Death of a Dissident (17 page)

In September 1996, as Akhmed Zakayev assumed his new office, the prospects of maintaining stability were shaky, at best. Nearly half a million people, 40 percent of Chechnya’s prewar population, had been uprooted and were now living in overcrowded villages or languishing in refugee camps. Grozny, which only two years ago had been a flourishing city of four hundred thousand, lay in ruins. The economy was all but destroyed. Thousands of youngsters, brandishing Kalashnikovs, roamed the streets.

The warlords Shamil Basayev and Salman Raduyev, who had led spectacular raids against the Russians, showed no intention of disbanding their militias and accepting central authority. On top of that there were two Russian brigades stationed in Chechnya, and neither one showed any sign of leaving, in spite of what had been agreed with General Lebed at Khasavyurt. There was a Party of War in Moscow plotting against Lebed. From where Zakayev sat, the precarious peace depended greatly on Lebed’s stature and job security.

One night in September, Sasha Litvinenko led a squad of opers in a raid of a large private security company in Moscow that was suspected of kidnappings and extortion. The company was run by former officers of the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Ministry of Defense, an old rival of the FSB. When Sasha’s men opened a huge safe, he was surprised to find a general’s uniform and a bunch of files marked “Top Secret.”

“You have no right to see these documents,” said the company director, turning pale.

“That is just what I am going to do,” retorted Sasha. “As for you, you have no business having them in your safe. For all I know you could have stolen them. How did they get here?”

“They belong to General Lebed, the NSC secretary. He believes his office is not safe.”

Sasha locked the door and began studying the files.

The documents were indeed Lebed’s. Among them were his ID and a bunch of personal photographs. There was a file detailing corruption in the Ministry of the Interior, implicating several top officials in a variety of misdeeds. Several of the names were familiar to Sasha.

Another file contained a GRU report on Chechnya, including details of the assassination of Dudayev. Sasha learned that, contrary to what everyone thought, the GRU played only an auxiliary role in the killing, providing the planes that fired the missiles. The report suggested that the mastermind of the operation was his FSB colleague, Gen. Evgeny Khokholkov. The report also alleged that Khokholkov was involved in a separate covert operation in which the American guidance system for the missiles was obtained and from which huge sums of money went missing.

The third document was a draft decree by Lebed creating a “Russian Legion,” an elite special force of fifty thousand men, subordinate to the National Security Council; it would carry out special operations against those posing a “threat to state security.”

In short, Sasha was looking at General Lebed’s deepest secrets: two files that gave him leverage over the FSB and the Ministry of the Interior, with the ability to threaten its hawkish directors with exposure to two major scandals; another that created an army under Lebed’s control. Together, they helped explain how Lebed planned to fight his political battles with the Party of War.

By the time Sasha acquainted himself with the contents, an official investigator had arrived.

“I cannot process this,” he said, when he saw the files.

“What do you mean? It is your official duty,” Sasha insisted.

“These documents have nothing to do with the case I am investigating.”

“The law says that all materials prohibited for open circulation
should be confiscated. Top secret documents are obviously prohibited for circulation.”

But the investigator flatly refused. Sasha called Gen. Vyacheslav Volokh, his boss in ATC. Volokh heard him out, promised to call back in a minute, and never did. The investigator suggested that once he finished with his official duties and left, Sasha could initiate a new case of his own.

But Sasha knew better. He called Anatoly Kulikov, the minister of the interior. He knew Kulikov personally through his friendship with a young officer who was like an adopted son to the minister, a son of his late friend. He had never used this connection before, but he needed it now, and he knew Kulikov was a fierce rival of Lebed.

Ten minutes later Kulikov called back.

“Anatoly Sergeevich, we found some Lebed material, top secret,” Sasha said.

“So why are you calling me? You have your own superiors.”

“My superiors cannot decide what to do.”

“Understood.” Kulikov’s tone shifted. “Is there something there?”

“Some secret memos and compromising files on the whole leadership of the Interior Ministry,” reported Sasha.

“Myself included?” inquired Kulikov.

“No, just your deputies.”

“Okay,” he said with relief. “I will send someone to process them officially.”

Gen. Alexander Lebed knew that Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov was plotting against him. They were on a collision course, and it seemed inevitable that one of them would eventually leave the government. He even joked that “two avians cannot live in the same hole,” a wisecrack on their names: Lebed means “swan” in Russian, and Kulikov means “snipe.” What particularly worried him was that Kulikov appeared to be forging an alliance with Anatoly Chubais, the Kremlin chief of staff who was now effectively running the presidency.

