- You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see
what was going on.
And in particular you had to be willfully ignorant
if you didn't see the implications of the Ryazan incident.
In the summer of 1999 the approval rating
of former President Yeltsin was 2%.
There appeared to be no chance whatever that Putin,
who was designated by Yeltsin as his successor
could possibly become the next Russian president.
The apartment bombings changed everything.
It was said after those buildings went up
that now we're living in a completely different country.
Putin came forward as the savior of the country.
He was put in charge of a war in Chechnya.
The bombings were blamed on Chechens
without any evidence whatsoever, and as a result of
the successful prosecution of that war,
against all odds he was elected the next Russian president.
The apartment bombings appear to be the keystone
of a plot to confuse Russian public opinion,
to create terror, to distract the Russian public,
to redirect their anger away from the corruption
that had flourished under Yeltsin, and toward the Chechens
who had had for a number of years
a semi-independent government in Chechnya
and in that way create the conditions for the Russian people
to vote in what they absolutely consciously did not want,
which was a successor to Yeltsin who would protect Yeltsin.
There was an enormous amount of material
in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta which pointed to
the possibility and in fact to the likelihood
that the authorities themselves blew up those buildings.
At the same time a fifth bomb was discovered
in the basement of an apartment building in Ryazan,
which is a city southeast of Moscow.
And I went to Ryazan after the bomb was discovered
and diffused to talk to local residents and it was clear
from those conversations that what took place
was a genuine attempt to blow up a fifth building.
The authorities said that this was only
a training exercise, but it was nothing of the kind.
And what was most important was that three persons
were arrested for putting a bomb in a building in Ryazan.
They turned out to be not Chechens,
not terrorists in the usual sense,
but rather agents of the Federal Securities Service
which is the FSB.
I asked for documents from the CIA from the FBI,
from the directorate of national intelligence
from the state department.
I got very, very little that was of any use.
But I did get a few documents from the state department
which indicated that their sources of information
were telling them that the apartment bombings
were extremely suspicious.
You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see
what was going on.
And in particular you had to be willfully ignorant
if you didn't see the implications of the Ryazan incident
in which three FSB agents were arrested for putting
a fifth bomb in a building, even though the bomb
didn't go off it was a live bomb.
What was it doing in the basement of an apartment building?