Putin's Gambit

by Lou Dobbs

  Putin seldom drank, but since this was a special occasion, he treated himself to a snifter of Remy Martin Black Pearl Louis XIII cognac. There were fewer than eight hundred decanters of it in the world. That this single small bottle of cognac, aged for eighty-five years, cost more than his entire family had earned in the first twenty years of his life somehow made the taste even smoother.

  In times such as these he sometimes thought about the multifamily apartment in Leningrad in which he’d grown up. His father rarely encouraged him to do anything to better himself, but his mother made him feel special. Along with the extra people in their small apartment was a small army of rats. One of his jobs was to keep the apartment clear of the vermin. He spent many hours chasing and killing them. One thing they had taught him was how ferocious they could be when trapped. It was a lesson he had learned well.

  More importantly, he had learned not to work himself into a corner where he might be trapped.

  If trapped, he’d learned to fight like a cornered rodent.

  No quarter given.

  His father had died when Putin was in his late thirties. He had seen his son rise through the ranks of the KGB and even witnessed the beginning of his political career. But he had no idea how far his son would go.

  When he started in the KGB, Putin dreamed of being in a position of power in the agency. Promoted to colonel, he realized there was more he could do. As the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, his hometown, he started to see the potential of political power and moved on to Moscow, working as deputy chief of the Presidential Property Management Department. Just two years later he was the head of the FSB—formerly the KGB—and found himself in a position to really make changes.

  It was about this time in his life when he found himself trapped like one of the rats from his childhood. An overzealous Russian general prosecutor named Skuratov had started looking into then-President Yeltsin’s inner circle. These were some of the people who had helped his rise. They could also be his downfall.

  Putin had been able to remove Yury Skuratov after a video of him in a compromising position with two women in a hotel room appeared on national TV. Of course the video had nothing to do with the fact that Skuratov had initiated an extensive investigation with the French into money laundering by people close to Yeltsin, including the president’s daughter.

  Putin smiled when he thought about how he had manipulated those around Yeltsin. The old man was ailing, and when those closest to him looked for a possible successor, he made sure they knew all he had done for them. They had decided the FSB head’s loyalty and quick action made Putin an excellent choice for prime minister—which would make him next in line for the presidency. Even if, by some miracle, Yeltsin lived out his term, the prime minister would have a huge advantage over anyone else in an election.

  In August 1999, Putin slipped into the position. Even journalists approved of him at the time. One said, “He makes you feel as if he shares your opinions and has the same background as you.” Clearly, growing up as a poor child in Leningrad before it became St. Petersburg was appealing to the masses.

  And as for Yeltsin’s oligarchs and top officials, he quickly cashiered those he deemed unreliable, replacing them with his own trusted cronies and KGB officials.

  This was just another step in his country’s evolution. He had done other things that people would have found contemptible. But there was always a purpose to them. Deploying members of the FSB to blow up the four apartment complexes in Buynaksk, Volgodonsk, and Moscow in 1999 was an example. They’d killed and injured over 1,300 people, but he’d managed to blame it all on the Chechens. Using the crime to rally the nation, he had simultaneously tightened his own grip on power. He’d also used the staged attacks as casus belli for a second war with Chechnya. Those bombings had galvanized the country against the rebels, and the Second Chechen War made him appear to be a strong leader.

  Soon he was more than a strong leader: He was a dictator.

  He smiled and poured himself another snifter of the Louis XIII.

  Over the years many men and women had attempted to stop him. That they had the temerity to try never ceased to amaze him. After all, his ruthlessness was well established and notorious.

  When Alexander Litvinenko, a former security officer, had tried to expose Putin’s role in the apartment-complex bombings and other crimes, Putin quickly retaliated. Two of Litvinenko’s fellow spies slipped polonium-210 into his tea at the Millenium Hotel in London, and Litvinenko spent weeks dying an unspeakably agonizing death.

  Then there was the case of the investigative journalist, forty-eight-year-old Anna Politkovskaya. She had attempted to dig up dirt on Russian atrocities in the Second Chechen War and on Putin’s murderous, dictatorial excesses—his dream of catapulting Russia “back into a Soviet abyss.”

  Well, it was a shame about Anna. She had arguably been the most impassioned and the most beautiful investigative reporter of her generation. Three bullets, and she wasn’t impassioned or beautiful anymore. One tap to the head, two to the chest, and Anna was history.

  Natalia Estemirova? A highly regarded human rights activist, she’d worked with Anna Politkovskaya on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Three years after Anna was killed, Natalia took two rounds in the head. She wasn’t a highly regarded activist anymore.

  Paul Klebinov, the editor of Moscow’s edition of Forbes magazine, had the impertinence to expose corruption among Putin’s plutocratic supporters. He was shot to death in front of his office.

  The thought of Klebinov’s demise brought a small wintry smile to Putin’s lips.

