Alexander Litvinenko Read online

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  to Chechnya shortly before the Chechen president was assassinated and was last seen at a Russian fortified position near the village of Kulary, where he had gone for a meeting with representatives of the federal authorities. Imaev told the men who accompanied him on the way to Kulary that he would be back in a week. He and the people who had been waiting for him flew off in a helicopter to an unknown destination, and he was never seen again.

  However, the negotiations begun by Volsky and Imaev did have a sequel: Dudaev was able to reach an agreement with Moscow on halting military operations. For the appropriate decree, Dudaev was asked to pay another multi-million dollar bribe. He paid the money so that no more people would be killed for nothing, but no decree calling a halt to military operations emerged. The people in Yeltsin s entourage had dumped the Chechens.

  Then Dudaev ordered his lieutenant, Shamil Basaev, either to get the money back or arrange for the beginning of peace talks and the halt to military action, for which money had already been paid over. Basaev came up with a novel idea. On June 14, 1995, he attempted to coerce Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Soskovets into honoring their debt by seizing a hospital in Budyonnovsk, with more than a thousand hostages. After all, this was a serious business deal he was trying to close!

  Responding to Basaev s occupation of the hospital, the Russian special operations squad Alpha had already taken the first floor of the building and was on the point of freeing the hostages and disposing of the terrorists, when Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, who had undertaken to mediate, judged correctly that the Chechens had been dumped out of order. He promised to start peace talks immediately, insisted on a halt to the operation to free the hostages and guaranteed Basaev s men an unhindered withdrawal to Chechnya. There was another chance to liberate the hostages and eliminate Basaev s men on their way home, with the interior forces special subunit Vityaz standing by, simply waiting for the order. However, the order was not given: Chernomyrdin had given Basaev certain guarantees, and he had to keep his word.

  On July 3, 1995, President Yeltsin signed the decree that Dudaev had paid for, No. 663: On the stationing of agencies for the military management of communications, military units, institutions, and organizations of the armed forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Chechen Republic. On July 7, Yeltsin signed a second decree detailing the procedure for implementing the first.

  After the seizure of the hostages at Budyonnovsk the Kremlin bureaucrats added Shamil Basaev s name to Dudaev s in their list of undesirable witnesses. They decided to eliminate him with the assistance of a specially established combat operations unit, commanded by the head of the Third Section (Intelligence) of the Military Counterintelligence Department of the FSB of the Russian Federation, Major-General Yury Ivanovich Yarovenko.

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  At the same time, a combat operations group was set up under the command of Khokholkov (in Chechnya, he worked under the pseudonym Denisov) in order to eliminate Dudaev. The group included a captain, first rank, Alexander Kamyshnikov (the future deputy head of URPO), and a number of other officers. It was stationed at the military base in Khankala. Chechen nationals were also brought into the group, such as Umar Pasha, who had previously served in Dagestan, and following Dudaev s elimination was promoted and transferred to Moscow. Also used in the operation was the air arm of the GRU, which had two planes for targeting rockets on beacons in radiotelephones. Dudaev s ordinary phone was successfully switched for one with such a beacon.

  On April 22, 1996, Dudaev, his wife Alla, and several companions set out from the settlement of Gekhi-Chu in the Urus-Martansk district of western Chechnya, where they had spent the night, and made their way into the woods. Dudaev always moved out of settled areas when he needed to make phone calls, because it was harder to get a fix on his position away from centers of population. There was no unbroken forest cover in that area, only scrub with occasional trees. Alla began preparing a meal, while the men stood off to one side. Dudaev didn t allow them to come close to him when he was talking on the phone, since there had already been one case of an air-strike against him while he was making calls, but on that occasion the rocket had missed.

  This time, however, Dudaev spoke on the phone for longer than usual (they say he was talking with the well-known Russian businessman and politician, Konstantin Borovoi, who stayed on the line to Dudaev until he was cut off). A guided missile from a Russian SU-24 assault plane, targeted on the signal from Dudaev s satellite phone, exploded close to Dudaev, and his face was burned a yellowish-orange color. The car was brought up, they put Dudaev on the back seat, and his wife sat beside him. Dudaev was unconscious, and he had a wound behind his right ear. He died without regaining consciousness. The State Defense Committee of Chechnya entrusted the arrangements for his funeral to Lecha Dudaev, the Chechen president s nephew. Dudaev s burial place can only have been known to a very narrow circle of individuals, including Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, who succeeded Dudaev as the chairman of the State Defense Committee and acting president of the Chechen Republic until the election of 1997, when Aslan Maskhadov was elected as president. According to Chechen sources, when Alla, the president s widow, and Musa Idigov, the president s personal bodyguard, were arrested at the airport in the town of Nalgik, Dudaev s remains were hurriedly reburied at a new site. Since Lecha Dudaev was killed during the second Chechen war, there have been no official sources which can say where Djokhar Dudaev is buried.

  The elimination of Dudaev was probably the most successful operation carried out by Khokholkov and his group. Khokholkov himself was nominated for the order of Hero of Russia for successfully completing his mission, but he preferred the post of head of the newly founded UPP, with the rank of major-general.

