“Rule the world,” said Edik cryptically.
At least this time he did not accuse me of asking him black-and-white questions about multicolor subjects that his grandfather could not understand.
Then he set me up to interview Dudayev’s widow, Alla Dudayeva, who just happened to be in town and, indeed, in the next room.
A small ethnic Russian woman (and a Soviet officer’s daughter) from Estonia who fancied herself an artist, Alla Dudayeva had been present at the time of the killing of her husband near the village of Gekhi-Chu, and gave me a completely different account of how it happened. Her description of the sudden ‘woosh’ suggested that the projectile that killed Dudayev was actually a laser-guided artillery shell called in by hidden spotters—adding yet another version to the growing conspiracy list. This now included everything from Edik’s American missile theory to a related twist that had an American AWACs airplane feeding the Russians the coordinates of Dudayev’s satellite phone while the Chechen president waited on hold to speak with Bill Clinton. Variations of this theme had Dudayev talking with a trusted interlocutor in Moscow, making a call to a Moroccan intermediary and chatting with the Boston-based academic Diane Roazen. These versions agree that Dudayev was rudely interrupted mid-sentence by a direct projectile hit trained on his telephone signal, and instantly killed. Still another twist has the Russians dropping a concussion bomb that killed Dudayev horribly and slowly by shattering bodily organs from the inside out, and another version that it was all a sham, and that Djohar Dudayev was still alive, but in necessary Occlusion. He would remain in hiding until Grozny was liberated, when he would return in Mahdi-like form to resume his presidency. But that holy day had come and gone, and even Alla Dudayeva dismissed the idea of her husband’s returning from the grave as nonsense.
“My husband was only one of many martyrs who died for Chechen independence,” she said softly. “Our task now is to make sure their deaths were not in vain.”
Then she thoughtfully gave me an autographed poem and showed me a photographic album of her paintings, all of which had been incinerated in Grozny
The man formally responsible for the Chechen Foreign Ministry in Istanbul may have been Acting President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, but the man on the ground (and paying the rent) was Khoj Akhmet Noukhayev. Khoj Akhmet (standard variations on his name include Hajj Ahmad Nukaev) was the cool-to-cold former head of Dudayev’s security apparatus, and a man who seemed to tolerate reports in the foreign media that described him as the ultimate Chechen mafioso so long as said reports credited him with being a state-building (or maybe state-supplanting) philosopher. The cash for the Bebek digs, for example, seems to have come not from the exchequer of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in Grozny (was there such an office?) but from Adnan Khashoggi (an Arabized form of the word Kashikji, or “Spoon-maker”), the globe-trotting Saudi business tycoon and international weapons dealer. Khoj Akhmet and Khashoggi appeared together at a Crans Montana Forum, an annual economic event held in Switzerland (that clearly attempted to rival the Davos World Economic Affairs forums) designed to bring together leading personalities from the business and political worlds for a little multilateral chitchat and discreet deal making.
It was there that Noukhayev first put on the table the idea of creating a “Caucasus Chamber of Commerce,” an interesting concept, given the convoluted politics of the region, that focused on devolution from state structures to those of the clan. Thus, on a theoretical level, Khoj Akhmet was seeking to destroy, or at least supplant, the state his operation was allegedly put in place to represent, while businessman Khashoggi announced that he had taken such a keen interest in newly independent Chechnya that he was willing to cough up one hundred million dollars to set up a joint investment bank.
Another of Yanderbayev’s men in Istanbul—and indeed, Noukhayev’s right-hand man—was Mansour Maciej Jachimczyk, a Polish Jew who had first converted to Catholicism when studying at Oxford, before then becoming a double apostate by next adopting Islam. Religious concerns or definitions aside, his crowded business card announced him to be not only the Secretary General of the International Roundtable for the Reconstruction of Chechnya, Peace in the Caucasus and Democracy in Russia, but also the Chief Advisor to the Government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria on Foreign Affairs and Foreign Economic Relations.
On a more casual level, he labeled himself a “Chechen agent,” a term that carried not only the familiar associations with dark deeds of espionage, but entertainment. Assisted by Khashoggi’s third wife, Shahpari, and a best-left-nameless CPA for the stars in Los Angeles, Mansour orchestrated a grand project to entice Elizabeth Taylor and Julio Iglesias to bombed-out Grozny to act as hosts for a one-thousand-dollar-a-plate Chechen war orphan benefit.
What? A Polish Jewish-Catholic convert to Sufi Islam fronting for a Saudi arms merchant supporting a former KGB hit man semiassociated with Osama bin Laden in league with Liz Taylor and Julio Iglesias, all sitting around the same one thousand dollars-a-plate benefit dinner to aid Chechen children in Grozny?
Well, yes—but who says geopolitics can’t be fun?
Actually, seeing old violet eyes in Grozny would have been a great coup, but then Liz got brain cancer and had to cancel. After her recovery, however, there she was with Julio, sitting at Mansour and Khoj Akhmed’s table for the slightly postponed charity bash, although for logistical reasons it had been transferred from downtown Grozny to Istanbul’s spectacularly expensive Ciragan Palace Hotel on the middle Bosphorus. The next stop for Mansour and Khoj Akhmet was London, for a meeting with Baroness Margaret Thatcher and other Tory lords interested in Chechnya’s oil pipeline schemes. The pair got around.
Meanwhile, in independent Chechnya itself, the charred and bloody landscape where heroes once fought was falling into the grip of nameless fear and dread. Friends were only friends-apparent. Trusted guides and protectors could turn. No one really knew who was who anymore. People had become booty to be exchanged for cash ransoms; Russian television reporters could fetch millions, and foreigners—well, it was assumed that all were worth their weight in gold, if you wanted to bother keeping them alive.
The most celebrated case of foreigners disappearing in Chechnya belonged to the unfortunate American humanitarian aid worker, Fred Cuny, who went missing at the time of the Samashki Massacre in the Spring of 1995. Subsequent consensus suggests that Cuny had pushed a bridge too far, and was executed by Chechen rebels in the vicinity of Fortress Bamut on suspicion of being a Russian spy.
But Cuny was not the only outlander to go missing at the hands of suspicious guards, rapacious kidnappers, or psychotic killers. Arguably the most horrible incident was when six Red Cross workers were slaughtered in their sleep in the town of Novi Atagi in November 1996. Although a shroud of conspiracy continues to obscure the identities of the killers, word had it that, far from being a murderous plot hatched by Moscow that was designed to destabilize Chechnya and drive all foreign observers from the country—which was the effective result—the killings were carried out by disgruntled security men who thought they would teach the Red Cross a lesson for declining the group’s professional “protection” services. Equally awful was the beheading of four British Telecom workers, abducted for ransom by unknowns and then killed when the gang felt the antikidnapping squad on their trail was getting too close.