Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  Goldfarb later claimed that, while Berezovsky was in on the negotiations, he actually opposed the rebel incursion. But political commentator Andrei Pointkovsky raised the question as to why, if Berezovsky really had been against the plan, he continued to support Putin even after the September bombings:

  Hundreds of people were killed and a war broke out in which tens of thousands would die. Mysterious bombings of apartment buildings took place, for which no one would claim responsibility. Was it not time, finally, to open the country’s eyes, to tell the shaken society about the Kremlin’s secret agreement and thereby stop the war?… Berezovsky believed in him [Putin] after this plan was realized before his very eyes? The person he fostered and continued to lead to the presidency?11

  Goldfarb later acknowledged:

  In retrospect, Berezovsky should have realized that Putin was not playing the limited war gambit developed by Udugov, but chose all-out war as the defining theme of his bid for the presidency.… He disagreed with Putin, but he had promised to steer clear of Chechnya. So he decided to leave this aside for a while. They were still part of the same team. They had an election to win, and Boris completely immersed himself in party politics.12

  The family decided that it needed an excuse to launch a second war in Chechnya as a means of rallying the Russian people around the new, relatively unknown Putin. But the violence in Dagestan was not enough to justify the full-fledged invasion of Chechnya that began in October. Something more was needed—hence the explosions. In the words of journalist and human-rights activist Alexander Podrabinek: “There was a lull after the first Chechen campaign [1994–96]. It seemed that now there would be peace. But the situation in Russia had developed in such a way that peace was disadvantageous to people who wanted to come to power. War was their ‘magic wand,’ it was their trump card, which they did not fail to take advantage of.”13

  Chechens Again As Enemies

  As Podrabinek noted, the authorities immediately attributed the September bombings to the Chechens, as if all had been planned beforehand: “Normally those in power—investigators and politicians—would show some restraint, at least to give the impression that they were thinking things through before making conclusions. But they did not pause. Right away they laid [the bombings] on the Chechens. It was clear that the authorities were prepared for this turn of events. The impression was that this came as no surprise. And this was confirmed by many later developments.”14

  In fact, the explosion in Buinaksk was subsequently blamed on natives of Dagestan, not Chechnya. But the alleged ringleader was Khattab, the so-called Black Arab, who was based in Chechnya and conducted training camps for rebel fighters there. In March 2001, the Supreme Court of Dagestan sentenced two men, Isa Zainutdinov and Alisultan Salikhov, to life imprisonment for carrying out the Buinaksk bombings, and four others to lesser sentences for their participation in the crime. (Although the Russian Constitution allows the death penalty, a moratorium was placed on executions in 1999, when Russia was seeking membership in the Council of Europe.) The same court, in April 2002, found Ziiavudin Ziiavudinov guilty of organizing the bombings and sentenced him to twenty-four years in prison. (Another alleged perpetrator, Magomed Salikhov, was tried separately and then, after being found not guilty, was subsequently killed in a confrontation with the FSB.)

  As Dunlop points out, the trials of the accused in the Buinaksk attack were carried out with gross violations of their rights—they were tortured and blackmailed and coerced into confessing. So it is difficult to know whether all of those charged—seven in all—were actually guilty. More significantly, the fact that these men were able to enter Dagestan from Chechnya freely with large amounts of explosives—their vehicles were inspected by the local MVD and FSB—suggests that security authorities had advance knowledge of the bombing. In fact, one of the accused, in his final statement at his trial, said: “The transport of the explosives had been shadowed from the very beginning to the end by the special services.”15 It should be added that a second bombing in Buinaksk that same night was barely averted. A Zhil-130 automobile with 2,706 kilograms of explosives was discovered in a parking lot near residential buildings and was disarmed by military sappers just minutes before it would have exploded.

  In May 2001, prosecutors announced that they were bringing five people to trial for the Moscow and Volgodonsk explosions. The five were all residents of the Karachay-Cherkessian Republic in the south of Russia. In the end, the accused were not found guilty of the bombings, but were convicted of a series of other terrorism-related crimes. It was not until two years later that a conviction was made in these bombings, which were said to have been carried out by members of a single terrorist group. Former traffic policeman Stanislav Liubichev was sentenced to four years in prison for accepting a bribe to allow a vehicle filled with explosives to enter into the city of Kislovodsk in the summer of 1999. The explosives were later used in the September bombings.

  Meanwhile, two alleged terrorists, ethnic Karachis Iusuf Krymshamkhalov and Adam Dekkushev, were arrested in Georgia in 2002 and extradited to Russia, where they were tried and convicted in January 2004 by a Moscow court of participation in the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings. The proceedings were carried out in secret with no members of the press allowed, and the defense lawyers claimed that prosecutors had falsified much of the evidence. While Dekkushev admitted his participation in the Volgodonsk bombing, he said that he had been given heavy narcotics. Krymshamkhalov acknowledged that he had transported explosives to Volgodonsk, but insisted he did not know that they were to be used for blowing up apartment houses. Both defendants got life sentences.

  Organizers and Masterminds

  The two convicted men were said to have been operating on the orders of Achemez Gochiaev, another native of Karachay-Cherkessiia. Gochiaev’s name had come up early on in the investigation as the alleged organizer of the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings. He had reportedly rented several premises in Moscow to plant explosives, including the building on Gurianova Street, and was said to be a direct subordinate of the warlord Khattab. The story of Gochiaev created much stir in the media but led to a dead end. Having disappeared, Gochiaev sent several communications to those conducting independent investigations into the bombings, in particular Aleksander Litvinenko and other members of the entourage around Berezovsky, who by this time had fled to London. He gave details about his role in the renting of storage areas in Moscow apartment buildings, but he claimed that he had not known what they were to be used for and that he had been framed. In exchange for information about the people he had dealt with in Moscow, Gochiaev, obviously aware of Berezovsky’s considerable wealth, asked for money.

  As Mikhail Trepashkin discovered, however, Gochiaev was not the person who had rented spaces for the explosives in Moscow. His photograph did not match the original composite photograph that had been compiled based on witnesses’ descriptions. The police had apparently doctored the photograph later to make it look like Gochiaev so that the real culprit would not be identified. After painstaking research, Trepashkin was able to identify this key person in the bombings as one Vladimir Romanovich, a shadowy figure with ties both to the FSB and the Moscow criminal underworld. Immediately after Trepashkin made his discovery public, the mysterious Romanovich was killed in a car crash in Cyprus; thus, in Trepashkin’s words, “the concrete trail of the zakazchik was broken.”16

  To sum up the paltry results of years of official investigations and prosecutions in the four bombings: seven men, Dagestanis, were convicted of organizing and carrying out the attack at Buinaksk, supposedly acting under the zakazchik Khattab. Two persons from the Karachay-Cherkassia, unemployed and eager to earn money, were convicted in the bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, but only as middlemen, not organizers. (A third individual was killed while Russian authorities were apprehending him in Georgia.) The man who organized the bombings, whether it was Romanovich or someone else, has never been apprehended and is probably dead. And the zakazchik again
was said to be Khattab.

  What is the evidence that Khattab was actually the person who ordered the 1999 bombings, rather than the FSB? Khattab was definitely a large presence in Chechnya at the time and viewed as a serious challenge by Russian authorities. Born in Saudi Arabia, he started his career as an international jihadist in Afghanistan, joining the mujahidin just as the Russians were withdrawing their troops from the country. He then moved to Tadzhikistan in 1994 and on to Chechnya in 1995, where he aligned himself with Chechen rebel Shamil Basaev and set up training camps for fighters against the Russians. Khattab supposedly was charismatic and able to recruit Muslims of all nationalities to the struggle against the Russians. And he apparently had his own resources and funding that could be used to recruit people to carry out terrorist missions.17

  As several observers have pointed out, however, neither Khattab nor Basaev had any motive for bombing innocent Russian citizens. Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, authors of the book Blowing Up Russia, noted that “the Chechens knew it was not in their interest to carry out any terrorist attacks. Public opinion was on their side, and public opinion, both Russian and international, was more valuable to them than two or three hundred lives abruptly cut short.”18 General Aleksandr Lebed, governor of Krasnoyarsk District at the time, concurred: “Any Chechen commander who wanted revenge would have begun to blow up [Russian] generals. He would have struck at the buildings of the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the FSB, or at weapons storage areas or at atomic electric power stations. He would not have chosen as a target simple and innocent people.”19

