The Hostages In Moscow... What Happened.

[Charean]

November 1, 2002

From Anxiety, Fear and Hope, the Deadly Rescue in Moscow

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

his article was reported by Steven Lee Myers, Sabrina Tavernise and Michael Wines, and was written by Mr. Myers.

MOSCOW, Oct. 31 — Last Friday was a workday like any other, but when employees arrived that morning at the gray, hulking Meridian House of Culture in southern Moscow, they were curtly told to go home. No one told them why.

Inside, however, commandos from the Interior Ministry's elite Alpha squad had already begun rehearsing plans to storm a similar cultural center seven miles away, where nearly 50 armed Chechens had taken more than 750 hostages two nights before.

These were the final preparations for an assault that was executed with lightning speed and the use of a powerful, untested and potentially lethal gas — and killed 41 of the guerrillas and at least 118 hostages.

Although the risky assault proved deadly, the decision to launch it was made in uncertainty and ambiguity. Tense negotiations had punctuated the siege, but Russian officials unable to see inside the theater concluded that the shooting of two hostages at 2:40 a.m. on Saturday morning had rendered further talks fruitless.

They thought the guerrillas had begun to carry out a promise to execute captives until their demands were met.

The denouement, on that pre-dawn Saturday soaked by an icy rain, seems to have been guided in part by cold calculation, in part by concern for human life, and in large part by the fear that no other option remained.

Only hours before the rescue began, an American hostage, Sandy A. Booker, had called the American Embassy. He said the Chechens' leader, Movsar Barayev, had agreed to release foreign hostages at 8 a.m., his Kazakh fiancé, Svetlana Gubareva, said in a television interview tonight. Mr. Booker was among those who died.

The hostage-takers had twice before offered to release the roughly 75 foreigners among the hostages, but then refused, giving negotiators little reason to believe a new breakthrough was at hand.

The Russian government's reaction after the rescue — silence, adamant denial of error, even prevarication — brought criticism from the relatives of the dead and from some foreign leaders. In the crisis, and particularly in the government's initial refusal to identify what turned out to be deadly gas, these critics saw troubling indications that Soviet autocracy and unaccountability lingered in today's Russia.

The decision to use the gas, Russian officials said, stemmed from a judgment that only a radical surprise attack could disarm the guerrillas before they could detonate what turned out to be 250 pounds of explosives and cause the catastrophic loss of far more lives.

"We hoped those people would be released, but each of us knew we had to be prepared for the worst," President Vladimir V. Putin said later.

And then, with uncharacteristic emotion, he acknowledged the cost of his own government's decision in a way that few Russian or Soviet leaders ever had.

"We could not save everyone," he said. "Forgive us."

Moment of Decision
Misunderstanding Hostage's Death

From the start of the crisis on Oct. 23, during the second act of a popular musical called "Nord-Ost," security officials began laying the groundwork for the storming of the theater.

But even in the hours leading up to the rescue, officials said, they had not ruled out a peaceful solution, despite Mr. Putin's iron vows not to negotiate with the terrorists, who were demanding that Russia withdraw its troops from Chechnya. Mr. Putin rode to the presidency of Russia after sending the army there in the fall of 1999 to quell separatists who had punched into Russian territory weeks earlier.

As late as Friday night, negotiators — a journalist, a pop star and a prominent member of Parliament — were trying to persuade the Chechens not to carry out their threats to kill everyone if Russian troops did not begin to pull out of Chechnya.

Reacting to the guerrillas' confused, conflicting demands, the Kremlin agreed late Friday to send an envoy, Viktor Kazantsev, to the theater at 11 a.m. on Saturday.

"They were offered the plane, a trip, whatever they wanted," said Aleksandr V. Machevsky, a spokesman for the Kremlin who spent the entire crisis at the makeshift commander center. "All options were considered."

The options seemed to vanish quickly, however, after 2:40 on Saturday morning when tensions inside the stuffy, increasingly filthy theater boiled over. One of the hostages, a man still not identified, suddenly rose from his seat and lunged forward, stepping on the backs of chairs and even on hostages bent forward in their seats.

It appeared, said another hostage, Georgi L. Vasilyev, one of the musical's producers, that he was lunging toward one of the Chechen women, whose body was strapped with explosives. A guerrilla opened fire, and a bullet struck the man in the eye. At least one, perhaps two other hostages were wounded.

The shots seemed to confirm the worst fears of officials in the command center: that the guerrillas had begun to carry out their threats.

In fact, the guerrillas called the command center and asked for medics to evacuate the man who had bolted. Fatefully, however, the callers did not make clear that the shootings had been a spontaneous eruption of violence and not the beginning of executions, according to siege survivors and officials.

The order to storm the theater — given shortly thereafter, officials said — came because the only thing the officials in charge believed unquestioningly was what the guerrillas had kept telling the intermediaries who met with them: they were prepared to die.

"The decision was made wisely," Mr. Machevsky said in an interview, "but circumstantially."

Distractions
How Videotape Saved Lives

After the man was shot, the exhausted, hungry and frightened hostages feared the worst.

"We dropped to the floor and said goodbye to each other," said Lyudmila Fedyantseva, a speech therapist who had attended the musical with her elderly mother and was sitting near the man who was shot. "I was shaking. My mouth was dry. I felt my heart beating."

Then, eerily, it was calm again. It became clear to the hostages, though not to the officials outside, that the executions had not started.

Mr. Vasilyev, the producer, recalled that after the shooting, the guerrillas asked him to help in the theater's glassed-in sound and lighting room. Mr. Vasilyev, who knew the equipment and theater well, said the guerrillas wanted to edit a videotape of their own raid taken by the theater's security cameras.

