Alexander Litvinenko

by Blowing Up Russia (lit)

  Chechen guerrillas took no direct part in the preparations for the terrorist attack. To judge from the general picture of the explosion, the bomb was planted by specialists who had been trained in Russian secret service departments. It also happens that all the previous terrorist attacks, with trails generally supposed to lead back to Chechnya, were carried out according to exactly the same scenario: a car bomb exploding close to a building. The car is usually parked in front of the intended target only a few hours in advance. The detonator is equipped with a timing mechanism. Even if the car bomb is discovered, explosives experts have only a matter of minutes to disarm it (as they did last Sunday outside the military hospital in Buinaksk)& This love of car bombs is very easy to explain. Explosives are very expensive nowadays, and terrorists pay for every kilogram of TNT or any other substance in cash. And planting the bomb at the target even one day before the deadline is fraught with the danger of failure, the risk of the bomb being discovered is too great& However, the general picture of the explosion on Guryanov Street suggests that it was planned by people who are not used to economizing, i.e. members of the secret services& Experts have determined that the main charge in the house on Guryanov Street was planted in the rented premises of a shop on the ground floor. And moreover, the explosive was there a long time before the explosion took place.

  The criminals were evidently wasting no time on trifles, and if the explosive were discovered the attack would simply have been transferred to another district of the capital. This tactic is similar to the use of the secret addresses so beloved of secret services the whole world over. When one of them is exposed, the operation simply takes place in a different area. During the days of the USSR, specialists capable of carrying out such a terrorist attack served in both the KGB and the Second Central Department of the General Staff (better known as the GRU).

  In other words, Moskovsky Komsomolets was hinting, ever so gently, that the FSB was behind the bombings.

  On September 12, the Moscow police received a phone call from the inhabitants of house number 6/3 on the Kashirskoe Chaussee: Something s not right in our basement, the concerned members of the public reported. A squad of policemen arrived. At the entrance to the basement, they were met by a person they took to be an employee of the district housing management office (REU), who told them that everything was in order in the basement, and our people were in there. The policemen lingered at the door to the basement for a while without going in and then went away again.

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  Early next morning, just as the edition of Moskovsky Komsomolets with the article The secret account of a bombing was being delivered to Moscow s news kiosks, the eightstory building at number 6/3 Kashirskoe Chaussee was blown into the air, the same building where the polite REU employee had spoken with the policemen outside the entrance. He had been right, everything in the basement was in order-for a terrorist bombing.

  A few days later, Moskovsky Komsomolets attempted to track down the resourceful REU employee : I had a meeting with the housing managers of the Kashirskoe Chaussee district, the newspaper s correspondent related. As yet we are unable to work out which REU employee had covered for the man who subleased the premises in the basement of house number 6 on the sly . No one admits to it. It s either an engineer or foreman or a district manager. Neither the REU employee nor those who sublet the basement were ever found.

  By 2 p.m. on September 13, the rubble of the house which was bombed on the Kashirskoe Chaussee had yielded up 119 dead bodies and thirteen fragments of bodies.

  The dead included twelve children. The experts quickly established that the two Moscow explosions were absolute identical in nature, and the composition of the explosive was the same in both cases. A thorough check of buildings, attics, and basements was launched. At one address, number 16/2 on Borisovskie Prudy Street a cache of explosives was discovered. Together with the hexogene mixture and eight kilograms of plastic explosive, which was used as a detonator, they also found six electronic timers made from Casio wristwatches. Five of them were already programmed for specific times. All the terrorists had to do was take the timers to their sites and attach them to the detonators.

  One of the mined houses was on Krasnodorskaya Street.

  The last house they were planning to destroy was the one on Borisovskie Prudy Street, at five minutes past four in the morning of September 21. It is remarkable that the FSB, which was hunting terrorists in Moscow, chose not to set an ambush at Borisovskie Prudy Street to apprehend the terrorists-who undoubtedly would have sooner or later come for the detonators-but instead hurried to inform the criminals via the mass media that the cache at Borisovskie Prudy Street had been discovered. It is absolutely impossible to assume that the FSB s announcement about the discovery of the secret terrorist cache was an accident. Not even a beginning investigating officer could have made such a mistake.

  The information about the explosives discovered after the terrorist attacks and the quantity discovered was not consistent. In Moscow, they found thirteen tons of explosive.

  There were three or four tons in the house on Borisovskie Prudy Street, even more at a cache in the district of Liublino, and four tons in a car shelter in Kapotnya. Some time later, it was discovered that six tons of heptyl (a rocket fuel of which hexogene is one of the components) had been taken from the Nevinnomyssk Chemical Combine in the Stavropol Territory. Six tons of heptyl could have been used to produce ten tons of explosives. But there s no way to process six tons of heptyl into ten tons of explosives in a kitchen, a garage or an underground laboratory. The heptyl was evidently processed at

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  an army depot. Then the sacks had to be loaded into a vehicle and driven out under the eyes of the guards, with some kind of documents being presented. So transporting the material required drivers and trucks. Overall, an entire group of people must have been involved in the operation, and if that s the case, information must have been received through the FSB s secret agents and the agents of military counter-intelligence.

