AT A TIME WHEN dozens of countries are routinely expelling record numbers of Russian intelligence officers, news of the unmasking of yet another Russian spy is barely newsworthy. However, the case of Sergey Cherkasov/Victor Muller is different. That is because, unlike the vast majority of Russian spies with blown covers, he did not operate under diplomatic protection. This is not necessarily uncommon —in fact, there are probably dozens of Russian case officers operating internationally without diplomatic cover. What is unusual is that one of them has been publicly unmasked. What is more, the case offers some interesting pointers for those interested in contemporary human intelligence (HUMINT).

The Facts

According to the Netherlands General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), which publicized the case last week, a man using a Brazilian passport attempted to enter Holland in April of this year. His passport had been issued under the name Victor Muller Ferreira, allegedly born to an Irish father and a Spanish-speaking mother in Niteroi (near Rio de Janeiro) on April 4, 1989. However, according to the AIVD, the man’s real name is Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, a citizen of Russia, who was born on September 11, 1985. Based on the information released by Dutch intelligence, Cherkasov is an intelligence officer of the Main Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff, which is commonly known as the GRU.

The AIVD claims that the reason for Cherkasov’s visit to the Netherlands was to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, as a paid intern. He eventually planned to transition into full-time employment in the ICC, where he “would be highly valuable to the Russian intelligence services”. The AIVD reportedly notified the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service, which detained Cherkasov upon his arrival at Amsterdam’s Airport Schiphol. The Dutch government declared the alleged GRU officer persona non grata and promptly expelled him back to Brazil “on the first flight out”.

Cherkasov’s Cover and Legend

Cherkasov arrived in Holland with a cover, a term that refers to a fake operational identity used for purposes of espionage. It is unlikely that his cover was natural, meaning that he is probably not Brazilian by birth —though it is possible that at least one of his parents was/is not Russian by birth. What is more likely is that Cherkasov’s cover is contractual, meaning that it was crafted especially for him by the GRU after he was hired as an intelligence officer. This likely happened as many as 10 years ago, when Cherkasov was in his early 20s.

The next stage in Cherkasov’s career required him to enter a cosmopolitan lifestyle, designed to introduce a degree of opaqueness into his personal history. According to information released by the AIVD, the alleged spy’s parents —indeed most of his extended family— were allegedly dead by the time he was in his late 20s. That would have shielded his cover with an extra layer of protection, since no family members would be around to contest his claims. Cherkasov worked as a travel agent in Brazil before moving to Ireland in 2014, where he majored in political science at Trinity College Dublin. He then went on to complete a Master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, which he received in 2020.

Throughout that time, Cherkasov muddled his background, built his fake persona of a motivated political science student, and severed all ties to Russia. He also carefully curated his online profile via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as through blogging on geopolitics. In doing so, he appears to have gone out of his way to express views critical of the Kremlin, while at the same time espousing pro-Western positions on a wide range of topics. It is worth noting that, based on information that has surfaced since his unmasking, Cherkasov’s contacts in Ireland, the United States and elsewhere did not suspect that he had any ties to Russia, let alone Russian intelligence.

The reason why Cherkasov managed to avoid suspicion by those around him was that he was able to craft a multi-level legend. The term refers to an entire universe of informational and physical artefacts that support one’s cover. These include an operative’s digital profile, as well as their biographical details, family life, educational history, personal interests, etc., that breathe life to their cover. Furthermore, building a legend encompasses the meticulous memorization of minute details, anecdotal stories and memories of one’s life, as these have the ability to strengthen the authenticity —and therefore credibility— of one’s cover. This can be seen in Cherkasov’s draft autobiographical note, which the AIVD somehow managed to acquire, and which it publicized last week in Portuguese, Dutch and English.

Some observers referred to this document as “extraordinary”. That is true, but only in the sense that it has been made available to the public. In reality, this document is typical of the kind of detailed biographical sketches that deep-cover operatives are required to produce —usually in the language of their cover— while building their legend. The document appears to be an early biographical sketch produced by Cherkasov in the process of creating his fake identity. He would have shared this draft with his support operations officer, seeking detailed feedback. He would then have repeated this process until the information contained in the document was convincing even to someone who grew up in the very neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro that Cherkasov/Muller claims to have lived.

Remaining Questions

Just how that AIVD came to be in possession of this fascinating document remains unknown. There is also the question of just how the AIVD became aware of Cherkasov’s links with the GRU. Given that the spy lived in Ireland and the United States in the past several years, it is likely that operational carelessness on his part could have raised suspicions among people around him, thus triggering a counterintelligence investigation. It is also possible —though not likely— that his ICC internship application resulted in a detailed examination of his background by the AIVD, which is aware of attempts by foreign countries to embed spies on Dutch soil through the ICC and other international organizations based in Holland.