  You can publish your exposés in hell now, Klebby old boy!

  Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova? Stan, a top human rights attorney, had been Anna Politkovskaya’s lawyer. He was was looking into the murder of a young Chechen by the Russian military.

  He was also shot dead for his efforts.

  Anastasia was killed when she ran up to help her friend.

  So many journalists, so little time.

  Today, it would be a ballsy reporter indeed who dared to criticize Putin or his friends.

  It never ceased to amaze him what a few hundred killings and beatings could accomplish. Not only was the Russian media terminally cowed, but Putin was now going after history itself, the rewriting of Russia’s past. He was achieving that by brute force as well. When the renowned human rights organization Memorial attempted to expose the atrocities of Stalinism, including the horrors of the Gulag—in the process, blackening the reputation of Putin’s preeminent idol, Josef Stalin—Putin made short work of them. Turning the entire force of Russia’s hopelessly corrupt legal system against Memorial, he now had that august operation on the brink of obliteration. They and their work would soon be flung down his own equivalent of the Stalinist “memory hole.”

  Nor did Russia’s plutocratic elite—its ruling oligarchs—oppose Putin with impunity. Witness Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2003, he was “the Richest Man in Russia.” After he complained personally to Putin about the Russian economy’s pervasive corruption, however, Putin jailed Khodorkovsky and liquidated his assets, including Yukos Oil, the biggest oil firm in Russia. Yukos ended up as part of Rosneft, which was owned by one of Putin’s friends.

  The lesson was clear: Not even “the Richest Man in Russia” was safe from Putin’s wrath.

  Putin sipped his cognac and stretched. He remembered how U.S. business magnate William Browder had hired the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate a massive fraud case involving Putin’s government. His evidence implicated the Russian police, among others.

  After his first full day on the job, Sergei was found beaten to death in police custody.

  All investigations ceased.

  Boris Berezovksy, a Russian tycoon in exile and an outspoken Putin critic, was found hanging in his ex-wife’s shower in London.

  Russian oligarch Alexander Perepilichny, after dying suddenly at forty-four years of age, was found to have been poisoned.
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br />   In 2006, Putin had even paved the way for such extrajudicial killings by passing laws allowing him to hunt down and kill his perceived enemies.

  As much as he despised his chief American critic, Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post, he had to admit she had accurately summarized his career in four blistering sentences, calling it part of “the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.”

  Lucky for Applebaum she wasn’t a Russian journalist.

  He’d have made short work of her, too.

  Still, one of the multitudinous advantages of a Putin-run press was that he could keep his private life private—especially his financial private life. With the Russian people suffering so much economic hardship, it would not do for them to learn how opulently he lived. That was one of the reasons he kept his sumptuous lifestyle a secret. For one of Russia’s leaders to be known as one of the world’s richest men would not be proper. Anyway, now, as he grew older, he realized there was more to life than just the accumulation of wealth. He couldn’t even spend it all if he wanted to. Instead he wanted to think about the future and how he would be remembered. He was confident that once this operation in Estonia was over and his country emerged victorious, he would be remembered as modern Russia’s greatest leader.

  He took another sip of brandy and enjoyed the temperate weather.

  *

  Derek Walsh shuttled through the empty lobby of the run-down hotel. There was only one desk clerk on duty, and he wondered if the others had chosen not to come into work. The young woman behind the counter didn’t even glance up at him as he bypassed the sketchy elevator and started up the three flights of stairs.

  Alena was just stirring as he put down the now-cool coffee and the bagels. She got up and inched her way around the tight space into the claustrophobic bathroom. When she got out, still wearing the towel she had gone to bed in the night before, she looked beautiful. How did she do it? She started gathering her clothes and said, “What are we going to do first?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you have to do something with the security plug from work. Do you need to get anything else from your apartment? We need to make sure we gather anything that could incriminate you.”

  “Incriminate me? I told you I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “In the part of the world I’m from, that never keeps anyone from being arrested. From what I’ve seen here in the U.S., it still won’t keep you from going to jail. We need to be aggressive and gather any material related to your work or the money transfer.” She took his face in her hands and said, “Let me help you. Use my debit card. Get the money you need. We can go on the run.”

  He liked her new proactive attitude. That was why he felt guilty when he said, “I’m not about to get you involved in this. You’re going to have to wait here for me.”

  “Here, in this crappy hotel? Is this now my prison?”

  “It’s not exactly Guantanamo.”

  “It’s not the W Hotel, either.”

  He didn’t mean it to, but it came out as a whine when he said, “Please, just one day.”

  “You mean I can’t even go to any classes?”

  Walsh shook his head. “They might wait for you at Columbia. I still don’t know how they found your apartment. But they know we’re connected, and I can’t risk your safety.”

  Now she looked at him with those big brown eyes and said, “What are you going to do?”

  “Whatever I have to.”

