Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [18]
A single phone call to Korzhakov was enough to arrange an assignment for Sasha, and with a “cover document” in his pocket—a diplomatic passport in the name of Alexander Volkov, second secretary in the Russian Embassy in Bern—Sasha flew in Berezovsky’s private jet for his first trip away from his homeland, in March 1995.
He called Marina from Switzerland and told her, thrilled, “You won’t believe it: they don’t lock the doors in the hotel and the cops are as polite as your academics!”
“You’ve had time to deal with the cops?” Marina asked in surprise.
“I’ll tell you when I get back,” Sasha said.
He gave her presents of French perfume when he returned and denim outfits for Tolik in graduated sizes for the next five years—an incredible luxury by Moscow standards. “Who knows what may happen, but at least one problem is taken care of,” he laughed.
He also told her the story of the Swiss cops. Dealing with them made an indelible impression on Sasha. Boris had been driving a sports Mercedes, with his wife, Lena, in the front and Sasha in the small backseat. With his Moscow habit of paying no attention to the rules, Boris drove at a wild speed, crossing the solid line on more than one occasion. They wound up in the hands of two exceedingly polite policemen. In Moscow, “resolving” a case like that would entail a $20 bill folded into one’s driver’s license. But that was out of the question here: the group went to the police station in the Alpine town of Chateau d’Oex. Boris, Lena, and Sasha were locked up in a cell with a steel door and a peephole while the police took their papers away.
It didn’t occur to Sasha that their salvation was his cover identity. The polite policemen returned two hours later. “We must apologize,” they said. “We have no right to detain you, you have diplomatic immunity. It took some time for your embassy to send confirmation, but now everything is in order.” They returned his fake passport, expressing no surprise that the second secretary in the Russian Embassy spoke no foreign languages.
In retrospect, Sasha’s presence in Switzerland might have been more than just a cursory precaution for Boris. Many years later a Russian defector to the West who had been privy to the goings-on in the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, told me that the Moscow center was extremely alarmed by Berezovsky’s plan to privatize Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, which had been a traditional cover for hundreds of spies all over the world. So, in early 1995, a secret cable went out to the Geneva station to monitor Berezovsky’s visit, which, as the SVR suspected, had to do with setting up a financial and sales center in Lausanne to place the airline’s cash flow out of the control of the spy agency. The intelligence report about that visit was the origin of the famous “Aeroflot case” that came to haunt Berezovsky many years later.
February 8, 1995: Russian troops finally take Grozny. Twenty-seven thousand civilians have been killed in the battle, and the city has been leveled by massive aerial and artillery bombardments. Russian forces carpet bomb many other towns. Civilians cannot escape. Aid groups are refused access. Chechen fighters retreat into the mountains and start a guerrilla war.
For Sasha, the war in Chechnya was at first essentially a sideshow, a distraction, which diverted the Agency’s attention and resources from what he saw as the core problem: corruption and crime among the police and the services. He was sure that the war would end quickly, as the president and the generals had promised. For nearly a year he had spent long nights at home at the kitchen table, drawing colored charts of mob connections with the top brass of the FSB and the Ministry of the Interior. He even wrote a memorandum about it, addressed to Yeltsin, which Marina retyped at least a dozen times.
But after meeting Berezovsky, he never sent it. Boris seemed to offer a better way to advance