Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [51]
Boris’s call woke me up in my Moscow apartment in the early morning hours on Thursday, June 12.
“A car will pick you up in fifteen minutes. I have to do an errand en route to Sochi. We are going to Grozny.”
A huge military aircraft stood on the tarmac of an airfield outside of Moscow, its motors warming up. It was the airborne headquarters of the Russian National Security Council.
“They would throw a fit if they knew that I brought an American here,” said Boris, sitting in the commander’s salon with Rybkin. “No one knows who you are except Ivan Petrovich [Rybkin] and Sergei, my bodyguard. So please keep a low profile. And once we start discussing state secrets, you will have to sit with Sergei.”
After takeoff, a guard took me to the back of the plane. It was quite something to see. In the communications section a dozen army officers with earphones monitored screens, apparently maintaining contact with the rest of Russia’s defense command. Next came a section with two dozen fearsome Spetsnaz paratroopers in full combat gear, with their Kalashnikovs resting in a stack in the corner. Finally I found myself in a tiny compartment with Sergei, whom I had seen at The Club.
“When we land, you stick to me, and ask me if you need anything,” he said. “Once these Chechens know who you are, you will be a prime target for kidnapping.” We landed. From the window I watched as our paratroopers took up positions in a circle around our aircraft. A van, followed by a Jeep full of armed Chechens, approached. Rybkin, Boris, two other NSC officials, Sergei, and I got into the van, six civilians in a sea of Chechen military. They drove us away, leaving our Spetsnaz escort behind.
“There is no point in taking them with us,” explained Sergei. “They are no match for the Chechens, and we do not want them to come in direct contact with their fighters. The Chechen tradition of hospitality, whatever it is worth, is our best protection.”
We drove for about fifteen minutes through a countryside ravaged by war, passing bombed-out houses, charred skeletons of trees, and a burned Russian tank.
We arrived at a miraculously untouched building. A caravan of Jeeps and SUVs brought the Chechen delegation: President Maskhadov, dressed in military fatigues, Akhmed Zakayev in a civilian suit—I saw him then for the first time—and Udugov in a traditional Chechen fur hat. Sergei and I remained in the hallway in the company of half a dozen ferocious-looking guerrillas, all dressed in black, armed with automatic weapons of all kinds. We sat in complete silence, staring at each other.
An hour later the negotiations were over. “We are taking Maskhadov to Sochi to see Chernomyrdin,” Boris explained, as we drove back to the plane.
As I later learned, these meetings were among the early twists in the new Great Game for control of the flow of North Caspian oil.
An existing pipeline from the Azeri capital of Baku to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk ran through Chechen territory for ninety miles. The Chechens were insisting that they should be a full sovereign partner to an agreement to reopen the pipe, along with Russia and Azerbaijan. Hardliners in Moscow refused to give the Chechens equal status, complaining that it would be another humiliation for Russia: wasn’t control of the pipeline one of the reasons for fighting the war in the first place? But for Boris and Rybkin appearances made no difference; their primary concern was to open the pipeline in order to weaken an American-backed proposal for a new pipeline, from Baku to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, which would bypass Russia.
On June 13, I was virtually the only live audience member for a joint statement of Maskhadov and Chernomyrdin delivered to the ever-present ORT camera at a Russian government dacha in Sochi, which had once been Stalin’s summer retreat. Outside were terraced