CIS Antiterrorist Center

Chief – Andrei Novikov

Structure:

Section of analysis, threats monitoring and decisions preparing
Section of the ATC on Central-Asian region (HQ in Bishkek)
Research-consultative council

In the second half of the 1990s Moscow was busy establishing special relations with the secret services of the CIS states, through new international umbrella organizations, all of which the Kremlin officially distanced itself from, but which were nonetheless subordinated to the FSB.

The first attempt was the SORB (Soviet Rukovoditelei Organov Bezopasnosti I Specialnikh Sluzhb – the Council of the Leaders of CIS Security Organs and Special Services), established in March 1997.

The next time the FSB tried to improve its control over the CIS countries took place in December 2000, when the CIS Antiterrorist Center (Antiterroristichesky Center - ATC) was established, with its Headquarters in Moscow on Ilyinka Street, 200 meters from Kremlin and its Central Asian branch sited in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Though the ATC had been conceived as a supra-national structure, in essence it was again under full FSB control: Russia held the command and 50 percent of the staff slots (60 as a whole), as well as providing 50 percent of the budget, of both the Moscow-based ATC and its Central Asia branch while the other CIS countries shared the rest. The Antiterrorist Center was headed by the first deputy director of the FSB, and the FSB also supervised “collective” anti-terrorist exercises in Central Asia, which were held annually every April. According to the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, ‘This supervision arrangement implicitly treats CIS member countries as a field of action for Russia’s internal security agency’.

This attempt was also in vain. The Center's mandate was essentially that of a database which has to supply intelligence information and "analytical reports" to CIS member countries. But the idea of sharing intelligence information was abandoned, no CIS Antiterrorism command was created, and very soon the ATC was turned into an another bureaucratic organization where the representatives of CIS secret services were banished to by their respective agencies, as was admitted by Armen Zakharyan, the Armenian representative in the ATC. He himself had been sent to Moscow after falling out with Karlos Petrosyan, the chief of the Armenian Service of National Security.

Furthermore, some CIS states did not buy the idea of Russia’s help with counter-terrorism efforts on their soil. Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan refused to send their representatives to the ATC, and in 2005 Georgia ceased sending its representatives after the Rose Revolution. Nevertheless, the ATC's leadership kept trying to expand its influence in Central Asia, even at the cost of public support for the repressions carried out by the local authoritarian regimes. When in May 2005 riots in the Uzbek city of Andijan were severely suppressed by Uzbek security forces, leading to hundreds of deaths, Boris Mylnikov, then the chief of the ATC, in a rebuttal to Western criticism, publicly demonstrated his support for the Uzbek authorities and proposed the Center's help Uzbekistan’s notorious National Security Service. But it did not help the ATC's positions in Tashkent, and eventually the Center, as previously the SORB, was unable to extend the Moscow's sphere of influence beyond the states in which loyalty had been secured in the early nineties.