After the announcement of Operation Intercept, when the routes out of town were already closed off, the operational divisions of the Ryazan UVD and UFSB attempted to determine the precise location of the terrorists they were seeking. They had a few lucky breaks. Nadezhda Yukhanova, an employee of the Electrosvyaz Company (the telephone service), recorded a suspicious call to Moscow. Leave one at a time, there are patrols everywhere, replied the voice at the other end of the line. Yukhanova immediately reported the call to the Ryazan UFSB, and it was a simple technical matter for the suspicious telephone to be monitored immediately. The operatives had no doubt that they had located the terrorists. However, difficulties arose, because when the bugging technology identified the Moscow telephone number the terrorists were ringing, it turned out to be the number of one of the offices of the FSB in Moscow.
After leaving Novosyolov Street shortly after 9 p.m. on September 22, the terrorists had not risked driving straight to Moscow, because a solitary car is always noticeable on a
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deserted highway at night, and the chances of being stopped at a traffic police post were too high. Any car stopped at night would be noted in the duty officer s journal, even if the people sitting in it were members of the FSB or other secret services, and the next day when the news of the explosion was announced, the policeman would be bound to recall stopping a car with three people. If there also happened to be reports by witnesses in Ryazan, they would pick up the car and its passengers immediately. The terrorists had to wait until the morning, since they couldn t leave the target area until after the explosion had taken place, and their military mission had been accomplished. In the morning, there would be a lot of cars on the highway. For the first few hours after the attack, there would be panic. If witnesses had spotted two men and a woman in a car, the police would be looking for three terrorists, two men and one woman. One person alone in a car could always give any police cordon the slip.
That this was the way things really were is clear from the report of operation Intercept in the newspaper Trud: By now the situation in Ryazan had reached red hot. Reinforced patrols of police and cadets from the local military colleges walked the streets. All road routes out of and into the city were blocked by the patrols and sentries armed to the teeth and road traffic police. Miles-long traffic jams had built up with cars and trucks moving to and from Moscow. They searched all the cars thoroughly, looking for three terrorists, two men and a woman, whose descriptions were posted on almost every street lamp post.
Following instructions received, one of the terrorists set out towards Moscow in the car on September 23, abandoned the car in the area of Kolomna, and made his way to Moscow unhindered. One of the terrorists had now escaped the clutches of the Ryazan police and taken the car with him as well. Late in the day of September 23, less than twenty-four hours later, an empty car was found by the police on the Moscow-Ryazan highway close to Kolomna, about halfway to Moscow. It was the same car with the papered-over license plates, which was used to transport the explosive, Bludov announced. The car turned out to be registered as missing with the police. In other words, the terrorists had carried out their operation in a stolen car (a classical feature of terrorist attacks).
The car had not been dumped near Kolomna by chance. If it had been stolen in Moscow or the Moscow Region, the police would have returned it to the owner at his home address, and it would probably never have entered anyone s head to think it might be the car used by unknown terrorists to transport hexogene for blowing up a building in a different region of the country, in Ryazan. Accordingly, they wouldn t have bothered to analyze the contents of the car for microparticles of hexogene and other explosive substances. The accomplice could go back for the two terrorists left behind in Ryazan the next day in a standard FSB operational vehicle and take them to Moscow without any risk of being caught. On the other hand, if it were discovered that the car found near Kolomna was the one used for the terrorist attack, the fact that it was abandoned halfway to Moscow would tell the Ryazan police that the terrorists had gotten away. The cordon in place around Ryazan would then be relaxed, which would make it easier for the remaining two terrorists to leave.
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So now there were two terrorists left in Ryazan. From information provided by the Ryazan UFSB, we know that the terrorists stayed overnight somewhere in Ryazan and didn t spend the night of September 22 hanging about in the hallways of buildings in a strange and unfamiliar town. The conclusion must be drawn that the terrorists had arranged places to stay in advance, even if they themselves were not from Ryazan. In that case, it is clear that they had time to choose their target, which was far from random, and to prepare for their terrorist attack. When they were caught by surprise by operation Intercept starting earlier than expected, the terrorists decided to wait it out in the town.
