RUSSIAN POLICE CORRUPTION SEEN AS MAJOR FACTOR IN INEFFECTIVE TERROR PREVENTION
Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moscow
27 Oct 04
A Russian paper has looked at failings in the fight against terrorism
in Russia. It recalled that when an investigation was launched
into how terrorists sneaked into the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow,
it turned out that “more than 100 guardians of law from Chechnya to
Moscow virtually turned a blind eye on their movements”. This “loss
of vigilance” sometimes was not at all for free: some policemen, who
were about to inspect the gunmen’s bags with weapons and explosives,
received a bribe, the paper said. Bribe-taking and betrayal in the
police ranks have been detected by prosecutors everywhere, be it
Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia or Moscow, the paper
said. It pointed out that the only unit in charge of antiterrorism
in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is its operational
investigation directorate, just a dozen committed operatives who
cover the whole of the country, but “even these dedicated officers
cannot do much without a network of agents”. Today, however, for fear
of a furious public outcry the FSB has practically discarded the
“institution” of informers. It has become obvious, the paper said,
that no laws, or antiterrorist commissions of all sort, or endless
bureaucratic conferences with loud agendas can protect Russia from
new explosions. The only way, according to the paper, is to restore
a system of training highly qualified operatives and ensure they are
paid well. The following is the text of the article “Not only force
required to fight bandits” published by Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya
Pravda on 27 October. Subheadings are as published:
A three-million-strong army of security officials works to ensure
security for Russian citizens. Why do they often prove helpless
with terrorists?
After terrorist acts in Moscow and Beslan in August and September, it
was announced to Russians that a terrorist war was declared on them. As
though before they never heard of bombings of houses, trains, railway
stations and cafeterias, captures of aeroplanes, downed helicopters
or raids by Chechen-Arab gangs in Kizlyar, Pervomayskoye, Budennovsk,
Nazran and even Moscow. For some reason, it is specifically now that
the authorities have started drafting yet another security doctrine
and setting up federal and interdepartmental antiterrorist commissions,
coordinating committees and new staffs.
The leaders of power structures are ordered to restructure their
work and submit to the Kremlin and Security Council new plans to
fight terrorism. FSB (Federal Security Service), the Internal Affairs
Ministry and Defence Ministry generals prepare new tonnes of directives
and orders, and develop plans of new exercises. However, the ordinary
man has only one interest in all these reforms: he wants to live
without fearing that he may be blown up tomorrow in his bed, in a bus
or an aeroplane. He wants to understand how a gigantic enforcement
machine, whose operation he funds from his pocket, can be forced or
taught to counter gangs of armed monsters or a lone shakhid (martyr,
suicide bomber) woman. We, too, are going to try to figure it out.
How a “five” slumped to be a “failure”
Of all our secret services, the FSB has the most extensive experience
in fighting terrorism. Back in the Soviet times, when it was called
the KGB, it had to grapple seriously with this problem. In Moscow
in 1977, a home-made bomb exploded on a train before it approached
the Pervomayskoye station. Although the KGB did not yet have its
own criminal institute or antiterrorism experts at that time,
the intelligence officers quickly resolved the crime. People who
organized and perpetrated that terrorist act were arrested, convicted
and executed.
Two other bombings, which were planted by the same Armenian
nationalist group in a store on Nikolskaya Street, near Lubyanka, were
prevented. Antiterrorism fight was assigned to one of the departments
of the famous “Five,” a KGB ideological directorate that was loathed
by anti-party people and fought dissidents (it was apparently equated
with terrorism back then).
A different group of KGB foreign intelligence specialists worked
abroad. Their job was to keep dissidents and terrorists out of the
USSR. In 10 years, the intelligence service managed to create virtually
from scratch an effective counterterrorist system: “TNT saboteurs”
and hostage hunters were often apprehended at a stage when they only
just planned their dirty deeds. Yet, in 1991 the USSR collapsed,
and so did a system of countering terrorism.
Books are already written on how hard some Russian politicians of
the Yeltsin era worked to destroy the KGB. Until the late 1990’s,
the new power had been zealously reforming (or more precisely,
ruining) the security structure, which exists in every civilized
state. The “Five” was reduced to the small Directorate for Combating
Terrorism, a hundred people covering the entire Russia. After the
(Chechen rebel commander Shamil) Basayev gang took hostages in
Budennovsk (in June of 1995), a frenzied sequence of new reforms
came. The Antiterrorist Centre and then the Department for Combating
Terrorism and the Directorate for Constitutional Security (political
extremism) were established. Following the Dagestani events in 1999,
the department and administration were merged. The Russian president
issued a decree creating one of the FSB’s most powerful departments:
for protection of constitutional system and combating terrorism.
