Kitabı oku: «Putin’s People», sayfa 9

Soldier

At that time, the Tambov was becoming the city’s most powerful organised-crime group. Its leader, Vladimir Kumarin, had served time in jail in 1991 following a violent battle with another of the city’s mafia groups. After he emerged from prison, with the help of Putin, Traber and his men, the Tambov began taking control of St Petersburg’s entire fuel and energy business. The battles with rival gangs continued: in 1994, Kumarin lost one of his arms in a bomb attack. By that time, however, he was creating the St Petersburg Fuel Company, or PTK, which became the city’s monopoly domestic oil distributor, while Ilya Traber was taking over control of the sea port and the oil terminal on the Tambov’s behalf.[62] (Later, Spanish prosecutors described Traber as a co-owner with Kumarin of PTK.[63]) Kumarin became so powerful that he was known as St Petersburg’s ‘night governor’. In essence, he was the dark side of City Hall.

Putin seemed to be central to these manoeuvrings, the point man providing logistical support from the mayor’s office. Together with his trusted deputy Igor Sechin, who towered over a lectern in an anteroom outside Putin’s office vetting all who entered, he was the one who issued the licences that allowed Traber to control the port and the oil terminal. He was the one who granted Kumarin’s PTK an exclusive contract to supply fuel for the city’s ambulances, buses, taxis and police cars.[64] The first sign of his cooperation with the Tambov group came late in the summer of 1992, when his Foreign Relations Committee registered a Russo–German joint venture, the St Petersburg Immobilien Aktiengesellschaft, or SPAG, for investing in the city’s real-estate business. Much later, German prosecutors would allege that SPAG was a vehicle for laundering illicit funds for the Tambov group, as well as for a Colombian drugs cartel.[65] During his stint as St Petersburg’s deputy mayor, Putin served on SPAG’s advisory board. The Kremlin said this was no more than one of many such ‘honorary’ positions he held as deputy mayor. But one of SPAG’s co-founders said he met Putin five or six times to discuss SPAG’s St Petersburg business.

Trader

For Gennady Timchenko, the alleged former KGB operative who’d apparently known Putin since their days studying spycraft together at the Red Banner Academy, gaining access to the oil terminal had also always been key. He prided himself on his powers of persuasion and, in later interviews, he’d often explain his success with a nod and a wink about his ability to sell anything to anyone.[66] Since childhood he’d been part of the Soviet elite. His father held a senior rank in the armed forces, and he spent some of his early years in East Germany. His knowledge of German helped secure him a job in Soviet foreign trade and, according to former associates, propelled him into the ranks of the KGB, where he allegedly worked undercover as a trade representative in Vienna and Switzerland. Through his connections he forged a partnership with a former senior KGB officer, Andrei Pannikov, a thick-set man with a broad grin and hands as big as dinner plates. Pannikov had studied offshore finance at the Soviet Trade Institute, and then, with the blessing of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence chief Leonid Shebarshin, set up the first joint venture to be licensed to export oil products outside the Soviet monopoly.[67] Timchenko’s Kirishineftekhimexport oil trader formed a partnership with Pannikov’s Urals Trading – and for a time, from 1990, Timchenko headed Urals’ branch in Finland. According to a report by French intelligence, the company had initially been set up by the KGB in the eighties as part of a network of firms to transfer assets for the Communist Party[68] – a claim Timchenko denied.

Even with all their connections, for at least two years Timchenko and Pannikov were unable to gain access to the St Petersburg oil terminal.[69] Not only was it part of Kharchenko’s fiefdom, but as the power of the Soviet Union fractured, it became a vicious battleground for the city’s warring criminal groups. The oil trader Timchenko co-founded had ready access to supplies as the in-house trading arm of the nearby Kirishi refinery, part of the Surgutneftegaz oil company. But without access to the St Petersburg terminal, it was forced to export its oil by rail to neighbouring ports in Estonia or Finland, a much costlier route.[70]

Gaining control of exports through the St Petersburg terminal became so important that Timchenko turned to Putin for assistance. In January 1992, together with Pannikov’s Urals Trading, Timchenko set up a joint venture with Putin’s Foreign Relations Committee called ‘Golden Gates’.[71] They aimed to bypass the existing terminal, beset by rival gangs and under Kharchenko’s ultimate control, and raise Western financing to build a new, upgraded terminal.[72]

