CHAPTER 9

AS RUSSIAN AS THE BALALAIKA

By June 2003, some six thousand former KGB and Red Army officers held important positions in Russia’s central and regional governments. Among them: Vladimir Putin, president of Russia; Dmitri Medvedev, prime minister; Sergey Ivanov, defense minister; Vladimir Osipov, head of the Presidential Personnel Directorate; Viktor Vasilyevich Cherkesov, chairman of the State Committee on Drug Trafficking¹ and former chief of the KGB’s infamous Directorate V, in charge of crushing internal dissidence.² That year, Sergey Lavrov, KGB Academy graduate and now Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, was named Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations and president pro-tempore of the UN Security Council.

To Ted Koppel of ABC television, Putin explained that he needed the KGB and Red Army men to root out graft. “I have known them for many years and I trust them. It has nothing to do with ideology. It’s only a matter of their professional qualities and personal relationship.”³ This was a half-truth. Filling governmental positions with undercover intelligence officers was as Russian as the Kremlin’s onion domes. Until 1913, Roman Malinovsky edited Pravda. He was recruited by the Okhrana as an undercover agent while serving a jail term for theft and burglary. Erasing his criminal record, the Okhrana infiltrated him into Lenin’s Communist Party, where he gradually rose to the position of chairman of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma.

The entire Soviet bloc was run with deep-cover intelligence officers. In the 1970s, during a meeting held with foreign trade officials, Romanian prime minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer whispered into Pacepa’s ear: “Do you know what would happen if you smeared shit over every undercover officer of yours in this building?” Maurer did not wait for an answer: “This whole huge damn place would stink of shit from cellar to attic!”

In 1978, a couple of weeks after Pacepa was granted political asylum by President Jimmy Carter, Romania unleashed the greatest political purge in its communist history. The Western media reported the event widely. Ceausescu demoted four Politburo members, fired one third of his cabinet, and replaced twenty-two ambassadors, all deep-cover intelligence officers whose military documents and secret pay vouchers Pacepa had regularly signed off on.

A new Cold War began to unfold between KGB-run Russia and the West just minutes after the Aug. 8, 2008, opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, at which world leaders, including President George W. Bush, had gathered. Russian tanks rolled across the Russian border into Georgia. “War has started,” Putin announced. With a straight face, he claimed that the government of Georgia was harassing Russian “peacekeepers” in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia. The Kremlin, he said, was pledged to “protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, no matter where they are located,”4 and therefore Russia must commandeer Georgia.

On Sept. 11, 2002, hordes of KGB officers gathered at the Lubyanka, the infamous headquarters of the newly renamed FSB, shockingly to celebrate the 125th birthday of Feliks Dzerzhinsky—the mass killer who had created the Soviet political police. (They did not gather in sympathy with the American tragedy of the previous year.) At the event, KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny, Pacepa’s former colleague, groused to the gathering: “I think a goal was set to destroy the KGB, to make it toothless.”⁵

Official Russian propaganda photographs had depicted President Putin posing as a “Tarzan,” with a knife under his belt or a Kalashnikov in his hand for years. On September 11, 2014, another clutch of former KGB officers gathered at the Lubyanka. They celebrate this date every year. But that year President Putin also announced the resurrection of an elite Interior Ministry special forces unit, using Stalin’s title for it, the Dzerzhinsky Division.

This must raise a question. Is it a pure coincidence that the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, which killed almost three thousand people (and the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi on September 11, 2012) took place on the birthday of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, which is now celebrated every year in Russia? Putin’s policies, his uses of terrorism and war, can only make one suspect his hand.

