Blowing Up Russia by Alexander Litvinenko Read Free Book Online Page A

representatives of the former Ninth Department of the KGB (protection of high-level national leaders). This made it possible for him to contact Korzhakov, Barsukov and their entourages and offer them the services of Stealth, under his management, to assist the SBP and FSK in the less traditional forms of struggle against organized criminal activity.

His suggestion met with approval, and a general plan of action was rapidly developed with input from Korzhakov s first deputy, General G.G. Ragozin. The program envisaged the use of criminal and extremist organizations, individual criminals, and retrained military personnel from the special missions department of the GRU of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Interior, and the FSB to undermine and break up criminal groupings and physically eliminate underworld bosses and leaders of criminal organizations.

In practice, everything turned out according to that eternal Russian principle: we wanted to do better, but things turned out the same as always. Stealth provided a roof for a range of commercial organizations and carried out various kinds of operations to put pressure on criminal and commercial competitors, up to and including contract killings.

In support of this activity, Korzhakov, Barsukov, and Trofimov arranged for any possible criminal investigations of the bodyguard firm by the agencies of law enforcement and the security forces (the FSB, Ministry of the Interior, the tax police, the Public Prosecutor s Office) to be neutralized. The heads of all of these state departments were informed of the contents of the initial program for which Stealth had been set up, and an understanding was reached that their agencies would not investigate Stealth s activities.

Stealth used the Izmailovo organized criminal group as its strike force, but gradually the financial influence of the group and the infiltration of its personnel transformed Stealth into the Izmailovo group s roof, or cover, and Lutsenko became its puppet leader.

Other private security companies, such as Kmeti and Cobalt, also found themselves in the same situation. All of them were exploited to implement the existing program for

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combating organized crime by non-traditional means. They became implicated in a series of well-known contract killings of criminal leaders, businessmen, and bankers. The operatives who carried out these murders were hired killers from free-lance special agency groups. As a rule, all of the operations were planned and carried out in a highly professional manner, with the subsequent elimination, if necessary, of the hired killers themselves and the individuals who provided their cover. There was no prospect of investigations into this kind of crime ever producing a trial. Any criminals involved in the crimes, who happened to be detained, simply didn t live long enough to get to the court.

In time, Stealth developed into an efficient bodyguard and detection organization, equipped with a wide range of technology, including special items and weapons (some of them illegal), with a payroll of up to 600 individuals. Approximately seventy percent of its personnel consisted of former members of the FSB and SBP, and about thirty percent were former members of the police force. Stealth was transferred to the UPP when it was set up in 1996, although it did maintain a certain degree of autonomy.

The main principle on which the UPP operated was problem-solving : if there s a problem, then a solution must be found. Clues to the existence of this operating principle can be found in Pavel Sukhoplatov s memoirs, published in Moscow in 1996, which happen to be the favorite reference text of the UPP s leaders. The murder of the president of Chechnya, Djokhar Dudaev, provides a good example of the problem-solving approach to the achievement of a combat goal. The people who organized this killing were also involved in setting up the UPP.

In a certain sense Dudaev s murder was a contract