Blowing Up Russia (20 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
Well, you know that he had hexogene on his hands, and then the other details which at the time unambiguously provided a basis for treating him as a suspect. Later we did a very thorough job on the Dakhkilgov connection. We had to check everything out again and present him for identification in a calm situation. And we were convinced that the features by which he d been identified, they were for Slavic persons identifying so-called Caucasians, but they raised doubts for those who had identified him, and by thorough investigation and establishing his alibi, we reached the conclusion that he was not involved in this crime. The case was considered jointly with employees of the Public Prosecutor s Office, and they agreed with our conclusions.
We must apologize to our readers for the quality of Sapozhkov s language. What Sapozhkov had planned to say was as follows. When the investigators arrested Dakhkilgov and began showing him to the residents of the bombed houses, so that they could decide whether he was the one who had planted the sacks of explosive with the
100
101
timers and detonating devices, the residents, to whom all Caucasians look the same, identified him as a man involved in the terrorist attacks. They did a thorough job on Dakhkilgov (we know that they interrogated him, beat him, tortured him, put polythene bags over his head, choked him, and planted an agent in his cell). The most important thing for them was to drag out the whole process as long as possible. After three months, Dakhkilgov was not needed any longer, and with the consent of the Public Prosecutor s Office, he was released, and the case against him was closed.
So Dakhkilgov spent his time inside for two reasons. Firstly, the crowd identified him as one of the culprits, and secondly, hexogene was supposedly found on his hands. But the FSB managed to get its explosives confused. Soon after, the bombing reports began appearing in the media that according to the FSB the hexogene story is a diversionary ploy. In actual fact, in all of the bombings the terrorists used a different explosive substance. Western commentators pointed out that the rubble of the houses bombed in Moscow was cleared and removed with lightning speed (for Russia, in only three days) These suspicious-minded foreigners thought that anyone in Russia working as diligently as that must be covering up their tracks. In any case, the FSB s ploy was merely for public consumption. The terrorists themselves knew perfectly well what explosives they used and there was no point in concealing the components of the explosives from them.
The question of exactly what was used as an explosive in the September bombings should not be regarded as still unanswered. Hexogene was produced in Russia at restricted military plants. Hexogene is carefully guarded, and its use is carefully controlled was the assurance given in September 1999, at the Russian research and production enterprise Region, where they worked with hexogene. At the plant, they were convinced that any leak of hexogene from secret defense plants, known only by their numbers was, virtually impossible.
Since hexogene was used by the terrorists in large quantities, it would have been easy to determine just who had bought or been given the substance, especially since the experts could always determine exactly where any particular batch had been produced. It was impossible for tens of tons of hexogene to have been stolen. Thousands of tons of TNT- hexogene mixture were kept at military depots and in the warehouses of munitions factories for inclusion in rocket warheads, mines, torpedoes, and shells. But hexogene extracted from finished munitions had a distinctive appearance, and extracting it was difficult and risky. Here are a few examples.
On October 8,1999, one of the Russian information agencies announced that the Central Military Prosecutor s Office had instigated proceedings against a number of officials in the central administration of the anti-aircraft defense forces (PVO). The senior military prosecutor, Yu. Demin, stated that over a period of several years, high-ranking military officers had abused their official positions by forging and falsifying documents, in order to steal spares for a range of antiaircraft rocket-launchers, which were sold to commercial companies and private entrepreneurs. Just a few of this group s many criminal escapades had cost the state a total of more than two million dollars. It is easy to imagine what kind of commercial organizations and private entrepreneurs bought stolen spare parts for
101
102
rocket-launchers. It is quite obvious that without the involvement of the FSB and the GRU, it would not have been possible to continue stealing the PVO s technology over a period of several years.
On September 28, 1999, employees of the Ryazan Department for Combating Organized Crime (UBOP) arrested the head of an automobile repair shop in an air-strike technology depot, twenty-five-year-old Warrant Officer Vyacheslav Korniev, who served at the military aerodrome in Dyagilev, where bombers were based. At the time of his arrest, he was discovered to be in possession of eleven kilograms of TNT. Korniev confessed that the TNT had been stolen from a military depot, and that a group of employees to which he belonged had extracted it from FAB-300 high-explosive bombs that were stored outdoors at the depot.
The same day, the military court of the Ryazan garrison pronounced sentence on the head of the field supplies depot of the Ryazan Institute of the VDV, A. Ashbarin, for stealing more than three kilograms of TNT, with the intention of selling it for three thousand dollars. Although the appropriate article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation stipulated a sentence of from three to seven years imprisonment, the soldier was fined 20,000 rubles.
