Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [42]
“If you knew about Sasha, why didn’t you take him out?” I asked Zakayev one night over dinner in his London house.
“Mostly because we did not want to compromise our own man. But now I will say that it was Allah’s will, because otherwise I would not have had the luck of knowing him in London.”
Alla Dudayeva, the president’s widow, also knew Sasha during the war. After her husband’s death, the rebel leadership decided that Alla should go to Turkey. She and her bodyguard, Musa, were carrying false passports when they were spotted in the Nalchik airport as they were about to board a plane on May 27. Lieutenant Colonel “Volkov” rushed in from Moscow to interrogate her.
“Although Alla was not mistreated, she was very scared,” Zakayev recounted. “The people who held her were really fearsome. So when an unexpectedly kind officer came from Moscow, he immediately gained her confidence. She said that Sasha ‘displayed an unusual intelligence and sensitivity for the KGB.’”
Sasha had told me what happened. They kept Alla at a former dacha of Stalin’s in the mountain spa resort of Kislovodsk. She was guarded by FSB field officers who were accustomed to roughing up captured fighters, not dealing with a grieving woman. They were ordered to treat her diplomatically.
Sasha’s task was to find out two things: first, whether her husband was indeed killed, or whether he could have survived the attack and was recovering in one of the mountain villages. Second, if he was dead, where was he buried? The Russians wanted to prevent his grave from becoming a martyr’s shrine.
Sasha arrived just as Alla and her captors sat down in awkward silence for lunch in Stalin’s luxurious dining room. Alla, forty-nine, a fragile blond woman dressed in black, with distinctly Slavic features, was “very tense and anxious,” Sasha recalled. To soften her up, he had to use all of his charms. He began by telling her that he respected her feelings. He expressed condolences. Although she suspected that it was just part of a good-cop/bad-cop routine, she was still moved. After lunch they continued the conversation, recorded by a hidden camera, and she told him the story of her life, from childhood as an officer’s daughter at a military base in the Soviet North, to a general’s wife, to the first lady of her adopted mountainous nation, to the comrade in arms of a guerrilla leader.
By the end of the hour Sasha was confident that Dudayev was indeed dead. He was just coming to his second task—locating the grave—when he learned that President Yeltsin had pardoned Alla Dudayeva and she was free to go.
When the war ended with the Khasavyurt Accord, Sasha agreed with most of his fellow FSB officers and the military brass: it was a humiliation. All of this suffering, destruction, and the death of his friends were for nothing. Since the agreement had been negotiated by General Lebed, Sasha and his fellow officers now considered Lebed a traitor, someone who, for the sake of politics, betrayed the soldiers in uniform, those who had fought and died. By contrast, the general public accepted the Khasavyurt agreements with relief, which boosted Lebed’s chances as a potential successor to Yeltsin in the presidential elections that lay four years ahead.
In September 1996, as Akhmed Zakayev assumed his new office, the prospects of maintaining stability were shaky, at best. Nearly half a million people, 40 percent of Chechnya’s prewar population, had been uprooted and were now living in overcrowded villages or languishing in refugee camps. Grozny, which only two years ago had been a flourishing city of four hundred thousand, lay in ruins. The economy was all but destroyed. Thousands of youngsters, brandishing Kalashnikovs, roamed the streets.
The warlords Shamil Basayev and Salman Raduyev, who had led spectacular raids against the Russians, showed no intention