Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [33]
Sasha had both official and unofficial reasons to be pleased when Boris called him in mid-February and proposed that they meet. He was doing what his bosses wanted him to do, and in the process he hoped he would learn why he had been given the assignment.
When they met, Sasha chatted about Chechnya and what he had seen in the trenches at the siege of Pervomaiskoye. He was still in shock from it. Boris had no time to listen, as usual, and he had his own agenda.
“We’ll work on Chechnya after the elections, and I promise you, we will end this mess,” said Berezovsky. “But for now, here’s what you need to know. Until quite recently, I was on very good terms with your bosses, Korzhakov and Barsukov. But now we’ve split. And I want to warn you that you may have problems if you remain connected to me.”
Boris explained his quarrel with Korzhakov: Korzhakov wanted to cancel the elections, but Boris thought that if that were to occur, the Communists would bring people out into the streets. Federal troops, certainly the FSB, might be ordered to shoot at the crowd.
“I don’t want to pressure you, Sasha,” Boris said. “I just want you to understand that very soon you’ll have to pick which side you’re on.”
Up until that moment Sasha had had no reservations about his special relationship with Boris. He was not particularly savvy politically. He relied only on the general conviction that he was working for the government, led by the president. He divided the world into “us” and “them,” and so Boris, as a member of the establishment and an adviser to Yeltsin, was part of “us” and someone whom the services were supposed to serve. Besides, his bosses—Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Trofimov—had encouraged their relationship all along. It was only now that Boris was being described as an “operative object.”
What he heard from Boris shook him to the core. For the first time in his life he faced a value judgment that could bring him into conflict with his official duties. Of course, Korzhakov and Barsukov were his commanders and Boris was an outsider. Yet he trusted Boris’s judgment.
Boris did not want an answer right away. He added that he would understand if Sasha distanced himself. However, he wanted one last favor: to set up a meeting for him with General Trofimov, the Moscow FSB chief, the man who had protected him from the city cops after the Listyev murder.
Trofimov, a short, thin man with the demeanor of an accountant, was a legend in the services. He had a reputation as incorruptible. Even the former Soviet dissidents whose cases he managed in the 1980s had accorded him a measure of respect. Some said that he was close to Korzhakov, but Boris doubted it; he believed that Trofimov’s only true loyalty was to Yeltsin. Trofimov was the one who had arrested the leaders of the parliamentary putsch after the storming of the White House in 1993. Boris was confident that Trofimov harbored no political ambitions, and he wanted to sound him out in advance of the gathering storm: the position of the Moscow FSB chief would to a large extent determine the outcome if Russian politics deteriorated into street-level confrontations.
The next morning, Boris came to see Trofimov at the Moscow FSB office. Sasha waited outside.
“I do not know what they talked about, but when I escorted him out after the meeting, out in the street I spotted surveillance,” he recalled. “Two guys standing across the street with an attaché case.”
Sasha knew the device well; it was a standard clandestine camera. The agents were positioned just as he had been taught, standing at an angle to each other. One was holding the attaché case perpendicular to the door of the FSB building, with the camera in its side pointed at Sasha and Boris. The other provided cover by pretending to talk.
“I pointed them out to Berezovsky. He