Killer in the Kremlin, page 7
I asked Donald Rayfield who was behind the Moscow apartment bombings: ‘The KGB or the FSB, as it is now. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. All the evidence of witnesses is that it couldn’t possibly have been Chechens. And then, of course, they were caught attempting to do the same thing in the town of Ryazan and the local police, as often happens with secret services, caught them on the hop. A local plod comes along and says, “What are you doing?” And spoils it all. They say it was just sugar, just for practice. It wasn’t sugar, it was high explosive.’
In Russia, they call TNT ‘Ryazan sugar’. It’s a joke but not a funny one.
The evidence is compelling that the very thing which galvanized Vladimir Putin’s career in Russian politics – his fightback against Chechen bomb outrages – was, in fact, a black operation by the secret police.
That Vladimir Putin blew up Russia.
In his ghosted autobiography, Putin is challenged about this and he replies: ‘Blowing up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really … utter nonsense! It’s totally insane. No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people. The very supposition is amoral. It’s nothing but part of the information war against Russia.’
September 1999 is the time, the way I see it, when Russia ceases to be a democracy. The Moscow apartment bombings were Vladimir Putin’s original sin, and any Russian who dared to investigate them lived in mortal danger.
CHAPTER FIVE
War Without Pity
The Chechen woman was on her own at the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia when she spotted us, a Western TV crew starting to film. She came up to me and unpacked something in a blanket and then she started to scream, ‘Thank you Mr Putin!’, piercingly. The something was two charred skulls, the only remains of her sisters incinerated by the Russian Army. I was shocked, utterly so.
It is hard, virtually impossible, to convey just how cruel the Second Chechen War was, how pitiless the master of the Kremlin’s killing machine. The hardest thing for me, as a reporter, as a human being, to bear was to witness the colossal mistake made by the West’s leaders who cuddled up to Vladimir Putin while the evidence of his war crimes in Chechnya, and the crimes against humanity committed when the FSB blew up Moscow apartment buildings, was overwhelming. George W. Bush said after his first face-to-face meeting with Putin in 2001: ‘I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.’
Tony Blair was the very first Western leader to celebrate the new leader of Russia, travelling to St Petersburg in the spring of 2000 to attend Prokofiev’s opera, War and Peace, with the Putins. The British prime minister blessed Putin with a face-to-face meeting before the Russian electorate voted him into office. Blair told reporters: ‘We have always made clear our concerns over Chechnya and any question of human rights abuses there, though it is important to realize that Chechnya isn’t Kosovo. The Russians have been subjected to really severe terrorist attacks.’
They were not terrorist attacks but black operations by the FSB. And both the CIA and MI6 knew that. James Bond is a slick fantasy. Smiley, created by John le Carré, smacks of the real thing. Spies read newspapers. They would have read the stories in Novaya Gazeta that raised questions about who was really responsible for the Moscow apartment bombings. In March 2000 The Observer published my report on the Ryazan bomb made of sugar. In 2001 a brilliant and fearless Russian journalist and MP, Yuri Shchekochikhin, printed a special issue of Novaya Gazeta by a former KGB colonel, Alexander Litvinenko, and the Russian-American journalist Yuri Felshtinsky, on the scandal. This became the book Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within, published in 2002. The title provides a clue that even Langley (HQ of the CIA) and Vauxhall Cross (HQ of MI6) would not have missed. To help the British and American spies get access to it, Blowing Up Russia was placed on Russia’s Federal List of Extremist Materials. In plain English, it was banned because it divulged state secrets. And if you’re an American or British spy, you read the books the Kremlin bans.
In 2005 I made a BBC documentary film about Craig Murray’s failed attempt to bring down then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in the UK’s general election. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan told me that he had seen a MI6 report on the Moscow apartment bombings, setting out the evidence that it was an own goal by the FSB.
In his 2003 book Darkness at Dawn the American journalist David Satter set out the scandal, and he did so again in a second book in 2016, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin. That year Satter filed a Freedom of Information request with the State Department, the FBI and CIA to find out what they knew about the Moscow apartment bombings. He got zilch. The CIA refused even to acknowledge the existence of any relevant records because doing so would reveal ‘very specific aspects of the Agency’s intelligence interest, or lack thereof, in the Russian bombings’.
