Pretty clear to me that because Putin helped
cover up for Berezovsky's 1999 bomb attacks and
restarted Chechen war while FSB head and acting Prime Minister
Berezovsky trusted Putin and backed him with his
NTV network to be his puppet when Putin became president in 2000
Then, later that year, Putin turned the tables on
Berezovsky, threatening to have him arrested if
he didn't leave Russia within 24 hours
BTW Master of United Grand Lodge Freemasins
Prince Michael of Kent was being FUNDED by
Berezovsky after his arrival in London
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143711/Queens-cousin-given-320-000-controversial-Russian-oligarch-pay-grace-favour-flat-upkeep.html
Tony
Scott Anderson on his censored GQ story - Moscow
bombs, Berezovsky & Putin's 1999/2000 rise to power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n15DTZjx3Xo
TG's penultimate appearance on RT.
Blowing Up Russia - The Alexander Litvinenko,
Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Putin connection?
short version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkEs0STiBUo
long version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boOz3VZ5mkQ
None Dare Call It a Conspiracy
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=174402#174402
Who was behind the Moscow apartment bombings that
accelerated Vladimir Putin's rise to power?
Scott Anderson • GQ • Sep 2009
http://reprints.longform.org/putin-conspiracy-banned-story-anderson
This article originally appeared in the pages of
GQ. But that was the only place it appeared. GQ's
parent company, Conde Nast, refused to allow the
article to be published in Russia, appear on the
GQ website or be publicized in any way. It is
reprinted on Longform thanks to the author, who
discussed this piece and more on the Longform Podcast.
The first building to be hit was the barracks in
Buynaksk housing Russian soldiers and their
families. It was a nondescript five-story
building perched on the outskirts of town, and
when the enormous truck bomb went off late on the
night of September 4, 1999, the floors pancaked
onto each other until the building was reduced to
a pile of burning rubble. In that rubble were the
bodies of sixty-four people - men, women, and children.
•••
In the predawn hours of last September 13, I left
my hotel in Central Moscow and made for a
working-class neighborhood on the city's southern outskirts.
It had been twelve years since I'd been in the
Russian capital. Everywhere, new glass-and-steel
buildings had gone up, the skyline was studded
with construction cranes, and even at 4 A.M., the
garish casinos around Pushkin Square were going
full tilt and Tverskaya Street was clogged with
late-model SUVs and BMW sedans. The drive was a
jarring glimpse at the colossal transformation
that Russia, its economy turbocharged by
petrodollars, had undergone in the nine years
since Vladimir Putin came to power.
But my journey that morning was to a place in
"old" Moscow, to a small park where a drab
nine-story apartment building known as 6/3
Kashirskoye Highway had once stood. At 5:03 on
the morning of September 13, 1999 - exactly nine
years prior to my visit - 6/3 Kashirskoye had
been blasted apart by a bomb secreted in its
basement; 121 of its residents had died while
they slept. That explosion, coming nine days
after the one in Buynaksk, was the third of what
would be four apartment-building bombings in
Russia over a twelve-day span that September,
leaving some 300 citizens dead and the nation in
panic; it was among the deadliest series of
terrorist attacks in the world until September
11. Blaming the bombings on terrorists from
Chechnya, Russia's newly appointed prime
minister, Vladimir Putin, ordered a
scorched-earth offensive into the breakaway
republic. On the success of that offensive, the
previously unknown Putin became a national hero
and swiftly assumed complete control of the
Russian state. It is a control he continues to exert today.
Where 6/3 Kashirskoye had stood there was now an
orderly grid of well-tended flower beds. These
surrounded a stone monument engraved with the
names of the dead and topped by a Russian
Orthodox cross. For the bombing's ninth
anniversary, three or four local journalists had
shown up, discreetly watched over by a couple of
policemen in a nearby squad car, but there really
wasn't much for anyone to do. Shortly after 5
A.M., a cluster of perhaps two dozen people -
most of them young, relatives of the dead,
presumably - trooped up to place candles and red
carnations at the foot of the monument, but they
retreated as quickly as they had appeared. The
only other visitors that morning were two elderly
men who had witnessed the bombing and who
dutifully related for the television cameras how
terrible it had been, such a shock.
I saw that one of the old men became quite
emotional as he stood before the monument,
repeatedly brushing at his cheeks to wipe away
tears. Several times he turned and walked
purposefully away, as if willing himself to
leave, but he never got very far. He would linger
by the trees at the edge of the park and then
inevitably make a slow return to the shrine. Finally, I approached him.
"I lived very close to here," he said, "and I was
awoken by the sound, I came rushing over and..."
He was a big man, a former sailor, and he waved
his hands helplessly over the flower beds.
"Nothing. Nothing. They pulled a young boy and
his dog out. That was all. Everyone else was already dead."
But as it turned out, the old man had a more
personal connection to the tragedy. His daughter,
son-in-law, and grandson had lived at 6/3
Kashirskoye, and they had all perished that
morning, too. Leading me up to the monument, he
pointed out their names in the stone, and
desperately brushed at his eyes again. Then he
angrily whispered: "They say it was the Chechens
who did this, but that is a lie. It was Putin's
people. Everyone knows that. No one wants to talk
about it, but everyone knows that."
