Death of a Dissident (18 page)

Akhmed Zakayev sighed with relief when he learned that Rybkin had replaced Lebed. The former Duma speaker had a solid reputation as a dove. But Berezovsky was a complete enigma to Zakayev. A few days later, when a Russian government plane carrying both men landed at a military airfield near Grozny, Zakayev was pleasantly surprised. Boris was cool-headed, goal-oriented to the point of cynicism, and, most important, not possessed by the usual demon of injured national pride that afflicted all of the Russians who had dealt with Zakayev until now. Their nostalgia for the lost empire had been a slow-acting poison: the Russians all seemed, to Zakayev, to hold the Chechens responsible for their historic misfortunes, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the emergence of America as the sole superpower, to the declining price of oil. This irrational
ressentiment
was the main obstacle to Zakayev’s immediate goals: getting the two remaining Russian brigades out of Chechnya and signing a permanent treaty that would resolve the issue of sovereignty.

“Do you think that Boris’s lack of ressentiment had anything to do with his being Jewish?” I asked Zakayev years later.

“Perhaps,” Zakayev replied. “But when that became an issue, it did not come from our side.”

From the very first day of Boris’s appointment to the NSC, the Communists started a fierce campaign against him, claiming that he had obtained Israeli citizenship and so could not be entrusted with a national security job.

“We had nothing against Jews,” explained Zakayev. “They did not kill us, the Russians did. Both our peoples have been victims of genocide. And the Israeli connection, if there was any, wouldn’t hurt. You know, at one point Dudayev told me about his vision of an alliance between Chechnya, Georgia, Turkey, and Israel, backed by the United States.”

“Against whom?” I inquired.

“Russia, of course. And Islamic radicals. But the Americans chose to betray us to the Russians. Anyway, it is all water under the bridge.

“The first thing Boris said to me,” he continued, “was, ‘You think you are an independent state. We—the Russian government—believe you are part of the Russian Federation. Having said that, let us put aside the issues on which we cannot agree, and then deal with what we can, step by step.’ And it was obvious to me that when we started discussing the logistics of troop withdrawals, he was not at all tormented by the vision of the Red Army leaving Eastern Europe.”

What immediately impressed Zakayev was that Boris and Rybkin behaved as if they had real clout.

“They were not afraid to tackle difficult issues, and they could make some decisions on the spot, for example, on prisoner exchanges and amnesty. When they could not, they would simply say, ‘We have to clear it’ or ‘We agree, but it will take some lobbying.’ They were straight with us. And we trusted them.”

Zakayev described the apparent division of labor between Berezovsky and Rybkin: “Boris did the creative stuff, proposed options, invented solutions, and Rybkin was the doubter; he sat there saying ‘This can be done, but that will never fly.’ Boris was the broker, and Rybkin a spokesman. They had a tremendous asset, ORT TV. Boris was always bringing a crew with him. Whenever we had a breakthrough or faced a problem, Rybkin would go on TV, to cut right through to Yeltsin—he watched the nightly news—and get the facts over to him before our opponents could react.”

Nevertheless, the Party of War in Moscow and the rowdy, murderous warlords in the mountains of Chechnya plotted in their separate ways to undermine the negotiations.

“I got some sense of how my counterparts got things done in the Kremlin when I arrived in Moscow at the end of November,” recalled Zakayev. The first batch of agreements was ready for signing, defining a legal framework for Chechnya’s self-administration until the elections. But the outstanding issue remained the two Russian brigades stationed in Chechnya. The Chechens were adamant to see them go, as was agreed at Khasavyurt.

On Thursday, November 21, Zakayev went to see Boris at the Security Council offices in the Kremlin administration building. He received disappointing news: the withdrawal was blocked by Interior Minister Kulikov, the supreme commander for Chechnya, who had gone on TV to say that the two brigades were to stay for another five years.

“Go talk to Kulikov yourself, so that you can see what we are up against,” Boris suggested.

The minister looked at Zakayev “as a soldier at a flea,” in the common expression of disdain in the Russian military. “These two brigades are staying there, period. They are there under special presidential decree.”

“Then there will be no signing,” exploded Zakayev. “As long as there is a single Russian soldier remaining in Chechnya, no further negotiations!”

“So be it!” said Kulikov coldly.

But on Saturday morning, Boris called Zakayev at his hotel: “You have it. The president has signed off on the pullout.” Boris also surprised Zakayev with the news that his own prime minister, Aslan Maskhadov, was in Moscow and on his way to the White House for a joint press conference with Chernomyrdin.

Zakayev turned on his TV and learned about a new presidential decree ordering the full and immediate pullout of all Russian forces.

“How did you do it?” Zakayev inquired as he shook hands with Boris at the White House ceremony.

