Shooting of Paul Joyal Still Unsolved

Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, established during the Cold War to help promote the views of Soviet defectors in the West, said it’s “absolutely” possible that the Russians may have sanctioned the attack on [security expert Paul] Joyal.

“It’s part of a whole chain of events,” Howard said. Since Putin has been in power, Russian diplomats in Washington have increasingly been exhibiting “thuggish” behavior in response to the foundation’s activity and criticism of Russian policies in Chechnya and rest of the North Caucasus.---CQ Politics

Paul Joyal (seen in this picture on the left), an expert on security affairs in the former Soviet bloc, was shot in his driveway Thursday, March 1, 2007. He had recently spoken on the news program Dateline about the Litvinenko polonium poisoning case.

As soon as Mr. Joyal was shot, he told his wife to call the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin (seen in this picture on the right). Joyal had just left Kalugin after a meeting at Washington's Spy Museum. Kalugin is an advisory director of the museum.

CQ Politics (2-15-08) has written an update on the shooting of Kremlin critic Paul Joyal. I have written previously about Mr. Joyal especially here, but also here and here.

CQ Politics writes:

Almost a year after Kremlin critic Paul Joyal was gunned down in his suburban Maryland driveway, the case remains a mystery.

To some, including the Prince George’s County police, it was a random street crime, “an attempt at a citizen robbery,” a spokesman said Friday.

The alleged assailants, two black men whom Joyal only glimpsed before he was felled by a single handgun shot in his gut, remain at large.

...Joyal was returning home after meeting Kalugin for a drink near the Spy Museum in downtown Washington. The longtime security expert pulled into his driveway and stepped out of his car.

Two men jumped from the bushes, one grabbing him from behind. They were both black...but he got only a fleeting look at the one facing him, who had “sandy hair that looked dyed.”

“He says, ‘Shoot him!’” Joyal said, in “some kind of accent, maybe Caribbean.”

A handgun went off. A bullet pierced his intestines. He crumpled to the ground, bleeding heavily.

The assailants ran off into the night, leaving behind Joyal’s wallet, his computer, his briefcase and, of course, his car.

...Joyal, who had been a consultant to former Soviet Georgia as well as companies who wanted to do business in Russia, saw the hand of the Putin regime in the assassination of dissident former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died from a lethal dose of polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope, in London in November 2006.

“A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin,” Joyal said on NBC Dateline. “If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible.”

Joyal was “silenced,” too, many Russian experts thought.

“He had just accused the Russian government on NBC of poisoning former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous November,” the prolific journalist Alex Shoumatoff, whose aristocratic parents emigrated from Moscow when the czar was overthrown in 1917, noted.

“Litvinenko had blown the whistle on murders and corruption in the Putin regime. . . . The month before that Anna Politkovskaya, who had written about the torture of Chechens by the Russian army in the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, was gunned down in her Moscow apartment elevator. And two years before that Paul Klebnikov, the Moscow editor of Forbes Russia, was shot dead in the street. Klebnikov had just begun to investigate the 1995 murder of a Russian TV journalist, Vladislav Listyev.”

Shoumatoff also noted the suspicious death of “Ivan Safronov, who fell to his death from his 5th-story window on March 2,” the day after Joyal was attacked. “A military correspondent for the daily Kommersant, Safronov was working on a story about the Kremlin’s furtive sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and jet fighters to Syria.”

Kalugin, who had once commanded all Soviet espionage operations in the U.S. as chief of the KGB’s First Directorate, said that without an arrest, no one could be certain of who was responsible for the attack on Joyal.

But he called it “strange.”

...Those who follow events in Russia closely are divided on whether the Kremlin would dare to reach out and touch someone in the United States.
For starters, it would demand a response from the Bush administration, which has soft-peddled its criticism of Putin, a former KGB agent himself, in exchange for cooperation against Islamic terrorists and other issues, many critics say.

“If the Russians were behind the attack on Paul Joyal, then they crossed a line that they had not done earlier even in Soviet times — attacking a native-born American citizen on American territory,” says Paul Goble, a longtime U.S. government specialist on Soviet and post-Soviet states who now teaches in Azerbaijan.

“One hopes that they would not dare do so, but that there are widespread suspicions on this point reflects two things: the Russian government’s lack of total control over all those in its security structures and the deterioration of conditions in Russia itself more generally.”

But Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, established during the Cold War to help promote the views of Soviet defectors in the West, said it’s “absolutely” possible that the Russians may have sanctioned the attack on Joyal.

“It’s part of a whole chain of events,” Howard said. Since Putin has been in power, Russian diplomats in Washington have increasingly been exhibiting “thuggish” behavior in response to the foundation’s activity and criticism of Russian policies in Chechnya and rest of the North Caucasus.

“They show up in the lobby and demand to see someone,” in contrast to the warm era under Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, when “they would have the civility to call you up an make an appointment.”

Not long ago, Howard said, one Russan diplomat simply showed up at his office and “refused to leave” until security guards were called.

Howard also said that Jamestown, and he personally, have been singled out for criticism by the state-owned Russian press. In 2005 the foreign ministry issued a note of protest to the State Department about the activities of The Jamestown Foundation, a research and analysis organization that focuses on Russia and Eurasia.

“It creates an air of intimidation,” he said. “It makes me think twice about doing something, not only in Russia, but even Washington. D.C.”

Whether the Kremlin had a hand in Joyal’s attack, said Goble, it’s unlikely to be discovered. Many cut-outs would have been employed to separate Moscow and the thugs who shot him.

“Some have speculated that it could be the case that no one in Moscow gave an order to go after Paul Joyal but that someone senior there made a ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome priest’ type of comment, and a more junior person decided to ‘show initiative’ by acting on that hint alone,” Goble said in an e-mail from Azerbaijan. “In some ways, that possibility is even more disturbing than a direct order, because it means that the Russian authorities may not be in a position to ensure that this does not happen again.”

