Alexander Litvinenko

by Blowing Up Russia (lit)

  Finally, the secret services were able to observe Kosman together with Tsveiba and one other guest-presumably an Abkhazian-departing for the local airport in Nice. At the same time, two people arrived at the airport in a private plane from Paris. One of them- Sultan Sosnaliev-had been the Abkhazian Minister of Defense during the years of the Georgian-Abkhazian war and effectively the number two man in the republic after Vladislav Ardzinba. The second person who came out of that airplane was another

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  individual from Sukhumi-Anton Surikov. During the years of the war in Abkhazia, Surikov had served under Sosnaliev. Operating under the assumed name Mansur, he was responsible for organizing acts of sabotage. Subsequently, under his real name, Surikov occupied a key post in the administration of Evgeny Primakov, although his official title was merely assistant to First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov. Both of them proceeded to the villa in Beaulieu.

  In the middle of July, two days after the couple s arrival, the private Biritish yacht Magia arrived in the port of Beaulieu from Malta. Two Englishmen came ashore from the boat. If their passports are to be believed, one of these Englishmen was a certain Turk by the name of Mehmed, formerly a consultant to the Islamist Prime Minister of Turkey Erbakan, a rather influential figure in Turkish, Middle Eastern, and Causasian Wahhabist circles. The second person, to the surprise of the secret services, was the well-known Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev. Incidentally, he had also at one time been Sosnaliev s deputy and headed the Chechen forces in Abkhazia. The French became alert and intensified their surveillance. And for good reason. Late in the evening, on an airplane belonging to one of Russia s oil companies, a man arrived at the Nice airport. The man was balding, had a beard, sharp eyes, and bore a strong resemblance to the head of the Kremlin administration. After passing through French passport control, this individual looked around intently. He was dressed in a formal suit, with a suitcase and without any bodyguards. The balding man calmed down only when he saw the people who were there to meet him-two Abkhazians and Surikov. All of them got inside a Rolls-Royce and drove off to the villa in Beaulieu.

  That whole night, something went on at the villa. The villa s security was especially vigilant, and there was so much magnetic radiation in the area surrounding the villa that cell phones within a radius of several hundred yards stopped working. In the morning, the same Rolls-Royce drove off to the airport and the person who resembled Voloshin flew back to Moscow. During the following day, all of the guests at the villa departed.

  It should be noted that Versiya turned out to be remarkably unyielding, even stubborn, in insisting on the theory that the invasion of Dagestan in August 1999 was organized by Russian secret services. In particular, on 29 February 2000, a few days before the deaths of Borovik and Bazhaev and the presidential election that brought Putin to power, the newspaper published an article titled Khasbulatov s Conspiracy :

  After Khasbulatov informs the Kremlin about the coup d etat being prepared [in Chechnya], the head of the president s office Alexander Voloshin, according to certain sources, hurries to a meeting with Shamil Basaev in France. This meeting is organized for Voloshin by Anton Surikov, a GRU colonel close to the authorities, or more concretely, close to the circle of Evgeny Primakov, the former head of federal intelligence. Immediately after the talks in France, Shamil Basaev invades Dagestan.

  Then come the apartment-house bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities. And then the second Chechen campaign. That is how wars start.

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  The bibliography of the meeting between Voloshin and Basaev would not be complete without a reference to Conspiracy-2, the final article in this series. The article was published-again in Versiya-on 2 July 2000, after Putin s election victory, outside the context of any election campaign. It represented an expanded version of the earlier article, Conspiracy, with new excerpts:

  The meeting supposedly took place at the villa of the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in the village of Beaulieu near Nice on 4 July 1999& Earlier, sources in the French and Israeli secret services, which had provided this information, reported that there exists a video of the meeting at the villa in Beaulieu. However, they offered no evidence. At the end of June, Versiya received a large mail envelope without a return address. The envelope contained a photograph of three men. Pictured on the left was an individual resembling Anton Surikov, assistant to former First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov. Pictured in the middle was a person bearing a very close resemblance to the head of the Kremlin office, Alexander Voloshin-balding and with a similar beard.

  Next to these two individuals was a squatting person wearing shorts-balding, but with a more substantial beard. After some time, Versiya received a phone call, and the caller, without introducing himself, said: This is a photograph of the meeting between Voloshin and Basaev. Voloshin is easy to recognize. Basaev is the bearded man on the right.. ..

