Tuesday, September 11, 2012

RC#61: The Kolchuga capers


published in Eastern Economist #452, October 1, 2002
I was supposed to be away on vacation for another week, but the situation in the country is getting out of hand. Apparently, the US has decided that the voice Maj. Mykola Melnychenko has on tape in at least one fairly compromising conversation does belong to Ukraine’s president, Leonid Kuchma. It’s about time.
            This charade has been going on for nearly two years now, ever since November 2000, when Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz first blew the story open in Ukraine’s legislature.
            When the tapes first started circulating in Ukraine, there was no doubt in most people’s minds that it was, for better or for worse, the voice of their president. The man whom, just a year earlier, they had re-elected after a fairly questionable campaign that left him and the Communist Party leader as the only two in a run-off.
            The conversations published then were between Leonid Kuchma and Leonid Derkach, the head of the Secret Service, and Yuriy Kravchenko, the chief of police. They resembled mostly backroom chat among officials airing their private beefs about the media and other matters that beleaguered top officials are wont to complain about.
            At the time, the first thing everybody commented on was the foulness of Mr. Kuchma’s language. It wasn’t just locker-room talk. It was the language of a person who did not seem to be able to say more than three words in a row without one of them being foul. Worse, he showed little imagination even in his foulness, using the same four-letter word over and over – one that is most commonly associated with the language of teenage boys.
            The second thing was the content. The tapes came in the wake of the disappearance of an obscure but pesky journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, and the discovery of a dead body near Kyiv. On the tape, Mr. Kuchma was heard making some suggestions for getting rid of the nuisancy journalist by “dropping him down among the Chechens in his gaunchies.”
            Admittedly, that might have been highly uncomfortable, possibly embarrassing, for Gongadze. But nothing more “serious” was revealed in the conversations that have so far been publicized. The steps from there to a headless corpse in Tarashcha are certainly not obvious from the taped conversations aired to date.
            Yes, Ukraine’s president came off as somewhat less brilliant than a rocket scientist and less well-bred than Emily Post. But there are any number of heads of state that could be described in equally unflattering terms.
            But this newest transcription is different. It does not reveal a conversation between a Head of State and a high government official.
            It reveals a conversation between a mafia don and one of his underlings. There is no other way to describe the content of such a conversation. Here’s what happens if you change the names:

Larry:     There’s a request for a special operation. Our Jordanian contact says Mohammed wants four Kolchugas. He’s offering a hundred million bucks cash.
Lenny:    What’s a f'n Kolchuga?

Larry:     It’s a passive anti-aircraft radar, boss. Keeps enemy MiGs off yer turf.
Lenny:    Who the f-k makes it?

Larry:     Topaz, Tommy’s crowd. Four of them makes a set, and it goes for a hundred million.
Lenny:    Can you sell it without the f'n Jordanian?

Larry:     Sure, boss. I suggest we get Billy to take care of it. Look at system we have to ship stuff from here to Iraq. The Kolchuga sits on a KrAZ anyway, so we crate them along with a bunch of KrAZ’s, that’s all. What’s going to give away that they’re Kolchugas and not just a lot of KrAZs like we usually ship. So a couple of our boys go along for the ride with fake passports to install and deploy it.
Lenny:    Make sure the f'n Jordanian doesn’t blab. Those f-kers'll be keeping an eye on the shipment.

Larry:     Who’ll be keeping an eye on it? We’re not selling them anything new, the Jordies, I mean. But don’t worry, we’ll be careful.
Lenny:   OK. Go ahead.

Larry:     Roger. Thanks.

This was in July. Nine months later, in late February, Der Spiegel, a major German weekly, finds a link to Iraq. Two firms in the city of Mannheim are suspected of being involved in illegal arms export to Iraq and of violating the UN trade embargo against this country. Their operations are being handled out through another small company in Germany which had connections leading to Britain, Switzerland – and Lenny’s home town.
            Soon, the FBI will start sniffing at Lenny’s door. Barely a week after this story hits the papers, Larry shows up dead in a car crash. In broad daylight. In the car with him was an underling who claims he fell asleep at the wheel. In broad daylight.
            Now, put the right names back into the story. •

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