Death of a Dissident (55 page)

He was brought to an investigator’s office in Grozny to sign a statement, the one submitted by Russia to the London court, only
with Dushuyev’s name blacked out. Then he was put in front of a TV camera operated by men in military uniform, where he repeated his allegations. On December 15 his “interview” was shown on NTV as a report by “special correspondents” from Chechnya. Two months later he was tried for belonging to an “illegal armed formation” and given a suspended sentence. He was released on January 29.

Judge Workman stated the obvious: that this turn of events was “dramatic.” He demanded from the prosecutor the full, unredacted testimony of Dushuyev and an explanation for why the original testimony did not mention that it was obtained while in custody, as the law required.

Sitting next to me in the crammed, spellbound courtroom, Sasha beamed. It had been he, a.k.a. Edwin Redwald Carter, who had arranged for Dushuyev’s safe delivery into the hands of British lawyers.

The other charge against Zakayev, that he had shot off the fingers of Ivan Solovyov, also fell away. This time it wasn’t Sasha who helped undermine the witness, but Anna Politkovskaya, in a story in
Novaya Gazeta
, which emerged after Solovyov testified. She wrote that Ivan Solovyov was actually well-known in Zakayev’s hometown in Chechnya. People had seen him with fingers missing—apparently lost to frostbite—back in 1992, six years before the alleged shooting episode. The story also said that according to one of his drinking buddies, before departing for London, he had bragged about making a deal with the FSB to testify against Zakayev in exchange for “plenty of booze.”

Zakayev’s lawyer completely destroyed Solovyov on the witness stand. On November 13, 2003, Judge Workman ruled for Zakayev.

The Kremlin lost both bids to extract its London enemies through the legal system.

Moscow, January 2004: The campaign for Russia’s presidential elections, scheduled for March 14, is in full swing. In the aftermath of a scandal concerning a conscript’s death from abuse, President Putin pledges to work for the abolition of the draft. The Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers claims that 3,500 conscripts
die every year from hazing, malnutrition, and disease, among the 1.1 million-member Russian army
.

To an outside observer, there was never much of a chance that Ivan Rybkin could defeat Putin’s bid for reelection. With the Kremlin’s control of the media and the Russian people’s traditional love of a powerful leader, Putin should not have had to bother thinking about Rybkin beating him at the polls. But insiders knew that Rybkin’s campaign was a major concern for the Kremlin. Putin knew that he owed his popularity to the absence of alternative voices, not the success of his policies. There was great popular discontent at the grass-roots level. Moreover, as a KGB veteran, he knew better than anyone that regimes that come into power by trickery are often dissolved by trickery. Central to any plot is a credible, often unexpected pretender. After all, Putin himself came to power by emerging from total obscurity within a few short months. The apartment bombings were his trump card. They could easily become his Achilles’ heel. A national campaign by someone like Rybkin, who would not hesitate to revive the bombing story, was something that he could not discount easily.

Backed by ample cash from Boris and the network of Liberal Russia branches around the country, Rybkin was planning to pick up where Yushenkov had left off. He wooed the protest electorate, particularly the antiwar and antidraft voters. Through his campaign he was aiming at establishing himself as the embodiment of anti-Putin sentiments, with an eye, perhaps, not at winning this election but setting himself up for the succession struggle of 2008. Rybkin’s strategy was to renew his peacemaking mission and attempt once again to paint Putin as a man who was wasting innocent Russian lives in a useless war with an enemy who desired peace, a war that had been started on a controversial pretext. What Rybkin did not realize was the extent to which his opponents were prepared to play dirty.

At the end of January he was approached by an intermediary who, he knew from his time as NSC chief, had contacts with the rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov. The man conveyed
Maskhadov’s suggestion to set up a meeting similar to the one Rybkin had in Zurich with Zakayev in 2002. This, of course, would have been a coup for Rybkin’s campaign. He agreed. The preparations would be handled under the utmost secrecy and the meeting would take place “in or around Chechnya” on terms set by the Chechen side.

According to the plan, Rybkin was supposed to slip out of FSB surveillance and go to Kiev, where he would meet a Maskhadov representative who would take him to the rendezvous.

Rybkin went to London to consult with the London group. All of us liked the idea, but Zakayev said that he was surprised he didn’t know about it. He would need a few days to communicate with Maskhadov to double-check the intermediary’s credentials. Rybkin went back to Moscow, where he got the word from his contact that everything was ready. There was no time to waste. He decided to go ahead without waiting for Zakayev’s confirmation. That was his big mistake. As Zakayev learned later, the invitation to meet with Maskhadov was bogus.

