The only person to suffer as a result of Shchekochikhin s inquiry was the head of the Moscow UFSB and deputy director of the FSB of Russia, Anatoly Trofimov, who was removed from his post in February 1997. Sergei Yastrzhembsky, press secretary to the president of Russia, declared that Trofimov had been removed for gross irregularities exposed by an inquiry conducted by the Accounting Chamber of the Russian Federation and dereliction of duty. It is widely believed, however, that Trofimov was simply made a scapegoat.
According to another version of events, Trofimov was dismissed because he attempted to do something about the substance of Shchekochikhin s inquiry. Supposedly, having read the letter of inquiry, Trofimov summoned one of his deputies and ordered him to draw up the paperwork for the dismissal of all the members of the FSB who were mentioned in it.
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His deputy refused. Trofimov then suggested that he should submit his resignation. In the end, the scandal surrounding the arrest of two of Trofimov s subordinates was exploited to have Trofimov himself dismissed. The two were arrested for dealing in cocaine by MUR and the Central Department for the Illegal Circulation of Narcotics. Trofimov was sacked two days after the media reported the arrest of drug dealers carrying the identity passes of officers in the Moscow UFSB.
It should be emphasized that the question of the involvement of particular FSB officers or of the FSB, as a whole, in terrorist activity, which had been attributed to the Chechens, was not raised either in Shchekochikhin s letter inquiry or in the replies given by various officials. The court did not pass a guilty verdict on any of the members of the coercive departments who were suspected, according to Kolesnikov, of a total of more than ten murders. On January 31, 1997, Lazovsky and Kharisov appeared before the Tver court in a trial, which lasted only three days. They were accused of possessing weapons and drugs and of forging FAPSI and MO documents. Not a single prosecutor or judge so much as hinted at terrorist attacks and contract killings. The accused s lawyers demonstrated quite correctly that no forgery had been committed, since they had carried genuine identity documents for agents of the secret services and agencies of coercion, and so the charge of forging documents had to be dropped. The case materials contained no information at all about the use of forgeries by the accused (which was in itself weighty evidence of the interfusion of the structures headed by Barsukov, Kovalyov and Lazovsky). The count of possessing and transporting dangerous drugs was also dropped-so that Lazovsky and Kharisov would not have to be charged under such a serious article of the Criminal Code.
Lazovsky s lawyer, Boris Kozhemyakin, also tried to have the charge of possessing weapons set aside. He claimed that when they were arrested, Lazovsky and Kharisov were with UFSB employee Yumashkin, with whom they had spent a large part of the day, that both Lazovsky and Kharisov were engaged in carrying out certain tasks for the secret services, and that was why they had been given weapons and cover documents. (When he was arrested, UFSB agent Yumashkin was also found to be in possession of a cover document, a police identity card.) However, for some reason, the question of collaboration between Lazovsky and Kharisov and the secret services failed to interest judge Elena Stashina, and representatives of the UFSB refused to appear in court, with the result that the accused were in any case found guilty of the illegal possession of weapons, and sentenced by an impartial court to two years imprisonment and a fine of forty million rubles each. When he heard the sentence, Boris Kozhemiakin said, he had been counting on a more lenient verdict.
Lazovsky served his time in one of the prison camps near Tula together with his codefendant and bodyguard Kharisov (which is strictly forbidden by regulations). While in the camp, he recruited new members for his group from among the criminal inmates, studied the Bible, and even wrote a treatise on the improvement of Russia. He was released in February 1998, since the time he spent in custody, while under investigation, was counted against his sentence.
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Meanwhile, in 1996, Russia had lost the war in Chechnya. Military operations had to be halted and political negotiations conducted with the Chechen separatists. There was a real threat that the conflict between two nations, which had cost the secret services so much effort to provoke, might end in a peace agreement, and Yeltsin might be able to return to his program of liberal reforms. In order to undermine the peace negotiations, the FSB carried out a series of terrorist attacks in Moscow. Since terrorist attacks, which didn t kill or maim had failed to make any impression on the inhabitants of the capital, the FSB began carrying out attacks which did. Note, once again, how well the supporters of war timed their terrorist attacks, and how damaging they were to the interests of supporters of peace and the Chechens themselves.