Perhaps the biggest question, which also remains unanswered, is why the Dutch did not arrest Cherkasov, choosing instead to send him back to Brazil “on the first flight out”. One would imagine it is not every day that a Western intelligence agency gets its hands on a deep-cover Russian operative. Cherkasov’s background, training and mission details would have been of interest to a host of Western government agencies. Did the Dutch already know everything they needed to know about him? Would it have been difficult to legally justify Cherkasov’s detention without exposing —and thus endangering— the source or information that led to his unmasking? Or could it be that the Dutch government did not wish to enter into a prolonged tit-for-tat contest of expulsions with Moscow, which might weaken its own intelligence presence inside Russia? These questions are among several that are unanswered, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

* Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis is Professor of Intelligence and Security Studies at Coastal Carolina University. He specializes in intelligence collection involving SIGINT and HUMINT.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 20 June 2022 | Permalink

Some said the old friends rarely speak these days, save for government business. Ensuring a smooth transition may be tricky with the war still raging, with one official telling POLITICO that Zelenskyy is worried about the optics of sacking someone from his inner circle. For now, much of the SBU’s daily operations are being run from the presidential office and people still in good graces of Zelenskyy and his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Bakanov is a lanky 47-year-old who’s been at Zelenskyy’s side since the latter rose from a scrawny comedian in the industrial, south-central city of Kryvyi Rih to a muscular war-hardened leader famous well beyond Ukraine’s borders. Bakanov’s appointment in 2019 was criticized by opposition parties who said someone with his background was unfit to lead the top intelligence-gathering agency. But as one of the president’s most trusted confidants and business partners, there was little opponents could do to stop the move.

Now some feel vindicated as criticisms of Bakanov reverberate in the halls of government and parliament. Many in Kyiv allege that he failed to respond to Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 and properly command his behemoth department of over 30,000 agents.

“We are highly unsatisfied with his job and are working to get rid of him,” a top Ukrainian official close to Zelenskyy told POLITICO on the condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive personnel issues. “We are not satisfied with his managerial, you know, [skills] because now you need … anti-crisis management skills like we don’t think that he has.”

Zelenskyy’s office, Bakanov and the SBU did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment.

The officials and the Western diplomat all said the concern is greater than just Bakanov — it’s also about the decisions of several senior agency personnel in the first hours and days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that may have cost the country precious territory, including the strategic city of Kherson.

Gen. Serhiy Kryvoruchko, head of Kherson’s SBU directorate, ordered his officers to evacuate the city before Russian troops stormed it, against Zelenskyy’s orders, authorities allege. Meanwhile, Col. Ihor Sadokhin, his assistant and head of the local office’s Anti-Terrorist Center, is alleged by authorities to have tipped off Russian forces heading north from Crimea about the locations of Ukrainian mines and helped coordinate a flight path for the enemy’s aircraft while he fled in a convoy of SBU agents going west.

Kherson was the first and so far the only major Ukrainian city captured by Russian forces since the start of the all-out invasion. It was occupied by the Russian army on March 3, seven days after President Vladimir Putin launched his new offensive.

The Ukrainian officials said Russian troops were able to take Kherson so easily because of the failure on the part of SBU officials there to blow up the Antonovskiy Bridge that crosses the Dnipro river, allowing Russian troops to cruise into the city.

Underscoring the lack of loyalty within the top ranks of the SBU, a third former senior official, Andriy Naumov, a brigadier general who headed the agency’s internal security department — a unit whose responsibilities include preventing corruption within the SBU — fled abroad a few hours before Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian authorities have charged all three former SBU officials with state treason. In his late-night video address on March 31, Zelenskyy stripped Naumov and Kryvoruchko of their ranks and denounced them as “traitors.”

Sadokhin and Kryvoruchko were detained by Ukrainian authorities; Naumov was detained on June 7 in Serbia, where law enforcement officers found him with an alleged German smuggler and 600,000 euros, $125,000, and a stash of emeralds. Kyiv is fighting for his extradition to face charges at home.

“There’s so many regional SBU managers who behaved really strange. Some ran away. One guy, for example, in Chernihiv, he [burned down] the whole building of the SBU for no reason, you know, like, because he said that he has no time to get all the documents out,” said the top Ukrainian official who spoke to POLITICO. Police and other law enforcement agencies in the city managed to successfully remove sensitive documents from their offices, the official said.

Known by its Ukrainian acronym, the SBU is the successor agency of the Soviet-era KGB. With more than 30,000 employees, the SBU is more than seven times the size of the U.K.’s MI5 and nearly the size of the FBI — which employs 35,000 people — despite Ukraine being 16 times smaller than the U.S. While it is tasked with traditional domestic intelligence and counterintelligence gathering, the SBU’s activities also go beyond the scope of similar agencies in Western nations; among its duties is combating economic crimes and corruption.

With this sweeping mandate, there have long been accusations of abuse of power and corruption within the agency, including in units meant to fight those very things, and it has largely proved impervious to change. Indeed, attempts to reform the SBU have sputtered.

It is also known to be infiltrated by Russian spies, much to the detriment of the country’s security interests and despite efforts to root them out.

Criticism of the agency reached a critical mass in 2018, when the SBU faked the death of a dissident Russian journalist to allegedly expose a hit squad hired by Moscow to assassinate high-profile figures inside Ukraine. International media watchdogs were outraged and Western governments winced.

After Zelenskyy won a landslide presidential vote in 2019, he set out to clean up the SBU and tapped his pal Bakanov to lead the charge in an attempt to showcase the newly elected leader’s determination to prove to the West that Kyiv was serious about reforms.

Whether he has been successful in doing so is debatable at best, observers say.

Alex Kokcharov, a London-based country-risk analyst focused on Ukraine and Russia for S&P Global, said a series of scandals in recent years had cast a shadow over the SBU. He said Kyiv wasted years not overhauling the agency when many feared a large-scale Russian attack was bound to happen.

“All these scandals around the SBU involved in the questionable practices over their attempts to conduct economic-related business investigations, and the interagency infighting between different security services of Ukraine [led to] not enough preparation done in specific areas like the south and the east, which were the more expected Russian targets,” Kokcharov said.