The elimination of critics, said Goble, is part of “the radical deterioration of conditions in the Russian Federation under Putin.”

“Because of that deterioration,” he added, “some who want to go to Russia regularly and maintain close ties with Russian officials have become more cautious, just as some of their predecessors were in Soviet times.”

But other security experts dismiss the likelihood of the Kremlin contracting out an assassination in the United States. The downside overwhelms any small advantage it could gain from silencing a critic here, not to mention the risk of getting caught. [Full text]

Russian Expert Paul Joyal Spoke Truth To Power!

Picture credit

Paul Joyal (seen in this picture on the left), an expert on the Litvinenko polonium poisoning case, was shot in his driveway Thursday, March 1, 2007. As soon as he was shot, he told his wife to call the former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin (seen in this picture on the right). Joyal had just left Kalugin after a meeting at Washington's Spy Museum.

The title of this article says Mr. Joyal is dead, but the text of the article says he is in critical condition.

Some people suspect that Mr. Joyal was shot because he publically accused the Kremlin of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko with polonium. According to the papers, Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium that was put in some tea he drank.

Speaking on Dateline on February 25, 2007, Mr. Joyal said of Litvinenko's murder:

"A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible."

Joyal told Dateline that he had befriended Litvinenko on trips to London. Joyal said of Litvinenko:

"He saw the moral fabric of the system that he grew up in just disintegrating before his eyes...He was driven by [moral] principles, no question on that."

Joyal told Dateline that Litvinenko had been ordered to kill the Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky; instead, Litvinenko refused and went public:

"Litvinenko went public in a way never seen before in Russia. He held a TV news conference with fellow officers to denounce the plot [to murder Berezovsky]. And he exposed in dramatic style what he saw as rampant corruption in the FSB.

He caused a major embarrassment to the FSB and its chief at the time— a man who the world would soon hear a lot about— Vladimir Putin.

At the news conference, while his comrades tried to mask their identities, Alexander did not...

[Litvinenko] was saying things that were just almost inconceivable to people [in Russia]. He was engaged in slander of the president as they would see it. He held nothing back. This man was absolutely hated."

Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin says that Russian and Western critics are being targeted by an organization of former KGB officers called "Dignity and Honor":

“'Dignity and Honor' is a brotherhood of ex-secret agents nostalgic for hard-line Soviet ways. He says the group hunts down perceived traitors and shows no mercy."

Joyal said that the people who delivered the poison may have not been fully in the picture, but that the poisoning was done by people will access to state-controlled facilities:

"We cannot assume that how this [poisoning] unfolded was the way it was planned or that the people involved actually knew the consequences of the material they were dealing with...When someone dies from a state-controlled substance, a substance that is manufactured in—in state controlled facilities, where does it come from?...It’s clear-cut. It has to be a state-run or a state-managed operation."

Dan McGrory, 54, of the London Times, who was also interviewed for this very same Dateline article, died unexpectedly on February 20 before the Dateline program aired.

The FBI is investigating the shooting of Paul Joyal, but "[l]ocal investigators are highly skeptical that his shooting was anything other than street crime."

Street crime?? Personally, I think that when two people are interviewed for the same Dateline show about Litvinenko's death and then both die, that is very suspicious. Quite a few of Putin's critics have been murdered and none of the murders have ever been solved.

I have written about the Litvinenko murder and the unsolved murders of other Putin critics in these posts:

Saturday, February 03, 2007--Symposium of Russian Experts Discusses Litvinenko Murder

Sunday, January 28, 2007--Litvinenko Poisoning Reportedly Orchestrated by Putin's State Security Services

Saturday, December 09, 2006--Something to Hide, Stirlitz?

Saturday, December 09, 2006--If I Did It!

Monday, December 04, 2006--Putin's Fairy Dust?

Sunday, December 03, 2006--The Polonium Tango!

Friday, December 01, 2006--Lightning Strikes Twice!

Tuesday, November 21, 2006--"Burnt by the Sun"

Monday, October 09, 2006--Anna Politkovskaya Defended Kidnap and Torture Victims in Her Final Interview

Monday, October 09, 2006--Anna Politkovskaya's Killer Captured on Fuzzy Security Video!

Saturday, October 07, 2006--Russian Journalist Anna Politkovskaya Gunned Down in Moscow!

Updates as needed...

Britian's "Top Spy" Alex Allan Is in a Coma

Britain's top intelligence adviser Alex Allan is pictured here and profiled in the London Times (11-16-07). See also his wikipedia.

British newspapers are reporting that their unconventional "top spy" Alex Allan, profiled here by the BBC (7-4-08), is critically ill in the hospital. The Sun (7-4-08) is even speculating that he may have been poisoned by the Russians or by Al Qaeda.

The Telegraph (7-4-08) [cache] is trying to damp down that theory as are The Times (7-4-08) and Daily Mail (7-4-08).

Maybe more information will become available when the medical tests come back.

British newspapers are sometimes prone to sensationalism, but still..

Last year, on March 1, 2007, an American expert on the KGB, Paul Joyal was shot in his Maryland driveway but survived. Mr. Joyal had recently taped a show for Dateline about the poisoning death in London of Alexander Litvinenko.

Speaking on Dateline on February 25, 2007, Mr. Joyal said of Litvinenko's murder:

"A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible."

Joyal told Dateline that he had befriended Litvinenko on trips to London and said of Litvinenko:

"He saw the moral fabric of the system that he grew up in just disintegrating before his eyes...He was driven by [moral] principles, no question on that."