  Khattab himself reportedly told an AP journalist around the time of the blasts that he and his rebels intended to bomb Russian cities. But he then insisted to the Interfax news agency on September 14, 1999 that he had nothing to do with the bombings: “We would not like to be akin to those who kill sleeping civilians with bombs and shells.”20 Russian authorities reportedly spent a year planning Khattab’s assassination. Their intelligence agents eventually managed to infiltrate themselves into Khattab’s Chechen enclave, and in March 2002 one of them handed over a letter to Khattab that was laced with poison. He died within hours.21

  The FSB as Prime Suspect

  The most persuasive evidence against the theory of Khattab as mastermind, supposedly in retaliation for the Russian incursion into Dagestan, is that the bombings could not have been planned and executed in the short time after the Russian foray there in August 1999. As journalist David Satter has pointed out, determining targets, renting spaces, and preparing and transporting explosives required several months’ time.22 And then of course there is the fact that the bombs contained hexogen (RDX), which is considered the most powerful of military explosives and is difficult to obtain. It became known, however, that a scientific research center in Moscow, Roskonversvzryvtsentr, served as storage place for hexogen from military sources and that the director of the center was conducting illegal trade in the explosive under the watchful eyes of the FSB.23

  Clearly, Russian law-enforcement authorities, with significant investigative tools and legal powers at their disposal, failed miserably in uncovering the real culprits in these explosions. It is thus reasonable to conclude that the Russian government never intended to unravel the secrets behind the bombings. That the authorities went through the motions in their investigations without actually producing results suggests strongly that Putin and the FSB were complicit in a cover-up. In addition, there is considerable evidence that the security services knew about the bombings before they happened.

  Among such evidence is an episode that occurred in the Duma on September 13, 1999. Duma speaker Gennadii Seleznev, a Communist, announced that he had just received a report that an apartment building in Volgodonsk had been bombed the previous night. But this was three days before the bombing in that city actually took place—on September 16! LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky asked Seleznev at a Duma session on September 17 how he possibly could have informed the Duma about the explosion three days before it happened, and Seleznev avoided a direct answer. When asked several years later about his announcement, Seleznev said he could not remember what he had said, but that he had had no forehand knowledge that there would be a terrorist incident in Volgodonsk. He claimed that Zhirinovsky had simply stirred up a scandal over his statement. But of course there is a stenographic record of what was said in the Duma, so Seleznev’s denials were futile.24

  Kremlin sources offered a feeble explanation for Seleznev’s September 13 announcement—that there actually had been a small explosion in Volgodonsk the evening before. According to the Volgodonsk MVD, an improvised explosive device made from a hand grenade blew up on the street at six in the evening on September 12, slightly wounding three people. But Seleznev had specifically referred to an apartment house, and this small explosion, with no casualties, would hardly have merited an announcement in the Duma. It is worth noting that Seleznev had close ties to the security services through the ad hoc Academy of National Security that he had established in St. Petersburg. It is very likely that, through these connections, Seleznev received advance information about the Volgodonsk bombing. And probable that he mistakenly referred to Volgodonsk, where a bombing was planned, instead of where a terrorist bomb actually had exploded at 5 A.M. on September 13—on Kashirskoe Highway in Moscow.

  The Scandal Over Ryazan

  For those who have studied the 1999 bombings, the smoking gun that pointed directly to the FSB as perpetrator of these attacks was the now-famous incident that occurred in the city of Ryazan, which is about 120 miles southeast of Moscow.25 On the evening of September 22, six days after the Volgodonsk blast, residents of an apartment house on Novoselov Street noticed three suspicious strangers, two men and a woman, exiting the basement of the building. After the three drove off in a white Russian-made car, a Zhiguli, the residents called the local police. The police discovered three sacks of what looked like sugar in the basement, along with a timed electrical device. While the police, soon joined by FSB officers, took the sacks out of the building, residents of the seventy-seven apartments were evacuated (all but a few invalids who could not be moved).