This was the first time the ties between Putin and Timchenko had emerged into the open. For almost a year, Putin led discussions with France’s BNP Paribas on a credit facility for the new oil terminal, backed by exports through Urals Trading.[73] But the talks fell apart when one of the key negotiators, a former KGB officer operating in Paris named Mikhail Gandorin, died just before the loan was to be approved.[74] ‘It looked like he’d been given something,’ one former Timchenko partner involved in the process said. ‘He called me two days before he died, and he couldn’t speak.’[75] That summer another member of the Golden Gates group, Sergei Shutov, was threatened and told to stay away from the project.

The project was under severe attack, with St Petersburg’s mafia groups, including the Tambov, battling each other to gain control of revenues from the existing terminal. The pressure mounted to such a degree that, according to two senior Western bankers, Putin sent his two young daughters away to Germany for their safety.[76] There is no indication Timchenko had any involvement in the violent struggles that accompanied Traber’s takeover of the port and oil terminal. But eventually, instead of building a new terminal, the way was opened for him to win a monopoly on exports through the existing terminal.[77]

One former Traber associate, a former Timchenko partner and a former KGB associate claimed Timchenko would only have been able to gain such a monopoly through forging some kind of working relationship with Traber. ‘Traber always had good relations with Timchenko,’ said one of Traber’s former associates. ‘The monopoly Timchenko won on exports would only have been possible through such ties.’[78] ‘If you need to ship oil and the port is full of bandits, then you need to agree,’ said a former senior KGB officer who worked with Putin in the nineties. ‘There was no way to go through without their agreement.’[79]

Lawyers for Timchenko said the relationship was no more than a ‘commercial, arm’s-length’ one, while any suggestion Timchenko had any involvement with organised crime, corruption or any other improper or illegal activity in St Petersburg, whether ‘via Mr Traber or in any other way’, was false and libellous. In 2011, a Timchenko representative told Russia’s Novaya Gazeta Timchenko was acquainted with the co-owner of Traber in the sea port and oil terminal, Dmitry Skigin, but the two men had not engaged in any joint business projects.[80]

At the same time, Timchenko was drawing on a network of KGB-linked foreign bankers to finance his trading operations. First, there was Dresdner Bank, headed in St Petersburg by one of Putin’s former Stasi comrades, Matthias Warnig, who’d worked with him in Dresden as part of a KGB cell.[81] Then there was Andrei Akimov, who’d worked with Yevgeny Primakov at the Institute of World Economy before becoming the youngest head of the Soviet foreign bank in Vienna, where, in the year before the Soviet fall, he set up his own private venture, IMAG, which provided financing to Timchenko.[82]

All the while, Putin assisted, issuing the licences allowing Timchenko to use the oil-storage facilities at Traber’s sea port, and helping facilitate supply arrangements between Timchenko’s Kirishineftekhimexport and Kumarin’s PTK.[83] Kumarin, meanwhile, joined the board of both outfits’ supplier, the Kirishi oil refinery.[84]

‘It was all very well organised,’ said Maxim Freidzon, co-owner of another oil trader in the city. ‘Putin and his guys ensured support from City Hall. Because of his KGB past, he could help with the logistical organisation. It was all one team.’[85]

The alliance that was forged then took KGB traditions from before the Soviet collapse and put them to a still more commercial use. ‘As far as I remember, the symbiosis between the bandits and the KGB had always existed,’ said Freidzon. ‘The KGB had worked with the bandits in the currency markets and in prostitution rings. They were sources of information. It was a natural symbiosis: neither of them had any moral limits. The bandits were like the infantry for them. They would take all the risks.’[86]