Joyal told Dateline that Litvinenko had been ordered by his superiors to kill the Russian mogul Boris Berezovsky but refused and went public:

"Litvinenko went public in a way never seen before in Russia. He held a TV news conference with fellow officers to denounce the plot [to murder Berezovsky]. And he exposed in dramatic style what he saw as rampant corruption in the FSB.

He caused a major embarrassment to the FSB and its chief at the time— a man who the world would soon hear a lot about— Vladimir Putin.

At the news conference, while his comrades tried to mask their identities, Alexander did not...

[Litvinenko] was saying things that were just almost inconceivable to people [in Russia]. He was engaged in slander of the president as they would see it. He held nothing back. This man was absolutely hated."

Dan McGrory, 54, a journalist for the London Times, was also interviewed for this very same Dateline program and died unexpectedly on February 20, 2007, before the Dateline program aired. Mr. McGrory had been covering the Litvinenko story for the London Times.

CQ Politics (2-15-08) reports:

Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, established during the Cold War to help promote the views of Soviet defectors in the West, said it’s “absolutely” possible that the Russians may have sanctioned the attack on [security expert Paul] Joyal.

“It’s part of a whole chain of events,” Howard said. Since Putin has been in power, Russian diplomats in Washington have increasingly been exhibiting “thuggish” behavior in response to the foundation’s activity and criticism of Russian policies in Chechnya and rest of the North Caucasus.

Dr. Nidal Hasan Attended a Conference with Homeland Security Experts at George Washington University

"US authorities are investigating reports that Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood attacker, attended a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, that was also frequented by two of the Islamic terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks in 2001...The Virginia mosque’s imam at the time was Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Muslim radical who saw Islam and America as enemies. Hasan is thought to have attended at least one of Aulaqi’s lectures before the imam left for his native Yemen."---London Times (11-7-09)

UPDATE (11-11-09): Articles on Nidal Hasan by The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC (scroll down), CBS, ABC, Brian Ross at The Blotter (ABC), Department of Defense, and the FBI.

According to press accounts, Army psychiatrist Dr. Nidal Hasan, who allegedly massacred soldiers at Fort Hood on Thursday, November 5, may have written on a website that being an Islamist suicide bomber is akin to an American soldier falling on a grenade to save fellow soldiers. According to news reports, Dr. Hasan may have written on the Internet that people should strap on bombs and go to Times Square.

It seems to me that Dr. Hasan didn't have a bomb, so he used the guns he illegally brought onto the post instead. Still, Dr. Hasan was basically a suicide bomber. His relatives are claiming that he was harassed in the Army because he was Muslim; however, a person who knew Dr. Hasan said the psychiatrist drew negative attention to himself with his pro-terrorist ideology. Dr. Hasan was given every opportunity by the Army. He was given a free medical education in exchange for serving in the Army. Even if some soldiers were harassing him, he could have reported this. After all, Dr. Hasan was a physican and an American Army officer, not a schoolboy.

A T.V. report claimed that Dr. Hasan's imam told the media that the psychiatrist wanted the imam to find him a Muslim wife who would wear a hijab, a garment that totally covers up a woman's body and face. Dr. Hasan was 39 and unmarried.

The London Telegraph (11-7-09) reports:

Adnan Haider, a retired professor of statistics, recalled how at their first meeting last year, a casual introduction after Friday prayers, Hasan immediately asked the academic if he knew "a nice Muslim girl" he could marry.

"It was a strange thing to ask someone you have met two seconds before. It was clear to me he was under pressure, you could just see it in his face," said Prof Haider, 74, who used to work at Georgetown University in Washington. "You could see he was lonely and didn't have friends.

"He is working with psychiatric people and I ask why the people around him didn't spot that something was wrong? When I heard what had happened I actually wasn't that surprised."

Indeed, many of the characteristics attributed to Hasan by acquaintances – withdrawn, unassuming, brooding, socially awkward and never known to have had a girlfriend – have also applied to other mass murderers.

According to the London Times (11-7-09):

US authorities are investigating reports that Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood attacker, attended a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, that was also frequented by two of the Islamic terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Funeral services for Hasan’s mother, Hanan, were held at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church in 2001. In April of that year Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, later identified as being among the 9/11 hijackers, paid several visits to the mosque, the largest in the vicinity of Washington DC. The two Saudi Arabians were on the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon.

The Virginia mosque’s imam at the time was Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Muslim radical who saw Islam and America as enemies. Hasan is thought to have attended at least one of Aulaqi’s lectures before the imam left for his native Yemen.

In London, the Telegraph (11-7-09) is reporting:

Hasan's eyes "lit up" when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki's teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday's horrific shooting spree.

I vaguely recall reading that al-Aulaqi pretended to be a moderate Muslim after 9-11. I vaguely remember advice he gave Americans in National Geographic right after 9-11. I vaguely recall that he advised that we not attack Bin Laden in Afghanistan because this would only inflame Muslims against America. I can't remember if he was quoted in this article or if he actually wrote the article.

I remember reading that al-Aulaqi falsely claimed to be an American citizen, but the 9-11 Commission Report (p. 221) says that al-Aulaqi was born in New Mexico and is thus an American citizen. The 9-11 Commission Report mentions Aulaqi 30 times. In 2002, he ran off to Yemen.

Here is an old U.S. News and World Report (6-13-04) article about al-Aulaqi and his possible links to al-Qaeda. U.S. News (6-13-04) notes that Aulaqi blamed the 9-11 attacks on Israel in his National Geographic article:

Al-Awlaki and his followers blamed Israel for the 9/11 attacks. "There is an expectation that Muslims should apologize for something that they never did," al-Awlaki told National Geographic magazine in September 2001.