  In the summer of 1996, after the Korzhakov-Barsukov-Soskovets group had fallen from power and General Lebed had been dismissed from his post as secretary of the Security

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  Council, Stealth could no longer count on support from state structures and was left entirely under the control of the Izmailovo criminal group. Lutsenko s only remaining serious contacts at state level were now in the UPP-URPO, which was headed by General Khokholkov. The absorption of organized criminal groups into the state s agencies of coercion had seemed a natural and logical step to the leadership of the FSB.

  Unfortunately the logic of events tended more and more frequently to draw the secret services into purely criminal activity. In theory this tendency should have been countered by the USB of the FSB, but in practice, the USB was incapable of maintaining the fight against mass crime committed with the direct connivance or participation of the FSB and the SBP. The only hope left was the single remaining law enforcement agency, the criminal investigation department (UR). In January 1996, thirty-eight-year-old Vladimir Ilyich Tskhai, criminal investigation s last romantic, was transferred to MUR, the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department.

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  Moscow detectives take on the FSB Tskhai was made head of the Twelfth Section, which specialized in solving contract killings, and only ten months later, he was already the deputy chief of MUR (Moscow Criminal Investigation Department). He had previously worked in the Central Criminal Investigation Department (GUUR) of the Russian Ministry of the Interior. Tskhai was regarded as being an exceptionally hardworking and talented detective. He was a born detective, and there ll never be another like him, was what his friends told us. Tskhai was easy and interesting to work with, said Andrei Suprunenko, especially important cases investigator for the Moscow Public Prosecutor s Office. A competent and decent man. One of the romantics. He provided the link between the operatives and the investigators, he believed that even the most complicated cases could be untangled&

  It was Tskhai who succeeded in exposing the group that produced fake identity cards from the departments of coercion. In that case, FAPSI contributed the efforts of its USB,
under the leadership of Colonel Sergei Yurievich Barkovsky. In an article which was evidently commissioned by the FSB, the Moscow journalist, Alexander Khinshtein, wrote that Lazovsky himself oversaw the production of false documents, and that was why his people had cover documents from the FSB, FAPSI, GRU, and MO. However, this was not the case. Lazovsky had absolutely nothing to do with the business of forging official identity documents, which Tskhai uncovered. Naturally enough, Barkovsky doesn t even mention Lazovsky in his version of events and names entirely different people as the organizers. Here are Barkovsky s own words: Even the specialists found it rather difficult to distinguish the fakes from genuine documents. Sometimes the quality of the dud was actually better. Expert analysis showed that there was clearly just one workshop involved. Following a whole series of operational and investigative measures four, very far from ordinary people were detained.

  One was the former deputy head of a section of the KGB of the USSR, who had become the head of a firm with the attractive name of Honor. Another was the head of one of the printing shops in Moscow and the former head of the printing shop of the administration of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU).

  Detained together with them was a former FAPSI lieutenant who had been involved in processing passes during his period of service. It is assumed that the idea of producing counterfeit documents must have been his. And there was one very talented engraver.

  From Barkovsky s account, it follows that the forgeries were not produced by bandits, but by a former member of the nomenklatura, the Soviet professional elite (from the administrative apparatus of the CC CPSU) and a member of the secret services (FAPSI).

  If that is the case, the possibility cannot be excluded that the laboratory for producing high-quality forgeries was also set up with the permission of the FSB and FAPSI, and controlled by them.

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  Let us get back to Lazovsky. The liquidation of his group during the period from February to August of 1996, was the greatest success achieved by the Twelfth Section of MUR. The personnel of Lazovsky s group were not organized on local territorial lines like ordinary criminal groupings. Lazovsky s brigade was international, which was a pointer to its distinctive nature. Working under Lazovsky were Chechens and people from Kazakhstan and gunmen from groups based in towns close to Moscow. Marat Vasiliev was a Muscovite, Roman Polonsky was from Dubna, and Vladimir Abrosimov was from Tula, Anzor Movsaev was from Grozny& The brigade was very well equipped, too.

  Lazovsky had been on the Russian federal wanted list from 1995, for offenses under article 209 ( banditry ) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. He was accused in connection with a number of different episodes. For instance, in December 1993, Lazovsky s group killed the guards who were transporting cash for the MMST Company, and 250 thousand dollars were stolen.

  At the same, time there were disputes between Lanako and the Viktor Corporation over deals involving deliveries of oil products. On January 10, 1994, persons unknown (obviously working for the Viktor Corporation) shelled the automobile of Vladimir Kozlovsky, a director and chairman of the management board at Lanako, with a grenade thrower. (The first syllable of Kozlovsky s surname had provided the third syllable of the name Lanako.) Barely two days later, on January 12, a bomb exploded outside an apartment belonging to one of Viktor s managers with such massive controlled force that the steel door was hurled into the apartment and clean through the next wall standing in its way. It was purely a matter of luck that no one in the apartment was hurt. The explosion, however, triggered off a fire in the apartment block, and neighbors were forced to jump from the windows. Two of them were killed, and several other people were injured.

  On January 13, persons unknown turned up at Lanako s Moscow premises, at corpus 3 of 2 Perevedenovsky Lane, where insult swapping with Lanako staff was followed by an exchange of gunfire. Ten minutes later, two busloads of OMON officers (the special operations police brigade) arrived at the Lanako offices, where they overcame armed resistance and took the office by storm (it was only by good luck that there were no casualties). They then proceeded to ransack the premises, arrest about sixty people, and take them away to the station, where they were recorded on videotape. After that, almost everyone was allowed to go. The only persons still detained at the station the following day were four bodyguards who had firearms in their possession when they were arrested.

  They were later tried, but received surprisingly lenient treatment for a shoot-out with the police. Two were released by the court, and two were given one year s penal servitude.

  On March 4, 1994, a full-scale battle broke out in the Dagmos Restaurant on Kazakov Street between Lazovsky s gunmen and members of a Dagestan criminal organization, with about thirty men involved from each side. The final tally was seven dead and two wounded. All of the dead were members of the Dagestan group.

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  On June 16, 1994, three members of the Taganka criminal group were mowed down by machine-gun fire near the offices of the Credit-Consensus Bank. Lazovsky had demanded that the bank pay him two-and-a-half billion rubles in interest on a sum of money over which the bank was in dispute with the Rosmyasmoloko firm, and the bank had turned for help to the Taganka group, its roof. The battle was sparked off by the Taganka bandits refusal to pay Lazovsky.

  Lazovsky committed one of his most brutal crimes on September 5, 1994. That year, arguments had flared up between Lazovsky and his partner, the joint owner of the Grozny Oil Refinery, Atlan Nataev (whose surname had provided the second syllable of Lanako s company title). Nataev was last seen at about ten o clock in the evening on September 5, close to the Dynamo subway station, in a dark-blue BMW 740 which belonged to Lanako. He was with two bodyguards, Robert Rudenko and Vladimir Lipatov, who disappeared with him. Lazovsky did not bother to report the disappearance of his colleagues to the police.

  By circumstantial coincidence, on September 7, the head of the Regional Department for Combating Organized Crime (RUOP), Vladimir Dontsov, escorted by ten men wielding automatic weapons, carried out an operational inspection at the Lanako offices. During the search Moscow, RUOP s personnel discovered a certain quantity of unlicensed arms, in particular TT pistols intended for resale on the illegal market. However, the find was not treated as seriously as it should have been, and no arrests were made.

  It emerged later that Nataev, Rudenko, and Lipatov had been kidnapped by Polonsky and Shchelenkov, and taken to a dacha in the Academy of Science s suburban settlement outside Moscow. Nataev was killed, and his corpse was beheaded. Then the corpse and the two bodyguards were driven to the peat bogs in the Yaroslavl district, where Rudenko and Lipatov were also beheaded. All three bodies were buried in the peat, from which they were recovered in 1996 by members of MUR. The identity pass of a General Staff officer was discovered on Nataev s corpse.

  On September 18, Nataev s brother arrived in Moscow in a state of alarm. Lazovsky summoned him to talks at a parking lot on Burakov Street, which belonged to his uncle, Nikolai Lazovksy. The owner of the parking lot sent his bodyguards home so that there would be no witnesses, and when the second Nataev, arrived Shchelenkov, Polonsky, and Grishin met him with a hail of bullets from automatic weapons, pistols and even a sawnoff shotgun. Nataev returned fire fourteen times, and before he was killed himself, he managed to gun down Polonsky and Grishin. The exchange of fire was so intensive that several cars in the parking lot caught fire. When the police arrived on the scene, all they found were pools of blood and spent cartridges. A few minutes later, news reached them from an emergency ambulance station where doctors had Polonsky s body (six unknown persons had blocked off Korolenko Street with their Volga automobile, stopped an emergency ambulance, and handed over Polonsky to the medics).

  Lazovsky s group was also responsible for the killing of the general director of the Tuapsi Oil refinery, Anatoly Vasilenko, an old business associate of Lanako, who was

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  shot in Tuapsi shortly before a meeting of the partners in the refinery. According to operational information, not long before the shooting, Lazovsky had taken a charter flight to Tuapsi for a meeting with Vasilenko (Lazovsky was met at the airport by members of the Tuapsi FSB), and had apparently failed to reach an understanding with him. Lazovsky was also suspected of the abduction in 1996 of State Duma deputy Yu.A. Polyakov, but this case remained a loose end that was never tied up.

  It is obvious that no attempt was made to bring in Lazovsky before Tskhai was transferred to MUR. No attention had been paid to Lanako after the Yauza bombing, primarily because it was an FSB outfit. According to MUR, almost all the members of Lazovsky s group used cover documents which were not fakes, but the genuine item.

  This led MUR operatives to draw the correct conclusion that Lanako had close links with the secret services, especially as Lazovsky himself took part in operations to free FSB personnel who had been taken prisoner in Chechnya.