Death of a Dissident (50 page)

Three months after Yushenkov, Yuri Schekochihin, the crusading journalist from
Novaya Gazeta
and a member of the Public Commission, died suddenly from an unexplained “allergic reaction.” His medical chart ended up “classified.” His colleagues and his family suspected poisoning related to his numerous investigations of the FSB.

“See,” said Sasha when we learned of Schekochihin’s mysterious death, “I told you, didn’t I?”

Sasha was an oper, not a scientist. He did not believe in coincidences. In retrospect, he had a point.

Moscow, April 30, 2003: The prosecutor general’s office announces indictments as the result of its now-closed investigation into the apartment house bombings. According to the indictments, nine Islamic fighters carried out the bombings. Five of them were already dead, including the Jordanian-born warlord, Amir Khattab, killed by a poisoned letter delivered to him by an FSB double agent. Two others remained at large, including Achemez Gochiyayev, the mastermind of the attacks. Two men were in custody. Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Adam Dekkushev would stand trial on charges of terrorism. Boris Berezovsky dismissed the prosecutors’ findings as ‘’absolute rubbish.”

On May 15 I landed in Istanbul in a last-ditch effort to make contact with Gochiyayev. For some weeks prior to that, the man who called himself his representative had negotiated with Felshtinsky. This time, for the full story, including a personal interview with Gochiyayev, he demanded money. He started at $3 million. He quickly reduced his price to $500,000; a few days later he asked for $100,000, saying that it was his last offer. Felshtinsky could not convince him on the phone that he was saying no because he meant no, not as a way to bring down the price.

We were pretty sure that Gochiyayev was no longer his own master, that he was being handled somehow. First, he could not have gotten into Turkey on his own, without someone providing money and false documents, as he was obviously on Interpol’s watch list. Second, the negotiator who called Felshtinsky displayed a level of sophistication indicative of a serious underlying effort, an organization of some sort. When Boris asked my opinion, I was absolutely against any money being paid, as this could be a trap with catastrophic consequences. I volunteered to go on a second unpredictable mission to Turkey to find out.

Akhmed Zakayev, with whom I discussed the trip, supplied me with a bodyguard, an Istanbul-based Chechen, who was waiting for me outside the Hilton Hotel. We got into a yellow Turkish cab. As we approached the walled entrance of the Kempinski Hotel on the bank of the Bosporus, where I was to meet my contact, I felt a bout of nostalgia for my adventures with Sasha three years earlier.

“I can’t go in there,” said my guard. “I will wait outside. See, I have a weapon here,” he slapped himself in the waist, “and they have metal detectors at the entrance.”

That’s reassuring, I thought. That means that whoever I meet will be metal-free, too.

My interlocutor was about forty-five and spoke an educated version of Russian. He looked like a schoolteacher, not a guerrilla. They were asking for money, he said, because they had to resettle Gochiyayev, who was a hunted man. He suggested we think of it as a witness relocation program.

“We cannot pay you a penny,” said I. “We do not know who you are. No offense intended, but you may be a group on some official terrorist list, or a front for the FSB. If we pay you, we expose ourselves. As for Gochiyayev, with Russian charges looming over him, he is doomed anyway. Sooner or later he will be caught. His only chance is to tell the truth and hope that we will help establish his innocence.”

“I have to consult my superior,” said the schoolteacher. “I will be back in an hour.”

While he was gone I had a lonely lunch, watching ships sailing up the Bosporus toward Russian shores. Finally he returned.

“If you are concerned about who we are, my boss says hello. He met you at a dacha near Moscow.”

It was his way of telling me that he was speaking for Movladi Udugov, the former Chechen deputy prime minister turned Islamist ideologue. No way could we pay him.

“Look,” I said, “your boss, knowing who he is and who I am, knows that there can be no question of money changing hands. The best I can suggest is this: we find a newspaper in London that might be interested in paying for Gochiyayev’s interview. For material like this, they might pay a lot of money. If your boss agrees, call me or send me an e-mail.” We said goodbye. They never called or e-mailed.

