Death of a Dissident (23 page)

Initially Boris did not believe him. He had heard similar warnings before. But when Sasha talked about Khokholkov, Boris became interested. To his multifaceted mind this appeared both as a threat and an opportunity to strike a decisive blow at his enemies in the secret services.

He said he would like to talk to the others in Sasha’s division.

After talking to Shebalin and Ponkin, Boris grew even more worried. He went to see Kovalev, the FSB director.

After that, all hell broke loose.

The next day, Kovalev called the whole of Sasha’s department into his office. They repeated their allegations. Perhaps all this talk about Berezovsky was nothing but a joke, Kovalev suggested. No joke, they insisted, considering everything else going on in the URPO. The director said he would begin an internal inquiry, swore them all to secrecy, and dismissed them.

A few hours later, Gusak rushed into Sasha’s office.

“I had a talk with Khokholkov,” he said. “He wants to settle the matter with Berezovsky amicably. He wants to speak with you.”

“Why in the world did you go to him?” Sasha fumed. “The director told us to keep our mouths shut, didn’t he?”

“Don’t be an idiot! The director told him himself.”

After he left, Sasha called Kovalev on a secure line: “Nikolai Dmitrievich, you said there would be a secret inquiry, but I have info that Khokholkov knows everything.”

The director paused for a moment. Then he said, “It was Gusak who told Khokholkov. Don’t go to him.”

Sasha went back to Gusak and repeated the director’s words. Gusak turned pale.

“You see what they are doing? The director sends me to talk to Khokholkov, and tells you I did it on my own. If we do not settle this, they will make me a scapegoat. You know what Khokholkov said to me? ‘If bad comes to worse, you should cover for the director.’ They are digging through all my cases. Go to Boris and tell him it was all a joke.” Gusak was in a panic.

“No, it’s too late,” said Sasha. “They are out to get us.”

He went home and called Boris on an open line. It was April 14.

“Boris Abramovich, they are covering up. The director told Khokholkov.”

“This is what I expected,” said Boris. “Tomorrow at ten, you have an appointment in the Kremlin with Evgeny Savostyanov, deputy chief of staff in charge of security services. Bring everyone.”

Savostyanov heard them out, saw that they were serious, and told them that the administration would arrange for them to give depositions to a federal prosecutor.

On the morning of April 19, 1998, Marina and Sasha drove to the house of some friends to celebrate Easter Sunday, a singular traditional holiday that had survived seventy years of Communism. The whole previous day Marina had painted eggs and baked
kulich
, the intense, round-shaped pastry that is usually eaten with sweet raisin-loaded cheese,
paskha
, a particularly gratifying way to break Lent, which, in truth, they did not observe.

It was a beautiful day. The snow was finally gone, and the sun was so unusually warm that they shed coats for the first time in months. Sasha’s unhappy mood that Marina had observed since the New Year seemed to have dissipated. He was cheery and confident, and she hoped that whatever problems had tormented him were finally blowing over.

As they finished their meal that afternoon, his cell phone rang. After listening, he became pensive and told her they had to go.

“Where?” she asked.

“You will see.” He remained silent throughout the drive, absorbed in thought.

“Perhaps it was his tone, or facial expression,” recalled Marina later, “but I instantly realized that I was about to enter a new world, from which he had been trying to shield me all these years.” Sure enough, that Easter Sunday turned into a day and night of “big surprises” for her.

They drove to the apartment of Viktor Shebalin, Sasha’s colleague. There was another man there whom Marina did not recognize. While she chatted with Shebalin’s wife, the three men locked themselves up for about an hour. Then the man left, and Shebalin and Sasha, with Marina at the wheel, drove to Alexander Gusak’s home, where another of Sasha’s colleagues was already waiting. This was the first time she met Andrei Ponkin, of whom she had heard so much.

The men were edgy. Gusak paced back and forth, smoking nonstop. Marina wanted to leave the room, but Sasha waved her to stay. Then Shebalin made an announcement, the first of Marina’s shocks that night.

“They are going to arrest us on Monday, all of us.”

The man she had seen at Shebalin’s house was a source at the Federal Agency of Government Communications (FAPSI), the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States. He reported that he had eavesdropped on an FSB telephone conversation indicating that a group of suspects would be apprehended tomorrow at Lubyanka HQ.

“It all fits,” Sasha said. “Kovalev called me yesterday and asked all of us to come to his office at 10 a.m.”

Marina distinctly remembered the dynamics of the conversation. Shebalin was calm, but he kept ratcheting up the pressure on everyone else in the room. He insisted that the FAPSI source was reliable. Besides, taking them into custody now would be a reasonable thing for Kovalev to do, because later in the week they were supposed to give their deposition.

Gusak and Sasha argued, both extremely agitated. Ponkin turned his big head from one side to the other, agreeing with each man in turn.

Gusak, pale and panicky, insisted that it was not too late to call the whole thing off. He blamed Sasha for “getting us into this shit.” He yelled that going to Berezovsky was “the most stupid of all his stupid ideas.” He would never have allowed it had he known beforehand. Sasha yelled back that if Gusak had his way they would be “going around killing everyone Khokholkov wants dead,” which would only bring them into even deeper shit. They almost got into a fight and had to be restrained by Shebalin and Ponkin.

