Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [55]
Thanks to this operation, Khokholkov established close ties with Alexander Korzhakov, who at the time was head of Kremlin security. The reason the assignment was top secret was to avoid American export restrictions on the technology that Korzhakov sought. It may also have been kept secret to avoid attention to a second purchase by Khokholkov: the American system that could guide a missile to a land target by homing in on a particular kind of signal, such as that of a satellite telephone. It was the system that was used to assassinate Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen president.
This information, by itself, did not raise any red flags for Sasha. After all, securing the Kremlin and assassinating the leader of a wartime enemy were both well and good, in his eyes. But the report went on to allege that millions of dollars were misappropriated in the operation. Whether it was true or not, this allegation of course was just what Sasha needed as part of his assignment to “dig up anything he could” on Khokholkov.
Backed by his superiors, Generals Volokh and Trofimov, Sasha brought his findings to the FSB director, Nikolai Kovalev. Kovalev thanked him and said that he would take it from there. But nothing happened. Khokholkov continued to build up URPO, his new secret division, and Sasha felt frustrated yet again.
And now Kovalev was ordering him to go to work under Khokholkov’s command!
“Don’t worry about Khokholkov,” said the director, obviously amused at Sasha’s bewildered look. “I want my own man in that division. So you will come in and report if you notice anything fishy. That’s an order.”
Within the FSB, the URPO enjoyed considerable autonomy. It employed about forty opers and had its own car pool, technical support services, a SWAT unit, and agents. It was headquartered in a separate unmarked building away from Lubyanka HQ. Before long Sasha realized that the URPO’s mission included carrying extrajudicial actions against suspected criminals.
Most URPO members were veterans of Chechnya, and indeed the very concept of the URPO emerged from the Chechen experience: in extraordinary circumstances, law enforcement must be capable of acting outside of the law. Sasha did not like it. Perhaps in wartime such excesses could be written off as collateral damage, but Russia had not invoked war powers in Chechnya. The army’s presence there was always viewed as a law enforcement operation.
Once the law enforcement agencies were allowed to kill and torture Chechens with impunity, it wasn’t difficult to use the same approach against organized crime figures back at home.
As Sasha told me, URPO’s approach to recruitment was to seek out opers with bloody records. One of its officers, for example, was reinstated in the service after doing time for killing a rape-murder suspect whom he had had to release for insufficient evidence. More senior URPO officers had “wasted” four Dagestan gangsters who had the misfortune of trying to extort money from a store that belonged to the son of an ex-KGB boss.
When he told me about the URPO, Sasha was aware that his revelations cast a measure of suspicion upon himself. As he explained to me, “I don’t say I am an angel, but I don’t have blood on my hands. I ended up in the URPO because Kovalev planted me there. Khokholkov would never have picked me.
“But one thing is sure: sooner or later all of us would have ended up