Death of a Dissident (24 page)

Alas, Schekochihin could not be asked personally; he died of apparent poisoning on July 3, 2003, while investigating yet another FSB scandal.

Chechnya, summer 1998: Amid economic chaos and an influx of militant Muslims from abroad, criminal gangs turn kidnapping into a profitable business. The Maskhadov government estimates that sixty-five people, including two Britons, are being held hostage. Valentin Vlasov, who replaced Ivan Rybkin as Russia’s special representative to Chechnya, is kidnapped at gunpoint on the road to Grozny. Maskhadov orders extremist militias to disband, leading to armed clashes in which nine people are killed. On July 23 Maskhadov himself narrowly escapes an assassination attempt when a car bomb explodes as he drives by, killing one of his bodyguards
.

In the middle of June, Valentin Yumashev, who often discussed major government appointments with Boris, asked the tycoon for his opinion of one of Yumashev’s aides, a man named Vladimir Putin.

Boris knew Putin quite well. He had met him when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, and Boris was still involved in the auto business. At the time Putin had the reputation of being uncorrupted, a rarity among officials. More recently, Putin had run an auditing group at the Kremlin administration.

“Why?” Boris inquired.

“We are considering him for the FSB directorship.”

Yumashev explained that the principal quality the president was seeking in a new spy chief was loyalty, but he didn’t trust any of the existing FSB generals. They were a tightly knit clan. If Putin had one defining feature, it was staunch loyalty. When his former boss, the
ardently anti-Communist St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, lost his bid for reelection, Putin preferred unemployment to betrayal. The new mayor had offered to retain Putin, knowing that he knew many of Sobchak’s secrets. Putin declined. He then moved to Moscow and found himself a low-level job in the Kremlin.

One particular episode about Putin that favorably impressed the president was the “rescue of Sobchak” that Putin had organized in November 1997, at substantial personal risk. By then, the new mayor of St. Petersburg, in collusion with the prosecutor general Yuri Skuratov, both Communist sympathizers, had finally succeeded in launching a criminal investigation against Sobchak—a clear case of settling scores with one of the key figures of Yeltsin’s 1991 revolution. Moscow liberals ran to Yeltsin for help. But Yeltsin was reluctant to lean on government prosecutors to help an old friend.

In the meantime Sobchak suffered a heart attack while under interrogation. He was rushed to the hospital. That very day in Moscow, Skuratov signed his arrest warrant. But two days later Putin went to St. Petersburg and arranged a dramatic escape. Dodging police surveillance, Sobchak’s loyalists put the ex-mayor on a stretcher and transported him from the hospital to the airport, where a private jet was waiting. The next day he surfaced in a Paris heart clinic, his wife at his side.

Now, as Yumashev talked to Boris about Putin’s candidacy for the FSB, he recited his KGB bio. Putin had served as an intelligence officer in East Germany. After the Wall came down, he ran the KGB station at St. Petersburg University. When the USSR collapsed, he resigned from the service as a lieutenant colonel.

Boris liked the idea of putting a lieutenant colonel over multistar generals; the newcomer would not be a part of the old-boy network, and would in fact be snubbed by the top brass, which should only strengthen his loyalty to the Kremlin.

“I support him 100 percent,” Boris said. And so, a process initiated by Sasha’s URPO whistle-blowers and steered behind the scenes by Boris plucked their future nemesis from obscurity and placed him in charge of one of the world’s most powerful spy services.

“Once upon a time there were two brothers. One was a smart fellow, the other a fool,” Sasha once told me. “You know, after I saved him from the Moscow cops, Boris said that from now on we will be like brothers. Between the two of us, I am obviously the fool. But for some reason, the fool turned out to be right. I told him from the very first day that Putin was a snake. But he did not believe me.”

When the new director took office on July 25, 1998, Boris said to Sasha, “Go see Putin. Make yourself known. See what a great guy we’ve installed, with your help.”

They did not hit it off. Putin was cold and formal. He listened in silence to Sasha’s passionate depiction of corruption in the Agency, but he did not want to meet the other whistle-blowers.

“I know a man by his handshake,” Sasha told Marina after that meeting. “His was cold and spongy. I could see it in his eyes that he hated me.”

