Alexander Litvinenko

by Blowing Up Russia (lit)

  It is obvious that the entire story about the evening trip from Moscow by Vympel operatives is an invention from start to finish. Zaitsev himself provided legally valid proof of this. On September 28, 1999, a press conference was held by members of the departments of law enforcement and the armed forces in the office of the Kolomna security firm Oskord, at which the representative of the Alpha Group veterans association, G.N. Zaitsev explained his position with regard to the incident in Ryazan: Training exercises of this kind make me really angry. It s not right to practice on real people! On October 7, a report on the press conference was published by the local Kolomna newspaper Yat. The only conclusion which can be drawn from Zaitsev s statement is that he had taken no part in the Ryazan escapade. But with only four days to go to the presidential election, when all forces were mobilized for Putin s victory, and the end justified any means, Zaitsev was forced to appear at a press conference and acknowledge his own blame and the involvement of Vympel operatives in the Ryazan exercise. Naturally, those who involved Zaitsev in this propaganda show were not aware of his press conference in Kolomna.

  Zaitsev s false testimony of March 22, 2000, served to emphasize an extremely important point: the employees of the secret services will lie if it is required by the interests of the agencies of state security, if they have been ordered to lie.

  Half of the criminals in Russia make themselves out to be lunatics or total idiots. It s better that way; you get a shorter sentence or even simply get off ( What can you expect from a fool? as the Russian saying has it). Patrushev calculated correctly that for terrorism against the citizens of one s own country, you could get life, but in Russia, you wouldn t even get sacked for being an idiot. (In any case, just who could have sacked

  62

  63

  Patrushev? No one but Putin!) Not a single employee of the FSB was sacked as a result of the Ryazan escapade. Indeed, according to Shchekochikhin, Patrushev was made a Hero of Russia, and he has recently been promoted to four-star general!

  Patrushev s psychological calculations proved correct. It was more convenient for the political elite of Russia to regard Patrushev as an idiot than as a villain. Commenting on Patrushev s statement about exercises in a live broadcast on the radio station Ekho Moskvy, chairman of the State Duma deputies grouping The Russian Regions, Oleg Morozov, said: It seems monstrous to me. I understand that the secret services have the right to check up on what s being done, but not so much by us as by themselves. In addition, he said it was difficult to imagine yourself in these people s places (in Ryazan) and, therefore, it wasn t worth it, there was no way such a price should have been paid for a check on the activities of the FSB and the vigilance of the public.

  Morozov declared that it might be possible to forgive the actions of the FSB, if the FSB promised there would be no more terrorist attacks. That was, in fact, the main point which he made: Russians had to be saved from the FSB terror. The subtle diplomat Morozov offered the terrorist Patrushev a deal: we don t punish you, and we close our eyes to all the explosions that have taken place in Russia, and you halt all operations in Russia for blowing up people s homes. Patrushev heard what Morozov was saying, and the explosions ceased. Patrushev was branded an idiot and allowed to remain at his desk.

  Perhaps the question of just who turned out to be the idiot in this situation should be regarded as undecided.

  There were some people who were of the opinion that Patrushev was not an idiot but insane. On September 25, 1999, the newspaper Novye Izvestiya carried an article by Sergei Agafonov which, in view of the circumstances, failed even to offend Patrushev: I wonder just how accurate an idea the head of the FSB actually has of what is going on?

  Does the head of the secret services have an adequate perception of surrounding reality?

  Does he not perhaps confuse colors, does he recognize his relatives? My soul is tormented by these alarming questions, since there seems to be no possible rational explanation for the FSB s all-Russian special training exercise using real people.

  Agafonov assumed that General Patrushev is seriously unwell and he should be released from the excessive burdens of duty and given urgent treatment.

  Of course, the FSB itself could not be unanimous in its attitude to Patrushev s operation.

  After the fiasco in Ryazan, even his own subordinates were prepared to criticize the head of the FSB (and Patrushev was prepared to tolerate this criticism abjectly). For instance, the press secretary of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region, Sergei Bogdanov, called the exercise in Ryazan crude and poorly planned work (if they were caught, their work must have been crude). The head of the UFSB for the Yaroslavl Region, Major-General A.A. Kotelnikov, replied as follows to a question about the exercise : I have my own point of view concerning the Ryazan exercises, but I would not wish to comment on the actions of my colleagues (as if there were any way that he could!).

  63

  64

  Note that not a single acting or retired senior member of the FSB made any attempt at a serious analysis of the actions of his colleagues. The professionals of the armed services departments left that honorable task to the journalists, who did the best they could in the face of the attacks made on them by the FSB. They began, naturally enough, with the sugar.

  The three sacks of sugar bothered everybody. Supposedly, the terrorists from the FSB (but probably it was a quite different group of FSB operatives) bought the sugar at the local market. They said that it was produced by the Kolpyansk Sugar Plant in the Orlov Region. But if it was just plain ordinary sugar from the Orlov Region, why was it sent off to Moscow for analysis? More importantly, why did the laboratory accept it for analysis?

