Creating Chaos by Larry Hancock

Author:Larry Hancock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2018-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten:

Sovereignty Issues

The Russian public and President Putin (elected to the Russian Federation presidency in 2000) both benefited from the major Russian economic turnaround in the first years of the new century. Government debts were paid off, budget surpluses became the norm, the consumer economy boomed, and along with it all, a new class of extremely wealthy capitalists emerged—the new oligarchs. Many, if not all, were tied to energy sales and capital investment. Yet in the midst of a new level of economic security, Russia had to face a series of major terror attacks. The separatist conflict in Chechnya, and Russia’s response, had bred its own extreme, radical terrorist consequences.

In October 2002 a series of small diversionary attacks culminated in a horrendous hostage siege at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. The FSB responded to the incident with Special Forces and in the end fentanyl gas was used during a rescue attempt; 45 died and 850 were treated for serious side effects of the gas. Within two years, beginning in June 2004, a brutal series of separatist attacks were launched beyond Chechen borders against Russian government buildings and personnel in the North Caucasus. That summer two domestic Russian passenger flights out of Moscow were destroyed in mid-air by terrorist bombs. In Moscow itself, bombers carried out individual attacks targeting city and government officials. And in September, a large group of terrorists seized a school in the Russian federal republic of North Ossetia, almost immediately executing a dozen adults. The FSB organized security response evolved into a street battle that not only involved the school but much of the adjacent town of Beslan. When it was over an estimated 334 hostages, including 186 children, were dead.1

Given that the new terror attacks were coming across Russian borders from adjacent territories, Russian intelligence—primarily the FSB—was directed to look outwards, to identify threats and if at all possible to abort or interdict them before more incidents occurred inside Russia itself. President Putin described Russia as being under attack, effectively in a “state of war” and moved to exert tighter political control over the regional governments in the North Caucasus.2

The FSB’s new 2004 foreign mandate was codified by the creation of the Directive of Operative Information. As mentioned in the previous chapter, “operative information” translates to political action and the result was that there was a significant increase in FSB officers traveling to and involving themselves in a good many of the new republics that had previously been members of the Soviet Union. It appears that at first the FSB political action was of the soft form, essentially reconnecting with individuals and parties known during the Soviet era who were essentially pro-Russia. In Moldavia, Deputy Director of the FSB Vyacheslav Ushakov (former head of the Directorate of Operations) was thought to have recruited a prominent local politician as an agent of influence.3 Senior FSB officers traveled to a separatist region of Georgia (Abkhazia) in 2004 to contact and support a Moscow-oriented candidate. Apparently their presence was

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