The Trouble With Being a Mobster

The Semyon Mogilevich story is becoming more intriguing. Over the weekend, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy at the Guardian in London weighed in with a long piece linking the notorious alleged mobster to the assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko.

Mogilevich, who has been on the FBI most-wanted list for years, was arrested last Thursday on tax charges in Moscow. Russian authorities said they had long been looking for Mogilevich, who has lived for years in plain sight in the Russian capital. There is much conjecture on why he was arrested just now. Some of it involves supposed efforts to unwind the shadowy natural gas trade between Russia and Ukraine, in which Mogilevich appeared to have a role.

The Guardian story is quite an involved piece of journalism. The top half is background, but it then picks up with a tale of Litvinenko investigating Mogilevich, who according to the piece griped about it to his FSB pals, who got angry at Litvinenko … well, you get the picture. It all ends with Litvinenko having polonium 210 dropped into his tea in November 2006.

I have to note the remarkable coincidence of two huge Mogilevich stories breaking at precisely the same time. First his arrest, and now the accusation of involvement in one of the biggest murder cases of recent years.

One can be certain that the FSB is scouring its voluminous unsolved case file for items to hang on the unsympathetic Mogilevich.

Becoming Like the Soviets - Part II

While researching The Oil and the Glory, an amusing story I heard again and again from the oilmen and diplomats who found themselves on the Caspian Sea was the ubiquity of eavesdropping. As they sought their lucrative deals or carried out statesmanship, they would find KGB microphones hidden behind portraits in their hotel rooms, and dug into the walls of their offices. Somehow the Azeris were able to surveil them even in five-star hotels all the way in London.

The Westerners described a resultant atmosphere that was paranoid, poisonous and wholly over the top.

Once, two Britons in Baku – BP’s Terry Adams and Ambassador Thomas Young – had something confidential to discuss, too confidential to risk being overheard indoors, and went for a rainy walk along the shoreline. Their privacy seemed assured — few cars or people were braving the nasty weather. Just then, a small Soviet-made Lada stopped fifty yards ahead of them, and a sheepdog with a big collar jumped out. The dog trailed after the men, making them suspicious. “When the dog’s tail would go up, Tom would say, ‘Careful, it must be transmitting,’” Adams told me. As bizarre as it sounded, the story took on a life of its own, and it helped convince many other oilmen that most if not all conversations were being recorded.

The foreigners began to treat it as a game. They would tailor their conversations with the express purpose of manipulating government negotiators. Some of the locals themselves tried to confound the bugging by dropping crumpled-up notes on the floor to caution foreign guests to watch their mouths.

Meanwhile the foreigners resorted to code names in hopes of confusing those listening in. One member of Azerbaijan’s loyal opposition was dubbed “Loyal Avis” by the Pennzoil team. Another who wore alligator shoes became “the Big Bopper,” and a third who owned a house near the president’s was known as “the Landlord.” A fourth who was in the local KGB was “the Lamp.”

As we see in today’s New York Times, the Bush administration set off on an eavesdropping campaign within two weeks of taking office, in February 2001. We can debate the merits of becoming like the Soviets, which I've blogged about previously.

But I can tell you after years of researching the KGB experience that in this respect it doesn’t work, at least not for long – shrewd listenees find a way to disguise their conversations, and conduct their genuine ones out of earshot.

Photo: tanakawho
Rights: Creative Commons

Nikolai Khokhlov: 1922 - 2007

Khokhlov (right) and Okolovich

Nikolai Khokhlov, a KGB defector who survived the world's first known assassination attempt by a nuclear isotope, died last week. He was 85.

Khokhlov, who recounted his story in the classic memoir "In the Name of Conscience," first gained fame in 1954 when he defied a Kremlin order to organize the assassination of an anti-Soviet dissident named Georgi Okolovich. Heading a three-man unit operating in Frankfurt, Khokhlov walked up alone to Okolovich's apartment, and informed him just what he was sent to Germany to do. With that, the murder was sabotaged.

The heroic tenor of the event turned tragedy, however, when the CIA failed to rescue Khokhlov's wife, Yana, and son, Alek, in Moscow, as the agency had promised as part of his defection. The wife and son were arrested, and Khokhlov saw them again only 38 years later, in 1992, when Boris Yeltsin pardoned him. He and Yana had meanwhile divorced, and Khokhlov had remarried.

In 1957, Khokhlov again attracted international attention. While he was attending an anti-Communist conference in Frankfurt, someone slipped a dose of a radioactive isotope of thallium, a metal, into his coffee. Khokhlov's doctors were certain he was going to die -- his hair had fallen out, his skin was covered with bloody splotches, and his body seemed to be working against him. Instead, Khokhlov somehow came out of it.

In the 1960s, Khokhlov went on to begin an entirely new career as a tenured psychology professor at California State University at San Bernardino. He became known as an exceedingly articulate defender of parapsychology, and conversely a critic of Freud and Jung.

Interest in Khokhlov became renewed in November, when another defector from Moscow -- Alexander Litvinenko -- was poisoned by a nuclear isotope in London. Litvinenko displayed almost identical symptoms to those suffered by Khokhlov. It turned out that he was poisoned by polonium, another radioactive isotope. Litvinenko died in November. Khokhlov gave several interviews in which he pinned the blame on the Russian spy services.

Khokhlov leaves his wife, Tanja, a son, two daughters and five grandchildren.