Clearly, stealing TNT-hexogene mixture in small amounts was difficult. In contrast, removing it by the truckload was easy, but only with the appropriate permits, which meant you were bound to leave a trail, and a trail like that might lead back to the FSB.
After the bombings, numerous representatives of the Russian military-industrial complex stated that such a large amount of explosives could only be stolen with the connivance of highly-placed officials. On September 15, the head of the MVD s Central Office for Combating Organized Crime (GUBOP), Vladimir Kozlov, confirmed that the explosion on Guryanov Street had not been caused by a homemade pyrotechnic mixture, but by industrial explosives.
So in order to throw pushy journalists and conscientious criminal investigation officers off the scent, the FSB had fed the media its story about hexogene as a diversionary ploy; in actual fact, they said, the explosive used was ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer. The point was that ammonium nitrate could have been bought, transported, and stored quite openly.
It made good bombs, and if hexogene, TNT, or aluminum powder was added, it became a really powerful explosive. It was true, however, that it required a complicated detonating device, a device not every terrorist would be able to work with.
Why was the hexogene story used initially? Because the houses were blown up by one group of FSB officers, the explosive was analyzed by a second and the propaganda (or public relations, to use the current term) surrounding the event was handled by a third.
The first group carried out the terrorist attacks successfully (with the exception of Ryazan). The second easily determined that they had used hexogene. The third suddenly realized that hexogene is produced in Russia at restricted military plants, and it was a simple job to determine exactly who had bought the hexogene which had been used to blow up the houses, and when it was bought. At this point, panic set in. In three days, all
102
103
the material evidence (the bombed houses) was removed, and stories were urgently planted in the media about ammonium nitrate. On March 16, 2000, the first deputy head of the Second Department (for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Combating Terrorism, i.e. Department K) and the operations and investigation department of the FSB, Alexander Dmitrievich Shagako, told a press conference that the explosive used in absolutely all the bombings in Russia had been identified, and that explosive was nitrate: I d like to observe that as a result of criminalistic investigations carried out by FSB experts, Russia has received confirmation that the composition of the explosives used in Moscow and the composition of the explosives which were discovered in the basement premises of the house on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, and also the composition of the explosive substances which were discovered in the town of Buinaksk on September 4 in an unexploded ZIL-130 automobile, they are identical, i.e. the composition of all of these substances includes ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, in some cases hexogene has been added, and in some cases TNT has been added&
All that remained was to determine where the nitrate in Moscow and the other Russian cities had come from. Shagako and Zdanovich, who was also at the press conference, dealt successfully with that problem. Were there any cases of theft of these explosives from state plants where they are produced using specific technologies? Zdanovich asked and then answered himself: I can say straight away that there were not, or at least the investigation is not in possession of any such information.
It is impossible to determine who has bought and sold nitrate for nefarious purposes.
There is just too much of it all over the country, including in Chechnya. Small amounts of TNT, hexogene, and aluminum powder could have been stolen by anybody from any military depot (a matter on which, with the assistance of the FSB and the Central Military Prosecutor s Office, several reports appeared in the media). In misinforming public opinion concerning the composition of the explosive, the FSB was trying to deflect suspicions that it had planned and carried out the terrorist attacks. All that still needed to be done was to find a warehouse of chemical fertilizers somewhere in Chechnya. It turned out that it had also already been dealt with, which was very timely, since it allowed the investigation to be completed a few days before the presidential election: In this connection I would also like to point out to you, said Shagako, that two months ago employees of the Federal Security Service in Urus Martan discovered a center for training demolition operatives. On the territory of this center five tons of ammonium nitrate were discovered. At the same site trigger mechanisms, identical to the mechanisms which were used in the explosions I listed earlier, were also discovered&
The trigger devices discovered in the ZIL-130 automobile in the town of Buinaksk and also the trigger devices discovered basement premises on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, in the course of criminalistic analysis they were proved to be identical. In all of these trigger devices, a Casio electronic watch was used as a delay mechanism. In all of these trigger devices, light diodes of identical design were used, the electronic circuit boards, even the colors of the wires which were used for welding, they re the same color in all the mechanisms. In this connection I wish to point out that several days ago,
103
104
employees of the Federal Security Service in Chechnya discovered several trigger mechanisms among the possessions of guerrillas who had been killed while attempting to break out of the encirclement of the city of Grozny. Investigations carried out by specialists of the Federal Security Service demonstrated that the trigger mechanisms removed from the ZIL-130 automobile in Buinaksk, and the trigger mechanisms removed from Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, the design of them all is the same. They are all identical with each other& In March in the settlement of Duba-Yurt, an isolated building was discovered, in which literature in Arabic on mine-laying and demolition and military training instructions were discovered, and in addition in the same premises, instructions for the use of a Casio watch were discovered. This kind of watch, as I told you earlier, was used by the criminals in all of the bombings listed above. In March in the settlement of Chiri-Yurt, an isolated building was discovered which was surrounded by an iron fence inside which fifty sacks of ammonium nitrate were sighted, identified, and discovered, that s something in the region of two-and-a-half tons.