Intimidating Putin’s enemies through political killings and Nazi-style invasions of foreign countries are other reasons to suspect the KGB’s hand in the bloody September 11 and Benghazi attacks. In 2006, six years after defecting to the United Kingdom, former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko told the West that he had brought Abu Musab Al Zarqawi to Russia to be trained as a terrorist by the KGB/FSB in 1996–976 and that he had learned that Zarqawi had formed al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—now called ISIS. Former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who defected to the U.S. in 2006 and is a regular guest on Voice of America, testified that Litvinenko “was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zarqawi’s presence in Russia while he was trained by FSB instructors.”⁷

The revelation that Al Zarqawi was a secret KGB/FSB operative has been ignored by our politicians—but not by the Kremlin, which savagely murdered Litvinenko with Polonium-210, a radioactive element used as a neutron trigger for nuclear weapons, in retaliation for his disclosures. In 2007 the United Kingdom called for Russian citizen Andrey Lugovoy (a former KGB officer) to be extradited to the UK on charges of murdering Litvinenko. Russia declined. Lugovoy overnight became a member of the Russian Duma, thus receiving parliamentary immunity.

In 2008, a new cold and potentially bloody war was in the making. Putin invaded Georgia.⁸ In February 2014, Putin then annexed Crimea while denying that “democratic Russia” had anything to do with the unmarked, masked armed forces trying to ignite civil war in Ukraine, which caused the Ukrainians to refer to them sarcastically as “Martians.”⁹ The gunmen were identified by U.S. experts to be Russian Special Forces.

The Ukrainian government irrefutably proved the day after the event that Russian separatists, armed and trained by Russian foreign intelligence, had shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 on board. The Kremlin insinuated that the U.S. might have done it.10

Putin’s Russia is as if postwar Germany were run by former Gestapo who openly deplored Nazi Germany’s demise as a “national tragedy on an enormous scale,” brought back “Deutschland Über Alles” as the national anthem, built dozens of new secret cities dedicated to nuclear bomb production, unleashed an Anschluss to rebuild the German-Austrian Empire, and invaded neighboring countries—Georgia and Ukraine. It is precisely how Hitler started World War II.

Meanwhile, all efforts to bring the former KGB to account for the millions of souls it murdered in Soviet Russia and abroad are met with howls of protest from Putin. Their fates are still locked up behind the walls of Lubyanka. Hundreds of thousands of former KGB officers, informants, and collaborators are still shielded by a veil of secrecy. “In Russia today, nobody is willing to recognize the horrendous crimes of the past,” said Valeryia Dunayeva of the Russian human rights group Memorial. Her mother had been framed as a spy and shot; her father had died in a Siberian gulag after twenty-five years there of political imprisonment. “There are 17,000 of us who lost both parents in Moscow alone, but the authorities simply pretend we don’t exist.”¹¹

KGB DEZINFORMATSIYA MOVES INTO THE KREMLIN

On August 12, 2000, the Kursk, one of Russia’s newest nuclear submarines, sank to the floor of the Barents Sea, killing all 118 people on board. Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, immediately deployed KGB-style dezinformatsiya to minimize the political damage by keeping the disaster secret or denying it as long as possible, minimizing its damage, and—when the truth came out—blaming the enemy. At first Putin kept the disaster a secret, allowing him to finish his summer vacation at the beach. When the Western media reported on the disaster, Putin tried to minimize it by announcing that the crew of the submarine were still alive and that a special navy team was working to save their lives. Soon, the world learned that in fact the Russian navy had neither the technical means nor the expertise to carry out any such rescue operation. The Kremlin then alleged that the United States, its traditional enemy, might have caused the disaster. Russian Minister of Defense, former Soviet General Sergey Ivanov, claimed that on August 17, 2000, the Russian navy had intercepted an American submarine signal leaving the site of the Kursk’s crash and suggested it might have collided with the Kursk.12

Several Western governments, realizing that Russia did not have the technical capability to rescue the Kursk, offered help. The Kremlin refused to accept it. Newspapers around the world accused the new Russian government of being “still in the grip of the morally outdated Soviet ideology” and failing to make “human lives the primary concern.”¹³ “The Russian elite’s reflexes have not changed in the past 10 to 15 years,” charged one.¹⁴ One columnist made a direct appeal to Putin: “As Putin watches the crisis reach its nadir from his distant holiday home on the shores of the Black Sea, he must remember that his country is now a very different place from the oppressive and secretive one dominated by his communist predecessors. It is time the prime minister [sic] brought Russia in from the cold.”¹⁵

Reluctantly, President Putin accepted a foreign offer of help. The first Norwegian divers reached the Kursk on August 20 and found no one alive, though the Kremlin, in order to calm public opinion, had just reported signs of life from the submarine. Lying was its first reflex.

