KILLED - Episode 2: The Bombshell

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

GQ tries to bury a provocative piece about Vladmir Putin's rise to power. Featuring Scott Anderson and Gabriel Snyder.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine earlier this year, the fate of the world seemed to be held hostage by one man. Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in eastern Ukraine. Explosions were heard in key. Democratic leaders all over the world began asking themselves the same question. How far would this man go in the name of power? The war in Ukraine has begun. More than a decade ago, journalist Scott Anderson wrote a provocative story for Men's magazine

GQ that all but answered that very question. I approached GQ with this idea. Here's this crazy story from Russia. Vladimir Putin's rise to power may have all been done by a false flag operation, which over 300 people died. Anderson's piece, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, was published in the September 2009 issue of GQ. But the story of Putin's criminal rise didn't even get a shout-out

on the cover. The magazine's PR didn't reach out to book Scott on Rachel Maddow or Bill Mar. It was almost as if, Konday Nast, the publisher of Glossies like Vogue, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair didn't actually want anyone to read it. My first inclination that there was a problem was actually the article had just come out and someone at GQ leaked me this email from the Cogniz lawyers. The basic idea was, okay, we have to run this article, but we're just gonna bear it in every way we possibly can.

The piece is killed. Kill, kill, kill, dead, holy shit. But as these attempts at censorship usually do, the professional statue GQ proputina is this, and all kind of backfired. From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Episode 2.

The Bombshell. Veteran War Correspondence Scott Anderson doesn't just report on explosive events around the world. He observes them, boots on the ground. His work in Bosnia inspired the 2007 film The Hunting Party, starring Richard Geer as Simon, a fearless journalist on a mission to track down Bosnia's most wanted war criminal, and Terrence Howard as his reluctant sidekick. I write long form feature articles for magazines, primarily for the New York Times magazine, actually, and almost all foreign stories, and usually on conflicts and wars around the world. Scott kind of looks like a mix between Steven Segal and Blake Shelton,

rugged with that intelligent, perma-squint thing. A Scott Anderson piece, it doesn't come cheap. War zones are really expensive. You have to hire a fixer, you have to hire a car and a driver. Everything is just expensive. I mean, you can easily average $1,000 a day just moving around. The New York Times magazine would send me to places up to a month at a time. And I would build them for expenses of well over $20,000. I think that era is over.

That just doesn't happen anymore. It's a real shame because there's so many amazing stories out there that just go unreported because there's not the money to fund it. In the mid-'90s, Scott's appetite for conflict led him to Chechnya, a small Muslim majority republic that had spent centuries defending itself against invasion from its larger neighbors, notably Russia, to

the North. I spent some time in Chechnya writing this article on a kind of a famous American disaster relief expert who had vanished in Chechnya during the war there between Chechen separatists and the Russians. I remember a series of apartment building bombings that happened first in Moscow and then in a couple of other Russian cities. In late 1999, massive apartment building bombings would be collapsing in an entire eight nine-story high rises and killed over 300 people.

These bombings that killed all these civilians were very quickly blamed on the Chechen's Chechen rebels, Chechen terrorists. But there are a number of aspects to the apartment building bombings that just didn't make sense. Chechen had achieved its independence in the first Chechen War four or five years earlier. So why four years after achieving independence,

why all of a sudden start launching this bombing campaign? And there was one attack in particular that never made much sense. What happened in the provincial city of Ryzen was a kind of a neighborhood watch group watched these two men putting sacks of some white substance in the basement of their building and they called the local police.

The first finding of the police was that it was explosives in the basement and they set out a dragnet and within day had actually caught one of the men who they were looking for. It turned out these men were FSB officers. And once they were caught, the FSB very quickly changed the story from, you know, that, oh, they are patriotic citizens who FOIL a terrorist attack to saying, oh, actually, no,

this was an FSB training exercise. Scott hadn't been the first journalist to question who was actually behind that streak of deadly bombings, the one that struck terror into the heart of Russians everywhere back in 99. Anyone who seemed interested in pursuing a counter narrative seemed to be stopped dead in their tracks. Alexander at Lipvin Yenko, lead FSB investigator who had been looking at the bombings, famously murdered and London by FSB agents who slipped them of fatal dose of polonium.

