Following the success of
Lichnyy Nomer
, the FSB turned to Russian state TV. Documentaries were considered the best propaganda vehicle, because they are cheaper, can be produced more quickly, and can be presented as an independent journalistic investigation, thereby relieving the FSB of connections. Best of all, they guarantee direct access to millions of viewers.
In January 2006, the documentary titled
Shpioni
(
The Spies
), devoted to British spy activity in Russia, offered the FSB a boost. The film’s director, journalist Arkady Mamontov, showed a video taken by an FSB surveillance team of a British embassy official walking on an unnamed Moscow Street. The FSB claimed in the film that the British diplomat, identified as Marc Doe, was trying to retrieve data from a spy communications device disguised as a rock, later widely known as the “spy rock.”
8
An X-ray of the rock shown in the film, displaying four big batteries and a radio transmitter tightly packed together, was offered as proof of Doe’s involvement in espionage. Then Mamontov’s documentary investigated Doe’s ties with Russian nongovernmental organizations: The names of the most respectable Russian NGOs were shown in the list of the organizations financially supported by the British government, and Doe was called the handler of the NGOs.
The documentary, which aired two weeks after Putin signed legislation toughening the rules for nongovernmental organizations, was used to show that the largest such organizations working in Russia are in touch with British intelligence.
9
The FSB’s Center for Public Communications gladly displayed an example of such a spy rock to journalists. Sergei Ignatchenko, the spokesman for the FSB, said, “According to our experts, this device cost millions of pounds. It’s a miracle of technology.”
10
The FSB claimed that one Russian was suspected of espionage for England, but it turned out that no foreign spies had been detained. The FSB said that the Russian was arrested, but no trial followed. What is more, the FSB did not even seize the spy rock as proof of espionage. (According to Ignatchenko, the rock presented at the press conference was later found in a different part of Moscow.)
11
In the end, four members of the British embassy staff were accused of taking part in a spy ring, but they were not expelled from Russia, which is highly unusual for true espionage cases.
12
While
Shpioni
was seen by many as transparent propaganda, it nonetheless intimidated nongovernmental organizations, which feared they could be accused of harboring spies.
Shpioni
set the tone for subsequent documentaries. In one called
Plan Kavkaz
(
Caucasus Plan
), shown in April 2008, a journalist claimed to have found evidence of the CIA’s backing for the first Chechen war.
13
IN 2000, THE authors of this book worked at the daily newspaper
Izvestia
. That summer, Soldatov was called by Olga Kostina, a public relations officer who had once worked for MENATEP, a bank owned by oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. She explained that the FSB had created an “unofficial” press service to which journalists could turn more freely than to the agency’s official public communications center, and she was hired to organize this work. She told Soldatov that there was also a high-level commission being formed within the FSB to oversee the new approach.
14
Kostina soon organized an interview for Soldatov with Victor Zakharov, the newly appointed chief of the FSB’s Moscow department. (At the time, rumors were circulating that Putin was planning to make changes at the FSB, and an interview with a top official might be a chance to get some real information.) But once he arrived, Soldatov found himself seated in a large conference room with a gigantic extended table. Nine or ten consultants sat around the table, hindering Soldatov from addressing Zakharov. At the far end of the table sat the FSB general, in uniform, with a chubby, inexpressive look.
He was holding a few sheets of paper. They carried the questions that Soldatov had submitted in advance and the previously approved answers.
Zakharov started to read the papers aloud, and Soldatov, frustrated, attempted to ask him some questions, but his response was formal: “There is nothing special about my destiny,” the FSB general said. “I was born into a family of workers, and in 1973 I graduated from the Moscow Institute of Railway Engineers.” He had entered the KGB in 1975. At the end of the meeting Zakharov brightened when he gave Soldatov a tape containing songs about the FSB. All of them had been written by Vasily Stavitsky, then the chief of the center of public communications of the FSB and a recognized poet of the secret services.
The general had given an interview, but had failed to supply any information.
One of the songs became an FSB official hymn, with the words:
Always at the front,
Always at one’s post,
Don’t touch Russia—
A Chekist is always vigilant.
15
The following week Kostina invited Soldatov to join the “pool” of journalists briefed by the FSB. Soldatov was told that there were five journalists from different newspapers in the pool, who were briefed regularly at the Lubyanka headquarters. They were all briefed at the same time, and that is exactly how their stories appeared: simultaneously, in their respective publications. After his experience with Zakharov, Soldatov declined. Soon afterwards the authors left
Izvestia
, which was becoming increasingly pro-government. But the pool remained active for years as an instrument for steering press coverage.
On January 29 and 30, 2001, the two biggest Russian daily papers
Izvestia
and
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, published front-page stories about a former Russian army noncommissioned officer, Vasily Kalinkin.
16
The articles claimed that he had deserted the Russian army to join the Chechen rebels in 1991 and had subsequently been trained in terrorist tactics in Afghanistan by an instructor named “Bill,” (a thinly veiled hint at CIA involvement). The story claimed that Kalinkin had signed a document of cooperation with American intelligence before returning in 1994 to Russia, where he became an undercover agent. According to the newspaper accounts, Kalinkin waited six years for orders to blow up the Volga Hydroelectric Station—the largest of its kind in Europe, a 725-meter-long, 44-meter-high concrete dam that crosses the Volga River.
