Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [56]
He did not deny that he had been told to do illegal things before, but the URPO was a totally different world. Orders were verbal, there were no records, deniability was essential.
Initially he just felt uneasy. His first assignments were against the same types of “objects” he had been targeting at the ATC: gangs, dirty cops, kidnappers. His breaking point was the Trepashkin case. One day in late October, Sasha was told, “There is this guy, Mikhail Trepashkin. He is your new object. Go get his file and make yourself familiar with it.”
Sasha studied the file. It turned out that Trepashkin, a lieutenant colonel and ten-year veteran of the KGB, had quarreled with his bosses, gotten kicked out of the service, and then sued the FSB for compensation. He published an open letter to President Yeltsin claiming that the Agency was sunk in corruption. At the time Trepashkin was working as a senior investigator in the tax service. When Sasha was told by a superior that “we should take care of him,” he decided to play dumb:
“What do you mean, ‘take care’?”
“Well, it’s a delicate situation. You know, he is taking the director to court, and giving interviews. We should shut him up, director’s personal request.”
“How do we shut him up?”
“Let’s plant a gun on him.”
“No way. He’s an oper, he knows all the tricks. It will never stand up in court.”
“Well, then, let’s just kill him.” His superior started to lose patience. “Say that we tried to take away his FSB ID, he resisted, and we knocked him off. Don’t play the fool with me, Sasha. Don’t you know what we are doing here? We are a special tasks division. We are here to solve problems, not to ask questions.”
“Okay, I will need some time to develop the case and figure out our options,” said Sasha.
He did not want to do it, so he stalled, hoping to quietly sabotage the assignment by dragging it out for a month or two.
November 4, 1997: Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov meet with President Yeltsin at his dacha while Prime Minister Chernomyrdin is away on vacation. They present him with a draft decree firing Boris Berezovsky, arguing that the deputy secretary to the National Security Council has been casting himself as “the gray eminence of the Kremlin,” undermining the presidency. Yeltsin, fed up with the “oligarch’s war,” agrees. A week later newspapers disclose that a company owned by Unexim Bank had paid Chubais and four associates $90,000 each on the eve of the Svyazinvest auction, disguised as a “book advance.” Yeltsin, enraged, purges the young reformers, including Alfred Koch, from the government and demotes Chubais. A new national security team inherits the Chechen situation.
One day that fall, Sasha was invited to an operational meeting. His superiors were discussing a plan to kidnap Umar Dzhabrailov, a prominent Chechen figure in Moscow, to force his family to pay a ransom, which would then be used to buy the freedom of some of their comrades held in Chechnya. Sasha was invited to the meeting because of his extensive experience with kidnappings.
“I was sitting there, discussing how to take a man hostage,” Sasha recalled, “based on my previous experience of freeing hostages. It was like the theater of the absurd. But for the guys there was nothing wrong with it. It was just the continuation of their war in Chechnya. Kidnapping Chechens for ransom was nothing out of the ordinary for them.”
By December, the planning of the Dzhabrailov kidnapping was at an advanced stage: URPO opers monitored his movements, tapped his phones, scrutinized his habits, and checked his contacts. The date, time, and place for the operation were set: they would take him when he arrived at a performance by Mahmud Esambaev, the famous Chechen folk dancer.
They even developed a disinformation line, which would be planted in the media in the aftermath of the operation. Dzhabrailov was a co-owner of the Radisson hotel in Moscow, with an American partner, Paul Tatum, who had been gunned down by an assassin near the hotel on November 3, 1996. An