If the terrorists had really used ammonium nitrate, the RUOP investigators would not have looked for hexogene on Dakhkilgov and Sauntiev s hands, they would have focused on nitrate. The police looked for hexogene on the hands of their detainees, precisely because the official conclusion which the experts had provided to the investigation was that hexogene was used to blow up the houses. No subsequent expert analysis could have been more accurate, including the repeat analysis which was later carried out by the investigative agencies of the FSB and made public in March 2000, just a few days before the presidential election. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in March 2000, a few days before the presidential election, the FSB was deliberately dispensing misinformation.
On September 13, 1999 in Moscow, Luzhkov signed three sets of regulations which contravened the Constitution and the laws of the Russian Federation. The first of them proclaimed the re-registration of refugees and migrants in Moscow. The second document demanded the expulsion from the capital of people who violated the regulations on registration. The third put a halt to the registration in Moscow of refugees and migrants. On the same day, the governor of the Moscow Region, Anatoly Tyazhlov, signed instructions for the arrest of individuals who were not registered as residents of Moscow or the Moscow Region. Of course, none of these regulations made any mention of Chechens, or even of Caucasians On September 15, joint police and military patrols were introduced in Moscow, and the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation was launched throughout Russia with the participation of the forces of the Ministry of the Interior. Muscovites were not yet aware that the wave of terror in the capital had ended at this point. Now it was the turn of the provinces. Early in the morning of September 16, an apartment block was blown up in Volgodonsk in the Rostov Region. Seventeen people were killed.
At an extraordinary session of the Council of the Federation held in camera on September 17, with the participation of the Prime Minister and the armed forces and law enforcement ministries, the Council approved a proposal for the creation of civil
We must apologize to our readers for the quality of Sapozhkov s language. What Sapozhkov had planned to say was as follows. When the investigators arrested Dakhkilgov and began showing him to the residents of the bombed houses, so that they could decide whether he was the one who had planted the sacks of explosive with the
100
101
timers and detonating devices, the residents, to whom all Caucasians look the same, identified him as a man involved in the terrorist attacks. They did a thorough job on Dakhkilgov (we know that they interrogated him, beat him, tortured him, put polythene bags over his head, choked him, and planted an agent in his cell). The most important thing for them was to drag out the whole process as long as possible. After three months, Dakhkilgov was not needed any longer, and with the consent of the Public Prosecutor s Office, he was released, and the case against him was closed.
So Dakhkilgov spent his time inside for two reasons. Firstly, the crowd identified him as one of the culprits, and secondly, hexogene was supposedly found on his hands. But the FSB managed to get its explosives confused. Soon after, the bombing reports began appearing in the media that according to the FSB the hexogene story is a diversionary ploy. In actual fact, in all of the bombings the terrorists used a different explosive substance. Western commentators pointed out that the rubble of the houses bombed in Moscow was cleared and removed with lightning speed (for Russia, in only three days) These suspicious-minded foreigners thought that anyone in Russia working as diligently as that must be covering up their tracks. In any case, the FSB s ploy was merely for public consumption. The terrorists themselves knew perfectly well what explosives they used and there was no point in concealing the components of the explosives from them.
The question of exactly what was used as an explosive in the September bombings should not be regarded as still unanswered. Hexogene was produced in Russia at restricted military plants. Hexogene is carefully guarded, and its use is carefully controlled was the assurance given in September 1999, at the Russian research and production enterprise Region, where they worked with hexogene. At the plant, they were convinced that any leak of hexogene from secret defense plants, known only by their numbers was, virtually impossible.