One of the SBU’s strengths, he said, has been the agency’s ability to identify saboteurs and collaborators outside its walls, such as civilians who have helped direct Russian artillery fire on the ground, often in return for money or the promise of a better life under Moscow rule.

But right now, the spotlight is less on the SBU’s successes and more on its failures. And Bakanov, with the exception of a few photo ops with Zelenskyy, has kept a low profile since the invasion began.

“I hope at the end of the day we will really have a proper investigation of how it happened that this one bridge [was not destroyed],” the top Ukrainian official said, noting that the government pins the fall of Kherson on the SBU’s lack of preparedness.

Kherson’s capture has allowed Putin’s forces a critical foothold in the country’s southern region along the Black Sea coast. For that, the top official said, pointing the finger at Bakanov, “somebody has to suffer.”

The Politico publication, citing its sources, announced the intention of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to dismiss Ivan Bakanov from the post of the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) due to a number of unsuccessful operations and losses in Kherson.

So, according to the publication, due to failures and losses in Kherson, Bakanov fell out of favor with Zelenskyy.

Citing the words of four officials close to the president and a Western diplomat who advised Kyiv on reforms, Politico writes that Zelenskyy is seeking “to replace Bakanov with someone more suitable.”

Bakanov came under criticism from people close to Zelenskyy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, as the head of the SSU failed to properly cope with new challenges.

As Ukrainian News Agency reported, during the war, Bakanov received about half a million hryvnias in salary.

Earlier, Dnipro City Mayor Borys Filatov accused Bakanov and Danilov of unwillingness to fight organized crime groups in Dnipro.

Los efectos de vapes, gomitas y otros productos con alta concentración de THC en el cerebro adolescente y más para el fin de semana.

David Cronenberg is that rare filmmaker who is a genre unto himself, such that his name has become an adjective. Yet, when his name is invoked, it’s usually as shorthand for body horror. Certainly, and in spite of his objections, this is to be expected: more than any other director, Cronenberg has examined, in detail both coldly clinical and gleefully perverse, the ways in which psychosexual desire, trauma, and society’s increasing dependency on technology manifest in the gruesome evolution and/or evisceration of the human body. 

Indeed, we see a fresh example of this in the promotion and reception of his latest film—his first in eight years—Crimes of the Future (available on VOD today), despite the fact, for as horrific as many of the images and ideas within it are, it’s not really a horror movie. That said, the last thing I want to do is make another tired argument over what counts as a horror movie. Rather, I want to make the case that Cronenberg deserves to be equally synonymous with a different genre, one that he’s spent as much time exploring as body horror. 

That genre is espionage.

***

As with his other major themes—disease and mutation, biomechanism and evolution, transgressive sexuality and the pathology of fetishism—Cronenberg’s interest in espionage is evident from the earliest phase of his filmmaking career, with the original, 1970 Crimes of the Future. The experimental feature (his second) is set at dermatological clinic is a post-apocalyptic future where women have gone extinct. Cult-like organizations dedicated to various medical, spiritual and sexual practices—including, disturbingly, pedophilia—compete for political power.

Around the same time that Cronenberg was making his experimental films, he was also directing a lot of television, including a short teleplay for the Canadian anthology series Programme X, titled Secret Weapons. Like Crimes, it is set in a future dystopia (this one ravaged by North American civil war) and concerns a lone scientist (here, a chemist who’s manufacture a drug that can enhance fighting skills) sought by competing political factions.

Both Crimes of the Future and Secret Weapons are dizzyingly convoluted, so much so that they prove nigh impenetrable on first watch. This is an intentional artistic choice on Cronenberg’s part, one that he will continue to use throughout his career (although he’ll hone it as time goes on). Before he decided to embark on a career in filmmaking, Cronenberg wanted to be a novelist. Amongst his literary influences were Franz Kafka, William S. Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip K. Dick and JG Ballard, all of whom would often load their stories with confounding political subplots so as to hold a mirror up to the widespread paranoia and anxiety spread by the often clandestine political, religious and corporate bureaucracies vying for power in the post-modern world. 

Like those writers, Cronenberg’s work reflects a core tenet of our increasingly dehumanized society: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean no one’s watching you.

***

After those early films, David Cronenberg helmed two Canuxsploitation flicks—Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977)—that put a gnarly original spin on the zombie apocalypse by centering them around mutant venereal diseases. As soon as he stepped onto the scene, he’d planted his freak flag. In 1979, the Toronto native released two more films—the stock car sports dramedy Fast Company and the terrifyingly personal The Brood—before firmly establishing himself as a major director within the international horror scene with 1981’s Scanners.

For all of its sci-fi trappings and iconic moments of gore, including the infamous exploding head scene, the film—about competing factions of renegade psychics with telekinetic powers—is, at heart, a corporate espionage thriller. Cronenberg keeps the action and story tightly contained, yet he still manages to tell an epic story about the military and medical industrial complexes inspired by the real-life MK Ultra experiments conducted by the CIA. 

Scanners is the first in Cronenberg’s thematically linked trilogy, with the following installments both released in 1983: The Dead Zone and Videodrome. The former, an adaptation of the Stephen King best seller, made for his first (and arguably only real) foray into the mainstream, while the latter proved his most shockingly unfiltered work up to that point. But despite the disparity in mass appeal, those two films both explore many of the same ideas as Scanners, such that, taken together, they comprise a loose thematic trilogy which we might call The Assassin Trilogy. 

