The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Kuchma made it clear to me that he believed Melnychenko was part of a plot to drive him from power, and that whoever was behind the plot wanted to be certain that Melnychenko was not questioned: A few days before the tapes were released, Melnychenko received a bogus passport from an unknown party and fled Ukraine. The Ukraine authorities could do no more than indict him for the theft of state secrets and conspiracy, charges which still stand.

  III.

  In the absence of definitive evidence, there are two principal theories about who masterminded the murder of Gongadze. The first one holds that President Kuchma himself ordered the hit. The prosecutors advanced this theory on March 24, 2011, more than a decade after the crime, by charging Kuchma with complicity in the murder. By that time, the key witnesses in the chain of command to whom General Pukach supposedly reported, including the Minister of the Interior’s two top aides and the Minister himself, were dead. The only evidence to support the Kuchma theory came from recordings, and neither the provenance nor the veracity of these tapes had been established. The theory also ran into a judicial stumbling block on December 14, 2011. The Ukraine high court ruled that even if the original cassettes could be obtained—and the tapes have still not been released—they could not be entered into evidence because they were the product of espionage against the state, which is a criminal act. This ruling, which is under appeal by the prosecutors, effectively invalidated the legal case against Kuchma.

  The other main theory is that the murder was the work of a rogue SBU unit in the Interior Ministry under the command of Pukach. After all, this unit had the victim under close surveillance in September 2000 and, according to Gongadze’s own report, was harassing him.

  There are also other intriguing theories. One focuses on the possible involvement of Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch in exile in London. Berezovsky, who himself was a fugitive from a Russian arrest warrant, had devoted a substantial part of his resources to attempting to overthrow Russian president Vladimir Putin. And, along with the CIA, Berezovsky benefited from the fruits of Melnychenko’s penetration, including receiving “Compramata,” or blackmail material, in the form of recorded conversations among high officials about money laundering and arms traffic, material that could be used for leverage against Russian and Ukrainian officials. Beginning in 2002, Berezovsky provided Melnychenko with financial support, including a $50,000 payment, through his Civil Liberties Foundation. Alexander Goldfarb, who worked for the foundation, personally delivered to Kiev a more extensive copy of the recordings than had been initially released. He told me that Berezovsky had provided $50 million to dissident elements in Ukraine who participated in what became known as the Orange Revolution. If so, Berezovsky was deeply involved in the power struggles in Ukraine.

  Finally, there is a theory that the crime was organized by Kuchma’s rivals in Ukraine to bring about his downfall. Yevhen Marchuk, who was Kuchma’s main political opponent, had formerly headed the Ukrainian KGB and served on Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. According to this view, he was in a position to recruit operatives, such as Pukach, and it was also Marchuk who used these tapes to undermine Kuchma.

  IV.

  We know that Gongadze was murdered by a Ministry of the Interior surveillance unit acting under the command of General Pukach. We also know that there was an elaborate cover-up. According to the trial testimony of Pukach’s driver, the cover-up was handled by two top deputies, Dagaev and Feres, of Minister of the Interior Kravchenko. What we do not know is how much higher the cover-up went, because all these men at the top tier of the ministry—Kravchenko, Dagaev, and Feres—met their deaths before they could be questioned on the subject by prosecutors. A number of the key investigators, including Deputy Prosecutor Roman Shubin in September 2012, also met premature deaths. My assessment, based on my interviews in Ukraine in 2011, is that these deaths may well be part of the continuing cover-up.

  This does not mean that either the president or his Minister of the Interior had been behind the murder of Gongadze. Nor is there credible evidence that either man had any advance knowledge of the murder. Pukach, whose men had Gongadze under close surveillance in 2000, was well aware that the journalist was not only a vocal opponent of the regime but was attempting to expose Pukach’s surveillance unit. Under these circumstances, Pukach needed no higher authority to have Gongadze taken for a “walk in the wood,” as the elimination of journalists was euphemistically called by the KGB. (Pukach had served in the KGB when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.) Gongadze was only one of a long list of Ukrainian journalists who vanished in this manner both before and after Ukraine got its independence. For his part, Pukach had little concern that Gongadze’s disappearance would be fully investigated, because none of the previous deaths or disappearances of journalists had been solved. What he had not anticipated, and what made this crime different from previous eliminations of dissidents, was the unprecedented release of secret recordings of the president and his intelligence council. It was these recordings that made Gongadze’s disappearance an international scandal.

