Death of a Dissident (22 page)

When he told me about the URPO, Sasha was aware that his revelations cast a measure of suspicion upon himself. As he explained to me, “I don’t say I am an angel, but I don’t have blood on my hands. I ended up in the URPO because Kovalev planted me there. Khokholkov would never have picked me.

“But one thing is sure: sooner or later all of us would have ended up tainted by blood in the URPO. That was the policy.”

He did not deny that he had been told to do illegal things before,
but the URPO was a totally different world. Orders were verbal, there were no records, deniability was essential.

Initially he just felt uneasy. His first assignments were against the same types of “objects” he had been targeting at the ATC: gangs, dirty cops, kidnappers. His breaking point was the Trepashkin case. One day in late October, Sasha was told, “There is this guy, Mikhail Trepashkin. He is your new object. Go get his file and make yourself familiar with it.”

Sasha studied the file. It turned out that Trepashkin, a lieutenant colonel and ten-year veteran of the KGB, had quarreled with his bosses, gotten kicked out of the service, and then sued the FSB for compensation. He published an open letter to President Yeltsin claiming that the Agency was sunk in corruption. At the time Trepashkin was working as a senior investigator in the tax service. When Sasha was told by a superior that “we should take care of him,” he decided to play dumb:

“What do you mean, ‘take care’?”

“Well, it’s a delicate situation. You know, he is taking the director to court, and giving interviews. We should shut him up, director’s personal request.”

“How do we shut him up?”

“Let’s plant a gun on him.”

“No way. He’s an oper, he knows all the tricks. It will never stand up in court.”

“Well, then, let’s just kill him.” His superior started to lose patience. “Say that we tried to take away his FSB ID, he resisted, and we knocked him off. Don’t play the fool with me, Sasha. Don’t you know what we are doing here? We are a special tasks division. We are here to solve problems, not to ask questions.”

“Okay, I will need some time to develop the case and figure out our options,” said Sasha.

He did not want to do it, so he stalled, hoping to quietly sabotage the assignment by dragging it out for a month or two.

November 4, 1997: Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov meet with President Yeltsin at his dacha while Prime Minister Chernomyrdin is away on vacation. They present him with a draft decree firing Boris Berezovsky, arguing that the deputy secretary to the National Security Council has been casting himself as “the gray eminence of the Kremlin,” undermining the presidency. Yeltsin, fed up with the “oligarch’s war,” agrees. A week later newspapers disclose that a company owned by Unexim Bank had paid Chubais and four associates $90,000 each on the eve of the Svyazinvest auction, disguised as a “book advance.” Yeltsin, enraged, purges the young reformers, including Alfred Koch, from the government and demotes Chubais. A new national security team inherits the Chechen situation
.

One day that fall, Sasha was invited to an operational meeting. His superiors were discussing a plan to kidnap Umar Dzhabrailov, a prominent Chechen figure in Moscow, to force his family to pay a ransom, which would then be used to buy the freedom of some of their comrades held in Chechnya. Sasha was invited to the meeting because of his extensive experience with kidnappings.

“I was sitting there, discussing how to take a man hostage,” Sasha recalled, “based on my previous experience of freeing hostages. It was like the theater of the absurd. But for the guys there was nothing wrong with it. It was just the continuation of their war in Chechnya. Kidnapping Chechens for ransom was nothing out of the ordinary for them.”

By December, the planning of the Dzhabrailov kidnapping was at an advanced stage: URPO opers monitored his movements, tapped his phones, scrutinized his habits, and checked his contacts. The date, time, and place for the operation were set: they would take him when he arrived at a performance by Mahmud Esambaev, the famous Chechen folk dancer.

They even developed a disinformation line, which would be planted in the media in the aftermath of the operation. Dzhabrailov was a co-owner of the Radisson hotel in Moscow, with an American
partner, Paul Tatum, who had been gunned down by an assassin near the hotel on November 3, 1996. An “FSB source” planned to plant a story saying that investigators believed that Dzhabrailov’s kidnapping was linked to Tatum’s murder.

