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- Pridružio: 08 Mar 2015
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Requiem for a Hit Man
A doomed hired gun unburdens himself in a jailhouse interview that sheds light on the shadow battle between Russia and Ukraine
https://www.wsj.com/articles/requiem-for-a-hit-man-1511461865
Citat:When they arrested Timur Makhauri with two unregistered pistols and a bogus passport in downtown Kiev earlier this year, police thought they made a breakthrough in a string of unsolved contract murders. A judge saw Mr. Makhauri had a dark history of allegedly assassinating critics of the Kremlin in Turkey, and ordered him held on a high bond.
But soon police learned that nothing about Mr. Makhauri was quite what it seemed. Ukraine’s intelligence service began calling the police to urge his release, interior ministry officials said. Mr. Makhauri, who was mute at first, explained that he had numerous identities over the years—and sometimes acted like an assassin to catch the real Kremlin agents performing what, in Russian underworld parlance, was known as “wet work.”
In a jailhouse interview with The Wall Street Journal in February, Mr. Makhauri expanded upon the murky world he inhabited, politely answering questions about his life for two hours while handcuffed in a hallway. He worked as an agent, he said, wherever there was a fight against Moscow’s influence, including Chechnya, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Ukraine, his last place of employment, would turn out to be more hazardous than he reckoned.
Ukraine has become a magnet for hired guns as Kiev tries to fight its former master Moscow’s bid to reassert control. With a stalemate on the battlefront between Russian-backed rebels and the government, Moscow and Kiev appear to have turned to contract killings to settle scores and winnow the ranks of commanders in the war, Western diplomats say.
Most of those killings have been carried out far from the almost daily volleys of artillery in eastern Ukraine, turning Kiev into a hotbed of spies and hit men.
Victims have included the head of a Ukrainian special forces unit, Maksim Shapoval, who was blown up in his car at an intersection in downtown Kiev in June, and a former Russian prosecutor and parliament member, Denis Voronenkov, who had recently fled to Kiev for protection and was shot dead on a chestnut tree-lined boulevard in March.
There have also been mysterious attacks in rebel-held areas, where a mix of civilians and pro-Russian soldiers inhabit the shelled-out remains of the country’s industrial heartland. One rebel commander, Mikhail Tolstykh, was killed by a rocket fired into his office in the provincial city of Donetsk in February. Another, Arsen Pavlov, was killed last year by a bomb planted in his elevator.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted in 2014 after protesters in Kiev toppled a Russia-friendly president and established a pro-Western government. Moscow invaded and annexed the country’s Crimea peninsula. At the height of fighting, the country’s industrial east was awash with fighters of all stripes, from Ukrainian nationalists to pro-Kremlin soldiers of fortune to bored men and women from post-Soviet backwaters looking for adventure.
In Kiev, many of the triggermen appear to be freelancers, moonlighting from their jobs in the Ukrainian armed forces or police, say law-enforcement officials and Western diplomats. Last year, the Belarus-born journalist Pavel Sheremet wrote in a blog post that the war in Ukraine had unleashed an atmosphere of lawlessness, and that volunteer battalions formed to fight the Russian-backed rebels had teamed up with crime syndicates. The next day he was killed by a bomb planted in his car.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, former head of the Ukraine intelligence services, said in an interview the mix has been made more murderous by an influx of foreign mercenaries who recognize Ukraine as a new place to ply their trade.
In January, a Ukraine court sentenced a Brazilian to 13 years in prison after he appeared in Russian news accounts and social media as a hero and mercenary for Russian-backed forces in Ukraine. Police nabbed him after luring him to fly into Kiev’s Borispol Airport with an offer to work for the other side.
Earlier this year, a man posing as a French journalist in Kiev invited a battalion commander to an interview, then allegedly shot him. The attempted hit went awry when the victim’s wife pulled a gun of her own out of her purse and fired back, disabling him with two shots. She herself was gunned down and killed four months later.
Even amid this mayhem, Mr. Makhauri’s career stands out. In a monotone, Mr. Makhauri described his path from Chechnya, where he allied himself with rebels for independence from Russia; to Georgia, whose side he fought on during its brief war with Moscow in 2008; to Syria, where Russian-speaking jihadists flocked to fight against Russia’s interests, many under the flag of Islamic State. Former Chechen rebels and officials in Georgia, where he worked for several years with the state security service, confirmed parts of his story, as did Ukrainian government officials who investigated his past.