In the Dead Zone, Christopher Walken’s car crash survivor awakens from a years-long coma to discover he’s been gifted (or cursed) with psychic abilities. When he runs into a popular nationalist politician on the campaign trial, he is given a horrible glimpse into the near future: the would-be senator eventually becomes President of the United States and, in a moment of religious fervor, kicks off nuclear Armageddon. The last third of the film becomes a perverse spin on the ‘70s paranoid conspiracy thriller—namely, Alan J. Pakula’s ultra-bleak masterpiece The Parallax View—in which we find ourselves rooting for the political assassin.

In Videodrome, Max Renn (James Woods), the sleazy head of a late night cable television channel, falls down a nightmarish rabbit hole of psychosis and biochemical mutation after he discovers a series of seemingly real snuff films. It’s ultimately revealed that the films are the creation of a right-wing cabal that wants to reverse what they see as the moral decay of western civilization by using violent and sexually explicit media as psychic weapons against the populace. Max is initially brainwashed into becoming their assassin, before a competing group turns the tables and recruits him to kill his would-be masters.

In its examination of brainwashing and political treachery, as well as its specific story beats, Videodrome could very well be viewed as Cronenberg’s gruesome, XXX remake of Jon Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, one of the greatest and most influential espionage movies ever made. 

It is also his most political film; one in which he explicates the ideas he touches upon in Scanners and The Dead Zone. This explication comes by way of a line of dialog in the first half of Videodrome, when Max is warned by an associate to stay away from the title organization: “It has something you don’t have. It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous.”

Cronenberg is amongst our least judgmental storytellers, such that even at their most shocking, it’s hard, if not outright impossible to read his work as cautionary tales. However, it’s clear from this section of his filmography—especially The Dead Zone and Videodrome—that he views zealotry, particularly in service to right wing ideology, as far greater threats to humankind than any technological or transhumanist evolution.

***

After scoring the biggest hit of his career in 1986 with The Fly, Cronenberg began moving away from the strictures of genre, into far stranger territory. And of all the films he’s made, none has ever proven as strange as his unlikely 1991 adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s infamous Beat classic, Naked Lunch.

Long considered unadaptable, the novel has no plot to speak of, but is comprised of hallucinatory “routines”—equal parts comic and nightmarish in their depiction of explicit sex, violence and scatological action—which Cronenberg combined with scenes from other of Burroughs’s work, episodes from his real life (most notably the accidental murder of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of William Tell) and a paranoid plot that borrows heavily from film noir and exotic spy films of the Cold War era.

The film is rife with the double agents, handlers, controllers, bagmen, fronts, cutouts and honeypots you expect to find in traditional espionage stories, only here they come in the form of sentient insectoid typewriters with talking asshole-mouths, giant reptilian mutants that excrete narcotic jism from phalluses that sprout through their heads, gender-and-species-bending figures who feast on human flesh and practice dark ritual magic. 

Yet, for as outrageous and absurd as Naked Lunch is, it contains the most penetrating musings on the existential nature of spy craft this side of John le Carré: “Homosexuality is the best all-around cover an agent ever had…”; “An unconscious agent is an effective agent…it’s your instincts that make you such a good operative…”; “All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That’s the sad truth…”

Two years later, Cronenberg followed Naked Lunch with another meta-narrative adaptation: M. Butterfly. Based on David Henry Hwang’s stage play (itself loosely based a true story), the film sees an French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) engage in a passionate affair with a female Beijing opera singer (John Lone) who he discovers is not only actually a man, but a spy for the Chinese government sent to seduce him into revealing classified information

One of Cronenberg’s most underseen and underrated works, M. Butterfly holds up exceptionally well today, not necessarily as a trans drama (although it certainly approaches its subject matter with more sensitivity and sympathy than other, similarly-themed films from the same time) but as a damning indictment of white, Western orientalist fantasies and naivety.  

Both Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly use the trope of secret identities to examine the psychic toll placed upon individuals by repressive regimes, in so doing showing that it’s not the so-called sexual deviants that are truly depraved, but the supposedly lawful societies which inflict their heteronormative strictures upon them in the name of power.

***

After bringing yet another seemingly unadaptable book to screen by way of JG Ballard’s Crash, Cronenberg returned to more traditional (on the surface, at least) science fiction in 1999 with eXistenZ (1999), which combined the (literally) visceral biotech of Videodrome with the labyrinthian political machinations of those early works to look at other potential avenues of transhumanist evolution: virtual reality and video games. As in Crimes of the Future, Secret Weapons, Scanners and Videodrome, the core plot is but a small part of a larger, more complex story, the true nature of which is reveled to us only in the closing moments. 

Given how intertwined modern intelligence agencies are with the organized crime, it was only a matter of time before Cronenberg delved into mob underworld. On the other side of the new millennium, he teamed with actor Viggo Mortensen for two back-to-back gangster films:  A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). In the former, Mortensen plays a psychotic mobster pretending to be a decent family man; in the latter, he plays an Interpol agent pretending to be a mobster in order to infiltrate the Russian mob. 

As in Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly, the conceit of secret identity is adopted to examine the way subconscious desire refuses to remain suppressed.

***

Cronenberg’s entered his late-career stage after Eastern Promises with a handful of films that proved underwhelming with critics and fans (although they all have their staunch defenders) A Dangerous Method (2011), an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud’s developing psychoanalysis; and Cosmopolis (2012), an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about the collapse of a tech billionaire’s finances and mental state amidst a stock market crash. 