  The unidentified caller specified that the photo was printed from a still-frame, and that the recording was made on an analog videocamera&

  At the time of the meeting, Surikov was a consultant to the general director of RSK MiG. At present he is still working with Maslyukov, but now heads the Committee on Industry, Construction, and Scientific Technology in the Duma&

  According to verifiable information from the French and Israelis, the private British yacht Magia arrived at the Beaulieu port from Malta on July 3. Two passengers disembarked. If their passports are to credible, one of these Englishmen was a certain Turk by the name of Mehmet& The second person, to the surprise of the intelligence officers, was Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev&

  Late in the evening of July 4, a man arrived at the Nice airport in a private plane belonging to one of Russia s oil companies. The man was balding, with a small beard, sharp eyes, and resembled the head of the Kremlin office&

  Whether by coincidence or not, some time later- in August-Shamil Basaev s group invaded Dagestan. The resignation of Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin soon followed. He was replaced by the former head of the FSB. After this, federal troops successfully repulsed the attack on Dagestan, and in pursuit of the Chechen fighters, once again entered rebellious Chechnya. The anti-terrorist operation in the Chechen Republic has been going on since that time and is unlikely to end in the near future. It should be noted that different sources have given different explanations of the purpose of the visit to Beaulieu by individuals resembling Voloshin and Basaev. According to one hypothesis, the subsequent invasion of Dagestan constituted a public relations stunt within the framework of the operation Heir. According to a contrary hypothesis, the man

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  resembling the head of the Kremlin office had learned from the Russian secret services about Basaev s intentions and had asked individuals who had once worked with him- presumably Anton Surikov-to arrange a meeting with Basaev, in order to attempt to prevent the invasion.

  Ilyas Akhmadov, the Chechen minister of foreign affairs in the government of Aslan Maskhadov, believed that the operation in Dagestan was provoked by Moscow: The leadership of Chechnya has condemned the Dagestan campaign. For us this is really a big problem. But remember what happened in July, when the Russian army destroyed our fortified position and then an entire battalion of Russian soldiers invaded our territory. Surely, that is provocation? Pilgrims from Dagestan came to Basaev and asked him to free them from the Russian yoke, then when he began the campaign, they began saying on television that they didn t want it, and they wanted to live in Russia. It s an obvious set-up.

  According to Abdurashid Saidov, founder and former chairman of the Islamic Democratic Party of Dagestan, from 1997 onwards, following the adoption by the Dagestan Parliament of its famous law On the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, members of the religious minority (the Vahhabites) were deliberately forced out of Dagestan into Chechnya. Persecution and threats of physical violence simply made it impossible for Vahhabites to live in
Dagestan. At the same time, the Dagestan leadership was well aware that the Vahhabites would be greeted with open arms in Chechnya. Once forced out of Dagestan into Chechnya the Dagestan Islamists joined the opposition and were prepared in time to return to Dagestan in the new capacity of rulers of the state. Rumors of a forthcoming invasion from Chechnya had circulated in Dagestan in 1997 and 1998, at a time when Russia had left the borders with Chechnya in the Tsumadin, Botlikha, and Kazbek districts of Dagestan exposed. Active members of the radical Dagestan opposition moved freely between the territories of the two republics, but there was no reaction from the FSB, which at that time was headed by Putin. It is possible that the retinue of the leader of the Dagestan Islamist radicals, Bagaudin, who had sought refuge from pursuit in Chechnya, included provocateurs operating on the orders of certain Russian departments of coercion, and they were the ones who, when the right moment came, pushed Bagaudin, and through him Basaev and Khattab, into the invasion of Dagestan.

  From May to June 1999, every market trader in Grozny already knew that an invasion of Dagestan was inevitable. For some reason, only the Russian secret services knew nothing about it. From July, there were several hundred armed Dagestan Vahhabites in the Dagestan village of Echeda in Russia, where they had dug themselves in and reinforced their positions in the inaccessible ravines on the Russian border with Chechnya and Georgia. Long before the arrival in the Tsumadin Region of the Islamist rebels, the area was bristling with weapons. In late July, at the height of a fuel crisis in the region, heavy tankers delivered fuel, tons at a time, to the guerrilla camps in the hills above the very windows of the UVD and UFSB of the Tsumada district. The FSB failed to react,

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  because the prospective armed conflict between the Chechens and the Dagestanis would be to the Kremlin s advantage.

  At the same time, Bagaudin was receiving encouraging reports from his agents: There s no one in Tsumada apart from policemen, and they won t go against their own. We ll be in the regional center in no time at all. This is your home region, the people are waiting for you, support is guaranteed, so push on! And Bagaudin fell into the trap. On the eve of the invasion, Basaev actually suggested joint operations with Bagaudin, but the offer of help was refused, so that Basaev and Khattabi were forced to act separately, advancing in the direction of Botlikha, which was most opportune for the Russian leadership, indeed perfectly timed for the organizers of Putin s election campaign. At this precise point in time, Russia was hit by an unprecedented series of terrorist attacks.

  The motivation behind the September attacks was provided by the FSB itself. An official information release from the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow region, formulated the goals of the terrorists, who blew up apartment houses in Moscow in September 1999, as follows: One of the main explanations under consideration by the investigators was the perpetration of a terrorist attack intended to destabilize the situation in Moscow, intimidate the public, and influence the authorities into taking certain decisions, which are in the interests of the organizers of the attack. The very same idea was formulated in the language of satirical polemic by the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva: The terrorists main aim is to create a heinously oppressive atmosphere in society. To make me turn coward so that I slap my neighbor from the Caucasus across the face, and he pulls out his dagger, and then it all starts& So that the party of idiots can emerge from underground, and the mass arrests can start-only don t ask what party this is, and where this underground is located.