Marina listened in complete bewilderment. Although with every phrase the gist of the problem became more and more clear to her, she tried to comfort herself with denial. Perhaps it was just some training exercise they were talking about.

Finally Sasha got everyone to listen to him. Having talked to the Kremlin staff, he argued, they had passed the point of no return. There were two parties to the matter now: the Kremlin administration versus the FSB. “If we backtrack now,” he argued, “both will disown us, and we will be done for.” They had no choice but to stick with Berezovsky. Besides, he believed in Boris, who, after all, had beaten Korzhakov and Barsukov. He was confident that Boris would do it again.

That sounded convincing. But then again, if they were to be arrested on Monday, they wouldn’t be able to testify to the prosecutors on Wednesday. With everyone’s consent, Sasha called Boris.

“Come to my dacha right away,” said Boris.

It was five minutes to midnight.

By the time they arrived at the dacha—Gusak, Ponkin, Sasha, and Marina, but not Shebalin—Boris had summoned Sergei Dorenko, the ORT star anchor, with a camera crew.

Nine years later, as I watched these recordings in New York, I could not help imagining myself in the shoes of poor Marina, who was the sole audience to the confessions that for the first time opened Sasha’s world to her. Boris disappeared after the first half-hour. He knew it all already and preferred to sleep.

In retrospect, Sasha suspected that Shebalin may have been a mole in their group from day one. That night he chose not to go to Boris, saying that he had something else to do. Was it to seek guidance from his handlers at the FSB? In fact, his entire calm speech about the “imminent arrest on Monday” could have been a ploy to scare them into backing out. But if so, it backfired by inspiring the midnight taping, which in the end may have saved their necks.

Sasha later observed that Shebalin never took part in any spontaneous action against the FSB, only those that were planned in advance, and he also never initiated anything.

But Gusak was genuine. The fact that he could not make up his mind testified to that. He was desperately trying to figure out which side would end up winning, and switching his allegiances accordingly. He was not among the initial whistle-blowers and he did not go with them to the Kremlin. He also served as Khokholkov’s intermediary in dealing with Sasha. But that night at Boris’s dacha he eagerly participated in the marathon taping and he told the whole truth. Yet six months later, in November 1998, when Sasha and his friends staged their famous press conference, Gusak backed out and even left town to be on the safe side.

The three other whistle-blowers, Ponkin, German Scheglov, and Konstantin Latyshenok, were Sasha’s loyal crewmembers. In the end they did what he did, and they went down with him.

Remarkably, nine years later, after Sasha’s death, Gusak suddenly surfaced in an interview with the BBC, as a lawyer in Moscow. He confirmed that Khokholkov had asked him to kill Berezovsky. But he did not take the order seriously, he said. Only “if the director of the FSB, Kovalev, had personally given me the order, would I have carried it out.”

On the Easter Sunday night at Boris’s dacha, they were all eloquent, as only confessing sinners can be. By the second hour of the taping Marina could no longer deny the truth: Sasha and his friends, who took turns speaking to a flabbergasted Dorenko, were launching a deadly struggle with their agency. She learned about Trepashkin, who was to be “taken care of,” the would-be kidnapping of Dzhabrailov, the talk of killing Boris, and many other things that Sasha called “illegal and criminal.” Marina knew that Sasha tended to see the world in black and white, and she assumed his whole profession shared this perspective. Now that he was in opposition to the FSB, Kontora, she feared that he would become its enemy and its target.

Although the initial impulse of the whistle-blowers was to immediately put the tape on TV, by morning they decided otherwise.

Boris agreed. “Films like that are most powerful if they are never
seen,” he said as they were saying goodbye. “Perhaps we could make an exception for an exclusive screening in the Kremlin, but for the time being it is not necessary. As for your bosses, I suspect they already know what you have been doing all night. You do what you were planning to: go to the prosecutors. And we shall see what happens next.”

He looked extremely pleased with himself.

When they arrived at the Lubyanka the next morning, they weren’t arrested after all. Kovalev tried to bargain with them, but the discussion went nowhere.

Two days later, they went to the prosecutors. Soon, Khokholkov and Sasha and his friends were suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.

On May 25,
Novaya Gazeta
, the liberal Moscow weekly, printed a story by the journalist Yuri Schekochihin, who was also a Duma deputy and a member of its anticorruption committee. Schekochihin described the questions that he had put to FSB Director Kovalev in a letter as part of his oversight duties including:

Is it true that military prosecutors are investigating the URPO division of the FSB?

Is it true that the head of the URPO division reports personally to the FSB Director?

Is it true that recruitment of URPO personnel entailed a written pledge to fulfill “any order”?

Is it true that some URPO operatives have committed acts of extortion and attempted murder? Is it true that certain officers of FSB Internal Affairs reported the suspected abuses at URPO to the Kremlin staff?

The Schekochihin article was a bombshell. Years later, in London, I quizzed both Sasha and Boris about whether either of them, or their associates, had organized a leak to the legislator. Both categorically denied it. Schekochihin, an activist member of the social democratic Yabloko Party, was noted for his dislike of the oligarchs, and he particularly hated Berezovsky.

As Boris and Sasha pointed out, Schekochihin’s questions to
Kovalev suggest that he had his own source, perhaps in FSB Internal Affairs or in the Kremlin. Schekochihin apparently did not know about the planned kidnapping of Dzhabrailov or the assault on Trepashkin, otherwise he would certainly have mentioned them.