With the Gochiyayev trail running cold, the prospects for our investigation looked bleak. After the death of Yushenkov and Schekochihin, the Public Commission was effectively defunct. Kovalyov was too old and too busy with his Chechnya work to devote much energy to investigating the bombings. In fact, he was about to retire; he had said that he would not run for another term in the December 2003 Duma election. Nobody else on the Commission’s roster was all that motivated. Only Trepashkin still continued his lonely pursuit.

Sometime in July, Sasha called: “Come to London, I have something new.”

It turned out that Trepashkin had had another breakthrough. He had just sent a courier with a stack of documents to Sasha.

By studying old press clippings, Trepashkin had uncovered the initial composite sketch of the Guryanova Street bomber that the police had released immediately after the attack on September 9. Two days later, the papers had published an image of the prime suspect, a different man; it was a photo of Gochiyayev. The initial sketch was quite elaborate, and Trepashkin thought that he knew the man: Vladimir Romanovich, a suspect in the Chechen-led extortion gang that Trepashkin had investigated seven years earlier when he was still employed by the FSB. At the time he was told by his superiors to leave Romanovich alone because he was working for the FSB.

Trepashkin showed the sketch to a former FSB colleague who
knew the agent’s files. The man agreed: it was Romanovich, an undercover agent who specialized in penetrating ethnic Caucasian groups in Moscow’s criminal underground. Romanovich had been killed by a hit-and-run driver in Cyprus in the summer of 2000, several months after the Moscow blasts.

In July 2003, Tanya Morozova visited Russia to see her grandparents. While in Moscow, using her status as a crime victim, she visited the official FSB investigator, accompanied by Trepashkin as her attorney. The meeting was inconclusive, but Trepashkin was allowed to look through the case file. There was no Romanovich sketch in it.

Trepashkin then sought the source of the Romanovich sketch that had been released to the press on September 9, 1999. He found a man named Mark Blumenfeld, the former property manager in Tanya’s building on Guryanova Street. Yes, said Blumenfeld, on the morning after the bombing he described to local police the man who had rented the ground-floor space. Yet two days later, he said, he was brought to Lefortovo, where FSB officers pressured him to change his story and “recognize” another photograph, that of Gochiyayev.

This was good stuff. Sasha was jubilant: “I told you, Trepashkin is top-notch! Now we will get the bastards.”

Trepashkin wrote that he wanted us to keep his discovery quiet until the trial of the two bombing suspects, scheduled to open on October 31, at which he would represent Tanya and Aliona.

Moscow, October 23: Interfax reports that former FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin has been arrested and charged with illegal weapons possession. Trepashkin is detained in the Moscow area after police find an unlicensed pistol in his car. Trepashkin insists that the weapon was planted
.

As it turned out, Trepashkin, every inch the systematic investigator, had planned for contingencies. A few days before his arrest he gave a copy of the Romanovich file to a reporter from
Moscovskiye Novosty
,
Igor Korolkov. After Trepashkin’s arrest, Korolkov rushed to Blumenfeld to verify the story. Everything checked out.

“At Lefortovo they showed me a photograph of a certain person,” said Blumenfeld in a taped interview, “and they said that this was Gochiyayev and that it was supposedly to him that I had rented out the basement. I answered that I had never seen that man. But they insistently recommended to me that I identify Gochiyayev. I understood what they wanted, did not argue further, and signed the statement.”

Korolkov’s story ran, but it was the end of 2003 and Putin’s media revolution was complete. All television and virtually all print media were under Kremlin control. Korolkov’s November 11 story in
Moscovskiye Novosty
was ignored in Russia.

Predictably, it was also discounted in the White House. And yet, among those few who were interested, our conspiracy theories were gradually gaining credence. Speaking on the Senate floor on November 4, 2003, U.S. Senator John McCain declared, “There remain credible allegations that Russia’s FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks.”