Putin's Labyrinth

“Russia is changing,” he finally said. “Now people turn to lawyers, not contract killers.”

Klebnikov took Musa to the airport two days later, then returned to his grueling routine, working late hours at the Forbes Russia office. It was situated in a building across from the lovely Botanichesky Sad, or “Botanical Garden.” Klebnikov was in the habit of commuting by metro, using a station in the park a short walk from his office.

On Friday, July 9, two days after his wife’s departure, Klebnikov was working late again. He made a series of phone calls—to Musa, his brother Peter and his sister, Anna—in which he voiced high hopes for both Russia and Forbes Russia. Then he quit for the night. On his way out of the building, he passed an office used by Newsweek reporters, some of who were still working. It was about nine- thirty p.m., but still light outside.

Klebnikov walked across the street and approached the park. Suddenly, a dark Russian-made car, a Lada, halted behind him. A man inside the vehicle pointed a 9-millimeter Makarov pistol at the editor and fired four bullets. The car drove off without any words being spoken.

A guard rushed into the Newsweek office: “Somebody just called. He says that someone shot Paul Klebnikov in the stomach.”

Reporters Mikhail Fishman and Alexander Gordeev trotted into the street, where police, ambulance attendants, and spectators formed a circle around the fallen editor. Klebnikov was on his back on the sidewalk. Gordeev saw blood coming from one of his ears, soaking his shirt. A pool of blood was visible about thirty yards away, marking the spot where Klebnikov had been hit. It appeared that he had tried to get back to the office, but collapsed. He was still conscious and able to talk.

“Do you know what happened?” Gordeev asked Klebnikov in English.

“No,” Klebnikov calmly replied in Russian. “Someone was shooting.”

“Do you know who?”

“No.”

Klebnikov described the gunman as a Russian, with black hair and wearing black clothing. He asked the Newsweek reporter to call his wife and brother. Then he asked for oxygen. There was none, but fluids were administered intravenously, and Klebnikov was loaded into an ambulance. Gordeev saw that he was tensing up. His eyes took on a desperate look, and he began to shake his head, as if to say, “No.” A doctor had to restrain Klebnikov from getting up. After a twenty-minute wait, the ambulance crew was told which hospital would receive them, and the vehicle sped from the scene.

Fishman, the other Newsweek reporter, rode along. “You can do it. It will be all right,” he repeated as Klebnikov slipped in and out of consciousness. At the hospital, there were more delays. The entrance gate was locked, forcing the ambulance to wait to be admitted. Once inside, Klebnikov was loaded onto a gurney and into an elevator, but it became stuck between floors.

At 10:48 p.m., just over an hour after Klebnikov had left his office, Gordeev’s phone rang. “It’s all over,” Fishman said. “He’s dead.”

Klebnikov had died either in the stalled elevator or shortly after, in the operating room. The doctors gave different stories, and no one knew whom to believe.

“None of us ever had the feeling that someone could kill him,” said Klebnikov’s deputy, Maxim Kashulinsky. “In retrospect, obviously everyone missed something.”

Russian police sometimes resemble the Keystone Kops. But they can be quite effective if they are motivated to solve a case, and if politics doesn’t get in their way. The killing of Klebnikov had their full attention.

Pyotr Gabriyan, one of the most skilled investigators in the federal prosecutor’s office, was assigned to the case. His team located the Lada used in the attack the very next day, and dusted it for fingerprints. Then they applied some old-fashioned shoe leather, with a high-tech twist. Gabriyan’s men reviewed cell phone activity in the vicinity of the park and discovered a number of suspicious calls to or from the area almost nightly for two weeks prior to and including the day of the murder. The callers were Chechen thugs who were identified as members of a murder-for-hire gang. Fingerprints and trace amounts of lint linked some of them to the Lada.

Four months after Klebnikov’s murder, authorities announced that two Chechens had been arrested in the case. One of them, Kazbek Dukuzov, the alleged triggerman, had been captured in Belarus. Extradition proceedings moved slowly at first, arousing suspicion that corrupt Belarus officials were protecting him. When the delays suddenly ended and the Chechen was shipped back to Russia, some suspected that Putin had intervened.