Mr. Vasilyev failed to get the equipment working, but Sasha Fedyakin, a lighting specialist at the theater, managed to do so. The Chechens' interest in the video did not seem to mesh with actions expected of those preparing to bring the siege to a deadly climax, Mr. Vasilyev said. But the guerrillas' fascination with creating a record of their raid may have saved hundreds of lives.

As many of the Chechens worked on the video, the deadly gas started seeping into the hall, quickly knocking hostages and hostage-takers unconscious. Mr. Vasilyev said he believed the Chechen women, 18 in all, never received an order to detonate the explosives strapped to their bodies.

"They were involved with watching that video recording," he said of the men. "At that moment, the gas started to be pumped in."

"Maybe it was a pure coincidence, and maybe they waited especially for this moment," he said, referring to the commandos then closing in. "The Chechen leaders were in the theater control room, carried away with watching that video, when the storming began."

The Wait
In Command Center, Angry Diplomats

The command center was inside War Veterans Hospital No. 1, about 200 yards away and with a direct view of the theater. There were representatives of all the Russian agencies involved, including the mayor's office, as well as consular officials from several embassies, who were there out of concern for the foreigners held hostage.

Anger and frustration were rising. The Ukrainian ambassador, Mykola P. Biloblotsky, blamed the Russian officials for not winning the release of nearly three dozen Ukrainians, shouting at one point, "What kind of government is this?," according to an official who was there.

Outside the command center, relatives of the hostages also became increasingly frustrated. "There is no demand that cannot be met to save 700 lives," said one placard they hoisted in protest. Another read, "Mr. Putin, what if your daughter were inside?"

Late Friday, there were several indications that a climax was building. In the command center, the foreign diplomats were asked to leave to a new post, farther away.

By then, the commandos were inside parts of the cultural center. Some had been there from the beginning, establishing control of parts of the complex, including the roof, the basement and a gay club on the second floor.

The Raid
Aura of Secrecy, Before and After

The details of the raid itself remain shrouded in the secrecy of the Alpha squad, whose operations are no more open to public scrutiny that those of American Special Operations troops.

Accounts in Russian newspapers, based on anonymous interviews with commandos, said the order to rescue the hostages — and kill the guerrillas — came shortly after the man was shot at 2:40. Around 3:30 or 4, the commandos began carrying gas into the basement. They were not told what the gas was, according to the media accounts.

At 5:15, the assault began when the commandos released the gas into the air conditioning system, according to Sergei A. Goncharov, a member of the Moscow City Council and president of the Alpha veterans' association, who said he discussed the raid with commandos.

Almost 200 began to storm the building just before 5:30, wearing white armbands to distinguish them from the guerrillas, who also wore camouflage. The commandos broke through a wall leading from the gay club into the main complex. They also entered through the roof and the underground tunnels used for wiring and sewage.

What they did not know was whether the gas had worked.

Its effects, however, had been almost instantaneous. Few of the surviving hostages remember much of the raid itself.

"It was quiet and very late at night," said Andrei Bogdanov, an actor who was sitting in the fourth row, close to the stage. "Most people were sleeping, or pretending to be asleep. I heard a round of shots near the building entrance — maybe 10 or 15. Some of the terrorists began running toward the exit. After that, I lost consciousness."

Not all the guerrillas succumbed. There was intense fighting in the foyer and on the second-floor landing behind the balcony. That was where Mr. Barayev, the leader, died, along with several other guerrillas, a Kremlin official said in an interview. Several grenades exploded, but none of the explosives the guerrillas had threatened to use detonated.

"In a minute," one commando told the newspaper Gazeta, "we realized that we managed to avoid the explosion."

Throughout the crisis, emergency medical workers were on hand, treating the hostages who trickled from the theater. Just after the 2:40 a.m. shooting, the command center had ordered the city's ambulance service to be prepared for casualties, the service's chief doctor, Igor S. Elkis, said in an interview.

By the time the assault was under way, more than 450 emergency teams were on the scene. Ambulances and even ordinary city buses were lined up near the cultural center for blocks.

"At the theater, we were prepared to help people suffering from terrorists' hands," Dr. Elkis said. "We expected victims of explosion, gunfire."

Indeed, much of the criticism that has surrounded the rescue has centered on the secrecy surrounding the use of the gas and the failure to have enough doses of a proven antidote ready. All the ambulances carried the drug, called Naloxone, but were soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of hostages being carried out.

Dr. Elkis disputed criticism that the emergency crews were unprepared, saying they had enough Naloxone, but he acknowledged that they had to order more to the scene. "When we learned that the gas was used, we sent more Naloxone to the site," he said.

Several rescue workers had no idea how much of the antidote to give; some administering 5 cubic millimeters, others 10, according to rescue workers quoted in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

In the frantic rescue, mistakes were made. A doctor who treated many of the victims said one person was found, still alive, beneath a pile of bodies of those presumed dead.

There was considerable confusion among the commandos and police officers carrying the unconscious victims from the theater. They conducted haphazard triage, putting the most seriously injured into ambulances and other cases into buses.

The doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the biggest difficulty — one that the American ambassador, Alexander R. Vershbow, also said probably cost lives — was the apparent absence of competent first-aid in the first crucial moments.

Like the ambulance crews, the hospitals were prepared to treat those wounded by bullets, not by gas. At one hospital, the receiving doctor had to call another hospital to find out what antidote was needed. Luckily, the hospital had a supply.

"It wasn't an evil plot," the doctor said of the accusations of bungling. "It was just a Soviet mess."

www.nytimes.com

I think I pretty much said exactly what this guy concluded a little while ago. The whole thing was a terrible tradgedy, but I knew it wasnt intended to end up like this.

[ 11-01-2002, 11:49 AM: Message edited by: MagiK ]