The probe of the 9/11 attacks soon led Washington FBI agents back to San Diego, where they found that al-Awlaki had twice been busted for soliciting prostitutes in 1996 and 1997 but had avoided jail time. Al-Awlaki has previously described these charges as "bogus." But FBI agents hoped al-Awlaki might cooperate with the 9/11 probe if they could nab him on similar charges in Virginia. FBI sources say agents observed the imam allegedly taking Washington-area prostitutes into Virginia and contemplated using a federal statute usually reserved for nabbing pimps who transport prostitutes across state lines. But in March 2002, al-Awlaki abruptly left the country for Yemen. "When he left town, it was as if the air went out of the balloon," says one FBI source. Al-Awlaki briefly returned to the United States in October 2002, but federal authorities did not have sufficient cause to detain him, even though his name popped up on a terrorist "lookout" database.

In the U.S. News article, his name is spelled al-Awlaki. Here is a Wikipedia entry about Anwar al- Awlaki/al-Aulaqi. I guess I will have to see if I still have that old issue of National Geographic so I can see what al-Aulaqi actually said.

Years ago an author named Paul Sperry also posted an article about al-Aulaqi. According to Sperry, al-Aulaqi lived at various addresses in Colorado, California, and Virginia.

The Washington Post (2-27-08) has a very informative 2008 article detailing al-Aulaqi's connections to al-Qaeda titled "Imam From Va. Mosque Now Thought to Have Aided Al-Qaeda."

The Washington Post (2-27-08) article states:

U.S. officials are saying for the first time that they believe that Aulaqi worked with al-Qaeda networks in the Persian Gulf after leaving Northern Virginia [in 2002]. In mid-2006, Aulaqi was detained in Yemen at the request of the United States. To the dismay of U.S. authorities, Aulaqi was released in December.

"There is good reason to believe Anwar Aulaqi has been involved in very serious terrorist activities since leaving the United States, including plotting attacks against America and our allies," said a U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity...

After 9/11, Aulaqi publicly condemned the attacks. But in comments published in English on Sept. 17, 2001, on IslamOnline, Aulaqi suggested that Israelis may have been responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default."

Weeks after leaving the United States in the spring of 2002, he posted an essay in Arabic titled "Why Muslims Love Death" on the Islam Today Web site, lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. Months later he praised them in English at a lecture in a London mosque that was recorded on videotape.

Perhaps we will hear more about the alleged relationship between al-Aulaqi, who praised suicide bombers, and the evil Dr. Hasan as the investigation of this mass murder goes forward.

If Dr. Hasan was working for the enemy and taking care of American soldiers with war-related psychiatric problems, he would even have been in an excellent position to collect intelligence from the young soldiers in his care. If he did this, I think that's pretty clearly treason. Certainly murdering American soldiers who were going to the Middle East might also be considered aid and comfort to the enemy.

Dr. Nidal Hasan also seems to have attended a conference at George Washington University in Washington D.C. sponsored by a think tank called the "Homeland Security Policy Institute."

The conference was titled:

Thinking Anew—Security Priorities for the Next Administration

PROCEEDINGS REPORT OF THE HSPI PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION TASK FORCE

April 2008-January 2009

On page 29 the report notes that one of the people who attended the conference was Nidal Hasan. His affiliated organization is the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine.

I wonder if Dr. Hasan was spying on these scholars, security experts, and medical people who give advice on Homeland Security. Dr. Hasan obviously was not sympathetic to the cause of Homeland Security. He seems like a traitor to me.

One of the people at the conference was Dr. Paul Joyal. He is a famous expert on the KGB who was shot in the groin as he got out of his car in the driveway of his home on March 1, 2007. You can search Joyal (scroll down) on this blog to read about him. Dr. Joyal was shot not long after he accused the KGB of poisoning the defector Alexander Litvinenko with polonium.

Speaking on Dateline on February 25, 2007, Mr. Joyal said of Litvinenko's murder:

"A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible."

I don't think that Dr. Hasan "snapped" because of anti-Muslim prejudice. Dr. Hasan was an officer who had received his medical education at the expense of the military. He was a person who was failing in his career and didn't want to be sent to the war in order to care for young, brave soldiers. He was a loser, a coward, a terrorist, and a traitor.

Britian's "Top Spy" Alex Allan Found "Covered with Blood"

"Outside Buckingham Palace, a hushed and cowering humanity is scanning the horizon and waiting for Ward Churchill and his trusted Indian friend Mean Russell to come galloping over the ridge and speak truth to power about 342 unexplained GOON murders!"---unidentified Whitehall sources

The Daily Mail (7-6-08) reports that Britain's unconventional top spy Alex Allan is still comatose and hospitalized under a police guard because he caught pneumonia.

Mr. Allen is shown in happier days (above) making a splash in the 1980s when he attempted to wind-surf to work to get around a train strike and ended up in the Thames.

According to the London tabloids, Dominique Salm, an attractive young artist who uses the artist studio of Allan's late wife, reportedly found him "covered in blood."

Some British newspapers have speculated that Alex Allan may have been poisoned by Al-Qaeda or the Russians. See my earlier post here. Others cite unidentified government sources who say that Mr. Allan has pneumonia or that he may have been depressed by the November loss of his wife and taken an overdose.

I don't know what happened to the handsome Mr. Allen, of course, but I would not put anything past the Russians. Russian "diplomats" are acting like GOONs in Washington, and the Kremlin's more irritating critics seem to get shot, fall ill with mysterious illnesses, and die of unexplained allergic reactions or radiation sickness with some regularity these days.

Last year, the former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko died horribly after he was poisoned with polonium in London; and Paul Joyal, a former chief of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was shot by two GOONs in his Maryland drivway. The shooting has never been solved.

Speaking on Dateline on February 25, 2007, Mr. Joyal said of Litvinenko's murder:

"A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible."