  Not just one laboratory, but two in different state departments (the MVD and the FSB).

  And why was an additional analysis carried out later? Surely it should have been possible to recognize sugar the first time around? Further, why did it all take several months? It only made sense for Patrushev to have the sugar brought to Moscow for analysis, if he wanted to take the material evidence away from his colleagues in Ryazan, and only if the sacks did contain explosives. Why would Patrushev insist on sacks of sugar being sent to Moscow? His own men would have made him a laughing stock.

  In the meantime, the FSB press office issued a statement saying that in order for the contents of the sacks from Ryazan to be checked, they were taken to an artillery range, where attempts were made to explode them. The detonation failed because it was ordinary sugar, the FSB reported triumphantly. One wonders what sort of idiot would try to explode three sacks of ordinary sugar at an artillery range, the newspaper Versiya commented ironically. Why, indeed, did the FSB send the sacks to the artillery range if it knew that exercises were being conducted in Ryazan, and the sacks contained sugar bought at the local bazaar by Vympel operatives?

  Then other sacks which did contain hexogene were discovered not far from Ryazan.

  There were a lot of them, and there was just a hint of a connection with the GRU. In the military depot of the 137th Ryazan regiment of the VDV, located on the territory of a special base for training intelligence and sabotage units close to Ryazan, hexogene was stored, packed in fifty-kilogram sugar sacks like those discovered on Novosyolov Street.

  In the fall of 1999, airborne assault forces (military unit 59236) Private Alexei Pinyaev and his fellow soldiers from Moscow were assigned to this very regiment. While they were guarding a storehouse with weapons and ammunition, Pinyaev and a friend went inside, most probably out of simple curiosity, and saw sacks with the word Sugar on them.

  The two paratroopers cut a hole in one of the sacks with a bayonet and tipped some of the state s sugar into a plastic bag. Unfortunately, the tea made with the stolen sugar had a strange taste and wasn t sweet at all. The frightened soldiers took their bag to their platoon commander. He suspected something wasn t right, since everyone was talking about the story of the explosions, and he decided to have the sugar checked out by an explosives specialist
. The substance proved to be hexogene. The officer reported to his superiors. Members of the FSB from Moscow and Tula (where an airborne assault

  64

  65

  division was stationed, just like in Ryazan) descended on the unit. The regimental secret services were excluded from the investigation. The paratroopers who had discovered the hexogene were interrogated for revealing a state secret. You guys can t even imagine what serious business you ve got tangled up in, one officer told them. The press was informed that there was no soldier in the unit with the name of Pinyaev and that information about sacks containing hexogene being found in the military depot had simply been invented by Pavel Voloshin, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta. The matter of the explosives was successfully hushed up, and Pinyaev s commander and fellow soldiers were sent off to serve in Chechnya.

  For Pinyaev himself, they devised a more painful punishment. First, he was forced to retract what he had said (it s not too hard to imagine the kind of pressure the FSB could bring to bear on him). Then the head of the Investigative Department of the FSB announced that the soldier will be questioned in the course of the criminal proceedings initiated against him. A female employee of TsOS FSB summed it all up: The kid s had it& In March 2000, criminal proceedings were initiated against Pinyaev for the theft of army property from a military warehouse containing ammunition& the theft of a bagful of sugar! One must at least grant the FSB a sense of humor. But even so, it s hard to understand why the Investigative Department of the FSB of Russia should have been concerned with the petty theft of food products.

  According to the engineers in Ryazan, explosives are not packed, stored, or transported in fifty-kilogram sacks, it s just too dangerous. Five hundred grams of mixture is sufficient to blow up a small building. Fifty-kilogram sacks, disguised as sugar, could only be required for acts of terrorism. Evidently this was the warehouse which provided the three sacks, which were later planted under the loadbearing support of the building in Ryazan.

  The instruments of the Ryazan experts had not lied.

  There was a sequel to the story of the 137th regiment of the VDV. In March 2000, just before the election, the paratroop regiment sued Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper had published the interview with Pinyaev. The writ, which dealt with the protection of honor, dignity and business reputation was submitted to the Basmansky Intermunicipal Court by the regimental command. The commander himself, Oleg Churilov, declared that the article in question had insulted the honor not only of the regiment, but of the entire Russian army, since in September 1999, there had not been any such private in the regiment. And it is not true that a soldier can gain entry to a warehouse where weapons and explosives are stored, because he has no right to enter it, while he is on guard duty.

  So Pinyaev did not exist, but he was still handed over for trial. The sacks contained sugar, but a state secret had been breached. And the 137th regiment had not taken Novaya Gazeta to court over the article about hexogene, but because a private on guard duty has no right to enter the warehouse he is guarding, and any claims to the contrary were an insult to the Russian army.

  The question of the detonating devices wasn t handled so smoothly, either. Despite all of Zdanovich s efforts to persuade people to the contrary, the device was genuine and live,

  65

  66

  as the chairman of the Ryazan regional Duma, Vladimir Fedotkin, firmly asserted in an interview with the Interfax news agency on September 24: It was an absolutely genuine explosive device, nothing to do with any exercises.

