FROM THE BEGINNING, Russian authorities had been prepared for a massive explosion from one of the bombs brought in beforehand by the Chechens. But at the time of the storming, there was none. Instead of killing themselves along with the hostages, the female terrorists, loaded down with explosive belts, had simply covered their faces with head scarves and lain down on the floor among the hostages. Since special purpose fighters were under orders to kill all terrorists, there was no chance to later ask the Chechens why they hadn’t detonated their bombs. Shavrin said, “When we entered the hall, we saw a female suicide bomber. She was sitting on a chair. Her eyes were open, she was holding the electrodes, all she had to do was to connect them. Why she didn’t do that is unclear. Perhaps she was waiting for some instruction or command. She had enough time.”
10
The day after the siege, it became known that the special forces had pumped into the theater fentanyl, an anesthetic gas, which they assumed would put the terrorists to sleep. The gas is three hundred times more powerful than morphine, but the effect on a person takes two minutes.
11
When the gas was pumped into the theater, the terrorists were not knocked out immediately.
According to Shavrin, the operations staff doubted there would be many hostages alive after the storming. Anticipating an explosion, the FSB used the deadly gas in a desperate attempt to support the special troops when they went in, no matter how effective it might be. The operations staff, considering the situation hopeless, had used all available methods. When no explosion occurred, the storming was deemed a victory; at that moment the authorities had not given thought to the consequences of the poisoning for the hostages.
In the end, 130 hostages died, only five at the hands of terrorists.
12
According to Russian authorities, fentanyl was a breath paralyzer, and the number of victims was so great simply because the hostages had been weakened by three days of the crisis. But Pavel Finogenov, who lost his 32-year-old brother in the Nord-Ost siege, told Borogan: “My brother Igor was an officer of the special forces and had recently undergone training, including an imitation gas attack, which he completed successfully. He was in excellent shape.”
13
Virtually no preparation had been made for the aftereffects of the gas. No temporary hospital had been set up, there was not enough oxygen on hand, and there was no antidote at the ready for those poisoned. It soon became clear that no one had been briefed on the use of fentanyl. “At headquarters level the prediction was that there would be losses, there would be shooting, there would be an explosion, there would be a lot of casualties. But what actually happened? The storming was over, there was no explosion, and eight hundred people or more had to be resuscitated from the effects of the gas. It turned out that no one was prepared for this,” recalled Shavrin.“We anticipated the explosion. We thought less than 10 percent would survive.”
The operations staff of the FSB and other services had gravely miscalculated. They did not imagine that the threat to blow up the building might be a bluff. The FSB’s laboratory had provided the gas, but no one thought about how it could be ameliorated afterward. The operations staff was ultimately determined not to repeat the disaster of Budennovsk. The generals wanted to make sure Putin would succeed where Yeltsin had failed. On October 24, on the second day of hostage crisis, Mikhail Leontiev, a political commentator for TV Channel One, thought to be very close to Vladimir Putin, said on his show: “The sense of the event is that all of us are paying for Budennovsk—for the shame of the political agreement with gangsters and degenerates. When one speaks about the question of price and negotiations, let’s count how many lives we have paid during these seven years for Budennovsk and Khasavyurt. . . . We are guilty—all of us together are guilty who have allowed them to think for a moment that there could be a repeat of Budennovsk.”
14
After the storming the same mantra was repeated by FSB general Alexander Zdanovich, then a member of the operations staff. On October 26, asked to compare the storming of Nord-Ost with that of Budennovsk, Zdanovich replied,“The first thing I would say is that there have been times when our special forces have been ready to solve the problem. In my opinion, this time [in Budennovsk] there was a lack of the political will to make a decision.”
15
Those who questioned the operation were punished. The radio station Echo Moskvy was officially warned by the Media Ministry that it could be closed down for airing interviews with the terrorists. The television channel Moskovia’s broadcasts were temporarily halted. The NTV coverage of the crisis was personally criticized by Vladimir Putin.
16
Meanwhile the clinics treating hostages suffering from gas poisoning were prohibited from providing information about the victims to journalists. The authorities officially stated that they would not divulge all the circumstances of the operation.
On Sunday, October 27, the day after the storming of the theater, the authors, then working for the weekly
Versiya
, realized the futility of waiting a week for their story to run and decided to publish it on the Web site Agentura.ru. On Monday, prominent Italian journalist Guilietto Chiesa republished their reportage in
La Stampa
.
17
The following Friday, November 1, when
Versiya
was going to press, a group of FSB officers arrived at the editorial offices and began a search, claiming they were looking for information published in an article by Soldatov the previous May. A few computers, including the editorial server, were seized, and a number of journalists were ordered to visit the FSB for interrogation. On Sunday, Soldatov received a phone call from Alexei Gorchakov of the FSB’s Investigative Directorate and was summoned for questioning.
A MONTH PASSED with a series of interrogations of the authors and others from
Versiya
. It was a difficult time. We felt under intense pressure, and all of the interrogated journalists were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.
At the end of November 2002, Soldatov was called by Vladimir, a major in the Moscow department of the FSB who worked in the counterterrorism section and a source who was at times useful for obtaining information on terrorist groups. Vladimir asked for a meeting, and chose to meet at the entrance of the Moscow Zoo, situated in the Krasnaya Presnya neighborhood in the center of the city.
