The Daily - A Russian Assassin Tells His Story

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has carried out a brazen campaign of state-sponsored assassinations. Our colleague tracked down one of the hitmen. Guest: Michael Schwirtz, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, spoke with Oleg Smorodinov, a Russian hit man. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has carried out a brazen campaign of state-sponsored assassinations. My colleague Michael Schwartz tracked down one of the assassins behind that campaign.

It's Monday, April 8th. So there's this small town in western Ukraine called Rivne. It's old. It has a number of Orthodox Christian cathedrals and a good theater. And there's a man named Oleg Smorodinov who moves into this small town. He rents an apartment on the first floor of an old Soviet-style building. But he's not there because he wants to live in this apartment. He's there because he wants to keep an eye on someone, a man who lives on the sixth floor of the same building.

a man who lives on the sixth floor of the same building. That man was on a list of six people that Oleg had been given by two handlers who had sent him to this town. Describe this list. There were six names on the list, each with addresses and dates of birth. And each of the names on the list was given a code name, the name of a flower in Russian. So there was Lyutik, which is buttercup.

There was Shapovinik, which is briar. And the name of the man on the sixth floor that Oleg was watching was Ivan Mamchur. And his code name was Rosa, or The Rose. And what did Oleg know about this man, The Rose? What does he learn by watching him? Oleg knows very little initially about this man. He learns that he's a man who keeps to a routine. He leaves every morning at around 6.30, 7 o'clock, takes his bicycle, goes to work.

He works as an electrician at a local jail. He comes back around 6 o'clock in the evening, goes into his apartment, and really doesn't come out all that much. He certainly doesn't know why he's there to watch him. His handlers were vague, but what they did tell him was that this was an enemy. This was somebody that had done something bad in his past.

And so what happens next? Oleg watches Ivan for about a month and a half, and then one day he gets a text message written in Russian. It's cryptic, but he knows what it means. It says, Which means the rose must be picked today. Tomorrow it is no longer relevant. At that point, Oleg positions himself on the sixth floor in the hallway

outside of Ivan's apartment and waits for him to come home. He stands there, I'm not exactly sure for how long, smoking cigarettes with a gun in his hand, a silenced pistol. And when the elevator doors open, he calls Ivan's name. Ivan turns to him and a leg opens fire. He shoots him eight times. But instead of falling to the ground immediately, Ivan turns and walks towards a leg and says, in Russian, which means, it's not me, I'm not guilty.

And then he falls dead to the floor. And Michael, how do you know all of these intimate details of this murder? I came to this story by reporting on another attempted Russian assassination, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Police worked well into the night, carefully examining the site of a bizarre incident they still can't explain. It happened yesterday in a shopping area. In March last year, British authorities found Mr. Skripal and his daughter twitching and unresponsive on a bench. There was a couple, an older guy and a younger girl.

She was sort of lent in on him. It looked like she'd passed out, maybe. Actually initially thought that they were suffering from a drug overdose. He was doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky. They very quickly realized that they had been poisoned. In a statement released in the past hour or so, police said the pair came into contact with a nerve agent, furthermore. They both remained critically ill. As the investigation delved deeper,

they determined that, in fact, Mr. Skripal was a former Russian spy and that he had been poisoned by agents sent by the Kremlin to kill him. Leaving him twitching on his bench. Exactly. The government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

This sets off a geopolitical conflict between the West and Russia. Alone, Russia's crime is worthy of this council's action. But this is not an isolated incident. The U.S. is removing 60 Russian officials. An entire consulate will be closed. Chancellor Merkel and President Macron agreed that there is no plausible explanation other than that the Russian state was responsible. It's now 16 EU nations following suit. One by one, they joined Britain in a standoff with the Kremlin. joined Britain in a standoff with the Kremlin.

What was most frustrating for me as a reporter about the Skripal case was that there was very little I could find out about the mechanism by which these sorts of attacks were carried out. When these sorts of things happen, we are reliant on Western intelligence services if they give us anything. We're reliant on Western law enforcement services. Normally, you get nothing but denials from the Kremlin. And what I was looking for is for somebody to explain to me how these assassinations, how these operations are carried out from the point of view of the people who are plotting them.

