Death of a Dissident (26 page)

August 19, 1998: Armed Islamic fundamentalists from the radical Wahhabi sect take over two villages in the southern Russian province
of Dagestan, declare a “separate Islamic territory,” and impose Sharia law. The Maskhadov government expects Russia to crack down on the insurgents. Instead, Russian Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin negotiates a formula allowing the Wahhabi to remain in the villages indefinitely. In the meantime, the hostage situation in Chechnya deteriorates. More than one hundred people are held in captivity. Russian Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo, assisted by Boris Berezovsky, begins direct negotiations with the hostage-takers, bypassing Maskhadov’s officials. He secures release of more than fifty captives. On September 20, Berezovsky flies two Britons, Jon James and Camilla Carr, who have spent fourteen months in captivity, to freedom. Berezovsky denies paying any ransom
.

The ascent of Primakov hurt Boris far beyond his plans for Aeroflot. His principal remaining avenues of influence were Chief of Staff Valentin Yumashev and Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, but they too were weakened. Yeltsin himself went into an apparent depression after having been forced to appoint a government that he did not like. Before the crisis, the Kremlin exercised control of the cabinet through appointments and firings of its ministers. But the newly empowered prime minister did not owe his position to the president, and Yeltsin could not afford to dismiss him, at least for now. If anything, it was the prime minister who was able to pressure the president over high-level appointments. For the sake of restoring stability, Primus argued, it would be much better if there were people in the Kremlin with whom the White House was on the same wavelength.

Boris’s influence was visibly in decline. The crowds at The Club were gone. Its bar, with the stuffed crocodile in the corner, stood deserted. Worse, at the beginning of November, Boris found himself the focus of a vicious public debate about Jews and their alleged responsibility for Russia’s economic woes. It started with a Communist member of the Duma, Gen. Albert Makashev, who spoke at a rally in the southwestern industrial city of Samara. He claimed that
zhidy—
a Russian slur for Jews—in and around Yeltsin were responsible for the country’s mess. The crowd cheered and applauded.
They “drink the blood of the indigenous peoples of the state; they are destroying industry and agriculture,” Makashev declared. Journalists immediately rushed to Boris for comment. Boris Berezovsky and his friends in the Kremlin personified a “Zionist conspiracy” to a major swath of the population.

As Boris was digging in his heels, expecting hostile action from the new prime minister, Sasha and his friends were on a collision course with the new FSB director.

After his meeting with Putin in July, Sasha became convinced that his crew of whistle-blowers was under surveillance. Their telephones, he was certain, were tapped. As part of their temporary suspensions, they were made to surrender their weapons and their badges. Internal Affairs combed through their past cases. Someone leaked a fabricated story to the press that Sasha and several other officers from his department were suspected of raiding a Moscow businessman’s apartment and seizing a substantial sum of money.

As for URPO, Putin did disband it on a direct order from the Kremlin. However, Khokholkov was transferred to a sinecure position at the tax service. Kamyshnikov was transferred to the ATC. All former URPO opers were reassigned—except the five whistle-blowers. Everyone at the Agency said that their days were numbered.

On September 30, the prosecutors suddenly closed the URPO case without taking any action. During his final visit to the prosecutors’ office, Sasha spotted Trepashkin, whom he recognized from the photograph in his file.

“Hey, Misha, I am your would-be killer,” he introduced himself.

“And I am your would-be victim. Nice to meet you.”

A week later Boris received an official letter.

The investigation focused on two episodes, it said. First, it was confirmed that “on December 27, 1997, [Capt.] A. P. Kamyshnikov, in the presence of Litvinenko, Shebalin, Ponkin and Latyshenok, allowed himself a number of thoughtless statements in reference to you. However, these statements, while discrediting him [Kamyshnikov] as a team leader, did not constitute an intent to commit murder.”

Second, the investigators found that, in a separate conversation with Colonel Gusak in November 1997, General “Khokholkov asked whether he [Gusak] would kill you.” However, the letter said that “the conversation took place in the absence of other witnesses.” Moreover, “when Khokholkov asked him whether he would ‘bump’ you, [it was] in the context of a subject matter not directly related to you, hence he [Gusak] did not take it as an explicit order to commit murder.”

The two other alleged victims, Trepashkin and Dzhabrailov, received similar letters.

