Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [61]
Is it true that some URPO operatives have committed acts of extortion and attempted murder? Is it true that certain officers of FSB Internal Affairs reported the suspected abuses at URPO to the Kremlin staff?
The Schekochihin article was a bombshell. Years later, in London, I quizzed both Sasha and Boris about whether either of them, or their associates, had organized a leak to the legislator. Both categorically denied it. Schekochihin, an activist member of the social democratic Yabloko Party, was noted for his dislike of the oligarchs, and he particularly hated Berezovsky.
As Boris and Sasha pointed out, Schekochihin’s questions to Kovalev suggest that he had his own source, perhaps in FSB Internal Affairs or in the Kremlin. Schekochihin apparently did not know about the planned kidnapping of Dzhabrailov or the assault on Trepashkin, otherwise he would certainly have mentioned them.
Alas, Schekochihin could not be asked personally; he died of apparent poisoning on July 3, 2003, while investigating yet another FSB scandal.
Chechnya, summer 1998: Amid economic chaos and an influx of militant Muslims from abroad, criminal gangs turn kidnapping into a profitable business. The Maskhadov government estimates that sixty-five people, including two Britons, are being held hostage. Valentin Vlasov, who replaced Ivan Rybkin as Russia’s special representative to Chechnya, is kidnapped at gunpoint on the road to Grozny. Maskhadov orders extremist militias to disband, leading to armed clashes in which nine people are killed. On July 23 Maskhadov himself narrowly escapes an assassination attempt when a car bomb explodes as he drives by, killing one of his bodyguards.
In the middle of June, Valentin Yumashev, who often discussed major government appointments with Boris, asked the tycoon for his opinion of one of Yumashev’s aides, a man named Vladimir Putin.
Boris knew Putin quite well. He had met him when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, and Boris was still involved in the auto business. At the time Putin had the reputation of being uncorrupted, a rarity among officials. More recently, Putin had run an auditing group at the Kremlin administration.
“Why?” Boris inquired.
“We are considering him for the FSB directorship.”
Yumashev explained that the principal quality the president was seeking in a new spy chief was loyalty, but he didn’t trust any of the existing FSB generals. They were a tightly knit clan. If Putin had one defining feature, it was staunch loyalty. When his former boss, the ardently anti-Communist St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, lost his bid for reelection, Putin preferred unemployment to betrayal. The new mayor had offered to retain Putin, knowing that he knew many of Sobchak’s secrets. Putin declined. He then moved to Moscow and found himself a low-level job in the Kremlin.
One particular episode about Putin that favorably impressed the president was the “rescue of Sobchak” that Putin had organized in November 1997, at substantial personal risk. By then, the new mayor of St. Petersburg, in collusion with the prosecutor general Yuri Skuratov, both Communist sympathizers, had finally succeeded in launching a criminal investigation against Sobchak—a clear case of settling scores with one of the key figures of Yeltsin’s 1991 revolution. Moscow liberals ran to Yeltsin for help. But Yeltsin was reluctant to lean on government prosecutors to help an old friend.
In the meantime Sobchak suffered a heart attack while under interrogation. He was rushed to the hospital. That very day in Moscow, Skuratov signed his arrest warrant. But two days later Putin went to St. Petersburg and arranged a dramatic escape. Dodging police surveillance, Sobchak’s loyalists put the ex-mayor on a stretcher and transported him from the hospital to the airport, where a private jet was waiting. The next day he surfaced in a Paris heart clinic, his wife at his side.
Now, as Yumashev talked to Boris about Putin’s candidacy for the FSB,