Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [130]
“I have to consult my superior,” said the schoolteacher. “I will be back in an hour.”
While he was gone I had a lonely lunch, watching ships sailing up the Bosporus toward Russian shores. Finally he returned.
“If you are concerned about who we are, my boss says hello. He met you at a dacha near Moscow.”
It was his way of telling me that he was speaking for Movladi Udugov, the former Chechen deputy prime minister turned Islamist ideologue. No way could we pay him.
“Look,” I said, “your boss, knowing who he is and who I am, knows that there can be no question of money changing hands. The best I can suggest is this: we find a newspaper in London that might be interested in paying for Gochiyayev’s interview. For material like this, they might pay a lot of money. If your boss agrees, call me or send me an e-mail.” We said goodbye. They never called or e-mailed.
With the Gochiyayev trail running cold, the prospects for our investigation looked bleak. After the death of Yushenkov and Schekochihin, the Public Commission was effectively defunct. Kovalyov was too old and too busy with his Chechnya work to devote much energy to investigating the bombings. In fact, he was about to retire; he had said that he would not run for another term in the December 2003 Duma election. Nobody else on the Commission’s roster was all that motivated. Only Trepashkin still continued his lonely pursuit.
Sometime in July, Sasha called: “Come to London, I have something new.”
It turned out that Trepashkin had had another breakthrough. He had just sent a courier with a stack of documents to Sasha.
By studying old press clippings, Trepashkin had uncovered the initial composite sketch of the Guryanova Street bomber that the police had released immediately after the attack on September 9. Two days later, the papers had published an image of the prime suspect, a different man; it was a photo of Gochiyayev. The initial sketch was quite elaborate, and Trepashkin thought that he knew the man: Vladimir Romanovich, a suspect in the Chechen-led extortion gang that Trepashkin had investigated seven years earlier when he was still employed by the FSB. At the time he was told by his superiors to leave Romanovich alone because he was working for the FSB.
Trepashkin showed the sketch to a former FSB colleague who knew the agent’s files. The man agreed: it was Romanovich, an undercover agent who specialized in penetrating ethnic Caucasian groups in Moscow’s criminal underground. Romanovich had been killed by a hit-and-run driver in Cyprus in the summer of 2000, several months after the Moscow blasts.
In July 2003, Tanya Morozova visited Russia to see her grandparents. While in Moscow, using her status as a crime victim, she visited the official FSB investigator, accompanied by Trepashkin as her attorney. The meeting was inconclusive, but Trepashkin was allowed to look through the case file. There was no Romanovich sketch in it.
Trepashkin then sought the source of the Romanovich sketch that had been released to the press on September 9, 1999. He found a man named Mark Blumenfeld, the former property manager in Tanya’s building on Guryanova Street. Yes, said Blumenfeld, on the morning after the bombing he described to local police the man who had rented the ground-floor space. Yet two days later, he said, he was brought to Lefortovo, where FSB officers pressured him to change his story and “recognize” another photograph, that of Gochiyayev.
This was good stuff. Sasha was jubilant: “I told you, Trepashkin is top-notch! Now we will get the bastards.”
Trepashkin wrote that he wanted us to keep his discovery quiet until the trial of the two bombing suspects, scheduled to open on October 31, at which he would represent Tanya and Aliona.
Moscow, October 23: Interfax reports that former FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin has been arrested and charged with illegal weapons possession. Trepashkin is detained in the Moscow area after police find an unlicensed