Satter, like a dog with a bone, even got hold of a cable on the Ryazan incident from the American Embassy in Moscow, sent on 24 March 2000, which he cited: ‘A former Russian intelligence officer, apparently one of the embassy’s principal informants, said that the real story about the Ryazan incident could never be known because it “would destroy the country”.’
If Litvinenko, Felshtinsky, Satter and I could discover the truth about the Moscow apartment bombings, so could the CIA and MI6. What happened instead was a sick-think by the Western foreign-policy establishment. They wanted to believe that Putin was a democrat, a friend of the West, someone with whom they could do business. They set out to bury the evidence to the contrary.
Their calculus was wrong. At the end of the 1990s, Putin described communism as ‘a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization’. His contempt for communism is real. But that, of course, does not mean that Putin embraced democracy or its essential partners that must ride along: scrutiny by a free press, free speech, tolerance of mockery and humour. Rather, Putin cherry-picked a series of ideas that coalesced together and became his guiding star: ultra-nationalism; hatred of the other; contempt for a free press and free speech; intolerance of mockery and humour; profoundly conservative social values; an unfree market in hock to political power; a reverence for ‘the organs’, the KGB and its alphabetic spaghetti predecessors (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, MGB) and offshoots (SVR, FSB). Without articulating it, with no announcement, Putin was a Russian fascist.
Moreover, Putin’s outlook fits snugly within the age-old tradition of Russian autocracy, sharply drawn by the Marquis Astolphe de Custine in his 1839 travel book on the land ruled by Nicholas I, Empire of the Czar: ‘a government that lives by mystery, and whose strength lies in dissimulation, is afraid of everything’. Stalin was an heir to this strand of autocracy, from the late 1920s effectively projecting Russian imperialism over communism, albeit with fancy, newfangled and deeply dishonest rhetoric. Putinism flows with Nicholas I’s tsarism and Stalinism – and this was bleeding obvious to anyone who was paying attention.
Listening to Blair and Bush talk about Vladimir Putin’s soul, having seen what I had seen in Moscow and Ryazan and Chechnya, I felt I was going mad.
In 2000 I went to Chechnya, undercover, twice.
It was scary. Two years before, four British telephone engineers working on building a mobile phone-mast system independent of the Kremlin’s control were kidnapped. Then their four severed heads were found by a road. As warnings go, this was not a subtle one. A brave Russian reporter, Andrei Babitsky, reacted to the Kremlin’s absurd claim in January 2000 that there were no civilians left in the Chechen capital, Grozny, by going there and reporting that was not true. He risked death because the bombardment by Russian artillery was so intense. In mid-January he was captured by Russian proxies, tortured, and finally released into Russian custody by March. So my team and I went to Chechnya when the chances of getting your head chopped off or being kidnapped were on the high side.
In February 2000 I flew to Moscow, then Nazran in Ingushetia, which is the next-door republic to Chechnya, with cameraman James Miller and producer Carla Garapedian. James and I had made a Channel Four Dispatches documentary about a massacre in Little Krushe in Kosovo in 1999, when Serb police and paramilitaries slaughtered more than a hundred Kosovar men and boys in a haybarn. Our film had won a Royal Television Society gong and we were good pals. James taught my children, Sam and Molly, how to surf. Carla is a brilliant and fearless American-Armenian film producer. Together, the three of us went undercover to Chechnya to document Vladimir Putin’s first war.
To start, we filmed interviews with Chechens who had made it across the border to Ingushetia. Both Chechnya and Ingushetia are autonomous republics inside the Russian Federation. Chechnya’s long wars with the Russian tsars and then their successors have been fought because the people want to throw out the invaders. The Second Chechen War (1999–2009) was Vladimir Putin’s answer. Russian artillery camped in the outskirts of Grozny and blew it to pieces. When columns of refugees moved towards safety, white flags attached to their cars, they were bombed.
