Connected

from Novaya Gazeta 11 October 2004 (my tr.)

CONNECTED

The best agents of the special services are terrorists, murderers and extortionists…


Last week, in an exclusive interview for NTV, the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev , described the very important role of agents in the fight with terrorism. The thesis is beyond dispute. But the special services are unscrupulous in their choice of agents, and often steer by the principle of “the ends justify the means”, using natural criminals – murderers and terrorists – to carry out their tasks.

Barayev’s Protector

Many inhabitants of Chechnya have been struck by the fact that the well-known terrorist and murderer Arbi Barayev travels calmly about Chechnya, lives in an enormous private house in Alkhan-Kala, and passes through the checkpoints of the federal troops with ease. He also continues to rob and murder people, and not even the fiercest “moppings-up” of the federal troops affect him.

The reasons for this immunity for a terrorist who from 1997 to 2001 brought terror to the inhabitants of Chechnya and the whole of the Northern Caucasus are simple. His “guardian angel” was the FSB agent Yunus Magomadov.

Magomadov hails from a neighbouring village – Alkhan-Yurt. In the mid-1990s he was enlisted as an officer of the special section of the Nazran pogranotryad (border rangers).

Using his FSB identity document, Magomadov got Barayev through all the checkpoints without difficulty. Magomadov also had prior information about any possible “mopping-up” operations.

Even during the period when federal troops were occupying Chechnya, Arbi Barayev held hostages in his house. On his conscience are three beheaded British citizens and a New Zealander, cruel reprisals against Russian soldiers and officers, including members of the FSB and GRU.

Barayev has earned millions of dollars by abducting people. His “protection”, like that of the cut-throat Akhmadov brothers from Urus-Martan, came from FSB agent Yunus Magomadov.

In the summer of 2001, however, Arbi Barayev was killed. But not as a result of special services operations. It was done by his own Chechen blood brothers. After Barayev was killed, information about the whereabouts of his remains was sent to the Russian special services, whose representatives did not neglect to boast of their efficiency.

And, after some conflicts regarding his activity among the special services (there is no agreement there, as is well-known) – Yunus Magomadov is at work again. Presently he is back in uniform. He is in command of one of the sub-units of the regiment that guards the oil pipeline in Chechnya.


Babitsky’s Jailer


In January 2000 the federals arrested Andrei Babitsky, Radio Free Europe’s correspondent in Chechnya. They beat him up and sent him to the solitary confinement cells in Chernokozov, in the Naur district of Chechnya.

Then, realizing that he was a well-known journalist working for a foreign radio company, and could report on the conditions at Chernokozov, and indeed on everything that happened to him, they devised a nonsensical operation involving the exchange of the journalist Babitsky, supposedly at the request of the well-known Chechen resistance field commander Atgeriev, for three Russian soldiers and an officer (Andrei Astranitsa, a 3rd-rank captain from Kaspiisk). In fact, the 3rd-rank captain was indeed freed, but in exchange for money given to the Akhmadov brothers through the mediation of Yunus Magomadov.

The FSB major (now sub-lieutenant) Igor Petelin, who supposedly exchanged Andrei Babitsky for the servicemen – was simply placed under the direction of his own “office”.

In actual fact, Andrei Babitsky was not exchanged for anyone, but simply handed over ‘for safe keeping’ as a hostage to FSB agent Gazimagomed Deniev. Gazimagomed kept the journalist-hostage in his house in his native village of Avtura, in the Shalin district.

In this provocation by the special services to discredit a Radio Free Europe reporter. a personal part was played by the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, the then Minister of the Interior Vladimir Rushailo, and Russia’s Deputy Procurator General, Yuri Biryukov, who announced on television that the fictive exchange of Babitsky was legal. This was followed by the story that is familiar to everyone, involving the “forged” passport…

As a result of the utter lack of talent of those who carried it out, the provocation against Babitsky failed. But at any rate, in order to cover up their own crime, at least externally, the leaders of the FSB and MVD, with the help of the Dagestan public prosecutor’s office and the Soviet district court of Makhachkala, Andrei Babitsky was fined several thousand rubles – and then immediately given an amnesty.

