Kitabı oku: «Putin’s People», sayfa 8

The scheme Salye had uncovered was almost identical to the practices deployed by KGB joint ventures in the dying days of the Soviet Union, which had led to a flood of raw materials being siphoned out of the country from state-owned enterprises at the low internal Soviet price, while the profits from the subsequent sales at much higher world prices remained in bank accounts abroad. In those days, any outfit that wanted to export raw materials had to receive a special licence to do so from the ministry of foreign trade, whose ranks were mostly manned by associates of the KGB. When the Russian government launched a series of barter schemes intended to staunch the looming humanitarian crisis following the Soviet collapse, the deals followed a similar route. But Putin had special permission to award his own quotas, licences and contracts for the city’s so-called oil-for-food deals, bypassing the need to agree each one with the ministry.[19] He’d been granted this by the minister for foreign trade himself, Pyotr Aven, the same bespectacled economist who’d worked closely on reforms with Gaidar in the early eighties, and who then protected Putin when the oil-for-food deals came under scrutiny.

One of the contracts Putin handed out was to a Soviet-Finnish joint venture called Sfinks, which at the end of December 1991 was awarded a quota to trade diesel fuel, cement and fertiliser in exchange for 200,000 tonnes of livestock grain.[20] Another was a Soviet-German entity named Tamigo, given a licence to trade five hundred tonnes of copper in return for supplies of sugar and cooking oil.[21] Dzhikop, the outfit that was awarded the contract to acquire 13,997 kilograms of rare-earth metals for two thousand times below the market price,[22] was co-run by the brother of one of Putin’s university classmates who shared Putin’s love for martial arts.[23] Another recipient of diesel oil quotas was a firm called Interkommerts, run by Gennady Miroshnik, a convicted criminal who’d participated in a scheme that siphoned 20 million Deutschmarks from funds earmarked for the relocation of the Soviet Union’s armed forces from East Germany.[24] Later, Putin’s wife Lyudmilla told a friend that Interkommerts was linked to East Germans her husband met in Dresden.[25]

The barter deals ‘were handed out to his friends,’ said Alexander Belyayev, the then head of the St Petersburg city council who oversaw Salye’s investigation.[26] ‘They had to be given to people Putin trusted. There was no legal tender process then, so it was clear they would be given to people he knew personally, to people he could control. For the oil-product sales, this was mostly connected to Kirishi. They were near monopolists. This was Timchenko, Katkov, Malov.’[27]

The men Putin was apparently handing the deals to appeared to represent far more than a network of friends. One of them, Gennady Timchenko, was a spry man with a charming smile who was fluent in German and English, with a smattering of French. He and his partners, Andrei Katkov and Yevgeny Malov, had set up the Kirishineftekhimexport oil trader when Gorbachev first loosened trade in 1987, granting seventy organisations, including the Kirishi oil refinery near Leningrad, the right to trade outside the Soviet monopoly.[28] All Katkov and Malov had done at their previous posts in the Soviet foreign trade ministry was stamp and file papers for export deals, and they leapt at the chance to enter into their own business. Timchenko appeared to be a different matter. His official biography said he’d worked as a senior engineer at the foreign trade ministry. But according to three people familiar with the matter, he’d taken a very different route. He’d studied German together with Putin at the KGB’s Red Banner Academy before Putin was sent to Dresden and Timchenko to Vienna and Zürich,[29] where, two former senior officers for the Russian foreign-intelligence service said, he had worked as an undercover agent in Soviet trade organisations.[30] It’s possible, according to a third former officer speaking to Russian newspaper Vedomosti, that he was sent there to handle bank accounts funding the KGB’s networks of illegals.[31] ‘I don’t rule out that Timchenko knew Putin then,’ one of the former officers archly told me.[32] Timchenko has repeatedly denied any connection to the KGB, saying any such connection is untrue. A senior Russian banker with ties to the security services also indicated he had links to Putin during his Dresden days.[33]

While Timchenko has also previously denied that his Kirishineftekhimexport had ever been involved in the scandal-racked oil-for-food deals, adding later that all his firm’s activities were ‘transparent and legitimate’, one of Timchenko’s former partners told me his firm had participated, as did two other associates. They insisted that all the food they’d been tasked with importing had been delivered to St Petersburg.[34] But overall, the scheme ended disastrously: only a tiny fraction of the food due to be imported had ever turned up. Instead, Salye suspected, KGB networks were being preserved. Salye told a friend she felt her inquiry had uncovered ‘the tip of an iceberg’.[35] What lay beneath, she believed, was a huge structure that had its origins in the foreign slush funds of the KGB, the networks of which the scheme was designed to maintain.

