Alexander Litvinenko Read online

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  Yuri Felshtinsky

  Alexander Litvinenko.

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  BLOWING UP RUSSIA

  Acts of terror, abductions, and contract killings organized by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation

  Second Edition

  Revised and Enlarged

  Translated from Russian by

  Geoffrey Andrews and Co.

  Foreword to the Second Edition

  On 27 August 2001, several chapters from Blowing Up Russia were published in a special edition of Noyava Gazeta. Since then, two and a half years have passed. Our book has been published in Russian and English, and it has served as the basis for a documentary film, Assassination of Russia (which has been shown in Russian, French, German, and English in many countries, including the United States, Australia, Western and Eastern Europe, and the states of the FSU). To our great disappointment, the film and the book have both been banned in Russia. Knowledgeable readers could find the text on the internet, but the print version remained inaccessible to the Russian audience. An indicative episode from the recent past-the confiscation of a shipment of copies of Blowing Up Russia from Latvia on the Volokolamskoye Highway on 29 December 2003-has brought an end to the life of the first edition. The need for a second edition has become all the more acute.

  However, we felt that we had no right to deny readers the opportunity to read the original text. The second edition consists of this text (with minor emendations and additions) and appendices: the most important and interesting documents that have been collected by us since the publication of the first edition of the book, as well as the most significant articles and interviews pertaining to the events of September 1999.

  Our hope is that the second edition will not meet the fate of the first edition. We assure our readers that we understand what kind of time we are living in and that, if necessary, we are prepared to publish a third, fourth, fifth& edition.

  Alexander Litvinenko

  Yuri Felshtinsky

  February 2004

  Alexander Litvinenko

  BLOWING UP RUSSIA

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  Foreword to the First Edition

  We did not reject our past. We said honestly: The history of the Lubyanka in the twentieth century is our history&

  N. P. Patrushev, Director of the FSB From an interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda on 20 December 2000, on the Day of the Cheka The pedigree of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB RF) scarcely requires any comment. From the very earliest years of Soviet power, the punitive agencies established by the Communist Party were alien to the qualities of pity and mercy. The actions of individuals working in these departments have never been governed by the values and principles of common humanity. Beginning with the revolution of 1917, the political police of Soviet Russia (later the USSR) functioned faultlessly as a mechanism for the annihilation of millions of people; in fact, these structures have never taken any other business in hand, since the government has never set any other political or practical agenda for them, even during its most liberal periods.

  No other civilized country has ever possessed anything to compare with the state security agencies of the USSR. Never, except in the case of Nazi Germany s Gestapo, has any other political police ever possessed its own operational and investigative divisions or detention centers, such as the FSB s prison for detainees at Lefortovo.

  The events of August 1991, when a rising tide of public anger literally swept away the communist system, demonstrated very clearly that the liberalization of Russia s political structures must inevitably result in the weakening, perhaps even the prohibition, of the Committee of State Security (KGB). The panic which reigned among the leaders of the coercive agencies of the state during that period found expression in numerous, often incomprehensible, instances of old special service agencies being disbanded and new ones set up. As early as May 6, 1991, the Russian Republic Committee of State Security was set up with V.V. Ivanenko as its chairman in parallel to the All-Union KGB under the terms of a protocol signed by Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and chairman of the USSR KGB, V.A. Kriuchkov. On November 26, the KGB of Russia was transformed into the Federal Security Agency (AFB). Only one week later, on December 3, the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed a decree On the reorganization of the agencies of state security. Under the terms of this law, a new Interdepartmental Security Service (MSB) of the USSR was set up on the basis of the old KGB, which was abolished.

  At the same time, the old KGB, like some multi-headed hydra, split into four new structures. The First (Central) Department (which dealt with external intelligence) was separated out as the new Central Intelligence Service, later renamed the External Intelligence Service (SVR). The KGB s Eighth and Sixteenth Departments (for governmental communications, coding, and electronic reconnaissance) were transformed into the Committee for Governmental Communications (the future Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information, or FAPSI). The border guard service became the Federal Border Service (FPS). The old KGB Ninth Department became the

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  Bodyguard Department of the Office of the President of the RSFSR. The old Fifteenth Department became the Governmental Security and Bodyguard Service of the RSFSR.

  These last two structures later became the President s Security Service (SBP) and the Federal Bodyguard Service (FSO). One other super-secret special service was also separated out from the old Fifteenth Department of the KGB: the President s Central Department for Special Programs (GUSP).

  On January 24, 1992, Yeltsin signed a decree authorizing the creation of a new Ministry of Security (MB) on the basis of the AFB and MSB. A Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs appeared at the same time, but only existed for a short while before being dissolved. In December 1993, the MB was, in turn, renamed the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK), and on April 3, 1995, Yeltsin signed the decree On the formation of a Federal Security Service in the Russian Federation, by which the FSK was transformed into the FSB This long sequence of restructuring and renaming was intended to shield the organizational structure of the state security agencies, albeit in decentralized form, against attack by the democrats, and along with the structure to preserve the personnel, the archives, and the secret agents.

  A largely important role in saving the KGB from destruction was played by Yevgeny Savostianov (in Moscow) and Sergei Stepashin (in Leningrad), both of whom had the reputation of being democrats, appointed in order to reform and control the KGB. In fact, however, both Savostianov and Stepashin were first infiltrated into the democratic movement by the state security agencies, and only later appointed to management positions in the new secret services, in order to prevent the destruction of the KGB by the democrats. Although, as the years went by, very many full-time and free-lance officers of the KGB-MB-FSK-FSB left to go into business or politics, Savostianov and Stepashin did succeed in preserving the overall structure. Furthermore, the KGB had formerly been under the political control of the Communist Party, which served to some extent as a brake on the activities of the special agencies, since no significant operations were possible without the sanction of the Politburo. After 1991, however, the MB-FSK-FSB began operating on Russian territory absolutely independently and totally unchecked, apart from the control exercised by the FSB over its own operatives. This all-pervading predatory structure was now unrestrained by either ideology or law.

  Following the period of evident confusion, resulting from the events of August 1991, and the mistaken expectation that operatives of the former KGB would be subjected to the same ostracism as the Communist Party, the secret servi
ces realized that this new era, free of communist ideology and party control, offered them certain advantages. The former KGB was able to exploit its vast personnel resources (both official and unofficial) to position its operatives in virtually every sphere of activity throughout the vast state of Russia.

  Somehow, former prominent KGB men began turning up at the very highest echelons of power, frequently unnoticed by the uninitiated: the first of them were secret agents, but

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  later, they were former or serving officers. Standing at Yeltsin s back, from the very first days of the events of August 1991, was KGB man Alexander Vasilievich Korzhakov, former bodyguard to the chairman of the KGB and general secretary of the Communist Party, Yury Andropov. The security service of the MIKOM Group was headed by retired GRU colonel Bogomazov, and the vice-president of the Financial and Industrial Group was N. Nikolaev, a KGB man of twenty years standing, who had once worked under Korzhakov.

  Filipp Denisovich Bobkov, four-star general and first deputy chairman of the KGB of the USSR, who in Soviet times had been the long-serving head of the so-called fifth line of the KGB (political investigation), found employment with business tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. The fifth line numbered among its greatest successes the expulsion from the country of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, as well as the arrest and detainment in camps for many years of those who thought and said what they believed was right and not what the party ordered them to think and say.

  Standing at the back of Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and a prominent leader of the reform movement in Russia, was KGB man Vladimir Putin. In Sobchak s own words, this meant that the KGB controls St. Petersburg.

  How this all came about has been described in detail by the head of the Italian Institute of International politics and Economics, Marco Giaconi, who teaches in Zurich. The attempts made by the KGB to establish control over the financial activities of various companies always follow the same pattern. The first stage begins when gangsters attempt to collect protection money or usurp rights which are not their own. After that, special agency operatives arrive at the company to offer their help in resolving its problems.

  From that moment on, the firm loses its independence forever. Initially, a company snared in the KGB s nets has difficulty obtaining credit or may even suffer major financial setbacks. Subsequently, it may be granted licenses for trading in such distinctive sectors as aluminum, zinc, foodstuffs, cellulose, and timber. These provide a powerful stimulus for the firm s development. This is the stage at which it is infiltrated by former KGB operatives and also becomes a new source of revenue for the KGB.

  However, the years from 1991 to 1996 demonstrated that despite being plundered rapaciously by the coercive state structures (who acted both openly, and through organized criminal groups under the total control of the secret services), Russian business had managed, in a short period, to develop into an independent political force which was by no means always under the full control of the FSB. Following Yeltsin s destruction in 1993 of the pro-communist parliament, which sought to halt liberal reform in Russia, the leaders of the former KGB, who had gone on to head Yeltsin s MB and FSK, decided to destabilize and compromise Yeltsin s regime and his reforms by deliberately exacerbating the criminal situation in Russia and fomenting national conflicts, first and foremost in the North Caucasus, the weakest link in the multinational Russian state.