But after numerous and bungled reforms, many specialists left for
the civilian sector, while a structure that was supposed to deal day
and night with terrorism never came into being (Alfa and Vympel do
not count because they, like a kind of “antiterrorism ambulance”,
come into action when a terrorist act is committed).
After the air strike on New York on 11 September 2001, the Directorate
for Combating International Terrorism was established. Sounds pretty
big, but “warriors” from the new structure spent most of their time
visiting international conferences. There were some incidents,
too. At a conference on fighting terrorism held in Saudi Arabia,
its staffers made a loud declaration on the need to fight mercilessly
Wahhabism. It would not be that bad if Wahhabism was not the official
religion of the kingdom. The stunned hosts reportedly looked like they
saw a ghost. Funny as all this sounds, the speeches for high podiums
were written and approved in Moscow. Then, what level of personnel
training in the country’s main secret service does this testify to?
Who covers Chechnya with a cloak and dagger?
In fact, the only subunit in charge of antiterrorism in the FSB is
its operational investigation directorate. Yet, it is only slightly
more than a dozen fanatically committed operatives (covering, again,
the entire Russia!). Most of them do not have apartments (this
and miserable pay is why almost half of them have broken personal
lives). Their career records include decorations for successful
operations during missions in North Caucasus.
But even these officers cannot do much without a network of
agents. It is the weakest spot in FSB operations. An agent network
is almost non-existent in Chechnya. Many Chechens who were loyal to
“post-Dudayev” authorities and cooperated with counterintelligence
officers were knifed together with their families.
For the same reason, more than 100 mullahs and local officials
were killed in recent years. Nobody hurries to secret services with
declarations disclosing whereabouts of (Chechen separatist leader
Aslan) Maskhadov and Basayev even for 10m dollars. The FSB Directorate
for Chechnya is only just getting on its feet. The danger of disloyalty
is high (information leaks have been reported all the time). The Moscow
counterintelligence officers are forced to rely mostly on the Chechen
Security Service, led by republic’s Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov
as his second job, and also on the Yamadayev brothers, who command
special-purpose troops and managed to build their own networks of
agents (although predominantly on the clan basis). The shuttle tactic
of special composite teams in Chechnya (apart from FSB operatives,
they include special-purpose units of the Interior Ministry Internal
Troops) is also not very effective. Following several major leaks of
information on planned counterterrorist operations, the “neighbours”
have increasingly rarely shared information with each other, while
the real joint work has been conducted mostly on paper.
Who is bothered by the “spectre of totalitarianism”?
In the USSR times, it was enough to call from Lubyanka to Groznyy
to find out on the same day in what mountain village a new hunting
rifle was purchased. If a police gun or a TNT cartridge disappeared
in Chechnya, they were found on the following day.
Today, a gang can spend a night in a village but the FSB Directorate
in Groznyy will find it out only a week later. The bandits bought
a dozen land mines in an army unit but FSB officers learned of this
fact only half a year later.
In the Yeltsin era, political activists liked to yell on squares about
a certain “monster”, the KGB, which wrapped up the whole country
with its networks of squealers. Now that they have sniffed hexogen
under their windows they shout at every corner about the “weakness”
of the FSB, whose staff has been “castrated” to one-eighth of its
former strength in the past 13 years! No sooner had the FSB tried
to restore its old practice of informers, recruiting also concierges
in houses, than some fighters for human rights again started weeping
about the restored “spectre of totalitarianism”.
But under totalitarianism, Lubyanka could see the whole country
almost all the way through – it was aided by more than two million
“volunteers”. Thanks to them, FSB managed to nip in the bud attempts
on life of some party and Soviet leaders, ferret out hundreds of
“werewolves” in government structures, foil armed attacks on industrial
facilities and banks, and prevent many man-made catastrophes. Murders
of people and hostage captures occurred extremely rarely.
Today, however, for fear of a furious public outcry on the part
of some political populists, the FSB has practically discarded the
“institution” of informers and collaborators (even though the law
allows and regulates such practices). Even if there are barely 50
of them for the whole country, they do not have enough strength to
“scan” movements in the terrorist underworld, sending alarm signals to
intelligence officers. We do not even mention that our laws prohibit
recruitment of agents from the criminal community.
