Death of a Dissident (40 page)

Five days later Sasha was sitting next to me, with Marina and Tolik on the back seat, driving from Ankara to Istanbul, where this story and our friendship began. The fog was thick—as thick, Marina thought, as the uncertainty of exile about which Boris had spoken.

Sasha finished relating his biography, bringing it up to my entrance the previous day and our visit to the American Embassy.

“So what was it that the Americans wanted from you?” I asked.

“Ah,” he grinned. “Everyone has his own problems. They wanted to know how we got hold of the missile that hit Dudayev. That homing system was an American toy, you know. For four years, they could not figure out how we got it.”

“And you know?”

“Sure I do.” He told me about Khokholkov’s visit to Germany and Khokholkov’s American contact.

“You know the identity of his contact?”

“I found it out just by accident once upon a time in Moscow.”

“So you told them the name?”

“Yeah. The FSB has been calling me a traitor for three years, and now I am one. A self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“You are not a traitor, Sasha,” said Marina. “You did it in self-defense.”

“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “Once upon a time in Germany, there was this guy in the Foreign Office. He volunteered to spy for the Americans, and was their most important spy during World War II. He warned that the Germans were planning to kill all the Jews in Italy. So tell me, was he a traitor or a hero?”

“For you maybe a hero, and for the Germans, a traitor.”

“Okay,” I said. “That was then. And now? If you go to Germany now, what do you think the Germans would say?”

“Well, they probably wouldn’t know who he was and wouldn’t care anyway. And Russia isn’t Germany. You can’t compare them.”

“True,” I said. “But didn’t Kontora blow up those apartment buildings? Isn’t that enough for you not to lose sleep about being a traitor?”

“Well, yes,” he sighed, not really convinced by my logic. “But it remains to be proven that they did it.”

One day in September 2004 in London, after having spent nearly four years investigating the apartment bombings, Sasha came up to me, beaming.

“Have you seen this?” He was holding a copy of
The Independent
. “Remember you told me about that German guy in Turkey? Here is his picture. His name was Fritz Kolbe. There is a story about him. The Germans made him an official hero. Put a plaque on the wall. So maybe you were right. Maybe our time will come too.”

New York, November 7, 2000

As I entered the New York offices of George Soros, I was expecting an unpleasant conversation. George had learned of my Turkish adventures from the newspapers. The story of the Russian FSB agent who sought asylum in Britain had mysteriously gotten into the evening edition of the
Sun
while we were still in Heathrow. By morning my name was next to Sasha’s in the Russian press: “Head of Soros Program Smuggles FSB Officer to England.”

I had worked with George for almost ten years, managing some $130 million of his money on advancing Russian reforms, and I was probably the longest lasting member of his Russia team. But our relationship had cooled noticeably of late because we differed on the question of who “lost” Russia. George maintained that the reforms fell victim to the excesses of “unrestrained capitalism,” that the oligarchs corrupted the weak state and impeded the work of the “young reformers.” I, on the contrary, felt that the main problem was the regeneration of the traditional all-powerful Russian bureaucratic police state, and that the only people who could effectively resist this trend were the oligarchs.

Our argument was personified in the figure of Boris Berezovsky. George’s and Boris’s breakup in the aftermath of the Svyazinvest privatization
was like a love affair turned sour. They accused each other of every mortal sin.

“Your friend is an evil genius,” George said. “He destroyed Russia single-handedly.”

“Soros lost money because the ‘young reformers’ fooled him,” said Boris. “And then he tried to convince the West—out of spite—that the oligarchs were evil and should not be allowed to control the beast.”

I listened and said nothing. Both were wrong, but it was useless to argue. George took my contact with Boris personally. He had already stopped inviting me to his summer house in Southampton. The Litvinenko affair would be the last straw, I thought, as I entered his office.

Soros’s office is on the thirty-third floor of a building at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. From the moment you enter, you know you are in a rarefied world. You are immediately treated to a knockout panorama of Central Park to the north and the majestic Hudson sparkling behind the jagged skyline to the west. George’s desk sits in the northwest corner. With his back to the Hudson, he can shift his glance from the park to his computer monitor, which is filled with stock index crawlers. The screen’s images are a bird’s-eye view of global finance.

In the six months since I had last been there, nothing had changed. The same official photographs lined the walls: George with two different presidents in the White House, George with the pope, George with Yeltsin at the Kremlin. My gift, a candle bust of Lenin that I bought at an outdoor market in Moscow, was still on the desk next to the monitor.

“Well, tell me, what happened in Turkey,” George demanded as I entered the office. He always has a half smile playing on his lips and a glimmer of curiosity in his eyes. You can never guess his attitude from the expression on his face. After ten years with him, I had learned to guess his mood from the timbre of his voice. This time it reflected absolute calm. His decision had already been made.

