According to
David Satter,
Yuri Felshtinsky,
Alexander Litvinenko,
Vladimir Pribylovsky and
Boris Kagarlitsky, the bombings were a successful
false flag operation coordinated by the Russian state security services to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and to bring Putin to power. Some of them described the bombings as typical "
active measures" practised by the
KGB in the past. According to a reconstruction of the events by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky: • The bombings in Buynaksk were carried out by a team of twelve
GRU officers who were sent to Dagestan and supervised by the head of GRU's 14th Directorate General
Nikolai Kostechko. That version was partly based on a testimony by
Aleksey Galkin. The bombing in Buynaksk was conducted by the GRU to avoid an "interagency conflict between the FSB and the Ministry of Defense". • In Moscow, Volgodonsk and Ryazan, the attacks were organized by the FSB through a chain of command that included director of the counter-terrorism department General
German Ugryumov, FSB operatives
Maxim Lazovsky, Vladimir Romanovich, Ramazan Dyshekov and others.
Achemez Gochiyayev, Tatyana Korolyeva, and Alexander Karmishin rented warehouses that received shipments of hexogen disguised as sugar and did not know that the explosives were delivered. • Adam Dekkushev, Krymshamkhalov, and Timur Batchayev were recruited by FSB agents who presented themselves as "Chechen separatists" to deliver explosives to Volgodonsk and Moscow. • Names and the fate of FSB agents who planted the bomb in the city of Ryazan remain unknown.
Books and films on the subject The theory of Russian government involvement has been described in a number of books and movies on the subject.
David Satter, a senior fellow of the
Hudson Institute, authored two books
Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State and ''The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin'' (published by
Yale University Press in 2003 and 2016) where he scrutinized the events and came to the conclusion that the bombings were organized by Russian state security services. In another book,
Lubyanka Criminal Group, Litvinenko and
Alexander Goldfarb described the transformation of the FSB into a criminal and terrorist organization, including conducting the bombings. Former
GRU analyst and historian
Viktor Suvorov said that the book describes "a leading criminal group that provides "protection" for all other
organized crime in the country and which continues the criminal war against their own people", like their predecessors
NKVD and KGB. He added: "The book proves:
Lubyanka [the KGB headquarters] was taken over by
enemies of the people. ... If Putin's team can not disprove the facts provided by Litvinenko, Putin must shoot himself. Patrushev and all other leadership of
Lubyanka Criminal Group must follow his example."
Alexander Goldfarb and
Marina Litvinenko published a book
Death of a Dissident. They asserted that the
murder of Mr. Litvinenko was "the most compelling proof" of the FSB involvement theory. According to the book, the murder of Litvinenko "gave credence to all his previous theories, delivering justice for the tenants of the bombed apartment blocks, the
Moscow theater-goers,
Sergei Yushenkov,
Yuri Shchekochikhin, and
Anna Politkovskaya, and the half-exterminated
nation of Chechnya, exposing their killers for the whole world to see." A
PBS Frontline documentary on Vladimir Putin also mentioned the theory and FSB involvement, citing the quick removal of rubble and bodies from the bombing scenes before any investigation could take place, the discovery of the Ryazan bomb, the deaths of several people who had attempted to investigate the bombings, as well as the defused Ryazan bomb being made of Russian military explosives and detonators. A documentary film
Assassination of Russia was made in 2000 by two French producers who had previously worked on
NTV's
Sugar of Ryazan program. A documentary
Nedoverie ("Disbelief") about the bombing controversy made by Russian director
Andrei Nekrasov was premiered at the 2004
Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the story of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, the two Russian-American sisters, who had lost their mother in the attack, and decided to find out who did it. His next film on the subject was
Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case. Yuli Dubov, author of
The Big Slice, wrote a novel
The Lesser Evil, based on the bombings. The main characters of the story are
Platon (
Boris Berezovsky) and
Larry (
Badri Patarkatsishvili). They struggle against an evil KGB officer,
Old man (apparently inspired by the legendary
Philipp Bobkov), who brings another KGB officer,
Fedor Fedorovich (Vladimir Putin) to power by staging a series of apartment bombings.
Support The view about the bombings being organized and perpetrated by Russian state security services was originally put forward by journalist
David Satter and historians
Yuri Felshtinsky and
Vladimir Pribylovsky, in co-authorship with
Alexander Litvinenko. It was later supported by a number of historians.
