Kitabı oku: «Putin’s People», sayfa 10

Although Putin’s appointment was unexpectedly blocked by Anatoly Chubais, the Western-leaning privatisation tsar who’d become Yeltsin’s new chief of staff, he was not abandoned. Instead, he was asked to head the Kremlin’s fabled foreign property department, which had inherited all the Soviet Union’s vast overseas holdings after the collapse – the stately trade and diplomatic missions, the network of arms bases and other military installations, clandestine or otherwise. Though it was an empire in which much had already gone unaccounted for, it represented a strategic core of the nation’s imperial wealth, and for Putin this was a prestigious promotion indeed.

It was the beginning of a dizzying rise. Within seven months of his move to Moscow, Putin was promoted further still. First, he was made head of the Control Department, a core institute of Kremlin power, where he was charged with making sure the president’s orders were carried out across the nation’s unruly regions. ‘They didn’t just take Putin from the street,’ said one close ally. ‘He was known in Moscow as an adviser to Sobchak, as an influential person in St Petersburg … I think this transfer was planned.’[116] Then, a year later, he was promoted to become the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff in charge of the regions, the third most powerful role in the Kremlin after the president. After just three months in that role he was appointed to head the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, for the whole of Russia. He was only a lieutenant colonel at the time, and it was unheard of for anyone other than a general to head the FSB. The FSB generals were said to be aghast, but Putin’s allies insisted that his status as first deputy chief of staff gave him a rank equivalent to a general. It was just that it was in civilian terms, they said.[117]

Yeltsin’s son-in-law Valentin Yumashev, a good-natured former journalist who’d risen to become Yeltsin’s chief of staff, insisted that Putin’s miraculous rise was down to his outstanding qualities. ‘Among my deputies, he was one of the strongest,’ he told me. ‘He always worked brilliantly. He formulated his views exactly. He would analyse the situation exactly. I was always happy I had such a deputy.’[118] But for others who had known him in St Petersburg, Putin’s elevation was taking on a surreal quality. Some of his former associates questioned whether he was being propelled by the KGB generals who’d mentored his career from the beginning. ‘You could make the case that he’d first been given the task to infiltrate the democratic community through his work with Sobchak,’ said one. When Sobchak had become surplus to requirements, had Putin played a role in helping make sure he lost? ‘It’s totally possible that Putin was following the orders of the Kremlin, and that when he completed this task he entered the Kremlin and became so important,’ said the former associate. ‘If you suppose this was a special operation to liquidate Sobchak as a contender, then everything becomes clear.’[119] But others argued that Sobchak had become increasingly controversial in St Petersburg in any case, mainly due to what many saw as his arrogance. It hadn’t taken much to make his bid for re-election touch and go.

However he got there, once Putin assumed his role as director of the FSB, he soon began to clean up the stains from his St Petersburg past. One of his greatest enemies from those days was Yury Shutov, a former Sobchak deputy who’d clashed with Putin and had been collecting compromising material on him – on the oil-for-food deals, on the privatisations of the city’s assets and on his ties to the Tambov group. Soon after Putin’s appointment, Shutov was arrested at gunpoint. He’d long been a deeply controversial figure and rumours of his ties to the St Petersburg underworld ran deep. But once Putin became FSB chief, the suspicions turned into legal charges. He was charged with ordering four contract killings and attempting two others. Though he was briefly freed by a local court which ruled that there was no legal basis for a criminal case, Shutov was swiftly arrested again, and dispatched to Russia’s toughest penal colony, known as the Beliy Lebed, or White Swan, in Perm, in the depths of Siberia. He never emerged from it. The material he’d gathered on Putin’s ties to Tambov simply disappeared, said Andrei Korchagin, a former city official who had known Shutov well: ‘He was Russia’s first and only real political prisoner.’[120]

