Death of a Dissident (5 page)

My own background was just the opposite: I was a secure child with loving parents in Moscow. We considered the KGB to be evil incarnate, and I never did any sports. Being drafted into the army in my youth would have been a catastrophe. “If you don’t study hard, they’ll haul you into the army,” my father, a professor of microbiology, used to say.

I asked Sasha what he had done in Kontora. He caught the tone of suspicion in my question.

“I was a young lieutenant when I joined the KGB,” he said. “Hadn’t seen anything in life except the army, and I thought I was going to be protecting people from harm. That the Agency had a
dark past—the Gulag, you know, millions of victims—I didn’t learn until the 1990s, when they started to write about it.”

First Sasha served in the Division of Economic Security, and then in the Anti-Terrorist Center (ATC), always working on the same thing: organized crime, assassinations, kidnappings, and criminal links in the police. His career advanced, and he married his high school sweetheart and had two children. Unfortunately, just like his parents’ brief attempt, it wasn’t a happy marriage.

Sasha was an operative detective, an “oper” in the trade lingo. He kept secret files on mobsters, studying their personal affairs, their networks, their contacts with businessmen and politicians. What Sasha knew—and how he knew it—was rarely revealed in court. Yet to official investigators, his stuff was priceless. He solved crimes before charges were made. He worked behind the scenes. He eavesdropped. He recruited and ran agents.

“‘KGB agent’ sounds horrible to people. They think of snitches reporting on their friends or spies in America,” Sasha continued. “But that’s not true. And not fair. Most of our agents are undercover, working inside gangs, and they are real heroes. They know that if they’re blown, they are as good as dead. My agents were my best friends, and they kept dealing with me and they helped my family when I was imprisoned. So there are agents and agents.

“Do you understand the difference between an oper and a formal investigator?” He was getting excited as he explained the intelligence business to me. Scenes from his career flew past. He did what he loved and apparently did it well. “The investigator follows the tracks of the crime. In his book, there are victims, suspects, witnesses, and so on. And he collects evidence, legally processed and packaged. But an oper like myself deals with a would-be criminal, my operational ‘object,’ and I want to know everything about him before he even commits a crime so that he can be stopped in time, or at least more easily caught. My stuff is not ‘evidence,’ it’s ‘operative information,’ see?”

Most of the people who fell under his purview—murderers, bank robbers, kidnappers, drug dealers—were not pleasant folk, and he had no regrets about his work. There was one exception, though: at
one point his object became the human rights activist Sergei Grigoryants, whom I also knew. It was his only political case prior to 1997, when he was told to target Boris Berezovsky.

It was during the first Chechen War. The famous “Fifth Line,” the Fifth Chief Directorate of the KGB that had dealt with dissidents in the Soviet era, was long gone. People like Grigoryants ended up under the eye of the ATC, an example of how the war pushed Russia back into the old ways of the USSR.

Grigoryants was investigating reports of a massacre of civilians by federal troops in the Chechen village of Samashki on April 12, 1995. Toward the end of that year, he was supposed to travel abroad for a human rights conference. He was bringing videotaped evidence of Russian troops shooting civilians in Samashki. Sasha’s unit was brought in for an unusual assignment: to plant some shotgun shells in Grigoryants’s companion’s bag at Moscow International Airport so that they would be stopped for a search. During the phony search, his videotapes would be confiscated and “accidentally” damaged.

“That’s the only case I’m ashamed of,” Sasha said.

“I hereby accept your repentance and forgive your sins. Amen,” I joked. “By the way, if you were twenty years older, I could have been one of your objects.”

I told him how, in the 1970s in Moscow, under the vigilant eye of the KGB, I passed information about political prisoners to Western correspondents. Sasha explained to me the nitty-gritty of how an oper would have kept tabs on me. The lecture would have been immensely useful twenty years ago, and was still amusing today. Notwithstanding different backgrounds, we had a lot in common.

Marina met Sasha on her thirty-first birthday, June 15, 1993. She had been divorced for four years, a free and self-confident woman, enjoying life, not seeking a serious relationship. She lived in her old room in an apartment with her parents, retired industrial engineers, in a huge residential complex just south of the center of Moscow. She had never met anyone from the “services” before. When her best
friend, Lena, told her that she and her husband wanted to bring an agent along to her birthday party, Marina’s eyes popped: “That’s some strange present you have for me.”

“He’s not like a secret agent at all,” Lena protested. “He’s funny. He has a great sense of humor, you’ll like him. Besides, he saved us.” She explained how Sasha was helping her husband fight off racketeers who were extorting money from his business.

“All right, then, bring your KGB man,” Marina said.

Sasha’s interest in Marina was already piqued because Lena had told him that she was a dancer. In his line of work he met all kinds of people, but never women who danced for a living. Marina took up dancing while still in college, where she was studying oil engineering. After graduation she decided that the oil business was not for her and went into ballroom dancing full-time, even winning some competitions. By 1993, she was teaching dance and aerobics.

That night the guests stayed late. They talked about the final resolution of Lena’s husband’s problem, planning for Sasha to arrest the extortionists as money changed hands. Marina, who had loved crime stories from childhood, could not believe her eyes: could this fellow, “light somehow, radiant, and as emotional as a child,” really handle the bandits who had recently beaten Lena’s husband and threatened to break his legs if he did not pay up?