Amy Knight, a historian of the KGB, wrote that it was "abundantly clear" that the FSB was responsible for carrying out the attacks and that Vladimir Putin's "guilt seems clear," since it was inconceivable that the FSB would have done so without the sanction of Putin, the agency's former director and by then
Prime Minister of Russia. In her book ''
Putin's Kleptocracy'', historian
Karen Dawisha summarized evidence related to the bombings and concluded that "to blow up your own innocent and sleeping people in your capital city is an action almost unthinkable. Yet the evidence that the FSB was at least involved in planting a bomb in Ryazan is incontrovertible." According to
Timothy Snyder, "it seemed possible" that the perpetrators of the apartment bombings were FSB officers. David Satter considered the bombings as a political provocation by the Russian secret services that was similar to
the burning of the Reichstag. This view has been also supported by investigative journalists. In 2008, British journalist
Edward Lucas concluded in his book ''The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West'' that "The weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation: that the attacks were a ruthlessly planned stunt to create a climate of panic and fear in which Putin would quickly become the country's indisputable leader, as indeed he did." The journal owner,
Condé Nast, then took extreme measures to prevent an article by Anderson from appearing in the Russian media, both physically and in translation. Former Russian State Security Council chief
Alexandr Lebed in his 29 September 1999 interview with
Le Figaro said he was almost convinced that the government organised the terrorist acts.
Andrei Illarionov, a former key economic adviser to the Russian president, said that FSB involvement "is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no other element that could have organized the bombings except for the FSB." Later Lebed's public relations staff claimed that he was quoted out of the context. On 11 January 2017, senator
Marco Rubio raised the issue of the 1999 bombings during the confirmation hearings for
Rex Tillerson. According to senator Rubio, "there's [an] incredible body of reporting, open source and other, that this was all—all those bombings were part of a black flag operation on the part of the FSB." According to the report, "no credible evidence has been presented by the Russian authorities linking Chechen terrorists, or anyone else, to the Moscow bombings." According to Satter, all four bombings that occurred had a similar "signature" which indicated that the explosives had been carefully prepared, a mark of skilled specialists. The terrorists were able to obtain tons of hexogen explosive and transport it to various locations in Russia; hexogen is produced in one plant in
Perm Oblast for whose security the central FSB is responsible. The culprits would also have needed to organise nine explosions (the four that occurred and the five attempted bombings reported by the authorities) in different cities in a two-week period. Satter's estimate for the time required for target plan development, site visits, explosives preparation, renting space at the sites and transporting explosives to the sites was four to four and a half months. Hexogen was however at this time also widely available in
Dagestan.
Criticism According to Russian investigative journalist
Andrei Soldatov, "From the start, it seemed that the Kremlin was determined to suppress all discussion ... When Alexander Podrabinek, a Russian human rights activist, tried to import copies of Litvinenko's and Felshtinsky's
Blowing up Russia in 2003, they were confiscated by the FSB. Trepashkin himself, acting as a lawyer for two relatives of the victims of the blast, was unable to obtain information he requested and was entitled to see by law". However, Soldatov believed that the obstruction might reflect "'paranoia' rather than guilt on the part of the authorities". Consequently, Soldatov argued, that paranoia has produced the very conspiracy theories that the Russian Government intended to eradicate. In their book
The New Nobility, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan believe that the Ryazan incident had actually been a training exercise by
Vympel, a counter-terrorism FSB unit. According to
Robert Bruce Ware, the simplest explanation for the apartment block blasts is that they were perpetrated by Islamist extremists from North Caucasus who sought retribution for the attacks of the Federal forces against the Islamist enclave in the central Dagestan, known as the
Islamic Djamaat. Political scientist Ronald R. Pope in his review of David Satter's book
Darkness at Dawn cited Kirill Pankratov's criticism, published as a contribution to
Johnson's Russia List. Regarding the apartment bombings, Pankratov argued that the Russian authorities did not need an additional justification to wage a war against Chechnya, in view of high-profile kidnappings and the invasion of Dagestan. Political scientist Brian Taylor believes that there is too little evidence to decide which version of the events is correct, as the available evidence is fragmentary and controversial. According to Taylor, it is plausible that the FSB "simulated" an attack in Ryazan in order to claim credit for "uncovering" it; however, the plot was foiled by vigilant local denizens and law enforcement personnel, and the "training exercise" justification was improvised after the plot failed.
Philip Short in his biography of Putin said that while "It cannot be conclusively proved that no one from the FSB was involved" there is no "factual evidence of Russian state involvement."
Russian officials In March 2000,
Putin dismissed the allegations of FSB involvement in the bombings as "delirious nonsense." "There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such crime against their own people. The very allegation is immoral," he said. An FSB spokesman said that "Litvinenko's evidence cannot be taken seriously by those who are investigating the bombings".
Yuri Luzhkov,
Mayor of Moscow at the time of the bombings, believed that the bombings in Moscow were facilitated by new legislation that established
freedom of movement within the country, which was restricted prior to 1993. According to Luzhkov, the law made it possible for Chechen terrorists to bring weapons to Moscow and store them there, as well as purchase vehicles and provide housing for their personnel who had arrived in Moscow. According to Luzhkov, "for three months, after having arrived in Moscow, a terrorist could live wherever he wanted and stay with anyone, without notifying the police", which allowed the terrorists to prepare the bombings. == Sealing information by the US government ==