Again, both films focus on small, personal stories backdropped by world-shaking political events just beyond the frame. In the former, it’s the growing specter of fascism in the lead-up to World War 2; in the later it’s an anti-capitalist uprising (although Cronenberg’s film was made post-Great Recession, post-Occupy Wall St., the ever-prescient DeLillo published his novel prior to both). Neither would be considered espionage movies in the strict sense, but both of them toe around the genre, particularly Cosmopolis, which contains many of the elements found throughout Cronenberg’s other work: corporate espionage, radical factions and assassins.  

A Dangerous Method, meanwhile, sees Cronenberg explore his Jewish heritage via the Nazi conspiracy that sought to extinguish it, a concept he touched on a few years earlier, by way of Hezbollah, in a 2007 short film titled At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (in which he also starred).   

***

Cronenberg combined this intense engagement with the contemporary geopolitics with his overriding speculative obsessions—including a return to body horror—in his debut novel from 2014, Consumed, which includes, amongst its various plot threads, a sinister conspiracy carried out by North Korean spies. 

Cronenberg tried to adapt Consumed but was unable to. For several years, it looked as though he was finished making movies (even as his son, Brandon Cronenberg, took up his father’s mantle, directing his own gnarly spin on The Manchurian Candidate with 2020’s Possessor). However, that changed when a script he’d written in the early 2000s caught the attention of producers.

Taking the same title as his sophomore feature, the excellent new Crimes of the Future—about a couple who conduct live surgery as performance art in a near future where technology has eradicated pain, even as environmental catastrophe has rendered the world nearly uninhabitable—contains yet another intricate and often perplexing espionage plot in which various corporate, governmental and radical political interests wage a shadow war in the name of the future and where Viggo Mortensen again plays an undercover agent and informer. As in so many of his other films, his hero comes to understand that he’s working for the wrong side and must betray his masters in the name of a greater cause.

It’s fitting that Crimes of the Future shares its title with Cronenberg’s earlier film. Although it was not conceived as any sort of career-defining capstone (and indeed, Cronenberg already has another film in development), the way it combines all of his favorite themes, ideas and story beats—including, and indeed especially, the way he uses espionage and conspiracy to decode the murkiest intricacies of human psychology. 

In the late summer of 1998, Russian journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin was returning to his St. Petersburg apartment after a long day at the startup newspaper he’d helped launch. He made it as far as the elevator before his attackers pounced.

The assailants smashed the journalist’s skull with a metal bar and fled the scene with Levin-Utkin’s documents, cash, and a briefcase carrying material for his newspaper’s next issue.

Levin-Utkin was taken to the hospital after a neighbor found him unconscious next to the elevator. The doctors who tried to save him said his attackers “deliberately beat him to death with excessive brutality and cruelty,” his colleagues would later write.

Levin-Utkin died four days later, on August 24, 1998. He had turned 41 a week earlier.

Publicly, police said the deadly attack appeared most likely to be a robbery. But Levin-Utkin’s colleagues at Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya (Legal Petersburg Today) linked it to his profession.

Anatoly Levin-Utkin in February 1998, six months before his death (Courtesy photo)

Levin-Utkin had worked closely with the reporters at the newspaper “and was one of the first to be aware of all the scandals,” Editor in Chief Aleksei Domnin told a news conference after his deputy editor’s death.

Just eight days before the attack, the newspaper had published its second issue, which included sensitive investigations into the regional customs directorate and Russia’s cutthroat banking sector.

Levin-Utkin’s colleagues say he was a phenomenal and dogged open-source researcher in an era before massive caches of public data and user-generated images were available to journalists online.

“Tolya had connections in [the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg],” Domnin recalled, using a diminutive form of Levin-Utkin’s first name. “He was a bibliophile who collected an enormous home library.”

This report is the fifth and final installment of an investigative project examining the scandals and scams that swirled around Vladimir Putin and his associates during his tenure as a St. Petersburg city official in the 1990s.

According to Domnin, Levin-Utkin himself did not write the more explosive articles in the paper’s final issues before his death, though he contributed critical research and reporting. After publication, the paper fielded angry calls from the customs service and “not very bright people” from bank security staff trying to figure out where the information for the investigations came from, Domnin said.

There was another article Levin-Utkin worked on, Domnin added, that was published in his final issue and that also drew outside attention: a dive into the past of the newly appointed head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), an ex-KGB-spy-turned-functionary named Vladimir Putin.

‘As Befits A Spy’

On July 25, 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Putin as the new head of the FSB. For Putin, who had come to work in Yeltsin’s administration in 1996 after a six-year tenure at St. Petersburg city hall, it was a homecoming of sorts.

“I started as a junior agent…in the St. Petersburg [KGB] directorate. That was 23 years ago or so. I repeat, these walls are home to me,” Putin told a news conference following his appointment.

As the head of St. Petersburg’s External Relations Committee under Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin was an influential local official whose involvement in lucrative and murky deals drew scrutiny from local lawmakers, who at one point called for his ouster.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin (right) meets with Vladimir Putin, whom he appointed head of the FSB a month earlier. The meeting was held on August 24, 1998, the day journalist Anatoly Levin-Utkin died. (TASS)

But outside of Russia’s tsarist-era capital, Putin was virtually unknown to the broader public. And his appointment to the country’s most powerful security post left journalists scrambling to dig up information on a man whose professional life had for years largely been devoted to misdirection and subterfuge.

It was Levin-Utkin’s newspaper, in Putin’s hometown, that offered readers one of the first profiles in the Russian print media to draw on deep digging into little-known aspects of his time as a city official in St. Petersburg.

