Mykola Melnychenko speaks out on his mission and the dangers involved (09/08/02)

Mykola Melnychenko speaks out on his mission and the dangers involved

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - Mykola Melny-chenko, the former major in Ukraine's security service who secretly recorded President Leonid Kuchma's conversations and fled with his recordings to the West, is a man caught between what is commonly described as a rock and a hard place.

He's a man with a mission - to topple what he claims is a corrupt and criminal head of state and his cronies - and he intends to do it with his own testimony and the approximately 1,000 hours of recordings that he claims demonstrate not only rampant corruption at the highest levels of government but complicity in murder and other serious crimes as well.

In Ukraine, the government has charged Mr. Melnychenko with passing state secrets - a charge he denies. In the United States, where he and his family received political asylum last year, the Justice Department, with the backing of a California judge, has demanded that he turn over his recordings, state secrets and all, for their ongoing investigations. So far, Mr. Melnychenko said, he and his lawyers have managed to hold back the ones with state secrets.

Mr. Melnychenko was in Washington for three days last week, and, with the help of an intermediary, he agreed to talk about himself and his mission in an interview with The Ukrainian Weekly.

He traveled to Washington along with Hryhorii Omelchenko, who chairs the Verkhovna Rada's interim committee charged with investigating the murder of Internet journalist Heorhii Gongadze and other crimes, and Oleksander Eliashkevych, a former national deputy who two years ago was attacked and severely beaten after he criticized the president publicly. Mr. Eliashkevych has been residing in the United States since April of this year. He applied for political asylum here in June, but his request has not yet been granted.

Mr. Melnychenko, 37, was dressed casually and appeared in good shape and at ease during the interview, which took place August 22 in a borrowed Capitol Hill office between his other scheduled appointments. But he may well have been concealing a concern for his own and his family's safety. The following day, his lawyer, Scott Horton, revealed to the media that a "senior law enforcement officer of the U.S. government" had alerted them a few days earlier that there was a credible threat against his life originating from Ukraine. It was the second such threat alert received from the FBI this year, his lawyer said.

Asked about possible reprisal attacks from those he accuses, Mr. Melnychenko admits that the danger exists and that it is a matter of some concern.

"I worry about the safety of my family," he said. He and his wife, Lilia, whom he married in 1992, have a 5 1/2-year-old daughter, Lesia, who will be entering first grade this year. Since he cannot afford bodyguards and has no intention of getting into the U.S. witness protection program, where he would cease to exist as Mykola Melnychenko, they simply have to have to live with the danger. By the time this story is published, however, he will have moved his family from the New York City area, where they have been living, to another part of the country.

How do they manage? Mr. Melnychenko said that initially he received material support from Yurii Lytvynenko, a businessman member of the Socialist Party of Ukraine. More recently he has received assistance from a few American foundations and international human rights groups.

Mr. Melnychenko was born in 1966 in Vasylkiv, a city of 50,000 southwest of Kyiv. His father, he said, was a "common laborer," working at various jobs, from driving a truck to working in a factory. His mother put enough time in as a hospital technician to earn a pension, but, for the most part, she stayed at home, taking care of her two sons - Mykola and an older brother.

He grew up in Vasylkiv, where he graduated from the mathematics school "with pretty decent grades," he related. "And like most teenagers of that time, I wanted to be a military officer and defend the fatherland."

In 1984, at age 18, he enlisted in the Soviet army. Later he was accepted for officer training, which he completed successfully. As an officer, he joined the KGB, to serve in what was then called the Ninth Directorate, the unit responsible for the security of senior Soviet officials, including then Soviet-President Mikhail Gorbachev.

He served in the security service in Moscow and in Kyiv, but, as he stresses to counter the short-hand descriptions of him in the press, he never worked as a "bodyguard" neither for President Kuchma or for President Gorbachev.

He was stationed in Kyiv during the break-up of the USSR and continued to serve in what is now called the Security Service of Ukraine.

Mr. Melnychenko remembers the post-independence period as one of high hopes for Ukraine. "When independence came, I welcomed it with an open heart and high hopes that life in Ukraine would improve greatly. It had all of the prerequisites for this," he said.

"But with every passing year it became worse and worse," he added. And in the course of his work and travels around the country he began to realize why this was so, he explained.

In all of his various statements, press conferences and interviews, Mr. Melnychenko has consistently evaded answering questions about when he started to secretly record conversations in President Kuchma's office. Neither would he answer that question for The Weekly.

Those who need to know, like Commission Chairman Omelchenko, he said, know the answer.

"Let Kuchma and the mafia remain fearful. Let them worry about when, from what year and which month I began to record," he said. And it wasn't a single incident that moved him to begin recording. It was, as he put it, when "quantity evolved into quality." It was the chasm he observed between the life of the common man and that of the president and the oligarchs, the expensive gifts, corruption and the president's meetings with leaders of criminal groups, he said.