Russia expert Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, claimed that a Russan GOON recently showed up at his office and “refused to leave” until security was alerted:

“It’s part of a whole chain of events,” Howard said. Since Putin has been in power, Russian diplomats in Washington have increasingly been exhibiting “thuggish” behavior in response to the foundation’s activity and criticism of Russian policies in Chechnya and rest of the North Caucasus.

Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down on October 7, 2006, Putin's 54th birthday; and we have just "celebrated" the five-year anniversary of Yury Shchekochikhin's unexplained death-by-allergy, reportedly shortly before he was planning to travel to the U.S. to testify in the Bank of New York money-laundering case.

And still there is no sign of Ward Churchill galloping over the ridge and speaking truth to power about 342 unexplained GOON murders! No doubt the Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (DBAB) is garaged due to high gas prices.

Regarding the comatose Alex Allan, the Daily Mail claims:

Whitehall sources insisted yesterday there was no evidence of foul play - and blamed his collapse on pneumonia. But this does not chime with Miss Salm's account of what she found.

Experts say pneumonia sufferers may cough up some blood but rarely large amounts. Miss Salm's account of the events is likely to fuel speculation over whether Mr Allan was a target for foreign agents.

Meanwhile her mother, Sally Ann Salm, added to the intrigue by declaring: 'Some very serious people have asked Dominique not to comment on any of this until it has been fully investigated and she is doing just that. So am I.'

...Last night a Whitehall source said: 'There is nothing to suggest this is anything other than a tragic illness.'

A police source said that officers had examined the circumstances in which Mr Allan was found and 'quickly established there were no indications of anything suspicious'.

He added: 'Because he is a person of significance, investigators made sure nothing untoward had occurred. But it was quickly established there was a medical reason for how he was found. He is being treated as a medical patient not the victim of any kind of poisoning or other attempt on his life.'

Dr Keith Prowse, chairman of the British Lung Foundation, said it was not unusual for someone of Mr Allan's age and lifestyle to succumb to pneumonia. But pneumonia alone would not have produced much blood.

The Polonium Poisoning and the Russian Apartment Bombings: The Testimony of Mikail Trepashkin, ex-FSB Lawyer

Picture credit and story

Trepashkin is in the same situation as the dissidents of the Soviet times. - Elena Bonner, human rights activist

In progress...

This is a picture of an amazing 1998 press conference in Russia. The men in the picture are Russian FSB (formerly KGB) officers, and they are making accusations against Putin and the leaders of the FSB. The man on the right, Aleksandr Litvinenko, is claiming that he was ordered to kill the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko, of course, is now known to the whole world as the ex-FSB officer who defected to Great Britain and who was poisoned in London by polonium-laced tea. Before he was murdered, Litvinenko reportedly even claimed that the FSB trained Osama Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in Dagestan in the years before the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, Litvinenko reportedly told a Polish paper called Rzeczpospolita that Zawahiri was trained in Dagestan.

Moscow News carries this story about Zawahiri being trained in Dagestan by the FSB but does not mention Litvinenko as the source of the story. [I will try to pin this claim down a little more.]

Here is a video of A. Litvinenko accusing Putin of ordering the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who worked for Novaya Gazeta.

On the far left in this picture is an FSB lawyer named Mikhail Trepashkin [search for Trepashkin stories here]. Trepashkin investigated the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia that Putin blamed on Chechen separatists. These bombings were used as a pretext to invade Chechnya and helped Putin win the Presidential election in March 2000. Trepashkin claims that his investigation of the bombings led right back to the FSB.

The 9-22-99 bombing of a Ryazan apartment was foiled when one resident noticed people unloading heavy bags into the basement. He called the police and a telephone tap revealed evidence that tracked back to the Moscow FSB. The FSB then countered that they were only doing a training exercise.

After M. Trepashkin investigated these bombings and alleged that the FSB was complicit in these mass murders, M. Trepashkin says a gun was planted in his car. He was arrested for divulging state secrets and put in prison.

His lawyer says he has information about the Litvinenko murder, too.

Below is a picture [credit] of Trepashkin in prison. On 3-9-07, RIA Novosti reported that the authorities have decided to give Trepashkin a harsher regime because he is supposedly an uncooperative prisoner:

A Russian court has ruled to transfer former security service officer Mikhail Trepashkin, serving a term for divulging state secrets, to a prison colony with a stricter regime...The colony administration has called for a toughening of his prison regime due to alleged breaches of internal regulations by Trepashkin.

It is hard to know the truth for sure about Trepashkin's case, but I think that Trepashkin was probably imprisoned for doing his job of investigating crimes honestly. I think that he is being punished for revealing the crimes of the FSB against its own citizens. In 2002, Trepashkin was even Litvinenko's lawyer [see: AFTER YEARS OF DISPUTES WITH AUTHORITIES].

Trepashkin reportedly claims that the FSB once proposed that he kill Litvinenko.

A blogger at A Step at a Time reports:

On March 9, Mikhail Trepashkin’s appeal will be heard by a court in Nizhny Tagil (Sverdlovsk Oblast). Trepashkin, a former FSB official who is serving a 4-year jail sentence for allegedly disclosing state secrets, and who is a witness of major importance in the Litvinenko poisoning case, has given an interview to The New Times in which he describes how the FSB proposed that he take part in the liquidation of Litvinenko. Newsru.com has published some excerpts from the interview. Asked why the special services chose such a complicated plan for eliminating Litvinenko, Trepashkin replies [my tr.]:

I think it was carelessness in the work of the agents who carried out the murder, and also the organizer’s intention to kill the agents along with Litvinenko, and also Litvinenko’s family, Berezovsky and Zakayev (while they were at it). It’s possible that the agents didn’t know about the possible consequences for themselves and the environment. I think they calculated that the cause of death would never be precisely established as polonium.

