Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [131]
As it turned out, Trepashkin, every inch the systematic investigator, had planned for contingencies. A few days before his arrest he gave a copy of the Romanovich file to a reporter from Moscovskiye Novosty, Igor Korolkov. After Trepashkin’s arrest, Korolkov rushed to Blumenfeld to verify the story. Everything checked out.
“At Lefortovo they showed me a photograph of a certain person,” said Blumenfeld in a taped interview, “and they said that this was Gochiyayev and that it was supposedly to him that I had rented out the basement. I answered that I had never seen that man. But they insistently recommended to me that I identify Gochiyayev. I understood what they wanted, did not argue further, and signed the statement.”
Korolkov’s story ran, but it was the end of 2003 and Putin’s media revolution was complete. All television and virtually all print media were under Kremlin control. Korolkov’s November 11 story in Moscovskiye Novosty was ignored in Russia.
Predictably, it was also discounted in the White House. And yet, among those few who were interested, our conspiracy theories were gradually gaining credence. Speaking on the Senate floor on November 4, 2003, U.S. Senator John McCain declared, “There remain credible allegations that Russia’s FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks.”
Moscow, December 30, 2003: Russian police and FSB agents seize a truck and confiscate five thousand copies of Blowing Up Russia en route from the western city of Pskov to Moscow.
January 11, 2004: A Moscow judge sentences Adam Dekkushev and Yusuf Krymshamkhalov to life imprisonment for participation in the 1999 Moscow bombings after a two-month-long closed trial, held without a jury.
On a sunny September 15, 2005, I arrived in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, for a meeting with Mikhail Trepashkin, who had just been released from prison. With me was Andrei Nekrasov, a filmmaker who had made a documentary about Tanya and Aliona Morozova. We had a mission: to convince Trepashkin to flee to the West. I wanted to repeat Sasha’s coup. Andrei wanted to film it.
Trepashkin was released as the result of an FSB oversight. Back in 2004 the case against him of illegal gun possession fell apart, and he was acquitted. However, he received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the disclosure of official secrets, a charge stemming from the old KGB file found in his desk in 2002. After serving two-thirds of his sentence in the godforsaken town of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, he applied for parole. He was a model prisoner, except that he had been a pain in the neck for the prison administration because, as a lawyer, he wrote complaints on behalf of every inmate. The administration supported his parole.
Apparently, no one in Nizhny Tagil knew who Trepashkin was. He was hardly a national celebrity, after all, and he was a first offender, a hapless former FSB officer serving time on an insignificant charge. So they let him go. He arrived in Moscow unannounced and surprised his wife, Tatyana, when he appeared at their doorstep.
By then Goose and Igor Malashenko, backed by an investment from Boris, had launched their new network, Russian TV International. Based in New York, it could be seen on cable in the far-flung Russian diaspora, from California to Kiev to Israel—everywhere except Russia. “We are the only Russian news not subject to Kremlin censorship,” boasted an RTVI ad. I saw an interview with Trepashkin on an RTVI dispatch from Moscow. He insisted that he planned to resume his probe into the apartment bombings, and also wanted to look into the theater siege. He added that he planned to start a new human rights group defending the rights of prisoners.
This man is mad, I thought. Sure enough, the next day, the prosecutor general’s office appealed his parole.
“Mikhail Ivanovich, let’s get together in the same place we met last time,” I said on the phone. “And bring your family.” Remarkably, his foreign travel passport had never been confiscated.
As he and Tatyana boarded