  This leads us to an even more intriguing mystery: Who was behind the release of these recordings? Based on my interviews with President Kuchma, Ukrainian intelligence officials, and forensic experts, it is clear to me that these recordings were the product of a large-scale espionage operation. It is not clear when in the 1990s this spying began, but given the sophisticated tradecraft of the operation, it may have been organized by the KGB before Ukraine achieved full independence. Russia, after all, had vital interests in Ukraine, including its shipment of gas to Europe and its principal naval base in the Crimea. I believe that, as often happens in such long-term espionage, the operation was discovered by parties in the Ukraine, and essentially hijacked. It is not clear why a portion of the recording was made public, but I am not convinced that Major Melnychenko was merely used to deliver the recordings to the public. In my investigation of his defection first to the Czech Republic and then to America, I was told by a top Czech official who handled his case that immediately after he arrived in Prague, the CIA made a very unusual request. After informing Czech authorities that there was a “contract” out on Melnychenko, it asked that the Czech secret service take extraordinary measures, including using a bulletproof car to transport him and round-the-clock counter-surveillance, to protect him until he could be transported to the United States. Since by this time the revelations of the tapes about Gongadze had been made public, the concern of whoever put out the assassination contract was not what was on the tapes that Melnychenko had already delivered but what he might know that was not on the released tapes. At that point, no one knew what he might have overheard while the tapes were being recorded.

  According to one intelligence official who dealt with the case, the Gongadze affair was just a “cherry” placed on top of the package to attract media interest, and the real threat posed by the recordings was what they might reveal about the secret enterprises of the Ukrainian regime. In this regard, we know from the portion that was released that Ukraine was deeply involved in money laundering and arms transfers to Middle Eastern countries, including the illicit sale of Russian weapons to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. These secret multi-billion-dollar enterprises presumably involved large payoffs. If so, what was behind the partial release of the recordings was not concern for justice for Gongadze, but rather the threat of further disclosures about this secret financing.

  In any event, when Melnychenko was taken to Washington, D.C., he turned out to have little further information that could assist the Department of Justice in its pursuit of Ukrainian money laundering. As one Justice Department official told me, he was “the man who knew too little.” Boris Berezovsky, the exile who claimed he was owed billions for secret participation in Russian deals, apparently came to the same conclusion after he retained Melnychenko.

  My conclusion is that the tapes were released to extort money and gain leverage over those involved in surreptitious transactions in
Ukraine and elsewhere. Because these interests are so deeply embedded in the political apparatus of Ukraine, it is unlikely that they will be exposed. Thomas Hobbes wrote in The Leviathan that if a mathematical proposition were found to be contrary “to the interest of men that have dominion,” it would be suppressed. In Ukraine, politicians have such power.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE DUBAI HIT

  Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the co-founder and commander of the military wing of Hamas, was assassinated in room 230 at the five-star al-Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai on January 19, 2010. He had left Damascus at 10:15 a.m., according to airline records, on Emirate Airlines flight 912, and he checked into the hotel later that afternoon. When Mabhouh’s body was discovered in his hotel bed the next day, it was initially assumed he’d died of natural causes, since his body showed no wounds, bruises, or other signs of foul play. The electronic door latch appeared to have been locked from the inside and, as the room had no opened windows or balcony entry, it was further assumed that he was alone and died in his sleep. The day following Mabhouh’s death, Hamas announced that he had died of cancer. The investigation might have ended if an ordinary tourist had died under such circumstances, but Mabhouh was no ordinary tourist.

  As a senior commander of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, he had been involved in a long series of covert activities, including the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 (an operation in which he disguised himself as an Orthodox Jew), arms smuggling, and providing explosives for bombs. He was also wanted for crimes in three countries: Israel; Egypt, where he had been imprisoned for almost a year; and Jordan. In Syria, Mabhouh had become a key intermediary in the covert arms traffic among Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Syrian intelligence service, and the Hamas government in Gaza. Because of his position in this triangular trade, he was ordinarily protected by a team of armed bodyguards. But they had not been allowed to accompany him to Dubai on January 19 because there was no room on the flight, according to a Hamas spokesman in Damascus. So, whether by design or accident, he was stripped of his protection on an international trip in which he was vulnerable to assassination.

  The Dubai authorities pursued the investigation. When police looked more closely at the crime scene, they found that the electronic lock on the door of the room had been reprogrammed to allow others entry, possibly the work of a sophisticated hacker. Then a Dubai forensic lab retesting Mabhouh’s body fluids discovered traces of succinylcholine. This is a quick-acting, depolarizing, paralytic drug that, by rendering Mabhouh incapable of resisting, could account for the lack of bruises on the body. If so, murder could not be ruled out.

  In February 2010, Dubai’s chief coroner, Fawzi Benomran, reversed his verdict of a natural death. Instead, describing the death as “one of the most challenging cases” in the history of the Emirate, he concluded that it was a disguised homicide “meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep.” Such a sophisticated use of pharmacology and electronic hacking to conceal an assassination suggested that this was not the work of ordinary criminals.

