Death of a Dissident (54 page)

Those who are subject to extradition, on the other hand, rarely seek asylum. They are fugitives from justice who usually hide from authorities, often using false identities. Because of various multilateral and bilateral treaties, states are obligated to catch them and deport them to face criminal charges in foreign lands. If, like Zakayev and Boris, the targets believe the extradition charges are false, they can seek exemption from deportation in a court of law, in an open hearing. Those hearings are very different from criminal trials; the court does not decide on the question of guilt or innocence. In effect, the burden of proof rests with the defendant: he has to demonstrate that the request to give him up is without merit or politically motivated, or that he would face an unfair trial, torture, or death if extradited. In other words, defendants face a presumption of guilt, not innocence.

Extradition and asylum are thus conflicting concepts, not mirror images. An asylum request would not be considered if there is an extradition case pending, and the court, as a rule, would not hear an extradition case against someone who has been granted asylum from the same country.

The extradition request for Zakayev came before he even considered seeking asylum, so there was no conflict. But with Boris, by April 2002, an asylum request had been pending for eighteen months. The British government surely knew that if it was granted, Boris’s asylum would make the Kremlin go berserk. The Russian government’s new request to extradite him, therefore, was something of a relief for
the Brits. The home secretary wrote to Boris that his asylum plea had been turned down because of the extradition charges. Boris’s fate was no longer in the hands of the executive branch. Instead, Judge Timothy Workman would decide it.

Zakayev’s and Boris’s extradition hearings—the two intertwined cases that tested the reach of the Kremlin and proved far more difficult than the average political assassination—lasted from April to November 2003. They were so beset with bizarre twists, unexpected developments, and odd coincidences that they eventually convinced me to believe in Sasha’s constant stream of conspiracy theories. They unfolded in parallel with our investigation of the Moscow bombings and growing suspicions about the theater siege. The improbable in one reinforced the unbelievable in the other, until I felt as if my life had turned into a made-for-television espionage thriller.

The most bizarre of all was an incident with a man I’ll call Pavel. At a bail hearing for Boris on April 2, his security guards, a squad of French Foreign Legion veterans, spotted a tall, skinny man with a wrinkled face, perhaps age fifty, in a gray suit. They had also noticed him earlier that day skulking around Boris at the Russian Economic Forum. They kept an eye on him. Then Sasha noticed him talking to a Russian by the name of Nikita, who was part of Boris’s retinue. The man came up to Nikita outside of the courthouse to introduce himself. He was a small businessman from Kazakhstan, living in London. The chat with Nikita did not last long and did not get much beyond the introduction.

Pavel appeared again at Boris’s next court hearing, on May 13. As soon as he could, Sasha converged on him like a tornado.

“Confess!” he blustered. “Who sent you to spy on us?”

Remarkably, Pavel
did
confess. He was moonlighting for the Russian Embassy, he said, entrapped by the FSB. He wanted to switch sides and work with us. Several days later Sasha brought him to meet me in a Starbucks café on Leicester Square.

Pavel said that he had been recruited by the KGB while working as a Kremlin driver in the Brezhnev era. When the Soviet Union collapsed,
he thought his relationship with Kontora was over. He started a business but came into conflict with some gangsters and had to flee for his life to Kazakhstan. From there he somehow got to London in 1999, where he applied for asylum and started a small trading company. His asylum was still pending, but in 2002 he was approached in a London park by two Russian diplomats who called out his old KGB code name.

“They said that I should work for them, otherwise they would report my past to the immigration authorities, and I’d be deported. Of course I had not mentioned the KGB in my asylum application. I had no choice,” he claimed.

“So what kind of work have you been doing?”

“Going places, writing reports. Russian events, for example. Or, say, details of parking, service elevators, and emergency exits in a department store. With Berezovsky, I was supposed to get friendly with one of you and report whatever I heard, that sort of thing.”

“So what do you want from us?”

“I don’t know. Can you help me with my asylum somehow?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Perhaps you should write your report to your embassy friends and hope for the best.” He was quite possibly genuine, but we had enough of our own problems.

Pavel reappeared a few weeks later, at yet more hearings, this time for Zakayev’s case. Sasha brought him to a sushi restaurant in Soho. He had a new assignment, he reported. His embassy contacts told him to buy a fountain pen, a particular model, and see whether he could get it through a metal detector in the Bow Street court. He also had to figure out where in the courthouse people were allowed to smoke: in the lavatory, in the stairwell, and so on.

Sasha became extremely excited.

“That’s binary!” he whispered, leaning toward us across the table. “They are setting up a binary attack. There are such binary poisons: you squirt some liquid on a person, say, using a pen, and it is harmless, but then you expose him to smoke, which is also harmless for everyone around, except the one who had that liquid on him. The man drops dead of heart failure. This is what it is!”

It sounded unreal.

“Look, Pavel,” I said, “this may be nothing, or it may be something. If you are telling the truth, and Sasha is right, then you may be part of a murder plot. If someone gets murdered, you’ll be in big trouble. We will have to report our conversation to the police. If I were you, I’d go to the police, too.”

He agreed. Would we help him find a lawyer?