Under the headline “Lieutenant Colonel Putin Illegally Heads Up FSB,” the article delves into Putin’s personal and professional ties with regional and national political figures, including his mentor, Sobchak; Yeltsin’s former chief of staff and first deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais; and former Prime Minister Viktor Cherdomyrdin, head of the Our Home Is Russia party, whose regional campaign in St. Petersburg was led by Putin in the 1995 parliamentary elections.

“Since his recent appointment, journalists have been trying to dig up more information about the past of the new Lubyanka [FSB headquarters] boss. It turned out that Putin has left neither good nor bad memories about himself: Very little is known about his career aside from the official information. As befits a spy, he doesn’t have a single major scandal on his record. Still, a few facts about his work in St. Petersburg have managed to be ‘declassified,'” the article states.

The article features no bombshell revelations about Putin. In fact, parts of it appear to have been plagiarized from a shorter piece published by the Moscow daily Kommersant two weeks earlier.

But the profile of Putin published in Levin-Utkin’s paper does touch on areas and claims unaddressed in the Kommersant piece, including the inquiry by St. Petersburg lawmaker Marina Salye into Putin’s suspicious barter deals as head of the External Relations Committee that led Salye to call for his firing.

The St. Petersburg Lawmaker Who Became Putin’s First Accuser

The profile, published under the pseudonymous byline “A. Kirilenko,” concluded with the questionable claim that Putin’s appointment as FSB director violated the agency’s internal staffing policy. It cited an alleged internal requirement that the position can only be filled by someone with the rank of general, while Putin had never risen higher than the rank of lieutenant colonel. (Russian law governing the FSB states that the director is appointed by the president and makes no mention of rank requirements.)

Domnin, the editor in chief of Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya, told RFE/RL that Levin-Utkin did not write the profile but was among those who contributed research to it.

“I sent all of the newspaper’s employees to the libraries” to search for information, Domnin recalled in a telephone interview.

He also claimed that, after it was published, an associate of Putin’s approached him and inquired about how the paper was financing its operations.

Aleksei Domnin in 1995 (Courtesy photo)

Domnin gave the name of this alleged intermediary, a St. Petersburg political strategist who had worked with the St. Petersburg operations of Our Home Is Russia, whose regional campaign in 1995 had been spearheaded by Putin. He said the two men met at the McDonald’s on St. Petersburg’s central Sennaya Square.

“His first words were: ‘Why did you publish such a bad photo of Putin? If you’d called me, I would have given you a good one,'” Domnin recalled about the alleged meeting.

Reached by RFE/RL, the political strategist denied knowing Domnin or being familiar with the profile of Putin that Levin-Utkin worked on.

RFE/RL is not identifying the man by name because it could not independently corroborate Domnin’s account of the alleged meeting with the political strategist, who does not appear to have any current links to Putin or the Kremlin.

‘Encyclopedic Knowledge’

Information about Levin-Utkin is virtually nonexistent online beyond a handful of contemporaneous articles about the attack that led to his death and brief snapshots in lists the media watchdogs maintain on the dozens of Russian journalists who have been killed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But those who worked with him described Levin-Utkin as a bookish, kind, and cautious man and the archetype of a member of St. Petersburg’s intelligentsia.

“He was always searching for a grain of rationality. He was a very soft-spoken and knowledgeable person. It often seemed to me that he had encyclopedic knowledge,” Aleksei Lushnikov, who owned a St. Petersburg media holding where Levin-Utkin worked, told RFE/RL.

Before embarking on a career in journalism, Levin-Utkin had worked at a factory producing leather sofas, Lushnikov said.

“I still remember his tales about leather sofas: how they are made, what kinds of leather there are. Tolya knew almost everything about all of this. Tolya was always sitting in bookshops,” Lushnikov said.

Domnin said Levin-Utkin began working in the media in 1993. “They killed a professional journalist,” he told RFE/RL.

In an obituary published a month after Levin-Utkin’s death, his colleagues wrote that their fallen colleague “made no enemies in his 41 years of life.”

“We are confident that he simply didn’t have any,” they wrote. “He managed to preserve his childlike spontaneity in his relationship to people and to life in general. We loved him, as one can only love very good, wonderful people.”

The obituary of Anatoly Levin-Utkin published in Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya a month after his death.

‘Deliberately Killed’

Nearly a quarter of a century after Levin-Utkin was beaten to death, the crime remains unsolved, like numerous other fatal attacks on journalists in post-Soviet Russia.

“For me it was completely incomprehensible precisely because Tolya was a cautious person,” Lushnikov, the media executive who employed Levin-Utkin, told RFE/RL. “How could he become a victim?”

In a newsletter shortly after Levin-Utkin’s death, the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Russian media watchdog, quoted a doctor who treated him following the attack as saying that “the nature of the injuries allow us to state that the journalist was deliberately killed.”

The newsletter also quoted a St. Petersburg police precinct chief as saying that “as of now there is no confirmation that the attack on Anatoly Levin-Utkin was connected to his professional activities.”

“Police are inclined to believe that this case involved a routine robbery,” Sergei Kukshtel, chief of the 59th precinct, was quoted as saying in the newsletter.

Domnin, however, told RFE/RL that investigators appeared more interested in a different possible motive when he was questioned at a local police station.

“They were particularly interested in the professional motive,” he said.

Domnin said he was questioned twice in connection with the crime — once at the paper’s office on the day after the attack, and once at a police precinct in St. Petersburg’s Primorsky district, though the crime was committed in the city’s Vyborgsky district. Domnin said the men who questioned him at the police station did not even keep a record of the interview, and that he believes they were likely FSB officers rather than police.