When Soldatov met Vladimir at a bus stop, the man who’d been a periodic source for two years refused to sit in the author’s car, suggesting instead that they walk alongside the perimeter of the zoo. “Look, Andrei, you know we are all in big trouble,” Vladimir said. “I was told to tell you they are ready to finish the investigation, but we have to make a deal. Forget about Nord-Ost.” Vladimir was suggesting that we not attempt any further investigation. At the time, there were still many unanswered questions about the operation, including the nature of the gas and the decisions the FSB had made in the face of a terrorist attack. Soldatov and Borogan were still receiving information about the Dubrovka siege and tried to keep the investigation alive.
Soldatov was astonished that his contact with Vladimir was now known to the FSB leadership, and that Vladimir was being used by the FSB to persuade
Versiya
to drop its investigation. (Just a week before the meeting, Soldatov and Borogan had published details provided by an investigator in the Moscow prosecutor’s office, who claimed that not all of the terrorists’ explosives had been operational, most had been dummies, and furthermore that the Kremlin had been well aware of this.)
The authors had also obtained information suggesting that the number of victims was higher than the official figure of 130. But it was increasingly difficult to gather information in a climate of paranoia; sources feared that all journalists from
Versiya
were under investigation and surveillance.
As they strolled around the zoo, Soldatov flatly refused to give up his investigation.
“Forget it, there is nothing to investigate, and nobody is interested in it—Nord-Ost was a victory!” Vladimir countered. Vladimir explained to Soldatov that the operation was being portrayed as a victory to discourage terrorists from attempting similar attacks in future. This was one of the reasons the FSB was not interested in releasing the exact number of victims: “Andrei, you know, according to the suicides bombers’ rules, if you kill six people, you’ve won.”
Vladimir warned Soldatov that if he didn’t stop investigating, he would be summoned for interrogation constantly. Soldatov countered that whenever he was questioned, it would be reported by his journalist friends—that it would put pressure on the FSB, not only on himself. In the end, that is exactly what transpired: The FSB continued to call Soldatov for questioning, and the journalists kept writing about it.
18
After a few weeks, the calls to Soldatov ceased, and the FSB returned
Versiya
’s computers. The FSB never told Soldatov whether the case was closed, but it stopped asking him about the case.
In the weeks after the siege, the Kremlin declared a victory against terrorism, and the generals who planned the operation were rewarded
.
The country’s highest honour—Hero of the Russian Federation—was bestowed upon FSB director Patrushev, his deputy Vladimir Pronichev, who had commanded the operation from the FSB, and Alexander Tikhonov, the commander of the special purpose center. The head of the FSB’s Moscow department was promoted.
19
The authorities justified this decision by saying the security services, gravely weakened during the 1990s, now needed support, not criticism.
Despite the authorities’ attempts to portray the Nord-Ost theater siege as a victory for Russia, in fact the operation illustrated the security services’ frightening lack of preparedness for a grave hostage situation. In addition to the devastating loss of life it caused, Nord-Ost revealed a shameful truth: Even when armed to handle the threat of terrorism, the FSB had mounted an ill-coordinated operation and managed to bungle it.
13
THE BESLAN CRISIS
T
WO YEARS AFTER the disastrous Nord-Ost siege in Moscow, Chechen terrorists launched a series of brutal attacks in the North Caucasus. Once again, the security services’ inability to respond quickly and effectively (despite changes to the structure of the security services themselves) demonstrated a perilous absence of the sort of commanding direction necessary in a crisis situation.
The first attack occurred on June 21, 2004, when more than two hundred insurgents arrived in Nazran and Karabulak, in the republic of Ingushetia, bordering Chechnya.
1
Militants divided into groups of twenty or thirty and stormed fifteen government buildings, including the 503rd Army Regiment headquarters, the Interior Ministry headquarters, the base of an FSB border guard unit, an arms depot, and the local police headquarters.
The insurgents, Chechen and Ingush fighters, were led once again by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.
2
Their main target was law enforcement personnel. Dressed in camouflage uniforms and masks, the insurgents stopped people in the streets, demanded identification, and killed anyone carrying law enforcement personnel identification. They even established their own checkpoints during the raid.
According to official data, the insurgents killed sixty-two law enforcement officials, including the Ingush minister of internal affairs, two prosecutors, and nine FSB regional officers.
3
The attack was well coordinated: While insurgents were combing both towns for law enforcement, thirty-five militants headed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs arms depot in Nazran, where they found more than 1,500 Kalashnikovs and a large quantity of ammunition. Appropriating the ministry’s trucks, the rebels loaded up with weapons and left the area. The loading took three to four hours, during which time the insurgents continued to attack military facilities and prevented any attempts to recapture the guns. The entire raid lasted less than five hours, and federal army troops did not arrive in Nazran until the following day, when the fighting was over.
The attack in Nazran opened a new front in the Russian conflict in the North Caucasus. It was the first such military foray by Chechens outside Chechnya’s border in many years. The action was a direct strike on law enforcement and the FSB and control over a whole region was lost for nearly a day. Just when many had thought the second Chechen war was over, the Nazran attack posed difficult new challenges to Russia’s security services.
The Nazran attack came at a time of change and paralysis in the organization of the security services. In Moscow, the top brass wanted to show that the war had indeed ended and that all that was needed was some kind of police action. This attitude prompted a change in the way the security services handled events in the volatile region. More responsibility was given to the Interior Ministry, which was essentially a police organization. The FSB kept its hand in, as did the military, but by the summer of 2004 it had been determined that police action would be left to the police agency. Under the new structure, jurisdiction was unclear, security services were overlapping, and problems with coordination soon reached a critical level. By July 2004, in the North Caucasus the situation was extremely complicated: At least three divisions of the national FSB as well as regional offices, military intelligence, and Interior Ministry units were all operating in the same area. There was little or no coordination between them.
4