We called George Menzies, Sasha’s solicitor, and asked him to meet us urgently in his office. It was almost midnight. Pavel repeated his story while Menzies took notes; he agreed to come in early the next week to review a formal statement for the police that Menzies would draft.

But he never showed up. On the day of their scheduled meeting, he called Menzies to say that he had suddenly been invited to the Immigration Office to discuss his asylum request. Sasha had already submitted his own statement about our Leicester Square conversation to the Special Branch of Scotland Yard.

In early September, Judge Workman told Boris’s lawyers that the extradition hearings would be moved from Bow Street to the Bel-marsh court, where high-security cases are usually heard, thanks to a request by the Metropolitan Police. They believed that there was a credible threat to Boris’s life. Then suddenly, on September 11, the Home Office granted Boris asylum without any explanation. The next day, Judge Workman threw out the extradition request, noting that it was now “quite pointless.”

We were stunned, and confused. Could it be that the police, alerted by Sasha and me, had checked out Pavel and corroborated his bizarre story?

“Can you believe it, that they would attack me with a chemical weapon?” marveled Boris. “Can you imagine the lunacy? Say I am Putin; I am trying to get me by legal means. I believe that I will succeed, otherwise why start? And at the same time, I am sending a hit squad into the court. Volodya must be really insane.”

“Boris,” I replied, “my wife is a psychologist. She says that it is wrong to forecast the other guy’s behavior by imagining yourself in his place. What sounds crazy to you may be pretty reasonable to him. He is KGB and you are not. That’s why we are here.”

“True. That’s why Sasha is so valuable. He looks at the world with their eyes. If he can imagine a plot, they could be planning it for real. I wonder what the Brits are thinking?”

I still didn’t know what to think. Yet ten days later, on September 21, the
Sunday Times
reported that there indeed was a plot. Citing “highly placed sources,” the paper said that “an SVR agent … planned to fill a pen with [poisonous] liquid and then stab Berezovsky in the arm when passing by.” The
Times
quoted an unnamed Whitehall official who confirmed that “MI5 had been approached by a man claiming he had been sent to Britain to murder the tycoon and they had referred the matter to the police.” The rival
Guardian
, however, was skeptical; it quoted another intelligence source: “Across the agencies, the take has been that this would mark a significant escalation of Russian activity in London above [Kontora’s] current capabilities.”

Athens: On August 21, 2003, Vladimir Gusinsky is arrested upon his arrival from a holiday in Israel, based on an Interpol warrant on charges of fraud and money laundering. He is released on bail but ordered to remain in the country. On October 14, a Greek court rejects Moscow’s request to extradite him. At a hearing lasting only a few minutes, the three judges decide that the charges against Gusinsky do not amount to a crime under Greek law
.

If Pavel was the FSB turncoat who unexpectedly helped Boris win asylum, a man named Duk-Vakha Dushuyev, a Chechen whose story was no less bizarre, proved to be the reason Zakayev defeated Russia’s attempt at extradition. Sasha was once again the go-between, and once again triumphant.

The Russian charges against Zakayev were severe: according to them, he was a torturer and a mass murderer. He was said to have led a Chechen gang in the 1999 war and to bear the responsibility for killing at least three hundred Russian officers. The indictment went on to claim that Zakayev had personally tortured a suspected Russian informer, Ivan Solovyov.

“When Solovyov refused to ‘confess’ to co-operating with the Russian Federal Security Service, Zakayev produced a gun which he threatened Solovyov with,” the indictment stated. “He then pressed the barrel of the gun against Solovyov’s little finger on his right hand and pulled the trigger, shooting the finger off. He did the same thing to the left hand, shooting two fingers off.”

Zakayev was also alleged to have kidnapped and tortured two Russian Orthodox priests. Presiding over the hearings was Judge Workman.

There was no presumption of innocence here: the defense had to prove that the charges were false, not the other way around. Zakayev’s lawyer pointed out that all of the opposing witnesses and victims had signed their statements in November 2002, when Zakayev was already in a Danish jail, suggesting that the case had been hastily concocted. But it wasn’t much of a defense. On the morning of July 24, the defense announced a surprise witness, a man whose particularly damaging sworn testimony against Zakayev had been introduced by the Russian side. It was Duk-Vakha Dushuyev, a Chechen who, in his signed statement, had claimed that he personally saw Zakayev give the orders to kidnap and torture the priests. How he got out of Chechnya and into England was a mystery.

Duk-Vakha Dushuyev was a short, balding man. There was a frozen, odd grin on his face, possibly the result of the ordeal he now unveiled to the court. On November 27, 2002, he said, he was detained by the FSB in Grozny and brought to a Russian army base, where he was thrown into a filthy pit half-filled with water and covered by a metal grid. The pit was so narrow that he could not sit, and so shallow that he could not stand up. He spent six days there, bent over, handcuffed, and with a sack over his head. He was taken out for interrogations, during which he was beaten for hours, tortured with electric shocks, and threatened with having his throat slit unless he agreed to give testimony against Zakayev. On the sixth day he agreed to testify that as a fighter under Zakayev’s direct command in 1997 he overheard him giving the orders to kidnap the priests.