It is 1999. You work in an office. It is the office of Russia's FSB (KGB). Your co-workers share a special comradeship, and a special history. Some of the agency's top bosses are linked to organized crime, kidnapping and murder. The kidnappings are a means for siphoning money from Westerners in order to finance Russian-speaking Arab terrorists in Chechnya. The kidnappings are also used to keep certain political players in line. The murders have to do with maintaining the position of hidden structures that supersede the Russian legislature, the national executive and the armed forces. There is nothing unusual in this, because conspiracy is a matter of FSB tradition. Back in 1917, when the organization was first formed, it was called the Cheka, deriving its name from the acronym VChK (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage). The Cheka was founded by a communist ideologue named Felix Dzerzinsky shortly after the Bolshevik coup of Lenin and Trotsky. In those days, the office had two assignments: (1) to investigate counterrevolutionary elements, (2) to liquidate counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs. In 1917 this mission was out in the open. In 1999 this mission was hidden behind a democratic government headed by an ailing alcoholic named Boris Yeltsin.
In 1998, to assure the loyalty of the FSB, Boris Yeltsin was advised to appoint a new director. His name was Vladimir Putin, brought into the Kremlin through the mysterious presidential administration. To understand what happened to Russia in 1999 we must understand the presidential administration. Some say it is the "center of control" in Russia, more fundamental than the Kremlin or the FSB. Some say it is none other than the old Central Committee of the Communist Party Soviet Union, operating from the shadows. After the kidnapping of Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin in 2004, Anna Politkovskaya wrote in her Russian Diary: "The fact that Rybkin was taken to the Woodland Retreat guesthouse is evidence that the presidential administration was privy to his abduction, as was the FSB." She further noted: "The president's secretariat [presidential administration] is an outfit that has long been described as a subdivision of the FSB. Those two offices are the principle managers of Russia and do not merely work hand in glove, but function as a single entity."
There is something deep in this organizational anomaly. If Russia was honestly organized as a democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, then what can we make of this aforesaid "single entity" lurking in the shadows of Russian politics, propping up Boris Yeltsin while thrusting its own candidate - Vladimir Putin - into the directorship of the FSB, then into the office of Prime Minister, then into the presidency itself? Looking back, we can see what was afoot. Latent forces from the Soviet past were reawakening in 1998-99. Putin would come to personify those forces, as they sought to resurrect the Soviet Union itself. The immediate reason for Putin's appointment was an alleged plot by the FSB to assassinate the country's leading capitalist entrepreneur, Boris Berezovsky. (The FSB officer charged with organizing Berezovsky's "liquidation" was Alexander Litvinenko, a man who has since become even more famous because he was assassinated with radioactive polonium-210 in November 2006.)
An important book has been published on all these machinations. It is titled Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, by Alex Goldfarb with Marina Litvinenko. One of the most important passages in the book, for Americans, is the passage where Akhmed Zakayev explains the origins of the Second Chechen War: "We wanted to build a secular, democratic, pro-Western Muslim state, something along the lines of Turkey," Zakayev is quoted as saying. But Russian-speaking Arabs flooded into Chechnya with Russian visas. "They were all experienced fighters," he said, "but they had nothing to do with ... the American-trained jihadists that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were all Arabs who spoke Russian, the old KGB cadre from the Middle East. And we knew that their money came not from Saudi Arabia, but from Moscow."
That is important information coming from an exiled Chechen leader. The civil war in Chechnya was a staged provocation, organized by the FSB and the presidential administration in Moscow. Vladimir Putin, in fact, was a leading organizer who profited from this operation. The Arab terrorists in Dagestan and Chechnya caused his appointment as prime minister, triggering a war to facilitate his subsequent elevation to the Russian presidency. The political maneuvers and conspiracies involved in the elevation of Putin, as detailed by Goldfarb, are must reading. For the first time, testimony from several sources is put together to form a larger, coherent picture of FSB (KGB) strategy involving the use of controlled Islamic terrorism.
