Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [124]
On a rainy afternoon in August 2002, Trepashkin met a truck from Riga with ten thousand copies of The Gang from Lubyanka, cleared through Customs at a highway border crossing as “printed material.” He directed the driver to a secret warehouse that he had rented. The next week, the book appeared in kiosks in central Moscow and became a best seller. The former interior minister Anatoly Kulikov announced that he planned to bring a libel suit against Sasha based on his portrayal in the book. Later on that year, two more shipments went through along the same route.
Moscow, September 2002: Speaking on the third anniversary of the apartment house bombings, Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky says that the alleged ringleader, Achemez Gochiyayev, is hiding in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge. He demands his arrest and extradition. However, Georgian foreign minister Iraklii Menagarishvili denies that Gochiyayev is in the country. The head of the Public Commission on the bombings, Sergei Kovalyov, states that if Gochiyayev is apprehended, he should not be turned over to the FSB.
For about a year after Sasha and Felshtinsky’s abortive trip to Georgia, a PR contest between the FSB and the Public Commission was waged on the back pages of Western newspapers and in a few remaining opposition print outlets and Web sites that Boris and Goose supported. For connoisseurs—some eight thousand visitors daily—the IFCL maintained a dedicated Web site at www.terror99.ru. Most Russians, of course, did not use the Internet, and the issue was completely taboo on Russian TV. But Boris was undeterred. He felt that the power of the story would overcome its narrow casting. The bombings had reached a high level of popular awareness. People talked about them, and so the news spread by word of mouth. And he knew, through countless reports from the Kremlin’s outer circles, that Putin was very anxious about his doings.
Shortly after Gochiyayev’s contact, another middleman approached Sasha and Felshtinsky with a statement from two other alleged perpetrators of the Moscow bombings, Timur Batchayev and Yusuf Krymshamkhalov. They admitted transporting a truckload of the explosive known as RDX to Moscow from a plant in southern Russia, together with a third man, Adam Dekkushev, who was already in Russian custody. Yet, they said, they had never been in touch with Chechen warlords and did not know Gochiyayev. At the time, they believed they were part of a jihadist underground in Moscow. They claimed that someone who posed as a jihad leader had duped them into the operation. They later came to believe he was working for the FSB. He told them that the bomb would be used for attacking “a military or government target,” not an apartment house. Whatever that statement was worth, it contained sufficient detail to establish the authors’ bona fides. They reported that a manhunt for them was under way in Georgia and claimed that the FSB had put a hefty bounty on their heads. It was only a matter of time before they would be caught or killed. Sasha and Yuri promptly reported all of this to the Kovalyov Commission and released it to Novaya Gazeta. Here was more humiliating evidence of FSB ineptitude.
“We do not intend to take part in the PR campaign of some dubious personalities or, all the more, to get engaged in polemics with them,” an FSB spokesman responded. “Litvinenko is the man who tarnished the title of a secret services officer, who committed a crime himself.”
Moscow, October 23, 2002: A group of about terrorists take about eight hundred people hostage at a Moscow theater, demanding of Russian forces from Chechnya. The raid is led by Movsar Barayev, the nephew of Arbi Barayev, the infamous warlord accused of beheading four Britons in 1998. After a three-day standoff, FSB commandos take the building, using gas to incapacitate the terrorists; 137 hostages die from exposure to the gas. All hostage-takers are killed execution-style by the commandos, even though they offered no resistance.
Tbilisi, Georgia, December 8,