Yeltsin seemed increasingly weak with every passing day. His heart surgery was scheduled for early November, and no one knew whether
the old man would survive it. Constitutionally, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin was next in line, but most people regarded Lebed, who had finished third in the first round of elections, as the heir apparent. Except among the Party of War, Lebed had earned great popular credit by stopping the war in Chechnya. Should the old man die and an election be scheduled, he would easily beat Chernomyrdin. The last person that Chubais needed at the helm was the maverick chain-smoking general, who used to come to official Kremlin functions sporting white socks in black shoes and a bright checkered suit.

On October 13, Lebed made a fatal mistake. Seeking to boost his standing against Chubais, he joined forces with General Korzhakov, the discharged former head of Yeltsin’s security who still had a lot of influence in the security services. They appeared together at a rally in Tula, an industrial city one hundred miles south of Moscow. It was the heart of Lebed’s former constituency and the district from which Korzhakov planned to run for the Duma.

“I have found a worthy replacement,” declared Lebed in his deep bass, the same voice that only three months earlier had pledged to crush a would-be coup led by Korzhakov. Korzhakov spoke next. He accused Chubais of running an “unconstitutional regency” in the Kremlin.

By appearing with the secret police general who was anathema to the liberals, Lebed sealed his own fate. The reformers promptly joined forces with the Party of War to stop Lebed. Boris Berezovsky flew to New York to show George Soros the Russian Legion memo that Sasha had found in the September raid.

“You should not be misled by Lebed’s peacemaking role in Chechnya,” explained Boris to George. “People in the West compare him to de Gaulle, but he is at best a Pinochet, at worst a Franco. Would you care to share this with whomever it may concern in Washington?” Later that day I faxed the memo to my contact at the Russian desk of the State Department.

The showdown in Moscow was fast approaching. On October 15, after a hostile grilling by Duma deputies, Lebed delivered an incriminating file on Kulikov to Yeltsin’s office.

The next day the Snipe struck back at the Swan. Kulikov, a stocky
man wearing his bemedaled general’s uniform, went on live TV to accuse Lebed of plotting to seize power by force and of undermining the Constitution with his Russian Legion, which (he explained by reading from the memo) would be tasked with the “identification, psychological treatment, isolation, recruitment or discrediting or liquidation of political and military leaders of extremist, terrorist and separatist movements as well as other organizations, whose activities threaten national security.”

The next morning Prime Minister Chernomyrdin called a top-level security meeting which turned into a shouting match between Lebed and Kulikov. In the end, Chernomyrdin dismissed the coup charges, but Lebed admitted to the authorship of the Russian Legion plan. This was enough for Chernomyrdin to accuse him of “crude Bonapartism.”

While Lebed tried to arrange an appointment with Yeltsin, his bodyguards arrested four undercover policemen who were tailing him, on Kulikov’s orders. By the end of the afternoon the ailing president had had enough. He summoned an ORT TV crew to his residence and signed a decree firing his national security adviser as the cameras broadcast it live. In a voice rife with emotion and barely concealed physical pain, Yeltsin admonished Lebed for sowing discord: “It looks as though some kind of election race is under way. The election won’t be held until the year 2000…. There has to be a united team; the team should pull together, work like a fist. But … Lebed is splitting the team apart…. This is totally unacceptable. Korzhakov has been sacked [but Lebed] took him to Tula to present him as though he were his successor. Well, he could have found a better one. They are both birds of a feather.”

As Yeltsin wrote in his memoir, he had had enough of generals. From now on, he wanted to work with civilians. Within a week a new national security team was in place, with Ivan Rybkin, a former speaker of the Duma and Yeltsin loyalist, as the NSC secretary and Boris Berezovsky as his deputy in charge of Chechnya.

“Why do you need this, Boris?” I asked, when I heard the news. “Don’t you have better things to do than dealing with the Chechens? All of this looks like a comic opera.”

“Well, it is a comic opera, but unfortunately they use live ammunition.
You see, the Party of War helped us get rid of Lebed, but we cannot let them run away with Chechnya. If the war starts again, this country is doomed. And there is simply no one else to do the job. Believe it or not.”

On November 5, 1996, President Yeltsin, now sixty-five years old, underwent open-heart surgery at the Moscow Cardiological Center. After seven and a half hours and five bypasses, the surgery was pronounced a success. Surgeons predicted a full recovery.