It is a riddle that lies at the very heart of the
modern Russian state, one that remains unsolved
to this day. In the awful events of September
1999, did Russia find its avenging angel in
Vladimir Putin, the proverbial man of action who
crushed his nation's attackers and led his people
out of a time of crisis? Or was that crisis
actually manufactured to benefit Putin, a scheme
by Russia's secret police to bring one of their
own to power? What makes this question important
is that absent the bombings of September 1999 and
all that transpired as a result, it is hard to
conceive of any scenario whereby Putin would hold
the position he enjoys today: a player on the
global stage, a ruler of one of the most powerful nations on earth.
It is peculiar, then, how few people outside
Russia seem to have wanted that question
answered. Several intelligence agencies are
believed to have conducted investigations into
the apartment bombings, but none have released
their findings. Very few American lawmakers have
shown an interest in the bombings. In 2003, John
McCain declared in Congress that "there remain
credible allegations that Russia's FSB [Federal
Security Service] had a hand in carrying out
these attacks." But otherwise, neither the United
States government nor the American media have
ever shown much inclination to explore the matter.
This apparent disinterest now extends into Russia
as well. Immediately after the bombings, a broad
spectrum of Russian society publicly cast doubt
on the government's version of events. Those
voices have now gone silent one by one. In recent
years, a number of journalists who investigated
the incidents have been murdered - or have died
under suspicious circumstances - as have two
members of Parliament who sat on a commission of
inquiry. In the meantime, it seems that most
everyone whose account of the attacks ran counter
to the government's version now either refuses to
speak, has recanted his earlier statements, or is dead.
During my time in Russia this past September, I
approached a number of individuals - journalists,
lawyers, human-rights investigators - who had
been involved in the search for answers. Many
declined to speak with me altogether. Others
begrudgingly did so but largely confined their
statements to a recitation of the known
inconsistencies in the case; if pressed for an
opinion, they allowed only that the matter
remained "controversial." even the old man in
Kashirskoye park ultimately underscored the air
of unease that hovers over the topic. After
readily agreeing to a second meeting, at which he
promised to introduce me to other victims'
families who doubted the government's account, he had a change of heart.
"I can't do it," he said when he called me back a
few days later. "I spoke to my wife and my boss,
and they both said that if I meet with you, I will be finished."
I was curious what he meant by "finished," but
the old sailor hung up before I could ask.
No doubt part of this reticence stemmed from
recalling the fate of the man who made proving
the conspiracy behind the bombings a personal
crusade: Alexander Litvinenko. From his London
exile, the rogue former KGB officer had waged a
relentless media campaign against the Putin
regime, accusing it of all manner of crimes and
corruption - and most especially of having
orchestrated the apartment-building attacks.
In November 2006, in a case that riveted the
world's attention, Litvinenko was slipped a
lethal dose of radioactive polonium, apparently
during a meeting with two former Russian
intelligence agents in a London hotel bar. Before
the poison killed Litvinenko - it took an
agonizing twenty-three days - he signed a
statement placing the blame for his murder squarely at Putin's feet.
But Litvinenko had not worked alone on the
apartment-bombing case. Several years before his
murder, he had enlisted another ex-KGB agent in
his search for answers, a former criminal
investigator named Mikhail Trepashkin. The two
men had a rather complicated personal history -
in fact, back in the '90s, one allegedly had been
dispatched to assassinate the other - but it had
actually been Trepashkin, working on the ground
in Russia, who had uncovered many of the disturbing facts in the case.
Trepashkin had also run afoul of the authorities.
In 2003 he had been shipped off to a squalid
prison camp in the Ural Mountains for four years.
By the time of my visit to Moscow last year,
however, he was out on the streets again.
Through an intermediary, I learned Trepashkin had
two young daughters, as well as a wife who
desperately wanted him to stay out of politics;
combining these factors with his recent prison
stint and the murder of his former colleague, it
seemed likely that my approach to him would go as
badly as had my conversations with other former dissenters.
"Oh, he'll talk," the intermediary assured me.
"The only way they'll stop Trepashkin is by killing him."
•••
On September 9, five days after the blast in
Buynaksk, the bombers struck Moscow. This time it
was an eight-story apartment building on
Guryanova Street, in a working-class neighborhood
in the city's southeast. Rather than a truck
bomb, the device had been stashed on the
building's ground floor, but the result was
virtually identical; the explosion brought down
all eight floors and killed ninety-four residents as they slept.
It was with Guryanova Street that the general
alarm first went out. Within hours a number of
Russian-government officials strongly suggested
that terrorists from Chechnya were responsible,
and the nation was sent into a state of high
alert. As thousands of police fanned out to
question - and in several hundred cases, to
arrest - anyone resembling a Chechen, residents
of apartment buildings throughout Russia
organized themselves into neighborhood-watch
patrols. Calls for retaliation rose from all political quarters.
•••
At Trepashkin's request, our first meeting took
place at a crowded coffee shop in central Moscow.
One of his aides showed up first, and then twenty
minutes later Trepashkin arrived in the company
of his bodyguard of sorts, a muscular young man
with a crewcut and an opaque stare.
Trepashkin, while short, was powerfully built - a
testament to his lifelong practice of a variety
of martial arts - and still very handsome at 51.
His most arresting feature, though, was a
perpetual amused grin. It gave him an aura of
instant likability, friendliness, although I
could imagine that anyone who sat across an
interrogation table from him back in his KGB days
might have found it unnerving.
For a few minutes, we chatted about everyday
things - the unusually cold weather in Moscow
just then, the changes I'd noticed since my last
visit - and I sensed Trepashkin was trying to
figure me out, deciding how much to say.