Her face burnt almost beyond recognition, a girl lay prone on her hospital bed attended by an aunt and told in a child’s whispers of the day her mother, father, her two brothers, her sister and her cousin, among 363 people from the same village, were wiped out. At eight years old – let’s call her Kamiisa – she was an eyewitness to a war crime. The village of Katyr Yurt, ‘safe’ in the Russian-occupied zone, far from the war’s front line, and jam-packed with refugees, was untouched on the morning of 4 February 2000 before Russian aircraft, helicopters, fuel-air bombs and Grad missiles pulverized the village. They paused the bombing at 3 p.m., shipped buses in, and allowed a white-flag convoy to leave, including Kamiisa’s family.
And then they bombed that as well, killing Kamiisa’s family and many others.
Our brave Chechen fixer, Natasha, found a rogue FSB officer who for $2,500 in cash agreed to drive James, Carla and I to Katyr Yurt. We crouched behind the darkened windows of his Volga and sailed through multiple Russian Army checkpoints until we arrived at the village. We saw what was left: a landscape as if from the Somme, streets smashed to matchwood, trees shredded, bloodstained cellars, the survivors in a frenzy of fear. The village was littered with the remains of Russian ‘vacuum’ bombs – fuel-air explosives that can suck your lungs inside out, their use against civilians banned by the Geneva Convention.
Local witnesses, astonished by the first visit by Western outsiders to their village, ringed west and east by special troops from the Russian secret police, the FSB, said they had counted 363 corpses piled two or three high in the street – ‘so many you couldn’t get a car past them’ – before the Russians took many of the bodies away and dumped them in a mass grave.
Kamiisa had a cruelly burnt face, both hands burnt and bandaged, a broken right leg swathed in plaster, a left knee pinioned by iron bolts and internal bruising, and yet she wanted to tell us what happened. Kamiisa’s father, Mansour, forty-five, a builder; her mother, Hava, forty-five, a schoolteacher; her brothers, Magomed, fourteen, and Ruslan, twelve; her cousin, Hava, eight; and her sister, Madina, six – they were squashed into the family’s black Volga saloon. She explained how the convoy left Katyr Yurt for what they hoped was safety. ‘There was a white flag on our car, flying from a wooden stick,’ she said. ‘Then two planes came and they hit us. We were blown up. I fell to the mud in the ground.’
Kamiisa winced as her aunt swabbed the burnt skin around her eye. The aunt said: ‘At night she is scared to close her eyes. She told me that she was afraid the whole picture would come back.’
The worst was that Kamiisa’s aunt could not bring herself to tell the little girl she was the only survivor of the seven people in the family car: ‘I don’t know how to tell her. If we tell her now, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She’s already afraid to close her eyes at night. Last night she woke ten times and we can’t calm her down.’
Katyr Yurt, to the west of Grozny, was quiet, calm and untouched on the night of 3 February. But Grozny had fallen and Chechen fighters had fled Russian revenge. Some of them passed through Katyr Yurt. There was one story that two Russian soldiers were kidnapped or killed that night. On the morning of 4 February, all hell began.
In January the then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook – a good man in many other respects – met Putin in Moscow and went out of his way to praise the secret policeman who had given out hunting knives to his troops on New Year’s Day. Cook said of Putin: ‘I found his style refreshing and open, and his priorities for Russia are ones that we would share.’
For my old paper, The Observer, I set out the evidence of what the Russian Army forces did to the civilians of Katyr Yurt, evidence that called into question the Foreign Secretary’s endorsement of Putin’s priorities ‘that we would share’.
Rumissa Medhidova was twenty-seven, but her face was so sick with grief and horror she looked thirty years older. She became a widow on 4 February. ‘All the Russians left the village and at around 10 a.m. they started to bomb. They used everything. In the centre of the village, not one house is left standing. In one family there were three children around their dead mother. They had been shot in the legs by Kalashnikovs. The Russians said: “We will give you two hours.” They sent buses in with white flags.’