An even more disturbing omen came just four months after Putin’s appointment as FSB chief. Galina Starovoitova, the same stout and tweedy human rights activist with soft brown hair who Putin had approached for work after his return from Dresden to Leningrad, was shot dead at the entrance to her apartment building late one evening in November 1998. She was by then St Petersburg’s leading democrat, its most vocal crusader against corruption. The whole city was in mourning after her death, the nation in shock. Many commentators linked her killing to tension surrounding elections to the local parliament that were to be held the following month. But one of Starovoitova’s former aides, Ruslan Linkov, who was with her at the time of the shooting but somehow escaped with his life, believed she was killed because of her corruption investigations.[121] One of her closest friends, Valeria Novodvorskaya, another leading democrat, was convinced the St Petersburg security men had ordered her murder: ‘They were clearly behind the scenes. They held the hand of the killers.’[122] A former partner of Ilya Traber said the biggest threat to Starovoitova could have come from the St Petersburg siloviki who controlled the sea port, the fleet and the oil terminal: ‘She had a dossier on the group of people who controlled the oil business in St Petersburg. Traber told me about this. He said, “Why the hell did she start looking into the oil business?” This is why she was killed.’[123] Later, a former FSB officer who’d investigated her death told me he suspected it was indeed Tambov that organised it: ‘We understood that we would not be able to get anywhere with the case.’[124]

The events that accompanied Putin’s rise were ominous. But the country was hurtling towards another financial crisis, and the warning signs, it appeared, were not noticed by anyone. Yeltsin’s health was failing, and if at least one account is to be believed, the generals of the KGB were preparing to return. One evening in Moscow, soon after a financial crash that obliterated the Russian economy in August 1998, a small group of KGB officers and one American gathered for a private dinner. Among them were the former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov; Robert Eringer, a former security chief for Monaco who’d dabbled as an informant for the FBI; and Igor Prelin, an aide to Kryuchkov and one of Putin’s senior lecturers at the Red Banner spy institute. According to Eringer, Prelin told the other guests that soon the KGB would return to power: ‘He said, “We know someone. You’ve never heard of him. We’re not going to tell you who it is, but he’s one of us, and when he’s president we’re back.”’[125]

4
Operation Successor: ‘It Was Already After Midnight’

*

‘Everyone forgot. Everyone thought that democracy would just be there. Everyone was thinking only about their own personal interests.’

Andrei Vavilov, former first deputy finance minister in Yeltsin government[1]

*

Plan A

MOSCOW – It was summer 1999, and a deathly quiet had descended on the Kremlin. In the warren-like corridors of the main administration building, the only sound was the steady whirr of electric motors as cleaners polished the parquet floors. In the distance, the clopping heels of a lone presidential guard on patrol echoed down the halls. Offices once overflowing with petitioners queuing for favours now stood largely empty, their former occupants huddled far from Moscow in their dachas, nervously drinking tea. ‘It was like being in a cemetery,’ said Sergei Pugachev, the Kremlin banker who’d also happened to serve as an adviser to a succession of Kremlin chiefs of staff. ‘It was like a company that had gone bankrupt. All of a sudden there was nothing there.’[2]

For Pugachev and the other members of Yeltsin’s inner circle, widely known as the ‘Family’, who were the Kremlin’s few remaining occupants, a tense new reality had begun. Yeltsin had been in and out of hospital ever since October, and outside the walls of the Kremlin, it seemed, a coup was being prepared. Piece by piece, the foundations of Yeltsin’s rule were being dismantled, a consequence of the past summer’s disastrous rouble devaluation and default on $40 billion in government debt. The easy money, the free-for-all for the well-connected few that had defined the boom years of the market transformation had ended in a spectacular bust. The government had spent four years funding the country’s budget through issuing short-term debt, creating a pyramid scheme in which the only winners had been a handful of oligarchs, the young wolves of the Yeltsin era. For a time, the tycoons had used surging interest rates on government bonds and a fixed exchange rate to pocket the proceeds of a surefire bet, while the central bank burned through its hard-currency reserves keeping the rouble stable. It had all come crashing down in August 1998, and once again the Russian population had borne the brunt of the blow. Many of the oligarchs’ banks had collapsed in the crisis, but while they themselves had managed to funnel most of their fortunes away offshore, the general population’s savings were wiped out. The parliament, then still dominated by the Communists, was in uproar. Forced onto the defensive, Yeltsin had been backed into appointing a prime minister from the top echelons of the KGB, Yevgeny Primakov, the former spymaster who’d run the foreign-intelligence service and had long been a sentinel of the networks of the KGB. Racked by ill health, his regime in tatters, Yeltsin had retreated to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, while Primakov brought a string of Communist deputies, led by the former head of the Soviet economic planning agency Gosplan, into his government. Yeltsin was repeatedly hospitalised, and a Kremlin aide gently hinted that he was to take a back seat from then on.[3]

