Death of a Dissident (13 page)

“Guess how many people read the transcript of your conversation?” Sasha Litvinenko asked when, years later, I described to him our meeting with Chernomyrdin.

He explained that in early 1996, one of his agents reported that someone was selling transcripts of conversations from Chernomyrdin’s office, which was bugged, along with conversations from the office of his chief of staff. The buyers included some Chechens in Moscow, who sent them to the separatists in the mountains. It was doubly a scandal: first, that someone was bugging the prime minister, and second, that the transcripts were reaching the enemy.

“We began to work on this lead and established that Korzhakov’s people were running the bug. That meant that Korzhakov’s office had been penetrated. As soon as I submitted the report, Korzhakov himself came, seized all the materials, and said he would investigate it himself.”

By then, Sasha found it harder and harder to sort through the arcane political connections of the top brass. Sasha’s mentor, Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, the head of the Moscow FSB, was close to Korzhakov. But if Korzhakov was bugging Chernomyrdin, Sasha was unsure of what should and shouldn’t be reported, and to whom.

At the same time, some people in the Agency were beginning to wonder about Sasha. It was not a secret that Sasha was connected to Berezovsky. But was he Berezovsky’s man? Or the opposite, an Agency mole in Berezovsky’s circle?

Shortly after the wiretapping investigation, one of the director’s aides called Sasha into his office. He came straight to the point. “Listen, Gusinsky is once again friendly with Berezovsky and has gone over to Chernomyrdin’s side. He’s left the mayor. The director is very interested in this connection: Goose, Berezovsky, and Chernomyrdin. So start developing this line and report personally to the director, through me.”

Sasha naïvely asked, “What’s wrong with Berezovsky and Gusinsky making peace? I think this is only for the good. Besides, perhaps some order will be restored in Moscow if the mayor quiets down a bit.”

The aide, who himself was not sure what was going on, offered his own interpretation: “You want these two Jews to be together? Nothing good will come of it. For us, it’s a good thing when the Jews quarrel among themselves. So, have you understood the assignment? Then you are free to go.”

Sasha had both official and unofficial reasons to be pleased when Boris called him in mid-February and proposed that they meet. He was doing what his bosses wanted him to do, and in the process he hoped he would learn why he had been given the assignment.

When they met, Sasha chatted about Chechnya and what he had seen in the trenches at the siege of Pervomaiskoye. He was still in shock from it. Boris had no time to listen, as usual, and he had his own agenda.

“We’ll work on Chechnya after the elections, and I promise you, we will end this mess,” said Berezovsky. “But for now, here’s what you need to know. Until quite recently, I was on very good terms with your bosses, Korzhakov and Barsukov. But now we’ve split.
And I want to warn you that you may have problems if you remain connected to me.”

Boris explained his quarrel with Korzhakov: Korzhakov wanted to cancel the elections, but Boris thought that if that were to occur, the Communists would bring people out into the streets. Federal troops, certainly the FSB, might be ordered to shoot at the crowd.

“I don’t want to pressure you, Sasha,” Boris said. “I just want you to understand that very soon you’ll have to pick which side you’re on.”

Up until that moment Sasha had had no reservations about his special relationship with Boris. He was not particularly savvy politically. He relied only on the general conviction that he was working for the government, led by the president. He divided the world into “us” and “them,” and so Boris, as a member of the establishment and an adviser to Yeltsin, was part of “us” and someone whom the services were supposed to serve. Besides, his bosses—Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Trofimov—had encouraged their relationship all along. It was only now that Boris was being described as an “operative object.”

What he heard from Boris shook him to the core. For the first time in his life he faced a value judgment that could bring him into conflict with his official duties. Of course, Korzhakov and Barsukov were his commanders and Boris was an outsider. Yet he trusted Boris’s judgment.

Boris did not want an answer right away. He added that he would understand if Sasha distanced himself. However, he wanted one last favor: to set up a meeting for him with General Trofimov, the Moscow FSB chief, the man who had protected him from the city cops after the Listyev murder.

Trofimov, a short, thin man with the demeanor of an accountant, was a legend in the services. He had a reputation as incorruptible. Even the former Soviet dissidents whose cases he managed in the 1980s had accorded him a measure of respect. Some said that he was close to Korzhakov, but Boris doubted it; he believed that Trofimov’s only true loyalty was to Yeltsin. Trofimov was the one who had arrested the leaders of the parliamentary putsch after the storming of the White House in 1993. Boris was confident that Trofimov harbored
no political ambitions, and he wanted to sound him out in advance of the gathering storm: the position of the Moscow FSB chief would to a large extent determine the outcome if Russian politics deteriorated into street-level confrontations.

The next morning, Boris came to see Trofimov at the Moscow FSB office. Sasha waited outside.

“I do not know what they talked about, but when I escorted him out after the meeting, out in the street I spotted surveillance,” he recalled. “Two guys standing across the street with an attaché case.”