Between nine and ten in the evening on June 11, 1996, there was an explosion in a halfempty carriage in a train at the Tulskaya station of the Serpukhovskaya line of the Moscow subway. Four people were killed and 12 were hospitalized. Exactly one month later, on July 11, a terrorist bomb exploded in a number twelve trolley in Pushkin Square: six people were injured. The following day, July 12, a number 48 trolley on Mir Prospect was destroyed by an explosion: twenty-eight people were injured. Information about the Chechen connection of the terrorist attacks was actively disseminated throughout Moscow (even though no terrorists were caught, and it was never actually determined whether they were Chechens or not). Before even a provisional investigation had been conducted, the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, declared at the site of the second trolley explosion that he would expel the entire Chechen diaspora from Moscow, even though he had no reason to suspect that the explosions were the work of the diaspora, or even of individual Chechen terrorists.
However, this second wave of terror failed, like the first, to produce any sharp swing in public opinion. In early August 1996, guerrilla fighters battled their way into Grozny, and in late August, the Khasaviurt Accords were signed by Security Council Secretary A.
Lebed and the new president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov. The supporters of war in Chechnya had lost, and terrorist attacks in Moscow came to a halt-until the FSB launched a new operation designed to spark off another Chechen war.
It is hard to tell just which of the FSB s operatives organized the explosions in Moscow in the summer of 1996. Lazovsky was under arrest. It is clear, however, that the FSB had a choice of many similar structures, and not just in Moscow. On June 26,1996, the newspaper Segodnya published a commentary on the FSB s criminal organization in Petersburg, which consisted primarily of former members of the KGB. Having set up several firms, in addition to what might be called clean business dealings the ex-KGB men also managed the trade in hand-guns, explosives and drugs, dealt in stolen automobiles and imported stolen Mercedes and BMWs into Russia.
The explosions in Moscow could, however, have been set up by members of Lazovsky s group who were still at large. In fact, there is very good reason for believing this to be the case.
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In February 1996, MUR agents arrested a certain Vladimir Akimov outside the pawnshop on Moscow s Bolshaya Spasskaya Street for trying to sell a Taurus revolver. Akimov turned out to be Lazovsky s former chauffeur. Under the influence of reports in the media about the new wave of terrorist attacks on public transport in Moscow in June and July 1996, Akimov began providing testimony about an explosion in a bus on December 27, 1994. Today, here in detention center 48/1, and seeing the political situation on the television, Akimov wrote, I consider it my duty to make a statement on the explosion of the bus& In his statement he claimed that on December 27, he and Vorobyov had set out to reconnoiter the VDNKh-Yuzhnaya bus stop in a Zhiguli automobile. They noted possible lines of retreat. On the evening of the same day, Akimov and Vorobyov left the Zhiguli not far from the stop at the end of the bus route and went back to Mir Prospect, where they boarded the number 33 bus, a LiAZ. When there were just a few passengers left in the bus, Akimov s testimony continued, they planted a bomb with forty grams of ammonite under a seat the right rear wheel. When they got out at the last stop, Akimov went to warm up the engine of their car, and Vorobyov used a remote control unit to set the bomb off.
On the morning of August 28, 1996, retired Lieutenant Colonel Vorobyov had been arrested by Tskhai, as he was on his way to a meeting with an FSB agent and taken to the MUR premises at 38 Petrovka Street, where, if the judgment of the court is to be believed, he told the entire story to the Moscow detectives without attempting to conceal anything, including the fact that he was a free-lance FSB agent. Shortly thereafter, Akimov withdrew his testimony, even though it had been given in writing. Vorobyov then also withdrew his testimony. The Moscow City Court, under presiding Judge Irina Kulichkova, evidently acting under pressure from the FSB, dropped the charges against Akimov of complicity in a terrorist bombing and sentenced him to three years imprisonment for the illegal sale of a revolver. Since the guilty verdict was pronounced in late April 1999, and Akimov had spent three years in custody while under investigation, he left the court a free man.
Vorobyov was sentenced to five years in the prison camps. The case was held in camera, and not even Vorobyov s relatives were allowed into the courtroom. As his employer, the FSB gave Vorobyov a positive character reference that was included in the case materials. In his final address, Vorobyov declared that the case against him had been fabricated by parties who wished to blacken the name of the FSB and his name as a freelance agent of the special service. Vorobyov described the sentence as an insult to the special agencies. Later, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation reduced Vorobyov s sentence to three years (most of which Vorobyov had already served by that time). In late August 1999, Vorobyov was released, despite the fact that Akimov and the investigators believed that he had been involved in the terrorist attacks of 1996. The FSB had demonstrated yet again that it would not abandon its own agents and would eventually obtain their release.