One by one, members of the Communist old guard had been settling on perches at the top of the government, and now that they were taking control of the cabinet, financial scandal after financial scandal targeting the excesses of their opponents in the Yeltsin ruling elite was beginning to emerge. Leading the corruption charges was Yury Skuratov, Russia’s rotund and seemingly mild-mannered prosecutor general. Until early that year, he had attracted more attention for his ability to quietly close down criminal cases than for opening them. Now, however, amid the widespread outrage that accompanied the country’s financial collapse, he’d begun to target top-level corruption. First, he’d launched a broadside against the central bank. In a letter to the Communist speaker of the State Duma, he zeroed in on how the bank had secretly funnelled $50 billion of the country’s hard-currency reserves through Fimaco, the obscure offshore company registered in Jersey[4] – a revelation that opened a Pandora’s box of insider trading and siphoned funds through the government debt market.

Behind the scenes, several more threatening probes were under way. One was a case that could lead directly to the financial accounts of the Yeltsin Family. It focused on Mabetex, a little-known company based in the Alpine Swiss town of Lugano, near the Italian border, which throughout the nineties had won billions of dollars in contracts to renovate the Kremlin, the Russian White House and other prestigious projects. Initially the probe, launched by Skuratov in tandem with Swiss prosecutors, appeared to focus on kickbacks apparently paid to middlemen close to Pavel Borodin, the jovial and earthy Siberian party boss who’d ruled over the Kremlin’s vast property department since 1993. But behind that lay a potentially bigger affair. And those in the Kremlin who were ruling in Yeltsin’s stead knew this only too well. ‘Everyone was scared about what was going to happen,’ said Pugachev. ‘No one dared to come to work. Everyone was shaking like rabbits.’[5]

The groundwork for the case had been laid quietly. Part of the old guard, particularly those waiting in the shadows in the security services, had been looking for ways to oust Yeltsin since the beginning of his rule. They had long viewed his overtures to democracy with disgust, and when he appealed to Russia’s regions to take as much freedom as they could swallow, they saw it as part of a Western plot to weaken, and ultimately destroy, the Russian Federation. Still set in the zero-sum thinking of the Cold War, they regarded Yeltsin as being in thrall to the US government, which they liked to believe had helped to install him and destroy the Soviet Union in the first place. They despised his apparent friendship with US president Bill Clinton, and believed the market reforms they themselves had developed, and which had helped bring Yeltsin to power, had been perverted to create the oligarchic rule of the semi bankirschina – the seven bankers who’d outrun their former KGB masters to take over much of the economy. They cared nothing for Yeltsin’s democratic achievements: in their view he was an addled alcoholic incapable of leading the country, while the Yeltsin Family, which included his daughter Tatyana, his chief of staff (and future son-in-law) Valentin Yumashev and various acolytes of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, was an unholy alliance that had illegally taken power behind the scenes, and was leading the country towards certain collapse.

‘A certain group of people understood that things could not continue this way,’ said one of the participants in this plot, Felipe Turover, the former KGB operative who’d worked with Putin on the St Petersburg oil-for-food scheme. ‘The whole operation was started out of necessity. There was no other choice. It had to be done. Yeltsin was a drunk and a heavy drug addict. It is a matter of fact that the country was ruled by his daughter, by a bunch of idiots who were only looking after their own interests … The governors were disobeying the Kremlin. The regions were starting to almost become independent countries. We needed to get rid of that scum.’

Turover refused to disclose the names of the security officials in the group plotting to remove Yeltsin from power. But it was clear that they were angling to replace him with Primakov, who as a former spymaster was one of their number. From the start, the group was looking for evidence directly linking Yeltsin to financial corruption; for something that would taint the president irredeemably, overcoming the widespread and age-old Russian view that the country’s problems were due to the poor decisions and corruption of the courtiers, the boyars surrounding the tsar, and not the president himself. ‘Because he’d been praised as the great democrat, no one knew how to get rid of him,’ said Turover. ‘The only clear path was a legal path. It had to be clear to the people that it wasn’t the case that the tsar was good and without fault, while the boyars were the bad guys. When the president is a thief himself, then everything is clear. We needed to have something concrete.’[6]

Turover was the informant who found and then disclosed the material that formed the basis of the case. From his perch overseeing clandestine payments of Soviet-era strategic debt, he had been gathering and sifting kompromat – compromising material – on the inner financing of the Yeltsin regime for years, in the hope that the right moment would come. As a close friend of the former head of the KGB’s black-ops department for financing illicit operations abroad, he’d been a member of the KGB security establishment since the eighties. Turover was the same wisecracking, tough-talking foreign-intelligence officer who had helped Vladimir Putin set up the oil-for-food scheme in St Petersburg in the early nineties – the scheme that created a strategic slush fund for Putin and his allies from the KGB. He’d helped set up other clandestine schemes that he said were to ensure the payment of the strategic debts of the Soviet Union to the so-called ‘friendly firms’, but which were almost certainly also slush funds for the KGB.

Documents show that many of these schemes had run through Banco del Gottardo, a small bank hidden away on the outskirts of Lugano, at which Turover was appointed as an adviser.[7] Banco del Gottardo was chosen, Turover said, because ‘We needed a very small bank with a very dirty reputation.’[8] It had been the overseas arm of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican-linked bank that had collapsed in scandal in the eighties, with its chairman Roberto Calvi found dead, hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Now numerous Russian black-cash financing schemes were run through its accounts, including a web of barter and commodities-export schemes through which billions of dollars had been siphoned.

It was another sign that for all Yeltsin’s attempts at market reform, for all his efforts to build a new Russia out of the rubble of the Soviet collapse, the old ways of the komitetchiki, the KGB men, still prevailed behind the scenes. Although Yeltsin had tried to man the ranks of his government with so-called ‘young reformers’ who sought to liberalise the Russian economy from the control of the state and run the country along the transparent lines dictated by the institutions of the West, the rules of business were still skewed in favour of insiders close to the state, and to the foreign-intelligence community. It was through these schemes that the Yeltsin Family had been compromised, and it was all the more telling that the blow to the freedoms Yeltsin had sought to bring to Russia came from a member of the KGB foreign-intelligence establishment. Yeltsin had been unable to pull either his country or his own family out of the practices of the past.

Banco del Gottardo hosted the accounts of Mabetex, the obscure Swiss company which handled the Kremlin renovation contracts, and this was where the links to Yeltsin and his family appeared. When he’d first uncovered these ties, Turover said he’d initially objected to handling any cash flow related to Yeltsin or his family. ‘But then I stopped, because I decided that all this could come in handy for the future.’[9]

Among the Banco del Gottardo accounts he oversaw, Turover had discovered credit cards for Yeltsin and his family. They’d been issued by the founder of Mabetex, a pugnacious Kosovar Albanian named Behdjet Pacolli, who’d worked in the netherworld of financing and construction for the Soviet regime since the seventies.[10] Pacolli, once an aide to the Yugoslav Communist Party boss, had long been involved in black-cash financing schemes through the sale to the Soviet regime of embargoed dual-use military goods, said Turover.[11] On the face of it, the credit cards looked like an out and out bribe by Pacolli, paid directly into the pockets of Yeltsin and his family, while the fact that they were paid out of a foreign bank account was a direct breach of a law banning Russian officials from holding such accounts. Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana had spent the most, running up bills worth $200,000 to $300,000 every year.[12] A further $1 million had apparently been spent by Yeltsin during an official visit to Budapest.[13]

By the standards of today’s multi-billion-dollar corruption scandals, the sums are almost laughable. But in those days the equation was absolutely different. The balance of power had already fast been shifting away from the Kremlin to Primakov’s White House. The old guard and the Communists were on the rise. In the aftermath of the financial crash, Yeltsin’s popularity ratings were at an all-time low of 4 per cent. The Communist Party, which still dominated the Duma, scheduled impeachment hearings to put Yeltsin on trial for everything they deemed as sins of his rollercoaster rule: the disastrous war in Chechnya that had taken the lives of so many Russian soldiers, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and what they claimed was the ‘genocide’ of the Russian population – the market reforms that had led to plummeting living standards and, they believed, to early deaths for millions of Russians. Revelations about the credit cards were intended to be the final straw. ‘Primakov was meant to stand up in the Federation Council and tell the senators the president was a thief,’ said Turover.[14]

The investigation also threatened to draw uncomfortably close to the much bigger sums that had washed through an oil exporter called International Economic Cooperation, or MES, that held accounts in Banco del Gottardo and was inextricably linked with the Kremlin reconstruction contract. MES had been granted contracts from the Russian government to sell more than 8 per cent of the country’s total oil and oil-product exports, its annual turnover nearing $2 billion in 1995.[15] It had been active since 1993, when old-guard members of the Yeltsin government had sought to take back control of the oil trade, reinstating a system of special exporters, known as spetsexportery, through which all oil companies had to sell their oil.[16] It was an insider game that lined the pockets of a small and murky group of traders mostly close to the security services in the Yeltsin administration. MES had initially been created as a means of financing the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church after decades of destruction and oppression under Soviet rule. But the billions of dollars in crude it was granted by the Russian government, export tariff-free, far surpassed any amount ever spent on the restoration of the Church.

MES was like a souped-up version of the slush funds created through Putin’s oil-for-food scheme. None of its operations were transparent, and the lines between what was strategic and what could be spent on personal needs and bribes had become conveniently blurred. Mostly, it generated black cash used to make sure politics went the way of a faction of security men in the Kremlin supporting Yeltsin. ‘The authorities always needed money. It would seem there is the state budget. But if you need finances to ensure a vote in parliament goes a certain way, you’re not going to get the cash from the state budget,’ Skuratov later told me.[17] MES’s activities were closely tied to Mabetex and the Kremlin reconstruction project. When Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin property department chief, initially asked the government for funding for the Kremlin reconstruction project, he was told the budget had no cash.[18] So he asked for oil contracts to be sold through MES to finance it instead. But the decrees issuing the oil quotas for MES – first for two million tonnes, and then for another 4.5 million tonnes – were all classified.[19] No accounting of how the proceeds were spent was ever published. And then, as if the oil sales through MES had never been granted, the government made an official announcement that it was going to finance the Kremlin reconstruction by raising $312 million in international loans.[20] MES looked to have got away with as much as $1.3 billion in proceeds from the oil sales, and no one could explain where the money had gone.[21]

In the middle of it all was Sergei Pugachev, the Kremlin banker who would later flee to London and then Paris. A tall, gregarious expert in the art of backroom deals, he’d teamed up with Borodin while the bank he co-founded, Mezhprombank, was the main creditor of the Kremlin property department.[22] In those days the property department was a sprawling fiefdom, controlling billions of dollars’ worth of property retained by the state following the Soviet collapse.[23] With Pugachev’s help it doled out apartments and dachas, medical services and even holidays to members of the Yeltsin government. It was a Soviet-style patronage network that to all appearances extended to the Yeltsin Family too: Pugachev said he’d bought an apartment through Mezhprombank for Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana.[24]

Officials’ wages were still paltry compared to what could be earned in business in the boom of Russia’s market transition, and Pugachev insisted that what the property department did was the only way to keep state officials honest, and stop them from taking bribes. But essentially the department was the ultimate Kremlin slush fund, and it gave Borodin a position of great power, including the ability to make or break careers. ‘People were queueing to see him,’ said Pugachev. ‘If you were a minister, you didn’t get anything if Borodin didn’t give you it. If you needed an apartment, a car, any resources you had to go to Borodin to get it all. It was a very influential position.’[25]

Pugachev would not explain the extent of his involvement with MES. But his Mezhprombank had helped bankroll the operation,[26] and he’d developed a deep friendship with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexei II, working closely with him ever since his appointment.[27] Pugachev had nursed the Kremlin reconstruction project, and guided its every step. He was an adept of the Byzantine financing schemes of Yeltsin’s Kremlin, and reaped a fortune for himself along the way. He’d somehow managed to set up a financial arm of Mezhprombank in San Francisco in the early nineties,[28] and spent large parts of the year in the United States. His direct access to the Western financial system further ingratiated him with the senior officials of Yeltsin’s government. ‘I could explain to them how the Western financial system worked,’ he said. He rented the most expensive house in San Francisco, and later bought a fresco-covered villa in the south of France, high on the hills overlooking the Bay of Nice. He’d become close to the Yeltsin Family, in particular to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, when he’d worked as part of a team helping to secure Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, bringing in a team of American spin doctors who ran a US-style campaign that helped boost Yeltsin’s flagging ratings and focused on the threat of a Communist return.[29]

All the while, Pugachev worked closely with Behdjet Pacolli, the owner of Mabetex. He personally oversaw the entire Kremlin reconstruction project, from the signing of the contract to the renovations themselves, he said. From the beginning, it was a lavish operation. Though he insisted that he tried to make sure the Kremlin got the best price possible, it seems that no expense was spared. Wood from twenty-three different types of tree was used to recreate the ornate patterns of the Kremlin Palace floor. More than fifty kilograms of pure gold was purchased to decorate the halls, and 662 square metres of the finest silk to cover the walls.[30] The Kremlin was to be transformed to its tsarist-era glory after decades of Communist rule in which all the treasures of pre-Revolutionary times – the mosaic floors, the precious ornamentation, the golden mirrors and chandeliers – had been ripped out and replaced with the plainest of decorations. Two thousand five hundred workers toiled day and night to create a palace fit for Russia’s new tsar.[31] Every last detail had to pass under Pugachev’s gaze. When Yeltsin asked why an urn had been placed outside his office, snapping ‘We don’t smoke here,’ Pugachev had it swiftly removed. And when Yeltsin asked why the new floors creaked and squeaked, he gently explained that there were now caverns of cables beneath them to carry the Kremlin’s top-secret communications.[32]

When it was all completed, visiting foreign leaders were awed by the grandeur they saw. US president Bill Clinton and German chancellor Helmut Kohl could not help but gasp when they were shown the vaulted gold-leafed ceilings of the Ekaterinsky Hall, dripping with golden chandeliers. ‘And these people are asking for money from us?’ Kohl remarked.[33]

The reconstruction had cost around $700 million,[34] at a time when Russia was receiving billions of dollars in foreign aid, supposedly to help it survive. But the financing that had been disbursed by the state for it was many times higher. The oil quotas MES had received alone were worth as much as $1.5 billion, while Yeltsin had signed off on an official decree for $300 million in foreign loans. Pugachev had also leaned on the first deputy finance minister, Andrei Vavilov, to approve an additional $492 million in guarantees for a treasury bill programme for the Kremlin property department – apparently another scheme to fund the reconstruction programme.[35] None of it was accounted for.

Pugachev had been aware of the credit cards for the Yeltsin Family soon after Pacolli issued them. ‘I said to him, “Why did you do it?” He thought if he gave them the cards he would have them on a leash. He understood it was criminal, that this would mean the president was essentially taking bribes.’[36] He said he was also aware of bigger sums that had apparently gone to the Yeltsin Family. Later it emerged that $2.7 million had been transferred to two accounts in the Bank of New York in the Cayman Islands held in the name of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana’s then husband, Leonid Dyachenko.[37] A lawyer for the oil firm Dyachenko ran later said the funds were for work he’d done.

So when, on a cold grey morning in late January 1999, Swiss prosecutors sent in helicopters and several dozen armed vans to raid Pacolli’s Mabetex offices in Lugano and left with a truckload of documents, it was, to put it mildly, a bit of a shock.[38] Pugachev and Borodin were immediately informed by Pacolli, and the news travelled like a poisoned dart to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, who in her father’s absence was acting as unofficial head of state, and to the man who was later to become her husband, Valentin Yumashev, or ‘Valya’, as he was affectionately known, who until recently had been the Kremlin chief of staff.[39] For Pugachev it was a threat because of all the sums that had washed through MES. For Tatyana and Yumashev, it could potentially lead to the credit cards and other, larger, sums that appeared to have been transferred to private offshore accounts.