Sasha knew the device well; it was a standard clandestine camera. The agents were positioned just as he had been taught, standing at an angle to each other. One was holding the attaché case perpendicular to the door of the FSB building, with the camera in its side pointed at Sasha and Boris. The other provided cover by pretending to talk.

“I pointed them out to Berezovsky. He jumped into his Mercedes and sped away, and I rushed toward them, but they were gone. So I went back to my boss and told him about the surveillance.”

Trofimov smiled and said that it was not the FSB. He suggested that Sasha inquire at the FSO, Korzhakov’s agency.

“I called General Rogozin, Korzhakov’s second in command, and I couldn’t believe it as I heard myself ask, ‘Georgy Georgievich, Anatoly Vasilievich here wonders whether it was you who was carrying out surveillance of our building.’ And Rogozin only laughed and said, ‘We should keep a watchful eye on the oligarchs, Sasha.’”

He expected Trofimov to give him at least a hint about what to do next. But the general was reticent. For the first time in his life, Sasha decided not to choose sides, “because I could not make any decision.”

“It was a very difficult time for him,” Marina recalled later. “He lost weight, and could not sleep at night.”

In the meantme, a similar dilemma tormented the president. He had to choose between the same two camps: Berezovsky and the Shadow HQ, or Korzhakov and the secret services. Yeltsin lost sleep
too, but unlike Sasha he could not afford the luxury of procrastination. In his memoirs,
Midnight Diaries
, he describes the lonely agony of indecision and soul-searching in 1996: Could he be certain that the election was all but lost? Did the end of stopping Communism justify any means, including suspending the Russian Constitution? Would it be acceptable to use force and shed blood to prevent the bloodbath that the Communists would undoubtedly unleash if they took power?

On March 17, 1996, he made his decision.

At 6 a.m. on that day, Berezovsky was awakened by a phone call from Valentin Yumashev.

“It’s all finished,” he said in panic. “Boris Nikolaevich has just given a green light to cancel the elections.”

After a late night with Korzhakov and his buddies, the president had authorized three decrees. He would dissolve the Duma, ban the Communist Party, and postpone presidential elections for two years.

Boris had two ways to get Yeltsin to change his mind: through Chubais, and through Prime Minister Chernomyrdin. By the time Yeltsin convened a secret meeting of his senior ministers to announce his decrees, Boris had pulled both of these strings for all they were worth.

Yeltsin began the meeting by saying that he had drastic steps to propose in response to the recent Duma resolution reinstating the USSR. Yet he admitted that this was just a pretext. He was fully aware that he would be violating the Constitution, but it was a necessary step to rid Russia of the scourge of Communism once and for all. He would take full responsibility.

Dead silence fell in the room. Then, after a long pause, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin spoke out against the decision, arguing that there was no need for such drastic measures when the president’s numbers were actually improving. Then, quite unexpectedly, Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov also spoke up. He suggested, ominously, that he could not guarantee the loyalty of his forces should the Communists call people into the streets—and he tendered his resignation. It was a powerful statement.

But it did not single-handedly change Yeltsin’s mind. Everyone
else—the FSB, the military, the intelligence and foreign services, and the two first deputy prime ministers, Soskovets and Kadannikov—were supportive of the decrees. We are firmly in control, they said, and after all, you are not going to abolish the Constitution, you are just going to suspend it for two years for a greater good, Mr. President.

Korzhakov was triumphant. In his hands he held a leather folder stamped with the presidential seal that contained the three decrees. Crack units of the FSB stationed around Moscow were placed on alert, ready to move into the city to secure media and communications centers. By speaking against the plan, Chernomyrdin just might have sealed his resignation and made it more likely that Korzhakov would get his wish that Oleg Soskovets would be installed as prime minister. Chubais, Goose, and Boris would not last long in such a regime.

But Kulikov’s and Chernomyrdin’s responses had puzzled Yeltsin, and the president hesitated. In a maneuver that must have thrown the hawks for a loop, he retired to his study for a final moment of reflection. The thick silence of the Kremlin descended on his shoulders. Yeltsin was alone in the famous room where Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin, and Khrushchev had each once plotted. As Yeltsin recalls it in his memoirs, he wrestled with a terrible choice: Would he be the ruler to go down in history as the man who had a chance to free Russia for the first time in a thousand years, and blew it?

And then he heard a noise. It was his daughter Tatyana who stormed into the room.

“Papa, you must hear another opinion.”

While Yeltsin had been discussing the would-be coup with his generals, she and Valentin Yumashev, the Tanya-Valya team, had brought into the Kremlin the only man who had the brains, the clout, and the chutzpah to try to change Yeltsin’s mind: Anatoly Chubais.

When Chubais entered the room, his face was crimson, his usual color in moments of extreme excitement. He did not waste time on niceties. He denounced Yeltsin’s idea as “madness.” He spoke about the civil war that such a move would unleash, and about the KGB
hacks, Korzhakov & Company, whose true agenda was to control the presidency. He boasted of his confidence that Shadow HQ would bring Yeltsin to victory in the election if it were to go forward.