For many years, the green uniforms of the FSB closely resembled those of the army. In fact, the two institutions were distinctly separate, the idea being that supervisor and supervised should not mix. In 2006, Putin went a step further and signed a decree changing the Russian security services’ uniform from green to black. The color of the night has never been popular with the Russian special services, but Putin’s decision was driven by historical symbolism—a nod to a moment during the civil war of the 1920s when the White Army, losing its fight against the Bolsheviks, found inspiration by creating units peopled with officers dressed in black uniforms. They wore black tunics as a symbol of their scorn for earthly goods and were strictly religious. The regiment of Lieutenant General Sergey Markov called itself a “brotherhood of monastic knights who sacrificed their liberty, their blood, and their lives for Russia.” This chapter of history continues to shape the thinking of those individuals serving in the FSB today.
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THE SEARCH FOR the truth about the FSB is hampered by the agency’s extreme secrecy, as well as the uncertainty and danger involved in expressing opinions openly in a time of political authoritarianism in Russia. Our investigation was made almost entirely from the outside looking in, scouring every available resource for evidence of the services’ actions but without the aid of official archives or internal documents. We did, however, benefit from many sources in the security services who spoke to us.
This book is largely based on our experience as journalists. We have spent over a decade reporting on and writing about the Russian security services. In 2000, we founded Agentura.ru—a journalism-based Web site for monitoring the Russian services. In recent years we were forced to leave four Russian newspapers, and we have been interrogated more than once by the FSB. In 2005,
Moskovskie Novosti
, one of the most popular liberal weeklies in the late 1980s and early ’90s, changed hands, emerging barely recognizable from the shake-up. Once upon a time, we had both worked there. In November of that year, we were looking for the next step. Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Russian political journalist and the author of
KGB: State Within a State
, suggested we write a series of stories about the revival of the security services for the online
Ezhednevny Journal
(one of the few remaining sites where it was possible to publish independent political commentary). By then the FSB had already assumed responsibility for electronic intelligence and border control, gained the right to conduct intelligence operations abroad, resurrected a section of political surveillance, and restored a plaque honoring Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving KGB chairman, at FSB headquarters. To us, the idea of comparing the FSB with the KGB was attractive. Many considered the KGB unique in terms of its ruthlessness and ubiquity, given its legacy of Stalinist repression, total surveillance inside the country, and spectacular killings abroad—including the poisoning of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. The monstrosity of the Soviet secret police was such that it inspired some dissidents to argue that Putin himself was but a small part, a puppet in a larger KGB plan to retain power after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this light, the strengthening of the FSB was seen as another step toward resurrecting the KGB. But what we found out was quite different.
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We were in Beslan during the 2004 hostage crisis in which 334 people were killed as the FSB special forces stormed a school captured by Chechen terrorists. We witnessed the process by which the FSB built a new system for managing espionage, under which several Russian scientists were accused of spying and sentenced to many years in prison. And we followed and reported on the offensive tactics adopted by the Russian secret services abroad: the 2004 assassination of former Chechen vice president Zelimhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar and several mysterious killings of Chechens in Azerbaijan and Abkhazia during 2006-2007. We hope this book might help the reader understand the process by which the FSB evolved into the organization it is today.
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THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA
THE BIRTH OF THE FSB
T
HE KGB, KNOWN formally as the Committee of State Security, was an omnipresent force in the Soviet Union. Established in 1954, the agency was an outgrowth of several Soviet security organizations. It combined dozens of different functions: gathering foreign intelligence, guarding national borders, protecting Soviet leaders, obtaining counterintelligence, silencing dissent, and closely monitoring all aspects of Soviet life, from the church to the national military. In order to carry out its myriad tasks, the KGB was afforded a generous budget by the Soviet leadership, one that provided for the KGB’s own armed forces team and elite special operations groups.
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The KGB’s headquarters were in Moscow, but—as with the Stalin-era secret police—its structure was replicated within every Russian region. Any foreigner fortunate enough to travel through Russia was inevitably followed by local KGB agents.
Within each Soviet university, plant, or research center was a security department known as the “first section.” These sections were ostensibly created to prevent spies from infiltrating the Soviet system. When agents in the first section found no spies, they turned their attention to monitoring the “moral climate of the collective,” recording conversations and making note of rumors. Occasionally members of the first section interfered in family affairs. In a time when divorce and adultery were grounds for state mistrust, reporting such transgressions to leadership could both ruin a person’s career and ultimately prevent a Soviet citizen from being allowed to leave the country.
Despite its sprawling and intrusive structure, the KGB was restrained in one very significant way: The Communist Party was keeping watch. Each division, department, and office of the KGB had a party cell, a peephole by which the state could monitor its agents. The Guidelines of the KGB, approved in 1959, established as much: “The party organizations . . . provide the development of real criticism and self-criticism. Party organizations and every communist have the right . . . to report about shortcomings in the work of the organs of state security to the respective party organs.”
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The Politburo, deeply traumatized by Stalin-era purges, was determined to keep the secret police in check.