Putin’s interest in St Petersburg’s sea port and oil terminal often seemed more direct than that of a state official responsible for the city’s share. The alliance he built with Ilya Traber and his men troubled even visiting businessmen. When one was brought in to help arrange financing for the port, he was whisked from the city’s Pulkovo airport straight to Traber’s lair in an armoured car, accompanied by police and Traber’s guards. On arrival at the high-gated compound in a back street, he was escorted past armed guards and snarling German shepherds. After passing through several rooms adorned with icons, he arrived at an inner chamber where Traber was waiting, wearing a tracksuit bottom and slippers, a thick chain with a huge gold cross around his neck – the uniform of the city’s bandits. The businessman was left in no doubt about whom he was meeting. ‘It was like in the movies,’ he said. ‘My heart stopped when I saw him.’[87]

The scene was far from what he had expected when he was invited by an official from City Hall to assist with financing the port. But after a tense discussion with Traber, he received the nod of approval. The next day he was taken to more salubrious surroundings: the downtown law offices of one of Traber’s business partners, Boris Sharikov, on one of St Petersburg’s most picturesque canals. Also at the meeting was a former KGB officer who’d become another of Traber’s partners, as well as Putin and the City Hall property chief Mikhail Manevich, and a smooth-talking thirtysomething named Dmitry Skigin, who the businessman was to learn owned the port jointly with Traber. Skigin was the acceptable face of the port, a mild-mannered geek, fluent in the language of international finance, a disciplined businessman who went mountain climbing in his spare time and spoke English and French. His father Eduard was close to Putin, according to Monaco intelligence.[88] But according to two of Skigin’s former business partners, he was also a front for another St Petersburg crime boss, a pugnacious former boxer named Sergei Vasilyev, with whom Traber had agreed a fragile peace for joint control of the port, and later for its oil terminal.[89]

The alliance St Petersburg’s administration forged with the Tambov group became embedded deep in the city’s infrastructure. With the help of Putin’s men in City Hall, the sea port become a major hub for smuggling drugs from Colombia into Western Europe, former senior KGB officer Yury Shvets later testified to a London court. One of Putin’s closest allies in the St Petersburg security services, Viktor Ivanov, had assisted the Tambov group in taking over the sea port, while Putin provided protection from the mayor’s office, he said.[90] (Ivanov strenuously denied the claim, but other signs emerged that the St Petersburg port was a vital channel for drug trafficking.[91])

Control of the port became so strategic that when, in 1997, the Property Department chief Mikhail Manevich sought to return the voting rights City Hall had lost to its 29 per cent stake during its privatisation, he was shot dead by a sniper as he drove to work.[92]

‘Manevich was pushing for it all to be returned to the state,’ said a former Traber associate. ‘The leverage that he had was that he could refuse to extend the licence for the long-term rent of the port including the oil terminal. And for this he paid with his life.’[93] Vyacheslav Shevchenko, a former member of the St Petersburg parliament and a close Manevich ally, reportedly testified to the police murder inquiry that in the final days of his life Manevich had been deeply troubled by the situation at the port: ‘On his request, I went twice to the port and spoke with the head of the port. I made a proposal that the English insurance company Lloyds should come to analyse the port’s financial situation. A week later, two of Traber’s bandits visited me and told me if I went to the port again my head would be cut off with an axe.’[94]

Traber refused to comment for this book, saying the allegations were ‘fantasy and slander’.[95] Just three months after Manevich’s murder, the port’s shareholders agreed to extend a new long-term management contract for the port to a new Traber company, OBIP, owned by a Liechtenstein foundation called Nasdor Incorporated.[96] Later, the only person who ever dared to speak out publicly about the looting of the Baltic Sea Fleet was the city’s mayor at the time it occurred, Anatoly Sobchak. Long after he had stepped down he wrote a newspaper article in which, for the first and only time, he publicly criticised the actions of the city’s post-Soviet KGB. ‘The prosecutors, the FSB and the policemen who took part in this should be charged with abusing their position and for causing the country enormous loss.’ he wrote.[97] Four months later he was dead. ‘I fear this was what cost Sobchak his life,’ said an associate of Kharchenko.[98]

In the eyes of Putin’s KGB allies, the alliances they forged then were necessary as the only way to restore some degree of control in the chaos of the Soviet collapse. The organised-crime groups were the infantrymen they needed to help control the masses, the men on the street – as well as in the prisons, according to one of Putin’s associates then. This was a typical KGB practice, forged in the Soviet past, when Putin for instance had run illegals through East Germany. ‘They worked with people. This is what they did,’ said a former KGB officer who worked with them. ‘Imagine you need to calm down a bunch of alpha males. If you can’t shoot them, this is terribly difficult work.’[99] But the argument that they needed to do this if they were to bring order was only a self-justification behind the power grab. The oil-for-food scheme had also been set up ostensibly to save the city – whether to bring in food or to pay down debts. But all it had achieved was to create a network of black cash to preserve the power and the networks of the KGB.

In the skein of these relationships, another thread led to one of the structures set up for the Communist Party’s ‘invisible economy’ in the final days of its rule. This was Bank Rossiya, a small St Petersburg bank which was one more key intermediary in some of the oil-for-food barter deals. Like many of the institutions and firms set up by the Party in the dying days of the regime, when the August 1991 putsch failed and the Soviet Communist Party was banned, control of Bank Rossiya passed noiselessly into the hands of representatives of the KGB. Its new shareholders included a senior KGB officer and two KGB-connected physicists who specialised in rare-earth metals, materials so rare, and so strategic, that trade in them could only be handled by members of the KGB.

Spy

When the senior KGB officer Vladimir Yakunin returned to Leningrad in February 1991, a year after Putin, from a posting undercover at the United Nations in New York, he was shocked by the conditions that greeted him. He had come from a comfortable residence in New York to the grime of a working-class area of Leningrad, where the street lamps rarely shone and his wife would return home from the shops in tears because the only thing on the shelves was pickled cucumbers. ‘In essence, the country that had sent me to work abroad, and in which I grew up and where my children were born, had ceased to exist,’ he said. ‘So too had the values – the social and moral values – which were the fundamental basis for any society. The entire country had descended into a certain darkness.’

It seemed to him that everything he’d once believed in had collapsed: ‘We were brought up in the spirit of loyalty to the Party and to the people. We really did believe we were doing something useful for our country and for our people.’ But like many in the foreign-intelligence services, he’d long been able to see that the Party leadership was failing: ‘There was no one who knew how to deal with the growing problems … The gap between reality and ideological dogma led to deep distrust in the country’s leaders.’[100]

Although the loss of empire and the loss of the decades-long Cold War hit men like Yakunin hard, he was among those who moved fast to embrace Russia’s new capitalism. And while he said he hankered for the days of certainty, for the morality and values that he believed lay at the foundation of Communism, that did not stop him from leaping into business before the Soviet Union had even collapsed, to pocket vast amounts of cash both for himself and, more importantly, to help preserve the networks of the KGB.

For four years after the Soviet collapse, Yakunin remained an officer in the security services, never resigning his post. Although he insisted that he hadn’t been taking orders, he admitted that the aim of his and his partners’ business activities was partly to preserve what they could: ‘We needed to redirect ourselves. We needed to create commercial enterprises that would earn money … We were all part of this process. The traditions of communication and cooperation remained.’

Yakunin joined forces with associates from St Petersburg’s prestigious Ioffe Institute for Technology and Physics, where he’d worked overseeing the institute’s international connections before being sent to New York. Among them was Yury Kovalchuk, then thirty-nine and a leading physicist of his day. Kovalchuk had a high forehead and a hawk-like gaze, and he worked closely with Andrei Fursenko; both of them were deputies in the Ioffe Institute’s work on sensitive semiconductor technologies deployed in laser and satellite systems. This was an area at the heart of the KGB’s special interest, in which all manner of smuggling schemes had been deployed to bypass embargoes and steal technology from the West (Yakunin was believed to have worked on technology smuggling when he served undercover in New York). Their expertise landed Yakunin, Kovalchuk and Fursenko a lucrative assignment: a deal to sell a batch of rare-earth metals, including rare and strategic isotopes used in the aerospace and military industries, and in semiconductor technology.[101] They were given the deal by a senior general in the KGB, said Yakunin. Once they’d pulled it off, one of the joint ventures they’d created, Temp, landed 24 million roubles in profits.[102] It was a huge sum in those days, and it helped them take over Bank Rossiya.

