Boris Ustyugov. Exploits of the Scouts

Exploits of the Scouts
Boris Ustyugov

Publication date: February 27, 2004

It is already alarming that the Russian Foreign Ministry published information about the arrest of SVR employees, albeit a week later - according to the unwritten chivalric laws of cloak and dagger, arrests of intelligence service employees while on duty should ideally not be brought up for open discussion at all. Leaks are allowed only when the usual methods of trading with the enemy in such cases have been exhausted, and the revealed residents face a prison sentence. In this situation, the homeland sends angry notes of protest and trading for special agents is already open. The fate of such fighters of the invisible front is usually predetermined - after returning to their homeland, they, at best, become restricted from traveling abroad and end their career as some kind of clerk in the internal service.

Here is the acting Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov not only admitted the arrest of employees of the Russian embassy in Qatar and charged them with the explosion of the Yandarbiyev jeep, but also said that the Russians arrested by the Arabs were employees of the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation): “The specified Russian citizens, one of whom has diplomatic passport, are employees of the Russian special services. As part of their status as seconded to the embassy, ​​they stayed in Qatar legally and carried out, without any violation of local legislation, information and analytical tasks related to countering international terrorism. These actions are fully consistent with the efforts of states - participants in the anti-terrorist coalition to identify sources and channels of financing, organizational mechanisms and other means of supporting terrorist organizations . " Commenting on the actions of the Qatari authorities, Ivanov noted that they “contrary to the elementary norms of interstate relations, did not immediately inform the Russian embassy about their actions. Moreover, in violation of international law, Russian citizens were denied a meeting with representatives of the Russian embassy for seven days . ”

It also turned out that immediately after the arrest of the three intelligence officers, a Foreign Ministry negotiator flew to Doha (the capital of Qatar) and that he managed to secure the release of one of the agents - precisely the one who was protected by a diplomatic passport. His name, of course, has not been disclosed, but it is obvious that it was this Russian who headed the Russian station in Qatar.

There were several versions of the assassination attempt on Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. The official point of view of the Russian authorities was “reasonably” confirmed by President of Chechnya Akhmat Kadyrov yesterday: “Our reliable sources indicate that Yandarbiev, shortly before his death, received quite a large sum from Middle Eastern sponsors to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia. The money reached the recipient, but subsequently Basayev and Maskhadov discovered a significant difference between what was promised and what was received . " This is precisely what proves that the Russian special services had nothing to do with the murder of Yandarbiev, but that his colleagues, offended by the dishonesty of Aslan Maskhadov, killed him. The head of the press bureau of the Foreign Intelligence Service, General Boris Labusov, fully agreed with the experienced Chechen, telling Interfax that “neither the SVR nor its predecessor - the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR - have been dealing with this kind of thing since 1959.” (Stepan Bandera was liquidated this year).

Modesty is one of the indispensable qualities of any intelligence service. However, there seems to be nothing unusual in the destruction of criminals outside their own states. The elimination of people who have sinned against the country has long been the calling card and main PR trick of the Israeli Mossad, whose employees manage to “kill” their enemies in almost any room anywhere in the world. The Americans, who in May 2002 fired rockets at a car containing one of the al-Qaeda activists in Yemen, also did not think of hiding their involvement in this act of intimidation. The only distinctive feature of Western counter-terrorism operations from ours is that truly valuable figures from the Mossad and the CIA are caught alive and then interrogated for a long time, revealing a lot of interesting things. It's just that it usually remains outside the scope of the "necessary information" provided by the media.

The Russian special services have their own style. During the entire time of the FSB’s unsuccessful fight against Chechen terrorists, only the copper-headed Salman Raduev ended up in prison, and even he died very quickly , without really having time to tell anything.

Several trials of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks in Russian cities only highlight the general policy of the intelligence services in this area. From the moment when Dzhokhar Dudayev was allegedly killed by a direct missile hit in Chechnya in 1996, and until the liquidation of all the militants who captured Nord-Ost, the destruction of Khattab and the death of the same Raduev, not a single significant Chechen terrorist was like this arrested.

There have been several reports in the media that in the summer of 2003, the Russian Foreign Ministry practically persuaded the Qatari authorities to extradite Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. The fact that the chief treasurer of Ichkeria continued to live in his villa in the diplomatic district of Doha did not in itself indicate anything. Yandarbiev, as a “refugee without the right to political activity,” was in full view of everyone. He was watched not only by the valiant Russian intelligence officers, but also by the Americans. And for them, Yandarbiev’s possible contacts with colleagues from numerous Islamic “charitable foundations” were especially interesting. Less interesting for the CIA, but extremely important for the SVR, would be to trace exactly how Yandarbiev communicated with his emissaries in the southern republics of the former USSR.

For example, in Azerbaijan, where the Americans, unlike the Russian special services, have a wide network of residents. For the SVR, not only surveillance was important, but also complete confidentiality regarding its results. Domestic competent departments only once allowed information to be “leaked” that the Chechen emissary Khodzh-Akhmet Nukhaev had recently settled in Baku, who had organized a Chechen headquarters in the local Absheron hotel and, through Yandarbiev, was engaged in providing information to the militants. According to some reports, Nukhaev is the head of the American-Caucasian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (registered in the USA) and, through the Turkish Koch Bank, is openly engaged in financing “warriors of Islam” in the territories adjacent to Russia. A large article about this appeared in the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta , and the fact that the domestic special services did nothing to prevent the mysterious Nukhaev from organizing the Baku headquarters leads to sad thoughts. If, on top of everything else, Russia, by the good will of the Qatari authorities, had received Yandarbiev alive, then the investigators, obviously, would not have known what to do with him. It is no secret that the Russian political and financial elite has long been firmly stuck in Chechen money, and therefore the appearance of the prosecutor's public testimony of the main financier of Chechen militants with schemes and channels for the movement of funds on the eve of the presidential elections in the country would be very inappropriate. Killing Yandarbiev quietly in a pre-trial detention center would be completely ugly.

Obviously, now the range of issues related to Qatari affairs must inevitably move to a new plane - Russian intelligence officers will still be returned to their homeland. It doesn’t matter whether they blew up Yandarbiev or not. Now we have to figure out who handed our residents over to the Qatari authorities. Either the Americans did this as petty revenge for a spoiled game, or the Arab intelligence services came to the rescue in order to push their own successful operation onto Russian agents who were not involved in it and protect themselves from retaliation from Yandarbiev’s unkind partners. However, analysts from the SVR already know the answer...