The New Nobility of the KGB (23 page)
Read The New Nobility of the KGB Online
Authors: Andrei Soldatov
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #International Relations, #Security (National & International), #Intelligence & Espionage, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Social Classes
On April 4, 2004, three Chechen brothers—Rustam Ilaev (30) and his younger siblings Inver (21) and Adlan (17)—as well as a fourth man, Kazbek Bataev (20), were seized in the Chechen village of Assinovskaya. All four were refugees from Bamut, a village destroyed by bombing during the war. At 4:30 A.M. around twenty armed people, most in balaclavas, arrived in three armored personnel carriers at the home of Jahita Ilaeva, the mother of the Ilaev brothers, to take them away. The captors did not identify themselves, but they spoke Russian without an accent, and those whose faces weren’t covered by masks looked like Russians. The four Chechen men have never been seen again.
Despite the requests of the relatives to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Chechnya and the local prosecutor, no explanation for the capture was offered. A few months after the event, the relatives of the kidnapped men received letters from Alexander Stepanov, the investigator attached to the village of Achkoy-Martan, confirming that the four men had indeed been taken away “by unidentified persons” in armored vehicles. He wrote that a criminal case had been filed and that he would inform the relatives about the outcome of the investigation. According to
Novaya Gazeta
, the four men were captured by FSB’s summary special group SSG-12, and the case was mentioned in a report of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights.
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Novaya Gazeta
, the four men were captured by FSB’s summary special group SSG-12, and the case was mentioned in a report of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights.
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Two of the disappeared, Rustam and Inver, had served in Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov’s security service—a department distrusted by Russian security services because Kadyrov encouraged former insurgents to join its ranks. Their bodies might never be found. In general, Russian special forces made it a practice to use drastic methods to eliminate evidence. One such method, known as pulverization, involved strapping artillery shells to a body, loading it down with TNT. The trick, as explained by two special forces officers who had fought militants in Chechnya for a decade, was to “make sure absolutely nothing is left. No body, no proof, no problem.”
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Without doubt, the Russians were not the only forces who turned to brutality in the Chechen wars. The Chechen rebels fought with equally harsh tactics, often targeting Russian soldiers and carrying out terrorist attacks against innocent civilians beyond the war zone.
THE FSB HAD also deployed units from its special purpose center to Chechnya. According to Colonel Sergei Shavrin, deputy commander of Vympel Department, two sections with more than thirty operatives each were deployed full-time in Chechnya.
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These groups carried out one of the most high-profile eliminations of the decade. On March 8, 2005, Aslan Maskhadov, the last legitimate president of separatist Chechnya, was hunted down and killed in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt by the special purpose center’s assault group. One of the officers was awarded the Hero of Russia medal for his role in the assassination.
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These groups carried out one of the most high-profile eliminations of the decade. On March 8, 2005, Aslan Maskhadov, the last legitimate president of separatist Chechnya, was hunted down and killed in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt by the special purpose center’s assault group. One of the officers was awarded the Hero of Russia medal for his role in the assassination.
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Russia’s unapologetic practice of extrajudicial killings has continued in recent years. On September 2, 2009, leading Russian human rights organizations called a press conference to declare that death squads were still in use in the North Caucasus.
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“We can describe their method as ‘death squads.’ We shouldn’t be afraid of using this term, because they kill civilians and push the Caucasus toward war,” said prominent activist Lev Ponomarev, head of the organization called For Human Rights. “The death squads are used illegally . . . since 2000, Memorial has been tracking such methods: illegal prisons, torture, and extrajudicial executions,” said Alexander Cherkasov of the human rights group Memorial. According to Memorial’s tally, in Chechnya seventy-nine people were victims of kidnappings in 2009. “After two years of some sort of calm in Chechnya, we have a new wave of suicide bombings, kidnappings, and murders. . . . We’ve gone backward three years,” Cherkasov lamented.
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“We can describe their method as ‘death squads.’ We shouldn’t be afraid of using this term, because they kill civilians and push the Caucasus toward war,” said prominent activist Lev Ponomarev, head of the organization called For Human Rights. “The death squads are used illegally . . . since 2000, Memorial has been tracking such methods: illegal prisons, torture, and extrajudicial executions,” said Alexander Cherkasov of the human rights group Memorial. According to Memorial’s tally, in Chechnya seventy-nine people were victims of kidnappings in 2009. “After two years of some sort of calm in Chechnya, we have a new wave of suicide bombings, kidnappings, and murders. . . . We’ve gone backward three years,” Cherkasov lamented.