Then he began to tell me about his career at the
KGB. He'd spent most of his years as a criminal
investigator who specialized in antiques
smuggling. He was, in those days, an absolute
loyalist to the Soviet state - and most
especially the KGB. Trepashkin was such a
dedicated Soviet that he even supported a group
that attempted to thwart the ascent of Boris
Yeltsin in favor of preserving the Soviet system.
"I could see that this was going to be the end of
the Soviet Union," Trepashkin explained in the
coffee shop. "But even more than that, what would
happen to the KGB, to all of us who had made it
our lives? I saw only disaster coming."
And that disaster came. With the disintegration
of the Soviet Union, Russia plunged into economic
and social chaos. One particularly destructive
aspect of that chaos stemmed from the vast
legions of Russian KGB officers who suddenly
entered the private sector. Some went into
business for themselves or joined on with the
mafiyas they had once been detailed to combat.
Still others signed on as "advisers" or muscle
for the new oligarchs or the old Communist Party
bosses who were frantically grabbing up anything
of value in Russia, even as they paid obeisance
to the "democratic reforms" of President Boris Yeltsin.
Of all this, Trepashkin had an intimate view.
Kept on with the FSB, the Russian successor the
the KGB, the investigator found it increasingly
difficult to differentiate criminality from governmental policy.
"In case after case," he said, "there was this
blending. You would find mafiyas working with
terrorist groups, but then the trail would lead
to a business group or maybe to a state ministry.
So then, was this still a criminal case, or some
kind of officially sanctioned black operation?
And just what did ‘officially sanctioned'
actually mean anymore, because who was really in charge?"
Finally, in the summer of 1995, Mikhail
Trepashkin began work on a case that would change
him forever, one that placed him on a collision
course with the senior most commanders of the FSB
and, Trepashkin says, would lead at least one of
them to plot his assassination. As with so many
other incidents that exposed the malevolent rot
in post-Soviet Russia, this one centered on
events in the breakaway southern republic of Chechnya.
By December 1995, rebels fighting for the
independence of Chechnya had fought the Russian
army to a bloody and humiliating stalemate after
a full year of war. The Chechens' success was not
as simple as mere force of arms, however. Even
during the Soviet era, Chechen mafiyas had
controlled much of the Russian criminal
underworld, so when Russian society itself became
criminalized it played beautifully to the Chechen
rebels' advantage. For their steady supply of
sophisticated weapons with which to fight the
Russian army, the rebels often had only to turn
to corrupt Russian army officers who had access
to such weaponry, with the funds for such
"purchases" supplied by the Chechen crime
syndicates operating throughout the nation.
Just how high up did this cozy arrangement go?
Mikhail Trepashkin got his answer on the night of
December 1, when a team of FSB officers stormed a
Moscow branch of Bank Soldi with guns drawn.
The raid that night was the culmination of an
elaborate sting operation, one that Trepashkin
had helped supervise, designed to finally bring
down a notorious bank-extortion team linked to a
Chechen rebel leader named Salman Raduyev. It was
a huge success: Caught up in the Soldi dragnet
were some two dozen conspirators, including two
FSB officers and a Russian-military general.
But inside the bank, the FSB men found something
else. To ensure they weren't walking into a trap,
the conspirators had planted electronic bugs
throughout the building, and those were linked to
an eavesdropping van parked outside. While their
precautions obviously needed some fine-tuning, it
begged the question of how the gang got their hands on bugging equipment.
"All these sorts of devices have serial numbers,"
Trepashkin explained in the Moscow coffee shop,
"and so we traced the numbers back. We discovered
that it had all come from either the FSB or the Ministry of Defense."
The implication of this was staggering, for
access to such equipment was severely restricted.
It suggested that high-ranking security and
military officers had colluded not only with a
criminal gang but with one whose express purpose
was to raise funds for a war against Russia. By
the standards of any country, that wasn't just corruption, it was treason.
Yet no sooner had Trepashkin started down that
investigative trail than he was removed from the
Bank Soldi case by Nikolai Patrushev, the head of
the FSB's internal-security department. What's
more, he says, no charges were brought against
any of the Russian officers implicated, and
nearly all of those caught in the initial dragnet
were soon quietly released. Instead, Patrushev
ordered an investigation of Trepashkin. That
investigation lasted nearly two years, at the end
of which Trepashkin had reached his personal
breaking point. In May 1997, he wrote an open
letter to President Yeltsin detailing his
involvement in the case and charging much of the
senior FSB leadership with a host of crimes,
including forming alliances with mafiyas and even
recruiting their members into FSB ranks.
"I thought that if the president knew what was
happening," Trepashkin said, then he would do
something about it. This was a mistake on my part."
Indeed. Boris Yeltsin, it turned out, was
fabulously corrupt himself, and the letter
alerted the FSB that they now had a serious
malcontent on their hands. The very next month,
Trepashkin resigned from the FSB, burn out, he
says, but the harassment he'd been subjected to.
But that didn't mean Trepashkin was going to go
quietly into the night. That summer he brought a
lawsuit against the FSB leadership and began
filing complaints that extended all the way to
the FSB director himself. It was as if, even at
this late date, the investigator imagined that
the honor of the Kontora (Bureau) could still be
redeemed, that some as yet invisible reformer
might step forward. Instead, his persistence
apparently convinced some senior FSB officials
that it was time for a permanent solution to
their Trepashkin problem. One of the first people
they turned to was Alexander Litvinenko.