Since hexogene was used by the terrorists in large quantities, it would have been easy to determine just who had bought or been given the substance, especially since the experts could always determine exactly where any particular batch had been produced. It was impossible for tens of tons of hexogene to have been stolen. Thousands of tons of TNT- hexogene mixture were kept at military depots and in the warehouses of munitions factories for inclusion in rocket warheads, mines, torpedoes, and shells. But hexogene extracted from finished munitions had a distinctive appearance, and extracting it was difficult and risky. Here are a few examples.
On October 8,1999, one of the Russian information agencies announced that the Central Military Prosecutor s Office had instigated proceedings against a number of officials in the central administration of the anti-aircraft defense forces (PVO). The senior military prosecutor, Yu. Demin, stated that over a period of several years, high-ranking military officers had abused their official positions by forging and falsifying documents, in order to steal spares for a range of antiaircraft rocket-launchers, which were sold to commercial companies and private entrepreneurs. Just a few of this group s many criminal escapades had cost the state a total of more than two million dollars. It is easy to imagine what kind of commercial organizations and private entrepreneurs bought stolen spare parts for
101
102
rocket-launchers. It is quite obvious that without the involvement of the FSB and the GRU, it would not have been possible to continue stealing the PVO s technology over a period of several years.
On September 28, 1999, employees of the Ryazan Department for Combating Organized Crime (UBOP) arrested the head of an automobile repair shop in an air-strike technology depot, twenty-five-year-old Warrant Officer Vyacheslav Korniev, who served at the military aerodrome in Dyagilev, where bombers were based. At the time of his arrest, he was discovered to be in possession of eleven kilograms of TNT. Korniev confessed that the TNT had been stolen from a military depot, and that a group of employees to which he belonged had extracted it from FAB-300 high-explosive bombs that were stored outdoors at the depot.
The same day, the military court of the Ryazan garrison pronounced sentence on the head of the field supplies depot of the Ryazan Institute of the VDV, A. Ashbarin, for stealing more than three kilograms of TNT, with the intention of selling it for three thousand dollars. Although the appropriate article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation stipulated a sentence of from three to seven years imprisonment, the soldier was fined 20,000 rubles.
Clearly, stealing TNT-hexogene mixture in small amounts was difficult. In contrast, removing it by the truckload was easy, but only with the appropriate permits, which meant you were bound to leave a trail, and a trail like that might lead back to the FSB.
After the bombings, numerous representatives of the Russian military-industrial complex stated that such a large amount of explosives could only be stolen with the connivance of highly-placed officials. On September 15, the head of the MVD s Central Office for Combating Organized Crime (GUBOP), Vladimir Kozlov, confirmed that the explosion on Guryanov Street had not been caused by a homemade pyrotechnic mixture, but by industrial explosives.
So in order to throw pushy journalists and conscientious criminal investigation officers off the scent, the FSB had fed the media its story about hexogene as a diversionary ploy; in actual fact, they said, the explosive used was ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer. The point was that ammonium nitrate could have been bought, transported, and stored quite openly.
It made good bombs, and if hexogene, TNT, or aluminum powder was added, it became a really powerful explosive. It was true, however, that it required a complicated detonating device, a device not every terrorist would be able to work with.
Why was the hexogene story used initially? Because the houses were blown up by one group of FSB officers, the explosive was analyzed by a second and the propaganda (or public relations, to use the current term) surrounding the event was handled by a third.
The first group carried out the terrorist attacks successfully (with the exception of Ryazan). The second easily determined that they had used hexogene. The third suddenly realized that hexogene is produced in Russia at restricted military plants, and it was a simple job to determine exactly who had bought the hexogene which had been used to blow up the houses, and when it was bought. At this point, panic set in. In three days, all
102
103
the material evidence (the bombed houses) was removed, and stories were urgently planted in the media about ammonium nitrate. On March 16, 2000, the first deputy head of the Second Department (for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Combating Terrorism, i.e. Department K) and the operations and investigation department of the FSB, Alexander Dmitrievich Shagako, told a press conference that the explosive used in absolutely all the bombings in Russia had been identified, and that explosive was nitrate: I d like to observe that as a result of criminalistic investigations carried out by FSB experts, Russia has received confirmation that the composition of the explosives used in Moscow and the composition of the explosives which were discovered in the basement premises of the house on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, and also the composition of the explosive substances which were discovered in the town of Buinaksk on September 4 in an unexploded ZIL-130 automobile, they are identical, i.e. the composition of all of these substances includes ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, in some cases hexogene has been added, and in some cases TNT has been added&
All that remained was to determine where the nitrate in Moscow and the other Russian cities had come from. Shagako and Zdanovich, who was also at the press conference, dealt successfully with that problem. Were there any cases of theft of these explosives from state plants where they are produced using specific technologies? Zdanovich asked and then answered himself: I can say straight away that there were not, or at least the investigation is not in possession of any such information.