  It s clear enough which kind of particular decisions the authorities could be influenced into taking by the bombings, and which kind they could not. The explosions could easily result in a decision to introduce troops into Chechnya. But there was absolutely no way terrorist attacks could produce the decision the Chechens wanted on granting Chechnya formal independence (by this time it had already achieved informal independence). In other words, the bombings were needed by the Russian secret services, in order to start a war with Chechnya, but not by the insurgents in Chechnya to encourage the legal recognition of their independent republic. Future events confirmed that this was indeed the case: the war began, the secret services came to power in Russia, and Chechen independence came to an end. And all as a result of the terrorist attacks carried out in September.

  On August 31, a trial bombing took place in the Okhotnyi Ryad shopping center on Manege Square in the center of Moscow. One person was killed, and forty were injured The government immediately put forward the Chechen connection as an explanation, although it was hard to imagine that the Chechen terrorists would attack a shopping complex where the director was the well-known Chechen, Umar Djabrailov. The person later arrested for planning and carrying out the terrorist attack was a certain Ryzhenkov, who according to the FSB impersonated an FSB general. In fact,

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  however, as early as 1996, Nikolai Vasilievich Zelenko, head of military intelligence in General Rokhlin s 8th Army Corps, had reported to the FSB that FSB General Ryzhenkov was definitely working for terrorists.

  Military intelligence engages in operational activity, both inside and outside Russia, and it has its own staff of secret agents. The 8th Army Corps was stationed at Volgograd, had fought in Chechnya, and was especially active in recruiting agents among the Chechens.

  Shamil Basaev underwent training at the GRU firing range in Volgograd before the conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia, and it was military intelligence that trained him.

  If Zelenkov had learned something about who was behind the bombing at the Okhotnyi ryad shopping complex, and about Ryzhenkov, he certainly must have reported it to General Rokhlin, who was chairman of the Defense Committee of the State Duma. At the time, however, Ryzhenkov was not detained. On the contrary, it was Zelenko who was arrested.

  Zelenko had served almost all of his time in the army in the Caucasus. He d been in all the hot spots: Karabakh, Baku, Tbilisi, Abkhazia, Dagestan, and Chechnya. He only missed out on Grozny itself, because he had been seriously wounded. FSB employees turned up to see Zelenko twenty days after he d had a heart operation at the Burdenko Hospital in Moscow. They accused him of possessing an unregistered pistol and planning to kill a certain businessman, and they took him as far away from Moscow as possible, to the prison in Chelyabinsk.

  So why was Zelenko arrested? Rokhlin was on good terms with the head of the FSB s military intelligence at the time, Vladimir Ivanovich Petrishchev, and would have been obliged to report to him any information received from Zelenko. That was when strange things started to happen: first Zelenko was arrested, and then on July 3, 1998, General Rokhlin was murdered.

  The FSB itself effectively confirmed that the arrest of Zelenko, the murder of Rokhlin, and the terrorist attacks in Russia were all interconnected. All of the cases were handled by the same investigator from the office of the Public Prosecutor General, N.P. Indiukov, who had a great deal of experience in the investigation of cases fixed, in which it was important to make sure that the investigation was directed along a false trail. Indiukov was appointed to conduct the investigation into the case of Tamara Pavlovna Rokhlina, who was accused of murdering her husband. The various stages of this great masterpiece of Russian jurisprudence are well known. Tamara Rokhlina was arrested after the general s murder, and in November 2000, she was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. In December, the length of her sentence was halved. On June 7, 2001, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation quashed Rokhlina s conviction, and on June 8, she was released from custody. Indiukov made no attempt whatever to investigate claims that the general had been killed by three unknown men wearing masks.

  However, the most remarkable thing in all of this is that Zelenko s case, following his arrest on completely unrelated charges of common criminal activity, was also

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  investigated by Indiukov, and that the case never even reached the courts. Zelenko was quietly released without any publicity following General Rokhl
in s death.

  These strange killings, dubious investigations and deliberately provoked incursions into foreign territory provided the background to the blowing up of a residential building in the district of Buinaksk in Dagestan. Sixty-four of the building s residents were killed.

  This terrorist attack was deliberately linked with the defeat of the Chechen rebel detachments in Dagestan, even though there were no Chechens among the perpetrators of the attack, and those accused of planning the bombing claimed that they were innocent.

  On the same day, a ZIL-130 automobile loaded with 2,706 kilograms of explosive was found in Buinaksk. The car was in a parking lot in a region containing residential buildings and a military hospital. An explosion was only averted thanks to the vigilance of local people. In other words, a second terrorist bombing in Buinaksk was foiled by members of the public, not the secret services.

  During the night of September 8-9, the nine-story apartment house at number 19 Guryanov Street in Moscow was torn apart by an explosion. The blast killed ninety-four people and injured 164 more. The first account put forward was an explosion due to a gas leak. The following day, the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region announced that the collapse of the third and fourth entranceways was induced by the detonation of about 350 kilograms of a high-explosive mixture. The explosive device was located at ground floor level. Physical and chemical investigation of items removed from the site of the occurrence revealed traces& of hexogene and TNT on their surfaces.