The leading investigator, journalists who had been looking into the bombings, she had been murdered in the elevator of her apartment building. And a member of parliament who had organized a inquiry into the bombings, he had been murdered in front of his home in Moscow as well. It was a story of Argo level intrigue in which history was hastily rewritten, a story in which a little-known man named Vladimir Putin stepped out of the wings and on to the world

stage to claim victory for his country. You know, throughout the 90s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia just suffered one kind of colossal indignity after another. One of the primary ones being the fact that the Chechens had beat them to achieve their independence in 1995. Yeltsin at this point was having musical chairs with Prime Minister, so Putin was the third Prime Minister in less than a year. He was almost completely unknown. His background was in the KGB and he had been sort of a drab colorless upper hat check, somewhere in the Kremlin, the upper hat.

Within days of the last apartment building bombings. Russian tanks were rolling into Chechnya. Within just a matter of a couple of months, the Russian side control of the Republic of Chechnya. So all of a sudden Vladimir Putin was kind of seen as the savior of Russia, his popularity soared, and then very quickly after that Boris Yeltsin stepped aside and ordered snap elections, which led to Vladimir Putin coming to power. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After GQ Greenlit's Scott Anderson's story,

exposing the false flag operation that brought Vladimir Putin to power almost a decade before, the journalist spent nearly three weeks in Moscow trying to gather strength. When I got over to Moscow in 2008 and I started nosing around trying to interview people who had been poking around the story for a long time. Investigative journalists, eyewitnesses to the bombings, virtually nobody would talk to me. And then he identified the perfect source, former FSB investigator, Mikhail Trapashkin. He had just come out of sending four years in prison, which he believes because of his poking around

in the apartment building bombing case. After coming out of prison for four years, his wife insisted that he just stay clear of politics. And again, by this point, almost every other notable who had looked into this case, and it had been murdered. Trapashkin was one of the last people around, and his wife begged him to just stay out of it and then die rolled in the town and he had read,

he talked to me. He hadn't come to his apartment to talk at a time when he knew his wife was gonna be away but she came back early, unexpected life. And she found us to talk, talking to this American journalist. And there was just kind of a big scene, you know, high strung Russian woman and kicked us out of the apartment so we went out and nearby park to keep talking for another couple of hours.

They agreed. Triposhkin would tell him what he knew, and Scott in return would get the story published in a mainstream US magazine. When you think of how brazen some of the political assassinations have been in Russia, I do find it quite remarkable that Trapashkin has managed to stay on this long. Clearly, he was facing threats of death, or at the very least of going back into prison. He had two little kids that he had to think about, but he's just a born detective.

And it is the mystery in his mind, the miscarriage of justice in the Department of Building Bomming Case that has driven him all these years. Forch or Pashkin, there was an almost perverse logic to talking to Scott. He had made the decision that safety for him lay in publicizing the case. If he tried to stay quiet about it, it would be very easy to arrest him again

or push him into sidelines. But if the whole world knew about him and the singular role he was playing, then it bought him a certain degree of safety. I mean, that was his calculation whether right or wrong. The story went through the usual gauntlet, copy editing, fact checking, and of course legal. It was set to appear in the magazine's September issue, typically the biggest of the year for

a print magazine. But in 2009, nothing was business as usual. This could be the most serious recession in decades. Less than a year earlier, the economy had plunged into a free fall. Banks across the world were hemorrhaging cash. Luxury brands were losing shoppers. And in a trend that would prove permanent, magazines were down major ad dollars.

Conday Nast had reportedly lost a whopping one-third of its ad revenue between 2008 and 2009, a loss that caused the company hundreds of millions. It was the worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987. For the first time, the editorial geniuses at the top of the mastheads weren't the ones calling the shots. The suits were. At that point, Kante Nast had robust business in Russia.

GQ, in addition to several other of its marquee titles like Vogue, Tatler, and Glamour, printed Russian editions, when an early copy of Scott's story was shared with the editor of Russian GQ, his reaction was less than enthusiastic. My understanding is that it had been shown to the editor of Russian GQ, right before it was going to be published in Hefreak, and said, if this runs, we're going to have huge repercussions. It will be shut down in Russia. I'm putting words in a smile,

but this is my understanding of what happened. So Connie Nesbikin worried about all their big publications in Russia. But disrupting international additions was only part of the concern. This story might actually put Russian-based companies off the idea of buying real estate in American GQ. The possibility of losing even one potential advertiser didn't sit well with the money

men. And censoring a piece to placate an advertiser? Well, that didn't sit well with the editors. My understanding is that Konday Nast tried to kill the story altogether, and when they tried to do that, Jim Nelson, who was my editor on the piece, threatened to resign. Killed reached out to Jim Nelson, who declined to comment. But a GQ staffer at the time, remembers that Nelson and other editors were, quote, infuriated by the situation. Condé Nast found itself in a pickle. So what this really became about was how, okay, we have to

