Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (35 page)

I heard Maskhadov has turned you away again recently?

Not Maskhadov, his representatives abroad, but I don’t trust them.

Rakhman Dushuyev in Turkey told me that he had received a cassette from Maskhadov saying the President no longer wanted me to call myself his representative, but I did not hear the cassette myself, or talk directly to Maskhadov. I recently had no trouble meeting Kusama and Anzor (Maskhadov’s wife and son) in Dubai. They accepted me. I ate and slept at their house.

Dubai, Turkey, Jordan, Strasbourg. You seem to be travelling all the time. How do you get visas?

I know all the Chechens. I travel to all countries and call on everyone to make peace and unite.

You travelled to Dubai from Baku?

Yes.

You turned up there after the terrorist act in Moscow in October and asked Chechens living there to help you? You told them you were one of the participants in the
Nord-Ost
hostage-taking who had survived, and now urgently needed contacts in the Arab world in order to escape pursuit?

How do you know that?

Chechens in Baku told me, and I read it in the newspapers. Your name is on the list of terrorists who were in
Nord-Ost.
Incidentally, are you suing over that?

No. Why should I? I just asked Yastrzhembsky, “How did that happen?”

What did he say?

“Just ignore it.”

The most recent upward spiral of Khanpash Terkibayev’s vertiginous political career in politics is indeed associated with the disastrous events of October 23–26, 2002, when the hostage-taking at the
Nord-Ost
musical caused the loss of many lives.

Had you known Barayev Junior for long?

Yes. I know everybody in Chechnya.

So did they have any explosives in there?

No, of course not.

After
Nord-Ost
, Khanpash really did become a confidant of Putin’s Presidential Administration. He held every authorisation he needed to enable him to move unobstructed from Maskhadov to Yastrzhembsky. He negotiated on behalf of Putin’s Administration with Deputies of the Chechen Parliament to get them to support a referendum. He obtained guarantees of immunity for the Deputies so they could come to Moscow. It was none other than Khanpash who, as leader of their group, took them to Strasbourg, to meet senior officials of the Council of Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly, where the Deputies did everything required of them at the behest of Dmitriy Rogozin, Chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee.

Naturally, the question arises, why did they choose Khanpash? What services had he rendered? How had he demonstrated his loyalty? Because without such proof he could not possibly have become involved in all this. We come now to a retelling of the most important part of our long conversation.

Khanpash appears to be the man for whom everybody involved with the
Nord-Ost
tragedy has been looking so diligently. He is the insider who made the terrorist act possible. Information in the possession of
Novaya gazeta
(which he doesn’t deny: he is vain), indicates that Khanpash was an agent sent in by the intelligence services.

He entered the building with the terrorists as a member of their unit. He claims he secretly enabled them to travel through Moscow and to the
Nord-Ost
venue itself. It was he who assured the terrorists that everything was under control, that there were plenty of corrupt people, that the Russians had again accepted bribes, as they did when high-ranking resistance fighters were able to break out of the encirclement of Grozny and Komsomolskaya. They needed only to make a lot of noise, he told them, and there would be a second Budyonnovsk, enabling peace to be secured. Then, when they had fulfilled their
mission, they would be allowed to escape. Not all of them, but many. “Many” turned out to be only Khanpash himself.

He left the building before the assault began. He had a map of the Dubrovka Theatre Complex, something possessed by neither Barayev, who was in command of the terrorists, nor even, initially, by the special operations unit preparing the assault.

How come? Because Khanpash belongs to forces far higher in the militia and security hierarchy than the Vityaz and Alpha special operations troops who were risking their lives to storm the building.

Whether he was telling the truth about the map is not, actually, all that important. Khanpash would lie for a copeck, as his faked photographs demonstrate. Those who could confirm or deny certain details of his story, like where his firing position was, have, to all appearances, been eliminated or are less garrulous. Do I believe there was more than one agent sent in? I think it is entirely possible.

What matters is that if there was an insider operating in
Nord-Ost
, the authorities knew about and were involved in preparing a terrorist act. It doesn’t matter why. The main thing is that they (which section of them?) knew what was going on long before the rest of us did. They set up their own people for a terrible ordeal, knowing what was going to happen, fully aware that thousands would be permanently affected and hundreds killed or injured. The regime stage-managed another
Kursk
disaster. (Remember the messages sent by the unfortunate hostages from the occupied auditorium? “We are like a second
Kursk
. Russia has forgotten us. Russia does not need us. Russia wants us to die.” Many outside the hall were indignant and thought this completely hysterical, but in fact they were accurately describing the situation.)

The question remains, then, why was this done? Why were all those people killed six months ago?

The first step is to work out who was responsible. Who, within the regime, was in the know? The Kremlin? Putin? The FSB? – the classical triad of modern Russia?

The state authorities are not a monolith and neither are the intelligence services. It is definitely not the case that most of the officers working in the operational headquarters beside the Dubrovka Complex
were only pretending to be trying to avert the tragedy, in the full knowledge that the whole thing was a put-up job. Most of them were entirely committed, like the Vityaz and Alpha Units, like the rest of us.

But if Khanpash was in there, there is no escaping the fact that some dark nook of the state authorities did know and was only going through the motions of sympathising during those three days of insanity. This completely alters the complexion of those events.

So who were the intelligence agencies who knew? Certainly not the special operations soldiers who carried out the assault. If they had known the depths of the duplicity, there might simply have been a repeat of 1993 when the units refused to mount an assault [on Yeltsin’s White House at the behest of the leaders of the anti-Gorbachev putsch], and the ending might have been completely different.

Neither was it the officers of the FSB and Interior Ministry, who planned the operation to rescue the hostages in all good faith. It was not they who infiltrated Khanpash into the terrorist group and subsequently fixed him up with a job.