The arguments in support of this interpretation are as follows.
It is very important to note that the leaders of the Ryazan Region were not aware of the explosion planned for Ryazan (or the exercises, as the events are referred to diplomatically by all the officials involved in them and by employees of the agencies of coercion). The governor of the region, V.N. Liubimov, announced this in an interview broadcast live on September 24, when he said: Not even I knew about this exercise.
Mamatov, the mayor of Ryazan, was frankly annoyed: They ve used us as guinea pigs.
Tested Ryazan for lice. I m not against exercises. I served in the army myself, and I took part in them, but I never saw anything like this.
The FSB department for the Ryazan Region was also not informed about the exercises.
Bludov stated that the FSB was not informed in advance that exercises were being conducted in the city. The head of the Ryazan UFSB, Major-General A.V. Sergeiev at first stated in an interview with the local television company Oka that he knew nothing about any exercises being held. It was only later, in response to a question from journalists about whether he had in his possession any official document confirming that exercises were held in Ryazan, that he answered through his press secretary that he accepted as proof of the exercises the television interview given by FSB director Patrushev. One of the women living in house 14/16, Marina Severina, recalled how, afterwards, the local FSB went round the apartments apologizing: Several people from the FSB came to see us, led by a colonel. They apologized. They said that they hadn t known anything, either. This is one case in which we can believe the members of the FSB and accept their sincerity.
The Ryazan UFSB realized that the people of Ryazan had been set up and that the Public Prosecutor s Office of Russia and the public might accuse the Ryazan UFSB of planning the explosion. Shaken by the treachery of their Moscow colleagues, the Ryazan UFSB decided to provide themselves with an alibi and announced to the world that the Ryazan operation had been planned in Moscow. There could be no other explanation for the statement from the Ryazan Region UFSB, which appeared shortly after Patrushev s interview about exercises in Ryazan. We give the text of the statement in full.
It has become known that the planting on 22.09.99 of a dummy explosive device was part of an ongoing interregional exercise. This announcement came as a surprise to us and appeared at a moment when the department of the FSB had identified the places of residence in Ryazan of those involved in planting the explosive device and was preparing
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to detain them. This had been made possible due to the vigilance and assistance of many of the residents of the city of Ryazan, collaboration with the agencies of the Ministry of the Interior and the professionalism of our own staff. We thank everyone who assisted us in this work. We will continue in future to do everything possible to ensure the safety of the people of Ryazan.
This unique document provides us with answers to the most important of our questions.
Firstly, the Ryazan UFSB had nothing to do with the operation to blow up the building in Ryazan. Secondly, at least two terrorists were discovered in Ryazan. Thirdly, the terrorists lived in Ryazan, if only temporarily, and evidently a network of at least two secret safe apartments were uncovered. Fourthly, just at the moment when arrangements were in hand to arrest the terrorists, the order came from Moscow not to arrest them, because the terrorist attack in Ryazan was only an FSB exercise.
In order to remove any doubts that the UFSB statement was both deliberate and accurate, the leadership of the Ryazan UFSB repeated it almost word-for-word in an interview. On May 21, 2000, just five days before the presidential election, when the failed explosion in Ryazan had been put back on the public agenda for political reasons by the parties competing for power, the head of the investigative section of the UFSB for the Ryazan Region, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Maximov, stated as follows: We can only feel sympathy for these people and offer our apologies. We also find the situation difficult. We took all the events of that night seriously, regarding the situation as genuinely dangerous. The announcement about exercises held by the FSB of the Russian Federation came as a complete surprise to us and appeared at a moment when the department of the FSB had identified the places of residence in Ryazan of those involved in planting the dummy (as it subsequently emerged) device and was preparing to detain them. This had been made possible due to the vigilance and assistance of the inhabitants of Ryazan, collaboration with the agencies of the ministry of the interior, and the professionalism of our own staff.
It was thus, twice confirmed in documentary form that the terrorists who had mined the building in Ryazan were employees of the FSB, that at the time of the operation they were living in Ryazan, and that the places where they lived had been identified by employees of the UFSB for the Ryazan Region. This being so, we can catch Patrushev out in an obvious lie. On September 25, in an interview with one of the television companies, he stated that those people who should in principle have been found immediately were among the residents who left the building, in which an explosive device was supposedly planted. They took part in the process of producing their own sketches, and held conversations with employees of the agencies of law enforcement.
The real facts were quite different. The terrorists scattered to different safe apartments.
No sooner had the leadership of the Ryazan UFSB reported in the line of duty by phone to Patrushev in Moscow, that the arrest of the terrorists was imminent than Patrushev gave the order not to arrest the terrorists and announced that the foiled terrorist attack in Ryazan was only an exercise. One can imagine the expression on the face of the
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Ryazan UFSB officer concerned: most likely Major-General Sergeiev was reporting to Patrushev in person when he was ordered to let the terrorists go.
Immediately after he put down the phone, Patrushev gave his first interview in those days to the NTV television company: The incident in Ryazan was not a bombing, nor was it a foiled bombing. It was an exercise. It was sugar; there was no explosive substance there.
Such exercises do not only take place in Ryazan. But to the honor of the agencies of law enforcement and the public in Ryazan, they responded promptly. I believe that exercises must be made as close as possible to what happens in real life, because otherwise we won t learn anything and won t be able to respond to anything anywhere. A day later, Patrushev added that the exercise in Ryazan was prompted by information about terrorist attacks planned to take place in Russia. In Chechnya several groups of terrorists had already been prepared and were due to be advanced into Russian territory and carry out a series of terrorist attacks& It was this information which led us to conclude that we needed to carry out training exercises, and not like the ones we d had before, and to make them hard and strict& Our personnel must be prepared; we must identify the shortcomings in the organization of our work and make corrections to its organization.
The Moscow Komsomolets newspaper managed to joke about it: On September 24, 1999, the head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, made the sensational announcement that the attempted bombing in Ryazan was nothing of the sort. It was an exercise& The same day, Minister of the Interior Vladimir Rushailo congratulated his men on saving the building in Ryazan from certain destruction.
But in Ryazan, of course, no one was laughing. Obviously, even though Patrushev had forbidden it, the Ryazan UFSB went ahead and arrested the terrorists, considerably roughing them up in the process. Who was arrested where, how many there were of them, and what else the Ryazan UFSB officers found in those flats we shall probably never know. When they were arrested, the terrorists presented their cover documents and were detained, until the arrival from Moscow of an officer of the central administration with documents which permitted him to take the FSB operatives, who had been tracked down so rapidly, back to Moscow with him.
Beyond this point our investigation runs up against the old familiar top secret classification. The criminal proceedings instigated by the UFSB for the Ryazan Region in connection with the discovery of an explosive substance under article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (terrorism) was classified, and the case materials are not available to the public. The names of the terrorists (FSB operatives) have been concealed.
We don t even know if they were interrogated and what they said under interrogation.
Patrushev certainly had something to hide. There s nothing I can do, guys. The analysis shows explosive materials, I m obliged to initiate criminal proceedings -such was the stubborn reply made by the local FSB investigator to his Moscow colleagues, when they tried putting pressure on him. So then, people from the FSB s central administration were sent down and simply confiscated the results of the analysis.
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On September 29, 1999, the newspapers Cheliabinsky Rabochy and Krasnoyarsky Rabochy, and on October 1, the Volzhskaya Kommuna of Samara carried identical articles; We have learned from well-informed sources in the MVD of Russia that none of the MVD operatives and their colleagues in the UFSB of Ryazan believes in any training involving the planting of explosive in the town& In the opinion of highly placed employees of the MVD of Russia, the apartment building in Ryazan actually was mined by persons unknown using genuine explosives and the same detonators as in Moscow& This theory is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the criminal proceedings under the article on terrorism have still not been closed. Furthermore, the results of the original analysis of the contents of the sacks, carried out at the first stage by local MVD experts, were confiscated by FSB personnel who arrived from Moscow, and immediately declared secret. Policemen who have been in contact with their colleagues in criminalistics, who carried out the first investigation of the sacks, continue to claim that they really did contain hexogene, and there is no possibility of any error.