Orders to Kill
Page 11
Iushenkov was an especially prominent parliamentarian, and his death was devastating to his colleagues in the political world. Boris Nemtsov, at the time the leader of the Duma faction Union of Right Forces, noted that Iushenkov was a key inspiration of Russia’s democratic movement and that he was a person of flawless reputation. (Ironically, given his own assassination almost twelve years later, Nemtsov added that he hoped this time [italics added] the murderers would be found.)14
Iushenkov, who was fifty-three years old when he died, first entered politics in 1990, when the Soviet Union was still an entity, representing the bloc Democratic Russia as a deputy to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet (later the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation). He was one of those who defended Yeltsin and his supporters at the Russian White House during the coup attempt in August 1991 by organizing a chain of civilians to block a possible assault by KGB troops. Iushenkov was elected a deputy to the Russian Duma in 1993 and was at the time of his death a vice-chairman of the Duma Committee on Security. He was a rarity among politicians, in that he had no interest in reaping the rewards of the privatization of state enterprises that occurred under Yeltsin. As political analyst Leonid Radzikhovskii observed, he was among a small minority that “did not become wealthy in politics, who didn’t steal, whether directly or through hidden connections,” although he “had every chance, whenever he wished, to take part in the winners’ feast, in the privatization of government property.… To him, it was repulsive.”15
In 2000, Iushenkov founded, with Boris Berezovsky, the movement Liberal Russia, which in March 2002 became a party. The goals of the party were to promote small and medium businesses and to turn Russia into a European-style democracy. Berezovsky’s presence in the party’s leadership became a source of contention, however, especially since Russian authorities apparently were refusing to register the party as long as Berezovsky, living in London and now a bitter foe of Putin, was a part of its ruling body. In October 2002, Berezovsky was removed from the leadership of Liberal Russia. In the meantime, on August 21, 2002, one of Liberal Russia’s leaders, Duma deputy Vladimir Golovlev, was shot dead on the street near his Moscow home while walking his dog. His killers were never found.
Iushenkov was not deterred by Golovlev’s murder from pressing forward with his political agenda. At the beginning of March 2003, he flew to London and had talks with Berezovsky, with whom he reconciled despite past differences, about strategies for Liberal Russia in the months leading up to the December parliamentary elections. One plan that Iushenkov had in mind was to organize mass protests against the authoritarian measures of the Putin regime and the war in Chechnya. After Iushenkov was murdered, Liberal Russia foundered and did not gain the required votes to have its candidates participate in elections.16
Investigation of the Iushenkov Murder
Russian investigators acted quickly in the Iushenkov case, rounding up two suspects, including the alleged zakazchik, and charged them by June 2003. (Four others would later be detained.) The suspects were held in Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo Prison. The investigation was led by Procurator-General Vladimir Ustinov and deputy MVD chief Rashid Nurgaliev, both of whom could be counted on to create a Kremlin-inspired scenario of the murder. The alleged mastermind of the murder was Mikhail Kodanev, a leader of Liberal Russia along with Iushenkov. Kodanev was accused of hiring his party aide, Aleksandr Vinnik, to carry out the crime, along with four accomplices, all of whom had criminal records. Supposedly, Kodanev’s motives were that he was being pushed out of the leadership of Liberal Russia by Iushenkov and that he wanted the money Berezovsky had contributed to the party for himself.17
Berezovsky, who had met with Kodanev several times in London, insisted publicly that Kodanev could not possibly have ordered Iushenkov’s murder, because he had no motive. And Kodanev’s defense attorney, who was hired by Berezovsky, pointed out at the trial, which began in March 2004, how sloppy the investigators had been. The case against Kodanev rested solely on the testimony of Vinnik, which was highly contradictory. Vinnik gave conflicting accounts of his meeting with Kodanev, who had allegedly paid him $50,000 to kill Iushenkov. It was never made clear where the money had come from or what Vinnik had done with it. Investigators did not bother to follow up. Vinnik claimed that Kodanev had told him that he wanted Iushenkov dead because the latter had made an agreement with Berezovsky that gave Kodanev a lesser role in Liberal Russia. Yet he said that Kodanev paid him the money to kill Iushenkov in February 2003, before the meeting between Iushenkov and Berezovsky in London over the fate of the party took place.18
The jury found Kodanev guilty, along with Vinnik and two accomplices. Kodanev was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. Grigorii Pasko, a journalist and environmental activist who had been persecuted by the FSB and had become associated with Iushenkov not long before his death, connected the Kremlin directly with the murder. Pasko stated: “Who killed Sergei Iushenkov? I would like to remind [you] here that FSB Major-General Alexander Mikhailov threatened Sergei Iushenkov directly on television, in the talk show Poedinok (Duel). Everyone saw and heard the general saying: ‘Mr. Iushenkov, we will take care of you later on.’”19
Berezovsky maintained from London that the Kremlin was behind the murder as part of an effort to thwart challenges from democratic parties in the forthcoming Duma elections: “You have to look at the pattern: two of our party members have been killed, and I cannot enter Russia.”20 But others pointed out that Liberal Russia had so little support among the population that it did not pose an electoral threat to the Kremlin. Most probably it was a combination of factors that made Iushenkov a target for murder, especially his public contention that the FSB had organized the September 1999 bombings.