With every passing day of preparation, Sasha became more and more depressed. He knew that after that operation he would be bound to the URPO gang forever. He even asked his old bosses at ATC whether they would take him back. But no one wanted to mess with Khokholkov.

And then, at the last logistical meeting before the hit, the SWAT team that was supposed to snatch the target flatly refused to participate unless they were paid in advance. They had carried out a prior kidnapping on spec, they said, and they were still waiting for their share of the proceeds. Not anymore. They wanted their cut beforehand.

The operation was postponed.

On December 27, Captain Alexander Kamyshnikov, Khokholkov’s deputy, called Sasha’s department into his office and told them to wrap up their current case, an investigation of mob penetration into a Moscow police precinct.

“This is not the type of case that we should be dealing with,” he proclaimed. “We are the department of
special
tasks. Have you read this?” He produced a copy of
Special Tasks
, the recently published memoir of Pavel Sudoplatov, the head of NKVD special tasks under Stalin. He had run the operation to assassinate Leon Trotsky, among other jobs.

“This is our role model!” He waved the book. “Everyone is ordered to read it. We have a new set of objectives ahead of us. There are people, criminals, who cannot be gotten in the normal way. They are tremendously wealthy and can always buy their way out of court. Such people are a grave threat to our country. You, Litvinenko, you know Berezovsky, don’t you? You will be the one to take him out.”

Sasha did not respond, but his mind was racing. Berezovsky had
until recently been a senior national security official and was still a Kremlin adviser. Even discussing the assassination of a person of his caliber was crazy and merited investigation under antiterrorism statutes. As far as Sasha knew no one at URPO had a personal grudge against Boris. The order must have come from the top, or as an outside contract. Or maybe it was a provocation to test him?

He was asked again: “You would bump off Berezovsky, wouldn’t you?”

Sasha gestured by shaking his head and pointing at his temple while making a rotating movement with his finger, meaning, “I am not crazy enough to talk about this, because the conversation may be recorded.”

Afterward, Sasha’s team gathered in his office to try to make sense of what had just happened. They decided to go to their boss, Alexander Gusak, who was on sick leave.

“Why are you so surprised?” Gusak responded when he heard them out. “Khokholkov has already spoken to me about bumping off Berezovsky.”

For Sasha, the holidays of early January 1998 were far from joyful. He did not say much to Marina, but she sensed that something was very wrong. He avoided parties. He declined to go to a concert, so she had to return the tickets. When she tried to cheer him up, he sighed, “If you only knew, my darling, how much I don’t wish to party.”

When he returned to work after the holidays, his superiors did not renew the talk of hitting Berezovsky. Nevertheless, he and his comrades knew that sooner or later, their division would be used for special tasks of a political nature. In several heated discussions, the members of Sasha’s team pondered their options: do whatever they were told and hope for the best, or report everything to Kovalev, as Sasha initially suggested. Sasha’s second in command, Maj. Andrei Ponkin, a big, ever-smiling fellow, objected: Kovalev surely knew what the URPO was all about. He would back Khokholkov and squash them.

It was Ponkin who first suggested going to Berezovsky. Boris had
already managed to get rid of Korzhakov and Barsukov. If he agreed to back them, Ponkin argued, they might have a chance. Everyone concurred, and Sasha was deputized to approach Boris. His superiors, Gusak and Shebalin, were happy for him to take the lead.

It took him a month to get an appointment with Boris. After the 1996 elections they had drifted apart and hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year. He started calling his office in mid-February but learned that Boris was in a Swiss clinic recuperating from back surgery after a snowmobile accident. He got through to him only in mid-March, just as Boris was getting busier than ever with Kremlin intrigues.

Although he was no longer with the National Security Council, he was serving Valentin Yumashev, the Kremlin chief of staff, as a special adviser. It gave him tremendous influence over presidential personnel choices. Yeltsin was getting ready to dismiss the entire cabinet, ousting both Chubais and Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov in one fell swoop.

Sasha got to see Boris in the middle of all this turmoil on March 20. He went straight to the point: “Boris Abramovich, my superiors told me that I should kill you.”