This is from the government paper. I like the rhetoric.
Rumored High-Level Political Connivance, Security Lapses in Moscow Hostage Crisis Analyzed
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 15 November 2002 [translation for personal use only] Article by Timofey Borisov: "Who Missed Barayev"
Who should be blamed now that 50 terrorists, armed to the teeth, managed to seize hundreds of hostages in the center of Moscow?
As the tragic events connected with the terrorist act on Dubrovka recede into the past, we are more likely to discern previously vague expectations: Will anyone be held responsible for those events? Who is to blame for the fact that a whole gang of terrorists, including individuals with faces familiar from "Wanted" posters, carried out this criminal plan to take hundreds of people hostage in the center of Moscow?
Can anyone be assured that the same thing, or a similar tragedy, will not happen again? These are far from idle questions in view of the fact that the organizers of the terrorist act in the Russian capital, Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev, are still at large, and so are potential new suicide bombers from the ranks of their rebel forces.
The pages of our newspapers are full of conjecture, predicting which of our high-level officials will be penalized, and which will be lucky to keep their heads. As a rule, the predictions focus on two targets: the police and the FSB [Federal Security Service]. They imply that the former allowed a whole company of rebels with forged documents and in full marching order to advance from the Chechen mountains to the capital, establish a bridgehead here for the terrorist act, and bring in a whole arsenal of weapons--and that the rebels managed to do all of this absolutely unimpeded. The FBS knew nothing about the plans for a terrorist act of this magnitude, although it is obligated to know these things. Otherwise, what is the point of all the arguments about the network of confidential agents, etc.? In short, they missed all of the signs.
The newspapers do not appear to be alone in these opinions. A difficult choice is being made in government offices on various levels: Who should be blamed? It is possible that the middle-management link of the police force will be the "whipping boy," especially in the GAI [State Motor Vehicle Inspection Administration] and GIBDD [State Inspectorate for Road Traffic Safety], because they failed to notice the evil rebels behind the tinted windows of the foreign cars. Tackling personnel issues has always been in fashion here, and it has always generated good PR for the regime. We know from experience, however, that people who were not in the wrong usually are blamed in these cases, while the real culprits escape punishment. Where are they, and to what degree are they actually to blame?
It is easy to slam the police, especially when everyone knows that there is good reason for this. When the vehicle filled with explosives was blown up near McDonalds in October, our top officials were quick to assure the Muscovites that this was just another fight between Chechen crime gangs. Rossiyskaya Gazeta ignored the official explanation and immediately described the incident as a terrorist act. It bore too many of the earmarks of the incidents that take place daily in Chechnya and occasionally in other places. After the terrorist act on Dubrovka, MVD officials essentially agreed with our conclusions. Does this mean that journalists know more about the situation than the police do?
Then there was the remark made by a general in a high-level job in the capital, suggesting that he would evaluate the performance of his agency according to the number of cases sent to court. We can imagine how "delighted" the homeless were to hear this statement. Moscow's street people already represent the best means of augmenting the productivity of law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement personnel "make points" by planting drugs and bullets on them, and after the general announced his intentions, the number of cases against the homeless rose dramatically, according to judges. The situation started verging on the ludicrous. Mindful of these police tactics, the homeless started sewing their pockets shut. After that, the vigilant guardians of the law started finding drugs and bullets in ... their socks. According to the vagrants, they started taking cover whenever they heard about an upcoming police sweep in Moscow. A man named Yevstratov is on trial now in one of the Moscow courts. Digging through a trash heap in search of something to sell, this lame and frail man picked up a polyethylene package. Before he had gone a hundred meters, they were "binding his hands" because the package contained nunchakus. Now the unfortunate wretch faces two years behind bars for carrying a concealed weapon in violation of Subsection 4 of Section 222 of the RF Criminal Code.
This can be a source of amusement and a cause for concern, but we do not think the buck should stop with the police in the case of Barayev's terrorist act.
The principal duty of the police is the maintenance of law and order.
The detection of an underground terrorist network is the job of other agencies and the special services. It is tempting to blame the police for failing to notice the rebels, but would this be fair? Despite all of the reports and evidence of corruption in the police force and the solicitation of bribes by police officers, we have to give them credit where credit is due: They do so much to keep us safe and they prevent so many crimes. Rossiyskaya Gazeta recently reported the work GIBDD personnel did during that alarming time. On 25 October alone, they searched vehicles in Moscow Oblast and impounded eight "Shmel" flame throwers, eight mortars, one antiaircraft gun, and two freight containers filled with 32 tonnes (!) of explosives, all of which were on their way to Moscow. The next day they impounded a vehicle carrying camouflage clothing and bladed weapons without any shipping documents. The driver could not tell them anything about the origin of the freight. On 5 November, Highway Safety Inspector Shchedrin from Company 14 stopped a GAZ 3307 vehicle carrying mercury. There were no shipping documents for the 4 tonnes (!) of lethal metal.