He could have turned a blind eye, he said, continued in his high and well-paid position, with ample perks and the possibility of retiring in 2001 to live in a government-provided apartment, on a good pension and with other privileges.

"But there was the matter of conscience," he said. "My father raised me to fight for what is right - the rule of law, in other words - and to fight for one's people." Having had the technical training for it, he decided to record the evidence, he said.

And why did he finally decide that the time was ripe to go public?

"The evidence was piling up, for one," he said. "Also, when the media began reporting about the disappearance of the journalist (Heorhii Gongadze), I understood that I could no longer remain silent."

He recalled how he and his wife were moved when they saw the slain journalist's widow, Myroslava Gongadze, on television and their reaction to what she said.

"So I asked my wife, 'What do you think this journalist may have done?' And she replied, 'Well, he reported the truth and paid for it.' 'And should one fight for truth?' I asked her, and she replied, 'Yes.'"

That was his Rubicon, he said.

He turned over copies of some of the recordings to Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz, whom he considered to be the most honest political figure he knew. On November 26, 2000, on the recommendation of Mr. Moroz, who was concerned about his safety, Mr. Melnychenko and his family managed to get out of Ukraine to an undisclosed East European country.

One of the first transcripts released through Mr. Moroz included a conversation in the president's office about the need to do something about the bothersome investigative reporter Gongadze.

When the term of his stay in the East European country elapsed, Mr. Melnychenko had to find another host country. In mid-April the State Department confirmed that he and his family were being granted political asylum in the United States, as was at about the same time Myroslava Gongadze along with her children.

Asked why he chose the United States or whether it was the United States that chose him - Mr. Melnychenko replied that he had received offers of asylum from other countries, but added: "Let's put it this way, only a very strong country could fight with and overcome the evil that exists in Ukraine today. And, as I saw it, it would have to be the United States, the more so because Kuchma was afraid of U.S. Ambassador (Steven) Pifer - very much afraid." He was also "very much afraid" of former Vice-President Al Gore, he said, and did everything he could so that he would not be elected president.

Mr. Melnychenko's views about the United States had reversed completely since the mid-1980s, when he saw the U.S. as an enemy of the USSR.

"We had a military doctrine that held that our foremost enemy was the U.S.," he said. "I accepted and believed the notion that the United States was our enemy."

"But as the years and time passed, I became convinced that the United States was not an aggressor," he said. And by 1996, he added, it became our friend.

Mr. Melnychenko admits he has a public image problem. Some people see him as a traitor; others are convinced he was or is working either for the CIA or Russian security; and still others, primarily in the diaspora, think that, although well-intentioned, he is misguided and causing harm to Ukraine by helping move it into Russia's embrace. And there are those who see him as a hero.

His parents, now retired, are suffering from the fallout of his decision to go public with the recordings. And so are his in-laws. "You can appreciate their suffering when a representative of the Kyiv police visits my mother-in-law every week and asks, 'Where is Melnychenko? When did you see him last?'" Every week they traumatize her, he said, knowing full well that he is in the United States. She has had a nervous breakdown and has developed Parkinson's disease, he said.

Asked whether he is optimistic or pessimistic about the future, Mr. Melnychenko said he is "convinced that in the very near future things will come to a fore." And the reason is that, while in the United States, Mr. Omelchenko took an official notarized deposition of his charges, which will be turned over to the Procurator General's Office. With those duly signed and sealed charges in hand, prosecutors will have to investigate them - something they have thus far evaded doing, Mr. Melnychenko said.

He also sees a very good chance for clamping down on the Ukrainian mafia, using judicial proceedings initiated in the United States by such plaintiffs as Ms. Gongadze and Mr. Eliashkevych, provided they can get some legal and technical assistance.

"Unfortunately," he added, "some politicians in Russia and in the United States are taking advantage of the situation to further their own interests." In his view, Russian President Putin is taking advantage of a weakened President Kuchma to have the Ukrainian gas pipelines transferred to the Russian mafia, while the United States is not pushing President Kuchma too hard on reforms, so as not to jeopardize the overfly rights for U.S. military planes in the war against terrorism.

"Kuchma today is drowning Ukraine's interests so that he can stay afloat," he said.

Some have criticized Mr. Melnychenko for dragging out the process of transcribing the recordings and making public only bits and pieces of them. He said that while it is true that not very many recordings have been completely transcribed and that only a small part of these have been released to the press, most of the recordings have been reviewed and annotated, and their contents are known.

If he had the chance to do it all over again, would he do it or change anything?

"I would do a few things differently. I would start recording a lot sooner, and I would have wanted to have the contents of these recordings revealed before the presidential election in 1999," he said.

Mr. Melnychenko declined to take the bait of a tongue-in-cheek question about whether he was invited to any of the diplomatic receptions marking the anniversary of Ukraine's independence. He answered in a more serious tone: "I think that in the not-too-distant future we will celebrate a day of true independence."

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