In the fall of 2001, the Kursk was raised from the ocean floor by two Dutch salvage companies. Experts established that it sank due to a leak of hydrogen peroxide in the submarine’s forward torpedo room, causing a torpedo warhead to explode that in turn triggered the explosion of a half dozen other warheads.

President Putin awarded the Order of Courage to all the deceased crew and made the submarine captain a Hero of the Russian Federation but never acknowledged the Russian avalanche of lies to cover up the disaster.

There is nothing unusual about this response. The use of dezinformatsiya to conceal and lie about killings and national calamities goes all the way back to the tsars. One day in 1839, a storm sank a fleet of boats crossing the Gulf of Finland from St. Petersburg to view an illumination display put on by Tsar Nicholas I at his summer residence of Peterhof. Marquis Astolphe de Custine (a visiting French nobleman who became famous after publishing his diary about his trip) wrote: “Today two hundred people are admitted to have been drowned; some say fifteen hundred, others two thousand. No one will ever know the truth, and the papers will not even mention the disaster—that would distress the Czarina and imply blame of the Czar.”16

The art of dezinformatsiya was also famously deployed in the Kremlin’s handling of the Chernobyl disaster, 147 years after the unacknowledged fiasco at Nicholas I’s fête. On April 26, 1986, an explosion ripped apart one of the four water-cooled nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. The official record as of today is that twenty people died fighting the fire, 135,000 others were evacuated, and an area within a radius of thirteen miles was declared a “forbidden zone.”¹⁷ In spite of its dimensions and its danger for all of Eastern Europe, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev kept the disaster a secret. Only when the Swedish government announced that it had detected fallout from the explosion did Gorbachev admit a “small” nuclear accident. But he said the reactor’s core had immediately been sealed off with air-dropped cement.

Later, Eastern and Northern Europe began to notice significant radioactive contamination of their farm products. Only then did the West start to see through Gorbachev’s disinformation campaign. It took many more years for the world to uncover that, in fact, eight tons of deadly radioactive material had escaped from the Chernobyl reactor, and an estimated 370,000 people had suffered various degrees of radiation.¹⁸ In the end, continued Russian obfuscation may mean we may never learn the true dimensions of the disaster.

No wonder the first page of the KGB manual on dezinformatsiya proclaimed on its first page, all in upper case letters, “IF YOU ARE GOOD AT DEZINFORMATSIYA, YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING.”

THE WEALTHIEST MAN ON EARTH

“I looked the man [Russian President Vladimir Putin] in the eye” and “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” President George W. Bush said at the end of the 2001 summit meeting held in Slovenia. “I looked into Putin’s eyes and I saw a stone-cold killer,” stated former CIA director Robert Gates. Knowing the widely unknown Russian “science” of disinformation and its understudy, glasnost, could change night into day.

In our view, Colonel Vladimir Putin is a twentieth century Russian tsar. The position of a tsar is that of the owner of a country and its people. Putin has occupied Russia’s throne for twenty-one years. Yet Russia’s Constitution only allows a person to be president for a maximum two terms of four years. Putin has served three full tours as president and two as vice president and is now serving his fourth term as president.