On paper, Litvinenko looked just the man for the
job. Having just returned to Moscow from a stint
on the brutal Chechen battlefield as a
counterterrorism operative, he had been
transferred into a new and highly secretive of
the FSB called the Office for the Analysis of
Criminal Organizations, or URPO. While Litvinenko
didn't know it at the time, it seemed the URPO
had been formed to serve as a death squad. As
reported in the book Death of a Dissident, by
Alex Goldfarb and Litvinenko's widow, Marina,
Litvinenko learned of this when he was summoned
by the URPO commander in October 1997. "There is
this guy, Mikhail Trepashkin," the commander
allegedly told Litvinenko. "He is your new
object. Go get his file and make yourself familiar with it."
When he did, Litvinenko learned of the criminal
investigator's involvement with the Bank Solid
case, as well as his lawsuit against the FSB
leadership; it left him puzzled as to just what
he was supposed to do with Trepashkin.
"Well, it's a delicate situation," Litvinenko
quoted his commander as saying. "You know, he is
taking the director to court and giving
interviews. We should shut him up, director's personal request."
Shortly after, Litvinenko claimed his target list
expanded to include Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch
and Kremlin insider whom apparently someone
powerful now wanted dead. Litvinenko stalled for
a time, making continual excuses for his
inability to carry out the assassination orders.
According to Trepashkin, at least two attempts
were made on his life during this period: a
failed ambush on a deserted stretch of Moscow
highway, and a rooftop sniper who couldn't get
off a clean shot. On other occasions, he says, he
was tipped off by friends still in the Kontora.
In November, the alleged FSB plot against
Trepashkin and Berezovsky was exposed in dramatic
fashion when Litvinenko and four of his URPO
colleagues appeared at a Moscow news conference
to detail the kill orders they'd been given. Also
in attendance was Mikhail Trepashkin.
And there, somewhat anticlimactically, the matter
seemed to end. Litvinenko, the ringleader of the
dissident officers, was summarily dismissed but
otherwise suffered no immediate retribution. As
for Trepashkin, after improbably winning his
lawsuit against the FSB, he married for a second
time and settled into his new job with the
Russian tax police, determined, he says, to
quietly serve out his term until he was eligible for retirement.
But then, in September 1999, the
apartment-building bombings would shake Russia's
political foundations to their core. Those
attacks would also propel Trepashkin and
Litvinenko back into the shadow world, this time with a common purpose.
•••
Amid the near hysteria that gripped Moscow after
the Guryanova Street bombing, early on the
morning of September 13, 1999, authorities were
called to check on reports of suspicious activity
at an apartment building on the city‘s southern
outskirts. Finding nothing untoward, security
personnel completed their search of 6/3
Kashirskoye at about 2 A.M. and left. At 5:03
A.M>, the nine-story building was collapsed by a
massive bomb, leaving 121 civilians dead.
Three days later, the target was an apartment
building in Volgodonsk, a city south of Moscow.
This time it was a truck bomb, and it left another seventeen dead.
•••
In the Moscow coffee shop, Trepashkin grew
uncharacteristically somber, staring into the distance for a long moment.
"It just seemed incredible," he said finally.
"That was my first thought. The country is in an
uproar, vigilantes are stopping strangers on the
streets, there are police roadblocks everywhere.
So how is it possible that these bombers are
moving about so freely, that they have all this
time to set up and carry out these sophisticated
bombings? It seemed impossible."
Another aspect that Trepashkin had a problem with was the question of motive.
"Usually, this is quite easy to find," he
explained, "it is money or hatred or jealousy,
but for these bombings, what was the Chechens'
motive? Very few people thought about this."
On one level, this was perhaps understandable.
Antipathy for Chechens is deeply ingrained into
Russian society, and it had grown much worse
during their secessionist war in the '90s.
Unspeakable atrocities were committed by both
sides in that conflict, and the Chechen rebels
had shown no compunction against taking their
fight into Russia proper or targeting civilians.
Except that war had ended in 1997, with Boris
Yeltsin signing a peace agreement recognizing Chechnya's autonomy.
"So why?" Trepashkin continued. "Why would the
Chechens want to provoke the Russian government
when they already had everything they had fought for?"
And there was something else that gave the former
criminal investigator pause: the composition of the new Russian government.
In early August 1999, just weeks before the first
bombing on Buynaksk, President Yeltsin had
appointed his third prime minister in less than
three months. He was a slight, humorless main,
virtually unknown to the Russian public, named Vladimir Putin.
The chief reason he was so little known was that,
until a few years earlier, Putin had been just
one more midlevel KGB/FSB officer toiling away in
obscurity. In 1996, Putin was given a position in
the presidential-property-management department,
a crucial office in the Yeltsin patronage machine
that gave Putin leverage to grant or withhold
favors to Kremlin insiders. He apparently put his
time there to good use; over the next three
years, Putin was promoted to deputy chief of the
presidential staff, then to director of the FSB, and now to prime minister.
But though Putin was still obscure to the general
public in September 1999, Mikhail Trepashkin
already had a pretty good sense of the man. Putin
had been the FSB director at the time the URPO
scandal went public and had personally dismissed
Alexander Litvinenko for provoking it. "I fired
Litvinenko," he had told a reporter, "because FSB
officers shouldn't hold press conferences ... and
they shouldn't make internal scandals public."
But equally alarming to Trepashkin was who had
been chosen to be Putin's successor as FSB
director, Nikolai Patrushev. As head of the FSB
internal-security department, it was Patrushev
who had removed Trepashkin from the Bank Soldi
case and who was now among those government
officials most vehemently claiming a Chechen
connection to the apartment-building bombings.
