Winds of Change.NET covered the murder of Paul Klebnikov, the Chief Editor of the Russian edition of Forbes Magazine, back on July 14, 2005. At the time, we noted that Klebnikov's journalism in Russia was not the only possible motive for the hit - he was also the author of "Millionaire Mullahs," which tore the lid off of the organized corruption that lies behind the terrorist theocracy of Iran.
In "One Killing, Many Stories," the LA Times goes back to that story. Two Chechen Mafia members (Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev, from a gang with its home base in Urs-Martan) are the prime suspects, and the Iran angle is never mentioned. But there are a few interesting tidbits about Klebnikov, Russia, Project Klebnikov, and the dangers of being a journalist.
As they peel through it, there seem to be lots of questions, but few answers. For instance:
"Was he killed, as the prosecution believes, on the orders of Chechen warlord-businessman Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, who was said to be incensed over Klebnikov's less-than-flattering book about him, "Conversations With a Barbarian"?
...Prosecutors have offered no evidence for why they believe that Nukhayev, a wealthy businessman and organized crime figure who became increasingly sympathetic to Islamic insurgents battling Russia, ordered Klebnikov's killing. Under Russian law, the government doesn't have to make public this evidence until Nukhayev is brought to trial....
Hmm, Guy with Islamist links, Iranians known to have some cooperation with Chechens, common enemy. It's certainly motive, and fits Iran's long history with such things. Meanwhile, there's this:
"It's too convenient a hypothesis to believe," Gordeyev, deputy editor of Russian Newsweek, said of the prosecution's theory. "I'm not exactly clear as to why the guy would get so [angry] as to order a hit. It's definitely not over the book. It was published a year and a half before he was killed, for one thing. And I understand Nukhayev had been looking for somebody who could write a book in response to it - which means he was intent on solving their differences in literary form, not by murder."
Depends what other offers may have been outstanding on Nukhayev's end. Then there's option B:
"Togliatti is Russia's Detroit, an auto manufacturing center that is home to the huge and scandal-plagued maker of the Lada and Zhiguli cars, and also home to a highly dangerous network of politics, money and organized crime....
"He was interested in the phenomenon that all the journalists who died there died after they tried to dig deep into the economy of the place. And in reality none of the cases was solved. Not one," [Karen Nersisyan] said. "So of course he was interested in the role of the authorities in this.
"I specialize in the murders of journalists," he added. "And I can tell you that journalists, if they're killed, they're killed not after they write something. They are usually killed for an intent to write something. I came to this conclusion after 10 years of working on such cases."
Not entirely. Note recently Steven Vincent's murder at the hands of Moqtada al-Sadr's forces for exposign their corruption and machinations in Basra. (One certainly recalls Juan Cole's despicable response). Nersisyan is often right, but not always.
At least this is the right response:
"An international committee of journalists has been set up in New York, dubbed Project Klebnikov, to follow the trails of Klebnikov's work and his death to see where they lead."
But so far, leads are thin and I'm not optimistic that we'll find out.
"It is all too clear that he was in the way of some people, people that grew to hate him," Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, wrote shortly after Klebnikov's death. "He gave his life for the truth - and for Russia, which he earnestly loved."
He gave his life for a truth - and which one, told or untold, we may never know. The best odds might ironically be if If the Iranians DID instigate it, in which case we might find out after the regime is gone and we can look in the secret police's archives. We certainly learned a lot about the Rosenbergs (traitors), Algier Hiss (guilty, also a traitor), et. al. via The Venona Cables after the Soviet Union was destroyed.
Otherwise, this case may remain unsolved forever as a monument to one man's courage and love of the truth - and the value of the rule of law. There are many who sacrifice to make the world a better place. Whatever he died for, his record speaks for itself; Klebnikov was unquestionably one of those people.
Methinks that's "Ve*n*ona", not Verona.
For the record, "Venona" was a made-up word, and (as was/is typical in US spook circles) all-caps. The slip was understandable and common. :) The VENONA decrypt story fascinates me in its stately, dogged, mind-numbingly-slow process, sort of a Kubrick's-Barry-Lyndon-Meets-Smiley's-People HUMINT versus SIGINT. They also serve who only grind and grind in back offices.
A key part of the story is that (somehow) the printers tasked with producing VENONA KGB one-time-pads evidently ran off a bunch of the same pages (or runs of the same sequence of pages) and collated them and shipped them as pads. Hey, they had a quota to make, and nobody told them what these books were for--this is Stalin's Russia! And that tiny avenue was enough to get useful stuff done, even if the decrypt process still took years.