the September 1999 operations in Moscow, Volgodonsk, Ryazan and Dagestan are no longer alive. As long as we are alive, we want everyone to know what is most important. According to the information we have gathered, received from various participants in the operation at various levels, the instigator of the bombing operation in Russia in September 1999 was the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation. In this connection the name of the director of the FSB, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, was mentioned repeatedly.
The curator of the entire bombing program was German Ugriumov, who was subsequently eliminated, according to our information, by the FSB itself. According to our information the total number of members of the group was over thirty. We know only two of them as managers of the middle-level team: a lieutenant colonel, a Tatar by nationality, with the nickname (pseudonym) of Abubakar; 2) a colonel, a Russian by nationality, with the pseudonym of Abulgafur. We assume that Abulgafur and the wellknown Russian special services agent Max Lazovsky are one and the same person.
4. We have been implicated in a tragedy for the Chechen and Russian peoples. We beg forgiveness from those to whom we brought grief in September 1999. We also beg forgiveness from the Chechen people for being used blindfold by the FSB to begin the second Chechen war. We do not ask leniency for ourselves and we shall dedicate the remainder of our lives to the Chechen people s struggle for independence.
Yusuf Ibragimovich Krymshamkhalov, Karachaevan, born November 16, 1966
[signature]
Timur Amurovich Batchaev, Karachaevan, born June 27, 1978
[signature]
July 28, 2002
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Appendix 16
Yuri Felshtinsky
INTERVIEW WITH INTERNET SITE SOMNENIE.NAROD.RU
19 September 2002
The War to Destroy Witnesses - Yuri Georgievich, none of your articles or interviews are appearing in the press. Are reporters not interested or are you not talking to anyone?
During this whole time since 27 August 2001, when Novaya Gazeta published excerpts from my and Alexander Litvinenko s book, The FSB Blows Up Russia, Russian reporters have contacted me twice. In both instances, I gave exhaustive answers to all their questions. Several reporters from Western radio stations, including Radio Liberty, have called me to request interviews. I ve given interviews to absolutely everyone who s asked.
What s most astonishing to me as a scholar and a historian is the fact the Russian reporters don t feel professionally obligated to call me or Litvinenko before printing an article that contains various assumptions and guesses (very often erroneous ones, by the way) and to ask us the questions that interest them. Neither I nor, as far as I know, my coauthor, Alexander Litvinenko, has ever refused to give an interview to a reporter. Anyone who wants to know my phone number can find it through an American internet search en
gine in a few seconds. And common acquaintances are never hard to find. The problem isn t that we re hard to reach, it s that people have no desire in find out the truth.
Despite all the details that need more work (for which I was the first to criticize you, quite severely), one thing is certain: you have done more than anyone else for a public investigation of these events. When did you become interested in this topic? Was it Boris Berezovsky s idea?
The idea to work on the topic of the bombings was my own. Litvinenko (I ll call him Alexander from now on - it sounds a bit too formal otherwise) was still in Moscow at the time, recently released from prison. I collected some materials. It became clear that this topic was worth developing. I should point out that I ve studied Soviet history my whole adult life: Stolypin, the Revolution, Soviet-German relations, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin&
Scientific (historical) research was a genre that was quite familiar to me.
It was in this familiar genre that I began investigating the apartment-house bombings in Russia in September 1999. But I didn t have enough inside information. There are certain purely psychological elements that a person who hasn t worked in the Russian security services simply isn t aware of.
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Even now, the biggest problem that readers have with our book is psychological. It s very hard to believe that an officer of the Russian security services (FSB or GRU) can blow up an apartment building. All the facts, documents, and evidence are on our side. But the ordinary person finds it so hard to believe them that he keeps looking for other, more understandable explanations, although these explanations aren t supported by any facts.
They make life easier, though. And the reader lives in Russia (it s easier for me, I live in Boston). Russians living abroad, by the way, generally don t have this problem. Nor do Western readers. In the West, it s well known what the FSB is capable of, and no one says, that s impossible.
So I didn t have enough inside information. I flew to Moscow, to meet with Alexander, whom I ve known since 1998. I told him I d been doing research on the bombings for several months. I told him I had definite suspicions and asked him to help me in my research.
We were already being very cautious, as far as this was possible. Alexander was constantly being watched. Two surveillance cars, with three people in each, followed him all day and waited outside his apartment building at night& We went out of town, to the woods, and talked in a whisper. Alexander said that he would start working on the matter.
I flew back home to the US. And this turned out to be my last trip to Russia.