You can draw your own conclusions. But I will add the following. Back in 2001, when I telephoned Litvinenko in London for the first time on Shebalin’s request (on behalf of the FSB, as he explained), I asked him if he was going to write a new book, where he was working and with whom, and he replied that he had a job as a postman in the mornings. Then, some time later, Shebalin expressed the view that it would be a good thing to send him (Litvinenko) a letter containing powder. There was a lot being written about such letters in the States at the time.

Some Russian authorities have claimed that the murders of Putin's critics are being done by Putin's enemies to discredit Putin. This official explanation is belied by the fact that the Russian government has not caught any of the murderers. This official explanation is also is belied by the case of M. Trepashkin. It was not Putin's enemies who put M. Trepashkin in prison; it was Putin's regime that did that.

A site called The Trepashkin Case also has information about this ex-FSB lawyer's history. This site also has an informative link to information about a film that investigates the mysterious Moscow apartment bombings in 1999. This 2004 film is called Disbelief and was directed by Andrei Nekrasov. [Watch the film right now!] There were also apartment bombings in other Russian cities as well.

The article about Disbelief is prefaced by this statement:

A fatal bomb blast in a Moscow apartment building ignites a fury of questions about terrorism, shadow politics, and post-Soviet intrigue in Disbelief; a film as much about the high art of political deception as it is about violence and human tragedy. The bombing on September 9, 1999, of a nine-story working-class apartment complex in Moscow was quickly blamed on Chechen terrorists. But was it their crime? Or did the Russian secret service deflect its own responsibility for the bombing on the Chechens to heighten national fear and hysteria and justify Russia's subsequent military attack on the breakaway republic?"

Deploying all the suspense and drama of a sophisticated murder mystery, Nekrasov has created one of the most compelling and captivating films of the year” - 2004 Sundance Film Festival Catalogue.

This 3-5-07 article in the Hamilton Spectator (by David Holley of the Los Angeles Times) tells about all the people who have died while trying to get to the bottom of these apartment bombings.

Holley writes:

Despite all the official denials, bus driver Alexei Kartofelnikov still thinks someone tried to blow up his home in September 1999.

A series of bomb blasts that authorities blamed on Chechen terrorists already had destroyed four apartment buildings in Russia that month, killing 310 people. Kartofelnikov's vigilance led police to discover an apparent bomb made with sacks of white powder in the basement of his apartment block in Ryazan, about 150 kilometres southeast of Moscow.

Two days later, the interior minister said authorities had prevented another attack. But the director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB, contradicted him, saying it was an exercise by his agency. The powder was just sugar, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said.

The Ryazan case might have remained a historical footnote had the Kremlin not launched its second war in Chechnya that month, a tough response that boosted the popularity of the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Riding that popularity, Putin was elected president six months later.

A series of Kremlin critics who demanded an independent investigation of the bombings have since died in murky circumstances. The latest were former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by radioactive polonium-210, and journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Critics say the evidence suggests the FSB tried to plant a real bomb at Kartofelnikov's building. If that's true, they say, it indicates the spy agency also might have been behind the other bombings, in a bid to boost the popularity of Putin, a former KGB spy.

Litvinenko made that argument in a 2002 book, Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within, which he wrote with historian Yuri Felshtinsky...[Amazon link to English version]

Doubts surfaced almost immediately about the accusation against the Chechens and the FSB's claim that the Ryazan incident was merely a test.

The debris from the Moscow bombings was cleared so quickly that critics wondered why authorities were willing to forgo the chance to search for more evidence. [full text]

I am going to do more reading about these dissidents' allegations that the FSB was behind the bombing of Russian people's apartments. When they first surfaced, I thought that these accusations against Putin's FSB by might be exaggerated and perhaps were fabricated by his enemies and aimed at discrediting him; but Putin's enemies did not put Mikail Trepashkin into prison. Putin did that. Andrei Sakarov's wife, Yelena Bonner, claims that the official investigation of the bombings was a sham and that the prosecutions were "show trials." A number of people who have tried to investigate these bombings independently have died violently after they participated in Andrei Kovalyev's independent commission to investigate the bombings. Trepashkin was the legal counsel for the Kovalev Commission, which also seems to be called the Terror '99 Commission.

According to Y. Bonner:

The landlord in the bombed building told Mr. Trepashkin that the FSB had forced him to recognize a Chechen suspect - someone he had never seen - as the man who rented the basement to plant the bomb. From the landlord's description Mr. Trepashkin identified the real terrorist - a known FSB agent.

Maybe some men in the Russian FSB actually did speak truth to power, instead of the usual lies. It is hard to know the truth.

I am going to read two books that are due out soon: Litvinenko's book, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (Encounter Books, April 2007) and a book by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko called Death of a Dissident: Alexander Litvinenko and the Death of Russian Democracy (The Free Press, May 2007). David Satter, the former Moscow correspondant for the Wall Street Journal, has also written an account of the apartment bombings in his book Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale University Press, 2004).

Russian FSB assassins may even have been involved in the 3-1-07 shooting of Paul Joyal, an American expert on the KGB, and in the sudden death on 2-20-07 of a British journalist for the London Times, Dan McGrory. Both of these men were interviewed by Dateline for a 2-25-07 program about the Polonium murder of A. Litvinenko.

Presidential Candidate Senator John McCain on the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings

Picture credit and information about the 1999 Russian apartment bombings. Read about the film Disbelief and watch the film. Read Chapter Two of David Satter's book Darkness at Dawn (pp. 24-33) here.

"There remain credible allegations that Russia's FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks."---Senator John McCain (11-4-03)

In progress...

I have written a number of articles about the Russian apartment bombings of 1999 [Search "Litvinenko", "Trepashkin", and "apartment" on this site].

