Blowing Up Russia (19 page)
Authors: Alexander Litvinenko
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Terrorism, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Violence in Society, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Murder
The terrorists planted the right amount of explosive required for the total demolition of their targets. The saboteur Starinov believed that the bombings could have been carried out by three men. The terrorists seemed to have been well-trained, not just in sabotage, but also in intelligence work: they knew how to avoid surveillance and live under assumed identities. Even a year s course at the very best special training center is not long enough to learn all of this. So it seemed that Muscovites had fallen victim to professional terrorists. And the only professional terrorists working in Russia were in the structures of the FSB and GRU.
Petra Prohazkova, a Czech journalist who was interviewing Khattab at the time of the bombings, remembered Khattab s astounding reaction to the announcement of the terrorist attacks in Moscow. His face suddenly assumed an expression of genuine fright.
It was the sincere fright of a front-line soldier who realizes that now he s going to get the blame for everything. Everybody who knows Khattab agrees that he is no actor and could not possibly have feigned astonishment and fear.
The Chechens knew it was not in their interests 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. That was why the Chechens could not have been behind the terrorist attacks of September 1999. And the Chechens must be given credit for always denying their involvement in these bombings.
Here is what Ilyas Akhmadov, minister of foreign affairs in Aslan Maskhadov s government, had to say on that point:
Question: In France you talk as though everybody knows that the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk were set up by the Russian secret services& Do you have any proof?
Answer: Of course. Throughout the last war, we never showed the slightest inclination for that sort of thing. But if it had been organized by Basaev or Khattab, I can assure you that they wouldn t have been shy about admitting it to Russia. What s more, everybody knows that the failed bombing in Ryazan was organized by the FSB& I myself served in the army as a demolition officer at a military proving ground, and I know perfectly well what a great difference there is between an explosive and sugar.
Here is the opinion of another interested party with whom it is hard to disagree, the Chechen minister of defense and commander of the presidential guard, Magomed Khambiev: Now for the explosions in Moscow. Why are the Chechens not committing acts of terrorism now, when our people are being annihilated? Why did the Russian authorities
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pay no attention to the hexogene incident in Ryazan, when the police had detained a member of the secret services with this explosive? There s not a single piece of evidence for the so-called Chechen connection in these bombings. And the bombings were least of all in the interest of the Chechens. But what is hidden will certainly be revealed. I assure you that the perpetrators and planners of the bombings in Moscow will become known, when there s a change of political regime in the Kremlin. Because those who ordered the bombings should be sought in the corridors of the Kremlin. These bombings were necessary in order to start the war, in order to distract the attention of Russians and the whole world from the scandals and dirty intrigues going on in the Kremlin.
Suspicions arose that the bombings were being carried out by people attempting to force the government to declare a state of emergency and cancel the elections. A number of politicians rejected the idea: I don t agree with the statements of certain analysts who connect this series of terrorist attacks with somebody s intentions to declare a state of emergency in Russia and cancel the elections to the State Duma, declared former Russian minister of the interior Kulikov in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta on September 11. The Chechens could not have had any interest in presidential elections or the declaration of a state of emergency in Russia. In 1996, it was the KorzhakovBarsukov-Soskovets group and the secret services standing behind them that supported the cancellation of the election. So who was attempting to provoke the declaration of a state of emergency in 1999?
Minister of Defense Igor Sergeiev thought it possible that military patrols might appear on the streets of Moscow. Soldiers could take part in patrolling the city together with the MVD s forces, he declared to journalists after a meeting with Boris Yeltsin. The military had been set the task of participating in the protection of the public against terrorist activity, Sergeiev stated. He also said that the GRU was working intensively to identify all possible contacts between those who had planned the explosions in Russian towns and international terrorists (a hint at foreign saboteurs!). The use of soldiers to protect peaceful citizens against terrorists looked rather like the introduction of military law. Igor Sergeiev spoke out for the introduction of wide-reaching anti-terrorist measures and anti-terrorist operations. In other words, the Russian Ministry of Defense was calling for war against an unnamed enemy, but, in fact, it was clear to everyone that he was calling for a war against Chechnya.
The final decision on all of these questions remained with President Yeltsin. The secret services, however, had practically unlimited opportunities for filtering or falsifying the information presented to the president. This was confirmed in an interview given on November, 12, 1999 by Edward Shevardnadze, the president of Georgia and former head of the Georgian KGB, when he spoke about the Chechen problem: Reference is usually made to the fact that the GRU has information of this kind. I know what information the GRU has historically used, how it is assembled, how it is reported at first to the General Staff, then to the minister of defense, then to the Supreme Commander. I know that there is large-scale falsification.