You wanted to know from the other side how this all works. Correct. And so I went looking for cases that could help better explain how these sorts of assassinations and assassination attempts are carried out. And that brought me to Ukraine. And why Ukraine? A steady stream of anti-Kremlin figures have been assassinated on Kiev's streets. Mostly because there have been a number of assassinations in recent years, a lot of them attributed to Russia. A former Russian lawmaker who defected to Ukraine in 2016 was shot dead outside a hotel in Kiev. The surveillance video appearing to show the assassination of a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The blast comes nearly a year after investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed in a car bomb.

It marked another dark moment in the awful relationship between Russia and Ukraine. And so I talked to a source who had some knowledge about some of these cases. And one of the cases he mentioned was this assassination in an apartment building with Oleg in far western Ukraine. And this one immediately jumped out at me because it was so unlike all the other cases that I had been researching. What do you mean? Most of the assassinations that have occurred have involved high-ranking officials or military

figures or journalists, people, it's sad to say, you might expect to be targets of assassination. This case didn't seem to fit any of those patterns. The victim wasn't a well-known political figure. He wasn't a journalist. He was an electrician at a jail. He was a nobody, really. And so I was curious why anyone would want to kill him,

let alone the Russians. And yet the Ukrainian officials insisted that Russia had something to do with this. Turned out that he was on trial and there was a hearing going on. And so I rented a car. I drove four hours from Kiev, the capital, to this town, Rivne, and just showed up at the courthouse. I arrived a little before anybody else got there and was in the courtroom alone. The courtroom

is about the size of a large New York city bedroom. There's a Ukrainian flag, there's a bench where a three-judge panel sits, and just a few benches for spectators. There's a large steel cage where the defendants are kept. A steel cage? A steel cage. In the middle of the courtroom? In the middleants are kept. A steel cage. A steel cage.

In the middle of the courtroom. In the middle of the courtroom. A few minutes later, the bailiffs bring this man in, Oleg, the defendant, and lock him in the cage. And he's short in stature. He's got a goatee flecked with gray hair. He's sort of slumped. He's wearing this blue track suit and a baseball cap. And I walk up to Oleg and just introduce myself as a journalist. Through the cage?

Through the cage. And I had expected maybe to get a few sound bites on this trip and to go home largely disappointed. And to my great surprise, Oleg just started talking and talking and talking. What did he say? He admitted almost immediately to having pulled the trigger at the behest of these two individuals who were his handlers. And then the judges walk in and were cut off. And Oleg suggests that I come back after the trial

and talk to him in jail where he has all the time he needs. So he is very willing to tell you this story. Eager to tell this story. And so you meet Oleg in prison. What happens there? I go to the jail after the trial. They lead me into a small room. There's a table, there's chairs, and a small barred window. After a few minutes, they bring a leg in, and we're left alone in there. I pull out my recorder and start talking to him.

They said I could record how they were doing. And how unusual is it to get this kind of access to these Russian assassins? The successful ones you never find, and the unsuccessful ones usually end up dead. And so it's rare to find an unsuccessful assassin who is captured and contained in a way that allows them to be interviewed.

And Oleg is uniquely in that sweet spot. Right. And Oleg is uniquely in that sweet spot. Right. What does he tell you when you guys start to talk? He started with a poem that I don't really remember. He said some sort of poem and then started rattling a few things off in English. I spy. Ah. Or slide. No. I simply study

with silly men. Yes. Do you have an accent? But very early on in our conversation, he brings out this map. Look, I was interested

in the question for... This map that he had drawn on a piece of graph paper ripped out of a notebook. This is Moscow. This is Moscow. The map shows downtown Moscow he had drawn on a piece of graph paper ripped out of a notebook. The map shows downtown Moscow,

and he points to this little shaded square that is labeled Vienna Café. And this is around the corner from the headquarters of Russia's domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, which is the successor of the KGB. He points to this square and said, this is where I met with my handlers. This is where I would meet with them. In downtown Moscow, around the corner from the FSB.

