How Soviet experience defined the FSB's approach to counterterrorism

The Soviet KGB had very little experience dealing with terrorists because of the almost complete absence of terrorist attacks on Soviet soil. The KGB had focused instead on hunting down spies and dissidents. The violent actions that might be con- sidered terrorism were mostly carried out by criminals. In the 1980s, only six terrorist attacks occurred in the Soviet Union, all of them plane hijackings by individuals trying to escape the country. The most famous incident was the attempt on March 8, 1988, by the Ovechkin family—a mother with ten sons—who tried to force the crew to take them to London. Instead of the British capital, the plane landed at a military airbase near Leningrad, where it was stormed. Three passengers, a flight attendant, and five members of the family were killed.

The new decade of terrorism began in earnest in 1991 with the hijacking of a plane by Shamil Basayev, who carried out the action in the name of Chechen independence. Thereafter attacks took place annually. Terrorists captured planes, helicopters, buses, and even a kindergarten. The attacks grew even more spectacular in 1995 when the entire city hospital in Budennovsk was captured by Basayev, who wanted to push Russian forces out of Chechnya.

The security services that replaced the KGB were faced with new challenges as terrorism increased; they had to change their structure and methods to deal with the new reality. The first problem was to find people to create a counterterrorism section.

The Soviet KGB had had two departments designated to deal with terrorists: The first was a part of the Fifth Directorate, responsible for political investigations and keeping an eye on domestic terrorist groups; the second was included in the K Directorate, responsible for overseas counterintelligence and preventing penetration by foreign terrorists.

When a new directorate on combatting terrorism (UBT — Upravlenie borbi s terrorismom) was formed in 1991, employees were drawn from the old Fifth Directorate. Many officers previously involved in the disruption of dissident groups were given the new task of fighting terrorists. The skills and practices of the old KGB may not have been a good match for the years of battling terrorists. As a rule, KGB agents played out their strategies over long periods, while the effort to prevent and combat terrorism often demanded rapid action and reaction.

On August 13, 1998, the lobby of the FSB headquarters at Lubyanka was blown up, with two FSB guards slightly wounded. On April 3, 1999, a second attack occurred at almost exactly the same place when a bomb containing the equivalent of 1.5 kilos of TNT was detonated, although this time without deaths or injuries. Both bombings were executed by left-wing extremists from the group called“New Revolutionary Initiative,”headed by four idealistic young women in their twenties and inspired by the German Red Army Faction. The culprits were identified soon after the first explosion, but the FSB preferred to keep the group under surveil- lance rather than apprehend them—a measure that would most likely have prevented the second bombing. At their trial the FSB claimed it had discovered a powerful terrorist organization of nearly 500 members that intended to overthrow the government.

The personnel problem was exacerbated by a closed culture of the agency: since Soviet times the Russian secret services had enjoyed their own system of the special Institutes and schools in Moscow and in regions. The high- and middle-ranking officers of the KGB-FSB tend to make state security their family business, and send their sons to the same Institutes that they attended themselves, including the heads of the Service: both sons of Nikolay Patrushev, FSB director in 2000-2008, Andrei and Dmitry, studied in the FSB Academy, as well as Pavel, a son of Mikhail Fradkov, director of the SVR (foreign intelligence service) since 2008.

The FSB Academy appears to operate like an average military school with barracks for students and strict military discipline, and thus it creates the peculiar mentality of would-be counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence officers: during the training period the FSB operative all but loses the ability to understand the world outside.

Hardly surprisingly, in the mid-1990s the FSB was desperate to find new personnel to fight terrorism, but at this point the approach showed by the British and the Russians was different.

The FSB, always suspicious of ethnic North Caucasians, failed to recruit Chechens and started to transfer resources from their counterparts at the Interior Ministry. That’s what happened to young and able operative Alexander Litvinenko, who served in the Internal Troops of the Interior Ministry, had been recruited as an agent of military counterintelligence and was then transferred to the FSB, where he found himself in the Anti-terrorist Center (the former Directorate on fighting terrorism UBT) in the mid-90s.

The FSB was eager to add fresh blood to its desk-officers, who were inclined to be bureaucratic. The ruthless officers of the Internal Troops were thought to be more effective because the terrorist groups, notably Chechens, who had close-ties with ethnic organized crime groups flourished in Moscow in the mid-90s. The FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs believed Chechen warlords obtained financing and weapons through them, thus targeting of such groups might be more efficient than any attempts to penetrate hardcore insurgents in Chechnya.

The special departments at both the FSB and MVD were tasked to deal with Chechens. Simultaneously the same departments adapted the practice of penetrating organized crime groups by any means, including protecting loyal ringleaders and even involvement in criminal activity.

Not surprisingly these departments were soon both highly corrupted and efficient, for they indeed possessed some priceless information. Litvinenko later recalled how he was simultaneously ordered to prevent the famous Russian dissident and human rights activist Sergei Grigoriants taking documents on war crimes in Chechnya abroad (Litvinenko succeeded: Grigoriants was stopped at the airport, ostensibly for attempting to deliver a small amount of ammunition) and was asked by the Solntsevo organized crime group to find their leader who had been kidnapped by another criminal group. This sort of activity was not confined to low-level operatives. According to Litvinenko, high-ranking FSB officials were deeply involved in dealing with prominent Chechen businessmen. In 1998 the FSB’s department URPO (Analysis and Suppression of the Activity of Criminal Organizations) where Litvinenko then served, was disbanded because of the media outcry that URPO was reportedly involved in extortions and kidnappings.

As a result, by the end of the 1990s harsh methods were adopted by the Russian security services in dealing with terrorism: the emphasis was to use adventurous and brutal extrajudicial operations which, for fear of leaks, were to be conducted by ultra-secret and out-of-control special units.

Agentura.Ru, March 14, 2011. See more in our book The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, from which this story is adapted. The book was published in September 2010 by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.)