Alexander Litvinenko Read online

  A brief word about the authors.

  Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky was born in Moscow in 1956. In 1974, he began studying history at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. In 1978, he immigrated to the USA and continued his study of history, first at Brandeis University and later at Rutgers, where he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History). In 1993, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and became the first citizen of a foreign state to be awarded a doctoral degree in Russia. He has compiled and edited several dozen volumes of archival documents and is the author of the following books: The Bolsheviks and the Left SRS (Paris, 1985); Towards a History of Our Isolation (London, 1988; Moscow 1991); The Failure of World Revolution (London, 199I; Moscow 1992); Big Bosses (Moscow 1999).

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  Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was born in Voronezh in 1962. After graduating from school in 1980, he was drafted into the army and over the next twenty years, he rose through the ranks from private to lieutenant colonel. Beginning in 1988, he served in the counterintelligence agencies of the Soviet KGB, and from 1991, in the Central Staff of the MB-FSK-FSB of Russia, specializing in counter-terrorist activities and the struggle against organized crime. For operations conducted with MUR (Moscow criminal investigation department), he was awarded the title of MUR veteran. He saw active military service in many of the so-called hot spots of the former USSR and Russia, and in 1997, he was transferred to the most secret department of the Russian KGB, the Department for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations, as senior operational officer and deputy head of the Seventh Section. He is a Candidate Master of Sport in the modern pentathlon. In November 1998, at a press conference in Moscow, he publicly criticized the leadership of the FSB and disclosed a number of illegal orders, which he had been given. In March 1999, he was arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned in the FSB prison at Lefortovo in Moscow. He was acquitted in November 1999, but no sooner had the acquittal been read out in court than he was arrested again by the FSB on another trumped-up criminal charge. In 2000, the criminal proceedings against him were dismissed for the second time, and Litvinenko was released after providing written assurances that he would not leave the country. A third criminal case was then instigated against him. After threats were made against his family by the FSB and the investigating officers, he was obliged to leave Russia illegally, which led to yet another, fourth criminal charge being brought against him. At the present time, he lives with his family in Great Britain, where he was granted political asylum in May 2001.

  The reader may find the genre of this work somewhat surprising, something between an analytical memoir and a historical monograph. The abundance of names and facts and the laconic style of presentation will come as a disappointment to anyone hoping for an easyreading detective story. As conceived by the authors, this book should be distinguished from superficial journalism and belletristic memoirs by its intrinsic faithfulness to historical fact. It is a book about a tragedy which has overtaken us all, about wasted opportunities, lost lives, and a country that is dying. It is a book for those who are capable of recognizing the reality of the past and are not afraid to influence the future.

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  Chapter 1

  The FSB foments war in Chechnya No one but a total madman could have wished to drag Russia into any kind of war, let alone a war in the North Caucasus. As if Afghanistan had never happened. As if it weren t clear in advance what course such a war would follow, or just what would be the outcome and the consequences of a war declared within the confines of a multinational state against a proud, vengeful, and warlike people. How could Russia possibly have become embroiled in one of its most shameful wars during the very period of its development which was most democratic in form and most liberal in spirit? This war required the mobilization of resources and increased budgets for agencies of coercion, government departments, and ministries. It enhanced the importance and increased the influence of men in uniform and sidelined or rendered irrelevant the efforts made by supporters of peace, democracy and liberal values to maintain the impetus of pro-Western economic reforms. This war resulted in the isolation of the Russian state from the community of civilized nations, since the rest of the world did not support it and could not understand it. A previously popular, well-loved president, therefore, sacrificed the support of both his own public and the international community. Once he had fallen into the trap, he was left with no option but to resign before the end of his term, and hand over power to the FSB in return for a guarantee of immunity for himself and his family. We know who it was that benefited from all of this-the people to whom Yeltsin handed over power. We know how the result was achieved-by means of the war in Chechnya. All that remains to be discovered is who set the process in motion.

  Chechnya had become the weakest link in Russia s multinational mosaic, but the KGB raised no objections when Djokhar Dudaev came to power there, because they regarded him as one of their own. General Dudaev, a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) since 1968, might as well have been transferred from Estonia to his hometown of Grozny, especially so that in 1990 he could retire, stand for election in opposition to the local communists, become president of the Chechen Republic, and in November 1991, proclaim the independence of Chechnya, thereby seeming to demonstrate to the Russian political elite the inevitability of Russia breaking apart under Yeltsin s liberal regime. It was probably no accident that another Chechen who was close to Yeltsin, Ruslan Khazbulatov, would also be responsible for inflicting fatal damage on his regime. Khazbulatov, a former Communist Youth Organization Central Committee functionary and a Communist Party member since 1966, had become chairman of the parliament of the Russian Federation in September 1991.

