Death of a Dissident (46 page)

“This is to be expected,” Yushenkov said to cheer up Aliona over lunch in the congressional cafeteria. “Just imagine that we’d come to Washington, say, in 1944, to complain about Stalin. We wouldn’t get a sympathetic hearing, would we? Uncle Joe was Roosevelt’s favorite ally, so he could get away with anything. It took Americans some time to realize that he was a more serious threat than Hitler. A very similar situation exists now. Still, it’s important that we say what we have to
say. Some years later they will remember our visit when they realize what Putin is all about.”

But some people did take us seriously. After the screening for the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, our tapes were snatched up like hotcakes.

“Don’t be discouraged,” an aide to one of the most powerful men on the Hill told us. “We just cannot go out and say that the president of Russia is a mass murderer. But it is important that we know it. Your stuff is serious. I will make sure that the senator sees it.”

The most sympathetic hearing we got was from the pundits who packed the conference hall at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. It was an act of courage for Blair Ruble, Kennan’s director, to let us show the film in his domain; other major venues in Washington had refused.

“Look, we need to protect our operation in Moscow, we have a branch there,” another think-tanker had told me when I had called to inquire. “The most important thing for us is access, so we don’t want the risk of Russians cutting us off. And they watch.”

They watched indeed. The Kennan screening was advertised around town and open to the public. I looked at the registry: there were two guests from the Russian Embassy. I spotted them easily—the KGB stamp was instantly recognizable—in the second row, close enough to the podium to get good-quality audio on their hidden recorders.

“Everyone knows I am not an admirer of Berezovsky,” spoke the dean of Kremlinology, Peter Reddaway, after the film. “But the film is convincing and Putin must respond to the allegations to reassure us that he is not what he appears to be.” The two embassy types listened with stone faces.

Yushenkov’s tour lasted a week and included screenings in New York and Boston, at places like Columbia and Harvard. Invariably he made a strong impression. He was a good speaker, and he projected passion and conviction. Aliona was obviously smitten; she listened to him with her face raised and eyes fixed as if he was a sage, and they spent hours talking when she took him on sightseeing tours.

A year later, Yushenkov was assassinated in Moscow by an unknown gunman. Aliona called me from Denver.

“You know what we talked about during all those hours we spent together?” she said. “It was about Russia. He was in love with Russia. He recited poetry—Yesenin, Lermontov—that I had never known. Actually, he transformed me. After I’d realized that it was the FSB that bombed our house, I had a problem with Russia. Perhaps he sensed that. He said, ‘You may never go back, but you should know that that scum that killed your mother, they are not Russia. You and your sister are.’ He promised that he would get to the bottom of it. And he knew what he was up against. He was the greatest, the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.”

Tbilisi, February 1, 2002: Russian Security Council Secretary Vladimir Rushailo arrives in the former Soviet republic of Georgia for talks about the situation in Pankisi Gorge, the region bordering Chechnya. The Russians claim that the Gorge is used as a training and staging ground for the Chechen guerrillas. Rushailo demands that the Chechens be ousted from Georgia and threatens military action. Akhmed Zakayev, deputy prime minister of Maskhadov’s government, says that there are no Chechen bases in Georgia, only eleven thousand to twelve thousand refugees. Georgia requests U.S. military assistance. On February 28 the Pentagon reveals a plan to send two hundred military advisers to Georgia. Zakayev welcomes the arrival of Americans: “The Chechen side is eager to cooperate with any force waging war on terrorism.”

On the day Yushenkov arrived in Washington, Yuri Felshtinsky and Sasha Litvinenko landed in Tbilisi. Sasha, wearing dark glasses, went through passport control as Edwin Redwald Carter, civis Britannicus. Yuri went through separately, and they reunited in a room at the Sheraton Metekhi Palace, where they were joined by the head of a local security company, “the most reliable and best connected in Georgia,” according to Boris’s security advisers in London. They had come on a secret and dangerous mission: to meet up with the man
who claimed to be Achemez Gochiyayev, the FSB’s main suspect in the Moscow bombings.

“There is a notion of a ‘beacon’ in our trade,” Sasha explained to me. “After the big splash with the book and the film, we became a beacon. It was only a matter of time before someone contacted us.” Sure enough, a few days after the screening, one of Boris’s aides received a phone call from Georgia. After that, Felshtinsky handled the negotiations using a clean, pay-as-you-go mobile phone. Yes, of course, he would be interested to talk to Gochiyayev. He agreed to wait on a certain date at a particular street corner in Tbilisi. Felshtinsky would be holding a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
. The man who would meet him would be wearing a green baseball cap. He would take him to see Gochiyayev.