  A source of considerable controversy about whether the sacks contained explosives was the fact that when explosive experts tried to detonate the substance, nothing happened. Yet a gas analyzer got a positive reading for the presence of hexogen. One explanation for the discrepancy was that the amount tested for detonation was very small, and presumably an explosion would have taken place if all three sacks had been ignited when the electrical device went off at the time it was set for, 5:30 A.M. on September 23.26

  Whatever the case, local authorities, both MVD and FSB, were convinced that they had averted a terrible explosion; they then scoured the city for other bombs. On the morning of September 23, the Russian media duly reported, with great sensation, that a bomb attack had been averted in Ryazan. Prime Minister Putin, in a brief public statement that morning, seemed to concur: “If the sacks which proved to contain explosives were noticed, then there is a positive side to it.” On September 24, MVD Chief Vladimir Rushailo, who headed a special commission for combating terrorism, also spoke about the thwarting of the terrorist attack in Ryazan and praised the local authorities for their vigilance.27

  But in the meantime, on the evening of September 23, two of the suspects who had planted the bags in the basement of the apartment on Novoselov Street had been apprehended by local authorities in Ryazan. It turned out that they were employees of the FSB and thus were released on the orders of FSB headquarters in Moscow. Now it was time for damage control on the part of the FSB leadership. On the morning of September 24, shortly after Rushailo spoke, FSB chief Patrushev weighed in with a surprising announcement on nationwide television: there had never been a real bomb in the Ryazan apartment house. The sacks contained no explosives and were placed there as part of a “training exercise” to test the public’s vigilance. The people of Ryazan and the local enforcement agencies were outrag
ed. And indeed, even the Ryazan FSB branch was caught off-guard, issuing a statement that “the information about [a training exercise] was for us completely unexpected and came just when our FSB department had located in Ryazan the people who planted the explosives and were detaining them.”28

  On September 27, the FSB closed its investigation into the episode of suspicious sacks in the Ryazan apartment building because of the “absence of criminal acts.” The residents of the building in question were not satisfied and wanted to press a case against the FSB in court. They were put under heavy pressure by the local FSB to drop their complaint, which they did.

  The Russian Procuracy looked into the matter further, but without result. On March 22, 2000, four days before the presidential elections which gave Putin a resounding victory, it pronounced its decision: “a criminal case will not be opened in relation to employees of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation involved in the training exercises in Ryazan.”29 All official documents relating to the incident were sealed.

  That same day, in an effort at damage control, Gennadii Zaitsev, former commander of the FSB’s elite “Alpha” troops, along with a retired commander of the FSB’s crack Vympel division, Dmitrii Gerasimov, elaborated on the “training exercise” in Ryazan. Gerasimov claimed that no live detonating devices had been used in the venture, and Zaitsev added that members of Vympel arrived in Ryazan and bought sacks of sugar at a market in preparation for a planned test: “It could not possibly have been an explosive. The experts [the bomb squad that arrived on the scene the night of September 22] simply ignored basic rules and used dirty instruments on which there were traces of explosives from previous analyses.”30

  Meanwhile, on March 13, an enterprising journalist from Novaia gazeta published an article claiming that a military arms depot just thirty kilometers from Ryazan housed a large cache of hexogen in bags marked “sugar.”31 This seemed to confirm that the three bags in the basement of the Novoselov apartments contained the same substance. Then on March 23, 2000, the television channel NTV aired a program titled “Ryazan Sugar,” in which residents of the apartment house questioned three high-ranking FSB generals about what happened on the evening of September 22. The generals were unable to reply satisfactorily to any of their questions. According to David Satter: “When the program ended, the residents were more convinced than ever that they had been unwitting pawns in an FSB plot and had only through a miracle escaped with their lives.”32 Not surprisingly, in May 2000, Russian tax police stormed the headquarters of NTV, and Vladimir Gusinsky, the predominant shareholder in the station, was forced to sell out to the state-owned Gazprom as a guarantee that he would not be prosecuted.