Both articles stated that in July 2000 representatives of the Chechen rebels went to Kalinkin with orders to carry out a terrorist attack on the Volgograd dam. In November of that year, Kalinkin gave himself up to a military counterintelligence unit.
These stories apparently planted by the FSB were full of holes: There was no explanation as to why Kalinkin had to spend six years as a stay-behind agent, why he was ordered to carry out a terrorist attack as late as 2000, or how he intended to blow up the hydroelectric station. A few days later, Kalinkin repeated his account in a press conference. He gave interviews to the Russian press in which he claimed the “recruiting document” he had signed had “in the left corner the Statue of Liberty and in [the] right the title ‘Osama bin Laden Diversion School.’”
17
What was most telling was that the story appears to have been printed by two of the largest newspapers in Russia almost exactly as the FSB had wanted it to read, despite the lack of supporting evidence.
The Kalinkin case was an example of a tactic invented by the Soviet KGB and primarily used for operations abroad, known as “active measures,” or political warfare usually aiming to influence the course of events in a particular country. A related tactic called “assistance programs” or “assistance operations” was intended to change the policy or position of the foreign government in a way that would “assist” the Soviet position.
To Sergei Tretyakov, a former Russian foreign intelligence officer in New York who defected to the United States in 2000, there is no difference between “active measures” and “assistance operations.” He said to Soldatov, “In the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, a Section ‘A’ (for ‘active measures’) handled these operations. When the First Chief Directorate was renamed the Foreign Intelligence Service, its Section A was renamed the Section of Assistance Operations. In the early 1990s, the CIA had asked the foreign intelligence service to stop carrying out ‘active measures’ that undermined the national security of the United States. As a result, the section was given a new name, but its methods, structure, and employees were retained.”
18
Active measures were based on 95 percent objective information to which something was added to turn the data into targeted information or disinformation. In 1999 this approach was openly acknowledged when Zdanovich, then chief of the FSB’s Center for Public Communications, presented himself as head of the new department for assistance programs. It embarrassed many FSB case officers, who were not happy that Zdanovich had revealed what was presumably a confidential term, and that he clearly presented himself as a chief of a disinformation unit.
19
ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1999, shortly after midnight, between 600 and 800 pounds of explosives detonated on the ground floor of an apartment building on Guryanova Street in southeast Moscow. The nine-story building was destroyed, killing 94 people and injuring 249. On September 13 a large bomb exploded at 5:00 A.M. in the basement of an apartment block on Kashirskoye Highway in southern Moscow, about 3.7 miles from the site of the first attack: 118 people died and 200 were injured.
The bombings terrified the city, and Putin immediately blamed Chechen terrorists and prepared to launch a major military offensive into the republic. The bombings were a critical turning point in Putin’s rise to power—his resolute response to the events, his deployment of troops, and his crude vow to “wipe out” the Chechens “in the outhouse” made him extremely popular. The question of who was responsible for the bombings—Chechens or someone else—has sparked debate that will not die. The debate mushroomed into a crisis of confidence in the FSB.
The terror the bombings inspired was so great that the authorities responded with frantic, widespread security measures, including stationing one soldier from the Interior Ministry in every building in the capital. (Soldiers were hastily deployed without rations, and in many cases Muscovites offered them food.) The panic deepened on September 22 in the wake of media reports that another terrorist attack on an apartment building had been foiled in the city of Ryazan, south of Moscow. According to initial media reports, an ignition device and explosives were found in the cellar of a Ryazan building on Novoselova Street, and the explosive material was similar to the hexogen used in Moscow. The Ryazan FSB department opened a criminal investigation immediately.
The same day, in Moscow, Alexander Zdanovich, the FSB’s main spokesman, was a guest on the NTV interview show
Hero of the Day
. When asked about the details of the Ryazan investigation, he said, “According to preliminary conclusions, there was no hexogen found in Ryazan. There was no ignition device, just elements of an ignition device.” But on September 24 the FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev, made the surprising statement in a television interview that the Ryazan episode had been an FSB training exercise. “First of all, there was no explosion. Second, an explosion was not prevented. But I think they didn’t do their job very adeptly. It was a training: It was sugar, not explosives—and this training was carried out not only in Ryazan—and we must praise Ryazan’s law enforcement and local population. They reacted appropriately. I believe this training should be close to what happens in the real situation.” Zdanovich then said on television, “Yes, in the framework of the counterterrorism operation, the FSB carried out a series of exercises in some Russian cities, including Ryazan. I want to say that in the other cities, which I don’t want to identify, the measures didn’t work, and the FSB officials, local law enforcement, and local authorities didn’t do their job, nor did we get any signals from local residents.” He added, “The next step in these exercises was Ryazan and first of all I have to say thank you to its citizens, and to the inhabitants of this specific building, for the vigilance they showed when they discovered these supposed explosives. And at the same time, I want to apologize to them.”
20
With these remarks, the leadership of the FSB utterly confused Russia’s citizens. Since then, there have been persistent questions about the role of the FSB in the training exercise and the explosions. The authors believe that there were indeed exercises carried out in Ryazan. Such exercises are typical for Vympel, a special unit of the FSB with the mission of verifying the efficacy of counterterrorism measures at locales like nuclear plants. But it is also the authors’ impression that the FSB needlessly bungled the crisis by giving an explanation that raised more questions than it answered. The idea that the FSB might have been involved in the bombings to help bring Putin to power became a runaway conspiracy theory. To date, the FSB has failed to counteract this speculation with convincing evidence of what did happen in Ryazan.