U.S. did the smartest thing possible. Don’t forget the FSB apartment bombings.
Russian government involvement theory
According to David Satter, Yuri Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Vladimir Pribylovsky and Boris Kagarlitsky, the bombings were a successful coup d’état coordinated by the Russian state security services to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and to bring Putin to power.[200][18][19][20][62][201][21][202][203] Some of them described the bombings as typical “active measures” practised by the KGB in the past. The war in Chechnya boosted Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin’s popularity, and brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma and Putin to the presidency within a few months.
David Satter stated, during his testimony in the United States House of Representatives, that:
With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, however, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.[204]
According to a reconstruction of the events by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky:[205]
- The bombings in Buynaksk were carried out by a team of twelve GRU officers who were sent to Dagestan and supervised by the head of GRU’s 14th Directorate General Kostechenko. That version was partly based on a testimony by Aleksey Galkin. The bombing in Buynaksk was conducted by the GRU to avoid an “interagency conflict between the FSB and the Ministry of Defense”.
- In Moscow, Volgodonsk and Ryazan, the attacks were organized by the FSB through a chain of command that included director of the counter-terrorism department General German Ugryumov, FSB operatives Maxim Lazovsky, Vladimir Romanovich, Ramazan Dyshekov and others. Achemez Gochiyayev, Tatyana Korolyeva, and Alexander Karmishin rented warehouses that received shipments of hexogen disguised as sugar and did not know that the explosives were delivered.
- Adam Dekkushev, Krymshamkhalov, and Timur Batchayev were recruited by FSB agents who presented themselves as “Chechen separatists” to deliver explosives to Volgodonsk and Moscow.
- Names and the fate of FSB agents who planted the bomb in the city of Ryazan remain unknown.
Support
Historians, journalists and politicians
The view about the bombings being organized and perpetrated by Russian state security services was originally put forward by investigative journalist David Satter and historians Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, in co-authorship with Alexander Litvinenko. It was later supported by a number of historians. Amy Knight, a historian of the KGB, wrote that it was “abundantly clear” that the FSB was responsible for carrying out the attacks and that Vladimir Putin’s “guilt seems clear,” since it was inconceivable that the FSB would have done so without the sanction of Putin, the agency’s former director and by then Prime Minister of Russia.[16][206] In her book Putin’s Kleptocracy , historian Karen Dawisha summarized evidence related to the bombings and concluded that “to blow up your own innocent and sleeping people in your capital city is an action almost unthinkable. Yet the evidence that the FSB was at least involved in planting a bomb in Ryazan is incontrovertible.”[207] According to Timothy Snyder, “it seemed possible” that the perpetrators of the apartment bombings were FSB officers.[208] David Satter considered the bombings as a political provocation by the Russian secret services that was similar to the burning of the Reichstag.[209]
This view has been also supported by investigative journalists. In 2008, British journalist Edward Lucas concluded in his book The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West that “The weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation: that the attacks were a ruthlessly planned stunt to create a climate of panic and fear in which Putin would quickly become the country’s indisputable leader, as indeed he did.”[74] In the September 2009 issue of GQ , veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson wrote about on Putin’s role in the Russian apartment bombings, based in part on his interviews with Mikhail Trepashkin[210] The journal owner, Condé Nast, then took extreme measures to prevent an article by Anderson from appearing in the Russian media, both physically and in translation.[211]
Former Russian State Security Council chief Alexandr Lebed in his 29 September 1999 interview with Le Figaro said he was almost convinced that the government organised the terrorist acts.[212][213][214] Andrei Illarionov, a former key economic adviser to the Russian president, said that FSB involvement “is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no other element that could have organized the bombings except for the FSB.”[215] Later Lebed’s public relations staff claimed that he was quoted out of the context.[212]
Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer noted that “The FSB accused Khattab and Gochiyaev, but oddly they did not point the finger at Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov’s regime, which is what the war was launched against.”[216]
A number of US politicians commented that they consider credible the allegations about Russian state security services as the actual organizers of the bombings. In 2003, U.S. senator John McCain said that “It was during Mr. Putin’s tenure as Prime Minister in 1999 that he launched the Second Chechen War following the Moscow apartment bombings. There remain credible allegations that Russia’s FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks. Mr. Putin ascended to the presidency in 2000 by pointing a finger at the Chechens for committing these crimes, launching a new military campaign in Chechnya, and riding a frenzy of public anger into office.”[202]
On 11 January 2017, senator Marco Rubio raised the issue of the 1999 bombings during the confirmation hearings for Rex Tillerson.[217] According to senator Rubio, “there’s [an] incredible body of reporting, open source and other, that this was all—all those bombings were part of a black flag operation on the part of the FSB.”[96] On 10 January 2018, senator Ben Cardin of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report entitled “Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security”.[96] According to the report, “no credible evidence has been presented by the Russian authorities linking Chechen terrorists, or anyone else, to the Moscow bombings.”
According to Satter, all four bombings that occurred had a similar “signature” which indicated that the explosives had been carefully prepared, a mark of skilled specialists. There is also no explanation as to how the terrorists were able to obtain tons of hexogen explosive and transport it to various locations in Russia; hexogen is produced in one plant in Perm Oblast for which the central FSB is responsible for the security. The culprits would also have needed to organise nine explosions (the four that occurred and the five attempted bombings reported by the authorities) in different cities in a two-week period. Satter’s estimate for the time required for target plan development, site visits, explosives preparation, renting space at the sites and transporting explosives to the sites was four to four and a half months.[99]