  The detonating device is a very important formal point. Instructions forbid the use of a live detonating device for exercises involving civilian structures and the civilian population. The device might obviously be stolen (and somebody would have to be held responsible), or it might be triggered by children or tramps, if they found it in the sack of sugar. If the detonating device was not live, then no criminal case could have been brought under article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (terrorism), the case would have been based on the discovery of the explosive and turned over to the MVD, not the FSB. In the final analysis, if we are talking about an exercise, then the vigilance of the people of Ryazan was checked to see how promptly they would discover sacks containing explosives, not what they would do with a detonating device. The FSB could not have carried out such a check using a live device.

  In order to find out whether this was really true, Novaya Gazeta turned for assistance to one of its military specialists, a colonel, and asked him the questions: Are exercises conducted using real explosive substances, and Are there any instructions and regulations which govern this kind of activity? Here is the colonel s answer: Powerful explosive devices are not used even in exercises involving live shelling. Only blanks are used. If it is required to check the ability to locate and disarm an explosive device, a mine for instance, models are used which contain no detonator and no TNT.

  Exercises on the use of explosives, of course, involve the real detonation of quite powerful explosive devices (the specialists have to know how to disarm them). But& such exercises are conducted in restricted areas without any outsiders. Only trained personnel are present. There is no question of involving civilians. The whole business is strictly regulated. There are instructions covering the equipment required, instructions for clearing mines, appropriate instructions and orders. Undoubtedly, these are similar for the army and the secret services.

  It is difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate the significance of the innocent phrase: the initiation of criminal proceedings under article 205. Most importantly of all, it means that the investigation will not be conducted by the MVD, but by the FSB, since terrorist activity falls into the FSB s area of investigative competence. The FSB has more than enough cases to deal with, and it won t take on any unnecessary ones. In order to take on a case, it has to have very cogent reasons, indeed (in this case the cogent reasons were provided by the results of the analysis). The FSB investigation is supervised by the Public Prosecutor s Office, and the search for the perpetrators is conducted by the FSB jointly with the MVD. A crime for which criminal proceedings have been initiated is reported within twenty-four hours to the FSB of Russia duty officer at phone numbers (095) 224-3858 or 224-1869; or at the emergency line numbers 890-726 and 890-818; or by high-frequency phone at 52816. Every morning, the duty officer submits a report on all messages received to the director of the FSB himself. If something serious is going on, such as the foiling of a terrorist attack in Ryazan, the duty officer is entitled to phone the

  66

  67

  director of the FSB at home, even at night. Reports in the media about the FSB and its members are also presented every day in a separate report.

  Within a few days of the instigation of criminal proceedings requiring investigation by the FSB, an analytical note is compiled on possible lines of action. For instance, the head of the section for combating terrorism at the Ryazan UFSB draws up a note for the head of the Department for Combating Terrorism of the FSB of Russia. This note is then submitted via the secretariat of the deputy director of the FSB with responsibility for monitoring the corresponding department, and from there the note goes to the director of the FSB. All of which means that Patrushev knew about the discovery in the basement of a building in Ryazan of sacks containing explosives and a live detonating device no later than seven o clock on the morning of September 23. When there are explosions happening everywhere, for a subordinate not to report to the top that a terrorist attack has been thwarted would be tantamount to suicide. The foiling of a terrorist attack is an occasion for rejoicing. It means medals and promotion and bonuses. And also, of course, public recognition.

  This time, the apparent cause for celebration created a tricky situation. In connection with the incident in Ryazan, Zdanovich announced on September 24 that the FSB offered its apologies to the people of the city for the inconvenience and psychological stress they had suffered as a result of anti-terrorist exerci
ses. Note that a day earlier, in his interview with NTV, Zdanovich had not apologized, which means that on September 24, Patrushev must have sent Zdanovich the directive to write everything off to sheer stupidity in order to avoid being accused of terrorism.

  General Alexander Zdanovich today apologized to the inhabitants of Ryazan on behalf of the Federal Security Service of Russia for the inconvenience they had suffered in the course of antiterrorist exercises and also for the psychological stress caused to them. He emphasized that the secret services thank the people of Ryazan for the vigilance, restraint, and patience they have shown. At the same time, Zdanovich called on Russians to take a tolerant view of the need to hold hard-line checks on the preparedness, in the first instance, of the agencies of law enforcement to ensure public safety, and also on the vigilance of the public in conditions of heightened terrorist activity. The general told us that this week, as part of the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation, the FSB had implemented measures in several Russian cities designed to check the response of the agencies of law enforcement, including the territorial divisions of the FSB itself, and of the population to modeled terrorist activity, involving the planting of explosive devices. The representative of the secret services observed that serious shortcomings had been uncovered. Unfortunately, in some of the cities tested, there was no response at all from the agencies of law enforcement to the potential planting of bombs. According to Zdanovich, the FSB conducted its operation in conditions as close as possible to a real terrorist threat, otherwise there would have been no point to these checks. Naturally neither the local authorities nor the local law enforcement agencies were informed.