Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [143]
According to the plan, Rybkin was supposed to slip out of FSB surveillance and go to Kiev, where he would meet a Maskhadov representative who would take him to the rendezvous.
Rybkin went to London to consult with the London group. All of us liked the idea, but Zakayev said that he was surprised he didn’t know about it. He would need a few days to communicate with Maskhadov to double-check the intermediary’s credentials. Rybkin went back to Moscow, where he got the word from his contact that everything was ready. There was no time to waste. He decided to go ahead without waiting for Zakayev’s confirmation. That was his big mistake. As Zakayev learned later, the invitation to meet with Maskhadov was bogus.
Rybkin’s stopover in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was supposed to be handled by Boris’s local contacts. By then Boris was heavily financing the Orange opposition to the dictatorial regime of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and had extensive contacts there.
As Rybkin told me later, on the evening of February 4, as a precaution to make sure he wasn’t followed, he drove some one hundred miles to the town of Kaluga, the first stop on the Moscow-Kiev railway, to catch up with the overnight express, which arrived in the Ukrainian capital the next morning. And then he vanished.
He was reported missing by his campaign staff on Saturday, February 7. It was the day after the Central Election Commission had formally registered him as a presidential candidate, with his submission of 2 million signatures, as required by the rules.
Rybkin’s disappearance became a sensation. Headlines around the world blared the news: “Russian Presidential Candidate Missing.” Police launched a search. Soon, reports claimed that a “well-informed source” in the FSB had hinted that Rybkin had been spotted relaxing in a sanatorium near Moscow.
Rybkin resurfaced, in Kiev, on February 10. In his first interviews he seemed inconsistent, indeed, incoherent.
“I have a right to devote two or three days to myself,” Rybkin told the Interfax news agency. “I came to Kiev to visit my friends. I switched off my mobile phone and never watched television,” he said, explaining why he was unaware of the media frenzy. When he arrived in Moscow later that day he was more cryptic: “I am back as if from a round of difficult talks in Chechnya, and I am glad to be back.” Asked if he had been detained, the grim-faced candidate said, “It is hard to detain me, but there are good people in Kiev, and I am very grateful to them.” We in London were at a total loss to explain what was going on and were afraid to make inquiries over the phone, fearing to make things even worse.
Sasha immediately came up with a perfectly logical conspiracy theory. But he was hardly the only observer to jump to conclusions. “I think that he came under pressure and was intimidated,” charged the leader of the Democratic Union, Valeria Novodvorskaya. “I believe that as an alternative, they threatened to kill him. I think that Rybkin gave up. Moreover, they offered him a way out. He may have arrived from Kiev but it was the FSB that had bought him a return ticket.”
“He was drugged,” said former KGB general Oleg Kalugin in an interview from Washington. “There are psychotropic substances and not only did the Russian special services not give up using them, but they have developed them further over the last few years.”
“They gave him SP-117,” Sasha argued. “Once you get SP-117, they can do whatever they want with you, drive you around, put you in bed with girls or boys, tape you, and so on. Then you get one pill of antidote and you are normal again and don’t remember what happened.”
“On a tape it would look like a very drunk man having fun,” said Kalugin.