Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [122]
In the Second Chechen War methods such as these have been used extensively by military intelligence. In the so-called death squads it is officers of the GRU, the Central Intelligence Directorate, who make the running. The extra-judicial killing of their fellow citizens there is their stock in trade. Against these blood-soaked leaders neither the FSB, nor the Interior Ministry, nor the Prosecutor’s Office, nor the courts can lift a finger. It is the practice of GRU units to exploit Chechen criminals and also their own victims, like those widowed by the death squads, as convenient fodder for achieving their aim of intimidating the whole of Russian society.
So was it the GRU, or someone as yet unknown? I have no answer, but it is vital that we should find out.
Why did those people die? Why such an unbelievable death toll of 129 lives?
That is what we get when we lift a corner of the curtain, when we hear the story of a double agent, a provocateur of our days so uncannily like Yevno Azef.*
People died, but the provocateur is alive and well. He is the political insider. He has his snout in the trough, looks good, and, most importantly, is still in business. In a few days’ time he will be going back to Chechnya. What will he be cooking up this time?
“I need 24 hours to meet up with Maskhadov,” he boasts.
“Just 24 hours?”
“Well, OK, two days.”
Khanpash is forbearing towards naive people like us.
A SCHEME FOR PROTECTION AGAINST WITNESSES: MANAGED TERRORISM IN THE LAND OF MANAGED DEMOCRACY?
December 22, 2003
The information agencies tapped it out: “Khanpash Nurdyevich Terkibayev has been killed in a car crash in Chechnya.” In the course of what we now know to have been his short life, the 31-year-old from Mesker-Yurt was to play many roles, of which the most important was unquestionably his complicity in the Nord-Ost hostage-taking in October 2002.
Who was Terkibayev? At first appearance, he was the last surviving witness from among the hostage-takers at the Dubrovka Theatre Complex. Officially listed as one of the terrorists, he claimed to have entered the building on October 23 last year as a member of Barayev’s unit. In reality, as Terkibayev himself told me, and as is indirectly confirmed, he was a turncoat, an informer who once inside first fed information to the secret services, then left the building shortly before the assault.
Khanpash Terkibayev had previously been a journalist for Maskhadov, presenting the President’s television program between the two wars. After Nord-Ost he was a member of President Putin’s Administration, on whose behalf he led a delegation of Chechen Deputies to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in April 2003. He would also show to anyone interested to see it his press pass as a special correspondent of the official newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta. He was, in short, the servant of many masters.
The pinnacle of Terkibayev’s career was undoubtedly Nord-Ost. His was a horrifying tale which proved that Khanpash genuinely did move in the circles he described and that, accordingly, the atrocity was stage-managed by at least one of the Russian secret services. Simultaneously, another Russian secret service and several special operations divisions were combating it, culminating in the use of a secret chemical weapon against Russian citizens.
In May this year our newspaper published an interview with Terkibayev who at that time was still firmly in the saddle. From his revelations it was clear that the Nord-Ost tragedy was advantageous to the highly original regime known as “Russian managed democracy.”
What happened after our interview? We called on the team investigating Nord-Ost to question both Terkibayev and the author of these lines on the subject of Terkibayev. On one occasion the investigator actually did come to Novaya gazeta’s offices. In his record of the visit he wrote whatever he fancied, as is now common practice, a so-called free paraphrase. His interest in Terkibayev