Tskhai also learned about the involvement of Lazovsky s group in the summer explosions from one other source, Sergei Pogosov. In the late summer and early fall of 1996, an operational source reported that a certain Sergei Pogosov was living in the
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center of Moscow on the Novyi Arbat, not far from the bookstore Dom Knigi and the Octyabr cinema in a huge penthouse apartment with a floor area of 100 or 150 square meters. His firm s office was located in the ground-floor apartment of the same block.
According to information received, Pogosov was directly linked with Lazovsky and his gunmen and financed many of Lazovsky s undertakings. Pogosov s telephones (home number 203-1469, work number 203-1632, and mobile number 960-8856) were tapped and monitored for two weeks on the instructions of the First Section of the Antiterrorist Center (ATTs, the former UBT) of the FSB. From conversations overheard, it became clear that Pogosov was paying Lazovsky s legal fees and was preparing a large sum of money to pay bribes for his release.
This operational information was relayed to Tskhai, who personally obtained permission from the Public Prosecutor s Office for a search of Pogosov s flat and office as part of the criminal investigation into Lazovsky s case. A few days later, the search was carried out jointly by the Twelfth Section of MUR and the First Section of the ATTs of the FSB of the Russian Federation (Platonov s former subordinates), lasting almost right through the night. Under Pogosov s bed, a sack was found containing 700 thousand dollars. No one tried to count the rubles, which were lying everywhere, even in the kitchen in empty jars. Cocaine was also found in the apartment (Pogosov s girlfriend was a drug addict).
The search at Pogosov s office on the ground floor turned up several mobile phones, one of which was registered to Lazovsky. Pogosov and his girlfriend were taken to the police station, but that very day a member of the Moscow UFSB drove round to the station and collected them. The police did not confiscate the money. The tax police said that it had nothing to do with them and didn t even bother to turn up. No criminal case was brought in connection with the discovery of cocaine. Apparently nobody was interested in Pogosov or his money.
Knowing the way things were done in the Russian agencies of coercion, Pogosov expected that the people who had come to search his apartment would just take him away and kill him, so he attempted to save himself by giving a written undertaking to cooperate (under the pseudonym of Grigory). Pogosov told one of the operatives about Lazovsky s connections in the Moscow UFSB and the kind of activity in which he was involved.
Pogosov had heard from Max that his brigade was not a group of bandits, but more like a secret military unit, that Lazovsky handled tasks of state importance, and there were people like him in every country. Pogosov said Lazovsky was a state assassin who eliminated people according to instructions, and organized acts of sabotage and terrorism.
Lazovsky himself only carried out instructions, and he got those from the top.
Concerning the money, Pogosov said it was for Lazovsky, and he was only an intermediary. Pogosov s legal cover for his activities was importing Parliament cigarettes into Russia, which generates quite a good income in itself. Pogosov said that he expected Lazovsky to be freed soon, since he hadn t broken down under questioning, he hadn t given anyone away, and had behaved with dignity. Pogosov sincerely recommended not interfering with the activities of Lazovsky s group and said Tskhai would have serious problems if he tried.
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A few days after Pogosov was released, he had his second and final meeting with the operative who had recruited him. First of all, Pogosov offered money for the return of his note about collaboration. He said that his controllers in the Moscow UFSB were extremely displeased about his note and had told Pogosov to ransom it. His controllers had also made direct threats against Tskhai.
Pogosov s written undertaking was not returned, and the offer of a bribe was not accepted. The following day, the recruitment of agent Grigory was officially reported to the chief. A few days later, the phone rang in the office of the operative who had recruited Pogosov. The caller spoke from the Moscow UFSB, on behalf of their own chief, politely recommending that Pogosov should be left in peace and threatening that if he weren t, there would be an investigation into money that had supposedly been stolen during the search at Pogosov s apartment. The operative never saw Pogosov again and never received any secret information from him. On April 12, 1997, at the age of thirtynine, Tskhai died suddenly from cirrhosis of the liver, although he didn t drink or smoke.