"So what you saw was this dynamic building,"
Trepashkin said, "and it was the government
promoting it. ‘The Chechens are behind this, so
now we must take care of the Chechens.'"
But then something very strange happened. It
happened in the sleepy provincial city of Ryazan,
some 120 miles southeast of Moscow.
Amid the state of hypervigilance that had seized
the nation, several residents of 14/16 Novosyolov
Street in Ryazan took notice when a white Zhiguli
sedan pulled up to park beside their apartment
building on the evening of September 22. They
became downright panicked when they observed two
men removing several large sacks from the car's
trunk and carrying them into the basement before
speeding away. Residents called the police.
Discovered in the basement were three 110-pound
white sacks wired to a detonator and explosive
timer. As police quickly evacuated the building,
the local FSB explosives expert was called in to
defuse the detonator; he determined that the
sacks contained RDX, a explosive powerful enough
to have brought the entire apartment building
down. IN the meantime, roadblocks were
established on all roads out of Ryazan, and a
massive manhunt for the Zhiguli and its occupants got underway.
By the following afternoon, word of the incident
in Ryazan had spread across Russia. Prime
Minister Putin congratulated the residents on
their vigilance, while the interior minister
lauded recent improvements by the security
forces, "such as the foiling of the attempt to
blowup the apartment building in Ryazan."
There the matter may well have ended, except that
same night two of the suspects in Ryazan were
apprehended. To the local authorities'
astonishment, both produced FSB identification
cards. A short time later, a call came down from
FSB headquarters in Moscow that the two were to be released.
The following morning, FSB director Patrushev
appeared on television to report a wholly new
version of events in Ryazan. Rather than an
aborted terrorist attack, he explained, the
incident at 14/16 Novosyolov Street had actually
been an FSB "training exercise" to test the
public's alertness. Further, he said, the sacks
in the basement had contained not explosives, but
rather common household sugar.
Contradictions in the FSB's account were
manifold. How to reconcile FSB headquarters'
sacks-of-sugar claim with the local FSB's
chemical analysis that had found RDX? If this
truly had been a training exercise, how was it
that the local FSB branch wasn't informed ahead
of time, or that Patrushev himself didn't see fit
to make mention of it for a day and a half after
the terrorist alert was raised? For that matter,
why did the apartment-building-bombing spree
suddenly stop after Ryazan? If the attacks were
truly the handiwork of Chechen terrorists, surely
the public-relations black eye the FSB had
received over the Ryazan affair would spur them to carry out more.
But the time for such questions had already
passed. Even as Prime Minister Putin gave his
speech on the night of September 23 praising the
residents of Ryazan for their vigilance, Russian
warplanes began launching massive air strikes on
Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Within a few
more days, Russian armored battalions that had
been massed on the border for months crossed into
Chechnya, marking the start of the Second Chechen War.
Events moved very quickly after that. On New
Year's Eve 1999, Boris Yeltsin stunned the nation
by announcing that he was stepping down from the
presidency effective immediately, which made
Vladimir Putin acting president until new
elections could be held. And instead of holding
them sometime in the summer, as originally
scheduled, those elections would now occur in
just ten weeks' time, leaving Putin's many
competitors for the position little time to prepare.
In a presidential poll taken in August 1999,
Putin had garnered less than 2 percent support.
By March 2000, however, riding a wave of
popularity for his total-war policy in Chechnya,
he swept into office with 53 percent of the vote.
The reign of Vladimir Putin had begun, and Russia would never be the same.
•••
For our next meeting, Trepashkin invited me into
his apartment. I was a bit surprised by this -
I'd been told that, for security reasons,
Trepashkin rarely brought visitors to his home -
but I guess he figured all his enemies knew where he lived, anyway.
It was a pleasant enough place, if a bit on the
spartan side, on the ground floor of a high-rise
tower surrounded by other high-rise towers in
southern Moscow. Trepashkin gave me a quick tour,
and I noticed that the only space with even a
hint of clutter was the tiny, paper-filled room -
a converted walk-in closet, really - he used as
his office. One of his daughters was home, and
she brought us tea as we settled in the sitting room.
With a vaguely embarrassed smile, Trepashkin
offered that there was actually another reason he
rarely had work-related meetings at his home: his
wife. "She wants me to stop all this political
stuff, but since she is away this morning..." His
smile eased away. "Well, it's because of the
raids. You know, they came charging in here - he
waved toward the front door - with their guns,
shouting orders; the children were terrified. It
really affected my wife, and she is always worried it will happen again."
The first of those raids had occurred in January
2002. Late one night, a squad of FSB agents burst
in and proceeded to take the apartment apart.
Trepashkin maintains they found nothing but
instead planted enough evidence - some classified
documents from the FSB archives, a handful of
bullets - to enable prosecutors to hang three "pending" charges over his head.
"It was their way of putting me on notice," he
explained, "of letting me know they would come
after me if I didn't straighten up."
Trepashkin had a good idea of what had sparked
the FSB's attention: Just days before the raid,
he had started getting telephone calls from the
man regarded by the Putin regime as one of
Russia's greatest traitors, Alexander Litvinenko.
Lieutenant Colonel Litvinenko's fall from grace
had been swift. After his 1998 press conference
alleging the URPO assassination plots, he'd spent
nine months in prison on an "abuse of authority"
charge and had then fled Russia as prosecutors
prepared to move against him again. With the help
of the now exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky,
Litvinenko and his family settled in England,
where he joined forces with Berezovsky to expose
to the world what they claimed were the crimes of
the Putin regime. A primary focus of that
campaign was getting to the truth of the apartment-building bombings.
