Budennovsk and its consequences. The ATTs

Budennovsk and its consequences. The ATTs

The debacle cost both Stepashin and Yerin their jobs. Stepashin however had been making substantial headway in rebuilding the FSK’s capacity: on April 3, 1995, Yeltsin, most likely at Stepashin’s urging, had signed a law “On the Organs of the Federal Security Service in the RF.” The law considerably boosted the agency’s powers and, to mark the new tack, changed its name from FSK to FSB. The new law:

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  described the FSB role in the regions,
  
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  clarified the FSB role in the Armed Forces and other military bodies,
  
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  gave the FSB director ministerial status and the rank of army general,
  
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  allowed the FSB, in co-operation with the SVR, to conduct intelligence work and to protect Russian citizens and enterprises abroad,
  
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  obliged the FSB to inform the president and the prime minister about national threats, gave the FSB powers of detention, and the right to enter any premises or property “if there is sufficient evidence to suppose that a crime is being been perpetrated there.” The FSB was not required to obtain a warrant but had to inform the prosecutor within 24 hours.
  
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  allowed the FSB to set up companies when necessary,
  
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  permitted the FSB to set up special units, carrying firearms, and to train security personnel in private companies,
  
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  described some aspects of remuneration for the FSB personnel,
  
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  established the control structures over the FSB.⁵³
  

Yerin was replaced as Interior Minister by Col.-Gen. Anatoly Kulikov, a veteran VV officer who commanded the Joint Federal Forces in Chechnya. Yeltsin took three weeks after Stepashin’s resignation to name his successor: at Korzhakov’s urging, he finally picked Mikhail Barsukov, the Director of GUO. Barsukov immediately purged several senior officers and close Stepashin associates, including Lt.-Gen. Igor Mezhakov, the senior FSB official in Chechnya. In November Barsukov was promoted to General of the Army. As Director of the FSB, he remained unusually secretive, never giving a single press conference; numerous observers felt that he was hiding his incompetence, and that if the FSB continued to develop under his leadership, it was more in spite of him than thanks to his initiatives.

The Budennovsk events, indeed, had fully convinced Yeltsin, already swayed by Stepashin, that the new FSB needed not only “eyes and ears” but also “claws and teeth.” Immediately after Barsukov’s nomination, the UBT was transformed into a much-expanded Antiterrorist Center (ATTs), to which Alfa and Vympel/Vega were transferred a few weeks later from MVD. The man chosen to head the ATTs was Col.-Gen. Viktor Zorin, a veteran KGB counterintelligence officer who had headed the KGB’s 7. Directorate (which included Alfa) in 1991, the MB’s Operational-Research Directorate in 1992, and the FSK’s Department of Counterintelligence Operations since 1994. Zorin, seconded by his Deputy Head Lt.-Gen. Ivan Mironov, built the ATTs into a powerful organization involved in a broad variety of activities. The ATTs included four Directorates: Operations (Terror), headed by General Mironov; Detachment A (formerly Alfa), tasked with protecting transportation and buildings; Detachment B (formerly Vympel/Vega), tasked with protecting strategic sites (the two were soon joined in a Tsentr Spetsnaz under Col.-Gen. Vladimir Pronichev); and Directorate “K,” tasked with ideological counterintelligence.

Litvinenko, in his book, cites a letter published on internet on March 11, 2000, by a man calling himself FSB Major Vladimir Kondratiev, who claimed to have served in a top-secret Department K-20, set up (within the ATTs) immediately after the Khassav-Yurt Accords of August 1996, with the task “of planning and carrying out operations to discredit the Chechen Republic, so that it would not receive international recognition.”⁵⁵ Whether or not this department actually existed, the ATTs certainly in the years after the first war carried out such operations, and was most likely deeply involved in many of the high-profile kidnappings that did so much to damage Chechnya’s reputations: foreign diplomats attempting to solve these kidnappings often dealt directly with Viktor Zorin, and it is alleged that he and his subordinates kept parts of the substantial ransoms paid in many cases, in effect playing both ends of the field. It is impossible to say whether these provocations were part of a more general FSB policy or whether the ATTs and its successor departments were running their own show; certainly it did not reflect the official policy of the government, nor of those officials like Ivan Rybkin, the Secretary of the Security Council, tasked with the Chechen dossier between 1996 and 1999. The ATTs’s attitude towards Chechnya, though, becomes clearer if we consider its institutional origins. Directorate “K” is considered by most specialist to be the main inheritor – even if not the direct successor – of the KGB’s 5. Main Directorate, which, after being renamed the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitution in 1989, was disbanded in 1991. Its personnel was dispersed, but, as stated, many were reemployed in the MB’s anti-terrorist department, as well as later in the FSK/FSB’s UKB (Directorate for Constitutional Security). An exact filiation cannot be drawn, and it seems that Litvinenko is incorrect when he states that the UKB was directly integrated into the ATTs as Directorate “K;”⁵⁶ in the 1998 organizational scheme, Constitutional Security (or Protection) and the ATTs appear as two separate departments (they were officially merged as the 2. Department for the Protection of the Constitutional Order & the Struggle against Terrorism on August 28, 1999; this has now become one of the most important branches of the FSB). Whatever the exact organizational history, a study of the biographies of many of the senior officers leading the antiterror/constitutional protection/Chechnya departmental complex within the FSB shows that many of them initially worked in the KGB’s 5. Main Directorate; and it seems apparent from their style of work and methods that they have preserved both the specific mentality and the practices of their old directorate, known mostly, through its work in persecuting dissidents and religious figures, as a haven for the KGB’s most narrow-minded and incompetent elements.