These are just a few examples, but similar incidents occur almost every day. This means that our police officers do their job, they do arrest people, they do detect wrongdoing, and they do display courage and intelligence. Furthermore, they risk their lives to do all of this for a meager wage, to put it mildly. Furthermore, they are cleansing their ranks. In that same GIBDD division in Moscow Oblast, disciplinary action was taken against 363 officers in just 10 months this year pursuant to the results of investigations by the Preventive Inspections Division, and 17 were dismissed in disgrace. They were replaced by new officers. Are all of them honest and decent individuals? No one can determine this in advance. The police force, after all, is manned by the same people we rub elbows with in our neighborhoods each day. This is not a specially cultivated caste.
In the formal sense, the special services, and specifically their undercover agents, missed Barayev, but this is not an incontestable fact either. There are more questions than answers. According to the terrorists, when they were making preparations for their terrorist act, they were active in Moscow for two months, buying weapons, living in safe houses, and attending a performance of "Nord-Ost." Were there no information leaks whatsoever? Did the FSB hear nothing about this? These are difficult questions....
I recently read a book by Nikolay Batyushin, one of the founding fathers of the earlier, tsarist system of Russian military intelligence.
I was most amazed by the now inconceivable sums of money the tsarist government allocated for its confidential agents in just the Warsaw Military District before and during World War I. We can safely assume that there was no extra money in the country at that difficult time, but the government believed that this work was worth the cost. It was better to spend large amounts of money on informants and learn in advance what the enemy was planning than to suffer heavy losses in battle, to bury soldiers and officers, and to lose costly military equipment. Is the fight against terrorism not the same kind of deadly warfare? For this reason, before we ask questions about the failure of the confidential agent network, we have to find our how much money was allocated for this work--and not just the work of the agents, but the work of the special services in general. It would be extremely naive to assume that someone in Moscow, not to mention someone in Chechnya, would risk his life to tell security agencies about the plans for a crime without good reason. I once witnessed this kind of incident in Chechnya. The operatives of the grouping were worn out from carrying all of the ammunition and weapons out of a secret cache. They had carried out about a thousand demolition charges. This was the biggest weapons cache they had found since the start of the second Chechen campaign. The Chechen who had taken revenge against Maskhadov by telling them about the cache asked for 3,000 rubles to pay one of his friends, who knew of two other comparable caches. Just 3,000 rubles to prevent hundreds of possible explosions. When I left Chechnya a month later, the money still had not been paid.
Give this state of affairs, how can anything surprise us? As soon as the senators responded to the tragic events on Dubrovka by resolving to allocate more money for security, some newspapers came out with headlines warning that the special services were getting more money again, and that the KGB was being revived. In the last 12 years, our special services were "reformed" so zealously (Sergey Stepashin, who became the head of the FSB after the latest phase of this process, called the reform a castration), that they simply cannot be expected to maintain the excellent network of confidential agents that took decades to build. The few remaining former professionals at Lubyanka say that the former dissidents were particularly active in demolishing the services making up the KGB (which included much more than just the directorate prosecuting anti-Soviet activity). In the beginning of the 1990s, they freely raced through the corridors of Lubyanka and spitefully committed unforgivable acts, destroying the agent files, while that notorious hysterical woman, who was a member of the KGB Personnel Commission, judged the suitability of candidates for positions in the state security network on her own. Judging by all indications, the realization that someone reluctant to feed his own soldiers would soon be feeding others was slow in arriving.
Thank God, they now understand at least this.
There is another aspect of the tragic events on Dubrovka. Many of the professionals I spoke with are convinced that this could not have happened without the help of high-level patrons. Basayev and Maskhadov, they assert, were incapable of carrying out this kind of operation on their own. I heard the same thing from a highly informed Chechen source, once a close friend of Maskhadov. He asked me a seemingly simple question: Could armed Chechens capable of paying out a million dollars in bribes get all the way to Moscow? Remembering what we had heard about the terrorist act in Budennovsk, I confidently replied that they certainly could. The Chechen, however, said the answer was an unequivocal no. "You have to realize," he said, "that I am stopped five times a day by the police in Moscow. Believe me, if I were a wanted man, nothing would help. Even if I had a million dollars, they would simply take it away from me, and then they would also 'make points' by arresting me. The same thing would have happened to the rebels if they had tried to get to Moscow on their own, using the 'infiltration' method.
Miracles do not happen. The terrorist act on Dubrovka was directed and backed by extremely high-ranking individuals in Moscow and abroad."
How credible is this opinion? I will not try to answer that question, but I could not come up with any arguments to disagree with him, or to agree with him. If we assume that this was the case, however, many of the details that seem so peculiar would sound more logical, particularly in connection with the sweep and scope of the terrorist act. We have to wonder what else could happen: After all, 50 butchers, armed to the teeth, could seize not only a theater, but also the State Duma, for example, while it is in session. A couple of police officers at the door could not stop them.
The "Nord-Ost" tragedy became possible because we kept criticizing everything of our own and praising everything Western for the last 10 years, destroying our own home and using the remainder principle to finance the services responsible for our safety and our lives. Later, as soon as tragedy struck, we demanded to know: Where were the police and the special services? Perhaps we finally should stop begrudging the expenditures on our own security and find, metaphorically speaking, those 3,000 rubles, so that no more of our buildings will be blown up, and so that the foreign special services will stop lording it over us here in Russia.