"So this is why he was calling," Trepashkin
explained. "Litvinenko couldn't come back to
Russia, obviously, so they needed someone here to help with the investigation."
Easier said than done, for by January 2002,
Russia had become a very different place. In the
two years since Putin had been elected president,
the once-thriving independent media had all but
disappeared, while the political opposition was
being steadily marginalized to the point of insignificance.
One indication of this chilling effect was the
revisions performed on the shakiest aspect of the
government's bombing story, the FSB "training
exercise" in Ryazan. By 2002 the Ryazan FSB
commander who had overseen the manhunt for "the
terrorists" now supported the training-exercise
explanation. The local FSB explosives expert who
had insisted before television cameras that the
Ryazan sacks contained explosives suddenly went
silent on the whole matter and disappeared from
sight. Even some of the residents of 14/16
Novosyolov Street who had appeared in a
television documentary six months after the
incident to angrily deride the FSB's account and
insist the bomb was real now refused to talk with
anyone beyond allowing that perhaps they'd been mistaken after all.
"I told Litvinenko that the only way I could
become involved was in some kind of official
capacity," Trepashkin explained in his sitting
room. "If I just went out on my own, the
authorities would move against me immediately."
That official capacity was fashioned at a meeting
held in Boris Berezovsky's London office in early
March 2002. one of those in attendance, a Russian
member of Parliament named Sergei Yushenkov,
would organize a blue-ribbon committee of inquiry
into the bombings and make Trepashkin one of his
investigators. Another attendee was Tatiana
Morozova, a 31-year-old Russian émigré living in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Morozova's mother had been
killed in the Guryanova Street blast, and under
Russian law that gave her the right to review the
government's records on the case; since
Trepashkin had recently obtained his license to
practice law, Morozova would appoint him as her
attorney and petition the courts for access to
the FSB's Guryanova Street files.
"So I agreed to both of these ideas," Trepashkin
said, "but the question was where to look first.
So many of the reports were unreliable, and so
many people had changed their stories, that my
first goal was to get access to the actual forensic evidence."
Also easier said than done, for a hallmark of the
government's response to the bombings had been a
peculiar haste in clearing away the ruins.
Whereas, for example, the Americans had spent six
months sifting through the remnants of the World
Trade Center after September 11, regarding it as
an active crime scene, Russian authorities had
razed 19 Guryanova street just days after the
blast and hauled everything away to a municipal
dump. Whatever forensic evidence had been
preserved - and it wasn't clear that any had -
was presumably locked away in FSB storehouses.
While what he discovered didn't pertain to the
specifics of the bombings, Trepashkin did soon
manage to come up with something quite interesting.
One of the odder footnotes to the whole affair
was a statement that Gennady Seleznyov, the
Speaker of the Duma, had made on the floor of
Parliament on the morning of September 13, 1999.
"I have just received a report," he had announced
to legislators. "An apartment building in the
city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night."
While Seleznyov got the basics right - an
apartment building had indeed just been blown up
- he had the wrong city; the blast that morning
had been at 6/3 Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow.
Which put the Speaker in kind of an awkward spot
when an apartment building in Volgodonsk was
blown up three days later. At least one Duma member found that puzzling.
"Mr. Speaker, please explain," he had asked
Seleznyov on the Parliament floor, "how come you
told us on Monday about the blast that occurred on Thursday?"
In lieu of an answer, the questioner had his microphone quickly cut off.
To many observers, it suggested that someone in
the FSB chain of command had screwed up the order
in which the bombings were to take place and had
given the "news" to Seleznyov in reverse.
Searching around nearly three years after the
fact, Trepashkin says he determined that
Seleznyov had been given the erroneous report by
an FSB officer, though he won't say how he knows.
But with progress also came the potential for
danger to Trepashkin. One of those who had
attended the London meeting, human-rights
activist and Berezovsky lieutenant Alex Goldfarb,
became concerned enough about Trepashkin's
welfare that he arranged a meeting with him in
Ukraine in early 2003. The two had never met
before, and Goldfarb found it an odd encounter.
"He was one of the stranger people I've ever
met," Goldfarb recounted. "He had no interest in
the philosophical or political implications of
what he was doing. To him, this was all just a
criminal case. In the back of my mind, I was
thinking, ‘Is this guy crazy? Doesn't he
appreciate what he's up against?' but I finally
concluded he was this kind of supercop - you
know, a Serpico figure. He was determined to do
the right thing because it was the right thing to
do; it was just that simple." Still, Goldfarb
felt it his duty to at least alert Trepashkin to
the deepening peril, the very little that could
be done if the authorities decided to go after
him. The more he pressed on this, though, the
more Trepashkin seemed to bristle.
"He didn't care about any of that," Goldfarb
remembered. "I think he still believed he was
fighting to reform the system, rather than that
he was up against the system itself."
But as it turned out, the hammer first fell
elsewhere. In April 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, the
Duma member who had hired Trepashkin for his
committee of inquiry, was murdered in front of
his Moscow home, shot down in broad daylight.
Three months later, another committee member died
under mysterious circumstances. The two deaths
effectively ended the independent inquiry - which
also meant that Trepashkin was now essentially on
his own. Still, acting as Tatiana Morozova's
attorney, he soldiered on - and in July 2003, he
finally hit pay dirt. It hinged on another loose
end in the case, one that no amount of cleaning
up after the fact could quite tie off.