in the story or it's going to be like a mini scandal because our two top out of here are going to are going to quit. And people are going to be asking about that. So we don't want that to happen. So how do we just vary this story in any way possible care? On July 23rd, 2009, weeks before Scott Anderson's piece about Vladimir Putin's bloody rise to power

would hit new stands. Legal counsel to Conte Nast had found a solution. An email was sent to the magazine's head of fact checking. In copy, we're a handful of lawyers, Jim Nelson, and Topkontain-Aspras, including company chairman, Sine Newhouse. The subject line, GQ September issue, Dash-Russia. Killed has reviewed the email. It begins. Following up on our conversation, Kondain-As management has decided that the September issue of USGQ magazine containing Scott Anderson's article Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power

should not be distributed in Russia. It then lists 7-Not-Tos. As in, editors are not two, send a copy of the issue to current or potential advertisers in Russia. They're not two, syndicate the story to any foreign Kantein-ass magazine. And not two, dear God, whatever you do, put this thing online. The basic idea was, we'll explain to the Russians, oh yeah, it's publishing, but it's not going to be circulated in Russia, you'll never hear about it, and it'll be business as usual. ConteNAS declined to comment for this episode of Killed, but a company spokesperson said at the time, were mindful of the laws and issues in the countries we publish in. So when I got hold of this email, I thought, well, what do I do? And you know, part of it, I was just furious that they were doing everything possible to

kill the story that I'd spent so much time on. I think what made me even angrier was thinking of Kroposhkin. They've had this man so open up to me and be so candid at great risk to himself. For then, you know, these weasels that CondiNASED to turn around and try to decipher the story, you know, simply over money. I mean, that's, you know, it's not. These weren't Putin supporters. You know, they, they, they, they was all about protecting the other CondiNAS publications

in, in Russia and the advertiser. I said, well, fuck it. I don't need condinous. I contacted David Fulkenflick, who for NPR, read a show about media. And he had me on and we talked about the article and about the memo from the lawyers of what they were trying to do to kill it. And that really kind of set off then a bit of a tempest. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. The very same morning that NPR aired the segment, why GQ doesn't want Russians to read

its story on the September 4th 2009 episode of Morning Edition. Normally when a magazine gets a big scoop, it shouts it to the world. But apparently not GQ. An editor named Gabriel Snyder just happened to be on the hunt for his next juicy blog post. If you like media gossip, I highly recommend Gabriel's newsletter, the fine print. Here's Gabriel. I kind of just happened on to the story when I read David Fulkenflick filed a report about about Kondaynast taking some pretty extreme measures to keep this story out of Russia. And I just really was struck by how one of the biggest

magazine publishers in the world was saying that the best way to keep something secret was to put it in a magazine and never talk about it. You know, there was no suggestion that there was anything wrong with the story, that there was any, you know, issues with sourcing or any other questions. It was just pure fear of what would the Russian government think if they knew that this story was there. At the time, Gabor was the lead editor of Gokker,

a blog co-founded at the start of the Aughts by British Firebrand, Nick Denton. Denton felt traditional media had become too stuffy, too full of PR fluff. Nick Denton's famous line about Gokker is that he wanted it to be things that reporters tell each other over drinks and that they can't get into their publications.

Galker would eventually make headlines for publishing a clip of Hulk Hogan having sex. Oh, yeah, I'm on a roll. But at the time, Galker was best known for its breathless reporting on New York's insular media scene. There was this underdog mentality to its coverage. The free-wheeling vigilante throwing stones at its stumble-footed print competitors.

In 2009, that was when print versus digital was still a live issue, and there was still a big divide in the industry between people who worked for print publications versus sort of the lower classes of people who were working for these digital only upstarts. Condé Nast was a big, you know, subject of interest for Gawker back in those days. Everything Condé Nast did inside its hallowed headquarters, then in Times Square, was fair game to Gawker. The result was hilarious or cruel, depending on who you asked. A typical headline might read,