The three men had set up a string of such joint ventures in the final months before the Soviet collapse, as the KGB stepped up preparations for the transition to a market economy, and they’d already been working closely with Bank Rossiya. In the aftermath of the failed August coup, said Yakunin, they had briefly feared that they might go out of business when their accounts in Bank Rossiya were frozen, along with the rest of the property of the Communist Party. But their connections, and the cash they made in the rare-earth metals deal, saved them. High-ups in the local Party and the KGB gave them the nod to take over Bank Rossiya and bring it back to life. ‘We were people who were well-known in the party structures of the city of Leningrad,’ said Yakunin. ‘We had many contacts, and people trusted us. We were allowed to take a controlling stake in Bank Rossiya precisely because these people trusted and respected us.’[103]

From the beginning, Bank Rossiya had been strategically connected to the foreign-relations committee run by Putin. Its offices were in the Smolny Institute, which had become the city’s mayor’s headquarters, and it began to play a key role in the creation of the obschak, the common cash pot for Putin’s men. The city’s KGB-connected businessmen, including Yakunin, Kovalchuk and Fursenko, almost religiously continued to follow the prescriptions of the KGB laid out in the twilight years of the Communist regime, when trade was to be ordered through joint ventures with foreign entities. All joint ventures were set up on the approval of Putin’s committee, and most were directed to open accounts with Bank Rossiya. In one instance, millions of dollars were siphoned from the city budget through Bank Rossiya’s accounts into a network of such companies linked to Putin’s men. The cash had been funnelled through a fund known as Twentieth Trust. At one point the scheme had threatened to embroil Putin in a criminal case. Like many of the slush funds created by Putin’s men, the money had gone towards strategic needs such as funding election campaigns, and also for personal acquisitions such as luxury properties in Finland and Spain for city officials.[104]

As Putin and his KGB men became more secure in their control of the city’s economy, they began to dream their own bourgeois dreams. One transfer in particular paid for a five-star hotel trip for Putin and the head of Twentieth Trust to Finland, where they met an architect from the St Petersburg government and most likely discussed plans for the building of a group of dachas, according to a senior police officer who investigated the case.[105] ‘Soviet people always have a dream to have a dacha,’ said a Putin associate from then.[106] ‘The understanding was that it was not just important to have a good piece of land, but also to have the right neighbours.’

The patch Putin chose to while away his weekends in peace and tranquillity was far down a highway snaking north from St Petersburg through the forests and lakes of Karelia. Near the border with Finland, an unsignposted road led to a snug group of wooden houses on the shores of the Komsomolskoye lake, renowned for its excellent fishing. Before Putin moved in, the road had been no more than a dirt track. But soon after the new inhabitants arrived it was asphalted over, and lights were installed.

The villagers who’d lived peacefully for generations on the coveted stretch of land on the lakeshore saw new, more powerful electrical lines installed, though none of the power reached their homes. Instead they were asked, one by one, to move away, and were either given money to leave or provided with new ready-built houses further inland. Their powerful new neighbours built imposing Finnish-style chalets on vast tracts of land. They formed a group that became known as the Ozero dacha cooperative, and took over the lakeshore, from which their former neighbours were cut off by a high new fence. When the newcomers had parties, the old inhabitants could only watch the festivities and fireworks from afar. They knew not to object. ‘My mother told me a simple thing: don’t fight the strong and don’t sue the rich,’ said one of them.[107] The only inhabitant who tried to fight lost every stage of her trial.

The men who moved to Lake Komsomolskoye with Putin were the blue blood of his KGB acquaintances. Mostly shareholders of Bank Rossiya, they included Yakunin, Fursenko and Kovalchuk. All of them had been connected to Putin since even before the St Petersburg days. ‘These were people who were close to Putin from before,’ said one former Putin associate.[108] ‘They hadn’t got there because of their work or their knowledge – but just because they were old friends.’

This was a principle that was later expanded across the entire country. After Putin became president, he and his allies from the Ozero dacha group began to capture strategic sectors of the economy, creating a tight-knit network of loyal lieutenants – trusted custodians – who took control of the country’s biggest cash flows and excluded everyone else. Bank Rossiya was to form the core of the financial empire behind this group, and it was to spread its tentacles throughout Russia, and deep into the West too.