Two years later, as we drove across Turkey together, Sasha gave me his take on the man, the former fellow lieutenant colonel who became the pursuer from whom he was fleeing. Putin, according to Sasha, never really left the service. He was loyal to the KGB all along. He might have lent his loyalty—temporarily—to Sobchak or Yeltsin, but once he returned to the bosom of the Agency, he immediately, and eagerly, fell back into the old fold.

According to Sasha, when Putin suddenly took charge of the Agency, its generals simply pulled Putin’s file from the dust and reclaimed him as one of their own, “a prodigal son, if you wish. But to make sure, they staged a little welcoming ceremony. Someone explained that to me before I went to see him.”

Three weeks before Putin’s appointment was officially announced, amid rumors that his predecessor Kovalev would soon be replaced, a murder occurred. Sasha believed it was an Agency job, arranged as a welcoming gift. In the early morning hours of July 2, retired army general Lev Rokhlin, a member of the Duma, was shot dead as he slept at his dacha. The police immediately announced that his wife, Tamara, confessed to the killing, “on grounds of personal hostility.”

Rokhlin was the founder of the movement “In Support of the Army and the Military Industry.” He had commanded the troops that took Grozny in 1995 and was an outspoken critic of President Yeltsin. He was one of the leading figures in the Communist-led parliamentary opposition. Indeed, he had openly called for the overthrow of the “hated regime.” He was extremely popular in the army and potentially a leader if the army brass ever decided to stage a coup. The Kremlin had good reason to want to be rid of him.

Almost immediately, the press and opposition leaders in the Duma speculated that his death was a political assassination organized by the FSB. On July 7, Rokhlin’s daughter and son-in-law appeared on TV to claim that the real killers had sneaked into the dacha, killed the general, and then forced his wife to confess by threatening to hunt down and kill her whole family. Later, Tamara Rokhlina recanted her confession.

After ten thousand people showed up at Rokhlin’s funeral, the FSB felt compelled to issue an unusual statement, denying that it had anything to do with the murder. A few days later, three charred bodies were found near Rokhlin’s dacha, adding fuel to the conspiracy theory. Were the three perpetrators promptly assassinated, as a cover-up?

Before his appointment with Putin Sasha went to see Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, his old mentor, who was by then retired. They walked through the narrow side streets of Moscow, chatting. Sasha told him all about the URPO scandal: the prosecutors, the Dorenko tape, and Boris’s great expectations for the new director.

Trofimov looked doubtful. “I am afraid you’ve lost, Sasha.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you see? They killed Rokhlin; surely that was a Kontora job. Now, the guy who came in will have to cover that up. He cannot afford to solve the case. It is like an insurance policy.”

Trofimov liked Sasha. He continued meeting him secretly and giving him advice up until he left Russia. On April 10, 2005, Trofimov, who worked as a security consultant, was gunned down, together with his young wife, on a Moscow street in front of their four-year-old daughter.

There is no corroborating evidence for Trofimov’s theory of Rokhlin’s murder. Tamara Rokhlina was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in November 2000 for murdering her husband, but in the summer of 2001 the Russian Supreme Court overturned her guilty verdict and sent her case for retrial. Later, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the Russian government owed her 8,000 euros in damages for unjust imprisonment. On retrial in Moscow she was again found guilty, but given a suspended sentence. She decided not to appeal. To this day she maintains her innocence and claims that three masked strangers killed her husband.

Whether or not Trofimov was correct, there was no doubt in Sasha’s mind that the FSB gained a kindred spirit in its new director.

“Putin is Kontora’s man, body and soul, and to him I am a traitor,” he put it to me, years later. “Never mind that he got there because of me. He had to show them that he had no obligation to me, that’s why he had me arrested in the end. He did the same thing to Boris, after Boris made him president.”

July 28, 1998: Russian officials collectively known as the Party of Peace, including Chernomyrdin, Lebed, and Berezovsky, call for reconciliation with Chechnya, saying that “recent mistakes and silence have already cost us all much too dearly, and Russia does not need to return to [the violence of] the mid-1990s.” Sergei Kiriyenko, Russia’s new prime minister, announces that he will meet Chechen President Maskhadov to discuss economic agreements
.