Russia now has more intelligence agents deployed in London than at the height of the Cold War, former British intelligence officials have said. They serve a variety of functions, including building contacts among British politicians. But the most important task is to keep an eye on the hundreds of heavyweight Russians — those aligned with President Vladimir V. Putin, and those arrayed against him — who have built lives in Britain, attracted by its property market and banking system….
Lord Timothy Bell, who was close to Mr. Berezovsky, said he had often sat in public places as his friend pointed out the agents following him. “They weren’t with anybody,” he said. “They weren’t sitting sociably. They were staring. It was unnerving. You got used to it after a while.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/world/europe/london-russia-spies.html
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2-2-17 According to a cable on the Ryazan incident from the U.S. embassy in Moscow, on March 24, 2000, a former member of the Russian intelligence services told an embassy political officer that the real story of the Ryazan incident would never be known because “the truth would destroy the country.” He said that the FSB “does indeed have a specially trained team of men whose mission is to carry out this type of urban warfare.” He said that Viktor Cherkesov, the first deputy director of the FSB and a former interrogator of Soviet dissidents, was “exactly the right person to order and carry out such actions.” https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/02/russia-apartment-bombings-september-1999-vladimir-putin-fsb-cia/
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11-22-2012 In June 1999, two Western journalists, Jan Blomgren of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and Giulietto Chiesa, the respected, longtime Moscow correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, reported that there was going to be an act of “state terrorism” in Russia. The goal would be to instill fear and panic in the population. Chiesa wrote:
With a high degree of certitude, one can say that the explosions of bombs killing innocent people are always planned by people with political minds who are interested in destabilizing the situation in a country…. It could be foreigners… but it could also be “our own people” trying to frighten the country.
These reports were followed in July by an article by the Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin in the national paper Moskovskaya pravda warning that there would be terrorist attacks in Moscow. Citing a leaked Kremlin document, Zhilin wrote that the purpose would be to derail Yeltsin’s political opponents, in particular Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and the former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. Zhilin’s information (appearing in an article entitled “Storm in Moscow”) was ignored. What he claimed appeared to be unthinkable….
Even more significant is the fact that a respected and influential Duma deputy, Konstantin Borovoy, was told on September 9, the day of the first Moscow apartment bombing, that there was to be a terrorist attack in the city. His source was an officer of the Russian military intelligence (GRU). Borovoy transmitted this information to FSB officials serving on Yeltsin’s Security Council, but he was ignored….
But the official explanations did not quell suspicions about FSB complicity among liberal, anti-Yeltsin journalists who were already making their own investigations. Their suspicions were intensified by a strange incident that occurred on September 22 in the city of Ryazan, about a hundred miles southeast of Moscow.3 Residents of an apartment complex had reported unusual activity in the basement and observed that three people in a car with partially papered-over license plates had unloaded sacks whose contents they couldn’t make out. A professional bomb squad arrived and discovered that the sacks contained not only sugar but also explosives, including hexogen, and that a detonator was attached. After the sacks were examined and removed, they were sent by the local FSB to Moscow.
The entire apartment building was evacuated. Local authorities found the car used by the three who had planted the explosives, a white Zhiguli, in a nearby parking lot. To their astonishment the license plates were traced to the FSB. And when they apprehended two of the suspects, it turned out that they were FSB employees, who were soon released on orders from Moscow.
After a day and a half of silence, Patrushev announced on television that the apparent bomb had been part of a “training exercise” and that the sacks contained only sugar. The local Ryazan FSB and regular police, who had been combing the city for more explosives, expressed outrage. In the words of one police official: “Our preliminary tests showed the presence of explosives…. As far as we were concerned, the danger was real.”…
Thanks to the stubborn investigative work of Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB lieutenant colonel, it turns out that the man who carried out the bombings was not Gochiyaev, but Vladimir Romanovich, who worked for the FSB and was reportedly killed in an automobile accident in Cyprus in 2003. In November 2003, after Trepashkin’s findings were reported in the Russian press, he was arrested on false charges of carrying illegal weapons. Trepashkin was released briefly in 2005, but then was rearrested and remained in prison until 2007.
Meanwhile, the efforts of Kovalev’s commission to unearth the facts were stymied at every turn. (Trepashkin had been the commission’s lawyer before his arrest.) The commission could not interview witnesses under oath or gain access to documents and testimony in the cases. One important commission member, liberal Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov, was gunned down in Moscow in April 2003, and another, the prominent investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, died suddenly in July of that year. Many suspect he was poisoned. As a result, the commission’s work ground to a halt.
A central question involved the materials used in the explosives. The day after the first Moscow apartment bombing, an FSB spokesman said that both hexogen and TNT were discovered. Patrushev himself confirmed this in his September television interview. But by March 2000 the FSB had changed its story and claimed that hexogen had not been used in the bombs. In fact, several Russian investigative journalists were able to demonstrate that hexogen was the key ingredient in all of the bombs and that hexogen can only be obtained from Russian government facilities under the control of the FSB. According to Novaya gazeta reporter Pavel Voloshin:
The targets, perpetrators and zakazchiki [those who gave orders] of the terrorist acts can be determined by the provenance of the explosives. The circulation of explosive substances in Russia is under strict state control…. To “conceal” a supply of hexogen by skirting the existing rules is de facto impossible. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/11/22/finally-we-know-about-moscow-bombings/
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Russian human-rights defenders Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko also worked to shed light on the apartment bombings. But all of them were murdered between 2003 and 2006....
Yuri Shchekochikhin, another member of the public commission, died three months later. He was the victim of a mysterious illness that caused his skin to peel off and his internal organs to collapse. The Russian authorities refused to allow an autopsy, but his relatives managed to send tissue samples to London; based on these samples, he was tentatively found to have died from thallium poisoning. Thallium is the substance also believed to have been used in the poisoning of Roman Tsepov, Putin’s former bodyguard, in September 2004.
Shchekochikhin had been a friend of mine since the 1980s. Shortly before his death, he presented me with a copy of his latest book, Slaves of the KGB: 20th Century, the Religion of Betrayal, about persons forced to work under the Soviet regime as informers. Yuri inscribed it: “We are still alive in 2003!” https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8tJzsFEq8M Litvinenko evidence--precise!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8tJzsFEq8M Litvinenko evidence--precise!
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