Those who’d worked with Putin at the sea port and the oil terminal also followed him when he vaulted to power. Timchenko was prime among them, first in the shadows working, according to two former associates, as an unofficial adviser, and then becoming the nation’s biggest oil trader. The men who ran the St Petersburg sea port under Traber’s watch were to take the first senior positions in Gazprom, the state gas giant, as Putin began to take over the country’s biggest and most strategic assets. Then, when Putin made his first moves to take back the nation’s oil industry from Western-leaning oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Timchenko and Akimov were part of the core group who benefited.

But in those days in the nineties, when they were just starting out, it was difficult to imagine that they would ever make it so far. The members of the Ozero dacha cooperative kept themselves to themselves, rarely speaking to the former neighbours who they’d moved away from the shores of the lake. But after Putin moved to Moscow, the weekend visits became rare. The houses they’d built were left empty, like ghosts on the edge of the lake. ‘It became too small for them here. They had absolutely different opportunities in Moscow,’ said one of the neighbours.[109]

*

When Putin was suddenly appointed to a senior position in the Kremlin in Moscow in the summer of 1996, one of the senior KGB generals who’d watched closely over his St Petersburg career pronounced himself satisfied with him. ‘He began his career as an official from zero,’ the general, Gennady Belik, later told a reporter. ‘Of course he made mistakes. The issues for him were absolutely new … The only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones that don’t do anything. But by the end of his activities in St Petersburg, Vladimir Vladimirovich had grown a great deal.’[110]

Belik was a veteran of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence service, and in St Petersburg he’d overseen a network of firms trading in rare-earth metals. He’d been a mentor of sorts to Putin as he managed the city’s economy, while according to one close ally Putin also stayed in touch with former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.[111] But although Putin’s men had dominated much of the city’s economy, the amounts of cash they were dealing with in St Petersburg were minuscule compared to what the young Western-leaning tycoons like Khodorkovsky were taking over in Moscow. They were far away from the action as the new oligarchs of the Yeltsin era began to carve up the country’s industrial wealth. For many of the St Petersburg KGB men, what was going on in Moscow represented the collapse of the Russian state. Vladimir Yakunin, for one, saw the country as being seized by a cabal of corrupt members of the Party elite and by men like Khodorkovsky who he called ‘criminals’.[112] The KGB men saw Yeltsin as a drunken buffoon, a mid-ranking Communist Party official who danced to the tune of the West and who was now handing over the country’s strategic enterprises for a song to a corrupt gang of rapacious businessmen. ‘People had given their lives. They’d served honestly and put their lives at risk. But all they got was a finger up their ass from a drunk bastard who by the way was no better than a local Communist Party leader,’ said a former KGB officer who worked with Putin in St Petersburg.[113]

Though it seemed far from likely then, Putin’s move to Moscow was the first step towards changing that equation. His promotion had happened at a moment when he should in fact have been down and out. In the summer of 1996, Anatoly Sobchak had just lost his campaign for re-election as St Petersburg’s mayor. Putin, as his campaign manager, had been partly responsible. Sobchak lost by a whisker: by 1.2 per cent – the equivalent, his widow Lyudmilla Narusova later said, of the occupants of one large apartment building. Whispers circulated that Sobchak’s defeat had been organised by Yeltsin, who wanted him out, as the flamboyant and charismatic Sobchak could have posed a challenge to Yeltsin’s own battle for re-election as president a few months later. Narusova was convinced of that: ‘He’d become too independent. Yeltsin saw him as his competitor, and therefore the order was given that the elections were to be a farce.’[114] Before the campaign had even begun, Sobchak was targeted by a criminal investigation over bribery allegations. Many believed it was part of a dirty tricks campaign by the old-guard security men surrounding Yeltsin.[115]

The allegations undoubtedly impacted the outcome of the election, and Putin resigned from the St Petersburg administration immediately after the loss. Kremlin spin doctors telling the official story of Putin’s career have always stressed his loyalty to Sobchak in stepping down, and the risk he took in facing unemployment because of his principles. But in fact he was out of work for less than a month before he was invited to Moscow, initially to take up a prestigious position as a deputy head of the Kremlin administration. He had been helped along the way by Alexei Bolshakov, a dinosaur from the Leningrad defence establishment and most likely from the KGB, who’d somehow become Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister.