Death of a Dissident (16 page)

On the third day of the siege a commando unit suddenly appeared out of the fog, and Sasha recognized its commander, an old friend from officers school. The new arrivals were equally disoriented, but at least they were properly equipped, dressed, and trained. The commander adopted the hapless FSB troop, which Sasha believed saved them from freezing to death.

“In Pervomaiskoye, we did not see any command or control or coordination,” Sasha told me later. “We were on our own, fighting the elements as much as we fought the Chechens, perhaps even more. Which made me wonder, who the hell were our commanders?”

On the last day of the operation they captured a Chechen boy, perhaps seventeen years old. They had finally taken the village after most of the terrorists had filtered out. It was a terrible sight: craters
from bombardment, burned-out houses, and everywhere the bodies of rebels, villagers, hostages, and Russian soldiers.

The boy had apparently strayed away from his comrades and walked right into their hands.

“He was very scared, expecting that we would beat him,” Sasha recalled, “but I took him aside to talk. He was an intelligent-looking boy from Grozny, spoke clear, educated Russian. I was interested to know how he ended up among the terrorists. Wouldn’t he rather be in school? And he told me a remarkable thing: ‘I hate the war, but it has to be done. When it started, our whole class went.’ I remembered my grandfather’s stories of his whole class volunteering to go to the front during the Great Patriotic War with the Germans. And I thought that these were not terrorists, even though they attacked civilians. Entire classes of schoolboys don’t join terrorist organizations. This was a people’s war.”

He also found a field journal on a dead Chechen commander. What a contrast from the typically messy methods of Russian commanders! At the end of each day, the Chechen took stock of his personnel, ammunition, and supplies in an organized and cool-headed manner.

“It was in Pervomaiskoye that I realized that it would not be an easy war to win, but I still thought it was necessary for Russia. It did not yet cross my mind that perhaps we should have left the Chechens alone,” he said.

In the Chechen notebook, Sasha found some Arab names among the fighters, his first indication of the presence of foreigners. This was a significant discovery. He handed over the notebook to his commanding officer. The next day, the FSB director displayed the list to reporters as evidence of “foreign mercenaries” involved in the raid. Even Yeltsin himself, in a broadcast from the Kremlin, mentioned the captured diary.

Sasha was in the audience for FSB Director Mikhail Barsukov’s press conference from Dagestan on January 20, 1996, which was broadcast nationally on ORT. He heard his boss say, “We used Grad [rocket] launchers mainly to exert psychological pressure … so that the local population, including the Chechens, could see…. There
were three Grad launchers but only one was used. It was shelling an area 1.5 kilometers from the village, and on the other side of the Terek [River] on Chechen territory, where rebels who had come to help the bandits might concentrate.”

Sasha could only curse quietly. When he had run across the muddy field toward the town, those Grad missiles were exploding all around him, killing two of his friends. How could Barsukov lie like that to the whole world? Even Yeltsin repeated those lies in a later broadcast from the Kremlin. He described Pervomaiskoye as “a Dudayev stronghold with earthworks, pillboxes, underground passageways between the houses, lots of special constructions, and heavy combat equipment. When I said, here in the Kremlin, that the operation was planned to last just one day, we did not know that under the ground there was a vast Dudayev stronghold. It had been set up long ago and maintained.”

It was all lies. The experience shattered Sasha’s trust in the system, but he was still adamant that the war must be won. He did not hate the Chechens, but he was a patriot. He could not accept losing a war to them.

It took two years and forty thousand dead, but in the end Russia did indeed lose. Chechnya suffered enormously, and never more than on April 21, 1996. Zakayev was supposed to be with President Dudayev that day but had to go home to his father’s funeral. That funeral probably saved his life.

Dudayev, his poet wife, Alla, and four aides went out into the mountains in two vehicles, a van and an SUV. At about 6 the sun had set in the valley, but there was still plenty of light on the hillside where they stopped. Alla was supposed to speak live on Radio Liberty, to make an appeal for peace to the women of Russia and to read one of her poems. But first Dudayev wanted to make a call to the Duma member Konstantin Borovoi in Moscow, who was a leading peace advocate. The president had a satellite phone, given to him by highly placed friends in Turkey. Zakayev had been wary of it, warning that missiles could home in on its signal. Dudayev reassured him: this was
American technology, not available to the Russians. And Dudayev knew what he was talking about. After all, he had been an air force general.

As for the Americans, Dudayev said, trusted sources in the Turkish government assured him that the United States was not helping Russia militarily. The American Radio Liberty in Prague was one of the main information outlets for the rebels. Also, Dudayev said, Yeltsin was moving toward a settlement with him. After the war, surely, the Americans would want to deal with him because he was the only one who could guarantee stability in the oil-rich region and contain “the crazies”—the radical Islamists. Why would America want to harm him?

While the president and his aides placed the satellite telephone on the hood of the SUV, set the antenna, and dialed Moscow, Alla and her bodyguard, Musa, stepped aside to the edge of a ravine.

