Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [126]
I accompanied Kovalyov to the White House to see Tom Graham, who by now had become Bush’s senior adviser on Russia at the National Security Council.
“Sergei Adamovich, I have known you for many years, and I will be undiplomatically frank with you,” said Tom. “Don’t waste your time telling us about Putin. We have no illusions. We know everything you would tell us and maybe more. But we cannot help you. For better or worse, our policy priorities are elsewhere.”
For three days and a dozen meetings, Kovalyov tried anyway, stubbornly repeating his moral charge that American “policy calculations sacrifice other people’s lives—tens of thousands of lives.” His audiences were polite, and uninterested. “This is not a far-sighted policy, it will return to haunt America later on,” Kovalyov warned.
He was described by Fred Hiatt in a Washington Post editorial as “a frail old Russian, moving like a ghost whom everyone would rather forget … in a Washington consumed with hard-headed calculations about Security Council votes and European alliances and intelligence cooperation.”
On February 25 Kovalyov and two members of the Public Commission arrived in London to question Boris and his associates. I was not present, but apparently all went well between them. There was not much that Boris and Sasha could add to the bombing case that had not been said already. But they used the occasion to launch another attack on the FSB, this time related to the theater siege in Moscow the previous October. Boris released a statement urging Kovalyov to look into the newest conspiracy theory: that the FSB might have had a hand in that attack. He posed five highly provocative questions:
For years there had been allegations that the FSB maintained relations with the Barayev clan. Could it have known about the planned attack?
How could the police have overlooked the arrival of some fifty terrorists in downtown Moscow, with tons of weapons, ammunition, and explosives?
Why were all the incapacitated terrorists, who offered no resistance and could have provided valuable information, shot execution-style?
Why had the terrorists not set off their waist-belt bombs, even though it took ten minutes for the gas to take effect? Were there any explosives in the building in the first place?
Why was the gas used without any antidote on hand, leading to the death of 137 hostages?
Upon his return to Moscow, Kovalyov announced that the Commission would expand its terms of reference to the controversial aspects of the theater siege. “We will look carefully into Berezovsky’s questions, and will perhaps add some of our own,” he declared. In the meantime, the IFCL added another NGO to its list of sponsored projects: the association of relatives of victims of the theater siege, who wanted the government to respond to the same set of questions and planned to pursue it in the courts.
Within weeks, new information surfaced that made the circumstances surrounding the theater siege even more suspicious. In the first days of April Yushenkov visited London. He met with Boris to discuss Liberal Russia. He also met with Sasha Litvinenko, who gave him what has later become known as “the Terkibayev file.”
The information came from Chechen sources via Akhmed Zakayev, who by then was living in London, fighting a Russian extradition request. It turned out that one of the Moscow theater terrorists had survived. His name was Khanpash Terkibayev; he was mentioned in the list of terrorists published in the media on October 25, the day before FSB commandos stormed the