Neighboring Dagestan has seen twenty-five kidnappings since February 2009 by Memorial’s count, twelve of which resulted in the murder of victims. A week after the press conference, Sirazhudin Umarov, 32, a construction worker, was kidnapped from Qala, a Derbent district of Dagestan. On September 9 he was called to a meeting by an acquaintance named Azer, a police officer. There Umarov was captured by unidentified masked men. The following day his badly mutilated body was discovered. The security forces confirmed that he had been killed by the authorities, though they claimed he had died during an antiterrorism operation. “His face was so badly smashed from beating that I had difficulty recognizing him,” said Gulbenis Badurova, 33, his wife. “His eye was missing, and both hands had been broken.”
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A few months earlier, Umarov and his uncle had been detained by local law enforcement officials for suspected involvement in the insurgency. Umarov’s uncle was tried and convicted. Umarov was released and returned to Dagestan. Two months later, he was dead.
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Extrajudicial killing would seem to be at odds with the law. In Chechnya, there was no declared war with Russia, only a counterterrorism operation. During counterterrorism operations, law enforcement agencies are supposed to operate according to the Criminal Code of Russia. Terrorism is a crime listed in the Criminal Code, meaning that terrorists should be detained, charged, and tried. If proven guilty, they should be sent to prison. (The death penalty is not used in Russia.) There is no place in the criminal code for summary execution without charge. Valery Dyatlenko, a former FSB general and deputy chief of the Security Committee at the State Duma, commented to the authors on the “shoot to kill” policy at the end of 2005: “You speak about liquidators, but this is not correct,” he said. “No one has permitted anyone to do such a thing.” Small insurgent groups, he added, “hide out in forests, and a tactic is in place to combat such groups. . . . There is a unit tasked to check any individual found in a forest. The principle is that no one has a legitimate reason to be roaming the woods. And if shooting begins, then our units, to protect themselves, excuse me, they are at war. . . . But this is not liquidation; liquidation is a term from the SS lexicon.”
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When asked what he would call the practice, he replied: “Elimination. Or armed struggle. . . . For me this term [direct liquidations] is equivalent to murder. It is wrong. But there is a war, no matter what you call it. These groups are not instruments of punishment or retaliation; it is one of the forms of the struggle.”
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Russian security services in Chechnya adopted other new tactics as well. One, called “counter-capture,” was a highly controversial practice of seizing terrorists’ relatives to pressure suspected terrorists to surrender. The term “counter-capture” was publicly used for the first time by general prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov before the State Duma on October 29, 2004, when he said that “counter-capture” would have a deterrent effect on future terrorism. “If people—if you can call them human beings—have turned to such an act as terrorism, the detention of relatives, to show the terrorists what could happen to these families, may to some degree save people.”
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Russian security services in Chechnya adopted other new tactics as well. One, called “counter-capture,” was a highly controversial practice of seizing terrorists’ relatives to pressure suspected terrorists to surrender. The term “counter-capture” was publicly used for the first time by general prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov before the State Duma on October 29, 2004, when he said that “counter-capture” would have a deterrent effect on future terrorism. “If people—if you can call them human beings—have turned to such an act as terrorism, the detention of relatives, to show the terrorists what could happen to these families, may to some degree save people.”
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Though the Russian legislature has never approved the policy of counter-capture, it is actively employed. The first capture occurred in March 2004, when more than forty relatives of Chechen field commander Magomed Hambiev were taken into custody. As a result, Hambiev surrendered to the federal authorities. The second capture of relatives occurred during the siege in Beslan. Relatives of the wife of Aslan Maskhadov, including her father, were detained. Similarly, on August 12, 2005, Natasha Humadova, the sister of Chechen field commander Doku Umarov, was taken by the authorities.
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In a new wrinkle to the long, bloody conflict between Russia and Chechnya, in May 2004 Putin ordered the creation of a special unit to serve the pro-Kremlin Chechen president. The “Kadyrov guards”—former bodyguards of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov—were assigned to the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs and used the same tactics of kidnapping and counter-capture.
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According to Memorial, the capture of seven relatives of Aslan Maskhadov in December 2004 was carried out by Kadyrov guards.
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According to Memorial, the capture of seven relatives of Aslan Maskhadov in December 2004 was carried out by Kadyrov guards.
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IN 2006, SEVERAL months before he was killed in an explosion, Basayev reorganized the military structure of the Chechen insurgents. Previously, they had been a rather conventional military organization with brigades, regiments, battalions, the Ministry of Sharia’s state security, and even an antiterrorist center. Faced with Russian squads carrying out extrajudicial killings, Chechens shifted from a quasi-military structure to a system of small three-to five-person groups tasked with attacking Russian law enforcement personnel.