Iushenkov and the FSB
Iushenkov had flown to London in March 2002 for the world premier of Assassination of Russia, the above-mentioned documentary about the FSB’s role in the 1999 explosions. He returned to Russia with copies of the film to be distributed all over the country, including in the Duma. The next month, Iushenkov carried his campaign to publicize the FSB’s involvement in the bombings to the United States. He showed the film on Capitol Hill, at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and at Harvard and Columbia universities. According to Alex Goldfarb, who accompanied Iushenkov for much of his tour: “Invariably he made a strong impression. He was a good speaker and he projected passion and conviction.”21
The Kremlin cannot have been happy about Iushenkov’s promotion of Assassination of Russia, especially at a time when Putin was engaging in a charm offensive toward the West, trying to convince Western leaders that he was a reliable partner in the battle against international terrorism. Then, of course, as co-chairman of the Kovalev Commission, Iushenkov began pressuring Russian authorities to furnish information that they had refused to release on the bombings. As he told Goldfarb: “I don’t have to prove anything. The government has been accused of mass murder of its own citizens, and half of the people believe it; this is enough for me. Presumption of innocence does not apply to governments; it’s a device to protect people from the government. Putin has an obligation to dispel the suspicions.”22
A further source of Kremlin ire toward Iushenkov was undoubtedly his questioning of the FSB’s role in the October 2002 Moscow theater siege. In early 2003, the Kovalev Commission expanded its purview to look into the circumstances of the siege. There were several aspects of the hostage crisis that suggested the FSB had inspired the attack, not the least of which was that fifty known Chechen terrorists had gathered in Moscow with weapons and explosives under the very nose of the FSB. And once the terrorists were finally incapacitated by the poison gas that had been funneled into the theater, why had the police and the FSB reportedly executed all of them, instead of keeping them alive to provide valuable information?23
In fact, Chechen sources in London claimed that one of the terrorists, Khanpash Terkibaev, had in fact escaped the theater and was living in hiding in Chechnya. Terkibaev was suspected
of being an agent of the FSB, and a file on him was handed over to Iushenkov by Litvinenko when Iushenkov was in London in early April 2003. Iushenkov then gave the file to Anna Politkovskaya—who, ten days after Iushenkov was shot, published a sensational article based on interviews with Terkibaev, in which she alleged that the authorities had known about the hostage seizure before it happened.24
Alex Goldfarb recalls that he was initially “of two minds” about who had ordered Iushenkov’s murder, especially when the authorities first came up with a zakazchik, Kodanev, who seemed to have a motive: Kodanev was losing his standing in Liberal Russia after Iushenkov reconciled with Berezovsky. But Litvinenko, who Goldfarb saw often in London, convinced him that indeed the FSB had ordered the murder. The two killers, Litvinenko noted, were drug addicts who had probably been recruited by the FSB when they were in jail with promises of a reduction in their sentences for drug activity if they carried out the killing and named Vinnik as the organizer. Vinnik was apparently told he would get a lesser sentence if he in turn accused Kodanev. This was, according to Litvinenko, a classic FSB operation. There would be others.25
Iurii Shchekochikhin