Mr. Makhauri came to Ukraine, he said, to hunt down the agents Moscow sent to eliminate opponents abroad. He said the killings ordered by Russia came from two distinct directions—from Moscow’s federal security services, as well as the Russian-backed Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
“I know who to look for and to stop them before they do anything,” he said from under a mop of long black hair, speaking politely in a vernacular Russian that earned him the nickname “Zone,” referring to someone from a penal colony. “There is a small number who do this kind of thing.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Mr. Makhauri’s accusations that Moscow sends hired guns to Kiev to do away with opponents. “This is the first time we hear that,” he said (први пут чују  ).
Mr. Makhauri said he was dealt his career by accident. He said he was born in Grozny, Chechnya, in 1978 and although he had wanted to study piano as a young man he never had the chance because he, like others his age, was caught up in the region’s two wars for independence from Moscow. He said he joined rebellion full-time in 1999.
Most of his classmates were wiped out early in the war when Russian troops stormed the Chechen capital, he said. For several years, he said, he fought in the mountains in the southern reaches of the province, staging hit-and-run attacks on Russian forces and ambushing supply convoys.
He gained the trust of Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev, who was notorious inside Russia for planning grisly hostage-taking operations, according to a fellow Chechen fighter interviewed by phone. The fellow fighter recalled seeing Mr. Makhauri evacuated to neighboring Georgia in 2002 after he was shot through the groin.
As rebel losses mounted, Mr. Basayev decided Mr. Makhauri was too valuable to lose and ordered him back to Georgia to ferry supplies for the fight inside Chechnya, the fighter said.
The Kremlin has long accused Georgia of funding Chechen rebels in their fight against Russia—something the Georgian government officially denies.
But Zurab Maisuradze, who ran Georgia’s antiterrorism center, acknowledged in an interview that he took Mr. Makhauri under his wing. He said he arranged for the young Chechen to receive two Georgian passports—one in the name of Ruslan Papaskiri and another made out to Timur Makhauri.
Mr. Maisuradze called Mr. Makhauri “a great Georgian patriot” always willing to undertake a mission against the Russians, whom they saw as a common enemy. In 2006, Mr. Makhauri proved his loyalty, he said, when the Chechen agreed to meet a Russian agent who was sent to Tbilisi to kill him. The Georgians eventually flipped the agent to work for their side, he said.
In 2009, Moscow tried to kill Mr. Makhauri again with a bomb packed with nuts and bolts that exploded outside his apartment, according to Mr. Maisuradze. Mr. Makhauri survived with a few scratches and was ready for work the next day, Mr. Maisuradze said. “If it was against the Russians he was always willing to do it,” he added.
But in the fog of spy intrigue, rumors began to circulate that Mr. Makhauri was working for the Russians, too. In 2006, the Chechen rebel commander, Mr. Basayev, received a load of explosives from a truck driven from Georgia into Russia. The shipment blew up, killing him and much of the rebel leadership. Mr. Makhauri, it was rumored, had planted a booby trap in the truck.
n the interview in Kiev, Mr. Makhauri denied involvement in Mr. Basayev’s death, and said that Russia’s security services were behind the rumors. “So many times they shot me, blew me up and did everything they could to kill me,” he said. “So they tarnished my name.”
Robert Schaefer, a retired U.S. Special Forces officer who helped train Georgian troops in the early 2000s, said in an interview that Moscow often tried to disrupt rebels by sowing phony reports of turncoats in their midst. But he added that many defeated rebels needed work and the money for paid hits overtook considerations of loyalty or friendship.
They may have become soldiers for patriotic reasons, but “soon they start going down this spiral of what had been legitimate special operations into wet work that they never thought they would have been involved in earlier,” Mr. Schaefer said.
Many former Chechen rebels ultimately left Georgia, decamping to Turkey with their families, while others went to Syria to join jihadist groups fighting the Russian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Makhauri said in his interview in Kiev that he also began spending time in Turkey, and in 2012 also visited Syria for three months “just to see the situation.”