When Alla heard airplanes Musa reassured her: they were too high to pose any danger. But suddenly, two missiles flew down, one after the other, with a sharp whistling sound. The shock wave knocked her off the edge of the ravine; she stopped herself from falling only by clinging to some branches. When she pulled herself back up, the SUV was destroyed. The missiles had scored a direct hit. Musa was holding the dying president in his arms.

The Moscow press trumpeted the assassination as a triumph of a new technology developed at a secret FSB weapons lab, but Zakayev did not believe a word of it. Such precision was simply out of the question for the Russians. The president himself had said that the technology was American. Zakayev was convinced that the fateful telephone contained a special homing chip that had been planted in Turkey, and that the Americans, using their own satellites, guided the Russian missiles to their target.

During the first Chechen War, Sasha Litvinenko was one of Zakayev’s enemies. Only much later in London would they become friends. But Zakayev knew about Sasha before he even knew his name.

“We were aware of an intelligence officer who often came from Moscow almost from the first day of the war. He operated from the FSB headquarters in Nalchik,” Zakayev later told me. Nalchik was Sasha’s hometown and the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, another Muslim province of Russia in the North Caucasus.

“We ran an agent of our own at Nalchik FSB,” Zakayev added. “He reported that the officer’s name was Alexander Volkov, and that he was a local. It was no trouble for us to establish that his real name was Litvinenko, since many people knew his father’s family.”

Most of Sasha’s work during the war was in Nalchik. The only exception came when he took part in the siege of Pervomaiskoye, Dagestan.

“He was pretty damn good,” reported Zakayev. “He planted agents in our midst. This was extremely difficult, you know, to find a Chechen who would work for the Russians. And he managed to recruit not one but three. We caught them in the end, thanks to our man in Nalchik. But still, it shows Sasha’s talent as an oper.”

There was another successful operation of Sasha’s about which Zakayev learned only years later. At the beginning of the war, Khamad Kurbanov, the representative of Dudayev’s government in Moscow, was detained by the FSB. At Sasha’s suggestion, he was released and permitted to settle in Nalchik, where Sasha continued to practice his oper craft on him. Kurbanov’s communications led the FSB to Chechen diaspora figures cooperating with the separatists in Russia and Europe.

“If you knew about Sasha, why didn’t you take him out?” I asked Zakayev one night over dinner in his London house.

“Mostly because we did not want to compromise our own man. But now I will say that it was Allah’s will, because otherwise I would not have had the luck of knowing him in London.”

Alla Dudayeva, the president’s widow, also knew Sasha during the war. After her husband’s death, the rebel leadership decided that Alla should go to Turkey. She and her bodyguard, Musa, were carrying false passports when they were spotted in the Nalchik airport as they were about to board a plane on May 27. Lieutenant Colonel “Volkov” rushed in from Moscow to interrogate her.

“Although Alla was not mistreated, she was very scared,” Zakayev recounted. “The people who held her were really fearsome. So when an unexpectedly kind officer came from Moscow, he immediately gained her confidence. She said that Sasha ‘displayed an unusual intelligence and sensitivity for the KGB.’”

Sasha had told me what happened. They kept Alla at a former dacha of Stalin’s in the mountain spa resort of Kislovodsk. She was guarded by FSB field officers who were accustomed to roughing up captured fighters, not dealing with a grieving woman. They were ordered to treat her diplomatically.

Sasha’s task was to find out two things: first, whether her husband was indeed killed, or whether he could have survived the attack and was recovering in one of the mountain villages. Second, if he was dead, where was he buried? The Russians wanted to prevent his grave from becoming a martyr’s shrine.

Sasha arrived just as Alla and her captors sat down in awkward silence for lunch in Stalin’s luxurious dining room. Alla, forty-nine, a fragile blond woman dressed in black, with distinctly Slavic features, was “very tense and anxious,” Sasha recalled. To soften her up, he had to use all of his charms. He began by telling her that he respected her feelings. He expressed condolences. Although she suspected that it was just part of a good-cop/bad-cop routine, she was still moved. After lunch they continued the conversation, recorded by a hidden camera, and she told him the story of her life, from childhood as an officer’s daughter at a military base in the Soviet North, to a general’s wife, to the first lady of her adopted mountainous nation, to the comrade in arms of a guerrilla leader.

By the end of the hour Sasha was confident that Dudayev was indeed dead. He was just coming to his second task—locating the grave—when he learned that President Yeltsin had pardoned Alla Dudayeva and she was free to go.

When the war ended with the Khasavyurt Accord, Sasha agreed with most of his fellow FSB officers and the military brass: it was a humiliation. All of this suffering, destruction, and the death of his
friends were for nothing. Since the agreement had been negotiated by General Lebed, Sasha and his fellow officers now considered Lebed a traitor, someone who, for the sake of politics, betrayed the soldiers in uniform, those who had fought and died. By contrast, the general public accepted the Khasavyurt agreements with relief, which boosted Lebed’s chances as a potential successor to Yeltsin in the presidential elections that lay four years ahead.