“I think Putin himself called [Belarus president Alexander] Lukashenko and pushed to have him extradited,” one of Klebnikov’s colleagues told me. “I think that Putin has pushed to make sure that the case is pursued.”

Putin openly expressed interest in the case, something that was unusual for him. In fall 2005, he met with Klebnikov’s widow and one of his brothers in New York. At his annual news conference in 2007, he said, “Not long ago one of our American partners said something very true: ‘Paul Klebnikov died for a democratic Russia, for the development of democracy in Russia.’ I completely agree with him. I fully agree with this evaluation.”

Police said they believed that the killing was ordered by Khozh-Ahmed Nukhayev, the central figure in Klebnikov’s book Conversation with a Barbarian. The book was highly critical of the Chechens in particular and Muslims in general. It was said that Nukhayev had become so incensed that he hired the Chechen gang to assassinate its author. But he disappeared from sight after Klebnikov’s slaying and was never tracked down by police.

(Valeri Streletsky, the book’s publisher, is skeptical about Nukhayev being the mastermind. Not long after Conversation with a Barbarian was released, a package arrived at the publisher’s office. It contained writings by Nukhayev and a note from his representative asking if Streletsky might want to publish them. The publisher declined, but told me that the package helped to persuade him that “Nukhayev had no role in the killing.” If he was so furious about the Klebnikov book, why would he want to have any dealings with the man who had made it possible?)

Once in custody, both suspects openly boasted that they had participated in the murder of Klebnikov, according to inside information that reached Russian journalists. Such braggadocio might strike Westerners as reckless. But gangsters regarded Russian law enforcement as largely impotent and had few inhibitions about virtually daring police to take them on.

The trial was closed, not witnessed by reporters or family members. But the prosecution was confident of its case, which was based on an array of circumstantial evidence: cell phone records; fingerprints and other clues gathered from the Lada; information linking the gang to other murders; and testimony that prior to Klebnikov’s killing, the gang members had bragged that they were to be paid $3 million for a “big job.” The boastful confessions did not figure in the trial because the two suspects refused to sign them, ruling out their use by prosecutors.

Klebnikov’s supporters began to have misgivings when word got around that the defendants and defense lawyers seemed to relax as the trial wore on. Suspicions arose that someone had tampered with the jury, always a possibility in Russia. In May 2006, the jury acquitted both defendants and the judge ordered their release. The Klebnikov camp felt defeated. But six months later, the Supreme Court intervened—in Russia, there is no concept of double jeopardy—and overturned the acquittals. A new trial was ordered. The second Chechen suspect, Musa Vakhaev, appeared at preliminary hearings, but the accused shooter, Dukuzov, vanished. In his absence, the judge halted all proceedings; the retrial was pending as of this writing.

Like his book publisher, I was not satisfied with the notion that Klebnikov died because of the way he portrayed a Chechen warlord in print. I turned to Mark Franchetti for some insight. He had lived and worked in Moscow for a decade, and was a seasoned reporter. Franchetti figured that a journalist in Russia had to do one of two things to get killed: either get really seriously into someone’s personal life, or ruin someone’s business deal. For instance, in 1994, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian reporter named Dmitri Kholodov was investigating allegations that the then defense minister, Pavel Grachev, and others were selling off military goods for personal gain. One day, a source called to say he had documents that could help advance Kholodov’s corruption probe. When the reporter opened the briefcase supposedly containing the documents, it blew up, killing him.

Investigative reporters in Russia know that the unpublished story poses the greatest danger to the writer. After a piece is printed, the damage is done. But when the makings for a potentially explosive article are still in a journalist’s notebook, everything is at risk, especially the reporter’s personal safety. Some believe Klebnikov was working on a blockbuster at the time of his death, a story involving large sums of money stolen in the multi-billion- dollar reconstruction of Chechnya. Klebnikov’s family, which has access to his computer hard drive and other