Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [62]
Boris liked the idea of putting a lieutenant colonel over multistar generals; the newcomer would not be a part of the old-boy network, and would in fact be snubbed by the top brass, which should only strengthen his loyalty to the Kremlin.
“I support him 100 percent,” Boris said. And so, a process initiated by Sasha’s URPO whistle-blowers and steered behind the scenes by Boris plucked their future nemesis from obscurity and placed him in charge of one of the world’s most powerful spy services.
“Once upon a time there were two brothers. One was a smart fellow, the other a fool,” Sasha once told me. “You know, after I saved him from the Moscow cops, Boris said that from now on we will be like brothers. Between the two of us, I am obviously the fool. But for some reason, the fool turned out to be right. I told him from the very first day that Putin was a snake. But he did not believe me.”
When the new director took office on July 25, 1998, Boris said to Sasha, “Go see Putin. Make yourself known. See what a great guy we’ve installed, with your help.”
They did not hit it off. Putin was cold and formal. He listened in silence to Sasha’s passionate depiction of corruption in the Agency, but he did not want to meet the other whistle-blowers.
“I know a man by his handshake,” Sasha told Marina after that meeting. “His was cold and spongy. I could see it in his eyes that he hated me.”
Two years later, as we drove across Turkey together, Sasha gave me his take on the man, the former fellow lieutenant colonel who became the pursuer from whom he was fleeing. Putin, according to Sasha, never really left the service. He was loyal to the KGB all along. He might have lent his loyalty—temporarily—to Sobchak or Yeltsin, but once he returned to the bosom of the Agency, he immediately, and eagerly, fell back into the old fold.
According to Sasha, when Putin suddenly took charge of the Agency, its generals simply pulled Putin’s file from the dust and reclaimed him as one of their own, “a prodigal son, if you wish. But to make sure, they staged a little welcoming ceremony. Someone explained that to me before I went to see him.”
Three weeks before Putin’s appointment was officially announced, amid rumors that his predecessor Kovalev would soon be replaced, a murder occurred. Sasha believed it was an Agency job, arranged as a welcoming gift. In the early morning hours of July 2, retired army general Lev Rokhlin, a member of the Duma, was shot dead as he slept at his dacha. The police immediately announced that his wife, Tamara, confessed to the killing, “on grounds of personal hostility.”
Rokhlin was the founder of the movement “In Support of the Army and the Military Industry.” He had commanded the troops that took Grozny in 1995 and was an outspoken critic of President Yeltsin. He was one of the leading figures in the Communist-led parliamentary opposition. Indeed, he had openly called for the overthrow of the “hated regime.” He was extremely popular in the army and potentially a leader if the army brass ever decided to stage a coup. The Kremlin had good reason to want to be rid of him.
Almost immediately, the press and opposition leaders in the Duma speculated that his death was a political assassination organized by the FSB. On July 7, Rokhlin’s daughter and son-in-law appeared on TV to claim that the real killers had sneaked into the dacha, killed the general, and then forced his wife to confess by threatening to hunt down and kill her whole family. Later, Tamara Rokhlina recanted her confession.
After ten thousand people showed up at Rokhlin’s funeral, the FSB felt compelled to issue an unusual statement, denying that it had anything to do with the murder. A few days later, three charred bodies were found near Rokhlin’s dacha, adding fuel to the conspiracy theory. Were the three perpetrators