At a coffee shop. And these were the guys that gave Oleg the list of names with six targets, one of them being Ivan, who lived in the apartment in Rivne. — And so Oleg, it sounds like, is part of the Russian intelligence system. — No, in fact. He was not an intelligence officer. He spent much of his life involved in various criminal pursuits. This is a criminal.

He was involved in an extortion racket in the early 2000s. He served two stints in jail for bribery and fraud. He was involved in sex trafficking. Not a good guy. This is not a pleasant man. And at some point,

he finds himself at a gun show in Moscow where he's trying to find some kind of accessory for a weapon that he has. And it's at this gun show in Moscow where he's trying to find some kind of accessory for a weapon that he has. And it's at this gun show that he meets some individuals who offer him employment, say that they know some people who might be looking for somebody with his particular skills

and would he like to meet him. And that is when he was introduced to these two individuals who became his handlers. when he was introduced to these two individuals who became his handlers. And what is Oleg's understanding, after speaking with these handlers, of what his job is going to be? He's getting older. He is starting to think about his future. And what he really wants out of this is a pension. I think it's a pension.

Mm-hmm. Pension. He sees this as sort of his way, his entry into a government job with the Russian government that would allow him to one day retire with a pension. So in his mind, he can do this job. He can carry out this task and be kind of financially set for the rest of his life. Right, and keep in mind, according to Oleg,

he doesn't know that he's going to kill anybody at this point. He knows that he wants to get into the government in some way, and he wants to find some way to pay for his retirement. But he doesn't exactly know what the task is. And when does he learn what the job actually entails? According to Oleg, he went to Rivne to start conducting surveillance of this individual, of this apartment building,

under the impression that that is all he was going to do. He did know that a murder was going to take place. He did know that this man was targeted for murder. But he insists, and he insists this to me, and he tells this to the prosecutors and the judges in the case, he claims it was a great surprise to him that he was then asked to carry out the murder himself. So when you leave this interview, what have you learned about this list?

What did he tell you about why they were being targeted by the Russian government? He knows very little other than he suspects that this is revenge for something. But he does give me the list, which allows me to go look into this question for myself. He gives you access to the assassination list. Gives me access to the assassination list,

and I sort of embark on this journey trying to figure out why. Why these individuals? What made them targets? And how do you do that? Google is a good place to start. I take the names and I just start Googling them. I start asking sources that I have in Ukraine about them. Very quickly I learned that some of them have military backgrounds. But the thing that stands out as most important is that they were all connected in some way to a 2008 war between

Russia and the Republic of Georgia, a war that for Russia ended up being a very big embarrassment. Bombings and firefights still raging and Georgian forces in retreat. Russian troops have pushed their way into Georgia itself. I think I vaguely recall this conflict, but what was so embarrassing about it for Russia? Well, firstly, Russia crushed the Georgian army in a matter of days. This was a massive superpower against a tiny little army. But what Russia didn't expect was that Georgia had these sophisticated anti-aircraft systems that were just blowing Russian planes out of the sky. Georgian rockets rained down on the South Ossetian capital.

Several pilots were killed, some were captured. This became a major intelligence failure. Russia routed Georgia's army in five days. Despite its victory, Moscow worried about its shortcomings on the battlefield. Putin was livid. And when Russia started looking into this, they discovered that it was Ukraine that had secretly sold these weapon systems to Georgia

in advance of the war. And this just set Putin off. He became incredibly angry and vowed to find the people that were responsible for providing Georgia these weapons. What he said was, we don't know who decided to deliver the equipment and weapons from Ukraine during the conflict, but whoever it was, that person made a huge mistake. huge mistake. And so these six names on this list that Oleg has, what do we know about their involvement in this Georgian conflict? Even with my digging, we don't know a lot. We know that all of them had some connection to the Georgian War, but it was really hard to find anything specifically about their involvement. One I found in a government document, several I found named in books about the war that were