During Putin’s twenty-eight years in the Kremlin, his personal wealth has secretly risen from a few thousand Russian rubles to an estimated $200 billion, making Putin more than twice as wealthy as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, with a fortune of $79.2 billion, once the world’s richest known person but no longer.19 It was certainly no coincidence that in 2002 Putin was able to buy Gerhard Schroeder, chancellor of the traditionally pro-American Federal Republic of Germany, who agreed to join Putin in opposing most U.S. foreign policy initiatives. It was no accident that in 2005, when Schroeder lost elections for his third term as chancellor, he became one of the top officials of Gazprom, a giant state-owned Russian company then headed by today’s Russian Vice President Dmitry Medvedev. Each intelligence service has a limited budget. The published CIA budget for 2018 was $59.4 billion. Putin’s intelligence budget for the same year was unlimited.

President Putin is the latest in the long line of Russian tsars who have upheld the tradition of lifetime rule by expropriating the country’s wealth and killing all who try to stop him, dating back at least to the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, who killed thousands of boyars and others, including Metropolitan Philip and Prince Alexander Gorbatyl-Shuisky, for the crime of refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to his eldest, infant son. The first freely elected president in the millennial history of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, tried to distance himself from the Soviet Union. Putin, who deposed Yeltsin in a coup d’état, does the opposite: he struggles to rebuild confidence in Soviet institutions, the only ones he has ever known. His long experience with the KGB “science” of dezinformatsiya put him into power and is what keeps him there.

On September 11, 2001, President Putin expressed sympathy to President George W. Bush for what he called “these terrible tragedies of the terrorist attacks.”²⁰ He pretended to aid the United States by passing information to the FBI about two Russian immigrants in the U.S. who later perpetrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. But these were gestures, not a break with Russia’s anti-American past. In 2014, former KGB General Oleg Kalugin was charged with “high treason in the form of betraying a state secret” by Putin’s chief military prosecutor for moving to the United States and publishing an autobiography21 describing old KGB operations against the U.S.²² Former KGB officer Lt. Colonel Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated for revealing Russia’s key role²³ in forming ISIS and Al Qaeda in Iraq, starting with training Ayman Al-Zawahiri to conduct terrorist operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina during Yugoslavia’s civil war, run out of Sofia, Bulgaria, which is now run by Rumen Radev, a member of the Communist Party until 1990 and backed in 2016 by the Socialist Party. As a result, the British have now forbidden any travel by Putin to the United Kingdom. For decades Bulgaria served as a primary surrogate for Soviet training and sponsor of terrorism. The Russians were playing both sides in the conflict, openly supporting the Serbs while covertly helping the Iranian-backed Muslims.²⁴

Putin strikes traditionalist, “conservative” chords, preserving the worst parts of the old Soviet Union, its nativism and xenophobia. He speaks fondly about his years in the KGB,²⁵ asking the nation to understand that KGB “agents work in the interest of the state” and arguing for patience with them on the grounds that “90 percent” of all KGB intelligence was collected with the collaboration of ordinary citizens.²⁶ That kind of verbal spin may work with many as disarmingly honest. But it also ignores the brutal, lawless oppression solely at the whim of an autocrat that is the historical record of the Russian political police.

The New York Times dedicated its “Book Review” issue of November 30, 2014, to the publishing industry’s reluctance to bring out judgmental books about Russian president Putin, in particular Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha, a highly respected American scholar of Soviet and Russian politics. This book was rejected by one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious publishers, Cambridge University Press, for fear of retribution. The publisher explained to Dawisha: “The decision has nothing to do with the quality of your research or your scholarly credibility. It is simply a question of risk tolerance.”²⁷

Indeed, in post-Soviet Russia alone, over three hundred political figures and newsmen who dared publicly criticize President Putin have been assassinated.²⁸ The criminal tactics to consolidate power by Putin are the same as those used by Ceausescu. Each were educated at a military school in Moscow, and each supervised his country’s secret police before becoming his country’s president. Ceausescu was eventually executed during an upsurge of popular disgust. He clearly shares the traditional Russian faith in the political police over party politics as a means to power—as well as the traditional Soviet-style anti-Americanism.