Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [10]
When he turned seventeen, his father, discharged from the army, returned to Nalchik with his new wife and children. They moved in, the grandfather’s house grew overcrowded, and Sasha’s whole routine collapsed. He tried to integrate into his father’s family but could not. He loved them, but he felt sidelined. So he found a way to join the army nearly a year before the usual draft age of eighteen. He was right out of high school, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps.
He took to it immediately. “Military service is somewhat like sport,” he told me in the car, “only it’s not a game anymore: you are part of a real team fighting a common enemy—and on the right side, so you think. When they asked me to join the KGB, it seemed perfectly in line, so I accepted enthusiastically, strange as that may seem to you.”
My own background was just the opposite: I was a secure child with loving parents in Moscow. We considered the KGB to be evil incarnate, and I never did any sports. Being drafted into the army in my youth would have been a catastrophe. “If you don’t study hard, they’ll haul you into the army,” my father, a professor of microbiology, used to say.
I asked Sasha what he had done in Kontora. He caught the tone of suspicion in my question.
“I was a young lieutenant when I joined the KGB,” he said. “Hadn’t seen anything in life except the army, and I thought I was going to be protecting people from harm. That the Agency had a dark past—the Gulag, you know, millions of victims—I didn’t learn until the 1990s, when they started to write about it.”
First Sasha served in the Division of Economic Security, and then in the Anti-Terrorist Center (ATC), always working on the same thing: organized crime, assassinations, kidnappings, and criminal links in the police. His career advanced, and he married his high school sweetheart and had two children. Unfortunately, just like his parents’ brief attempt, it wasn’t a happy marriage.
Sasha was an operative detective, an “oper” in the trade lingo. He kept secret files on mobsters, studying their personal affairs, their networks, their contacts with businessmen and politicians. What Sasha knew—and how he knew it—was rarely revealed in court. Yet to official investigators, his stuff was priceless. He solved crimes before charges were made. He worked behind the scenes. He eavesdropped. He recruited and ran agents.
“‘KGB agent’ sounds horrible to people. They think of snitches reporting on their friends or spies in America,” Sasha continued. “But that’s not true. And not fair. Most of our agents are undercover, working inside gangs, and they are real heroes. They know that if they’re blown, they are as good as dead. My agents were my best friends, and they kept dealing with me and they helped my family when I was imprisoned. So there are agents and agents.
“Do you understand the difference between an oper and a formal investigator?” He was getting excited as he explained the intelligence business to me. Scenes from his career flew past. He did what he loved and apparently did it well. “The investigator follows the tracks of the crime. In his book, there are victims, suspects, witnesses, and so on. And he collects evidence, legally processed and packaged. But an oper like myself deals with a would-be criminal, my operational ‘object,’ and I want to know everything about him before he even commits a crime so that he can be stopped in time, or at least more easily caught. My stuff is not ‘evidence,’ it’s ‘operative information,’ see?”
Most of the people who fell under his purview—murderers, bank robbers, kidnappers, drug dealers—were not pleasant folk, and he had no regrets about his work. There was one exception, though: at one point his object became the human rights activist Sergei Grigoryants, whom I also knew. It was his only political case prior to 1997, when he was told to target Boris Berezovsky.
It was during the first Chechen War. The famous “Fifth Line,” the Fifth Chief Directorate of the KGB that had dealt with dissidents in the Soviet era,