The New Nobility of the KGB (3 page)
Read The New Nobility of the KGB Online
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
In 1993 a new agency, the tax police, was created to address catastrophically low Russian tax receipts, and inter-service rivalry intensified. The new tax police engaged in bitter competition with the department of economic safety within the FSK and later FSB. Meanwhile, the new service charged with protecting the president was transformed by its chief, Alexander Korzhakov, a former Yeltsin bodyguard, into what many described as an updated Praetorian Guard. The agency employed parapsychologists and clairvoyants to prepare prognoses and analytical reports for Yeltsin, independent of the communications agency and the FSB.
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UNDER HIS REIGN, Mikhail Gorbachev had been roundly criticized for the use of force to quell independence movements and nationalist revolts in the Baltics, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Ultimately, the crackdowns failed to bring the regions to heel and served only to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin, by contrast, had urged the restless regions to take all the power they wanted from the center, when that center was the Soviet Union. But once he became the Russian president, he confronted the same centrifugal forces.
In 1992, Yeltsin faced a crisis in the Ingush-Ossetian conflict in the North Caucasus. The ethnic Ingush attacked Ossetians, triggering a reprisal. Yeltsin used the Russian army to support the Ossetians. This move led to the first major ethnic cleansing on Russian soil, when Ingush families were expelled from the disputed Prigorodny district. According to a 1996 Human Rights Watch report, “Russian officials disbursed large numbers of weapons to North Ossetian authorities, who then handed them out to both North Ossetian security officers and to paramilitary groups and militias. . . . Russian forces either aided in the evacuation of Ingush civilians—‘polite’ forced evacuation—or spear-headed attacks against villages held by Ingush militants, forcing out both civilians and fighters.”
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Leaders of the Russian security services and Yeltsin interpreted the outcome of this conflict as a sign that force could be used effectively to quell ethnic tensions in the North Caucasus.
But this approach resulted in disaster in November 1994, when leaders of the breakaway republic of Chechnya intensified their demands for independence from Russia. In an operation planned in secrecy, the security service (then the FSK) organized an attack on the Chechen capital, Grozny, that was disguised to look like a march of opposition forces. The men carrying out the attack had been recruited from the Russian armed forces. Among others the FSK paid off to join the operation were members of Russian tank crews. According to eyewitness accounts by Captain Andrei Rusakov, Lieutenant Alexei Rastopka, and Captain Alexander Shihalev, the men were summoned by the FSK officer attached to their regiment, who introduced them to two counterintelligence officers from Moscow. The counterintelligence officers presented the tank officers with a contract to join the operation, the only copy of which was retained by the FSK officer “for secrecy reasons.” The recruited officers and soldiers were then transferred to the town of Mozdok in North Ossetia, where they were deployed in unmarked tanks. The three columns of tanks disguised as opposition militants were dispatched to Grozny in late November to serve as a demonstration of force to the separatist Chechen leader, Dzhokar Dudaev, a former general in the Soviet army who was posing an increasingly strident challenge to Yeltsin with his demands for Chechen independence.
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Sergei Kozlov, a short, fit soldier with a mustache and a former officer in special forces military intelligence with a straightforward style, recalled that he was approached in late 1994 to join the operation. He told the authors he was urged by the FSK to lead a group of forty former military officers for a reconnaissance and diversion mission to Grozny in exchange for one thousand dollars. “In these circumstances I thought the sum would be just enough to pay for my funeral,” said Kozlov.
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Assuming the operation would be nothing more than a show of force, the armored columns headed toward the Chechen capital with no reconnaissance or cover. The tanks were supplied with additional fuel tanks—a measure that ensured them long-distance range but which would never have been made if a battle had been anticipated. On November 26, the disguised “opposition forces” were ambushed by Chechens and burnt in the streets of Grozny. The few officers left alive were captured by Chechen militias and were dismissed by the authorities as “mercenaries” or “volunteers” hired by unknown forces. The incident caused grave doubts in the Kremlin about the abilities of the FSK.
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Assuming the operation would be nothing more than a show of force, the armored columns headed toward the Chechen capital with no reconnaissance or cover. The tanks were supplied with additional fuel tanks—a measure that ensured them long-distance range but which would never have been made if a battle had been anticipated. On November 26, the disguised “opposition forces” were ambushed by Chechens and burnt in the streets of Grozny. The few officers left alive were captured by Chechen militias and were dismissed by the authorities as “mercenaries” or “volunteers” hired by unknown forces. The incident caused grave doubts in the Kremlin about the abilities of the FSK.