This was something that Boris expected. By then he already knew that Prosecutor General Skuratov was secretly cooperating with Primakov in developing several highly political probes that would target the Kremlin inner circle. The URPO investigation was a Kremlin-instigated case. It was not surprising that Skuratov quashed it.

When in mid-October the whistle-blowers met with Boris at The Club to consider their options, Sasha was adamant: they must not give up. This was a cover-up, he said. All the facts had been confirmed. The talk of “bumping” Boris was illegal, whether or not justice would be done. They should go ahead and make the whole thing public. The noose around them was tightening; publicity was their only remaining defense.

Trepashkin, who joined them, backed Sasha. Shebalin, as usual, was silent. Ponkin, Scheglov, and Latyshenok leaned toward Sasha’s position. As for Gusak, he had stopped talking to them several weeks ago. He knew which way the wind was blowing.

Boris’s first impulse was to talk to Putin, but he thought better of it. At that junction Putin was still an enigma. After his appointment to the FSB, he hid like a hermit crab in his shell. Perhaps it was time to force his hand. If he was committed to reforming the FSB, make him show as much. Boris took a week to think about the best options. By the end of October, he agreed: they should go public.

On November 13, the newspapers published an open letter from Boris to Putin, urging him to pursue the URPO affair. He wrote that the whistle-blowers, after revealing their information to him, had been accused by their superiors of “preventing patriots from killing
a Jew who had robbed half of Russia.” This charge resounded with the recent scandal about General Makashev’s anti-Semitic diatribes.

Four days later Sasha and his friends staged a press conference. Sasha and Trepashkin dressed normally; the other four wore ski masks to hide their faces. The event was a sensation, but not in the way they had hoped. The press focused on only one charge among many that they made: the plot to kill Berezovsky. Boris’s notoriety overshadowed their intended message. No one seemed to care about the criminalization of the FSB.

The publicity also failed to support Boris’s aim of smoking out Putin. The new FSB chief responded angrily but carefully. He ridiculed the whistle-blowers for not coming up with better evidence and said that they themselves may be rogue agents. He did not say a word about the substance of their allegations.

As General Trofimov explained when they met to review what went wrong, Sasha’s major misfortune was bad timing: in a way, the whistle-blowers fell victim to the financial crisis, too. Their main ally, Boris, a formidable force in the beginning of 1998, had lost much of his clout by the end of the year. With Primakov in the White House, he was on the defensive himself.

On December 7, 1998, Yeltsin interrupted his hospital stay to fire his chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, replacing him with Gen. Nikolai Bordyuzha, the secretary of the National Security Council and formerly the commander of the Border Guards. Apparently the president had had enough of civilians and decided to rely on generals once again.

“Now they will either kill me or put me in jail,” predicted Sasha to Marina.

Chechnya, December 8, 1998: Chechen authorities find the severed heads of four hostages, three Britons and a New Zealander, in a sack outside a village forty miles from Grozny. Their killing was apparently triggered by a rescue attempt staged by President Maskhadov’s antiterrorist squad. Chechen officials accuse the leader of a radical Wahhabi group, Arbi Barayev, of the kidnapping and murder. Barayev threatens to unleash a wave of terror in Russia if Maskhadov’s forces attack his stronghold of Urus-Martan. Islamist opposition leaders Shamil Basayev and Movladi Udugov demand Maskhadov’s resignation
.

Sasha’s falling out with the FSB coincided with a deadly disintegration of the Russian-Chechen rapport that Boris had helped to build a year earlier. According to Akhmed Zakayev, the fault was squarely on the Russian side. “From the moment Rybkin and Berezovsky were removed from the process, things started deteriorating,” he later explained. Zakayev believed that starting in the summer of 1998, the Russian secret service began to systematically destabilize Maskhadov’s government by quietly supporting radical Islamists.

“We wanted to build a secular, democratic, pro-Western Muslim state, something along the lines of Turkey, and eventually join NATO,” Zakayev explained, “but then all of a sudden, all these Wahhabi
appeared, with stacks of money, and started preaching a totally foreign brand of Islam. How do you think they got there? Through Moscow—they all had Russian visas!”

In July 1998, during the crackdown on the militants, the Maskhadov government caught some of them and expelled them to Jordan.

“They were all experienced fighters,” Zakayev recalled, “but they had nothing to do with ‘the Afghans,’ the American-trained jihadists that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were all Arabs who spoke Russian, the old KGB cadre from the Middle East. And we knew that their money came not from Saudi Arabia, but from Moscow.”