Salye, it turns out, was probably right.

*

‘Salye was a fool! This all happened. But this is absolutely normal trading operations. How can you explain this to a menopausal woman like that!’[36] It was May 2013, more than twenty years since the scheme was set up, and Felipe Turover, a former senior officer for the foreign-intelligence directorate of the KGB, was telling for the first time the story of how he helped Putin set up the St Petersburg oil-for-food scheme.

We were sitting in the sun on the terrace of a café in Boadillo del Monte, a sleepy market town in the hills near Madrid. The scheme that had been publicly presented in the early nineties as a mechanism to bring in vitally needed imports of food, Turover claimed, actually had a different purpose. It was never really intended that the food would arrive. There were much bigger problems to deal with: ‘All this bullshit about the report of Marina Salye. This was absolutely beside the point. The situation was one of total collapse. There was an absolute lack of federal finance for projects, and Moscow only drank and stole. In order for everything not to collapse, we had to do something. It was like a ship without a captain, and when you try to turn the wheel it falls off. This was what it was like. If we had not started work, then St Petersburg would have drowned in shit.’

Built like a bodybuilder, with a shaved head and dark glasses, Turover had a demonic laugh and a treasure trove of stories about the Soviet collapse. He was from the elite of the Soviet foreign-intelligence service. His father had taught languages at the KGB Red Banner Academy, and served as a translator to Leonid Brezhnev; Giulio Andreotti, the long-serving Italian prime minister, was among his friends. In Soviet times Turover had worked closely with Vladimir Osintsev, the legendary komitetchik who headed the so-called ‘Party Technology’ division of the Central Committee’s International Department, running black operations and illegals deep into countries where the Communist Party was banned. In the chaos that followed the Soviet collapse, Turover had been charged with finding ways to pay debts owed to the ‘friendly firms’ at the heart of the clandestine financing schemes of the KGB and Party influence operations abroad – many of which also supplied crucial equipment, including for energy infrastructure, to the Soviet Union at a marked-up price.

The problem was that when the USSR collapsed, Russia had agreed to take on all the foreign debts of the former Soviet republics in exchange for their foreign property, and had then promptly pronounced itself bankrupt. An international moratorium had been announced on all Russia’s foreign debts. Turover, who needed to bypass this in order to pay the friendly firms without anyone finding out, claimed that the barter schemes were in fact set up as a way to do so. Eventually he’d set up a channel for payments through a small Swiss bank in Lugano, documents show. ‘We could not say we paid someone and did not pay Philip Morris,’ he said. ‘This was not a small matter. For some things we needed to pay right away. If we did not pay for equipment for nuclear power plants, then we would have a catastrophe. When the country stopped existing, everyone had stopped supplies.’

Turover had been sent to St Petersburg, he said, to help Putin set up his own scheme to pay off debts to some of the friendly firms. One of them, he claimed, was an Italian outfit called Casa Grande del Favore, which he said was one of a handful of engineering firms capable of the delicate operations required for repairs of the sewerage system that criss-crossed St Petersburg’s myriad of canals: ‘We had to pay, because without completion of the work St Petersburg would be covered to the tops of its cupolas in crap.’ He’d advised Putin to set up the oil-for-food scheme, he said, because ‘We needed to have operative instruments to be able to pay someone off fast.’[37]

Turover was essentially admitting that from the start the scheme had been intended not to bring in imports of food, but to create a hard-currency slush fund for the city. But without any oversight, there was no way of telling whether any of the funds were actually used to pay off the debts to the friendly firms, or whether they were in fact funnelled to networks of KGB agents still operating abroad. Turover claimed that there was no other way to operate, because the Russian state bank in charge of foreign operations, Vneshekonombank, was in a state of collapse. All of its accounts had been frozen January 1 1992, when the Russian government announced it had run out of funds. ‘It was a pure necessity,’ said Turover. ‘It was not possible to pay the expenditures of the city any other way.’[38] Any hard-currency accounts officially connected to City Hall would be frozen, along with the other accounts impounded under the Soviet bankruptcy: ‘If they’d kept it on the accounts of the city, it would mean the same thing as keeping the cash in VEB. But if you had funds somewhere in foreign accounts, in Liechtenstein, then you could pay immediately.’[39]