Following several years of the terrorist war, it has become obvious
that neither piles of laws, nor antiterrorist commissions of all
stripes, nor endless bureaucratic conferences with loud agendas,
nor the most courageous Alfa or Vympel troops can protect us from new
explosions. Nobody can replace in Russia a secret service “digging”
deeply and silently. To this end, we should at least stop pestering
it with endless reorganization and reforms. We should also restore
a system of training highly qualified operatives. In addition, they
need to be paid – well and regularly.
“Feeding” the police
Let us recall: after the events on Dubrovka, police officials were the
first to demonstrate readiness for an all-out antiterror effort (it
is police that people blamed more than anyone else for what happened:
insufficient vigilance, insufficient checks). After the storm of the
(Dubrovka) House of Culture, then-Deputy Internal Affairs Minister
Vladimir Vasilyev pledged publicly: “We are now going to clean not
only Moscow but even Russia of this filth!”
But when an investigation was launched to find out how the terrorists
sneaked into the Dubrovka theatre hall, the police chiefs’ eyes
nearly popped out of their heads: it turned out that more than 100
guardians of law from Chechnya to Moscow virtually turned a blind eye
to movements of the thugs right under their very nose. This “loss
of vigilance” sometimes was not at all for free: some policemen,
who were about to inspect the gunmen’s bags with weapons and TNT,
received bribes at railway stations and checkpoints and let the
suspicious people go.
The paid neglect was crowned with betrayal: the intelligence officers
arrested one policeman, a senior officer of the Moscow Internal
Affairs Main Directorate, immediately after the terrorist act. He
passed information on details of the hostage-releasing operation
and movements of Spetsnaz (special-purpose) troops to (leader of
hostage-takers) Movsar Barayev’s gunmen.
Bribe-taking and betrayal in the police ranks have been detected
by prosecutor’s office investigators everywhere, be it Chechnya,
Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia or Moscow. Most of the traitors
wearing police uniforms have been exposed in Chechnya. On this issue,
Akhmat Kadyrov, the late president of the republic, said once: “It
is increasingly difficult for me to tell our policemen from masked
saboteurs.” According to investigators, it is also saboteurs who
killed him.
The worst thing is that all that is taking place in a republic that
has become a hotbed of Russian terror. Of course, one can understand
objective difficulties experienced by the Chechen authorities,
who found themselves in a situation where it is often impossible to
break firm family (clannish) ties between guardians of law and those
who they fight. Our domestic experience of tackling this complicated
problem shows that this will take a decade.
After bandits attacked Ingushetia, the Russian Prosecutor-General’s
Office pressed terrorist complicity charges against two Ingush
policemen. One of them, Magomed Lolkhoyev, personally helped Shamil
Basayev himself travel around the republic by car for reconnaissance
purposes.
As the investigation chief, Mikhail Lapotnikov, declared, “a total of
22 individuals have been put on a wanted list in this case and checks
are being run on more than 60. Cases against 18 individuals have been
sent to court.” In other words, a hundred of professional cops could
have been in the pay of terrorists? Another fact has been revealed:
the terrorists managed to prepare as many as 10 bases on the territory
of Ingushetia and local police were involved in their organization.
Wrongdoers were found also in North Ossetia – and again after, not
before a terrorist act. The Prosecutor-General’s Office instigated
criminal cases on charges of “neglect causing grave consequences”
against Miroslav Aydarov, chief of the district internal affairs
department for Pravoberezhnyy District; Taymuraz Murtazov, deputy
chief for public security; and Guram Dryayev, the district internal
affairs department chief of staff.
Dozens of other “treason” criminal cases clearly indicate that men
of Maskhadov and Basayev conduct effective recruitment work in the
Interior Ministry structures in those parts as well. We cannot do
without a thorough purge here. This is what the situation warrants:
our “southern” police bodies are in need of reliable internal security
structures.
Otherwise, we will hardly manage to prevent the process of intentional
or unintentional integration between uniformed criminals and
terrorists. This problem becomes critical in the centre as well. It
turned out recently that a 1.5m army of guest workers from the Caucasus
entrenched themselves in Moscow Region not without the knowledge of
police. Almost half of them should already be sent back to places
of their permanent residence: these people stand on the wrong side
of the law and law-enforcement agencies have some major complaints
about them. But a question is: what did Interior Ministry staffers
do before? This is exactly where the shoe pinches: some police chase
terrorists while others cover the latter for bribes. And now we are
surprised that caches with weapons and TNT are found right near Moscow
every day.