People rushed around to find white sheets or anything at all white to mark their cars. There was even time for a joke: ‘I saw a cow with white on its horns and people were laughing.’
The convoy set off, each car showing a white flag, some cars showing two or three, packed with mainly women and children – the men held back, to make more room for children, said Rumissa. It headed west towards the town of Achoi Martan and safety. ‘When we were on the open road, they fired ground-to-air rockets at us. It was a big rocket, not as big as a car. It was strange. It didn’t explode once, it exploded several times. Every car had flags, how many cars I don’t know. It was a mess, lots of them. They hit us without stopping.’
This sounds like Grad missiles but, with the distance of time, it is impossible to tell.
Could the Russians have mistaken the white-flag convoy for fighters? ‘No, they couldn’t mistake us. They knew very well there were a lot of refugees: 16,000 refugees and 8,000 locals in the village. In front of us was a big car full of children, not grown-ups. They burnt before my eyes.’
Her husband stepped out of the car and was killed by shrapnel. With her children, she ran from the carnage and made it to Achoi Martan: ‘I saw a lot of bodies but I don’t know how many. There were a lot of people lying on the road. I didn’t count them. I also saw different parts of burnt bodies collected in buckets.’
And then the cover-up began: ‘The Russians wouldn’t allow the people in the village to collect the bodies. They only allowed people on the fifth day to go and collect the bodies. When people arrived there, they asked: “Where are the bodies of our people?” The Russians said some had already been burnt. People say the Russians took the bodies and threw them in a mass grave.’
Another eyewitness, a wounded man of the killable age, said: ‘They started bombing. Bombs, artillery. They were killing people. At our local school on the edge of the village there were Spetsnaz [Russian Special Forces] troops. They said: “We will give you a safe corridor.” So everyone started to go towards Achoi Martan. Then they used rockets against us. Some say 350 refugees were killed, 170 from the village itself.’
Zara Aktimirova, aged fifty-nine, had been looking after her mother, Matusa Batalova, eighty-five, hit by shrapnel. ‘The fear was so terrible I do not have the words … We were in a cellar. You could hear the vacuum bombs: “Whoosh, whoosh”. We just got into this cellar and the whole house next to us was completely destroyed. If someone ran to the apartment block entrance, snipers would fire and hit arms and legs.’
Later she and her mother passed along the road and saw the wreckage of the white-flag convoy: ‘The cars were mangled up, like mincemeat. I didn’t count the cars, I was carrying my mother. The convoy stretched maybe three kilometres. Every car was hit.’
Her mother was dying.
Our fifth witness, a doctor, was glassy-eyed and dead-tired after operating on hundreds of patients without anaesthetics, medicines or electricity during the bombardment. He said: ‘First they hit the village, then they gave civilians a corridor and then they opened fire. They didn’t bring the dead to us, only those in agony. They brought ten bodies, to check if they were alive or not: one baby among them, grown-ups, teenagers, some without both legs, burnt with traumas to the head, stomach. There were a lot of bodies in the village they didn’t bring to us.’
Our sixth witness stood outside the ruin of his home in Katyr Yurt, leaning on two crutches. Rizvan Vakhaev, forty-seven, was contemptuous of the dangers of speaking out. When two vacuum bombs fell outside his house, the blasts killed eight people: six women, a man and an eleven-year-old boy outright; ten more died later. His wife was seriously injured, as were three of his children. His daughter-in-law died immediately.
He showed us where the children had been lying before the blast, and the remains of human intestines lying on the ground. The vacuum bomb was dropped by a parachute. As it falls to the ground, it releases a cloud of petrol vapour, which ignites, and the sky explodes. A US Defence Intelligence Agency study from 1993 reported: ‘The kill mechanism against living targets is unique and unpleasant. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.’
An old lady, our seventh witness, emerged from a hole in the ground, trembling. She put a piece of bread to her mouth: ‘We didn’t eat yesterday and today. It was like Doomsday. Helicopters, planes, three bombs fell when we were in the cellar. Three sons and one daughter died. Our fourth son is dying at the hospital.’
