Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [41]
Dudayev, his poet wife, Alla, and four aides went out into the mountains in two vehicles, a van and an SUV. At about 6 the sun had set in the valley, but there was still plenty of light on the hillside where they stopped. Alla was supposed to speak live on Radio Liberty, to make an appeal for peace to the women of Russia and to read one of her poems. But first Dudayev wanted to make a call to the Duma member Konstantin Borovoi in Moscow, who was a leading peace advocate. The president had a satellite phone, given to him by highly placed friends in Turkey. Zakayev had been wary of it, warning that missiles could home in on its signal. Dudayev reassured him: this was American technology, not available to the Russians. And Dudayev knew what he was talking about. After all, he had been an air force general.
As for the Americans, Dudayev said, trusted sources in the Turkish government assured him that the United States was not helping Russia militarily. The American Radio Liberty in Prague was one of the main information outlets for the rebels. Also, Dudayev said, Yeltsin was moving toward a settlement with him. After the war, surely, the Americans would want to deal with him because he was the only one who could guarantee stability in the oil-rich region and contain “the crazies”—the radical Islamists. Why would America want to harm him?
While the president and his aides placed the satellite telephone on the hood of the SUV, set the antenna, and dialed Moscow, Alla and her bodyguard, Musa, stepped aside to the edge of a ravine.
When Alla heard airplanes Musa reassured her: they were too high to pose any danger. But suddenly, two missiles flew down, one after the other, with a sharp whistling sound. The shock wave knocked her off the edge of the ravine; she stopped herself from falling only by clinging to some branches. When she pulled herself back up, the SUV was destroyed. The missiles had scored a direct hit. Musa was holding the dying president in his arms.
The Moscow press trumpeted the assassination as a triumph of a new technology developed at a secret FSB weapons lab, but Zakayev did not believe a word of it. Such precision was simply out of the question for the Russians. The president himself had said that the technology was American. Zakayev was convinced that the fateful telephone contained a special homing chip that had been planted in Turkey, and that the Americans, using their own satellites, guided the Russian missiles to their target.
During the first Chechen War, Sasha Litvinenko was one of Zakayev’s enemies. Only much later in London would they become friends. But Zakayev knew about Sasha before he even knew his name.
“We were aware of an intelligence officer who often came from Moscow almost from the first day of the war. He operated from the FSB headquarters in Nalchik,” Zakayev later told me. Nalchik was Sasha’s hometown and the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, another Muslim province of Russia in the North Caucasus.
“We ran an agent of our own at Nalchik FSB,” Zakayev added. “He reported that the officer’s name was Alexander Volkov, and that he was a local. It was no trouble for us to establish that his real name was Litvinenko, since many people knew his father’s family.”
Most of Sasha’s work during the war was in Nalchik. The only exception came when he took part in the siege of Pervomaiskoye, Dagestan.
“He was pretty damn good,” reported Zakayev. “He planted agents in our midst. This was extremely difficult, you know, to find a Chechen who would work for the Russians. And he managed to recruit not one but three. We caught them in the end, thanks to our man in Nalchik. But still, it shows Sasha’s talent as an oper.”
There was another successful operation of Sasha’s about which Zakayev learned only years later. At the beginning of the war, Khamad Kurbanov, the representative of Dudayev’s government in Moscow, was detained by the FSB. At Sasha’s suggestion, he was