  At the same time, an energetic campaign was launched in the mass media to promote the message that impoverishment of the general public and an increase in criminal and nationalist activity were the results of political democratization, and the only way to

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  avoid such excesses was for Russia to reject democratic reforms and Western models, and follow its own Russian path of development, which should be based on public order and general prosperity. What this propaganda really promoted was a dictatorship similar to the standard Nazi model. Of all the dictators, great and small, enlightened and bloodthirsty, the one chosen as a model was the most personable and least obvious, the Chilean general, Augusto Pinochet. For some reason, it was believed that if a dictatorship did emerge in Russia, it would be no worse than Pinochet s Chile. Historical experience, however, demonstrates that Russia always chooses the worst of all possible options.

  Until 1996, the state security services fought against the democratic reformers, since they saw the most serious threat in a democratic ideology, which demanded the immediate implementation of radical, pro-Western economic, and political reforms, based on the principles of a free-market economy, and the political and economic integration of Russia into the community of civilized nations. Following Yeltsin s victory in the 1996 presidential election, when Russian big business showed its political muscle for the first time by refusing to permit the cancellation of the democratic elections and the introduction of a state of emergency (the demands being made by the pro-dictatorship faction in the persons of Korzhakov, FSO head M.I. Barsukov, and their like) and, most importantly, was able to ensure the victory of its own candidate, the state security services redefined the major target of their offensive as the Russian business elite.

  Yeltsin s victory at the polls in 1996 was followed by the appearance, at first glance inexplicable, of propaganda campaigns dedicated to blackening the reputations of Russia s leading businessmen. Heading up the vanguard in these campaigns were some familiar faces from the agencies of coercion.

  Russian language acquired a new term, oligarch, although it was quite obvious that even the very richest man in Russia was no oligarch in the literal meaning of the word, since he lacked the basic component of oligarchy, power. Real power remained, as before, in the hands of the secret services.

  Gradually, with the help of journalists, who were operatives or agents of the FSB and SBP, and an entire army of unscrupulous writers eager for easy, sensational material, the small number of oligarchs in Russian business came to be declared thieves, swindlers, and even murderers. Meanwhile, the really serious criminals, who had acquired genuine oligarchic power and pocketed billions in money that had never been listed in any accounts, were sitting behind their managers desks at the Russian state s agencies of coercion: the FSB, the SBP, the FSO, the SVR, the Central Intelligence Department (GRU), the General Public Prosecutor s Office, the Ministry of defense (MO), the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), the customs service, the tax police, and so on.

  It was these people who were the true oligarchs, the gray cardinals and shadowy managers of Russian business and the country s political life. They possessed real power, unlimited and uncontrolled. Behind the secure protection of their identity cards from the agencies of coercion, they were genuinely untouchable. They abused their official positions on a regular daily basis, taking bribes and stealing, building up their ill-gotten capital, and involving their subordinates in criminal activity.

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  This book attempts to demonstrate that modern Russia s most fundamental problems do not result from the radical reforms of the liberal period of Yeltsin s terms as president, but from the open or clandestine resistance offered to these reforms by the Russian secret services. It was they who unleashed the first and second Chechen wars, in order to divert Russia away from the path of democracy and towards dictatorship, militarism, and chauvinism. It was they who organized a series of vicious terrorist attacks in Moscow and other Russian cities as part of their operations intended to create the conditions for the first and second Chechen wars.

  The explosions of September 1999, in particular the terrorist attack which was thwarted in Ryazan on September 23, are the central theme of this book. These explosions provide the clearest thread for following the tactics and strategy of the Russian agencies of state security, whose ultimate aim is absolute power. This book is about the tragedy that has befallen all of us, about missed opportunities, about lost lives. This book is for those who, recognizing
what has happened, will not be afraid to influence the future.

  After the publication of excerpts from the book in Novaya Gazeta on 27 August 2001, as well as after the publication of the American edition of the book in January of this year in New York, we were repeatedly asked about our sources. We would like to assure our readers that the book contains no fabricated facts and unfounded assertions. We concluded, however, that given the current situation in Russia-with many government officials whom we suspect to have been involved in the organization, execution, or sanctioning of the terrorist atrocities of September 1999 active in the leadership of the country-it would be premature to publish the names of our sources. At the same time, in the very first interviews given by us after 27 August 2001, we indicated that these sources would be immediately released to any Russian or international commission formed to investigate the terrorist atrocities of September 1999. Our position remains unchanged to this day: all of the materials used in the writing of this book will be given to those who undertake impartially to discover what happened.