In Turkey, Mr. Makhauri’s name was tied to mysterious killings that made it hard to shake suspicions that he was a double agent. The victims, all former Chechen fighters, were gunned down either on the street or near their homes between 2008 and 2011. One of them, an emissary of the Caucasus Emirate, a group of fighters who claimed to be the successor to the Chechen movement for independence, was a close friend of Mr. Makhauri, according to Turkish court documents. The man, Ali Osaev, was shot three times in the face on the steps of his apartment building.
In 2012, Mr. Makhauri was passing through passport control in the airport in Istanbul when Turkish police arrested him, later charging him with Mr. Osaev’s murder. At trial, prosecutors cast him as a possible double agent, and presented lurid evidence of Mr. Makhauri’s meetings with agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, which had been widely suspected of organizing the murder of Mr. Osaev and other Chechens.
A key piece of evidence was a videotape, shot by Mr. Makhauri himself through a camera concealed in the button of his shirt, of one meeting in which he bargained with a Russian agent over the price of killing three men who had fallen out of favor with Moscow. Speaking over a lunch in Istanbul, Mr. Makhauri poked at a plate of fish as he asked for $1 million per head, but then settled for half that for the first hit.
This work is something I’ve always dreamed of,” he said in a reedy monotone. “Like films about hunters and the hunted.”
In the jailhouse in Kiev, Mr. Makhauri said that the trial against him and the videotape were all a farce. He held the meeting, he said, on behalf of the Georgian security services to lure the Russian agent into an embarrassing situation and perhaps recruit him. Former Georgian authorities corroborated the story. Givi Targamadze, the former chairman of the defense and security committee of the Georgian Parliament, said Georgian authorities knew about Mr. Makhauri’s meeting with FSB officers and that the operation was carried out to ascertain whom Russian intelligence services were targeting.
Mr. Makhauri said he wore the concealed camera to leave a record behind in case negotiations soured and the Russian became violent. If he was killed “at least it would be clear what happened,” he said.
The court didn’t convict Mr. Makhauri but didn’t release him either for four years as it cited various procedural hold ups. Finally, Mr. Makhauri was acquitted on lack of evidence in 2016, his lawyer in Istanbul, Dursun Uçar, said.
A picture of him with his wife in Istanbul shows he had grown a beard to his chest, and she wore a traditional head scarf. But soon he trimmed his beard and moved to Ukraine, where he found work with a volunteer battalion fighting Russian-backed rebels in the east of the country.
Mr. Makhauri said he spent little time on the actual battle front. Instead he stayed mostly in Kiev on the lookout for agents sent by Moscow. In January, he said, he noticed that he himself was being followed, and in February he was arrested by police in the central market for possession of his handguns, a Glock and a Stechkin automatic pistol.
In the interview, Mr. Makhauri said he suspected that Russian agents were looking for him in Ukraine, but that there was no other country for him to go to. “Everywhere is dangerous,” he said.
When he was released from jail in April after he pleaded guilty to illegal firearms possession, he told friends that he sensed he was still being followed—by whom he wasn’t sure.
He was cagey about his movements, never telling friends by phone where he was or when precisely he would arrive anywhere. Several times he asked a friend, Yevhen Deydey, who is a member of Ukraine’s parliament, if he could help him get official permission to carry a handgun. Mr. Deydey said he was unable to help.
Early in September, Mr. Makhauri had coffee at a cafe in the center of Kiev and accepted a ride from a friend who was driving her daughter home, according to police. The car pulled out of an underground garage and stood in rush-hour traffic. Police say Mr. Makhauri was riding in the passenger seat, likely leaning toward the center of the vehicle when a bomb detonated in the arm rest, ripping off his arm and part of his torso and killing him instantly.
The bomb, which police say likely weighed about two kilograms and was set off by remote control, was fashioned to direct its blast against the passenger, although it maimed the driver. Her daughter wasn’t seriously hurt. Likely the bomb was planted in the car weeks ahead of time, said police, who suspect an explosives expert helped design and plant the device.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry spokesman, Artem Shevchenko, issued a statement after the blast that a motive for the killing hasn’t been determined. But he noted that Mr. Makhauri was “known quite well in the criminal world.”
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