•••
In the hours just before the Guryanova Street
bombing, the FSB had released a composite sketch
of a suspect based on information provided by a
building manager. But soon after and with no
explanation, that sketch had been withdrawn and
replaced with that of a completely different man.
This second man had long since been identified as
one Achemez Gochiyayev, a small-time businessman
from the region of Cherkessia, who had
immediately gone into hiding. In the spring of
2002, Alexander Litvinenko had tracked Gochiyayev
to a remote area of Georgia where, through an
intermediary, the businessman steadfastly
insisted that he had been framed by the FSB and
had only run because he was sure they would kill him.
It made Trepashkin very curious to learn the
identity of the man in the first sketch, even
more so when, going through the voluminous FSB
files on Guryanova Street, he discovered there
wasn't a copy of it to be found anywhere. As a
last resort, he started sifting through newspaper
archives to see if any had run that sketch before
the FSB had pulled it from circulation. And there it was.
It depicted a square-jawed man in his mid-30s,
with dark hair and glasses. Trepashkin was
convinced he knew the man, that in fact he had
arrested him eight years before. He believed it
was a sketch of Vladimir Romanovich, the FSB
agent who had manned the electronic-surveillance
van for the Raduyev gang during the robbery of Bank Soldi.
Trepashkin's first thought was to find Romanovich
and try to compel him to reveal his role in the
apartment bombings. Not likely. As far as
Trepashkin could determine, shortly after the
bombings, Romanovich had left Russia for Cyprus
and died there in the summer of 2000, killed by a hit-and-run driver.
Trepashkin then tracked down the original source
of the sketch, the Guryanova Street building manager.
"I showed him the sketch of Romanovich,"
Trepashkin said in his sitting room. "And he told
me that was the accurate one, the one he had
given to the police. But then they had taken him
to Lubyakna [FSB headquarters], where they showed
him the Gochiyayev sketch and insisted that was the man he saw."
With his bombshell, Trepashkin planned a little
surprise for the authorities. the FSB had long
since released the names of nine men they claimed
were responsible for the Moscow and Volgodonsk
bombings. Ironically, considering that the
bombings had been the chief pretext for embarking
on the Second Chechen War, none of these suspects
were Chechen. By the summer of 2003, five of
those men were reportedly dead, and two others
remained at large, but the trial for the two in
custody was slated to begin that October. As
attorney for Tatiana Morozova, Trepashkin
intended to attend the trial and introduce the
Romanovich sketch as evidence for the defense.
He took an added precaution. Shortly before the
trial's start, he met with Igor Korolkov, a
journalist with the independent magazine
Moskovskiye Novosti, and described the Romanovich connection in detail.
"He said, ‘If they get me, at least everyone will
know why,'" Korolkov explained. "He was
apprehensive, tense, because I think he already knew they were coming for him."
Sure enough, shortly after meeting with Korolkov,
Trepashkin was picked up by authorities. while he
was being held, the FSB conducted another raid on
his apartment, this one involving a whole busload of agents.
"I understand it was very exciting for the
neighbors," Trepashkin said with a laugh, "the
biggest thing to happen around here in a long time."
They brought him up on an old FSB standby -
possession of an unlicensed gun - but the judge,
apparently familiar with that tired cliché,
immediately dismissed the charge. Prosecutors
then turned to the charges they still had pending
on Trepashkin from the raid two years earlier and
the classified he maintains were planted. It
wasn't much, but it was enough; tried in a closed
court, Trepashkin received a four-year sentence
for "improper handling of classified material"
and was shipped off to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains.
In his absence, the two men tried for the
apartment bombings were found guilty and
sentenced to life in prison. Declaring the matter
officially closed, the government then ordered
all FSB investigative files on the case to be
sealed for the next seventy-five years.
•••
My last question to Mikhail Trepashkin was something of a throwaway.
We were standing on the sidewalk outside his
apartment building, and I asked him if, in
looking over the trajectory of his life for the
past fifteen years, he would have done things any differently.
It was a throwaway because people in Trepashkin's
position, those who have waged battle against
power and been crushed, almost invariably say no:
In the pursuit of justice or liberty or a better
society, they explain, they'd do it all again and
in just the same way. It's what such people tell
themselves to give their suffering meaning.
Instead, Trepashkin gave a quick laugh, his face
creasing into his trademark grin.
"Yes," he said, "I would have done things very
differently. I see now that one of my flaws is
that I am too trusting. I always thought the
problems were with just a few bad people, not
with the system itself. Even when I was in
prison, I never believed that Putin could
actually be behind it. I always believed that
once he knew, I would be released immediately."
Trepashkin's grin eased away; he gave a slow
shrug of his powerful shoulders. "So a certain
naïveté, I guess, that led to mistakes."
I wasn't wholly convinced of this. More than
naïveté, I suspected his "flaw" was actually
rooted in a kind of old-fashioned - if not
downright medieval - sense of loyalty. At our
first meeting, Trepashkin had given me a copy of
his official résumé, a document that ran to
sixteen pages, and the first thing that struck me
was the prominence he'd given to the many awards
and commendations he had received over his
lifetime of service to the state: as a navy
specialist, as a KGB officer, as an FSB
investigator. As bizarre or as quaint as it might
seem, he was still a true believer. How else to
explain the years he had spent being the dutiful
investigator, meticulously building cases against
organized-crime syndicates or corrupt government
officials, while stubbornly refusing to accept
that, in the new Russia, it was the thieves themselves who ran the show?
