Not all the officers on active reserve for the FSB were in such high-profile positions. Many deliberately avoided the limelight but still exercised a certain degree of power. One example is Mikhail. He is in his early fifties, with obvious Asiatic features, simple manners, and modest dress. He looks like anything but an FSB colonel. An ethnic Tatar, he volunteered for the KGB as a young man out of a sense of idealism. Earlier in his career he was responsible for keeping his eye on Islamist movements in Uzbekistan. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he was transferred to Moscow to serve with the Central Apparatus of the FSB, where his specialization proved valuable in the counterterrorism department. (While he bears a Tatar name, he presented himself as Mikhail, a Russian name, after tiring of his xenophobic colleagues.) After he fought in the first Chechen war, he was brought back to Moscow; he became a colonel by the mid-2000s and was sent to Moscow city government as an “officer of active reserve” to supervise the city’s policy toward Muslims. By day, he works in the municipal government dealing with such questions as where to build a new mosque in the city and how to address tensions between Tatar and Azeri minorities in the capital. At the same time, he quietly recruits agents in these ethnic communities, monitoring Islamist trends, gathering intelligence, and passing information along to the FSB.
ACCORDING TO FSB rules inherited from the KGB, active reserve officers should receive only one salary. If his salary at the FSB was higher than in the company he infiltrated, the officer was allowed to keep the difference. But if his salary in the FSB was lower, he was ordered to return the difference to the FSB. If he had no such intention (as it turned out in most cases), he had the option of refusing the FSB salary.
The officers on active reserve were caught in an absurd hall of mirrors. It was assumed in the FSB that if they went off to another company to work, they were still loyal to the security agency. However, many who went on active reserve during the explosive growth of Russian capitalism became more loyal to their profitable companies than to the security agency. In some cases they regarded the company as their primary boss and the FSB as “in their pocket”—a source that would provide access to precious data and personnel.
Those officers who were sent to small companies, mostly majors and colonels, largely maintained loyalty to the FSB and never turned down the service salaries, because they wanted to further their careers with the security agency. By contrast, generals on active reserve, who were courted by the biggest corporations and banks and were offered huge profits, often quickly forgot about their comparatively small generals’ salaries. They became powerful business representatives within the FSB. Mostly in their late fifties or early sixties, they acted in full knowledge that they probably would never again have a future in the secret services.
This tension between the generations of security officers led to a breach, as younger officers grew increasingly frustrated by the fortunes of the older group. Colonels and majors started to question a policy designed to benefit generals. According to one FSB colonel of the active reserve, who spoke to the authors on condition of anonymity: “The main question is the old point about two salaries. I was sent with elements of disguise, so I was forced to do my official job and then the job for the FSB, having meetings with agents at night, so why am I refused a second salary? [The rule] was established by the secret order of the FSB director, but the order has not been duly registered in the Ministry of Justice, so there is no way to challenge it.”
Perhaps no one knew more about the active reserve than Putin. In the final years of the Cold War, Putin served in East Germany for the KGB. When he returned to Russia in 1990, he was transferred to the active reserve and attached to Leningrad University. The following year, he was transferred to the office of prominent democrat Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad. On August 20, 1991, he finally retired from the KGB.
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Once Putin became president, the wave of security people moving into business and government went well beyond those who were serving the FSB on active reserve. In many cases, Putin cleared the way for people who had worked in the KGB and elsewhere to gain high-level positions outright. Known as the
silovikii
, their ranks swelled under Putin. For example, Igor Sechin, who had served in military intelligence, became a deputy prime minister and chairman of Rosneft, the huge state-owned oil company. Sergei Ivanov, who had served in the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB, became deputy prime minister. Former KGB agent Viktor Ivanov became deputy chief of administration of the Kremlin when Putin was president and later was named to head the anti-drug agency. Vladimir Shults, a former deputy director of the FSB, is now part of the leadership of the Russian Academy of Science. The telecommunications business of the huge Russian business empire Alfa Group was headed by former deputy director of the Federal Protective Service Anatoly Protsenko. A former Soviet intelligence officer in New York, Vladimir Yakunin, became president of Russian Railways, one of the world’s largest railroad networks. Yuri Zaostrovtsev, the former head of the FSB’s Economic Security Department, was appointed vice president of Vneshekonombank, the main institution used by the government to manage Russian state debts and pension funds.
General Alexander Perelygin had one of the most mysterious careers in this twilight zone. He began his career in the Soviet KGB providing technical support for surveillance. In the early 1990s, he was deputy chief of the Moscow department of the FSB. By the end of the decade he had become the security adviser to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. It is not known when or if he left the FSB, but what is notable is just how many times he appeared to stand at the intersection of power politics and business. After many visits to Latvia, he was accused by the Latvians of interfering in their politics and refused an entry visa in November 2000.
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He later became a major player in the Moscow real estate market. He was appointed deputy head of the Department of Investment Programs for Construction in Moscow. He became the mediator between the secret services and developers in the most sensitive area—purchasing land previously owned by the secret services.
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It was a very profitable business because prices for Moscow real estate were comparable with those in New York and London in the early 2000s, and the Russian secret services had been granted huge areas in the heart of the city since the Stalin era. In this and other appointments, Perelygin appeared to move with ease between the state and business. Later in the decade he was appointed deputy director general of Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest nickel and palladium producer, where he was in charge of security. In recent years, his talents were employed in the attempt to save the reputation of Russian biathalon stars after a doping scandal disqualified them from participating in the Olympics.
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AS THE SECURITY services moved into other jobs in the new Russia, there were stirrings of discontent. They were aired in an open letter published on October 9, 2007, by Viktor Cherkesov, then the head of the anti-drug agency. Cherkesov, a close friend of Putin whose wife co-owned a private news agency and a newspaper in St. Petersburg, was a former KGB officer. His letter (titled “We Can’t Let Warriors Turn into Traders”) put forth the analysis that Russia had been falling into chaos in the 1990s only to be caught and saved by the “hook” of the security services.“Some wanted the society to be fragmented completely,” he said,“but this hook saved the society.” Nonetheless, he went on, the security services had suffered their own internal tensions. Many of the best and brightest in the ranks of the KGB went on to make their own fortunes elsewhere. Cherkesov, whose own deputy was caught up and jailed in a bitter, internecine battle among security services, lamented that the agencies were turning on each other in fierce competition. They appeared to have lost the unity of the Soviet days. “Today,” he warned, “experts and journalists started to talk about the ‘war of groups’ inside secret services. In this war there can be no winners. This ‘all against all’ war can end up with the collapse of the whole corporation. . . . The caste is destroying itself from within, when warriors become traders.”
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As examples of men like Perelygin made clear, the new order of the FSB extended a degree of protection and stability to its officers through continued high-level placement beyond the agency itself. But the promotion of a selective group, coupled with the fierce rivalry of former colleagues, fueled division.
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“THE INTERESTS OF THE STATE DEMAND IT”
SPYMANIA
I
N MAY 1999, Putin was the director of the FSB and also head of the Kremlin’s security council, a group of high-ranking officials who set national security strategy. It was a time of instability in Russia, just months after the country had suffered a major economic crash. President Boris Yeltsin seemed to be drifting. One day Putin went to the offices of
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, a mass-circulation broadsheet daily. At the newspaper he gave an interview in which he was asked,“There is a concern that you and your friends might organize a military coup d’état?” Putin replied, “And why do we need to organize a coup d’état? We are in power now. And whom would we topple?” Then the newspaper interviewers suggested: perhaps the president?
“The president appointed us,” Putin said, with a half-chuckle.
Instead of an internal threat, Putin pointed to foreign espionage as Russia’s gravest enemy. He declared, “Unfortunately, foreign intelligence services, besides diplomatic cover, are very active in using in their work various ecological and civil society organizations, the business and charity foundations. That is why these structures, however pressed we are from the media and the public, will be always under our steadfast attention. The interests of the state demand it.”
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The FSB got the signal. In the years to come, all the institutions Putin had named would become the targets of such investigations. The surge of espionage prosecutions reflected a sea change in Russia’s direction. During the 1990s, with the country weak and on the verge of bankruptcy, when Western powers extended a hand, Yeltsin welcomed them. But being the recipient of handouts, combined with a sense of constant upheaval, led to feelings of humiliation and resentment; these only deepened after the economic crisis of 1998 and the renewed war with Chechnya in 1999. A central thrust in Putin’s rise to power and popularity was a response to this feeling of defeat—to show that Russia would not be pushed around any longer and that Putin would establish a sense of order and calm. His campaign to ferret out foreign spies was part of his larger reassertion of power and order in Russia.
Human rights organizations and charity organizations were targeted in 2000. In August, the FSB accused Halo Trust, the British mine-clearing charity, of gathering intelligence in Chechnya and teaching Chechen rebels techniques to create explosives.
2
In 2002, the FSB was behind the refusal to renew the visas of thirty Peace Corps volunteers working in Russia who were suspected of “gathering information of social-political and economical character.”
3
In 2006 the next target was Russian nongovernmental organizations. Some prominent Russian human rights organizations, including Moscow Helsinki Group, were accused of accepting money from British intelligence. A documentary that aired on public television identified several British diplomats as spies responsible for funding Russian NGOs.
4
Putin personally backed the allegations. On February 7, 2006, at a meeting with leaders of the FSB, Putin said, “Russia’s counter-intelligence has acted professionally. I can only express my regret that this scandal has cast a shadow on nongovernmental organizations. But you have nothing to do with it. Those who accept financial assistance—you must know your partner.”
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In November of the same year Putin accused the political opposition of “behaving like jackals near foreign embassies.”
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Scientists were put in a special category. During the Cold War, most Soviet science research centers’ contacts with foreign organizations were highly restricted, but in the 1990s they were encouraged to look for overseas financing on their own. This practice prevailed for almost a decade, but in the 2000s the FSB changed the rules of the game, claiming that many state secrets had been leaked as a result of democratic reforms and insisting that a regime of secrecy should be restored. In 2004, the Russian scientific community was horrified when Valentin Danilov, a physicist and a head of the Thermo-Physics Center at Krasnoyarsk’s State Technical University, was charged with espionage and sentenced to fourteen years in prison because of his center’s contracts with the Chinese.
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Environmental groups were singled out for particular attention. The most notorious case was that of the Norwegian group Bellona. Alexander Nikitin, an activist who had called attention to nuclear risks in the Russian submarine fleet, was arrested on February 6, 1996, and accused of espionage. Nikitin was finally acquitted, but not until December 1999.
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