After the FSK was renamed the FSB in 1995, it met with another failure in the war against Russian organized crime. In 1996, a secret branch was established in the FSB to prosecute mafia-style groups. The crime unit was infamous as the most ruthless, brutal, and corrupt section of the intelligence services.
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(Purportedly, the unit had been given license to adopt vicious methods in fighting criminal activity.)
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In 1998, after officers claimed at a November 17 press conference in Moscow that they had been ordered to kill prominent Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the unit was disbanded.
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In the aftermath, Nikolai Kovalev, then FSB director, lost his position.
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(Purportedly, the unit had been given license to adopt vicious methods in fighting criminal activity.)
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In 1998, after officers claimed at a November 17 press conference in Moscow that they had been ordered to kill prominent Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the unit was disbanded.
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In the aftermath, Nikolai Kovalev, then FSB director, lost his position.
Also in the mid-1990s, a storm arose in the rivalry between two powerful security services: the FSB and the communications agency. An Investigative Directorate of the FSB accused Major General Valery Monastyretsky, the chief of the communications agency’s financial department, of corruption. The FSB Investigative Directorate opened a criminal inquiry into charges that Monastyretsky received 1.5 million DM from Siemens-Nixdorf Corporation in exchange for a profitable contract.
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However, the authors were told by reliable sources that the investigation was aimed not at Monastyretsky but rather at his boss at the communications agency, Alexander Starovoitov. News of the accusation was leaked to the Russian news media.
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But Yeltsin preferred to stay on the good side of the communications agency, ensuring his access to the electronic vote-counting system (which the agency controlled) on the eve of the 1996 presidential election. Furthermore, Yeltsin believed that inciting a healthy rivalry between the two agencies would keep them under control.
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However, the authors were told by reliable sources that the investigation was aimed not at Monastyretsky but rather at his boss at the communications agency, Alexander Starovoitov. News of the accusation was leaked to the Russian news media.
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But Yeltsin preferred to stay on the good side of the communications agency, ensuring his access to the electronic vote-counting system (which the agency controlled) on the eve of the 1996 presidential election. Furthermore, Yeltsin believed that inciting a healthy rivalry between the two agencies would keep them under control.
This volatile, imperfect system hobbled along through the twilight of Yeltsin’s years. On July 25, 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin, a little-known Kremlin official and KGB veteran from St. Petersburg, to serve as the new director of the FSB. Putin was viewed at the time as a big question mark, in part because he had never risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel in his sixteen-year KGB career, and during the chaotic years of perestroika and glasnost, he had been on duty in Germany.
These years were times of upheaval in Russia. In 1998, Russia defaulted on its debts and devalued the ruble in a financial crisis that bankrupted millions of people and cast doubt on the Western capitalist model. Russians wanted to find simple answers, and many looked for a strongman to replace Yeltsin’s perceived vacillating, weak character. This desire for decisive leadership came to a head in September 1999, when 216 people were killed in bombings in two Moscow apartment buildings. Putin, by then prime minister, pointed the finger at the Chechens, vowing to “rub them out in the outhouse.” His tough talk vaulted him to immediate popularity as he launched a new military offensive in Chechnya.
When Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve of 1999, Putin, a man whose outlook had been formally shaped by nearly two decades in the KGB, became acting president. Now the stage was set for an Act Two in which the methods of the security services would be adopted to govern Russia.
WITH PUTIN’S RISE, it was rumored that the Kremlin was preparing to recombine all parts of the former KGB into one special service.
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This seemed confirmed when the founders of the Russian secret services under Yeltsin—independents accustomed to aggressively defending the interests of their structures—lost their posts one after the other. In December 1998, Alexander Starovoitov, founder of the communications agency, was forced out. In February 1999, Sergei Almazov, creator of the tax police, resigned under pressure. And in April 2000, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, the director of Foreign Intelligence, was forced to step down.