Khanpash was not going to tell me who it was, but clearly the FSB and Interior Ministry were only acting out somebody else’s script.

In the Second Chechen War methods such as these have been used extensively by military intelligence. In the so-called death squads it is officers of the GRU, the Central Intelligence Directorate, who make the running. The extra-judicial killing of their fellow citizens there is their stock in trade. Against these blood-soaked leaders neither the FSB, nor the Interior Ministry, nor the Prosecutor’s Office, nor the courts can lift a finger. It is the practice of GRU units to exploit Chechen criminals and also their own victims, like those widowed by the death squads, as convenient fodder for achieving their aim of intimidating the whole of Russian society.

So was it the GRU, or someone as yet unknown? I have no answer, but it is vital that we should find out.

Why did those people die? Why such an unbelievable death toll of 129 lives?

That is what we get when we lift a corner of the curtain, when we
hear the story of a double agent, a provocateur of our days so uncannily like Yevno Azef.
^*

People died, but the provocateur is alive and well. He is the political insider. He has his snout in the trough, looks good, and, most importantly, is still in business. In a few days’ time he will be going back to Chechnya. What will he be cooking up this time?

“I need 24 hours to meet up with Maskhadov,” he boasts.

“Just 24 hours?”

“Well, OK, two days.”

Khanpash is forbearing towards naive people like us.

A SCHEME FOR PROTECTION AGAINST WITNESSES: MANAGED TERRORISM IN THE LAND OF MANAGED DEMOCRACY?

December 22, 2003

The information agencies tapped it out: “Khanpash Nurdyevich Terkibayev has been killed in a car crash in Chechnya.” In the course of what we now know to have been his short life, the 31-year-old from Mesker-Yurt was to play many roles, of which the most important was unquestionably his complicity in the
Nord-Ost
hostage-taking in October 2002.

Who was Terkibayev? At first appearance, he was the last surviving witness from among the hostage-takers at the Dubrovka Theatre Complex. Officially listed as one of the terrorists, he claimed to have entered the building on October 23 last year as a member of Barayev’s unit. In reality, as Terkibayev himself told me, and as is indirectly confirmed, he was a turncoat, an informer who once inside first fed information to the secret services, then left the building shortly before the assault.

Khanpash Terkibayev had previously been a journalist for Maskhadov, presenting the President’s television program between the two wars. After
Nord-Ost
he was a member of President Putin’s Administration,
on whose behalf he led a delegation of Chechen Deputies to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in April 2003. He would also show to anyone interested to see it his press pass as a special correspondent of the official newspaper
Rossiyskaya gazeta
. He was, in short, the servant of many masters.

The pinnacle of Terkibayev’s career was undoubtedly
Nord-Ost
. His was a horrifying tale which proved that Khanpash genuinely did move in the circles he described and that, accordingly, the atrocity was stage-managed by at least one of the Russian secret services. Simultaneously, another Russian secret service and several special operations divisions were combating it, culminating in the use of a secret chemical weapon against Russian citizens.

In May this year our newspaper published an interview with Terkibayev who at that time was still firmly in the saddle. From his revelations it was clear that the
Nord-Ost
tragedy was advantageous to the highly original regime known as “Russian managed democracy.”

What happened after our interview? We called on the team investigating
Nord-Ost
to question both Terkibayev and the author of these lines on the subject of Terkibayev. On one occasion the investigator actually did come to
Novaya gazeta
’s offices. In his record of the visit he wrote whatever he fancied, as is now common practice, a so-called free paraphrase. His interest in Terkibayev did not extend beyond the fact that, after our report, Basayev was threatening him for his treachery.

Terkibayev lived for much of this year in Baku, where things got so bad for him that he had no option but to move. Sooner or later Basayev’s people would have eliminated him, so he moved to Chechnya. This was a step born of desperation, putting his head in the tiger’s mouth. The federal forces now had no time for him, and he had no other source of support. The car accident followed.

What is the most important aspect of this? Historically, as everybody knows, double and triple agents end up getting murdered. For us, however, this only makes things worse. Terkibayev never was questioned, and accordingly one further fragile link in the chain leading to the truth about
Nord-Ost
has been broken. He took with him information which ought to be known to everyone in Russia, the
answers to fundamental questions about
Nord-Ost
to which we, thanks to the efforts of those at the top of the political pyramid, have no answers. Who supported Barayev’s unit in Moscow? (We are not talking here about corrupt officials issuing visas, although, ironically, some are facing trial this very week.)

How did Barayev’s people get into Moscow at all? How were preparations for a terrorist attack in Moscow made? Who was Terkibayev’s controller in the secret services, and in which one? Why was there an assault? Why were negotiations which had some prospect of success in getting the hostages released terminated? Who was involved in taking such criminal decisions?

If we reduce these questions to their lowest common denominator, they indicate something we all suspect but cannot prove: that this was a managed act of terrorism in which Barayev was manipulated, and in which the female suicide bombers in black who accompanied him were dupes.

One important detail for anyone interested in receiving accurate information is that not only was Terkibayev not questioned by the members of the official
Nord-Ost
inquiry, he was even ignored by the members of the Public Commission of Inquiry, which does exist, although it is so inactive that it might as well not.

The timing of the car accident is also revealing: Terkibayev might have been about to open his mouth. The CIA was taking an interest in him. CIA agents were (quite properly) conducting their own inquiry into the death of an American citizen who had been among the audience, and had been signalling that Terkibayev was of interest to them as a source of evidence. (This may also have been a reason for Terkibayev’s move from Baku; in Baku he was accessible to the CIA, while in Chechnya he was probably not.)

Where does that leave us? “The agent must not be allowed to talk,” and Terkibayev has been duly silenced.