He was interested to learn how high up in the U.S. administration my role in Sasha’s defection was known. I told him about my contacts
in the U.S. administration. The whole thing was extremely unpleasant for him. For the past two years he had been telling anyone who would listen that Russia’s reforms collapsed because of the oligarchs and that the worst villain among them was Boris. And now one of his own people had helped Berezovsky’s man.

“I understand why your friend needs this.” George never used Boris’s name when talking about him with me. “That guy in Turkey was a trial balloon. Your friend will soon need to ask for asylum himself, and he has to create a precedent. But why you needed to do this, I cannot understand!”

It was pointless to argue with him about Boris.

“To tell the truth, I didn’t expect it to turn out this way. I just planned to bring them to the embassy,” I said. “But in the situation I couldn’t have acted any differently. I’m sorry about the publicity.”

“There,” George said animatedly. “Unintended consequences! I’ve warned you many times not to get involved with your friend. And now you’ve done it publicly, and that means that you can no longer be associated with me. Not to mention that you’ll probably become persona non grata in Moscow. What are your plans?”

“I’m thinking of going back to science.”

“That’s excellent. There’s a hidden plus in all this for me. I’m looking for a way to reduce our presence in Russia. You’re giving me a wonderful excuse to shut down the project.”

What irony, I thought to myself. Soros is leaving Russia and blames Berezovsky, while Berezovsky is leaving Russia and blames Soros. And neither one of them gets it. Most Russians see no difference between them. Russia rejected them both, and basically for the same reasons: they’re both rich, both Jews, both independent characters, confident in their mission to reorder the world. For the gray mediocrity that Putin embodies, each is a threat and a challenge.

As I left the office and merged into the crowd, I pondered an offer Boris had made, to work for him. He wanted me to organize a foundation that would pick up where Soros has stopped short: funding democratic opposition to Putin’s regime.

It was a complicated choice for me. I still ran a research lab at the Public Health Institute in New York. At fifty-four I had a pretty successful scientific career, which was already suffering because of my Soros work. If I continued spending a large part of my energy on Russia, I would have to wind that up. But Boris’s proposal—an opportunity to get out of my “seat in the front row” and become a player just as the drama was nearing culmination—was too exciting to pass up.

There was also the problem of Boris’s reputation. I knew the inside story well enough to discount the horrific allegations made against him, but the fact remained: rightly or wrongly, in the public eye Boris Berezovsky was the embodiment of the dark side of Russian capitalism. Yet, with all his errors and transgressions, he was the only one (except, perhaps, Goose) of the major Russian players who opposed the antihero Putin, and the fact that he did it against his immediate self-interest was also to his credit. Ultimately, I knew that if I wanted to join the fray, there were only two sides to choose from. The choice was obvious. So, in the end, I called Boris at Cap d’Antibes and said, “If you are really serious about the foundation, I am with you.”

“Okay, hop on a plane and come over. We’ll discuss the details,” said Boris.

I landed in Nice on November 12, 2000, eleven days after I’d brought Sasha to London. A driver in a Land Rover was waiting to take me to Château de la Garoupe, Boris’s Italianate villa dominating the Cap, with a magnificent view of the Bay of Nice. Although he had owned it for more than three years, he hadn’t had the time to renovate it. Much of the decor in the two-story, turn-of-the-century house remained from its previous owners, giving the place an Edwardian flavor.

We spent the evening discussing the would-be foundation over a candlelight dinner in a hall decked with dark, archaic mirrors. The next morning, as I ate breakfast with him and his wife, Lena, Boris shocked us with the news that he was about to leave for Moscow “for a few hours” to answer his summons “as a witness” in the newly reopened Aeroflot case.

It was clear to me that if Boris went, he would be arrested. The summons had been issued ten days earlier, along with one to Goose, who was accused of defrauding Gazprom of $300 million via a loan to NTV. A few days prior to that, Putin had told
Le Figaro
that he had a “cudgel” he planned to use on the two media magnates, “just once, but on the head.” Goose announced that he would ignore his summons and remain in Spain. But Boris, in a bout of apparent madness, wanted to go. His plane was waiting at the airport. I literally pulled him out of his car.

“Boris, are you insane? Didn’t they tell you that they would put you in jail if you did not give up ORT? Why are you going there? You have nothing to prove!”

“They won’t dare. It would be too blatant. If I don’t go, it would look like an admission of guilt on Aeroflot.”

It didn’t make any sense to me. Just a week earlier Sasha had fled, in fear of his life.

“Boris, did not you yourself tell Marina a month ago that they would kill Sasha?”

“With Sasha it is different. Putin considers Sasha one of their own, a traitor.”