Swine flu strikes folk, Kanye asked Fancyus Magazine is infected with a dreaded Mexican pig influenza, or with regards to the long-running editor of Vanity Fair, great in Carter, getting too old for this shit. A big thing that Nick Denton was always pushing for his editors to do is to think about stunts. He wasn't satisfied with churning out a whole bunch of blog posts that made funny jokes

about the celebrities of the moment. He wanted big attention getting stunts. Stunts. As in the time Galker's sister site, Jezebel offered a $10,000 bounty for unretouched images of Lena Dunham in Vogue. And then a reader came through with the goods in like a few hours. Gabriel knew exactly what to do. The idea that clicked was, you know what, if Kahn-E-Nast is going to go to all these lengths

to keep this story away from Russian readers, then we can put up a Russian translation, you know, why not? Alongside opposed accusing Kani Nost of publishing cowardice, he scanned a copy of the article and asked Russian-speaking readers to pitch in. I had a felt like a moment when a little snarky blog could do some good in the world. The response was swift. The thing that I most remember was just being shocked at how fast it got translated. You know, so many people help. And one of the things that I remember being very concerned about was someone pranking

us. Oh, yeah, I'd be happy to do this. And then, you know, send us back, you know, gokars run by douchebags. We hate gokars blah, blah, blah. And I, and thenars run by douchebags, we hate gochars blah blah blah. And I, and then we get us to post it because we don't speak Russian. Google Translate was really my friend at that point. The translation, which was the effort of more

than a dozen gochareaters, was published within 48 hours in two parts under a Russian headline that roughly nets out to, hey, Psst, you can read the BANGQ article about Putin here. Back then, I was, you know, I don't know how many dozens of posts we put up in a day, but, you know, I was kind of thinking that that would be a post, one of the posts that would be up and then I would have to worry about five others. With the reception far exceeded what I thought it was going to be. And the reaction soon became, it was one of, you know,

at that point, I think one of our biggest stories, biggest traffic getters that I had had in a long while. In fact, the story would wind up being Galker's 15th most popular of the year, with close to 225,000 views. And it was everywhere, even the New York Times picked it up. In Russia, the translation began to circulate on various reddit threads and blogs. A leading Chechen separatist site posted it too. Russian GQ meanwhile attempted damage control.

In an interview with BBC, the magazine's editor-in-chief denied allegations that he was forbidden by Condon Ast to run Scott's piece, telling the news outlet that he didn't publish it on account of its quote, sloppiness. He added, I think the article was written in extremely bad faith. The author makes accusations against one of the first leaders of the country, monstrous accusations if you think about it.

Scott Anderson, the piece's author, remembers the reaction. As these attempts at censorship usually do or often do, it all kind of backfired because the article ended up getting probably a lot more attention than it would have. I was interviewed by Russian television. I was getting death threats. You know, email death threats, telephone death threats from from Moscow. Certainly the Russian government saw this as, you know, scandalous libelists, whatever.

I mean, not really libelists because they certainly never brought any legal action against me. So it created a bit of a stir in this, in what was really just such a naked attempt of censorship. When the whole controversy broke, I felt sorry for Jim Nelson because I think he kind of got caught in the middle. The way these stories run, it looked like, oh, GQ is trying to kill their own story. When, in fact, it wasn't GQ, it was the communist you know management. So I think he got sort of unfairly caught in the middle of things. It's always the lawyers, it's like the villains are always the lawyers.

Scott never spoke with Tripashkin again, Neither after his story or the Galker translation came out. The whistleblower's phone was probably tapped, he said, and it wouldn't have been safe. But he imagines that Trapashkin, who is still alive, would have been, quote, quite pleased by all of the Hullabaloo. After Putin's invasion into Ukraine, hijacked the new cycle earlier this year. My producer, Amanda and I, called Scott back to discuss the piece, which was quietly added to the archives of GQ's website sometime in 2017, in its frightening new context. First of all, I've become even more convinced as time has gone on that what I wrote about the

apartment bonbons in 1999. We're an FSB operation and we're designed to bring poop to power. And then there have been a number of other things that have happened since then that I think further emboldened pooping to think he could get away with it. The 2008 incursion into Georgia, the incursion into South Assetia, the 2014 seizure of Crimea. This is the playbook he's always gone back to. It's that, you know, when in doubt, it's time to go bomb somebody. It's worked for me before. So if there's any lesson of how he came to power, it's that you can do people and you can slaughter people

and get away with it. I kind of put out this warning about who this guy was and it was ignored. It rangles me, it rangles me more now, it's seeing what's happening in Ukraine. The idea of this First Amendment lawyer, you know, actively working to minimize the exposure of the story in every way possible. I would just love to hear how he goes to sleep at night now, because this wasn't about ideology.

It was all about cunningness, not burning their bridges in Russia, because they had a lot of magazines, they had huge advertisers out of Russia. It was all about money. It was all about money. The day after this interview was recorded. Kondaynaz suspended editorial operations for its seven magazines in Russia, including GQ. In a memo, later sent to the global staff, current CEO Roger Lynch cited, quote, the escalation in the severity of the censorship laws, which he said, have, quote, significantly curtailed free speech and punished reporters, simply for doing their jobs. you