Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [65]
The spy agencies were largely left to their own devices during the “shock therapy” of 1991-1993, with little supervision and insufficient funding. What Glushkov discovered was that the spies had turned the national airline into a cash cow to support international spying operations and the livelihood of thousands of operatives around the world.
“The things we found were absolutely mind-boggling,” Glushkov told me in a conversation in London ten years later. “Aeroflot finances abroad were managed by mysterious off-shore companies; we could not identify the people behind them.”
Proceeds from ticket sales went to 352 foreign bank accounts, but it was impossible to establish who controlled them. All heads of foreign Aeroflot offices were operatives of the SVR or GRU; they were not accountable to the company management.
“To compound the problem, there were secret services personnel on the staff: 3,000 people, out of the total workforce of 14,000! The head of human resources was an FSB officer. The head of security was an FSB officer. And we could not touch them. So you know what I did?” Nikolai smiled. “I sent them a bill. I wrote a letter to the head of the SVR, Mr. Primakov, and the director of the FSB, General Barsukov, asking them to pay for their people’s salaries.” It was the summer of 1996.
The next thing he knew, he received a phone call from Korzhakov. He screamed and yelled, promising to “destroy” Glushkov if he “continued to violate the rights of the services.”
“But that was just the beginning,” Glushkov continued. “The real blow to them came when we reorganized our cash flow. We simply closed all of the 352 accounts and channeled all foreign revenue into one financial and accounting center in Switzerland, which we controlled. The company name was Andava. That’s what really infuriated them.”
Years later, when I was researching this book, I spoke to a Russian defector who lives under an assumed name in a quiet European town. He told me that starting in 1995, the SVR station in Geneva began watching Boris during his visits. They monitored his business in Switzerland, particularly Andava. The SVR information was fed to prosecutors in Moscow and later formed the basis for the so-called Aeroflot case.
My source told me of one SVR station chief who used to freely avail himself of Aeroflot cash for SVR business—that is, before Glushkov took over the company’s finances. One day, the local Aeroflot man—an SVR officer as well—told the station chief that he no longer had access to the cash. According to my informant, more that 30 percent of the station’s operational funds—hundreds of thousands of dollars—dried up as a result of the Aeroflot cleanup.
“The station chief cursed Boris endlessly and said that if one of the guys took him out, he would do a great service to the Motherland,” said my source. He added that when Korzhakov visited, “Much of the time that they spent talking—and drinking—was devoted to the Aeroflot problem, and Boris,” my informant recalled.
After the spies were purged, the performance of the airline improved steadily. Glushkov obtained Western insurance coverage for the planes; replaced its aging fleet of Russian aircraft with leased Boeings; hired attractive, bilingual staff; and improved the quality of food. Within three years, the company became profitable; its stock skyrocketed from $7 to $150.
Yet as of early 1998, 51 percent of Aeroflot still belonged to the government. The rest was in the hands of private investors, mostly staff members. Boris’s partner, Roma Abramovich, began quietly buying up Aeroflot stock from small shareholders in anticipation of the privatization of the government’s majority stake.
In the spring of 1998 I myself got entangled