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This seemed confirmed when the founders of the Russian secret services under Yeltsin—independents accustomed to aggressively defending the interests of their structures—lost their posts one after the other. In December 1998, Alexander Starovoitov, founder of the communications agency, was forced out. In February 1999, Sergei Almazov, creator of the tax police, resigned under pressure. And in April 2000, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, the director of Foreign Intelligence, was forced to step down.
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These moves were followed in 2003 by a major reorganization. In March Putin abolished the tax police, the communications agency, and the border guards as independent agencies.
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The border guards were merely absorbed by the FSB. The tax police had been more active than other services in the 1990s. They created their own corporate culture and ideology and became the first Russian security service to fund a TV series promoting their image—
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(for the address of its headquarters), with famous Russian film actors cast as tax police officers. It became quite popular despite the dubious reputation of the service.
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The border guards were merely absorbed by the FSB. The tax police had been more active than other services in the 1990s. They created their own corporate culture and ideology and became the first Russian security service to fund a TV series promoting their image—
Maroseyka 12
(for the address of its headquarters), with famous Russian film actors cast as tax police officers. It became quite popular despite the dubious reputation of the service.
In 2003 all officers of the tax police were redeployed to fill the ranks of a new agency combatting the narcotics trade, led by Viktor Cherkhesov, a former KGB operative and close friend of Putin. (Cherkhesov had earned a reputation at the KGB as the officer who had initiated the last prosecution of dissidents in the Soviet Union.)
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Neither the tax police nor Cherkhessov had any experience in fighting drug dealers. Not surprisingly, the new agency started with the prosecution of veterinarians for dealing in ketamine, an anesthetic used only for animals, and Moscovites for cultivating opium poppies at their dachas.
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Neither the tax police nor Cherkhessov had any experience in fighting drug dealers. Not surprisingly, the new agency started with the prosecution of veterinarians for dealing in ketamine, an anesthetic used only for animals, and Moscovites for cultivating opium poppies at their dachas.
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Once the most powerful rival of the FSB, the communications agency was divided up between the FSB and the Federal Protective Service, which guarded Kremlin leaders. Over the course of twelve years, the communications agency had created an industrial empire engaged in information security. In the 1990s the agency was in charge of licensing information security software—firewalls, cryptography, and so on—and used this privilege to grant licenses and government contracts to its own companies. (It even tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to obtain control of the Russian stock exchange, SWIFT codes, and the Russian part of the Internet.)
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The agency justified its efforts with its claim that the Internet—an American-born invention—required their control within Russia. In 1996, General Vladimir Markomenko, then deputy director of the agency, testified before the State Duma that “the Internet is a threat to National Security.”
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The agency justified its efforts with its claim that the Internet—an American-born invention—required their control within Russia. In 1996, General Vladimir Markomenko, then deputy director of the agency, testified before the State Duma that “the Internet is a threat to National Security.”
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In 2003, the communications agency’s empire fell, and the FSB absorbed the most crucial part of its former adversary: overseas electronic intelligence.
The second benefactor—the Federal Protective Service—meanwhile was assigned to handle lines of government communications and analytical structures with “sociological” services.
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Under Putin’s jurisdiction, the FSB also got the upper hand over the Ministry of Internal Affairs, an agency combining the functions of national police and an investigations department similar to the FBI. The FSB placed counterintelligence officers in key posts in the ministry, ranging from the position of deputy minister to chief of administration for internal security (which oversaw internal misconduct). Purportedly established to strengthen discipline and morale inside the corrupted ministry, the larger purpose of the FSB officers’ presence was to broaden the agency’s control. Finally, in 2003, Rashid Nurgaliev, an FSB general and close friend of Nikolai Patrushev (then head of the FSB), was appointed minister of internal affairs.
The Kremlin, now with Putin at the helm, reinstated the FSB as warden of army morale, charging the agency to watch for potential mutiny. In February 2000 Putin signed into law new “Regulations About FSB Directorates in the Armed Forces,” which expanded the agency’s functions of military counterintelligence and gave it the right to fight organized crime. Putin’s decree further broadened the role of FSB officers in the army to include detecting possible threats to the regime. Added to their professional responsibilities was the fight against “illegal armed formations, criminal groups, and individuals and public associations which have set as their goal a violent change of the political system of the Russian Federation and the violent seizure or violent retention of power.”
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The FSB had gained considerable ground.
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The FSB had gained considerable ground.
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