  *

  Bill Shepherd had sat in the simple officers’ mess a thousand times, but tonight it felt entirely different. He was nervous. The normally busy dining room was nearly empty as everyone prepared for protests or rested from their sleepless nights. He sat in the far corner at a table for two with the delightful Maria Alonso sitting across from him. He didn’t know if his nerves came from having a first dinner with a pretty woman or not wanting anyone else from the inquiry board to see him eating with the FBI agent.

  It’d been a quiet meal so far, and they’d just chatted about their somewhat similar backgrounds. Her father had also been in the navy, and she spent time at bases on Puerto Rico, in San Diego, and in Virginia.

  He liked the way her dark eyes met his and her hair would slip into her face occasionally. She had a very athletic build and soft, flawless skin.

  He said, “I’m sorry we had to eat on base, but there’s no telling what they might need me for, and I’m not sure it’s safe off base.”

  “This is lovely. I don’t mind at all.”

  There had been few protesters outside the gate. The story about someone from the U.S. military throwing a hand grenade into the crowd persisted in the German media. Even though there was no truth to it whatsoever, it had kept the protesters away. Shepherd would remember that for the future. Maybe a hand grenade once in a while wasn’t a bad idea.

  Maria said, “You really handled yourself well today at the inquiry. I couldn’t believe they threw it together so quickly. From what I understand the representative from the German ministry insisted that it go forward.”

  “She didn’t seem too happy when she left.”

  “She filed an official protest. She said that I was just siding with my country and that we had falsified forensic information.”

  “Will it have any effect?”

  Maria shrugged. “Another German ministry official filed a complaint against a DEA agent who linked her son to a heroin-smuggling ring. Just to save the hassle, they sent the poor guy home. I doubt it’ll get that far with this complaint.”

  They continued with their simple meal once the waiter recognized they just wanted to be left alone. Shepherd was picking at his steak when Maria surprised him.

  She said, “Have you heard from your friend Derek Walsh?”

  His head popped up involuntarily. Mike Rosenberg had filled him in on everything that had happened just a few hours ago.

  The FBI agent asked, “How well do you know Walsh, anyway?”

  “Come on, you know exactly how well I know him.” He looked into that stunning face and added, “Is this an official interrogation?”

  “I know the military uses back-channel communication all the time. The FBI agent working on this in New York, Tonya Stratford, was in the academy with me. We talk all the time. We’re not idiots. We can look at someone’s service record. I was just wondering if you had any ideas about him.”

  “I know he wouldn’t do anything like what he’s been accused of. One of our friends says it’s a conspiracy and he can’t trust the FBI. Is that possible? Do you guys ever go bad? Any past evidence of FBI criminal activity?”

  She gave him a flat look, then said, “Sure, I guess. A couple of years ago one of our agents in El Paso, a guy named Eriksen, discovered a crooked supervisor. The agency hammered him. So it happens, but not very often, and Tonya is my friend. I think that’s just an excuse for Walsh to keep running.”

  “And me to keep my mouth shut.”

  Shepherd was disappointed he had just realized what the whole point of this dinner was.

  *

  Derek Walsh felt a little uneasy leaving Alena at the hotel by herself. He’d sat and answered her questions, but ultimately he was the one who had to make some decisions. That was why he was heading in the general direction of Wall Street. He hadn’t absolutely decided to go directly to Thomas Brothers Financial, but that was his inclination.

  He strolled downtown on Columbus Aven
ue looking for exactly the right place to stop. He knew his next move precisely. He just needed the right spot to execute it. It would have been so simple if there were still public pay phones on every corner. But those days were long gone, and one call from his cell phone would render it more of a liability than an asset. Finally he found a subway entrance and was pleased to find two ancient pay phones stuck on the wall like an afterthought. The next question was if they worked.

  As soon as he felt the lack of substance in the first phone’s handset he knew it didn’t work. The handle was just a plastic shell with no speaker or microphone in it. He didn’t hesitate to grab the second handset, which felt more like a real phone, and was gratified to hear a dial tone. He dug in his pocket for two quarters, which the private carrier required on this phone. Then he dialed the number he’d found on the Internet for Tonya Stratford.

  There were three rings, and he wondered if she would pick up on a number she didn’t recognize. Finally he heard the connection and Agent Stratford’s clear voice simply saying, “Hello.”

  He hesitated until he heard her say, “Hello” again. Then he blurted out, “This is Derek Walsh. Is there any chance we could talk without your partner beating me or you dragging me to jail?”

  There was a long pause. He thought she’d ask how he got her number, but she surprised him. Agent Stratford said, “We have a little bit of leeway. There is currently not a warrant issued for you. But you’ve probably seen yourself on the news as a person of interest.”

  “If your interest is in arresting me, I may have a way to prove my innocence. You weren’t listening to me when we talked about this before.”

  “And I won’t listen to you over a phone, either. We have to meet in person. I promise you’ll have a fair chance.”