  Dubai investigators examined 645 hours of videos from surveillance cameras at the hotel and elsewhere. They saw that, after Mabhouh left his hotel room, four suspicious-looking individuals got out of the elevator on the second floor near his room. Several hours later, at 8:25 p.m., Mabhouh returned to his room, according to the electronic lock. Shortly afterward, the video showed the four men leaving the floor.

  The police theorized that these men had surreptitiously entered Mabhouh’s room while he was out, and that they incapacitated him with the paralytic drug on his return. They then induced a heart attack by suffocating him with a pillow and reprogrammed the electric lock to make it appear to have been locked from the inside.

  With the aid of facial-recognition software, Dubai police then found twenty-six suspects who had been in Dubai at the time of Mabhouh’s brief visit. What made them suspicious is that they had entered Dubai using fake or fraudulently obtained passports from countries not requiring a Dubai visa, including Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia.

  All the passports turned out to be stolen identities with faked passport photos. The credit cards, airline tickets, and pre-paid phone cards that these suspects used were also in the names of their stolen identities. The new evidence made it likely that Mabhouh’s death was the work of an intelligence service. Presumably, only an intelligence service possessed the resources to provide fake IDs and the ability get operatives out of Dubai without leaving clues about their actual identities. The only hint to their real identities was that eight of the fake identities had been stolen from people with dual Israeli citizenship. As Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, had previously used dual citizens’ passports to fake identities, Dubai authorities assumed that the suspects were from Mossad.

  Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police force, stated on a government-owned website that he is “99 percent, if not 100 percent, sure that Mossad is standing behind the murder.” While this authoritative finger-pointing was largely accepted by the media, Dubai was not a wholly uninterested party in the Mabhouh affair. In 2010, Dubai was the principal transshipment point for the arms trade between Iran and Hamas in which Mabhouh had been deeply involved. As stated by Sherlock Holmes, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” Surveillance videos show that twenty-six people were in Dubai that day with false identities, but they do not show them engaging in any other illegal activity. Employing false identities is not uncommon in Dubai for intelligence agents from countries such as Israel that do not have diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates. The practice is also used by people in clandestine businesses such as arms and drug trafficking. Mabhouh himself reportedly had five different passports. The twenty-six people with bogus identities may well have been there on undercover business, but it does not necessarily follow that they were all in Dubai on the same undercover business, or that any of them were working together or even on the same side.

  If Mossad had agents in Dubai, as seems to be the case, they might have been there to monitor the activities of arms smugglers in Dubai. Other intelligence services, including those of America, Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, may have had similar missions in Dubai. After all, Iran maintains its largest offshore financing facility in Dubai, which is used by the Revolutionary Guard, among others, to support its traffic in covert weapons. Since Mabhouh and Hamas were major players in this game, his presence may have attracted the attention of any of these parties. Consider, for example, that two of the twenty-six Dubai suspects exited by boat to Iran, according to Dubai authorities. This is an unlikely escape route for Mossad agents. Or that two other individuals whom the Dubai police had named as suspects worked for the Palestinian Authority, an archenemy of Hamas. (They were arrested in Jordan and turned over to Dubai.) Or that a third person wanted for questioning returned to Damascus just prior to the killing. While it may have been obvious that Mabhouh was being watched, it is less clear how or why this surveillance turned into murder.

  The missing piece of the jigsaw remains Mabhouh’s mission to Dubai, one apparently important enough for him to travel there without his normal contingent of bodyguards. He stated that he was in transit en route to China, which was merely a cover story, since he had not made arrangements to continue on to China. Mabhouh arrived from the airport at his hotel shortly before 3:00 p.m. and, after changing his clothes, left for an unknown destination. He was gone for several hours. But even with state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of the person or persons he met. Without knowing what he was doing, and with the intelligence services successfully cloaking and withdrawing their operatives, it remains an unsolved assassination.

  There is no shortage of theories as to who murdered Mabhouh. The prime suspect of the Dubai a
uthorities is Mossad. Certainly, Israel, which had previously attempted to capture Mabhouh, had a motive. There is also no doubt that Mossad had the capabilities to infiltrate agents disguised as tourists, who could follow and kill Mabhouh.

  Another theory is that this was an inside job by Syria, which wanted to more tightly control the militant wing of Hamas. Someone in Syria apparently was responsible for having Mabhouh’s bodyguards bumped from the plane just before his flight to Dubai. As Syrian security agencies tightly control information concerning Hamas, it is unlikely that we will find out why Mabhouh was stripped of his protection. Without bodyguards, the assassin only needed to gain access to his room, and, if this was an inside job, Mabhouh may have himself been lulled into opening the door.

  Iran might also have arranged his elimination because he was diverting arms shipments. This might explain the report that two of the suspects with false identities fled to Iran.

  My assessment is that Mossad had motive, means, and opportunity. It may also have had sources in Syrian intelligence that assisted by providing data about Mabhouh’s movements. If so, it seems plausible to me that Israel assassinated Mabhouh.