Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [121]
He entered the building with the terrorists as a member of their unit. He claims he secretly enabled them to travel through Moscow and to the Nord-Ost venue itself. It was he who assured the terrorists that everything was under control, that there were plenty of corrupt people, that the Russians had again accepted bribes, as they did when high-ranking resistance fighters were able to break out of the encirclement of Grozny and Komsomolskaya. They needed only to make a lot of noise, he told them, and there would be a second Budyonnovsk, enabling peace to be secured. Then, when they had fulfilled their mission, they would be allowed to escape. Not all of them, but many. “Many” turned out to be only Khanpash himself.
He left the building before the assault began. He had a map of the Dubrovka Theatre Complex, something possessed by neither Barayev, who was in command of the terrorists, nor even, initially, by the special operations unit preparing the assault.
How come? Because Khanpash belongs to forces far higher in the militia and security hierarchy than the Vityaz and Alpha special operations troops who were risking their lives to storm the building.
Whether he was telling the truth about the map is not, actually, all that important. Khanpash would lie for a copeck, as his faked photographs demonstrate. Those who could confirm or deny certain details of his story, like where his firing position was, have, to all appearances, been eliminated or are less garrulous. Do I believe there was more than one agent sent in? I think it is entirely possible.
What matters is that if there was an insider operating in Nord-Ost, the authorities knew about and were involved in preparing a terrorist act. It doesn’t matter why. The main thing is that they (which section of them?) knew what was going on long before the rest of us did. They set up their own people for a terrible ordeal, knowing what was going to happen, fully aware that thousands would be permanently affected and hundreds killed or injured. The regime stage-managed another Kursk disaster. (Remember the messages sent by the unfortunate hostages from the occupied auditorium? “We are like a second Kursk. Russia has forgotten us. Russia does not need us. Russia wants us to die.” Many outside the hall were indignant and thought this completely hysterical, but in fact they were accurately describing the situation.)
The question remains, then, why was this done? Why were all those people killed six months ago?
The first step is to work out who was responsible. Who, within the regime, was in the know? The Kremlin? Putin? The FSB? – the classical triad of modern Russia?
The state authorities are not a monolith and neither are the intelligence services. It is definitely not the case that most of the officers working in the operational headquarters beside the Dubrovka Complex were only pretending to be trying to avert the tragedy, in the full knowledge that the whole thing was a put-up job. Most of them were entirely committed, like the Vityaz and Alpha Units, like the rest of us.
But if Khanpash was in there, there is no escaping the fact that some dark nook of the state authorities did know and was only going through the motions of sympathising during those three days of insanity. This completely alters the complexion of those events.
So who were the intelligence agencies who knew? Certainly not the special operations soldiers who carried out the assault. If they had known the depths of the duplicity, there might simply have been a repeat of 1993 when the units refused to mount an assault [on Yeltsin’s White House at the behest of the leaders of the anti-Gorbachev putsch], and the ending might have been completely different.
Neither was it the officers of the FSB and Interior Ministry, who planned the operation to rescue the hostages in all good faith. It was not they who infiltrated Khanpash into the terrorist group and subsequently fixed him up with a job.
Khanpash was