A series of bombings in Moscow and elsewhere occurred beginning on August 31, 1999, and ending on September 22, 1999, when local police found and defused a bomb in the basement of a Ryazan apartment block before it could explode. The bombings killed nearly 300 people and injured more than 550. The survivor's possessions were destroyed and they were left homeless. Many articles about these bombings can be found at a site called TERROR-99.

The bombings precipitated the Second Chechen War, although Chechen field commanders did not take responsibility for the bombings and Chechnya's President Aslan Maskhadov said that his government was not involved.

Wikipedia notes:

On the evening of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment building in the town of Ryazan noticed two suspicious men who carried sacks into the basement from a car with a Moscow license plate.[2] When police arrived, the car with people was gone.

The cops found three hundred-pound sacks of white powder in the basement. A detonator and a timing device were attached and turned on. The timer was set for 5:30 in the morning [1]. Yuri Tkachenko, the head of the local bomb squad, disconnected a detonator and a bomb timing device and tested three sacks of white substance with a gas analyzer MO-2. The substance was identified as hexogen (RDX), military explosive used in all previous bombings.[2]

Police and rescue vehicles converged from different parts of the city, and 30,000 residents have been evacuated from the area. 1,200 local police officers with automatic weapons set up roadblocks on highways around the city and started patrolling railroad stations and airports to hunt the terrorists down. In the morning, "Ryazan resembled a city under siege".[2] Composite sketches of two man and a women terrorist suspects were sent to two thousand policeman and shown on TV.

At 8 a.m. September 23 Russian television networks reported the attempt to blow up a building in Ryazan using hexogen. The minister of internal affairs Vladimir Rushailo announced that police prevented a terrorist act. Later in the evening Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the Ryzanians and called for the air bombing of Grozny.[6].

In the evening of September 23, the perpetrators were caught. A telephone service employee tapped into a long distance phone conversations managed to detect a talk in which an out-of-town person suggested to "split up" and "make your own way out". That person's number was found to belong to an FSB office in Moscow. When arrested, the detainees produced FSB identification cards. They soon have been released on orders from Moscow. The names and further fate of three FSB agents who conducted this operation remained unknown as of 2007.

Next morning FSB director Nikolai Patrushev declared that the incident was a training exercise.[7]

On March 23 2000, a few days before the Putin's election, Igor Malashkevich, the president of NTV Russia was going to broadcast "The Sugar of Ryazan" movie about the events. He was warned that NTV "should consider themselves finished" if they will go ahead with the broadcast. The warning allegedly came from Vladimir Putin and was brought by Valentin Yumashev, son-in-law of Boris Yeltsin [8]

Wikipedia's entry on the bombings notes:

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident. An public commission to investigate the bombings chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members linked with Berezovski as well, have since died in apparent assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003 respectively.The Commission's lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin has been arrested in October 2003 to become one of the better-known political prisoners in Russia.

In his book Darkness at Dawn, David Satter cited evidence against the FSB in the 1999 bombings and the attempted bombing in Ryazan. Most of his story is in Chapter 2, "Ryazan." pages 24-33. These pages are available on-line here.

On 5-17-07, Mr. Satter testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs:

With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution [for corruption]...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 [Full text of Satter's 5-17-07 Congressional testimony. See also David Satter's 4-19-02 on-line paper for The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: "The Shadow of Ryazan: Who Was Behind the Strange Russian Apartment Bombings in September 1999?"]

A Russian lawyer who had worked for the FSB (the main domestic security service of the Russian government and the main successor-agency of the Soviet-era KGB), Mikhail Trepashkin, investigated these bombings for Duma deputy Sergei Kovalyev's independent public commission and concluded the bombings were the work of his own agency, the FSB. The FSB is supposed to be in charge of tracking terrorists, but really they may be the terrorists.

The ex-FSB lawyer Trepashkin has been held in a Russian prison for revealing state secrets (See Trepashkin's prison letters here); and others who also shared his suspicions, such as the ex-FSB officer Alexander/Alexandr Litvinenko, have been murdered.

This past November, the Eurasian Security Services Daily Review (11-29-07), citing the Russian news agency Interfax, reported that Trepashkin was expected to be released from prison on 11-30-07. According to the Eurasian Security Services Daily Review (11-29-07):

The Moscow District Military Court said [Trepashkin] would spend four years in a convict settlement. Trepashkin applied for the release on parole after he had served a third of his time, Interfax notes [Full text].

A website about a film called Nedoverie or Disbelief that chronicles the investigation of these bombings can be viewed here. A short synopsis of the film explains:

When Tatyana Morozova, a pre-school teacher in Milwaukee, learned that her mother had been killed and her old apartment block destroyed by an explosion back in Moscow, she believed the official version: that the attack was the work of Chechen terrorists. Then an American scholar published a book arguing that the bombing was engineered by the FSB, the Russian secret service, to help Vladimir Putin win the elections.

Torn by grief and disbelief, Tatyana and her sister Alyona embark on a journey in space and time to seek the truth - followed by the camera of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov. Filmed in Milwaukee, Moscow, Denver, Washington, London and the Ural Mountains, Disbelief chronicles the agony of a devastated family swept up in the high-stake politics of the age of global terrorism.

The actual film Disbelief can be viewed here.

Some people claim that blaming the FSB for these bombings is a conspiracy theory akin to blaming the Bush administration for the 9-11 attacks. Anything is possible, and both sides of the controversy are available in the Wikipedia entry about these bombings.

Still, the KGB has a long history of using active measures and of hiring terrorists to achieve its goals, so it is disturbing that the KGB's main successor agency, the FSB, is charged with countering terrorism.

Soviet active measures have historically included terrorism directed against totally innocent people that was then often blamed on the regime's enemies---who were not necessarily the same as the Russian people's enemies.

