Historian Felshtinsky: Assassinations That Never Expire
Businessman Boris Berezovsky was warned that his assassination attempt was being planned, hitmen were apprehended, but he never paid the informer, wrote in an exclusive material for GORDON Russian-Americam historian Yuri Felshtinsky. He also explains how Berezovsky was connected with former Deputy CEO at Aeroflot Company Nikolai Glushkov who had been found strangled in London on March, 12. And about the role that was played in their lives by ex-entrepreneur, ex-KGB agent and sitting member of Russian parliament Andrey Lugovoy.
Glushkov made substantial personnel changes at Aeroflot that included, among other measures, the firing of a number of secret service agents that were operating abroad under the auspices of Aeroflot’s foreign affiliates
The death of Nikolai Glushkov on March 12 that followed the recent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, further fueled the tensions in Great Britain over the suspicion that Kremlin is behind yet another assassination.
It seems quite reasonable to believe that Russian intelligence services cast a long cloud of influence over Glushkov’s life and death. Indeed, the course of his life changed forever in 1997 when he and Boris Berezovsky became a target of investigation of the Department of Justice of the Russian Federation in connection with Aeroflot, the Russian airline where Glushkov served as a Vice President in 1996-1997.
The impetus for the Aeroflot investigation was the fact that Glushkov, in an attempt to turn an otherwise loss-making state enterprise into a profitable private company, made substantial personnel changes at Aeroflot that included, among other measures, the firing of a number of secret service agents (from both FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Services) and GRU (Russia’s Military Intelligence Directorate)) that were operating abroad under the auspices of Aeroflot’s foreign affiliates. These same individuals essentially controlled financial operations of Aeroflot outside of Russia and thus the company was perpetually generating losses. In an interview to a Russian newspaper Kommersant, Glushkov described the situation as follows:
“In reality, Aeroflot’s assets and profits were already transferred without any input from the company’s management to separate enterprises that served the interests of certain employees. Approximately 450 foreign bank accounts with varying degrees of legitimacy were receiving company’s profits on behalf of more than a 100 different enterprises. Russia’s Central Bank’s authorization was received for each of these accounts. Current profits of Aeroflot that were handled in this manner amounted to approximately $80 million to $220 million. At the same time, all of such “representatives” of the company were the agents of the various branches of Russia’s secret service, which precluded any degree of accountability.
From the beginning of my employment with Aeroflot, a problem arose with the employees who were also working for the Russian intelligence. Out of 14,000 employees, there were at least 3,000 of these individuals, including the Head of Human Resources and the Head of Security, both of whom were FSB officials or officers. We inconvenienced them quite a bit by consolidating all of the finances that were previously controlled by them into a single accounting center. The first call that I received at the beginning of the summer of 1996 was from General Alexander Korzhakov, who headed up the Security Service for the President of Russian Federation. He was livid, stomping his feet and yelling at me that he would destroy me if I were to continue impinging the rights of the FSB operatives. Mikhail Barsukov, who was the Head of the Russia’s FSB, took similar tone with me. It was really the Secret Service organization that initiated the events that ensued in 1998-1999.”