It was 12-1-1995 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.
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."
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RFE/RL: Did the editor in chief of American "GQ" tell you why he decided not to let people in Russia read your article?
Anderson: No. I think it's an important distinction between the editors at "GQ" and the higher, corporate structure of Conde Nast Publications. I never had any indication from my editors at "GQ" that they were unhappy with the article--certainly they seemed very excited about it -- nor did I get any sense that they wanted to conceal the article at all. I think it was all a decision made at the Conde Nast corporate level. I know that in the memo, they never come out and specify what their concerns were, whether they're legal concerns or political concerns or economic concerns. My personal feeling is that they were worried about reprisals against their Russian-language magazines in Russia, and this article could affect their publications there.
(Editor's note: On July 23, a Conde Nast lawyer sent an e-mail to several Conde Nast executives and editors at "GQ" that said, in part: "Conde Nast management has decided that the September issue of U.S. 'GQ' magazine containing Scott Anderson's article, 'Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power' should not be distributed in Russia.") https://www.rferl.org/a/US_Journalist_Shocked_By_Decision_To_Censor_Putin_Article/1818296.html
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