To Marina, despite his cheery confidence, Sasha seemed “uncared for, unanchored somehow.” When the subject of divorce happened to come up, Sasha said that he was married and would never divorce because of the children. Marina had a rule against dating married men, yet the way he said it made her feel that not all was well in his family.

She saw him again in a week. Sasha was leaving on vacation after successfully arresting the gang who had terrorized her friends, and Lena called her to join them for a farewell party at the train station. To her surprise, Sasha was alone, no wife or children around.

“His wife kicked him out. Because of us,” Lena whispered into her ear. “They were supposed to go away last week, but he stayed on to finish our case. So she made a scene, and when he came home that evening, all his things were piled up outside the door. He hasn’t been
home in a week. And this isn’t the first time. If not for the kids, he would have left her ages ago.”

“Well, so long, see you again,” Sasha called from the window as his train departed.

Lena gave her a sly look. “Just remember that you can only be serious with this guy. He’s incapable of quick affairs. So don’t even think about it.”

“I wasn’t even considering it,” Marina said.

Sasha showed up again about three weeks later. He had asked his wife, Natasha, for a divorce.

Slowly and shyly, he began courting Marina. “Suddenly he would show up at my door with flowers, then vanish for a few days, only to unexpectedly call and invite me to the movies.” She wasn’t sure why she put up with it, but she was as hesitant to reject as to encourage him. He too was in no hurry to rush the situation.

“Sasha knew how to wait, but he never gave up on what he wanted.”

Once, when he asked her for a date, she told him she had already made plans with a girlfriend to go to a concert. Just before the intermission, when the applause had died out, she felt a light tap on her shoulder: Sasha sat right behind her, smiling, with a plastic bag full of bananas in his hands.

“I must go away for a while, so I wanted to leave you with a supply,” he explained. On their first date, she had told him that she loved bananas.

Sasha had been transferred to the Anti-Terrorist Center and this was his first trip for the new job. With his boss, he was heading to the North Caucasus republic of Adygeya to hunt a major gangster, the local mob king, whose gang was responsible for several killings and kidnappings in Moscow.

“After the concert, he walked me home and said that he did not want to go. I knew that he meant because of me, and that made me feel good. I didn’t want him to go either. Gradually I grew accustomed to him being around. He exuded reliability and comfort. I may not have been looking for that, but when he left, I realized that I missed him.”

Sasha called from the airport when he got back. He spent that night at her place and never left. It was early August. Her parents were at their country dacha. Sasha and Marina had the apartment all to themselves. When her parents came back, he said that he would move into an apartment owned by the FSB, but Marina’s mother insisted that he move in with them; she “had accepted him as a son from the start.”

“When I think about why we were so happy, it’s because we could be ourselves. No need to pretend, to worry about being attractive, there was nothing to conquer and nothing to prove. That was obvious to us from the first day, and it was so natural. Neither of us had ever thought this was possible, and we were amazed by it to our last day together.”

In October, Marina announced that she was pregnant. It was one more miracle from Sasha: this was her very first pregnancy, after a previous marriage and medical advice that she needed fertility treatment. Sasha was thrilled by the news. “Now I can be sure that you won’t leave me,” he said.

“Usually you hear that kind of reasoning from women,” Marina retorted, with a smile.

As she later explained, “The traditional roles in our family were often reversed: he allowed me to be the boss in most things, perhaps as compensation for his overly ‘masculine’ work.”

But she could always sense that he had another side of him, very hard, which he tried not to show her and which, she said, “turned on in extraordinary situations, like the auxiliary shift in a four-wheel drive.” He would leave to her all decisions about their apartment renovation, yet when he planned their escape from Russia, she did not have a hint of what was going on until the very last moment; he took it all upon himself, and when he finally told her about it there was no point in arguing, and no time to try.

The first time she saw the other side of him was when she went to a driving school not long after he had moved in. As the classes came to an end, the instructor announced that those who did not
want to bother taking the actual driving test could bring in $200 and give it to him “for the cops,” and then drop by the school to pick up their license soon thereafter. Marina was a pretty good driver and she decided to take the test. The traffic patrolman flunked her deliberately. He made it clear that she should pay up, or flunk continuously. As he put it, “The next test is in a week, lady. Now, it seems, we’ll be driving around once a week.”

In a panic, Marina ran to the school. The instructor, shaking his head sadly, said, “You’re not in the group anymore, so it will be $300 now.”

Sasha was infuriated. “Do you really think that I fight corruption day and night for you to pay bribes to those cops?”

He went with her to the next test, called the traffic patrolman aside, said a few quiet words to him, flashed his FSB card, and gave him a look that Marina had never seen before. The cop blanched and couldn’t think of anything better than to offer to pass her without even bothering with the test. Sasha grew even angrier, snapping, “I’ll stay in the car and we’ll test her together. If she passes, she passes, if she doesn’t, she’ll be back.”

After the test, Sasha instantly switched back to his normal, easy-going, boyish self, smiling and slapping the patrolman on the back. Marina never forgot that look. She was not afraid of it; she was glad to have it at her disposal, “just in case.”