Death of a Dissident (7 page)

But it was easier said than done. Ostankino was a colossal, clumsy structure, overgrown with innumerable useless auxiliary services and subdivisions, with a swollen staff and an astronomical deficit of $170 million a year. Advertising revenues were less than a fifth of that.

Ostankino was a black hole in the government’s budget, a structure that simply could not be salvaged. It would be easier to shut it down and start from scratch. This was just what Berezovsky proposed to Yeltsin’s advisers: to grant the license for Channel One to a new joint-stock company, in which 51 percent would belong to the state and 49 percent to private funders, controlled by Berezovsky, who would build a management structure that would run the network at a profit, or at least reduce losses to a manageable level.

The presidential decree dismantling Ostankino and creating ORT in its place in early December 1994 went almost unnoticed, as all eyes were then on the nascent conflict with the Chechen separatists. But three months later ORT dramatically announced its presence by calling a moratorium on advertising.

Berezovsky’s goal was to cut all ties between the Ostankino studios and the shadow structures that sold advertising time. Sasha’s description of the dilemma of privatization held true: the network lost hundreds of millions, while major graft was outsourced to third-party organizations that did its selling. Even by modest estimates advertisers paid five times as much as the network actually received from them. Most of the money was handed over in envelopes full of cash, and it remained in the pockets of producers, middlemen, and
gangsters. The intention of Boris’s new management was to use a hiatus of a few months to build an in-house sales department, cutting out all the middlemen.

The moratorium was announced on February 20, 1995. On March 1, Vlad Listyev, ORT’s new director general, was gunned down by an assassin at the door of his Moscow home. Listyev was Russia’s Larry King, its most popular TV host, the darling of the country. In mourning, every television station in the nation went off the air for twenty-four hours. The entire country was in shock.

The morning after the murder, an emergency meeting was convened in the office of the deputy director of the FSB. Sasha, a major, was the lowest-ranking officer in the room. He told the assembled generals that he believed Listyev’s murder and the attempt on Berezovsky eight months earlier were the work of the same group, the Kurgan gang, which had penetrated Moscow’s police department.

“Suddenly, I got a message on my pager from Berezovsky,” Sasha told me, staring into the foggy Turkish night. “‘Call immediately.’ I notified Trofimov and he said, ‘Go call him.’”

“Who is Trofimov?”

Sasha looked at me as if I were a schoolboy. “Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, chief of the Moscow regional FSB. He was close to Korzhakov and was thought to have a direct line to the Kremlin. Well, I called Boris and he said that they’d come to arrest him. ‘Who?’ I asked. He said, ‘Moscow police,’ and he named some names. I ran back to the office and said, ‘The very people I was talking about have come for him: the Kurgan connection in the police.’ Trofimov ordered me to go there immediately and clear things up.”

It’s a stone’s throw from the Lubyanka HQ to The LogoVAZ Club. There Sasha discovered eight armed policemen who told him that they were ordered to deliver Berezovsky to the station to be questioned in the murder of Listyev. A camera crew from NTV was setting up in front of the entrance; someone had tipped them off that Berezovsky was going to be arrested.

“I knew that he could not be allowed to be taken away by these
cops, because by morning there would be a report that he’d had a heart attack or was killed trying to escape, and you wouldn’t be able to prove anything,” Sasha continued. “I pulled out my service gun and FSB ID and yelled, ‘Move along! This is our investigation and we’ll question him ourselves.’ ‘We have our orders,’ they snapped back. After some arguing they called their bosses, and I called mine. Trofimov said, ‘Don’t give him up under any circumstances. I’m sending reinforcements. How many are there?’”

Fifteen minutes later twenty of Trofimov’s men arrived with their guns. The incident ended when an official police investigator showed up and took a statement from Berezovsky, with Sasha standing guard by his side.

At the time, I had heard that the standoff at LogoVAZ was part of ongoing hostilities between the Moscow city government and the Kremlin. Tensions were running high, almost to the point of violence. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a powerful city boss, fought with First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais over the privatization of city property. The city police naturally worked on behalf of City Hall, and the FSB for the Kremlin.

“I heard that the confrontation at LogoVAZ was part of politics—City Hall versus the Kremlin—and that the mayor tried to use the murder of Listyev as an excuse to get rid of Boris. Isn’t that so? What did the Kurgan gang have to do with it?” I asked.