“We can guarantee your security within the perimeter of the capital,” said the security man. “But we cannot guarantee anything if you go out of town. So don’t. Out of town, the only way to protect you would be to send a platoon in a personnel carrier. As an American you are a prime target for kidnappers.”

Equipped with a copy of the
Herald Tribune
, Felshtinsky went to meet the contact. Sasha watched from a distance in case of trouble.

“If you are ready, let’s go. I’ve got a car,” said the man in the green baseball cap, a middle-aged Chechen, after they exchanged code words.

“Go where?” inquired Felshtinsky.

“Pankisi Gorge.”

“No, I can’t. Why don’t you bring him here?”

“Impossible, the place is filled with FSB. The Gorge is the only place where they don’t go. We’ve got to go there.”

After twenty minutes of arguing, it became clear that a face-to-face meeting with Gochiyayev was impossible. Felshtinsky brought the man to a hotel—not the one where they were staying—where Sasha had rented a room for cash, expecting this kind of contingency. Sasha knocked on the door almost as soon as they entered the room.

“How many cars do you have?” he asked the Chechen.

“One.”

“We have one, too,” said Sasha. “And I have counted five loitering around. That means that there are at least three from Kontora.”

“You see?” said the Chechen. “I told you, the Gorge is the only safe place.”

They gave the Chechen a tape recorder, a video camera, and a questionnaire for Gochiyayev that Sasha had prepared. They agreed to meet the next day, when the Chechen would bring Gochiyayev’s statement.

The Chechen called Felshtinsky’s cell phone three hours later. “I am at home,” he said, “but I had company—as far as they could go. You watch out. See you tomorrow.”

The meeting never took place. Instead, at six in the morning, the security man appeared.

“You are going home,” he declared. “First plane. Leaves in two hours. We cannot guarantee anything, the way things are developing.”

They were rushed to the airport in a convoy of Jeeps. A dozen guards surrounded them as they entered the terminal.

“My people will be on the plane until you get off in Frankfurt,” their bodyguard said. “From then on you are on your own.”

As Felshtinsky and Sasha later learned, the previous night in Tbilisi the car that was assigned to them had been ambushed. The driver was killed.

The Chechen go-between resurfaced two weeks later via e-mail. The tape and the questionnaire were ready, he wrote. He wanted to keep the equipment for further use. He told them how to get in touch with a contact in Paris to get the material.

Tbilisi, Georgia, July 16: Adam Dekkushev, another of the suspects in the 1999 bombings, is extradited to Russia following his arrest by Georgian authorities. Upon arrival in Moscow he is transferred to Lefortovo prison
.

On July 25, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko reported their findings to the Public Commission, an unofficial body set up by Yushenkov after the
Duma voted down his motion to formally investigate the matter. That is, the report was virtual: the Commission gathered in Moscow with the press present; the two sleuths were in London, talking by video link. By then, the Commission had acquired a new chairman, the widely respected human rights activist and Duma deputy Sergei Kovalyov, with Yushenkov as his deputy. In the twenty-member group there were five Duma members, including the MP-journalist Yuri Schekochihin. That was about all the parliamentary support Yushenkov could muster after two years of the Kremlin’s artful use of carrots and sticks with the legislature. Mikhail Trepashkin was present as an adviser.

That Felshtinsky and Litvinenko were able to find the man who was Number One on the FSB’s Most Wanted list was by itself a slap at Kontora. The substance of Gochiyayev’s testimony as related by Sasha kept everyone in Moscow spellbound for nearly two hours.

First, Sasha said, there was no doubt that the man who sent the testimony was indeed Gochiyayev. This was confirmed by a top British forensic expert who compared the witness’s photographs with the one on the FSB Web site. Should they wish, the authorities could further verify his identity by the extensive personal information, such as his residence and army service details, offered in the testimony, and by an analysis of the handwriting of his six-page statement.

In his statement Gochiyayev admitted that the ground-floor warehouse spaces in the bombed-out buildings had been rented by his construction company using his ID. But he insisted that he did not do it himself. He claimed to have been tricked by a business partner, an ethnic Russian whom he now believed had been working for the FSB.

“He said he discovered a good opportunity of distributing food supplies and offered a joint venture. First I ordered for him a stock of mineral water…. He sold it and paid on time. Then he said that he would need to rent warehousing facilities in the southeast [of Moscow], where he had many buyers. I helped him get space at Guryanova St., Kashirskoye Hwy., Borisov Ponds and Kapotnya,” Gochiyayev wrote.