  The history of escalation in the complex and confused relations between Russia and Chechnya is a theme for a different book. In any case, by 1994, the political leadership of Russia was already aware that it could not afford to grant Chechnya independence like Belarus and Ukraine. To grant Chechnya sovereign status could pose a genuine threat of the disintegration of Russia. But could they afford to start a civil war in the northern Caucasus? The party of war, based on the military and law enforcement ministries,

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  believed that they could afford it, if only the public could be prepared for it, and it should be easy enough to influence public opinion, if the Chechens were seen to resort to terrorist tactics in their struggle for independence. All that was needed was to arrange terrorist attacks in Moscow and leave a trail leading back to Chechnya.

  Knowing that Russian troops and the forces of the anti-Dudaev opposition might begin their storm of Grozny at any day, on November 18, 1994, the FSK made its first recorded attempt to stir up anti-Chechen feeling by committing an act of terrorism and laying the blame on Chechen separatists: if the chauvinist sentiments of Muscovites could be inflamed, it would be easy to continue the repression of the independence movement in Chechnya.

  It should be noted that on November 18 and in later instances, the supposed Chechen terrorists set off their explosions at the most inopportune times, and then never actually claimed responsibility (rendering the terrorist attack itself meaningless). In any case, in November 1994, public opinion in Russia and around the world was on the side of the Chechen people, so why would the Chechens have committed an act of terrorism in Moscow? It would have made far more sense to attempt to sabotage the stationing of Russian troops on Chechen territory. Russian supporters of war with Chechnya were, however, only too willing to see the hand of Chechnya in any terrorist attack, and their response on every occasion was to strike a rapid and quite disproportionately massive blow against Chechen sovereignty. The impression was naturally created that the Russian military and law enforcement agencies, while quite unprepared for the terrorist attacks, were incredibly well-prepared to launch counter-measures.

&
nbsp; The explosion of November 18, 1994, took place on a railroad track crossing the river Yauza in Moscow. According to experts, it was caused by two powerful charges of about 1.5 kilograms of TNT. About twenty meters of the railroad bed were ripped up, and the bridge almost collapsed. It was quite clear, however, that the explosion had occurred prematurely, before the next train was due to cross the bridge. The shattered fragments of the bomber s body were discovered at a distance of about a hundred meters from the site of the explosion. He was Captain Andrei Shchelenkov, an employee of the oil company Lanako, and he had been blown up by his own bomb as he was planting it on the bridge.

  It was only thanks to this blunder by the operative carrying out the bombing that the immediate organizers of the terrorist attack became known. The boss of Lanako, who had given his firm a name beginning with the first two letters of his own last name, was thirty-five-year-old Maxim Lazovsky, a highly valued agent of the Moscow and Moscow Region Department of the FSB, who was known in criminal circles by the nicknames of Max and Cripple. At the risk of anticipating events, we can also point out the significant fact that every single one of Lanako s employees was a full-time or free-lance agent of the Russian counterespionage agencies.

  On the day of the explosion on the river Yauza, November 18, 1994, an anonymous phone call to the police claimed that a truck full of explosives was standing outside the Lanako offices. As a result, the FSB department actually did discover a ZIL-131 truck

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  close to the firm s offices containing three MON-50 mines, fifty charges for grenade launchers, fourteen RGD-5 grenades, ten F-1 grenades, and four packs of plastic explosive, with a total weight of six kilograms. The FSB claimed, however, that it had been unable to determine who owned the truck, even though a Lanako identity card was found on Shchelenkov s remains, and the explosive used in the Yauza bombing was of the same kind as that on the truck.

  War in Chechnya offered a very easy way to finish off Yeltsin politically, a fact understood only too well by those who provoked the war and organized terrorist attacks in Russia. There was, in addition, a primitive financial aspect to relations between the Russian leadership and the president of the Chechen Republic: the Russians were continuously extorting money from Dudaev. It began in 1992, when bribes were accepted from the Chechens in payment for the Soviet armaments left behind in Chechnya that year. The bribes for these weapons were extorted by head of the SBP Korzhakov, head of the FSO Barsukov, and First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Oleg Soskovets. Of course, the Ministry of Defense was in on the deal. Some years later the naive citizens of Russia began to wonder how all those weapons the Chechens were using to kill Russian soldiers could have been left behind in Chechnya. The answer was nothing if not mundane: they were paid for by Dudaev in multi-million dollar bribes to Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Soskovets.

  After 1992, the Moscow bureaucrats continued their successful bribe-based collaboration with Dudaev, and the Chechen leadership continued sending money to Moscow on a regular basis, because there was no other way Dudaev could resolve a single political question. However, in 1994, the system began to falter, as Moscow extorted larger and larger sums of money in exchange for political favors relating to Chechen independence.

  Dudaev started refusing to pay. The financial conflict gradually developed into a political standoff, and then a contest of strength between the Russian and Chechen leaderships.

  The threat of war hung heavily in the air. Dudaev requested a personal meeting with Yeltsin, perhaps even intending to tell him what had been going on. But the threesome, who controlled access to Yeltsin, demanded a bribe of several million dollars for organizing a meeting between the two presidents. Dudaev refused to pay and demanded that the meeting with Yeltsin take place without any money changing hands in advance.