  The explosives were packed in sugar sacks bearing the words Cherkessk Sugar Plant, but no such plant exists. If sugar had been carried throughout the whole of Russia in sacks like that, especially with counterfeit documentation, the chances of discovery would have been too great. It would have been simpler to draw up documentation for the sugar from a plant that actually exists. Several conclusions can immediately be drawn from this fact, for instance, that the terrorists wanted to point the investigation in the direction of the Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, since it was obvious that sooner or later, at least one sack from the Cherkessk Sugar Plant would fall into the hands of the investigators; also that the terrorists were not afraid of transporting sacks with a false name and documents into Moscow, since they were clearly quite certain, both they themselves and their goods were safe. Finally, it is reasonable to assume that the explosives were packed in the sacks in Moscow.

  It would have been hard to finance the terrorist attacks without leaving any tracks. The intelligence services must have heard something, at least about a large sale of heptyl or hexogene from the depots, since no one would have given terrorists explosives for free.

  Only the agencies of state security or military officers could have gotten hexogene from a factory or a store without paying for it.

  Such were precisely the conclusions reached by many reporters and specialists, trying to figure out the clever plan by which the hexogene could have been delivered to Moscow.

  The plan turned out to be exceedingly simple, since it had been worked out by the FSB itself. It consisted of the following steps.

  On 24 October 1991, the scientific research institute Roskonversvzryvtsenr opened in Moscow. The institute was located in the center of the city-Bolshaya Lubyanka 18, building 3-and it was created for the utilization of convertible explosive materials in national agriculture. The head of the institute from 1991 to 2000 was Yu.G. Shchukin.

  In reality,
the institute was a cover, a front-a link between the army and the consumer -and its business was illegal trade in explosives. Hundreds of thousands of tons of explosive substances, mainly TNT, passed through the institute. The institute purchased explosives from the military for utilization and conversion, or from chemical factories for research. It then sold explosives to consumers, which included real and legitimate commercial enterprises, such as the Belorussian government enterprise Granit. Naturally, the institute had no right to sell explosives. But for some reason no one seemed to notice, including the heads of the security agencies, least of all Patrushev.

  Among the numerous large contracts for shipments of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT and TNT charges, brokered by the institute between the supplier (the army) and the consumer (the commercial enterprises), there occasionally appeared small orders for one94 two tons of TNT charges. These orders contained detailed descriptions of the obligations of both sides, although the sale of a ton of goods brought no more than $300-350, barely enough to cover trucking expenses. In reality, these small orders for the delivery of TNT charges were contracts for hexogene shipments. Through the institute hexogene was purchased from the army and delivered to the terrorists for the bombing of buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities. These deliveries were possible only because Yu.G. Shchukin s scientific research institute Roskonversvzryvtsenr had been created by the secret services, and the terrorists who received the TNT charges were agents of the FSB.

  And so& The hexogene, packed in 50-kilogram sacks labeled Sugar, was stored in the only place where it could have been stored-in military warehouses, guarded by armed soldiers. One such warehouse was the warehouse of the 137th Ryazan Airborne Regiment. One of its guards was private Alexei Pinyaev. For the price of TNT charges- namely, 8900 rubles per ton (roughly $300-350)-the institute purchased hexogene from the military warehouse, nominally for research. In the invoices the hexogene was treated as TNT. Order forms were made out to recipient -the link between the institute and the terrorists. In the order forms the TNT charges went under the innocent label A-IX-1.

  Only an extremely narrow circle of people knew that the label A-IX-1 denoted hexogene.

  It is possible that the go-betweens who drove the hexogene out of the military warehouses in their own vehicles did not know about it.

  The small shipments of TNT charges (hexogene) transported from the military warehouses literally vanished (were given to the terrorists). In the overall flow of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT charges, small orders in the range of $300-600 were impossible to trace.

  Reporters have tried to understand how exactly the terrorists transported the hexogene across the expanse of Russia. But there was no need to transport it. The hexogene was used were it was found. Thus, the hexogene from the warehouse of the 137th Ryazan Airborne Regiment was used on Novosyolov Street in Ryazan. The hexogene from the military warehouses outside of Moscow ended up in Moscow& The system was ingeniously simple. Everything had been foreseen, except, perhaps, entirely accidental omissions, which, certainly, were not worth taking into account: the observant driver Alexei Kartofelnikov, the curious private Alexei Pinyaev, the fearless Novaya Gazeta reporter Pavel Voloshin. And what was absolutely impossible to foresee was the departure for London, with douments and video footage in hand, of FSB agent and member of the consultation board of the State Duma commission for fighting corruption N.S. Chekulin, who, as fate would have it, served as director of the Roskonversvzryvtsenr institute in 2000-2001.