Iurii Shchekochikhin, a member of the Kovalev Commission, a Duma deputy from the Yabloko Party and one of Russia’s most respected investigative journalists, died suddenly in July 2003 at the age of fifty-three from apparent poisoning. A 1975 graduate of the journalism department of Moscow State University, Shchekochikhin had worked as a reporter for several leading Russian newspapers and since 1996 had been a journalist for Novaia gazeta, where he became deputy editor. He was an outspoken critic of both the first and second Chechen wars and was among the first to voice skepticism toward official versions of such incidences as the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster, in which the entire crew perished, and the Moscow theater hostage crisis.26
In addition to his work for the Kovalev Commission, Shchekochikhin had been investigating the corruption scandal involving a large Moscow furniture store called Three Whales [Tri Kita], whose managers were suspected of weapons-smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion, and bribery of government authorities, in particular customs officials and employees of the MVD, FSB, and Procuracy. After Shchekochikhin published a story in early 2002 noting that millions of dollars had been laundered by owners of the Three Whales, rumors abounded about the involvement of top law-enforcement officials, who were allegedly using the furniture business to funnel vast sums of money through the Bank of New York. In apparent retaliation for his revelations, Shchekochikhin was beaten up outside his home by unknown assailants, and he received death threats against himself and his family, which prompted him to hire security protection for one of his sons. He remained steadfast. In February 2003, his party Yabloko issued a defiant statement: “If the life of a journalist and his family is the price to pay for telling the truth, then there is no freedom of speech in the country.”27
Shchekochikhin kept digging, using his Duma position to request interviews from government figures and gain access to documents. He also wrote to Putin directly, requesting that Putin intervene in the Three Whales case. Although Putin said he would, nothing ever came of it. This is hardly surprising, given that senior officials from the security services were implicated. On June 2, 2003, Shchekochikhin published yet another article in Novaia gazeta, providing new details of the far-reaching corruption in the case. He observed that, whereas authorities in Europe and the United States had arrested people connected to the affair, Russian law-enforcement agencies had done nothing. He concluded: “Do not tell me fairy tales about the independence of judges. Until we see a fair trial, the documents of the case will be eliminated, witnesses intimidated or killed, and investigators themselves prosecuted.”28
Shchekochikhin, a member of both the Duma Anti-Corruption Committee and the Security Committee, was also investigating financial malfeasance on the part of former Minister of Atomic Energy Evgenii Adamov. Shchekochikhin uncovered evidence that Adamov had stolen millions of dollars that the U.S. Department of Energy had given to Russia to improve its nuclear security. In March 2003, Shchekochikhin passed on a report against Adamov to the Procuracy, but with no result. Adamov was finally arrested in Switzerland in 2005 and extradited to Russia. Despite the fact that he was found to have defrauded the Russian government of $31 million and convicted of these charges by a Moscow court in February 2008, his sentence was suspended by a higher court two months later, and he was released from prison.29
Shchekochikhin Meets His Fate
Shortly before his death, Shchekochikhin met in Moscow with officials from the FBI to discuss the Three Whales scandal and its connection to the Bank of New York. He was planning on flying to the United States in early July to testify about the case, as well as about Adamov’s defrauding of the Russian government. But he never made the trip. In mid-June he fell ill, and was hospitalized in grave condition on June 21.
Shchekochikhin’s death, on July 3, was excruciating. He lost his hair, his skin peeled off his body, and he suffered failure of all his major organs—kidney, liver, lung, and brain. His wife, Nadezda Azhgikhina, herself a journalist, told me that when she saw her husband’s body after he died, he was unrecognizable: “he was only fifty-three and he looked like a man in his eighties.”30 Officially the cause of death was toxic epidermal necrolysis, also known as Lyell’s syndrome, a very rare and often deadly affliction that is usually caused by an allergic reaction to drugs. But in this case doctors could not establish the substance that caused the reaction. Shchekochikhin did not take any medications, and his only allergy was to honey. When Shchekochikhin’s family requested his medical records so that they could learn more about his illness, they were told that information about the diagnosis and treatment was a “medical secret.” Later, when pressed, the Procuracy claimed that Shchekochikhin’s medical record had been accidentally thrown out by a charwoman.31
The Procuracy did not initiate a criminal investigation into Shchekochikhin’s death on the grounds that the cause had been established. But in 2008, his family and former newspaper colleagues managed to persuade the Russian Investigative Committee to open another investigation. The process was short-lived, and the case was soon closed again. Sergei Sokolov, Shchekochikhin’s newspaper colleague, stated in 2010 that he and his colleagues had new evidence that they were looking into and that they would get to the bottom of the case. But the years have passed, and still there are no answers.32 His widow remains hopeful: “I do believe, and so does Grigory Yavlinsky [leader of the Yabloko party], that we will know the truth sooner or later.… We are waiting until someone will be ready to talk,” she told me.33 Shchekochikhin was hardly the only one in Russia to write about high-level corruption, but what probably sealed his fate was his giving of information to the FBI and his planned trip to the United States to present testimony. As with Iushenkov (and later Nemtsov), approaching the Americans was something that would not be tolerated by the Kremlin; Shchekochikhin had crossed a tripwire.
Paul Klebnikov
A little over a year after Shchekochikhin’s death, another muckraking journalist died in Moscow, this time an American. On July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian-language Forbes magazine, was walking from his office to the subway at around 9:30 P.M. when a Zhiguli automobile drew up beside him and its tinted windows were lowered. Klebnikov was shot four times in the chest and stomach and once in the head. The editor of the Russian edition of Newsweek, Aleksandr Gordeev, happened to be nearby and rushed to the scene. Klebnikov was still conscious and able to tell him that he had seen the face of the killer—a dark-haired man thirty to thirty-five years old. Emergency medics came quickly and took Klebnikov to the hospital, but he died in the hospital elevator. Two unidentified persons had pushed their way into the elevator cab, despite pleas of medics that it was overloaded. The cab fell to the basement floor, where its doors were stuck for fifteen minutes as Klebnikov lay dying.34
The forty-one-year-old Klebnikov, who was descended from a family of
prominent Russians, left behind a wife, Musa, and three small children, who lived in the United States but visited Moscow often. Klebnikov had intended only to spend a year in Russia working for Forbes and then to return to his family. Just the day before he was killed, he had sat with Musa at a Moscow playground, watching one of their boys play in the bright sunshine, before Musa and the children flew back home.35
Klebnikov’s most recent piece for Forbes had listed the hundred wealthiest businessmen in Russia, which could hardly have endeared him to the Kremlin, given that several of these men were close to Putin. First on the list was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with a net worth of over $15 billion. (Khodorkovsky had been arrested by Russian authorities on charges of tax evasion and fraud the year before.) Second was Roman Abramovich, with a net worth of $12.5 billion.36 Although he was generally optimistic about Russia and its future, in an interview the morning of his murder Klebnikov had this to say: “It [the government] is meddling in absolutely everything it thinks should be meddled in. All too soon, we may begin talking of another danger. Instead of [this danger] being posed by oligarchs, it will be posed by the bureaucratic machinery applying the law as it sees fit.”37
Russian Authorities Respond Quickly
Literally hours after Klebnikov’s killing, Russian authorities claimed that Chechens were the perpetrators, thus reinforcing the Kremlin’s familiar line about Chechen terrorists. Then, after an almost year-long investigation, the Procurator-General announced in June 2005 the identity of five Chechens who were involved in the killing. Three were in custody—Kazbek Dukuzov, Musa Vakhaev, and Fail Sadretdinov—but two others remained at large, including the alleged mastermind, Chechen rebel leader Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who was said to have paid the killers to carry out the murder. Nukhaev, according to the Procuracy’s account, was motivated by a 2003 book Klebnikov had published about him in Russia, A Conversation with a Barbarian, which was based on extensive interviews the journalist had conducted with Nukhaev in Baku, Azerbaijan.38