  Furthermore, for the first time, he threatened the people who had been helping him strictly for payment with the disclosure of documents in his possession, which contained compromising information about the functionaries self-serving dealings with the Chechens. Dudaev believed that possession of these documents was his insurance against arrest. He could not be arrested; he could only be killed, since he was an eyewitness to crimes committed by members of Yeltsin s entourage. Dudaev had miscalculated. His blackmail failed, and the meeting he wanted never took place. The president of Chechnya was now a dangerous witness who had to be removed. So a cruel and senseless war was deliberately provoked. Let us trace the sequence of events.

  On November 22, 1994, the State Defense Committee of the Chechen Republic, which Dudaev had founded by decree the previous day, accused Russia of launching a war against Chechnya. As far as the journalists could see, there was no war, but Dudaev knew

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  that the party of war had already made its decision to commence military action. The Chechen State Defense Committee which, in addition to Dudaev, included the leaders of the military and other agencies of coercion, as well as a number of key governmental departments and ministries, held an emergency session in response to the threat of military incursion into Chechnya. A statement by the State Defense Committee which was distributed in Grozny, claimed that Russian regular units are occupying the Nadterechny district, part of the territory of the Chechen Republic, adding that in the days immediately ahead, it was planned to occupy the territory of the Naursk and Shelkovsk districts. For this purpose, use is being made of regular units of the North Caucasus Military District, special subunits of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, and army aircraft from the North Caucasus Military District. According to information received by the State Defense Council, special subunits of the Russian FSK are also taking part in the operation.

  The Central Armed Forces HQ of Chechnya confirmed that military units were being concentrated on the border with Chechnya s Naursk district, in the village of Veselaia, in the Stavropol Region: there were heavy tanks, artillery and as many as six battalions of infantry. It later became known that the backbone of the forces, drawn up for the storming of Grozny, consisted of a column of Russian armored vehicles assembled on the initiative of the FSK, which paid for it and also hired soldiers and officers on contract, including members of the elite armed forces from the armored Taman and Kantemirov divisions.

  On November 23, nine Russian army helicopters, presumably MI-8s, from the North Caucasus Military District, launched a rocket attack on the town of Shali, located approximately forty kilometers from Grozny, in an attempt to destroy the armored vehicles of a tank regiment located there, and were met with anti-aircraft artillery fire.

  There were wounded on the Chechen side, which announced that it had a video recording showing helicopters bearing Russian identification markings.

  On November 25, seven Russian helicopters from a military base in the Stavropol Region fired several rocket salvoes at the airport in Grozny and at nearby apartment buildings, damaging the landing strip and the civilian aircraft standing on it. Six people were killed and about twenty-five were injured. In response to this raid, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chechnya forwarded a statement to the authorities of the Stavropol Region pointing out, among other things, that the region s leaders bear responsibility for such acts, and in the case of appropriate measures being taken by the Chechen side, all complaints should be directed to Moscow.

  On November 26, the forces of the Provisional Council of Chechnya (the Chechen opposition), supported by Russian helicopters and armored vehicles, attacked Grozny from all four sides. More than 1,200 men, fifty tanks, eighty armored personnel carriers, and six SU-27 planes from the opposition took part in the operation. An announcement, made by the Moscow center of the puppet Provisional Council of Chechnya, claimed that the demoralized forces of Dudaev s supporters are offering virtually no resistance, and everything will probably be over by the morning.

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  In fact, the operation was a total failure. The attackers lost about 500 men and
more than twenty tanks, and another twenty tanks were captured by Dudaev s forces. About 200 members of the armed forces were taken prisoner. On November 28, a column of prisoners was marched through the streets of Grozny to mark the victory over the forces of opposition. At the same time, the Chechen leadership disclosed a list of fourteen captured soldiers and officers who were members of the Russian armed forces. The prisoners confessed in front of television cameras that most of them served in military units 43162 and 01451 based outside Moscow. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation replied that the individuals concerned were not serving members of the Russian armed forces. In response to an inquiry concerning prisoners Captain Andrei Kriukov and Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Zhukov, the Ministry of Defense stated that these officers had indeed been serving in army unit 01451, but they had not reported to the unit since October 20,1994, and an order for their discharge from the armed forces was being drawn up. In other words, the Russian Ministry of Defense declared the captured soldiers to be deserters. The following day, Yevgeny Zhukov s father refuted the ministry s statement. In an interview with the Russian Information Agency Novosti, he said that his son had left his unit on November 9, telling his parents that he had been assigned for ten days to Nizhny Tagil. The next time Yevgeny s parents had seen him was in a group of captured Russian soldiers in Grozny on the weekly television news program Itogi on November 27. When he was asked how their son came to be in Chechnya, Unit Commander Zhukov refused to answer.