Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [36]
Sasha Litvinenko sensed that something was cooking on the afternoon of June 18. A fellow oper complained about an extra load of work that had suddenly fallen on him just as he was about to go home: Director Barsukov urgently wanted all available information on Chubais, Berezovsky, and Gusinsky.
“A thought went through my mind immediately: they are preparing to arrest them,” Sasha recalled.
“Did you think of warning Boris?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That would be treason, and I was not at all up to it. I was not happy, of course. I thought of Boris as a friend, and I knew the whole thing was political, but you know, that’s the whole point of wearing a uniform: you don’t question your superiors.”
“Would you have arrested him if you were ordered?”
“At the time I would. I was a loyal officer. That was what I was trained to do: obey orders. But it would not have given me any pleasure.”
“Would you have shot at the crowds if you were ordered?”
“I don’t know. Lucky me, I was never asked to.”
On that afternoon in 1996 Sasha wondered why he had been left out of any preparations that were going on. After all, he was the Agency’s “Berezovsky connection.” Was his loyalty in question? Or were they saving him for some special task? Just as he was leaving for home, his phone rang. It was General Rogozin, Korzhakov’s deputy.
“Sasha, can you stop by my office tomorrow at four?” he asked.
This is it, Sasha thought. They want to use me against Boris. Just as Boris had warned. God help us both.
But he never met with Rogozin. Just as Sasha was entering the deputy’s waiting room the next afternoon, Rogozin ran out in great haste.
“Georgy Georgievich, shall I wait for you?” Sasha inquired.
“Don’t wait, I have a situation to deal with. Let’s talk tomorrow,” cried the general as he ran down the hall.
The conversation never happened.
In the early hours of the evening on June 19, 1996, Igor Malashenko, Goose’s right hand and the creative genius of NTV, stopped by The Club. There he found Berezovsky and Chubais sitting on the veranda. Boris was in a festive mood, sipping his favorite Chateau Latour, whereas Chubais was increasingly worried.
For the past four hours he had not been able to locate his closest lieutenant, Arkady Evstafiev. It was not like Arkady to disappear without warning. Chubais made frantic phone calls all over town, telling everyone he knew to look out for Arkady.
Suddenly, word came that Arkady and Sergei Lisovsky, the owner of the talent agency Media International, had been arrested by Korzhakov’s people as they were leaving a government building, carrying a box filled with half a million dollars in cash.
According to Malashenko, “Stunned silence fell over the terrace.” No one was surprised by the cash: Lisovsky’s agency was coordinating campaign performances for Yeltsin, and his rock stars and pop singers only sang for cash. But that Korzhakov chose to move against Chubais’s people was ominous. Clearly, another shoe was waiting to drop.
“Let’s move off the terrace and get inside,” someone suggested, fearing for the group’s safety.
Several more people arrived: Gusinsky, surrounded by his security detail led by the fearsome Cyclops, armed with a huge pump gun; curly-headed Boris Nemtsov, a rising star of the liberal movement; and Alfred Kokh, the state properties minister.
Malashenko later reconstructed the events of that night: “The two coolest heads, as usual, were Boris and Goose. They sat down with Chubais to review our assets”: the two TV networks, a direct line to the president in the persons of Tanya-Valya, and, as allies, probably the prime minister and possibly General Lebed.
Tanya-Valya were destined to save Russian democracy for the third time that year. They arrived at The Club just after midnight. In everyone’s retrospective judgment, it was perhaps the single most important development of the affair. By the early morning hours, snipers had deployed on the roofs and the building was surrounded. Yet they would never dare an assault with the president’s daughter inside.