Of course, it was also this abiding sense of
loyalty that rather paralyzed Trepashkin and
prevented him from learning from his past
"mistakes," from living his life any differently
in order to get out of harm's way. For that
matter, even the change of venue of our meeting
from his apartment to the sidewalk outside was
kind of a testament to Trepashkin's obduracy; his
wife, returning home earlier than expected, had
been so incensed at finding him meeting with a
Western journalist that she'd promptly kicked both of us out of the house.
"Well, what can you do?" Trepashkin had whispered
as we'd fled, as if he really had no control over the matter.
But perhaps his wife's edginess that day -
September 25 - was rooted in something else. That
afternoon, Trepashkin was headed downtown to meet
with a handful of his supporters, and then at 6
P.M. they would hold a demonstration in Pushkin
Square to demand a new investigation into the
bombings. "You should come by," he said with his
usual grin. "It could be interesting."
In the five years since Trepashkin had first gone
off to prison, there'd been a lot of changes in
Russia - but none of them particularly auspicious
for a man like him. In March 2004, Vladimir Putin
had been reelected with 71 percent of the vote,
and he'd use the mandate to even more forcefully
restrict political and press freedoms. In October
2006, Anna Politkovskaya, Russia's leading
investigative journalist and someone who had
written extensively on the murky connections
between the FSB and Chechen "terrorists," had
been shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow
apartment building. The following month, it had
been Alexander Litvinenko's turn to be eliminated.
But perhaps most dispiriting, it appeared the
Russian public saw very little cause for worry in
all this. Instead, with their economy booming on
a flood of petrodollars, most seemed rather
pleased with Putin's tough-guy image and his
increasingly belligerent posture to the outside
world, the whiff of superpower redux it conveyed.
This image was fittingly captured in May 2008
when Putin, constitutionally barred from a third
term as president (although he remained on as
prime minister), officially handed the reins of
state over to his handpicked successor, Dmitry
Medvedev. For the occasion, the two men donned
matching black jackets with Medvedev in jeans,
looking less like co-heads of state than a pair
of gangsters as they strutted about Red Square.
Even Russia's ferocious intervention in Georgia
in August 2008, an act roundly denounced in the
West, spawned a new burst of Russian national
pride, a new spike in Putin's popularity.
Perhaps not surprising, then, the rally in
Pushkin Square was a rather pitiful showing.
Other than Trepashkin and his closest aides,
perhaps thirty demonstrators showed up. Many of
them were elderly people who had lost relatives
in the bombings, and they stood mutely on the
sidewalk holding up posters or faded photographs
of their dead. The small band was watched over by
eight uniformed policemen - and presumably a
number of others in plainclothes - but it seemed
quite unnecessary. Of the vast throngs passing on
the sidewalk at rush hour, very few gave the
protestors a second glance, and fewer still took the leaflet proffered them.
Watching Trepashkin that evening, it seemed there
might be another way to understand why someone
like him was still alive while people like
LItvinenko and Politkovskaya were dead. Part of
it, no doubt, is that Trepashkin has always shied
away from pointing an accusatory finger directly
at Putin or anyone else in connection with the
apartment bombings. This fits with his criminal
investigator's mind-set: that you only make
accusations based on facts, on what is knowable and certain.
But surely another part of it is his
single-minded focus on getting to the bottom of
the apartment bombings, his bringing the same
level of dogged tenacity to that case as he did
to the Bank Soldi affair. This was the problem
for Litvinenko and Politkovskaya: They made so
many accusations against so many members of
Russia's ruling circle that they gave their
enemies safety in numbers. For Trepashkin, there
is really nothing else but the apartment
bombings, and if he is murdered, everyone in Russia will know why.
The irony, though, is that by continuing to push
on with the case, and by continuing to call for a
public investigation, Trepashkin may also be
propelling himself ever closer to the answers
that will destroy him. So long as those behind
the bombings are confident that they have won or
that they have at least sufficiently buried the
past, he remains relatively safe. It is when the
crowds start taking his leaflets that the danger to him grows.
That day may now be fast approaching. Amid the
international economic collapse of the past year,
few countries have been more ravaged than Russia,
and almost every day brings accounts of new
popular protests: against the oligarchs, against
government policies, increasingly against
Vladimir Putin himself. It may not be very long
now before the Russian people start to ask
themselves how all this was set in motion and
remember back to the awful events of September 1999.
But it didn't come on that day in Pushkin Square.
On that day, the throngs were still true
believers in the Russian renaissance, and they
hurried on past Trepashkin toward the subway and
home, hurried toward the bright, shiny future their ruler has promised them.
Scott Anderson is a war correspondent and
novelist who has covered foreign conflicts on
five continents over the past two decades. Along
with his journalism, he is the author of four
non-fiction books, including The Man Who Tried to
Save the World and, with his brother and fellow
journalist Jon Lee Anderson, Inside The League
and War Zones. He discussed this article on the Longform Podcast.
Made with Atavist. Make your own.
So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish
participation in Bormann companies that when
Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the
Jewish and German communities of Buenos Aires.
Jewish leaders informed the Israeli authorities
in no uncertain terms that this must never happen
again because a repetition would permanently
rupture relations with the Germans of Latin
America, as well as with the Bormann
organization, and cut off the flow of Jewish
money to Israel. It never happened again, and the
pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an
Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most
efficient German infrastructure in history as
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>http://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/
--
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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