Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [121]
In his statement Gochiyayev admitted that the ground-floor warehouse spaces in the bombed-out buildings had been rented by his construction company using his ID. But he insisted that he did not do it himself. He claimed to have been tricked by a business partner, an ethnic Russian whom he now believed had been working for the FSB.
“He said he discovered a good opportunity of distributing food supplies and offered a joint venture. First I ordered for him a stock of mineral water…. He sold it and paid on time. Then he said that he would need to rent warehousing facilities in the southeast [of Moscow], where he had many buyers. I helped him get space at Guryanova St., Kashirskoye Hwy., Borisov Ponds and Kapotnya,” Gochiyayev wrote.
On the night of the first explosion, at Guryanova Street, Gochiyayev was not at home. This, he believed, saved him, because the police could not find him that night. His partner called him at 5 a.m. to say that there was a small fire at the Guryanova Street location and that he should go there immediately. Luckily, before leaving a short time later, he turned on the news and heard about the explosion. He went into hiding instead.
For reasons that Sasha and Felshtinsky could not explain, Gochiyayev did not provide the name of his partner. However, he gave another important piece of information. It was he himself, he claimed, who tipped off the authorities about the two other locations in Moscow that were rented by his company. After the second explosion occurred on September 13 and his photograph appeared in the newspapers, he realized that he had been set up. Before leaving town he used his mobile phone to call the police, the fire department, and the emergency service to give them two other addresses that he suspected were part of his partner’s plot.
That was an extremely important point, Sasha emphasized. What Gochiyayev said fit with the published reports. Indeed, on September 13 a bomb had been defused in a building in the Kapotnya area. In addition, a warehouse with several tons of explosives and six unused timing devices had been discovered at Borisov Ponds. How the police learned about these sites had never been explained; now Gochiyayev had provided an explanation. If indeed he was the source of the tip, it was easily verifiable because all emergency phone calls are recorded and the telephone companies store all mobile phone calls.
Everyone present at the teleconference knew that it was pointless to ask the authorities to cooperate with the Commission. But Yushenkov’s approach was to generate enough public pressure on the official probe so that the findings of the Commission could not be ignored.
“Sergei Nikolaevich,” Sasha said to Yushenkov, “I see Mikhail Trepashkin sitting there. I suggest that you charge him with verifying Gochiyayev’s claims. If anyone can get to the bottom of it, he will.”
Over the summer of 2002 I spent almost five weeks with Sasha working on his second book, The Gang from Lubyanka. About half of that time we spent on the beach: two weeks at the Spanish resort of Sitges and a week in Italy. The book was in the form of questions and answers, adopted from a series of interviews that Sasha taped throughout the preceding year in London, which had been transcribed. The book retold Sasha’s life from his first visits to the zoo with his grandfather in Nalchik, to the granting of asylum through the good efforts of George Menzies the previous year. Much of the story was devoted to a horrific depiction of the lives and mores of the FSB and to Sasha’s take on the epic battle between the oligarchs and security services in the late 1990s. The final section was an update on the bombing investigation, including the Gochiyayev file.
There was one new item: a video and a transcript, which he brought with him to Spain, depicting an