written by Russian authors. One of the men on the list I met, and he claimed to have been in Georgia during this time, but didn't even take part in the war. And so what is clear is that, you know, these people don't appear to have played a very big role, if any, in the fighting. And there's no evidence to suggest that they had anything to do with these missile systems that shot down Russian planes. That includes Ivan Mamchur, the man who was killed. It had been eight years since the war in Georgia. He was doing nothing that would seem to constitute a threat to Russia. But for some reason, they came after him and they killed him. It sounds like to the degree that people on this list

were involved in the Georgian conflict and in embarrassing Russia, it might have been quite peripheral. Well, I mean, you know, the problem is, is like, we just don't know. We don't know what the motivation was, why, you know, eight years after the fact, suddenly they send a leg to go start handling this problem, why they were still so burnt up about it. I talked to one Ukrainian intelligence officials who just described this as a bureaucratic problem. Somebody discovered that a file was left open and not resolved,

and somebody set about resolving it. Meaning like a file of Russian grievance. Correct. In other words, there is no slight too small or old because Russia doesn't forget. — Correct. Russia will remember, the Kremlin will remember, and in a lot of cases, they come after you. If you look at Skripal, and if you look at Mamchur, and if you look at any number of people that we believe have been murdered by the Russian state, these killings, these attacks seem to serve no geopolitical purpose.

They are individual petty slights that the Kremlin is pursuing, that the Kremlin is seeking satisfaction for. And that's what sort of sets Russia apart from other countries. And that's what sort of sets Russia apart from other countries. It operates more like, you know, a mafia organization, an organized crime syndicate than it does a state. It almost often seems as if it's sort of Putin's personal animosities that are driving these attacks and driving these killings. But the one thing that's interesting and even perhaps more scary about this case is that not only is the target insignificant, but the assassin is a nobody.

I think there's this assumption about Russian spies that they're the elites, they're highly trained. Russia is one of the most well-funded, most populous spy services in the world. And yet Oleg was a criminal. He was untrained. He was not an intelligence officer based upon everything that we know. And that, to me, is probably more terrifying than anything else. How many Olegs are there out there? How many people are out there willing to work for the Russian government to kill people? How many people can be recruited to murder other people

to match with the myriad grievances that Russia possesses? If you can recruit a kind of nobody on the street. Then you can recruit anybody. And it feels like the answer is there are a lot of Olegs and there are a lot of grievances. I think that's true. I'm curious what will happen to Oleg in the end Did he end up getting that pension from Russia That he thought would kind of set him off for the rest of his life? He certainly didn't get a pension

He did get a few thousand dollars A Mercedes van and a dinner at a Japanese sushi chain In exchange for this murder But he'll never be able to use the money or the car and a dinner at a Japanese sushi chain in exchange for this murder. But he'll never be able to use the money or the car. He's sitting in a Ukrainian jail and almost certainly will be convicted and possibly spend the rest of his life in a Ukrainian prison. He's holding out hope that Russia is going to help him, that perhaps he might be exchanged for a Ukrainian prisoner on the Russian side.

But the Russians have shown no interest in his welfare at all. By all accounts, for Russia, he's just disposable. One official told me, он использованный патрон. He's a used bullet. We'll be right back. of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, resigned amid growing frustration from President Trump over the number of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border. Nielsen's departure comes just days after the president dumped his nominee to run the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, Ronald Vitello, because the president said he did not believe that Vitello would be

tough enough on immigration. Ron's a good man, but we're going in a tougher direction. We want to go in a tougher direction. And... Over the weekend, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pledged that if re-elected, he would annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank, imposing Israeli authority over the highly disputed territory. How do you say, in the nearest time?

Before the elections? Yes. I don't know if it will be before the elections, because the elections are not our responsibility. The pledge, which will appeal to conservative voters ahead of Tuesday's election, would all but end the possibility of a two-state peace deal with Palestinians, since Palestinians consider the West Bank the heart of a future state. Polls show that the election for prime minister remains close, but Netanyahu's party is expected to have a better chance than

his rival of forming a ruling coalition. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.