  Meanwhile, after two buildings had been bombed, the checks on housing in the capital continued. In a single day, the Moscow police checked 26,561 apartments. Special attention was paid to non-residential premises on the ground floors of buildings, basements and semi-basements, in other words to places that are often used for storage.

  The number of such premises checked was 7,908. Public buildings were also checked:

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  180 hotels, 415 hostels, and 548 places of entertainment (casinos, bars, cafes). The work was conducted under the pretext of a search for those suspected of involvement in the terrorist attacks in Moscow. Taking part in the checks were 14,500 employees of the GUVD and 9,500 members of the interior ministry s armed forces, including a separate operational division (the former F.E. Dzershinsky Division). Employees of the MVD and GUVD worked twelve hours a day with no days off.

  Premises in which the terrorists had planted bombs were identified. According to the official version of the investigation (which may have absolutely nothing in common with the truth), they had been rented by Achimez (Mukhit) Shagabanovich Gochiyaev (Laipanov). The genuine Laipanov was a native of the Republic of KarachaevoCherkessia, who had been killed in a road accident in the Krasnodar Territory in 1999.

  The dead Laipanov s documents became cover documents for the real terrorist. A former GRU employee, who spent all his life building up a network of secret agents abroad, commented: This kind of practice is the usual approach employed to legalizing agents in all the secret services in the world. It s a classic, described in all the textbooks.

  It s as though the dead man is granted a second life.

  As early as July 1999, Gochiyaev-Laipanov had inquired at one of the Moscow renting agencies on Begovaya Street and received information about forty-one premises. After the first explosion, thirty-eight of the premises were checked by investigators to see if they contained explosives.

  Laipanov s young partner was also identified. The FSB claimed that he was Denis Saitakov, a twenty-year-old forced emigrant from Uzbekistan and former novice at the Yoldyz Madrasah (Islamic Seminary) in Naberezhnye Chelny in Tatarstan, who had a Russian mother and a Bashkiri father. The FSB believed that during the preparations for the terrorist attack, he and Laipanov rented a room in the Altai Hotel and telephoned firms that rent out trucks. Although on the second day after the attack, the KGB of Tatarstan, at Moscow s insistent request, began looking for Saitakov, no one in the KGB of Tatarstan was convinced that Saitakov was involved in the bombings. In any case deputy chairman of the KGB of Tatarstan, Ilgiz Minullin, emphasized that no one can declare Saitakov a terrorist until his guilt has been proved& At the present time, the agencies of state security are not in possession of any facts which indicate the involvement in terrorist attacks in Moscow& of students of the Yoldyz Madrasah. The KGB of Naberezhnye Chelny also issued a statement, indicating that accusations against inhabitants of Tatarstan of complicity with terrorists were groundless, and that the Tatarstan KGB had no information indicating the involvement of residents of the republic in the bombings.

  The terrorists who set up the September explosions followed the line of least resistance.

  First they used their cover documents to rent several basement and semi-basement premises, including the ones on Guryanov Street and the Kashirskoye Chaussee. Then they moved in the explosives, stacking sacks of sugar and tea and packages of plumbing supplies around the crates of hexogene (at least that s the way they did it on Guryanov Street). The targets for sabotage were ideally selected. The chances of encountering the

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  police in front of buildings in the unfashionable dormitory districts are not usually very high, and usually there are no caretakers in the entranceways. Starinov announced that the location of these buildings and the environment around them met the two conditions most essential for terrorist bombers-vulnerability and accessibility.

  The terrorists planted the right amount of explosive required for the total demolition of their targets. The saboteur Starinov believed that the bombings could have been carried out by three men. The terrorists seemed to have been well-trained, not just in sabotage, but also in intelligence work: they knew how to avoid surveillance and live under assumed identities. Even a year s course at the very best special training center is not long enough to learn all of this. So it seemed that Muscovites had fallen victim to professional terrorists. And the only professional terrorists working in Russia were
in the structures of the FSB and GRU.

  Petra Prohazkova, a Czech journalist who was interviewing Khattab at the time of the bombings, remembered Khattab s astounding reaction to the announcement of the terrorist attacks in Moscow. His face suddenly assumed an expression of genuine fright.

  It was the sincere fright of a front-line soldier who realizes that now he s going to get the blame for everything. Everybody who knows Khattab agrees that he is no actor and could not possibly have feigned astonishment and fear.

  The Chechens knew it was not in their interests to carry out any terrorist attacks. Public opinion was on their side, and public opinion, both Russian and international, was more valuable to them than two or three hundred lives abruptly cut short. That was why the Chechens could not have been behind the terrorist attacks of September 1999. And the Chechens must be given credit for always denying their involvement in these bombings.

  Here is what Ilyas Akhmadov, minister of foreign affairs in Aslan Maskhadov s government, had to say on that point: