Insight - 05.13.2002

 

Insight

Russia May Prove to Be Erstwhile Ally

By J. Michael Waller

The May 22-23 summit in the old imperial capital of St. Petersburg will be the last meeting between President George W. Bush and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, before the United States drives the final stake into the heart of Cold War arms control. The presidents will agree formally to unilateral nuclear-arms reductions without resorting to another round of seemingly endless treaty negotiations. This well could be the last arms-control agreement before the United States ditches the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and unilaterally begins deployment and further testing of a limited defense against incoming ballistic missiles.

They probably will announce further cooperation against international terrorism. And they will continue hammering out an agreement to give Russia a greater voice in NATO without being able to veto alliance decisions.

But big obstacles remain. Senior U.S. officials are chafing at Russia's continued flagrant violations of major arms agreements, including illegal development, production and stockpiling of undeclared next-generation biological and chemical weapons. Moscow still ignores U.S. pressure to stop proliferating nuclear and ballistic-missile technology to Iran and other rogue regimes.

Top Pentagon officials have taken notice of Russia's apparently successful efforts to manipulate U.S. disarmament and nonproliferation aid to fund continued development of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Also of concern is Putin's steady but incremental assault on political freedoms back home, including draconian press restrictions not seen since the late Soviet period, a resurgence of the old KGB and runaway government corruption and organized crime.

And then there's the hexogen problem - the explosive found in the Moscow apartment-building bombing that could have come only from closely held Russian military stores. Putin's political machine and secret police are trying to keep a lid on it, but the hexogen issue threatens to undermine the Russian leader's credibility and the very legitimacy of his presidency.

Scholar David Satter of the Hudson Institute crystallized the growing unease concerning Putin in a recent project for the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Satter notes: "In explaining his support for the American-led antiterrorist coalition after Sept. 11, 2001, Putin said that Russia had also been a victim of terrorism." Specifically, Putin referred to the apartment-building bombings two years earlier in Moscow and two other cities that killed 300 people. Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB) - the renamed KGB internal-security organs that he had headed - immediately blamed Islamic terrorists fighting for independence of the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

"There is compelling evidence that, contrary to claims that the bombings were the work of Chechen terrorists, they were, in fact, carried out by the Russian government itself," Satter says in his study. In his view, the bombings were "part of an effort to preserve the power and wealth of a criminal oligarchy" around then-president Boris Yeltsin.

This is an extremely serious allegation - and a warning shot to the Bush administration, which is building an intensely personal relationship with Putin. Satter is no armchair pundit or political hack. For two decades he was a reporter for the Financial Times, Reader's Digest and the Wall Street Journal and had unparalleled Russian contacts. He was one of the earliest Western observers to warn about what he called "the rise of the Russian criminal state."

President Bush's policy toward Russia is more hard-nosed than that of the predecessor Clinton-Gore team, but it welcomes deeper security relations with Russia and includes it more in NATO activity. It set out a decidedly unilateral course of action concerning nuclear weapons and missile defense, welcoming Moscow along but presenting as a fait accompli that the United States would go it alone if necessary. It also is holding Russia responsible for its continued systemic arms-control violations and proliferation of WMDs technology to terrorist regimes.

But some senior Russia specialists in the Bush administration who are politically loyal to the president are expressing disquiet about what they see as the emergence of a personality-driven policy toward Russia. It began in June 2001 when Bush and Putin met for 90 minutes at Brdo Castle in the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. Emerging from the meeting, Bush gushed to reporters, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Was it hyperbolic diplomacy, a poor choice of words or true sentiment? The question has dogged Russia-watchers in and out of the administration, but Bush quickly developed a warm, personal relationship with Putin, as he has with many other leaders. But despite some real bilateral cooperation such presidential talk shook some of Bush's allies who work Russia-related policy.

Russia has shown progress in several security areas. Putin pledged to rip up al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror networks in the Middle East and South Asia, even lifting objections to a U.S. military presence in former Soviet territory south of Russia. Moscow quickly shipped badly needed weapons and supplies to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance fighters as they were about to be smashed by elite Taliban units before U.S. ground forces arrived. Russia also shared intelligence to support the U.S. effort.

In October, Putin shut down the giant signals-intelligence (SIGINT) base near Lourdes, Cuba, that long had been an irritant to Washington (see "Fidel May Be Part of Terror Campaign," Dec. 3, 2001) and abandoned the large, deepwater, U.S.-built naval base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. Moscow even acquiesced to the announced U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and to deployment of limited defenses against ballistic missiles.

Moscow wasn't exactly being magnanimous. Its own interests came first. Russia, too, is a target for international jihadist terrorists who have taken up the Chechen cause. Bogged down in a low-level conflict with Muslim extremists in Tajikistan, Russia welcomed U.S.-led military might to smash their incubators in Afghanistan.

And the Kremlin didn't give weapons to the Northern Alliance for free; Pentagon sources say that Russia demanded cash payment from Washington for the arms plus the cost of their delivery. Then, too, giving up the SIGINT spy base in Cuba saved Moscow $200 million a year that Fidel Castro was demanding as rent, while the pullout from Cam Ranh Bay came because the Russian navy was too small to use it and Hanoi started demanding hefty annual rent to keep it under the Russian flag. Likewise, the Kremlin didn't simply acquiesce to Bush's declaration to abandon the ABM Treaty and deploy missile defenses. It demanded and received concessions despite certainty that the huge arms-control shift was a fait accompli.

Nonetheless, Russia and the United States are finding more common interests. Intelligence sources say that Russia's military representatives to NATO now include more legitimate military liaison officers and fewer spies. Does this commonality of interests necessarily translate into friendship? Some Russia-watchers already are worried that Bush could get too caught up in a personal "friendship" with Putin to the detriment of U.S. security interests or long-term strategy.

On most foreign-policy and national-security issues, the general approaches are crafted in the State Department and Pentagon, hashed out at the interagency level, then presented to the president for approval or rejection. With Bush's Putin relationship, however, the policy definitely is driven from the top down, as was Richard Nixon's relationship with Mao Tse-tung and Ronald Reagan's with Mikhail Gorbachev. Some Bush supporters worry that the president's kinship with Putin unwittingly could follow former president Bill Clinton's much-caricatured embrace of the unpopular Yeltsin, or with former vice president Al Gore's joined-at-the-hip closeness to Yeltsin's discredited prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin (see "Red-Handed Lies," Nov. 8, 1999).

"The White House is certainly driving this relationship," says a senior official in a national-security post. The official says he is disturbed at the White House reluctance to consider certain realities of Russia, but broke off the conversation when asked for specifics. "The National Security Council [NSC] is in denial," adds another high-ranking official - an assessment shared in a separate interview by a senior Senate foreign-policy staff member with close ties to top NSC figures.

Satter paints the backdrop for this apprehension. "In August 1999, on the eve of the [apartment] bombings, it appeared that the Yeltsin 'family' and the rest of the corrupt oligarchy that ruled Russia was facing an unavoidable day of reckoning," Satter says in his study, "with the bottom having fallen out from the economy, criminal investigations of the Yeltsin family and its cronies and barely 2 percent of the Russian population still supporting Yeltsin and his new prime minister - Putin - whom the president had just plucked from the leadership of the former KGB."

Satter details the Russian political situation and the fighting in Chechnya, leading up to the September apartment bombings. The attacks set the stage for popular demands that the Chechens pay for the crimes. Prime Minister Putin, himself with a 2 percent popularity rating, responded with a massive war against the separatists, "and in the process became Russia's savior." Yeltsin abruptly resigned on Dec. 31, 1999, naming Putin his successor. Putin handily won a popular election the following summer - and, in Satter's words, "granted immunity from prosecution to Yeltsin and his family … and preserved the Yeltsin-era oligarchy virtually intact."

Borrowing heavily from Russian investigative journalism, Satter dissects the actual bombings themselves. The nature of the bombings - from the hexogen explosives that were used and the manner of their placement - pointed to a single group of well-organized perpetrators who probably had prepared the operation for months. The clincher, however, was a fourth bombing in the city of Ryazan that didn't take place.

There, an alert apartment resident stumbled on a hexogen bomb ready to go off in the basement of his building. Acting on a tip, the local police arrested two terrorist suspects who identified themselves as federal FSB officers and were released on orders from Moscow headquarters. Two days later, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the bomb was really a dummy as part of a "vigilance" test, and praised Ryazan citizens for their watchfulness. The FSB said that the "hexogen" was actually sacks of sugar.

Heroic investigative journalism peeled away the official excuses to reveal the truth. Pavel Voloshin of Novaya Gazeta interviewed the Ryazan policemen who answered the call and reported the bomb, insisting that the incident was not an exercise but a real explosive with a live timer and detonator (see "Did Putin's Agents Plant the Bombs?" April 17, 2000). He interviewed the sapper from the local bomb squad who defused the weapon and confirmed the hexogen by chemical analysis with a sophisticated gas analyzer.

The government could have tried to refute the allegations against it, but instead the Kremlin covered it up. It produced no FSB officers who were part of the "training exercise," no records of the exercise and no dummy bomb. It sealed the Ryazan evidence for 75 years (despite the fact that the U.S.S.R.'s official secrecy laws extend only 30 years). As Satter noted, "The government has also prevented any inquiry by the parliament." In March 2000, the pro-Kremlin Unity Party voted unanimously in the Duma against an independent probe, and as the majority party it blocked passage. Last February, lawmakers tried again to open a probe, but again a majority abstained.

The issue has huge implications for Russia as well as for the United States, according to Satter. "If, as the available evidence indicates, the bombings were carried out by the FSB, it means the present government of Russia is illegitimate. It also means that a tradition has been established in Russia that can only lead to the country's degeneration," he argues. "Under these circumstances, it is important to Russia's future that the bombings not be ignored. Failing to react to evidence of a crime by the Russian government means implicitly condoning it and leaving unchallenged a precedent that will serve as a standing temptation for the future, demonstrating to all subsequent Russian leaders how elections can be 'won' and putting paid to the effort to apply law consistently and establish the authority of moral values in Russia.

"The worst outcome would be for the Russian public gradually to become convinced that the present government was established as the result of an act of terror but to treat that as a normal phenomenon," says Satter, "because, in that way, they would not only be accepting criminal domination but also the cutting off of the moral roots of their own subsequent regeneration."

J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight.