This exceptional man inspired generations of diplomats and journalists, including me. But I never thought I was Maclean. Klebnikov apparently did. “Most journalists think of themselves as observers. But Paul thought of himself as a participant. Like Maclean, Klebnikov wasn’t only interested in recording what he saw. He really believed he could play a part in public affairs,” said James Michaels, the Forbes editor who hired him. William Baldwin, another of Klebnikov’s editors, said, “He had this messianic belief that he was going to be part of the transition from a gangster country to a civilized country.”
I couldn’t relate to this side of Klebnikov. I felt highly uncomfortable with the notion of injecting myself into the affairs of a foreign country. Not Klebnikov. He seemed to have acquired Lord Jim pretensions, exhibiting the vanity of a Westerner who imagined himself rescuing the natives. As to his bashing of Berezovsky, I had dealt with many such unappealing characters over the years, but I felt it was crossing a journalistic line to invest so much personal outrage in one’s reportage.
But that, of course, was precisely the point for Klebnikov. He was personally invested in the story. He did take offense at the perceived misconduct of those he wrote about, Berezovsky being a prime example.
The Russian edition of Godfather of the Kremlin became a nonfiction bestseller, with 110,000 copies sold. Klebnikov tried to repeat that success with a book based on fifteen hours of taped conversation with a well-known Chechen warlord named Khozh-Ahmed Nukhayev. The man had been a debonair law student in Moscow and then a mobster before becoming a Chechen guerilla fighter and finally an anti-Western Islamic fundamentalist. But the book, Conversation with a Barbarian, was a flop, selling only six thousand copies.
Still, Klebnikov’s writings about Berezovsky had impressed his editors. They offered him the editorship of his own magazine, a Russian-language version of Forbes, and he readily accepted. All these years, Klebnikov had been flying from the United States and elsewhere to Moscow to do his reporting, then returning home. Now he could live in the Russian capital.
The forty-year-old Klebnikov, handsome, with piercing hazel eyes and a shock of brown hair, plunged headlong into his new assignment. He threw a champagne party for the magazine’s launch, at the five-star Baltschug hotel on the Moscow River. And he set in motion an editorial project that was breathtaking by Russian standards—an American-style listing of the country’s wealthiest citizens. It would throw the spotlight on Russia’s profiteers and surely offend the gangster element that would be well represented on the list. Klebnikov’s brainstorm seemed impossible to execute. How could anyone assemble such a list in a country where personal wealth is hidden from view, largely stashed in offshore accounts under false names? Yet Klebnikov and his team somehow succeeded, and the resulting layout, “The Golden Hundred,” was an instant sensation. It appeared in the magazine’s second issue, in May 2004, and catapulted Forbes Russia into the top tier of the country’s business magazines.
One might expect Klebnikov’s editorial daring to have triggered threats of physical retaliation; death threats had been quick to follow publication of “Godfather of the Kremlin?” in the magazine’s U.S. edition. But I could find no record of any threats against Klebnikov while he edited Forbes Russia. This was somewhat puzzling. As Leonid Bershidsky, his publisher in Moscow at the time, observed, “He was doing investigative stories and was making enemies with every story.”
Klebnikov now moved about Moscow without bodyguards, outwardly confident that he was in no personal danger. He was heartened by Boris Berezovsky’s self-exile in London and the firm rule of Vladimir Putin, now president of Russia. A fresh breeze was blowing through the country, he thought. But the private Klebnikov seemed somewhat ambivalent about security conditions. His wife and their three children had remained in the United States; she didn’t want to live in Russia and Klebnikov had agreed to take the job for just a year. When a visitor asked why his family was not with him, he replied, “I don’t know if it is safe for my family.”
Bershidsky, technically Klebnikov’s boss at Forbes Russia, was employed by Newsweek when I first met him in Moscow in the early 1990s. I was writing for the magazine and he was a “fixer,” on call to translate and solve any problems encountered by its reporters. He had since become a notable success in the business world. He told me that Klebnikov’s managerial skills were lacking, but that his journalism was towering. Klebnikov, he said, could “spend a month on a project and dig out something that others wanted to but couldn’t for ten years.” The American editor dazzled on all fronts. “People gathered around to hear how he carried out interviews,” Bershidsky said.
But as I talked with other journalists in Moscow, I discovered that Klebnikov’s reputation was mixed. Again and again I was told that his main claim to fame—the book Godfather of the Kremlin—was based on documents and interviews provided by a single disgruntled former Berezovsky ally, Alexander Korzhakov, who had been Boris Yeltsin’s chief of security. Prevailing wisdom said it was a hatchet job.
I concluded that some of the criticism was sour grapes. From the endnotes, one can see that Korzhakov provided Klebnikov with a road map—the knowledge and documents that he needed to get started. But finding fault with Klebnikov seemed to overlook how investigative journalism often begins with information supplied by an insider. Then the real work begins: The reporter must seek corroboration, authenticate documents, test the credibility of sources, and broaden the story to include all sides. Klebnikov’s twenty-nine pages of endnotes are an impressive display of such footwork. Overall, the book was solid journalism, covering a vast amount of ground, with insider detail that gave the reader a “you are there” feeling.
Not that it is bulletproof. Valeri Streletsky, the publisher of the Russian-language edition, was in fact Korzhakov’s former deputy, and thus an interested party. Streletsky told me that Klebnikov brought him the English-language manuscript that was being published by Harcourt, the Florida-based house, and that he simply hired a translator for the Russian edition. He didn’t see anything unscrupulous about his role, and given that it was a straight translation of the English edition, I didn’t either. Still, it was reckless for Klebnikov to expose himself to this appearance of partiality.
The English-language edition occasionally suffers from disingenuous writing. It hints at a Berezovsky connection to certain murders, but presents no proof. For example, Klebnikov writes that many of Berezovsky’s business ventures “were marred by the assassination or accidental death of key players,” but “there is no evidence that Berezovsky was responsible for any of these deaths.” What was Klebnikov’s point, other than to plant in the reader’s mind the opposite message—that Berezovsky somehow was to blame? Klebnikov also overexerts himself in some instances to show cause and effect. For example, he intimates that Berezovsky caused the Second Chechen War by making ransom payments to Chechen kidnappers who then attacked Russia. Berezovsky’s aim, according to Klebnikov? To make Putin president. Without something more in the way of evidence, the scenario is strained and unconvincing.