Russia’s central bank had used the same reasoning when it tried to explain away a scandal that emerged later in the nineties, when it emerged that it had transferred tens of billions of the country’s hard-currency reserves through a small offshore firm in Jersey named Fimaco, which had been established in November 1990, shortly after Ivashko ordered the creation of the ‘invisible Party economy’. The secret transfers through Fimaco, the Russian central bank chief later argued, had been necessary to protect the funds from being seized after the Soviet Union pronounced itself bankrupt, and to pay off the foreign debts of the Soviet international banking network.[40]

But there was zero oversight over any of the transactions, and rather than paying down debts, many suspected most of the money was used to fund the foreign networks of the KGB. In many ways, the central bank’s Fimaco operations and Putin’s oil-for-food scheme were cut from the same cloth. They looked to be part of the black cash of the Russian regime, and were so lacking in transparency that they could just as easily be used as the personal slush funds of the officials running Russia. Turover insisted that Putin never stole from the slush funds he helped create through the oil-for-food scheme. ‘But he spent money, of course. Of course he spent some of the money, and somehow managed this money, because he needed to travel, to pay for hotels, and he probably needed to eat as well.’[41]

In essence, what had been created was what in Russian criminal parlance is called an ‘obschak’, a common cash pot or slush fund for a criminal gang. It was a model based on handing out riches to a tightly controlled network of close allies, where the lines between what was to be used for strategic operations and what was for personal use were always conveniently blurred. This model became the basis for the kleptocracy of the Putin regime, and later its influence operations too – and it was based on the clandestine networks and payments systems of the KGB.

As for Salye, she was sidelined as a political figure. Sobchak blocked any further investigation of his young protégé’s oil-for-food deals. In the mid-nineties she moved to Moscow, where her voice was drowned out in the capital’s political din. On the eve of Putin’s election as president, however, she resurfaced to publish the first in-depth investigative article on the deals, titling it ‘V. Putin – The President of a Corrupt Oligarchy!’ Although her findings created a furore among liberals, they had little impact nationwide. Soon after the election she withdrew to the depths of the countryside near the border with Finland, miles down a boneshaking road from the nearest town. Only a handful of journalists made the journey to interview her there. But the scheme, and her investigation of it, remained her abiding obsession till the day she died, just weeks after Putin began his third term in 2012. She knew she’d glimpsed the true nature of his regime in those deals.[42]

Submariner, Soldier, Trader, Spy

The KGB men who took over St Petersburg with Putin were far more commercially minded than the generation that had gone before. Though they mourned the collapse of the Soviet empire, many in the younger, middle echelon of the security services like Putin had fast embraced the tenets of capitalism and rejected the dogma of the Communist Party. For this new generation, it had been Communism that failed the empire, leaving them high and dry in Afghanistan and abandoning them in East Germany. ‘They saw Communism as having betrayed them,’ said Andrei Illarionov, the former presidential economic adviser to Putin.[43] They were the product of the operations the KGB launched in the final years of Soviet rule to create networks of foreign firms. The secrecy surrounding these activities meant that from the beginning, the methods of the KGB men of the eighties resembled money-laundering operations.

Once the oil-for-food scheme was done, Putin’s allies began to move in on the sea port, which initially together with the oil terminal and a fleet of ships was part of a vast state holding company known as the Leningrad Baltic Sea Fleet, or BMP. For the St Petersburg KGB men, the BMP had long been a strategic asset and the story of how Putin’s people took it over is inextricably bound up with the forging of an alliance between Putin’s City Hall and the city’s most notorious organised-crime group, the Tambov group. In Soviet times, the KGB had manned the fleet’s ships as trade aides to the captains.[44] They knew intimately its trade routes, its cargoes, the contraband and the money to be made. In its heyday, hundreds of ships had set out from Leningrad carrying oil products, metals and grain, while others arrived from as far away as South America carrying fruit, sugar and smuggled goods, vital for underground operations and cash. In those days, the BMP represented the city’s most strategic cash flow. Even in 1991, the year of the Soviet collapse, its net profits were in the hundreds of millions of dollars.[45] It was not only the owner of nearly two hundred passenger and cargo ships, it also controlled the entire Leningrad sea port, including its oil terminal, as well as the neighbouring ports in Vyborg and Kaliningrad. It was the key to the city’s wealth.