“It might be,” Sasha replied. “I didn’t understand politics at all then. I’m an oper, and I followed the evidence, not the politics. But Listyev was not murdered by the mayor. And the mayor was not the one who tried to blow up Boris in ’94. So you can’t get away from the mob. And the cops are much closer to the mob than they are to their own higher-ups, believe me. I knew for sure that the cops who had come for Boris in ’95 were up to no good. But you are right: many thought at the time that it was the mayor versus the Kremlin.”

He paused for a bit, glanced over at me, and added, “You and Boris, you’re always thinking politics, but you don’t see the people—that’s your big mistake. In our work the individual is the most important thing. I trusted Boris right away, and Trofimov. I didn’t trust Luzhkov, and I never trusted Korzhakov, even though he and
Trofimov were friends. That time in LogoVAZ, I was protecting Boris and I felt Trofimov backing me up, the two people I trusted. I couldn’t have cared in the least about the Kremlin or the mayor.”

Listyev’s killers were never found. The case became just another of a dozen legendary contract killings of the 1990s, from the shooting of the liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova, to the bombing of the investigative journalist Dmitry Kholodov, to the poisoning of the prominent banker Ivan Kivelidi.

Nevertheless, ORT went on the air as planned and kept its three-month moratorium on advertising. As for Sasha and Boris, they developed a bond shared only by people who have faced mortal danger together—not friendship or attachment, but a special kind of loyalty that no other can surpass.

Boris’s first instinct was to repay Sasha for saving his life by simply giving him money—completely typical for Moscow in those days. But he had already learned enough about Sasha to know he wouldn’t take it and might be offended. So he decided to give him something that most former Soviet citizens could only dream about: he would take him on a trip abroad, combining the pleasant with the useful. After the attempt on his life and the murder of Listyev, security was not an idle concern, and Sasha was someone he was happy to have around.

A single phone call to Korzhakov was enough to arrange an assignment for Sasha, and with a “cover document” in his pocket—a diplomatic passport in the name of Alexander Volkov, second secretary in the Russian Embassy in Bern—Sasha flew in Berezovsky’s private jet for his first trip away from his homeland, in March 1995.

He called Marina from Switzerland and told her, thrilled, “You won’t believe it: they don’t lock the doors in the hotel and the cops are as polite as your academics!”

“You’ve had time to deal with the cops?” Marina asked in surprise.

“I’ll tell you when I get back,” Sasha said.

He gave her presents of French perfume when he returned and
denim outfits for Tolik in graduated sizes for the next five years—an incredible luxury by Moscow standards. “Who knows what may happen, but at least one problem is taken care of,” he laughed.

He also told her the story of the Swiss cops. Dealing with them made an indelible impression on Sasha. Boris had been driving a sports Mercedes, with his wife, Lena, in the front and Sasha in the small backseat. With his Moscow habit of paying no attention to the rules, Boris drove at a wild speed, crossing the solid line on more than one occasion. They wound up in the hands of two exceedingly polite policemen. In Moscow, “resolving” a case like that would entail a $20 bill folded into one’s driver’s license. But that was out of the question here: the group went to the police station in the Alpine town of Chateau d’Oex. Boris, Lena, and Sasha were locked up in a cell with a steel door and a peephole while the police took their papers away.

It didn’t occur to Sasha that their salvation was his cover identity. The polite policemen returned two hours later. “We must apologize,” they said. “We have no right to detain you, you have diplomatic immunity. It took some time for your embassy to send confirmation, but now everything is in order.” They returned his fake passport, expressing no surprise that the second secretary in the Russian Embassy spoke no foreign languages.

In retrospect, Sasha’s presence in Switzerland might have been more than just a cursory precaution for Boris. Many years later a Russian defector to the West who had been privy to the goings-on in the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, told me that the Moscow center was extremely alarmed by Berezovsky’s plan to privatize Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, which had been a traditional cover for hundreds of spies all over the world. So, in early 1995, a secret cable went out to the Geneva station to monitor Berezovsky’s visit, which, as the SVR suspected, had to do with setting up a financial and sales center in Lausanne to place the airline’s cash flow out of the control of the spy agency. The intelligence report about that visit was the origin of the famous “Aeroflot case” that came to haunt Berezovsky many years later.

February 8, 1995: Russian troops finally take Grozny. Twenty-seven thousand civilians have been killed in the battle, and the city has been leveled by massive aerial and artillery bombardments. Russian forces carpet bomb many other towns. Civilians cannot escape. Aid groups are refused access. Chechen fighters retreat into the mountains and start a guerrilla war
.