The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Chechen Bombings

The bombings started on 4 September 1999, when an explosion destroyed a block of military flats in the southern Russian city of Buinaksk, killing 62 people. Two civilian apartment blocks in Moscow were blown up on 9 and 13 September that same year, with 212 fatalities. Then, on 16 September, 17 people died in a truck-bomb blast in Volgodonsk.

The Russian secret service, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), quickly identified one of the perpetrators as Achimez Gochiyaev, a foot soldier for the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. Since 1994 the Chechens, led by Basayev, had been fighting fanatically for independence from Russia. Case closed: the bombings were committed by Chechen militants as part of their terrorist campaign for a free Chechnya. In response, the acting prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, ordered a mass counter-terrorism campaign in Chechnya, a piece of hardman politicking that so endeared him to a fearful Russian electorate that they voted the former FSB director their President in 2000.

Conspiracy theorists pounced. And not just conspiracy theorists, but respected politicians like British Conservative MP Julian Lewis, and respected journalists, like the Financial Times’s. Moscow correspondent David Satter. What sense did it make for the Chechens to commit outrages likely to cause an invasion of Chechnya? Not much. What tangible evidence did the Russian authorities offer to prove Chechen involvement in the bombings? None. Strangest of all was the bomb that failed to explode in the city of Ryazan, where an apartment resident noted two men acting suspiciously and reported the matter to the city police. On investigating the apartment block’s basement the police found sacks of hexogen (also known as RDX, the explosive ingredient used in the four bombings) and timers. Swiftly the FSB confiscated the sacks, before announcing that they contained sugar and had been used as a prop in a counter-terrorist exercise.

Evidence that the bombings were a “false flag” operation undertaken by the FSB to provide a casus belli for a Russian incursion into Chechnya mounted. In December 1999 Lieutenant Alexei Galkin, a Russian spy captured by the Chechens in the siege of Grozny, testified to Western journalists that the Russian secret services had planted at least some of the “Chechen” bombs. The transcript of his interview included:

Journalist/Interpreter: Can you introduce yourself please.

Galkin: Assistant head of sector senior lieutenant Alexei Viktorovich Galkin, employee of the Central Intelligence Office [GRU] of the Russian Federation.

[…]

Journalist: Did you take part in the bombing of buildings in Moscow and Dagestan?

Galkin: I personally did not take part in the bombing of the buildings in Moscow and Dagestan, but I know who blew them up, who is behind the bombing of buildings in Moscow and who blew up the buildings in Buinaksk.

Journalist: Can you tell us who?

Galkin: Russian special forces, the FSB together with GRU [Central Intelligence Office] are responsible for blowing up the buildings in Moscow and in Volgodonsk. The bombing of the buildings in Buinaksk was the work of some members of our group, which at the time was on a mission in Dagestan.

Journalist: And as far as I know, here you have been recorded on tape, you confessed to all this, apparently you were filmed with a video camera. And when… when you, during the filming were you acting on your own wishes?

Voice off camera of the head of the Chechen Security Service Abu Movsaev: That… Don’t answer that question.

Journalist: How have you been treated here?

Galkin: I’ve been treated well here. As a prisoner of war I have not been beaten here, they have fed me three times a day and when necessary given me medical assistance.

Journalist: Here is the statement given by you. Do you confirm that you made it voluntarily without any pressure on the part of anyone?

Galkin: This statement is printed from my words. I wrote this statement by hand [holds the piece of paper in front of his face], with my personal signature.

Journalist: Now, at this moment, as you are speaking with us, are you afraid of anything?

Galkin: No, it is simply that this is the first time I have faced journalists… journalists from western television companies, so I am a bit nervous.

Abu Movsaev’s voice off camera: The special forces are not allowed to appear on…

Galkin: It is quite simply that due to the nature of our work we have to…we are not supposed to show ourselves in front of television cameras. [Smiles tensely.]

[…]

Journalist: Do you personally and does your unit have anything to do with the explosions in Moscow?

Galkin: Personally our unit has nothing to do with the explosions in Moscow, since at that time we were in Dagestan. The members of our unit, the members of our unit of twelve men, who were in Dagestan at that time, carried out the bombing of the house in Buinaksk.

After Galkin, it was the turn of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko to accuse his ex- colleagues of orchestrating the apartment block bombings in his book Blowing Up Russia, which was underwritten by the exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky. More than 5,000 copies of the book were confiscated by Russian authorities in 2003. Boris Berezovsky also financed a documentary film, FSB Blows Up Russia, which again accused Russian special services of organizing the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow. Meanwhile, sometime KGB colonel Konstantin Pre-obrazhensky asserted that the Chechen rebels lacked the materiel to organize the bombings “without the help of high-ranking Moscow officials” and the Los Angeles Times claimed to have identified FSB operative Vladimir Romanovich as the person who rented the basement where one of the bombs was detonated.

The FSB denied everything. Meanwhile, Berezovsky was compromised by his overt hostility to the Russian regime, which had accused him of financial wrongdoings. Yet suspicions that the FSB had something to hide over the apartment bombings refused to go away. Indeed, they were only increased by the strange circumstances which surrounded other “Chechen” terrorist acts in Russia, notably the October 2004 siege of Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre which ended when security forces pumped in a mysterious gas to overcome the hostage-takers. Why, if the hostage-takers were incapacitated, were they summarily executed with bullets? Then there was the atrocity at Beslan elementary school, where “Chechen” terrorists held a thousand parents and children hostage before the siege ended in an inferno of explosions and gunfire, killing over 300. The Chechen authorities blamed pro-Putin forces in Russia as the instigators of the siege, a claim that was given credence by the Russian defence department’s forced admission that none of the hostage-takers at Beslan were actually Chechens. Beslan residents themselves organized protests against Russian complicity in the siege.

The truth of the apartment bombings may never properly emerge from the murky war between Russian neo-imperialists and Chechen separatists. Matters have not been aided by a pro-Kremlin bloc in the Russian Duma (parliament), which stymied an investigation into the attempted Ryazan bombing, or by the inconvenient fate that met two members of an independent public investigation, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikin. They died in circumstances which suggested assassination.

And then, of course, there was the Litvinenko case…

The Russian apartment bombings were a false-flag FSB operation intended to justify the Russian invasion which started the second Chechnya war: ALERT LEVEL 7

Further Reading

Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror, 2004

David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, 2003