It is impossible to determine who has bought and sold nitrate for nefarious purposes.
There is just too much of it all over the country, including in Chechnya. Small amounts of TNT, hexogene, and aluminum powder could have been stolen by anybody from any military depot (a matter on which, with the assistance of the FSB and the Central Military Prosecutor s Office, several reports appeared in the media). In misinforming public opinion concerning the composition of the explosive, the FSB was trying to deflect suspicions that it had planned and carried out the terrorist attacks. All that still needed to be done was to find a warehouse of chemical fertilizers somewhere in Chechnya. It turned out that it had also already been dealt with, which was very timely, since it allowed the investigation to be completed a few days before the presidential election: In this connection I would also like to point out to you, said Shagako, that two months ago employees of the Federal Security Service in Urus Martan discovered a center for training demolition operatives. On the territory of this center five tons of ammonium nitrate were discovered. At the same site trigger mechanisms, identical to the mechanisms which were used in the explosions I listed earlier, were also discovered&
The trigger devices discovered in the ZIL-130 automobile in the town of Buinaksk and also the trigger devices discovered basement premises on Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, in the course of criminalistic analysis they were proved to be identical. In all of these trigger devices, a Casio electronic watch was used as a delay mechanism. In all of these trigger devices, light diodes of identical design were used, the electronic circuit boards, even the colors of the wires which were used for welding, they re the same color in all the mechanisms. In this connection I wish to point out that several days ago,
103
104
employees of the Federal Security Service in Chechnya discovered several trigger mechanisms among the possessions of guerrillas who had been killed while attempting to break out of the encirclement of the city of Grozny. Investigations carried out by specialists of the Federal Security Service demonstrated that the trigger mechanisms removed from the ZIL-130 automobile in Buinaksk, and the trigger mechanisms removed from Borisovskie Prudy Street in Moscow, the design of them all is the same. They are all identical with each other& In March in the settlement of Duba-Yurt, an isolated building was discovered, in which literature in Arabic on mine-laying and demolition and military training instructions were discovered, and in addition in the same premises, instructions for the use of a Casio watch were discovered. This kind of watch, as I told you earlier, was used by the criminals in all of the bombings listed above. In March in the settlement of Chiri-Yurt, an isolated building was discovered which was surrounded by an iron fence inside which fifty sacks of ammonium nitrate were sighted, identified, and discovered, that s something in the region of two-and-a-half tons.
If the terrorists had really used ammonium nitrate, the RUOP investigators would not have looked for hexogene on Dakhkilgov and Sauntiev s hands, they would have focused on nitrate. The police looked for hexogene on the hands of their detainees, precisely because the official conclusion which the experts had provided to the investigation was that hexogene was used to blow up the houses. No subsequent expert analysis could have been more accurate, including the repeat analysis which was later carried out by the investigative agencies of the FSB and made public in March 2000, just a few days before the presidential election. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in March 2000, a few days before the presidential election, the FSB was deliberately dispensing misinformation.
On September 13, 1999 in Moscow, Luzhkov signed three sets of regulations which contravened the Constitution and the laws of the Russian Federation. The first of them proclaimed the re-registration of refugees and migrants in Moscow. The second document demanded the expulsion from the capital of people who violated the regulations on registration. The third put a halt to the registration in Moscow of refugees and migrants. On the same day, the governor of the Moscow Region, Anatoly Tyazhlov, signed instructions for the arrest of individuals who were not registered as residents of Moscow or the Moscow Region. Of course, none of these regulations made any mention of Chechens, or even of Caucasians On September 15, joint police and military patrols were introduced in Moscow, and the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation was launched throughout Russia with the participation of the forces of the Ministry of the Interior. Muscovites were not yet aware that the wave of terror in the capital had ended at this point. Now it was the turn of the provinces. Early in the morning of September 16, an apartment block was blown up in Volgodonsk in the Rostov Region. Seventeen people were killed.
At an extraordinary session of the Council of the Federation held in camera on September 17, with the participation of the Prime Minister and the armed forces and law enforcement ministries, the Council approved a proposal for the creation of civil
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