St. Petersburg police did not respond to an inquiry about the status of the investigation of Levin-Utkin’s killing.

Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya managed to put out four more issues after Levin-Utkin’s killing — six in total — before it was shut down in the wake of the Russian government’s default, which coincided with Levin-Utkin’s 41st birthday on August 17, 1998, and came three days before his fatal attack.

Domnin left the media industry in 2007 and now works as a musician and DJ.

Levin-Utkin’s editor, Aleksei Domnin, now works as a musician and DJ. (Courtesy photo)

Levin-Utkin was survived by his wife, who declined to speak with RFE/RL when reached by telephone. Despite the contemporaneous statements by police, media watchdogs, and Levin-Utkin’s colleagues about his work for Yuridichesky Peterburg segodnya, his widow claimed that he never worked for the newspaper. Follow-up calls for clarification about this claim went unanswered.

Levin-Utkin’s widow to this day lives in the same apartment where the couple resided 24 years ago, in the building where he was fatally beaten on his way home from work.

RFE/RL is publishing below an English translation of the profile of Vladimir Putin that Anatoly Levin-Utkin worked on shortly before his fatal beating. RFE/RL has added hyperlinks and images for background on the events and individuals cited in the text.

The profile looking at Vladimir Putin’s past published by Yuridichesky Peterburg segodya published in August 1998.

According to staffing structure, the director of the security service must be a lieutenant general.

On July 25, the first deputy of the presidential administration, retired KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, was appointed director of the FSB by presidential decree.

He has been assigned to reform the agency in the short term, reducing its central staff several times over to 4,000 officers. The funds saved by this will allow for salary increases for the remaining staff. If the FSB is financed by the residual model, its best officers are likely to leave. As they say, a new broom sweeps clean. However, Putin has declared that there will be no massive reduction of FSB staff.

Kovalyov

Putin’s predecessor, army General Nikolai Kovalyov, was not particularly popular with his subordinates after he proved unable to secure salary increases, something the heads of the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General’s Office succeeded in doing. Indeed, Kovalyov was notably shy for a high-ranking officer and preferred to report about the successes of his agency than its problems.

Within the FSB, his dismissal had been expected. That was the reason for the postponement of the staff exercises in the North Caucasus — which involved the Interior Ministry, army units, the FSB, the Emergency Situations Ministry, and the Federal Border Service — from July 25 to July 27. Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin was the commander of the exercises.

Kovalyov was appointed head of the FSB more than two years ago, following the famous scandal with the “Xerox box” that was used by the members of Yeltsin’s election campaign staff Sergei Lisovsky and Arkady Yevstafyev as they tried to take more than $500,000 from the White House [Russian government headquarters]. FSB head Mikhail Barsukov, who was involved in their detention, soon left his post.

No specific reason was given for Kovalyov’s dismissal. Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko conveyed the president’s “gratitude” for the “big and important” work he had done. However, Kovalyov isn’t known for any significant achievements. Quite the opposite. His only success was in setting up an FSB hotline for repenting agents of foreign intelligence services. But even without a hotline, the FSB had always worked steadily in its counterintelligence operations: In 1997 alone, 30 foreign intelligence officers were expelled from Russia, and seven Russian citizens working for foreign intelligence were neutralized.

[These successes] were not matched by the FSB’s economic counterintelligence department, which was constantly understaffed due to the transfer of many of its officers to the tax police. In 1997, however, economic counterintelligence helped to increase state budget revenues by more than 16 billion rubles.

A special operation under Kovalyov’s personal command to free a Swedish diplomat taken hostage late last year gained worldwide fame. During the operation, the Alfa special forces group shot one of its top officers, chief of staff, Anatoly Savelyev. To preserve the group’s reputation and support the officially declared cause of death as a “heart attack,” Savelyev’s colleagues removed his medical records from the hospital the next day. Anatoly Savelyev was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Russia.

In executive circles, they said Kovalyov had “stayed in his post too long.” Everything is good in its season. Yeltsin, however, promised him another job, and Kovalyov has received a few lucrative job offers, according to those in the know. It recalls one of Krylov’s fables, The Quartet: What was the result of all the reshuffles there?

Putin And The Security Apparatus

“After university, I started working as a junior investigator. Now — imagine that — I have become the director of the whole system,” Vladimir Putin told journalists when he took up the post.

Indeed, 23 years ago, Putin accepted an offer to work for the security services after he graduated from the law department of Leningrad State University. He started as a junior investigator at the KGB Directorate of Foreign Intelligence. He worked there for 15 years, specializing in German-speaking countries: West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel but resigned from the KGB voluntarily in 1991.

Since his recent appointment, journalists have been trying to dig up more information about the past of the new Lubyanka [FSB headquarters] boss. It turned out that Putin has left neither good nor bad memories about himself: Very little is known about his career besides the official facts. As befits a spy, he doesn’t have a single major scandal on his record. Still, a few facts about his work in St. Petersburg have managed to be “declassified.”

Putin and Sobchak

Putin’s career in St. Petersburg was inextricably linked to Anatoly Sobchak, right up until the former mayor lost the 1996 elections.

They first met when Putin was studying law at Leningrad State University, where Sobchak lectured on commercial law. Later, Putin’s experience in the security services helped him become vice rector for international relations at Leningrad State University (this area of operation had been monitored by the KGB), where he met his former professor and soon took a post in Leningrad’s first democratic city council. Putin’s administrative career began in May 1990, when Sobchak became chairman of the council. As his aide, Putin managed to be his assistant, desk officer, and secretary all at once.