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Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, another well-informed contemporary politician, who was a presidential candidate in the 2000 election, formulated his doubts differently. When Primakov was asked for his comments on the terrorist attacks in Moscow, he said that he thought the Moscow bombings would not be the end of the matter, there could be more explosions right across Russia, and one of the reasons for the situation that had arisen lay in the links between people in the agencies of law enforcement and the criminal underworld.
In effect, Primakov admitted that bombings in every part of Russia were the work of people connected with the secret services. This was also confirmed by Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze in an address broadcast on national television on November 15, 1999: Already at the meeting in Kishinev, I informed Boris Yeltsin that his secret services had contacts with Chechen terrorists. But Russia does not listen to its friends. Diplomatic etiquette did not permit a more forthright statement. The president of Georgia could not say that by Chechen terrorists he simply meant terrorists.
It is obvious, however, that Shevardnadze suspected the Russian secret services of committing the bombings. Information in his possession even suggested that the Russian secret services had been involved in two attempts on Shevardnadze s own life. In order to avoid making unsubstantiated claims, we can quote the former director of the United States National Security Council, retired Lieutenant-General William Odom. In October 1999, he stated that Prime Minister Putin and his entourage from the military were using this Chechen campaign to put Shevardnadze under severe pressure. They had already made one attempt to dismember Georgia by taking Abkhazia and southern Ossetia away from it and now, Odom said, they wanted to exploit the Chechen events to position their forces there, which was opposed by the current president of Georgia. Beginning with Primakov s term as Prime Minister, the Russian government had made at least two attempts on Shevardnadze s life. The Georgian leadership had provided the governments of a number of foreign countries with convincing evidence of this. Primakov himself was personally involved. He had used secret agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service in Belorussia, and in May an attempt was made with his knowledge on the life of Shevardnadze and several members of his entourage. The American government is in possession of tape-recordings of conversations made by the actual killers involved in the attempt. A year before that, a first attempt to kill Shevardnadze was made, not by amateurs, but by genuine professionals, well-prepared military groups who could only have been trained in Russia. There is, in addition, a mass of material evidence collected at the scene of the crime which confirms all of this.
What Shevardnadze hesitated to say about the bombings in Moscow was openly stated by Lebed, in answer to a question from the French newspaper Le Figaro: Do you mean to say that the present regime is behind the bombings? The general replied: I m almost convinced of it. Lebed pointed out that the force that could be discerned behind the bombings of residential buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk was not the Chechen terrorists, but the hand of power, that is the Kremlin and the president, who were up to their necks in shit, totally isolated, and together with Yeltsin s family had only one goal, to destabilize the position in order to avoid elections.
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99
On September 14, the FSB and MVD issued the statement for which the FSB had carried out the bombings: Zdanovich announced that the agencies of law enforcement had no doubt that the series of explosions from Buinaksk to a house on the Kassirskoe Chausse in Moscow represented a large-scale terrorist operation launched by Basaev and Khattab s guerrillas in support of their military action in Dagestan. Igor Zubov, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, confirmed the suggestion: We can now state without the slightest doubt that Basaev and Khattab are behind these bombings.
The statements by Zdanovich and Zubov did not reflect the true situation. A day later, the head of GUBOP MVD of Russia, Vladimir Kozlov, announced that a number of people involved in these terrorist attacks have been identified, and explained that he meant a group of terrorists with connections in Moscow and the regions and towns surrounding the capital. Kozlov did not even mention Chechnya or Dagestan. Zdanovich was openly disseminating false information.
The FSB s conclusions did not sound convincing, and the attempts of the security forces to capture the culprits looked farcical. In the atmosphere of anti-Chechen hysteria in Moscow a few days after the second explosion, members of the FSB and GUBOP arrested two suspects for the terrorist attacks, and their names were immediately made public, without any concern for possible prejudice to the investigation: they were thirtytwo-year-old Timur Dakhkilgov and his father-in-law, forty-year-old old Bekmars Sauntiev.
Timur Dakhkilgov was an Ingushetian who was born in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and lived there in the city s Tram Park District, before he moved to Moscow. He was a dyer in the Krasny Sukonshchik Textile Combine. On September 10, immediately after the terrorist attack on Guryanov Street, Sauntiev went to see the Dakhkilgovs and said that they all had to go to the northern Butovo police station for re-registration.
At the station, Timur Dakhkilgov and his wife Lida were photographed, their fingerprints were taken, swabs were taken from the palms of their hands, and they were released.
Soon after the second bombing, MVD operatives turned up at Sauntiev and the Dakhkilgovs apartments, said that there were traces of hexogene on Timur Dakhkilgov s hands (he was a dyer, after all!), and arrested him. There was no hexogene on Sauntiev s hands, so, instead, they found a revolver under his bath, and discovered traces of hexogene on the handle of the door to his flat (on the outside, that is, in the stairwell).
The suspects were questioned for three days. Sauntiev was later released and the pistol found in his apartment was apparently forgotten. Timur Dakhkilgov was taken to the MUR premises on Petrovka Street, where he was accused of possessing explosives and terrorism. The entire process was reported openly on television, and Rushailo even reported to the Council of the Federation that a terrorist had been caught.
According to Dakhkilgov, three investigators worked with him, but they were never introduced to him, and they never called each other by name. To himself the suspect
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100
called them Old Man, Ginger, and Nice Guy. The latter earned his nickname by never actually hitting Dakhkilgov. The interrogation lasted for three days, after which Dakhkilgov was transferred to the FSB detention center at Lefortovo.
It was very important for the FSB to keep Dakhkilgov in prison for as long as possible, since the Ingushetian was their only justification for the Chechen connection. They began working on Dakhkilgov in his cell, in ways which he knew nothing about. An inside agent who was supposedly an authoritative criminal was planted in the cell with him. The agent won the Ingushetian s confidence, and Dakhkilgov told him the circumstances of his case, saying that he had nothing to do with the bombings. Some time later, Dakhkilgov was released. An analysis of the swab taken from his hand had confirmed the presence of hexane, a solvent used at the fabric combine for cleaning wool.
There was no hexogene on his hands. The Chechen connection had been broken. But the war with Chechnya was now already in full swing, so Dakhkilgov had not spent his time in prison in vain.
On March 16, 2000, when the leadership of the FSB was giving an account to the public of progress made in investigating the September bombings, one of the journalists asked the deputy head of the investigative department of the FSB, Nikolai Georgievich Sapozhkov: Can you please tell me why Timur Dakhkilgov spent three months in prison as a terrorist? The reply given by Sapozhkov, who had already spent several months investigating the terrorist attacks as a member of a group of many dozens of investigators, depressed the journalists, since it made it clear that the investigation was following a false trail: I can explain. There was direct testimony against him from the people who brought the sugar and the explosives to Moscow&
So they gave his name?
No they& I mean it was direct testimony, they identified him by sight as a man who had helped to unload those sacks. Afterwards, you know, when we did a more thorough&
Petra Prohazkova, a Czech journalist who was interviewing Khattab at the time of the bombings, remembered Khattab s astounding reaction to the announcement of the terrorist attacks in Moscow. His face suddenly assumed an expression of genuine fright.
It was the sincere fright of a front-line soldier who realizes that now he s going to get the blame for everything. Everybody who knows Khattab agrees that he is no actor and could not possibly have feigned astonishment and fear.
The Chechens knew it was not in their interests 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. That was why the Chechens could not have been behind the terrorist attacks of September 1999. And the Chechens must be given credit for always denying their involvement in these bombings.
Here is what Ilyas Akhmadov, minister of foreign affairs in Aslan Maskhadov s government, had to say on that point:
Question: In France you talk as though everybody knows that the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk were set up by the Russian secret services& Do you have any proof?
Answer: Of course. Throughout the last war, we never showed the slightest inclination for that sort of thing. But if it had been organized by Basaev or Khattab, I can assure you that they wouldn t have been shy about admitting it to Russia. What s more, everybody knows that the failed bombing in Ryazan was organized by the FSB& I myself served in the army as a demolition officer at a military proving ground, and I know perfectly well what a great difference there is between an explosive and sugar.
Here is the opinion of another interested party with whom it is hard to disagree, the Chechen minister of defense and commander of the presidential guard, Magomed Khambiev: Now for the explosions in Moscow. Why are the Chechens not committing acts of terrorism now, when our people are being annihilated? Why did the Russian authorities
96
97
pay no attention to the hexogene incident in Ryazan, when the police had detained a member of the secret services with this explosive? There s not a single piece of evidence for the so-called Chechen connection in these bombings. And the bombings were least of all in the interest of the Chechens. But what is hidden will certainly be revealed. I assure you that the perpetrators and planners of the bombings in Moscow will become known, when there s a change of political regime in the Kremlin. Because those who ordered the bombings should be sought in the corridors of the Kremlin. These bombings were necessary in order to start the war, in order to distract the attention of Russians and the whole world from the scandals and dirty intrigues going on in the Kremlin.
Suspicions arose that the bombings were being carried out by people attempting to force the government to declare a state of emergency and cancel the elections. A number of politicians rejected the idea: I don t agree with the statements of certain analysts who connect this series of terrorist attacks with somebody s intentions to declare a state of emergency in Russia and cancel the elections to the State Duma, declared former Russian minister of the interior Kulikov in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta on September 11. The Chechens could not have had any interest in presidential elections or the declaration of a state of emergency in Russia. In 1996, it was the KorzhakovBarsukov-Soskovets group and the secret services standing behind them that supported the cancellation of the election. So who was attempting to provoke the declaration of a state of emergency in 1999?
Minister of Defense Igor Sergeiev thought it possible that military patrols might appear on the streets of Moscow. Soldiers could take part in patrolling the city together with the MVD s forces, he declared to journalists after a meeting with Boris Yeltsin. The military had been set the task of participating in the protection of the public against terrorist activity, Sergeiev stated. He also said that the GRU was working intensively to identify all possible contacts between those who had planned the explosions in Russian towns and international terrorists (a hint at foreign saboteurs!). The use of soldiers to protect peaceful citizens against terrorists looked rather like the introduction of military law. Igor Sergeiev spoke out for the introduction of wide-reaching anti-terrorist measures and anti-terrorist operations. In other words, the Russian Ministry of Defense was calling for war against an unnamed enemy, but, in fact, it was clear to everyone that he was calling for a war against Chechnya.
The final decision on all of these questions remained with President Yeltsin. The secret services, however, had practically unlimited opportunities for filtering or falsifying the information presented to the president. This was confirmed in an interview given on November, 12, 1999 by Edward Shevardnadze, the president of Georgia and former head of the Georgian KGB, when he spoke about the Chechen problem: Reference is usually made to the fact that the GRU has information of this kind. I know what information the GRU has historically used, how it is assembled, how it is reported at first to the General Staff, then to the minister of defense, then to the Supreme Commander. I know that there is large-scale falsification.
97
98
Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, another well-informed contemporary politician, who was a presidential candidate in the 2000 election, formulated his doubts differently. When Primakov was asked for his comments on the terrorist attacks in Moscow, he said that he thought the Moscow bombings would not be the end of the matter, there could be more explosions right across Russia, and one of the reasons for the situation that had arisen lay in the links between people in the agencies of law enforcement and the criminal underworld.
In effect, Primakov admitted that bombings in every part of Russia were the work of people connected with the secret services. This was also confirmed by Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze in an address broadcast on national television on November 15, 1999: Already at the meeting in Kishinev, I informed Boris Yeltsin that his secret services had contacts with Chechen terrorists. But Russia does not listen to its friends. Diplomatic etiquette did not permit a more forthright statement. The president of Georgia could not say that by Chechen terrorists he simply meant terrorists.
It is obvious, however, that Shevardnadze suspected the Russian secret services of committing the bombings. Information in his possession even suggested that the Russian secret services had been involved in two attempts on Shevardnadze s own life. In order to avoid making unsubstantiated claims, we can quote the former director of the United States National Security Council, retired Lieutenant-General William Odom. In October 1999, he stated that Prime Minister Putin and his entourage from the military were using this Chechen campaign to put Shevardnadze under severe pressure. They had already made one attempt to dismember Georgia by taking Abkhazia and southern Ossetia away from it and now, Odom said, they wanted to exploit the Chechen events to position their forces there, which was opposed by the current president of Georgia. Beginning with Primakov s term as Prime Minister, the Russian government had made at least two attempts on Shevardnadze s life. The Georgian leadership had provided the governments of a number of foreign countries with convincing evidence of this. Primakov himself was personally involved. He had used secret agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service in Belorussia, and in May an attempt was made with his knowledge on the life of Shevardnadze and several members of his entourage. The American government is in possession of tape-recordings of conversations made by the actual killers involved in the attempt. A year before that, a first attempt to kill Shevardnadze was made, not by amateurs, but by genuine professionals, well-prepared military groups who could only have been trained in Russia. There is, in addition, a mass of material evidence collected at the scene of the crime which confirms all of this.
What Shevardnadze hesitated to say about the bombings in Moscow was openly stated by Lebed, in answer to a question from the French newspaper Le Figaro: Do you mean to say that the present regime is behind the bombings? The general replied: I m almost convinced of it. Lebed pointed out that the force that could be discerned behind the bombings of residential buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk was not the Chechen terrorists, but the hand of power, that is the Kremlin and the president, who were up to their necks in shit, totally isolated, and together with Yeltsin s family had only one goal, to destabilize the position in order to avoid elections.