Rybkin’s stopover in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was supposed to be handled by Boris’s local contacts. By then Boris was heavily financing the Orange opposition to the dictatorial regime of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and had extensive contacts there.

As Rybkin told me later, on the evening of February 4, as a precaution to make sure he wasn’t followed, he drove some one hundred miles to the town of Kaluga, the first stop on the Moscow-Kiev railway, to catch up with the overnight express, which arrived in the Ukrainian capital the next morning. And then he vanished.

He was reported missing by his campaign staff on Saturday, February 7. It was the day after the Central Election Commission had formally registered him as a presidential candidate, with his submission of 2 million signatures, as required by the rules.

Rybkin’s disappearance became a sensation. Headlines around the world blared the news: “Russian Presidential Candidate Missing.” Police launched a search. Soon, reports claimed that a “well-informed source” in the FSB had hinted that Rybkin had been spotted relaxing in a sanatorium near Moscow.

Rybkin resurfaced, in Kiev, on February 10. In his first interviews he seemed inconsistent, indeed, incoherent.

“I have a right to devote two or three days to myself,” Rybkin told the Interfax news agency. “I came to Kiev to visit my friends. I switched off my mobile phone and never watched television,” he said, explaining why he was unaware of the media frenzy. When he arrived in Moscow later that day he was more cryptic: “I am back as if from a round of difficult talks in Chechnya, and I am glad to be back.” Asked if he had been detained, the grim-faced candidate said, “It is hard to detain me, but there are good people in Kiev, and I am very grateful to them.” We in London were at a total loss to explain what was going on and were afraid to make inquiries over the phone, fearing to make things even worse.

Sasha immediately came up with a perfectly logical conspiracy theory. But he was hardly the only observer to jump to conclusions. “I think that he came under pressure and was intimidated,” charged the leader of the Democratic Union, Valeria Novodvorskaya. “I believe that as an alternative, they threatened to kill him. I think that Rybkin gave up. Moreover, they offered him a way out. He may have arrived from Kiev but it was the FSB that had bought him a return ticket.”

“He was drugged,” said former KGB general Oleg Kalugin in an interview from Washington. “There are psychotropic substances and not only did the Russian special services not give up using them, but they have developed them further over the last few years.”

“They gave him SP-117,” Sasha argued. “Once you get SP-117, they can do whatever they want with you, drive you around, put you in bed with girls or boys, tape you, and so on. Then you get one pill of antidote and you are normal again and don’t remember what happened.”

“On a tape it would look like a very drunk man having fun,” said Kalugin. “Or he would confess that he works for twenty different foreign intelligence services. Then they would tell him to stop his presidential campaign, all public activity, or they will give the material to the media.”

On February 12 I went to meet Rybkin as he arrived from Moscow at London’s Heathrow Airport. He looked pale and exhausted and sported a resigned smile. His story essentially fit Sasha’s and Kalugin’s
scenario. The next day he repeated it at a press conference at the Kempinski Hotel.

His Ukrainian contacts, he said, had taken him to a flat in Kiev. He was offered some tea and sandwiches and felt drowsy. He did not know what happened next. He woke up four days later in a different apartment, where he was shown a compromising video of himself. As he spoke about it, he seemed close to tears. It was made by “horrible perverts … I don’t know who did it,” except that they spoke Russian. “I know who benefited from this,” he added.

Following the press conference we urged Rybkin to undergo toxicology tests. They detected nothing unusual. His presidential race and political career were over.

On the day of Rybkin’s press conference, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, Chechnya’s exiled former president, was assassinated in Doha, Qatar, when a bomb blew apart his car as he left a mosque with his teenage son. Russia’s security services denied any involvement in the attack.

Doha, Qatar, July 1, 2004: Two Russian secret agents, Anatoly Belashkov and Vasily Bogachyov, are convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for the assassination of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. “The Russian leadership issued an order to assassinate the former Chechen leader,” states the judge at the trial. He adds that the plot had been discussed and set in motion after a meeting at Russian intelligence headquarters in Moscow in August 2003
.

The attack on human rights organizations came in the president’s annual state of the nation address to Parliament, on May 27, 2004. Putin lashed out at “some” nongovernmental organizations, which, instead of representing “the real interests of the people,” are serving “dubious group and commercial interests.” The NGOs, he said, are only interested in securing funds from “foreign bodies and influential Russians.” This is happening “amid a global competitive (economic) war” against Russia, in which “political, economic and
media resources are being used…. Not everyone in the world wants to deal with an independent, strong, and confident Russia.”