NEWS ANALYSIS
The Gongadze cover-up
by Roman Kupchinsky
RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch
PART I
This September will mark the fourth anniversary of the killing of Heorhii Gongadze, a 31-year-old journalist in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
Mr. Gongadze's murder, which remains unsolved, has been the subject of numerous international protests and has generated hundreds of articles in the world press. The inability of Ukrainian law enforcement agencies to solve the case has isolated Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma throughout the world and created a prolonged crisis throughout his second term as president.
Apparently it is also a case cloaked by a massive cover-up engineered by high-level officials in Kyiv.
Known for articles that he and his co-workers had been writing about corruption at the highest levels of government, Mr. Gongadze disappeared on the night of September 16, 2000. The next day many people began to blame Mr. Kuchma for complicity in his disappearance. The president and his closest circle had often been mentioned in Mr. Gongadze's exposés and, therefore, Mr. Kuchma, in the eyes of many, had a good reason to see Mr. Gongadze cease his activities.
Their fears were confirmed two days after his disappearance when an anonymous caller to the Georgian Embassy in Kyiv told the receptionist that Mr. Gongadze could be found in the Kyivsky District of Kyiv and that Yurii Kravchenko (the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), Oleksander Volkov (a close friend of Mr. Kuchma and his campaign manager) and Volodymyr Kysil (a well-known organized crime figure in Kyiv) knew where he was. There is no record of what the investigation was able to determine about this call, if there was any investigation of it at all.
On September 27, 2000, the Interfax news agency reported that President Kuchma officially announced that he was taking the investigation under his personal control. By making such a statement, Mr. Kuchma apparently wanted to deflect speculations and show that he, too, was interested in finding the killer or killers. But by announcing this obligation he also took upon himself responsibility for everything that was to take place in the coming months and years.
Earlier that same year a Russian journalist, Andrei Babitsky, had suddenly gone missing in Chechnya. Mr. Babitsky's reporting on the war in Chechnya had been angering the Kremlin for some time, and his disappearance was soon blamed by many observers on the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) which was suspected of having arranged his kidnapping. This precedent was to play a role in the events that took place in Kyiv.
In early November 2000, Gongadze's headless body was accidentally discovered in a shallow ditch outside of Kyiv.
On November 28, 2000, the leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Oleksander Moroz, told the Ukrainian Parliament that he had in his possession recordings made in the president's office and that these recordings showed that Mr. Kuchma had discussed Mr. Gongadze with Internal Affairs Minister Kravchenko and Leonid Derkach, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Furthermore, in these discussions, recorded prior to Mr. Gongadze's disappearance, Mr. Kuchma had been urging the removal of Mr. Gongadze.
The Babitsky scenario was most definitely on President Kuchma's mind as he told Mr. Kravchenko on July 10, 2000: "I tell you, get him out, throw him out, give him to the Chechen's (expletive), have him become a hostage, let them pay a ransom for him."
Kravchenko: "We will think it through. We will do what is needed I was told today that we are preparing a program for him. We are studying his movements, where he goes. We need to learn this and then we will act
What Mr. Kravchenko was describing is the surveillance which had been placed by the Internal Affairs Ministry on Mr. Gongadze in July and which continued up to the day he went missing.
This fact has been denied for four years by Mr. Kuchma, Mr. Kravchenko and Leonid Derkach. All three men have stated that the recordings made in the president's office were "fakes" and that there was never any surveillance of Mr. Gongadze by the MVD.
The surveillance
On January 15, 2001, Yuriy Lutsenko, the editor of the newspaper "Grani" published an article in which he stated that MVD officers from the Organized Crime Unit were involved in the surveillance of Mr. Gongadze. A few days after this disclosure, a number of MVD officers were interrogated by the office of the Procurator-General of Ukraine (PGU). These interrogation reports were never released, but now it is clear that the men who were questioned had been forced to deny surveilling Mr. Gongadze.
Apparently the PGU wanted to have such evidence on file in case Mr. Lutsenko or others were to continue this line of investigative reporting.
Almost 4 years later new information on the case appeared in the London newspaper "The Independent" on June 19, 24 and 26 of this year. The author of the article, Askold Krushelnycky, stated that he received copies of interrogations of these same MVD officers conducted in June, July and August 2003.
The documents given to Mr. Krushelnycky show that the newly appointed Procurator-General of Ukraine, Svyatoslav Piskun, had repeated the interrogations of these same men. Only this time the officers told a different story. One of them, Major Serhiy Chemenko, described how in January 2001 he had been coached by a high official of the MVD, Lt. General Oleksiy Pukach, the head of the Criminal Investigation Division, on how to answer the questions which the PGU investigator would pose. Mr. Chemenko admitted that he was not asked any questions and merely told to sign his interrogation report. The fake interrogation report stated that there had been no surveillance of Mr. Gongadze.
Major Chemenko told investigators on June 19, 2003:
"Concerning the surveillance of Mr. Gongadze it took place in the late summer-early fall. Normally such surveillance lasts 10 days, but in his case it lasted longer This surveillance lasted up to the day of his disappearance Our work was coordinated by Bernak After our shift ended, we prepared a report on our days activities which everyone on the shift signed and it was sent to our section head"
"Why did the deputy head of the division, Mr. Bernak, coordinate the work of the surveillance team following Mr. Gongadze?"
"For some reason the surveillance of Mr. Gongadze was given a very high priority. Even the head of the Main Administration of the Criminal Investigation Division, (General) Oleksiy Pukach himself took part in the field work."
During an interrogation held on June 11, 2003, Volodymyr Yaroshenko, identified in the interrogation report as a police officer, told investigators:
"First of all, I want to admit for the first time that surveillance of Gongadze H.R. took place and that I personally, as an employee of the Main Administration of the Criminal Investigation Division of the MVD of Ukraine, took part in it."
The new information published by the "Independent" also served as additional proof that the recordings made in the president's office were authentic.
The first proof that the recorded segments dealing with the Gongadze surveillance were authentic came in 2001, when a private audio laboratory in Virginia (USA) Bek-Tek, headed by a former FBI audio forensics specialist, Bruce Koening, came to the conclusion that the recordings were genuine. Later, in 2002, the FBI forensic audio laboratory came to the same conclusion when it examined a different segment of the recordings dealing with a conversation between Mr. Kuchma and the head of the state arms sales company during which the president expressed his intent to break the arms embargo and sell Iraq the highly advanced Kolchuha radar system.
Despite these findings, the official position of Mr. Kuchma, who had assumed responsibility over the investigation, and the MVD was that the tapes were fake and the investigation of the Gongadze case was steaming along at full speed.
The PGU even went so far as to authenticate the recordings themselves and found them to be fakes. The then Procurator-General Mykhailo Potebenko concocted a story that whoever made the recordings edited together phrases uttered by the men heard on the recordings in order to compromise them.
PART I
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 18, 2004, No. 28, Vol. LXXII
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