In November 2006 Ali Taziev (nom-de-guerre Magas), a Chechen commander, stated in an interview on a separatist Web site that the formation of such groups was designed “to target specific people and to prepare and execute military operations for their elimination.”
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These changes were confirmed by the authors’ sources in the Russian secret services, which face a new generation of militants: By 2008, Chechen youth were being drawn to jihad, replacing experienced insurgents in their mid-thirties. Jihadist groups extended their reach beyond the borders of Chechnya to the internal republics of Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Dagestan. The tactic of large insurgent raids were replaced by ambushes.
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These changes were confirmed by the authors’ sources in the Russian secret services, which face a new generation of militants: By 2008, Chechen youth were being drawn to jihad, replacing experienced insurgents in their mid-thirties. Jihadist groups extended their reach beyond the borders of Chechnya to the internal republics of Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Dagestan. The tactic of large insurgent raids were replaced by ambushes.
Between 2007 and 2009 a number of high-ranking Russian officials were ambushed and killed by Chechen terrorists. On January 12, 2008, Colonel Anatoly Kyarov, the head of the Kabardino-Balkaria republic’s organized crime unit, was assassinated in Nalchik. On March 7, Mark Metsaev, the head of the same unit in North Ossetia, was machine-gunned to death. On June 12, 2009, General Adilgerei Magomedtagirov, Dagestan’s interior minister, was killed in the capital, Makhachkala. The militants also returned to suicide bombing; in November 2008 a female suicide bomber killed eleven people and wounded as many as forty others in an attack in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, and in June 2009 a suicide bomber killed two police officers in Grozny.
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On March 29, 2010, female suicide terrorism returned to Moscow: Two women from Dagestan almost simultaneously blew themselves up in the capital’s metro. The attack killed forty people.
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On March 29, 2010, female suicide terrorism returned to Moscow: Two women from Dagestan almost simultaneously blew themselves up in the capital’s metro. The attack killed forty people.
Military operations led by Russian troops, meanwhile, were in decline: In 2007, Putin cut the federal presence in Chechnya from 50,000 to 25,000 troops. Federal forces now had the same number of personnel as Kadyrov’s formations.
For three years, Kadyrov urged the Russian security agencies and military to withdraw. He largely succeeded in pushing out (by persuasion and other means) the extrajudicial hit squads and other remnants of the Russian attack on Chechnya.
In April 2009 the Kremlin declared the decade-and-a-half-long war in Chechnya over. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the lifting of the “special security regime” in the region and announced the end of the counterterrorism operation in Chechnya.
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PART III
ACTIVITY ABROAD
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ASSASSINATIONS
I
N RESPONSE TO Chechen terrorism, Russia’s security forces had gradually expanded their counteroffensive beyond national boundaries to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of terrorists abroad.
N RESPONSE TO Chechen terrorism, Russia’s security forces had gradually expanded their counteroffensive beyond national boundaries to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of terrorists abroad.
At 12:45 P.M. on February 13, 2004, a white Toyota Land Cruiser carrying Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen warlord and vice president of the breakaway republic, and his 13-year-old son was blown up in the Qatari capital of Doha as they were driving away from a mosque after Friday prayers. Yandarbiyev had driven only 300 yards from the mosque when the blast occurred. Gravely wounded, Yandarbiyev was pronounced dead several hours later. No one took responsibility for the attack, by far the most serious blow to the Chechen insurgency since the killing in 1996 of Dzhokhar Dudaev, the separatist president of Chechnya, when Russian military intelligence successfully homed in on Dudaev’s cell phone signal and fired a missile in his direction.
Yandarbiyev’s assassination was a sign of new tactics adopted by the Russian secret services in their fight against Chechen rebels. In the 1990s the battlefield was largely in Chechnya, but now Russian services were hunting down Chechen leaders anywhere in the world. The Russian authorities had openly declared Yandarbiyev a terrorist because of his role in the Nord-Ost theater attack, but they had little hope that he would be extradited from an Arab capital. Most of the Muslim world was sympathetic to the Chechen cause.
Yandarbiyev was born in 1952 into a Chechen family expelled by Stalin from Chechnya to Kazakhstan. In the late 1980s the intelligentsia in the North Caucasus were the first to be inflamed by nationalism, and Yandarbiyev, in Soviet times a poet and writer, became involved in local politics. He founded his own nationalist party and in 1993 was appointed vice president of Chechnya under Dudaev, serving as acting president during Chechnya’s de facto independence in 1996-1997, a period of chaos and rising warlordism. In 1997 he came third in Chechnya’s presidential elections, behind Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev.
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