After some time, Alexander sent word that he had gathered some very important and interesting documents about the bombings, that they completely corroborate my account of the events, and that he considers it imperative to continue working on this topic.
By this time it was clear that Alexander and his family would not be allowed to live in peace in Russia. The public prosecutor s office had a number of completely trumped-up charges against him, all of which fell apart one after the other. But they wanted very badly to convict him. He had gone against the system (the FSB) and the system sought revenge. I urged Alexander to consider emigrating from Russia, since both he and his family were in danger of being killed. In fact, threats were made against his family. And then, on top of everything else, there was our book. To write it in Russia was just suicide& The conclusion of this part of Alexander s biography is now well known.
Alexander left Russia and managed to make it to England. In his very first interview in London, he said that he d left Russia because he possessed materials about the involvement of the Russian security services in the September 1999 apartment-house bombings. No one at the time paid any attention to this interview.
In the summer of 2001 the manuscript was more or less complete. We gave it to several people to read. One of them was Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, with whom both I and Alexander were well acquainted. B.A. read the manuscript and asked: So what will you do now?
I replied:
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We will try offering this text to Novaya Gazeta. They ve covered the topic extensively. I think they should have first publication rights.
B.A.: And what will happen, in your opinion?
Well, it s obvious what will happen&
And then, in glowing colors, I proceeded to describe a triumphant procession: how the Duma and the President s Office will be flooded with inquiries, how a Duma commission will be formed to investigate the September bombings, how Putin will remove Patrushev - at least while the commission is investigating the bombings, since otherwise it will become obvious that the president was in league with Patrushev and other terrorists&
B.A. waited until I finished and said: Do you want me to tell you what will happen?
Well?
Nothing will happen.
What do you mean, nothing will happen? We will publish this text - and nothing will happen?!
Nothing will happen.
On August 27 Novaya Gazeta put out a special edition with large excerpts from our book.
And nothing happened.
Some time later, when I met B.A. again, he asked me: Well?
We both knew what the question was about. I just hung my head and thought: He was right, as always&
There were, of course, responses to our publication. I don t want to go over them in detail now. Let s just say that many of these articles revealed more about their authors than they did about us and our book&
An English edition of the book was published in the beginning of January 2002, in New York, with the title Blowing Up Russia. Again, silence. (Work was in full swing on a documentary film - Assassination of Russia - but only a few people knew about it.) A Russian edition came out at the end of January, again in New York. And again, silence.
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And then I sent a copy of the book to Berezovsky. Unexpectedly for us, in a February interview on NTV, he displayed it on the air to the whole country and said that the FSB was behind the apartment-house bombings in Russia. That s when things started to happen. Everyone suddenly became interested in the bombings. And ever since then, people haven t stopped asking me and Alexander questions& about Berezovsky.
We are extremely grateful to Boris Abramovich for making our book world-famous. We realize that it s only because of him that this issue got into headlines all over the world.
It s only because of him that this issue now will never be forgotten, and that sooner or later the question of who was behind the bombings in Russia in September 1999 will have to be answered. And believe me, the defendants in this trial will yet sit in the dock, and a verdict will yet be read. And everyone who took part in this event, the worst terrorist attack in Russian history, will be named. And all of this, only because of B.A.
Berezovsky.
When I read articles by Russian reporters - whose own buildings, really, were blown up by the FSB and the GRU in September 1999 - and when I find statements such as: The authors account of the events would look more credible if the documentary had no connection to Berezovsky, then I recall the period between the end of August 2001 and the middle of February 2002, when our more credible account had no connection to Berezovsky and no one paid any attention to it at all.
In your view, how many more years will the public investigation of the bombings take?
Or is everything already clear to you?
You know, what is going on in Russia now, in connection with our investigation, reflects the state of mind in Russia more than it does the actual regrettable bombings.
After all, the bombings were organized by a relatively compact group of people - a few dozen individuals. They are unquestionably evildoers. They are obviously terrorists.
They are obviously members of a terrorist organization.
This terrorist organization is called Russian national security.
Yes, everything is already clear to us. We don t know all the perpetr
ators by name. But that s not so important. It s not our responsibility to bring this matter to trial. It s Russia s responsibility, the responsibility of Russian law enforcement. Plus, many of these people are no longer living. We know that the bombings in Moscow and in Volgodonsk were carried out by the FSB in collaboration with the GRU; that the explosion of the building in Buinaksk on September 4 was carried out by a 12-man team from the GRU.