Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [68]
The publicity also failed to support Boris’s aim of smoking out Putin. The new FSB chief responded angrily but carefully. He ridiculed the whistle-blowers for not coming up with better evidence and said that they themselves may be rogue agents. He did not say a word about the substance of their allegations.
As General Trofimov explained when they met to review what went wrong, Sasha’s major misfortune was bad timing: in a way, the whistle-blowers fell victim to the financial crisis, too. Their main ally, Boris, a formidable force in the beginning of 1998, had lost much of his clout by the end of the year. With Primakov in the White House, he was on the defensive himself.
On December 7, 1998, Yeltsin interrupted his hospital stay to fire his chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, replacing him with Gen. Nikolai Bordyuzha, the secretary of the National Security Council and formerly the commander of the Border Guards. Apparently the president had had enough of civilians and decided to rely on generals once again.
“Now they will either kill me or put me in jail,” predicted Sasha to Marina.
PART IV THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT (Russian-Style)
CHAPTER 8 THE LOYALIST
Chechnya, December 8, 1998: Chechen authorities find the severed heads of four hostages, three Britons and a New Zealander, in a sack outside a village forty miles from Grozny. Their killing was apparently triggered by a rescue attempt staged by President Maskhadov’s antiterrorist squad. Chechen officials accuse the leader of a radical Wahhabi group, Arbi Barayev, of the kidnapping and murder. Barayev threatens to unleash a wave of terror in Russia if Maskhadov’s forces attack his stronghold of Urus-Martan. Islamist opposition leaders Shamil Basayev and Movladi Udugov demand Maskhadov’s resignation.
Sasha’s falling out with the FSB coincided with a deadly disintegration of the Russian-Chechen rapport that Boris had helped to build a year earlier. According to Akhmed Zakayev, the fault was squarely on the Russian side. “From the moment Rybkin and Berezovsky were removed from the process, things started deteriorating,” he later explained. Zakayev believed that starting in the summer of 1998, the Russian secret service began to systematically destabilize Maskhadov’s government by quietly supporting radical Islamists.
“We wanted to build a secular, democratic, pro-Western Muslim state, something along the lines of Turkey, and eventually join NATO,” Zakayev explained, “but then all of a sudden, all these Wahhabi appeared, with stacks of money, and started preaching a totally foreign brand of Islam. How do you think they got there? Through Moscow—they all had Russian visas!”
In July 1998, during the crackdown on the militants, the Maskhadov government caught some of them and expelled them to Jordan.
“They were all experienced fighters,” Zakayev recalled, “but they had nothing to do with ‘the Afghans,’ the American-trained jihadists that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were all Arabs who spoke Russian, the old KGB cadre from the Middle East. And we knew that their money came not from Saudi Arabia, but from Moscow.”
He pointed out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the eventual mastermind of the September 11 attack, had tried to get into Chechnya in 1997, before he worked with Osama bin Laden. He was not allowed to pass through Azerbaijan. The same was true for at least four of the eventual 9/11 terrorists, including Mohammed Atta. All of them, before going to Afghanistan, tried to enter Chechnya but could not: the place was tightly sealed to outsiders.
“So explain to me, please, how those guys we caught, with their Jordanian passports, not to mention their Arab looks, went to a Russian embassy, got a visa, then flew to Moscow, then to North Caucasus—a trip that required special permission—without the FSB noticing? Impossible!
“And the three Dagestan villages that Stepashin patronized! That