“Well, when I told you to go see Kulikov on Thursday, I already knew that the decree would be signed later that night,” explained Boris. “But I wanted to make sure that Kulikov did not suspect as much. Right after seeing you he left for Warsaw for a meeting of East
European police ministers. We used you as a decoy, you see? You were so disappointed. For Kulikov to see you with that face was the best insurance that he would take the trip. Otherwise he might have canceled, rushed to the Kremlin, made a scene, and who knows?

“Sorry for misleading you, my friend.”

Years later, Ivan Rybkin, speaking by telephone from his dacha outside Moscow, told me what really happened behind the scenes.

Late on Thursday night, in utmost secrecy, the two NSC planes carrying Boris and Rybkin left for Chechnya. Their major concern was to keep Kulikov’s people from learning what was happening for as long as possible. They did not trust telephone communications, so they decided to take the trip to personally inform Maskhadov that Yeltsin had signed off on the withdrawal. As they were approaching Grozny, the pilot informed him that the military had closed down the airport.

“What about Nalchik? Makhackala? Sleptsovsk?” Rybkin inquired.

“No airport in the North Caucasus will let us land.”

It was not the weather. It was the military playing tricks, Rybkin thought.

“Do we have fuel?”

“For about an hour,” said the pilot.

They turned around in midair and landed in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), six hundred miles to the north. It was 4 a.m.

They snatched three hours of sleep in the airport hotel. In the morning, Rybkin’s staff worked out landing rights for them in the Ingush airport of Sleptsovsk. Maskhadov and his people drove there from Grozny. They looked at Rybkin and Boris in disbelief when they announced that they were taking them to Moscow because Yeltsin had signed off on the withdrawal.

“Why hasn’t it been announced?” the Chechens asked.

“Trust us,” said the Russians.

They landed in Moscow, undiscovered, on late Friday afternoon.

On Saturday morning, the two prime ministers gathered at Rybkin’s dacha, waiting for Yeltsin to announce the troop withdrawal on TV.

Then, finally, they signed the agreement. Until the last moment Maskhadov did not believe it would happen.

Chechen-Dagestan border, December 14, 1996: Salman Raduyev, the Chechen warlord, is stopped at a border checkpoint on his way to a congress of Chechens living in Dagestan. When the Russian police try to detain him, a backup force of Raduyev’s militia moves in, disarms the Russian policemen, and takes twenty-one of them hostage. Defying orders of the Chechen government to release the hostages, Raduyev threatens to kill them unless the Russian command apologizes for impeding his passage
.

Boris Berezovsky arrived at Raduyev’s stronghold of Novye Gordali on the morning of December 18, the fourth day of the hostage standoff. He was there to make a last-ditch effort to prevent the incident from escalating to a full-scale confrontation. The forces of the Interior Ministry were getting more and more edgy with every hour of captivity of their comrades. Raduyev, the maverick warlord whose oversized beard, dark glasses, and baseball cap concealed a face that had been disfigured in a shootout, had defied all pleas and pressure from the separatist government to free his prisoners. Raduyev did not recognize the Khasavyurt Accord because it did not grant Chechnya full independence. Now, at a minimum, he wanted an apology from the Russians for not letting him travel to Dagestan.

“You have my apology, Salman,” said Boris.

“Come on, Boris, you are not the one who I want to apologize,” smiled Raduyev.

Suddenly they heard a loud clattering outside. Two unmarked helicopter gunships appeared out of nowhere and showered Raduyev’s camp with several bursts of machine-gun fire before disappearing. No one was hurt.

“These are the ones, Boris,” said Raduyev. “They know you are here, don’t they? I want an apology from
them.”

After three hours of negotiations they were close to an agreement
to exchange the hostages for eleven of Raduyev’s men captured a year ago at Pervomaiskoye, a deal they planned to keep secret. But Raduyev still insisted on a Russian apology.

To demonstrate impatience, Boris looked at his watch.

“Nice watch,” said Raduyev. “Is it a Rolex?”

“No, Patek Philippe.”

“Never heard of it. Is it better than Rolex? How much did it cost you?”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” said Boris.

“Nice watch.”

“It is yours,” said Boris, taking the watch off his wrist.

Raduyev played with the watch for a few minutes.

“Okay, you can have your cops. You can take them today, and I will take your word that you will release my men.”

On the same day that Boris was negotiating with Raduyev, in the predawn hours of the morning, masked men broke into the Red Cross compound in the Chechen village of Novye Atagi and, using guns with silencers, killed six foreign relief workers, including five women, in their sleep. On the next night five local ethnic Russians were killed in the same execution style in Grozny. “This is a national catastrophe for us,” said Aslan Maskhadov, head of the Chechen government.

As Zakayev later explained, “These murders were completely out of character, even for the renegade Chechens. No claims of responsibility. No political demands. No robbery. To us it was clearly an effort by the Russian secret service to torpedo troop withdrawal and the elections.”