Death of a Dissident (14 page)

In the end, after enduring a shouting match with Yeltsin, something he had never done before, Chubais changed the president’s mind.

Yeltsin returned to the meeting, canceled the decrees, and told the Korzhakov team to steer clear of the campaign. Chubais received a green light to do what he saw fit.

Activity at Shadow HQ resumed at full speed. Working in concert, ORT and NTV strove to offset Zyuganov’s propaganda on the many regional TV stations that were controlled by the Communists. In living rooms, on banners, and on billboards, Yeltsin’s campaign slogans “Vote with Your Heart!” and “Choose or Lose!” were ubiquitous. Goose delivered Luzhkov’s support and blanketed Moscow with photographs of the president and the mayor together. Berezovsky met with General Lebed and agreed to secretly fund his campaign, to split the Communist vote.

April 21, 1996: Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev is assassinated by two guided missiles homing in on the signal from his satellite telephone. He had been speaking with a liberal Duma deputy in Moscow, discussing a peace initiative. Dudayev is succeeded by Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev
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May 27, 1996: President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin meet with Yandarbiyev at the Kremlin to sign a cease-fire in the seventeen-month war, in which an estimated forty thousand people have died
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On June 16, after an ardous campaign that took him all over the country, Yeltsin managed to eke out a plurality of 35 percent of the
vote, just ahead of the 32 percent for his Communist rival Zyuganov. By the rules of the new Russian electoral system, it set the two of them to face each other in a runoff on July 4. Berezovsky’s strategy of diminishing the social democrat Yavlinsky and secretly helping Lebed paid off: Lebed, the former paratrooper, finished a strong third with 15 percent, heavily denting the Communist base, while Yavlinsky finished fourth with only 7 percent. Vladimir Zhirinovsky earned only 6 percent of the vote.

There was no doubt in the president’s mind that he owed his first-round win to the work of Chubais, Goose, and Berezovsky. On the morning of June 17 he gathered the team in the Kremlin to start planning for the second round. The mood was jubilant. The coalition of reformers and oligarchs seemed to be firmly in charge in the Kremlin.

Not only that, but Yeltsin even managed a masterstroke on the very next day. He got Lebed’s endorsement in exchange for naming him secretary of the National Security Council, with a mandate to find a quick solution to the Chechen conflict. It all but sealed Yeltsin’s victory in the second round.

One day later, Korzhakov made his move.

Sasha Litvinenko sensed that something was cooking on the afternoon of June 18. A fellow oper complained about an extra load of work that had suddenly fallen on him just as he was about to go home: Director Barsukov urgently wanted all available information on Chubais, Berezovsky, and Gusinsky.

“A thought went through my mind immediately: they are preparing to arrest them,” Sasha recalled.

“Did you think of warning Boris?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That would be treason, and I was not at all up to it. I was not happy, of course. I thought of Boris as a friend, and I knew the whole thing was political, but you know, that’s the whole point of wearing a uniform: you don’t question your superiors.”

“Would you have arrested him if you were ordered?”

“At the time I would. I was a loyal officer. That was what I was
trained to do: obey orders. But it would not have given me any pleasure.”

“Would you have shot at the crowds if you were ordered?”

“I don’t know. Lucky me, I was never asked to.”

On that afternoon in 1996 Sasha wondered why he had been left out of any preparations that were going on. After all, he was the Agency’s “Berezovsky connection.” Was his loyalty in question? Or were they saving him for some special task? Just as he was leaving for home, his phone rang. It was General Rogozin, Korzhakov’s deputy.

“Sasha, can you stop by my office tomorrow at four?” he asked.

This is it, Sasha thought. They want to use me against Boris. Just as Boris had warned. God help us both.

But he never met with Rogozin. Just as Sasha was entering the deputy’s waiting room the next afternoon, Rogozin ran out in great haste.

“Georgy Georgievich, shall I wait for you?” Sasha inquired.

“Don’t wait, I have a situation to deal with. Let’s talk tomorrow,” cried the general as he ran down the hall.

The conversation never happened.

In the early hours of the evening on June 19, 1996, Igor Malashenko, Goose’s right hand and the creative genius of NTV, stopped by The Club. There he found Berezovsky and Chubais sitting on the veranda. Boris was in a festive mood, sipping his favorite Chateau Latour, whereas Chubais was increasingly worried.

For the past four hours he had not been able to locate his closest lieutenant, Arkady Evstafiev. It was not like Arkady to disappear without warning. Chubais made frantic phone calls all over town, telling everyone he knew to look out for Arkady.

Suddenly, word came that Arkady and Sergei Lisovsky, the owner of the talent agency Media International, had been arrested by Korzhakov’s people as they were leaving a government building, carrying a box filled with half a million dollars in cash.

According to Malashenko, “Stunned silence fell over the terrace.”
No one was surprised by the cash: Lisovsky’s agency was coordinating campaign performances for Yeltsin, and his rock stars and pop singers only sang for cash. But that Korzhakov chose to move against Chubais’s people was ominous. Clearly, another shoe was waiting to drop.

“Let’s move off the terrace and get inside,” someone suggested, fearing for the group’s safety.

Several more people arrived: Gusinsky, surrounded by his security detail led by the fearsome Cyclops, armed with a huge pump gun; curly-headed Boris Nemtsov, a rising star of the liberal movement; and Alfred Kokh, the state properties minister.

Malashenko later reconstructed the events of that night: “The two coolest heads, as usual, were Boris and Goose. They sat down with Chubais to review our assets”: the two TV networks, a direct line to the president in the persons of Tanya-Valya, and, as allies, probably the prime minister and possibly General Lebed.

Tanya-Valya were destined to save Russian democracy for the third time that year. They arrived at The Club just after midnight. In everyone’s retrospective judgment, it was perhaps the single most important development of the affair. By the early morning hours, snipers had deployed on the roofs and the building was surrounded. Yet they would never dare an assault with the president’s daughter inside.

With the security of The Club ensured by Tatyana’s presence, everyone’s mind turned to the fate of the two detainees, Evstafiev and Lisovsky. It was at that point that Chubais picked up the phone and yelled at Barsukov, the FSB director: “If a single hair falls from their heads, you are finished!” Of course he did not have much to back up his threat, but the sight of Chubais shouting at Barsukov raised everyone’s morale.

As soon as she arrived, Tatyana called her father. She insisted that he be woken. “Papa, you have to watch the news,” she said, “something important is happening.” By then, the NTV announcer Evgeny Kiselev was on his way to the newsroom. Berezovsky called General Lebed and sent someone to bring him to the studio as well.

“This was perhaps the most important newscast in NTV’s history,” Malashenko recalled. “Ironically, the broadcast was aimed at an audience of only one: the president. If not for Tatyana’s wake-up call, everything would have been lost.”

Usually when in Moscow, I went to bed late and kept my TV on. At about 1 a.m. that night, I heard NTV make an announcement of an emergency special report, coming soon. An hour later, somber Evgeny Kiselev appeared on the screen to say that a coup d’état was in progress: two Yeltsin campaign workers had been arrested by the secret services. The coup’s aim was to destabilize the government and declare a state of emergency. Then General Lebed came on the screen and declared in his deep voice that any attempted coup “would be crushed mercilessly.” Fifteen minutes later the report was repeated by ORT.

I could not understand what I was hearing. I picked up my phone and called Boris at The Club. He was at a peak of excitement.