98
99
On September 14, the FSB and MVD issued the statement for which the FSB had carried out the bombings: Zdanovich announced that the agencies of law enforcement had no doubt that the series of explosions from Buinaksk to a house on the Kassirskoe Chausse in Moscow represented a large-scale terrorist operation launched by Basaev and Khattab s guerrillas in support of their military action in Dagestan. Igor Zubov, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, confirmed the suggestion: We can now state without the slightest doubt that Basaev and Khattab are behind these bombings.
The statements by Zdanovich and Zubov did not reflect the true situation. A day later, the head of GUBOP MVD of Russia, Vladimir Kozlov, announced that a number of people involved in these terrorist attacks have been identified, and explained that he meant a group of terrorists with connections in Moscow and the regions and towns surrounding the capital. Kozlov did not even mention Chechnya or Dagestan. Zdanovich was openly disseminating false information.
The FSB s conclusions did not sound convincing, and the attempts of the security forces to capture the culprits looked farcical. In the atmosphere of anti-Chechen hysteria in Moscow a few days after the second explosion, members of the FSB and GUBOP arrested two suspects for the terrorist attacks, and their names were immediately made public, without any concern for possible prejudice to the investigation: they were thirtytwo-year-old Timur Dakhkilgov and his father-in-law, forty-year-old old Bekmars Sauntiev.
Timur Dakhkilgov was an Ingushetian who was born in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and lived there in the city s Tram Park District, before he moved to Moscow. He was a dyer in the Krasny Sukonshchik Textile Combine. On September 10, immediately after the terrorist attack on Guryanov Street, Sauntiev went to see the Dakhkilgovs and said that they all had to go to the northern Butovo police station for re-registration.
At the station, Timur Dakhkilgov and his wife Lida were photographed, their fingerprints were taken, swabs were taken from the palms of their hands, and they were released.
Soon after the second bombing, MVD operatives turned up at Sauntiev and the Dakhkilgovs apartments, said that there were traces of hexogene on Timur Dakhkilgov s hands (he was a dyer, after all!), and arrested him. There was no hexogene on Sauntiev s hands, so, instead, they found a revolver under his bath, and discovered traces of hexogene on the handle of the door to his flat (on the outside, that is, in the stairwell).
The suspects were questioned for three days. Sauntiev was later released and the pistol found in his apartment was apparently forgotten. Timur Dakhkilgov was taken to the MUR premises on Petrovka Street, where he was accused of possessing explosives and terrorism. The entire process was reported openly on television, and Rushailo even reported to the Council of the Federation that a terrorist had been caught.
According to Dakhkilgov, three investigators worked with him, but they were never introduced to him, and they never called each other by name. To himself the suspect
99
100
called them Old Man, Ginger, and Nice Guy. The latter earned his nickname by never actually hitting Dakhkilgov. The interrogation lasted for three days, after which Dakhkilgov was transferred to the FSB detention center at Lefortovo.
It was very important for the FSB to keep Dakhkilgov in prison for as long as possible, since the Ingushetian was their only justification for the Chechen connection. They began working on Dakhkilgov in his cell, in ways which he knew nothing about. An inside agent who was supposedly an authoritative criminal was planted in the cell with him. The agent won the Ingushetian s confidence, and Dakhkilgov told him the circumstances of his case, saying that he had nothing to do with the bombings. Some time later, Dakhkilgov was released. An analysis of the swab taken from his hand had confirmed the presence of hexane, a solvent used at the fabric combine for cleaning wool.
There was no hexogene on his hands. The Chechen connection had been broken. But the war with Chechnya was now already in full swing, so Dakhkilgov had not spent his time in prison in vain.
On March 16, 2000, when the leadership of the FSB was giving an account to the public of progress made in investigating the September bombings, one of the journalists asked the deputy head of the investigative department of the FSB, Nikolai Georgievich Sapozhkov: Can you please tell me why Timur Dakhkilgov spent three months in prison as a terrorist? The reply given by Sapozhkov, who had already spent several months investigating the terrorist attacks as a member of a group of many dozens of investigators, depressed the journalists, since it made it clear that the investigation was following a false trail: I can explain. There was direct testimony against him from the people who brought the sugar and the explosives to Moscow&
So they gave his name?
No they& I mean it was direct testimony, they identified him by sight as a man who had helped to unload those sacks. Afterwards, you know, when we did a more thorough&
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