Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [48]
As Zakayev later explained, “These murders were completely out of character, even for the renegade Chechens. No claims of responsibility. No political demands. No robbery. To us it was clearly an effort by the Russian secret service to torpedo troop withdrawal and the elections.”
Grozny, January 27, 1997: Voters cram the polling stations across Chechnya in what European Union observers call “legitimate, democratic, and free” presidential elections. Fifty-five-year-old former Soviet army officer Aslan Maskhadov, who coordinated military operations against Russia during the war, wins office with an overwhelming majority of 69 percent. The guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev, who had led a terrorist attack on Budyonnovsk, finishes a distant second with 16 percent of the vote. Acting president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev finishes third, with 15 percent.
One day in late April 1997, Boris Berezovsky summoned me to The Club. “Can you pretend to be a CIA agent?”
“First of all, it is a criminal offense to impersonate a federal officer,” I said, with a smile. “Second, knowing you, I hope there will be no gunfire.”
“You are a Soros representative, aren’t you?” Boris beamed, and added, “Do you have a business card? That’s impressive enough. Everyone in Russia thinks the Soros Foundation is a CIA front. Let us go to my dacha. I need you to project American authority. Your job is just to bless us with your presence.”
At the dacha I found myself at a dinner for four: Boris, myself, NSC Secretary Rybkin, and Movladi Udugov, the Chechen deputy prime minister, the leader of the Islamist wing in Maskhadov’s government. The matter at hand was the wording of the peace treaty that would formally end the war in Chechnya, which was scheduled for signing next month.
It was an improbable scene: Rybkin projected the confidence of a former Soviet apparatchik. Boris sipped his Chateau Latour. Udugov interrupted the discussion for an evening prayer. I simply tried to look important, personifying the clout of the United States as best I could.
The treaty was essentially completed. It began with half a page of lofty phrases declaring reconciliation between the two nations to end their “centuries-long” enmity. What was missing was a legal frame of reference. Rybkin and Boris wanted the agreement to be explicitly derived from the Russian Constitution. Udugov wanted to root it in international law.
They argued for nearly three hours. In the end a compromise was reached as each side added a legal reference of its choosing. In the final version the references were dropped, so the evening’s exercise was in vain. Yet I learned something valuable about the process. Both sides were more cagey with their own intransigent members than with each other.
On April 28, 1997, a bomb exploded shortly before 7 p.m. at the railway station in the southern resort city of Pyatigorsk, Russia, killing two and injuring more than forty people. The Chechen peace accord was at risk again. President Yeltsin, vacationing 150 miles away on the Black Sea, immediately imposed tight security measures on the whole southern region of Russia.
Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov blamed Chechen terrorists, announcing that two Chechen women had been arrested in Pyatigorsk who had confessed to planting the bomb. He claimed that the women were known terrorists who had taken part in the hostage incident in Pervomaiskoye in January 1996. He also disclosed that Chechens had attacked a Russian police station at the Dagestan border the previous night.
“Now everyone can see that the party of war was not in Moscow but in Grozny,” Kulikov fumed on TV.
Two days later, however, as Boris and Rybkin flew to Grozny, the Chechens announced that one of the two women named by Kulikov was alive and well and quietly living in that city. The other had been killed a year earlier. Journalists discovered that their stand-ins, the two women who had “confessed” in Pyatigorsk, had been arrested