At the beginning of October 2000, when the legal farce with Babitsky was being played out, his jailer, FSB agent Gazimagomed Deniev, was killed in Moscow. He was shot in one of the Moscow banks: the FSB agent had been trying to extort money.






Arjan Erkel’s Abductor


Late on the night of 12 August 2002 in the outskirts of Makhachkala, in the presence of officials of the Dagestan Republic FSB, the head of the Swiss mission “Doctors Without Borders”, the Dutchman Arjan Erkel, was abducted.

He was kept for 20 months as a hostage. Throughout all this time “Doctors Without Borders”, the Dutch government, and the human rights worker’s friends and relatives were in despair: Erkel had been abducted on the orders of the Russian special services. The purpose: to give such a “fright” that no “humanitarians” would ever again want to work in the Northern Caucasus, or inform the international community about the lamentable state of human rights in that region.

The abduction of Arjan Erkel was organized by Kazimagomed Magomedov, nicknamed Kazimagomed Gimrinsky. Kazimagomed’s brother Ibragim was used by the FSB in March 2002 to liquidate the Arab terrorst Khattab.

Seven months after Erkel’s abduction killer Gimrinsky (involved in the attempt on the life of head of Dagestan RUBOP Colonel Ruslan Gitinov and the murder of his driver, and suspected, according to the evidence of the law enforcement agencies, of the murder of Dagestan’s Minister of Finance Gamid Gamidov and the abduction of his son Dzhamal) was elected as a deputy of the Dagestan National Assembly.

Kazimagomed Magomedov was personally presented to the former head of the Dagestan FSB General-Lieutenant Smirnov to the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, as the man who saved Dagestan from the Wahhabites. Though in actual fact. Gmirinsky, together with Bagautdin Magomedov, Dagestan’s chief Wahhabite and organizer of the attacks by Basayev’s and Khattab’s gangs on Dagestan, made his business out of abducting people.

The Dutch government and “Doctors Without Borders” gave millions of euros to the benevolent fund for the veterans of foreign intelligence headed by Colonels Velichko and Ubilava, in order to free Arjan Erkel. Where did that money go?

As for Kazimagomed Magomedov, he continues to sit in the Dagestan National Assembly.


Basayev


The 27 year-old Shamil Basayev became known in 1992-1993 during the events in Abkhazia. Here future terrorist No. 1 was in command of an armed band (subsequently known as the Abkhaz Battalion), which consisted mainly of natives of Chechnya.

Help in the equipping of Basayev’s band, and also with all questions relating to its relocation on to Georgian territory, to the region of Abkhazia, was provided by the Central Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Federation in agreement with the Federal Counter-intelligence Service (FSK) and the leadership of the Russian MVD.

But it is not widely known that as long as a year before the Abkhaz events, Shamil Basayev had already become a terrorist – as an aerial hijacker.

At the end of August 1991 Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in Chechnya (a day later he revoked his decision). In response, a group of Chechens who were commanded by a former civilian arline pilot, Said-Ali Satuyev (he had left flying as the result of a mental illness, schizophrenia), hijacked a passenger plane on its way from Mineralnye Vody to Turkey. One of the terrorist hijackers in this group was the 26 year-old Shamil Basayev.

The terrorist Basayev, who was under investigation from August 1991 for his part in the hijacking of the airplane, was shortly afterwards enlisted in the GRU and sent with his armed band to the Georgian territory of Abkhazia.

“All special services, including us (the FSB), make use of sources of information – we naturally have to work with agents,’ Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB, told a journalist for NTV.

To the director’s words it remains for us to add that the best agents of the Russian special services in the post-Soviet period are the terrorist Shamil Basayev, the terrorist Barayev’s accomplice Yunis Magomadov, the extortionist Gazimagomed Deniev, and the killer and abductor, National Assembly deputy Kazimagomed Magomedov.

Note: Some readers may possibly doubt the reliability of the information I have presented here. But in the period in which I have studied the freeing of hostages from Chechen captivity, I have personally encountered many of the anti-heroes and heroes of my article, and also witnesses to all the events I have described.


Vyacheslav Izmailov, military correspondent for Novaya Gazeta