The man who ran the Baltic Sea Fleet at the time of Yeltsin’s revolution, Viktor Kharchenko, was an avowed liberal who under Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms had won the government’s permission to carve out the company as his own fiefdom. Square-jawed and built like a tank, Kharchenko had become increasingly independent. He’d risen from a childhood spent in an orphanage to become one of the city’s most revered businessmen. In 1990, under his watch, the BMP became an enterprise he rented from the state, which kept 50 per cent of its profits for reinvestment.[46] He’d grown close to Yeltsin, and when the Communist regime collapsed in the wake of the failed August putsch, he unceremoniously kicked all the KGB men out of the fleet.[47]

Kharchenko was carving out a separate power base just at the time the St Petersburg KGB men most urgently wanted to keep control of the cash flow. In the chaos of the Soviet collapse, and with organised-crime groups also trying to get a piece of the port and the oil terminal, it took over a year for them to exact their revenge.

One of the first moves was made quietly. Late one evening in February 1993, Viktor Kharchenko was returning home from a meeting with Yeltsin in Moscow when police stopped the Red Arrow train he was travelling on just outside St Petersburg. He was hauled off the train, charged with siphoning $37,000 out of the Baltic Sea Fleet, and jailed.[48]

Kharchenko was released on bail four months later, but he was removed from his post in charge of the BMP. The St Petersburg KGB men installed their own director, sold off the fleet of ships one by one and transferred them to a myriad of offshore companies. In the process, one of the BMP’s directors was shot dead.[49] ‘It was a real raider attack,’ said one of Kharchenko’s associates. ‘They sold off the ships for nothing. Everything disappeared. They siphoned everything out of the country.’[50]

Kharchenko’s former associates still fear to speak of what happened back then, or about who was behind the attack. But the footprints of the local KGB men were everywhere. ‘They needed to clean their boots and eat,’ said one. ‘They didn’t pay attention to anyone. They just took BMP and looted it.’[51]

The raid was a foretaste of operations that were to come later. The KGB men had bent St Petersburg’s law enforcement to their will to take over the city’s most important trading link. Kharchenko had been removed as BMP chief at a crucial moment. At the same time, the port and the oil terminal were being carved out from the Baltic Sea Fleet into separate entities, and privatised by Putin’s City Hall. ‘They pulled out the harbour walls from BMP,’ said a former Kharchenko associate.[52]

Submariner

As City Hall began to privatise part of its stake in the sea port, Ilya Traber, an alleged St Petersburg mobster later named by Spanish prosecutors as an associate of the Tambov organised-crime group, was quick off the mark.[53] His men bought up shares from the port’s workers, who’d received them as vouchers, as soon as the sell-off began. The process was violent. ‘There were huge violations in the privatisation of the port. But all this was covered up,’ said a former Traber associate.[54] From the beginning, Traber seemed to have an inside track. On paper, the state retained a 49 per cent stake in the port: 20 per cent through the federal property ministry, and 29 per cent through St Petersburg’s City Hall. But a clerk at the City Hall Property Department somehow lost the City Hall voting rights to the 29 per cent stake through a ‘mistaken’ stroke of a pen, leaving Traber and his associates free to do as they wished.[55]

‘The raider takeover would not have happened without help from the mayor’s office,’ said a former city FSB officer.[56] After a series of violent struggles, Traber, who’d become the quintessential intermediary between the St Petersburg KGB men and the Tambov group, established control over the oil terminal too.[57] He’d first arrived in Leningrad in the early eighties, as an ex-officer from the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet. A squat and burly man with a thick neck and close-set eyes, he’d washed up at a city-centre bar named Zhiguli,[58] a favourite haunt of Leningrad’s street thugs and budding black marketeers. Traber worked there as a barman and administrator, and in the bar’s dark reaches he began to trade in hard currency, and then in the city’s rich collection of tsarist-era antiques. He soon cornered the market, earning himself the nickname ‘Antikvar’. By the end of the eighties he was moving his business out of the black market and into the light, setting up the city’s finest antiques store on Nevsky Prospekt. There he established ties with St Petersburg’s newly-elected mayor Anatoly Sobchak and his wife Lyudmilla Narusova, who became frequent customers, forging a close friendship with Traber that was to last long after Sobchak’s time in office.[59]

Traber had always worked closely with the city’s KGB, without whose assistance it wouldn’t have been possible for him to smuggle antiques. ‘It was clear he had deep ties with the city’s law enforcement,’ said a former senior official from the city parliament.[60] He was also ‘in business with the Tambov group’, said a former FSB officer who worked in the St Petersburg contraband division.[61]