The Wikipedia entry on active measures notes:

Active measures range "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degree of violence". They can be used abroad or domestically. They include disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration of churches, and persecution of political dissidents [1].

"Active measures" include establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g. the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. [1]. The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc and other communist states also contributed in the past to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations. [1]

Retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin described "active measures" as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence": "Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs." [2]

In my opinion, the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee and the 1978 mass-killings at Jonestown may have been instances of KGB-sponsored terrorist active measures that were blamed on the FBI and CIA. Indeed, discrediting these agencies may have been the main objective of these tragic events: The lawyer for both the AIM terrorists who occupied Wounded Knee and for the Jonestown commune was Mark Lane, who wrote a book about the Jonestown murders that blamed the CIA.

KGB documention brought out by the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin has subsequently revealed that the lawyer for both the Wounded Knee occupiers on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation and for the ill-fated people at Jonestown was Mark Lane, who reportedly had a relationship with the KGB.

When over 900 of his clients were poisoned with cyanide, attorney Mark Lane reportedly abandoned them and saved himself by fleeing into the jungle. Mark Lane was one of only 9 people who escaped into the jungle. And then Mark Lane wrote a book that blamed the Jonestown mass-murders on the CIA.

The discredited "Indian expert," ex-professor Ward Churchill---a vicious, mendacious radical who celebrated the war crimes of 9-11 and characterized the innocent victims as "little Eichmanns"---once claimed in a KGB-sponsored publication that the FBI backed death squads who killed 342 Pine Ridge Indians.

A site called The Trepashkin Case quotes the 2003 remarks of Republican Pesidential candidate John McCain on the Russian apartment bombings here:

From the Statement of U.S. Senator John McCain delivered on the Senate floor on November 4, 2003

...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...

...Earlier this year, State Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov, who had been investigating potential connections between the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings and the start of the Second Chechen War, was killed outside his Moscow apartment. State Duma deputy Yuri Schekochikhin, who had been looking into the role of the FSB in the Moscow bombings as well as a scandal surrounding the involvement of FSB officers in illegal trade, was also killed in mysterious circumstances. Both crimes remain unsolved. [Links added by Snapple; Read full text here, here, and here].

The last book that Shchekochikhin published was titled Slaves of the KGB: 20th Century. The Religion of Betrayal. The book recounts the experiences of people who were unwillingly recruited into the KGB. Shchekochikhin died after a brief mysterious illness. Many people who have tried to investigate the Putin regime have been silenced by poisons, shootings, or bombs: from the pro-democracy Kremlin critic Galina Starovoitova to the American expert on the KGB Paul Joyal, who survived a shooting in the driveway of his Maryland home.

It is very bitter experience to reread Shchekochikhin's premature optimism about the young generation that was coming into adulthood during the 1980s. In the foreward Nancy Traver's book Kife: The Lives and Dreams of Soviet Youth (1989), Shchekochikhin wrote about his hopes for these young people who grew up without the fear of Stalin in their hearts:

A new generation, devoid of social fear, had stepped into life. The nightmare of Stalin's terror was not in their genes because they were the first generation in our country whose innocent fathers had not been arrested....

Already another new young generation is appearing in our life: it's composed of the ones who are growing up during perestroika. These are the children of glasnost. They don't have to look for the words of truth in samizdat (illegally published literature). Glasnost is not an unexpected gift for them, as it is for us, the older generation. Glasnost is an integral part of their lives and they will never let anybody destroy it (KIFE x-xi).

A Radio Free Liberty article published on 7-16-03 by Virginie Coulloudon a few days after Shchekochikhin's mysterious death explains why Shchekochikhin was a threat to some people:

Shchekochikhin became famous in the summer of 1988, when he published in "Literaturnaya Gazeta" an interview with the then deputy head of the Interior Ministry's Organized Crime Department, Aleksandr Gurov.

Shchekochikhin and Gurov were among the first in the Soviet Union to denounce publicly the system of organized corruption that linked Soviet industry and the system of domestic trade to the police and the state. In his articles, Shchekochikhin ultimately revealed the real -- unofficial -- Soviet Union and Russia: the informal rules of clan logic and the secret prices for all official functions, the extent of endemic corruption at both the local and federal levels, and the key issue of burgeoning juvenile crime.

After a remarkable career in investigative journalism, Shchekochikhin took advantage of a second window of opportunity opened by the state and entered politics. This turning point dates back to 1989, when he was elected as a USSR People's Deputy from Ukraine and became a member of the Interregional Group. He was elected deputy in the Russian State Duma in 1995, where he joined the Yabloko parliamentary group. Since then, Shchekochikhin was a Duma deputy and one of the most visible members of Grigorii Yavlinskii's party.

After his re-election in December 1999, he was appointed deputy chairman of the Duma's Security Committee. He primarily worked on issues related to organized crime and corruption, and he advised the United Nations on all issues related to international organized-crime groups linked to the Russian mafia.

Shchekochikhin had already received a death threat last February. The threat came immediately after he published a detailed article on the so-called Tri Kita affair. Tri Kita is the name of a major furniture store in Moscow, some of whose managers are suspected of weapons smuggling, laundering large sums of money in Europe, and corrupting officials in the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General's Office. Only four days after the article appeared, Yabloko issued a press release making this threat public and denouncing the atmosphere of intimidation that accompanies the work of investigative journalists. "If the life of a journalist and his family is the price to pay for telling the truth, then there is no freedom of speech in the country," Yabloko's press release declared.

Shchekochikhin had been doggedly investigating the Tri Kita affair over the past three years. He wrote detailed articles in "Novaya Gazeta" and used his position at the State Duma to question high-ranking officials and request official documents and materials related to the case. As of today, only one thing is certain: Shchekochikhin was embarrassing too many people.