Article on President Putin by an ex-KGB officer

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Mr Putin will not be moved by this tragedy
By Oleg Gordievsky
The Telegraph, (Filed: 05/09/2004)


Negotiating the release of hostages is never less than appallingly
difficult. But I do not believe the crisis in the school in Beslan
was bound to end in the deaths of hundreds of children. The official
toll already stands at 322, half of them children, and is likely to
go higher. The Russian "Spetsnaz", or Special Forces, who surrounded
the school and who were in charge of containing the hostage crisis
and bringing it to an end, have a reputation for fearsome, if brutal,
efficiency. That reputation helps to sustain the belief, at least in
the West, that there was very little that could have been done to
prevent this disastrous outcome.

This is simply not true. Only part of the Spetsnaz's reputation is
justified. They are certainly brutal. But they are not efficient, and
never have been - even in the old days of the Cold War, when they
were well financed. The Spetsnaz were assigned to assassinate
President Amin in Afghanistan in December 1979. They bungled the
operation comprehensively. True, they killed the president - but only
after shooting dozens of their own comrades, and shooting his
children.

The operation was aimed to be "clinical" and to assassinate the
president with a minimum of what the Americans would call "collateral
damage". It quickly turned into a nightmare of confusion and
incompetence: members of the Spetsnaz teams (several of them had been
assigned to the task) attacked in the dark, and then failed to
recognise who was firing at whom - with the result that they ended up
shooting each other, inflicting horrendous casualties on their own
side.

Vladimir Putin was beginning his career in the KGB when it organised
that debacle. Now the president of Russia, Putin has sent messages of
condolence and sympathy to officials in the North Ossetia region
where the terrorists took the school hostage. Yet the truth is that
he is at least partially responsible for the fact that the siege
ended in so horrible a blood-bath. The Russian siege negotiators and
the Spetsnaz (there were several thousand of them) who had surrounded
the school were totally unprepared for what happened. They knew that
the terrorists had mined the school and had strapped bombs to
themselves and its roof, but they had no contingency plans if one of
those bombs went off.

That was what actually happened: in the chaos which followed the
explosion, there was a break-out by some of the children, followed by
some of the terrorists. Yet the Spetsnaz had failed to seal off the
school, with the result that some of the terrorists managed to get
away. There weren't even any ambulances waiting to take the wounded
hostages to hospital. Many of the children who died will have been
shot by Spetsnaz officers because they were caught in the crossfire
between the terrorists shooting at them, and the Spetsnaz shooting at
the terrorists. It is distinctly possible that the roof which
collapsed and buried many more of the captured children under a pile
of rubble was destroyed by a rocket fired by one of the besieging
Spetsnaz.

Despite the official denials, President Putin was certainly planning
to storm the school before the sudden explosions derailed that plan.
He had taken the precaution of persuading the UN to issue a
condemnation of the hostage-takers - thereby ensuring that the
international community gave him carte blanche to deal with the
incident as he saw fit. Storming the building would also certainly
have caused hundreds of casualties - but that would not have deterred
Putin.

Despite all the caring, sympathetic noises he is now making, Putin
has a fabulous indifference to human life. When the Russian nuclear
submarine Kursk was stuck on the bottom of the Baltic, its 118 crew
suffocating and freezing slowly to death, he didn't even bother to
interrupt his holiday. When he was later interviewed on CNN about
what had happened to the Kursk, he simply smiled and said: "It went
to the bottom." About the 118 Russians who died he said not a word.

The thousands of deaths in the war in Chechnya don't move him in the
least. He regards them as "normal wastage" - a hardly noticeable
price which has to be paid for maintaining Russian control of
Chechnya. That is the traditional KGB view, an attitude I remember
all too well from my own days in the organisation.

Russia's army and its security forces aim to inculcate an attitude of
total indifference to the loss of human life, and they certainly
succeeded in the case of Vladimir Putin. For example, for at least as
long as he has been president, the Russian press has published
stories about the more than 1,000 Russian army conscripts - they are
teenage boys - who are killed every year during training, often as a
result of being viciously bullied by other soldiers. And what has
been Putin's response? Nothing at all.

Putin believes he can bludgeon the Chechens into submission. Hundreds
of dead children from a school in North Ossetia won't be enough to
persuade him to change that policy. He may never accept that it has
failed. And yet Russia has very little reason to continue to be so
intransigent on the issue of greater autonomy for Chechnya.
Chechnya's oil reserves are almost spent; the country has few other
natural resources; and its "strategic" importance to Russia is
largely a myth. Most Chechens are not Islamic fundamentalists, or
even seriously Islamic at all. Al-Qaeda is not welcome there, and I
regard it as almost inconceivable that there was any serious al-Qaeda
involvement in the hostage-taking in Ossetia, despite the claims from
the Russians that they have identified 10 "Arabs" among the dead.

Putin has been able to convince the world that his war in Chechnya is
part of the global "war on terror". It is not. It is a totally
avoidable civil war which has very little to do with Osama bin Laden
or indeed any group of Islamic fanatics. But by persuading gullible
Western leaders such as Tony Blair and George W Bush that, in
Chechnya, he is dealing with the same sort of people who destroyed
the World Trade Center, Putin has been applauded, even while he uses
exceptional cruelty in prosecuting his unnecessary war. No civilised
person can deny that the hostage-takers have taken barbarity and
inhumanity to new depths. But in President Putin, they are up against
a leader who has as little regard for human life as they do.


Oleg Gordievsky was the highest-ranking KGB officer to work for MI6