Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [60]
In retrospect, Sasha suspected that Shebalin may have been a mole in their group from day one. That night he chose not to go to Boris, saying that he had something else to do. Was it to seek guidance from his handlers at the FSB? In fact, his entire calm speech about the “imminent arrest on Monday” could have been a ploy to scare them into backing out. But if so, it backfired by inspiring the midnight taping, which in the end may have saved their necks.
Sasha later observed that Shebalin never took part in any spontaneous action against the FSB, only those that were planned in advance, and he also never initiated anything.
But Gusak was genuine. The fact that he could not make up his mind testified to that. He was desperately trying to figure out which side would end up winning, and switching his allegiances accordingly. He was not among the initial whistle-blowers and he did not go with them to the Kremlin. He also served as Khokholkov’s intermediary in dealing with Sasha. But that night at Boris’s dacha he eagerly participated in the marathon taping and he told the whole truth. Yet six months later, in November 1998, when Sasha and his friends staged their famous press conference, Gusak backed out and even left town to be on the safe side.
The three other whistle-blowers, Ponkin, German Scheglov, and Konstantin Latyshenok, were Sasha’s loyal crewmembers. In the end they did what he did, and they went down with him.
Remarkably, nine years later, after Sasha’s death, Gusak suddenly surfaced in an interview with the BBC, as a lawyer in Moscow. He confirmed that Khokholkov had asked him to kill Berezovsky. But he did not take the order seriously, he said. Only “if the director of the FSB, Kovalev, had personally given me the order, would I have carried it out.”
On the Easter Sunday night at Boris’s dacha, they were all eloquent, as only confessing sinners can be. By the second hour of the taping Marina could no longer deny the truth: Sasha and his friends, who took turns speaking to a flabbergasted Dorenko, were launching a deadly struggle with their agency. She learned about Trepashkin, who was to be “taken care of,” the would-be kidnapping of Dzhabrailov, the talk of killing Boris, and many other things that Sasha called “illegal and criminal.” Marina knew that Sasha tended to see the world in black and white, and she assumed his whole profession shared this perspective. Now that he was in opposition to the FSB, Kontora, she feared that he would become its enemy and its target.
Although the initial impulse of the whistle-blowers was to immediately put the tape on TV, by morning they decided otherwise.
Boris agreed. “Films like that are most powerful if they are never seen,” he said as they were saying goodbye. “Perhaps we could make an exception for an exclusive screening in the Kremlin, but for the time being it is not necessary. As for your bosses, I suspect they already know what you have been doing all night. You do what you were planning to: go to the prosecutors. And we shall see what happens next.”
He looked extremely pleased with himself.
When they arrived at the Lubyanka the next morning, they weren’t arrested after all. Kovalev tried to bargain with them, but the discussion went nowhere.
Two days later, they went to the prosecutors. Soon, Khokholkov and Sasha and his friends were suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.
On May 25, Novaya Gazeta, the liberal Moscow weekly, printed a story by the journalist Yuri Schekochihin, who was also a Duma deputy and a member of its anticorruption committee. Schekochihin described the questions that he had put to FSB Director Kovalev in a letter as part of his oversight duties including:
Is it true that military prosecutors are investigating the URPO division of the FSB?
Is it true that the head of the URPO division reports personally to the FSB Director?
Is it true that recruitment of URPO