The New Nobility of the KGB (17 page)

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Authors: Andrei Soldatov

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #International Relations, #Security (National & International), #Intelligence & Espionage, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Social Classes

BOOK: The New Nobility of the KGB
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The radical opposition leader and writer Eduard Limonov, who was imprisoned at Lefortovo on a charge of illegal weapons possession, gave a detailed account of the prison in his 2002 book
A Captive of Dead Men
: “In a place where three parts of the letter K . . . all converge, there is a command and control room. . . . There are always five, six, ten jailers, there are screens of computers, and there are microphones.”
 
Former inmates have reported that Lefortovo’s guards make every effort to prevent inmates from seeing one another. Escorting prisoners, guards use little clackers—a circular piece of metal—or snap their fingers to make their presence known to the other guards. The other way they communicate is by knocking on hollow pipes attached to the walls at each door and along corridors. If two escorts meet, one puts his charge into one of many wooden cabinets lining Lefortovo’s corridors. This has been the practice since Tsarist times. In the nineteenth century, special boxes were put to use in the prison’s church to prevent inmates from seeing one another during the service. (Under the Soviets, the church was turned into an execution chamber.)
 
By Limonov’s estimate, there are fifteen exercise yards on the prison roof, used by three separate groups of prisoners each day. Each of the prison’s four floors holds fifty cells, but only two floors are occupied. Although the prison has a capacity of up to two hundred, it usually contains no more than fifty detainees.
 
Most cells are designed to house three people but rarely are there more than two. There are a few solitary cells and two cells for six inmates. This is in striking contrast to other Moscow prisons where inmates are crammed into cells. Even lawyers note that it is practically the only corrective establishment in the country where drugs cannot be found and where there is no “rope telegraph”—the Russian prison tradition of using a crude “mail rope” for transmitting notes and small packets of tea and tobacco from cell to cell.
 
Natalia Denisova, the wife of Valentin Moiseev, a diplomat condemned for espionage, describes Lefortovo from personal experience: “Though conditions in Lefortovo at first sight were not bad, the rules are very strict. I was not allowed to see my husband for ten months, even though under the law two meetings of at least three hours a month are allowed. But I was never allowed to talk to my husband for more than an hour. It is really hard to transfer anything to prisoners, especially money. Relatives are supposed to send it by mail, and it takes a month. Money is necessary to buy products in prison.”
3
 
In Soviet times, Lefortovo prison was used by the KGB for the detention of political enemies and suspected spies. As the main KGB successor in the early 1990s, the FSB inherited Lefortovo. But it had to fight hard to hold on to the prison.
 
In 1993, in the throes of the early effort to weaken the former KGB, the FSB temporarily lost its investigative apparatus in a reorganization ordered by Yeltsin. In turn, the prison was handed over to the Interior Ministry in January 1994. Nine months into this new arrangement, two prisoners escaped—the first in Lefortovo’s history, and an undeniable black eye for the Interior Ministry. With the ministry now seen as incapable of effectively running the prison, Lefortovo was returned to its former overseer by 1997. (Along with Lefortovo, thirteen regional prisons were handed back to the FSB.)
4
 
In 1996, Russia joined the Council of Europe. In so doing, the Kremlin promised, among other things, to “revise the law on federal security service in order to bring it into line with Council of Europe principles and standards within one year from the time of accession: in particular, [to withdraw] the right of the Federal Security Service (FSB) to possess and run pretrial detention centers.”
5
 
The Council of Europe demanded that Russia separate its investigating agencies from their detention facilities on the grounds that inmates could be subject to pressure from investigators. While the Interior Ministry transferred its prisons and other penitentiary facilities to the Justice Ministry in 1998, the FSB struggled fiercely against the European pressure.
 
In 2004 Vyacheslav Ushakov, the deputy director of the FSB, explained at a meeting with representatives of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly that it was absolutely crucial for the FSB to possess a prison guaranteeing“ahigh level of safety.”
6
Only Lefortovo, according to Ushakov, met these requirements. (In March 2005, Ushakov’s argument was tested by a young 27-year-old prisoner from Kyrgyzstan, Talgat Kukuev, who had easily made it past Lefortovo’s perimeter fence. He was not caught until May of that year.)
 
Finally, in July 2005 Putin signed a decree to transfer all FSB prisons (Lefortovo included) to the Ministry of Justice by January 2006.
7
 
At first it seemed that the FSB intended to comply. The FSB jails were reported to have been transferred to the Federal Penal Service, where a special department was created for them.
 
But in late 2005 the authors were given information by reliable sources inside the FSB Investigative Directorate that the FSB prison personnel would be transferred to the penal service on temporary assignment. While they were formally on the staff of the penal service, these officers actually remained subordinate to the FSB. This information came from different sources, and the authors published it in the independent online magazine
Ezhednevny Journal
in January 2006.
8
The story was never challenged by the FSB, and in 2008 it was confirmed officially, but in a peculiar way.
 
In March 2008 the Saint Petersburg military court sanctioned the arrest of two FSB officers who turned out to be the chief and deputy chief of the number three pretrial detention center in the city. This prison had been previously attached to St. Petersburg’s FSB department and according to presidential decree had been transferred to the penal service in 2006. Both officers had previously served in the regional department of the FSB, but when the penal service took over, the prison retained their posts. Officially, they had been transferred to the penal service, but they kept their FSB ranks all the same, according to the information disclosed at the trial and then reported in the media.
9
 
Russia’s defiance of its promise to Europe drew no action from Putin. Ultimately, the FSB even managed to expand its prison facilities. In June 2006, in a new decree, Putin allowed the FSB to create its own “temporary” detention facilities.
10
Few believed that the so-called temporary detention facilities were anything other than the very prisons the FSB was supposed to relinquish. The presidential decree clearly claimed that the accused being investigated who already had been charged could also be held in the FSB temporary detention facilities.
 
It was a smart trick carried out by the FSB’s leadership. Until recently only the Interior Ministry and the border guards possessed temporary detention centers, intended to hold people arrested for a few days until official accusations could be presented. So it was quite logical that such centers were used only by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose employees caught criminals in the streets, and by border guards, who apprehended people who infringed on state borders.
 
In 2003 the border guards were absorbed into the FSB, offering an incentive and an excellent excuse to extend the practice of the Federal Border Service, which keeps border violators behind bars, to the entire secret service. Now the FSB had temporary detention facilities not only near the border but throughout the entire country.
11
With the addition of such facilities, the FSB cleverly maneuvered around its promise to turn its prisons over to the Ministry of Justice while expanding its ever-widening reach within Russia.
 
PART II
 
RESPONSE TO TERRORISM
 
12
 
THE NORD-OST SIEGE
 
I
N THE FALL of 2002, during one of the most serious terrorist attacks on Russian soil since 1995, Russia’s security services’ ability to counter a hostage situation under extreme pressure proved disastrously inadequate.
 
In September 2002 several small groups of Chechens, three or four each, began arriving in Moscow by bus from Makhachkala and Khasavyurt in the republic of Dagestan. For many years this route was taken by North Caucasian traders who moved between Moscow and the regions. It was faster than a train, and there was no need to buy a railway ticket, which required a passport. Most of them came on September 16, and some came a few days later, on September 19.
1
Simultaneously, a vehicle laden with explosives hidden under apple crates and another carrying three bombs disguised as brake mechanisms for Kamaz trucks were driven into the city.
 
The Chechens gathered in three rented apartments outside the city center, which were to house them for the weeks ahead. Their explosives were carefully hidden in garages in different districts of Moscow. There were fifty-two people in total, most in their twenties. The women among them were instructed to await orders in the apartments while the men, disguised as construction workers, were sent to a huge building at no. 7 Melnikova Street, in the southeastern part of the city. Once the theater of the Moscow Ball Bearing Factory, it was known as the theater on Dubrovka.
 
The hall and nearby premises were rented by the Link Production Company, which had launched Russia’s first Broadway-style musical
Nord-Ost
in October 2001. The show was a hit. A significant part of the building was occupied by the Institute for Human Self-Restoration and a gay club frequented by members of Parliament, prominent businessmen, and politicians.
 
In its heyday, the three-story club was visited by more than 1,500 people a night, but starting in May 2002, it was under construction. Chechens were hired as workers in the last stage of the reconstruction. Few paid attention to what they were doing. The door between the gay club and the theater hall was never closed.
 
On October 19, 2002, a small car exploded near a McDonald’s restaurant on Pokryshkina Street; one Muscovite was killed and eight people were wounded. A second car bomb near the Chaykovsky Concert Hall failed to explode. This tactic of a diversionary attack was to be repeated many times over the years ahead, notably in 2004, when the Beslan tragedy was preceded by the suicide bombing attack in the Rizhskaya metro station in Moscow. But in October 2002 it was the first time the FSB had come across such tactics.
 
On Wednesday, October 23, the first act of
Nord-Ost
was coming to a close at 8:45 P.M. when three minivans approached the main entrance of the theater: a Ford Transit, a Volkswagen Caravelle, and a Dodge. In a few seconds a large group of Chechens armed with Kalashnikovs and pistols rushed into the theater shooting in the air. Some members of the Chechen group were already inside, disguised as normal theatergoers.
 
The Chechens, with only forty-one people, didn’t have the manpower to capture and guard the whole building. Instead they focused solely on the area occupied by Link Productions, about 40 percent of the structure.
 
The entire audience of 920 people, 67 foreigners among them, was taken hostage by the Chechens, who ordered the captives to call relatives to ask them to organize a demonstration against the Chechen war. Amongst the hostages were journalists and law enforcement officers, who promptly called the news media and the secret services. When the Chechens understood that Russian authorities knew what was going on inside the theater, they ordered all hostages to relinquish their phones. A few managed to hide them.
 
At about this time the FSB leadership was celebrating the achievements of its Dynamo volleyball club at the Lubyanka headquarters. They were called away from the celebration for what was to become one of the gravest terrorist attacks in Russia during the decade.
 
At the outset, it was unclear to the authorities how many terrorists were in the theater and how many guns they had. (The forty-one hostage takers included nineteen women and were armed with seventeen Kalashnikovs and twenty pistols.) The terrorists had brought dozens of explosive charges, including twenty-one explosive belts and two massive bombs that could easily have destroyed the theater hall and everyone in it. During the preceding weeks these had been carefully collected in the premises of the gay club.
 
On the first day of the siege, a 22-year-old Chechen named Movsar Barayev declared himself the leader of the terrorists. Barayev was the nephew of the notorious Chechen warlord Arbi Barayev, who had been killed in 2001. (Movsar, whose real name was Movsar Salamov, adopted the name Barayev after the killing of his uncle.) The Nord-Ost attack, as it came to be known, appeared at first to be an act of personal revenge. Barayev had two deputies: experienced Chechen fighter Ruslan Elmurzayev, 29, nephew of the Akhmadov brothers, who were famous warlords; and “Yaseer the Assyrian” (no further identity was ever established). Elmurzayev turned out to be the real commander of the operation. The women were headed by Esira Vitalieva, a 42-year-old Chechen who had been a cook for another nationalist leader, Shamil Basayev, during the first Chechen war.

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