St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak (right) sits next to his deputy, Vladimir Putin, in August 1993.

According to those who knew them, Putin had significant influence on the former mayor. But outside the Mariinsky Palace, the general public knew practically nothing about him. An experienced professional — he spoke German, had contacts with Western partners, and earned trust — Putin had the reputation of a power broker during his work in the city administration. After Sobchak was elected mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin became one of his three deputies and, in fact, one of the most influential political figures in the city.

But Putin never emphasized his exceptional proximity to power, not even when he served as acting mayor (which happened often). He always kept his distance.

Putin the bureaucrat oversaw the establishment of the currency exchange in St. Petersburg, diplomatic offices, the gambling industry, and nongovernmental organizations; he brokered the sale of the Astoria hotel and the opening of one of Russia’s first foreign bank offices, BNP-Dresdner Bank (Rossija). He also coordinated all security services: army, police, counterintelligence, prosecutor’s office, and customs. Only one of his foreign-investment projects was implemented: a Coca-Cola production facility was built.

During his tenure at the mayor’s office, Putin was officially accused of using the methods of secret services only once. According to the former chairman of the St. Petersburg city council, Aleksandr Belyayev, the External Relations Committee established by Sobchak and headed by Putin was collecting information on Russian companies to be sold to foreign owners. At the same time, the prosecutor’s office reproved Putin for being too gullible and issuing illegal gambling licenses.

In 1992, a [city] parliamentary investigation of the committee’s activities was conducted with regard to several import and export deals. It revealed that some of the deals were made at prices that did not correspond to world prices. Putin admitted errors during public hearings, the deals were called off, and no one was punished.

Putin and Chernomyrdin

In 1995, Putin took part in a political campaign. At the time, governors or their deputies were expected to run the regional offices of the [pro-Yeltsin] Our Home Is Russia party. Putin became the head of its St. Petersburg office. Residents of the city could see posters of [Viktor] Chernomyrdin on almost every billboard in the city. But Putin didn’t live up to the expectations: Our Home Is Russia took only third place in the parliamentary election in St. Petersburg, securing two seats (the mayor’s wife, Lyudmila Narusova, took one of them).

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) listens to Viktor Chernomyrdin, leader of the Our Home is Russia faction, during the pro-government movement Unity congress in May 2000.

Putin And Yakovlev

Putin was the head of Sobchak’s campaign in the 1996 election, and in many respects the way the campaign was conducted determined its result. After Sobchak lost, there were rumors circulating in the city that Putin had “sold out” his boss at a meeting with his rival, Vladimir Yakovlev, a couple of days before the election. However, Putin resigned immediately after the election.

St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev (left) with Vladimir Putin in January 2000, shortly after Putin was named acting president by Boris Yeltsin.

This failure didn’t stop his career. According to Putin, he came to Moscow at the invitation of Pavel Borodin and became his deputy. But presumably the personal political preferences of powerful figures also played a role here.

Putin And Chubais

The head of the presidential administration, Anatoly Chubais, had supported Sobchak and, after his defeat, tried to weaken the new governor’s team. It was his initiative to invite two former first deputy mayors into the federal government: Chubais’s old friend Aleksei Kudrin, and Vladimir Putin.

In March 1997, Vladimir Putin took the vacant post of the head of the Government Accountability Office. He often grabbed headlines in this capacity: It was Putin who disclosed the sensational results of the inspection of arms sales to Armenia and systematic delays in army salary payments.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (center) at a meeting with Anatoly Chubais (right), Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko (left) and Gazprom head Rem Vyakhirev in October 2000.

For a few months before becoming the director of the FSB, Putin served as a deputy head of the presidential administration, where he was responsible for regional policy. A week before the new appointment, Yeltsin commissioned him to prepare papers on the demarcation of jurisdiction between federal and regional authorities.

Putin And Kovalyov

Putin has spoken about his predecessor with sympathy: [Kovalyov] worked in the agency during the tough early years of the reforms. Will Putin follow Kovalyov’s policies? It’s possible because he believes Kovalyov’s reform plans were sufficiently developed, so there’s no need to invent anything. The main thing is that reforms should increase the efficiency of the agency. Some sectors require expansion rather than cuts. According to Putin, that is the case with the department of economic crimes and the computer control group that prevents leaks of classified information to the Internet. The new head puts special focus on counterterrorism operations: In Putin’s opinion, these forces need to be less dispersed and more effective.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) and Nikolai Kovalyov, whom Putin succeeded in 1998 as head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

Besides, a recent presidential decree has tasked the new FSB head with restoring the department of protection of the constitutional order. However, it’s similar to the KGB’s infamous Fifth Directorate [responsible for crackdowns on dissidents in the U.S.S.R.], so that shouldn’t be a tough challenge for Putin.

In the wake of Putin’s appointment, there has been a lot of interest in his former boss, Sobchak. He is a witness in a corruption case launched not only by Yury Skuratov, but also by the heads of the Interior Ministry and the FSB. Will Vladimir Putin use his position to protect his former boss? Putin has repeated in his interviews that the former mayor has nothing to fear should he decide to return to Russia.

As for the idea of uniting the FSB and the Interior Ministry, which has been recently promoted by Sergei Stepashin, Putin believes that it has already happened — he and Stepashin are friends and will be working together. But no FSB officers will ever become police officers.

Vladimir Putin is not worried in the least by the fact that, according to staffing policies, only a general can be head of the [FSB].

A. Kirilenko