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(there were no casualties and no terrorists were found).

December 23 is the date which can be regarded as the beginning of the FSB s terrorist campaign against Russia. From then on, terrorist attacks became a commonplace occurrence.

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The secret services run riot It is worth noting the way in which the press office of the Russian government described the terrorist attack carried out on December 23: Information has been received concerning the dispatch to Moscow [from Chechnya] of three experienced guerrilla fighters, including one woman, who have instructions to assume the leadership of groups of terrorists sent here previously. A group of foreigners who were seeking contact with guerrillas from Grozny has been detained, and a number of radio-controlled explosive devices they were carrying have been confiscated, together with twenty kilograms of TNT and sixteen radio-controlled anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. On the night of December 23, the rails were blown up on one section of the Moscow circular railroad.

Another bomb was rendered harmless. Measures are being taken to identify sabotage groups active in Moscow and the Moscow Region.

No investigation of any acts of terrorism was carried out. The picture was clear enough anyway: first the Chechens sent sabotage groups to Moscow and the Moscow Region; then they sent three experienced guerrilla leaders to help them; and finally, a group of foreigners was brought in to help them from abroad with TNT and bombs (apparently they were carrying the bombs on their persons as they entered the country). The result of all these complicated preparations was a terrorist attack on one section of the Moscow circular railroad, which indicated that the groups of saboteurs already sent to Moscow and the Moscow Region had not yet been neutralized (one could assume that the terrorist attacks would continue).

Everything in the press office statement was absolutely untrue, except for the announcement that there had been an explosion on a section of the Moscow circular railroad on December 23. The modus operandi suggests that this attack was also carried out by Lazovsky s people. In any case, it is impossible to regard as mere coincidence the fact that only four days later yet another terrorist attack was carried out in Moscow. At nine in the evening on December 27, 1994, Vladimir Vorobyov, a free-lance FSB agent and employee of Lazovksy s company Lanako, who came from a long line of military men (in 1920, his grandfather had been in charge of the Arsenal arms plant in Tula), and had a Candidate degree (i.e. Ph.D.) in Technical Sciences and was employed at the Zhukovsky Academy (on the development of a new anti-missile defense system), planted a remote-controlled bomb in a bus at a bus stop on Route 33 between the All-Union Economic Exhibition (VDNKh) and the Yuzhnaya subway station. There were no passengers on board the bus when the bomb exploded, and the only casualty was the driver, Dmitry Trapezov, who suffered severe bruising and concussion. Trolley buses standing close by were lacerated by shrapnel.

Vorobyov s boss, Lazovsky, worked not only for the FSK, but also for the SVR, where his controller was the experienced officer, Pyotr Yevgenievich Suslov, who was born in

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1951. Lazovsky was one of his secret agents. Suslov officially quit the intelligence service and went into business in 1995, after which he made repeated journeys to wartorn Grozny, Baghdad, Teheran, the Arab Emirates, and other countries in the Middle East. In fact, Suslov was organizing extra-legal reprisals. In order to carry out missions involving acts of coercion and killings, he hired qualified former operatives from special units, in particular from the special missions unit of the First (Central) Department (PGU) of the KGB of the USSR, known as Vympel, who possessed advanced sniper s skills.

Vympel s officers were involved both as instructors and front line operatives, and a