Embedded as it was in Soviet life, the KGB suffered the same inefficiencies that defined Soviet bureaucracy. Intelligence officers sent abroad on espionage missions compiled reports from Western newspapers and presented them as sensitive information provided by “sources.” And those agents who were sent abroad to spy were not necessarily the best or the brightest. The KGB worked on a thinly veiled system of nepotism. Those with the best connections were promoted. The sons of the Soviet elite, realizing the advantages of being stationed in the West, supplanted trained agents. KGB agents in the Soviet army, put in place to ferret out corruption among high-ranking military officers, were often themselves corrupt.
The KGB organization was rife with internal rivalries. The foreign intelligence directorate, or First Chief Directorate, a powerful agency arm, looked down upon counterintelligence officers. The directorate felt it was more enlightened because of its exposure to the outside world, and it felt the counterintelligence agents were narrow-minded and inward looking. The KGB was not a monolith, but deeply divided by internal factions, jealousies, and conflict.
The internecine rivalries within the KGB were well hidden in this extremely secretive atmosphere. When the failures of the Soviet system became clear during Brezhnev’s reign, the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, deliberately promulgated a myth that the KGB was the only uncorrupted body capable of saving the state. Andropov, the longest-serving chairman of the KGB, was infamous for the brutal repression of both the Hungarian revolt in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. In November 1982, when he assumed leadership of the Soviet Union, he carefully nurtured the notion that the KGB was made up of intelligent people, not brutal secret police. He was keenly interested in broadening the KGB’s functions in economics, an area traditionally distant from the secret services, in an ambitious plan to build his own team to steer the country. Andropov sought to fight the Soviet Union’s stagnation with an emphasis on workplace discipline and measures to combat corruption, but his methods proved largely ineffective during his short reign. (He was in power for less than two years.) Yet when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the myth of the KGB’s greatness survived.
AMONG THE PLOTTERS involved in the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse was Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB. Boris Yeltsin, the silvermaned icon of the democratic movement who had been elected president of the Russian republic earlier in the year, stood up to the coup plotters. In its aftermath, Yeltsin approached the KGB warily. His goal was to weaken the agency by splitting it into smaller independent agencies. The general feeling was that the only way to control the secret services was by strictly delineating areas of responsibility and not allowing intelligence to operate inside the country or counterintelligence outside it.
With so much uncertainty in the wake of the Soviet collapse, Yeltsin was unwilling to disband the KGB entirely.
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With the fear of the disintegration of the organization was acutely felt in the KGB’s hulking headquarters on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow. On August 23, 1991, KGB leaders watched apprehensively as crowds of Muscovites overturned the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s first security chief.
In the year that followed, the KGB initiated an unprecedented era of openness. KGB officers welcomed human rights activists searching for files on those who had been repressed during the Stalin years. KGB generals became guests on TV shows, and the leadership of the secret service invited dissidents to visit the Lubyanka headquarters.
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The KGB opened its doors to many who had never dreamed they would be allowed to view the secret archives of decades of repression. Nikita Petrov, a historian with the human rights organization Memorial, recalled the first time he was invited to the small town of Kuchino, outside Moscow, for his initial look at documents in the agency’s storage site. The KGB archivists were dumbstruck to see him. “They were shocked at seeing me wearing shirt and jeans in the place where even the visitors from the KGB headquarters were very rare,” Petrov said.
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The KGB even suggested that some of the activists take part in the sweeping changes. Sergei Grigoriants, a famous Soviet dissident who spent nine years in jail, was invited to join the KGB’s supervisory committee, but he refused, fearing that his name might be exploited.
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With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the KGB was restructured. The largest department—initially called the Ministry of Security, then the Federal Service of Counter-Intelligence (FSK), and finally the Federal Security Service (FSB)—would be responsible for counterespionage and counterterrorism.
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The KGB’s former foreign intelligence directorate was transformed into a new espionage agency called the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR.
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The division of the KGB responsible for electronic eavesdropping and cryptography became the Committee of Government Communication, later called the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information, or FAPSI.
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A relatively obscure directorate of the KGB that guarded secret underground facilities continued its functions under a new name: the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President, or GUSP. The KGB branch that had been responsible for protecting Soviet leaders was renamed the Federal Protective Service, and the Soviet border guards were transformed into an independent Federal Border Service.
The changes meant that the new counterintelligence agency, the FSK, after 1995 known as the FSB for its Russian name,
Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti
, was stripped of the overseas intelligence functions of the KGB. The agency no longer protected Russian leaders and was deprived of its secret bunkers, which fell under the president’s direct authority. It maintained a nominal presence in the army. In its new incarnation, the agency was pruned to something resembling Britain’s MI5.
Meanwhile, party control over the KGB dissipated. Yeltsin’s response was to encourage rivalry in the splintered intelligence community, providing a precarious system of checks and balances. Under Yeltsin, the foreign intelligence agency remained in direct competition with military intelligence; the FSB struggled with the communications agency, which kept a close eye on the social and political situation in Russia. After obtaining a report from the FSB director, Yeltsin could compare it with the report from the communications director. The communications agency was particularly crucial, as it controlled the central electronic vote-counting system, which offered a sneak preview of voting outcomes in real time for the Kremlin.
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