DRUG TSAR, DETHRONED

Abstract

(By Mikhail Fishman. The Moscow Times, May 19, 2016, p. 6. Complete text:) On May 10, an unusual post appeared on Facebook, apparently signed by Viktor Ivanov, the head Russia’s Federal Narcotics Control Service (FNCS): Comrades and fellow soldiers, it began. want to apologize that I couldn’t save our organization. We protected our national interests honestly. Someone somewhere seemed far from happy with the decision to dismantle one the largest government agencies. ... For any former senior-level official to question [Russian] President Vladimir Putin’s logic is, in the context the Russian system, a demonstration significant disloyalty. The post - allegedly written by Ivanov himself - disappeared from Facebook within an hour. The FNCS press office described the publication as a provocation against the service and its head. ... The decision to disband FNCS, along with the Federal Migration Service, was announced on March 30 as part a broader reform, including the creation a new National Guard [see Current Digest, Vol. 68, No. 14, p. 9]. Under the plans, in a little over one week, the agency will be no more, and Ivanov, a longtime associate Putin, will retire. According to various sources in and around the government, Ivanov had been kept in the dark about the plans until the very last minute. ... is a quite unusual way doing business in Putin’s universe, and seems to be a sign serious dissatisfaction somewhere within government. ... Ivanov’s name features prominently in any account Putin’s rise to power. A career KGB officer, he moved to St. Petersburg in the 1990s to take up a role within the city administration. According to some reports, he did this on Putin’s own recommendation. Since then, their careers have dovetailed. When, in the late 1990s, Putin headed the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, Ivanov was assigned a top position in the service. ... Ivanov always dealt with paperwork, not fieldwork, a former official who knew him at that time recalls. was always the HR manager, he says. ... When Putin was elected president, the manager, albeit with KGB roots, enjoyed a meteoric rise to become presidential deputy chief staff. was a position enormous authority. It placed Ivanov in charge the Kremlin’s HR department, and gave him control over all issues relating to national awards and staffing within the justice system. It was here that he developed a reputation as the Kremlin’s forceful power broker - alongside Igor Sechin, a similarly faithful assistant hailing from Putin’s St. Petersburg days. ... The extent Ivanov’s omnipotence was publicly revealed in court in 2008, when a leading Supreme Arbitration Court judge testified that Ivanov’s staff directly intervened in judicial appointments. is unconstitutional. One Ivanov’s former colleagues agreed that of course this was what was happening - this is how the system works; they were acting in the interests the state, and besides, it has only gotten worse since. ... It was around this time that Ivanov’s rise was checked and his career problems began. He first had a run-in with Dmitry Medvedev, who became president in 2008, and who found it difficult to deal with Putin’s KGB associates. Ivanov was asked to move out the Kremlin, and, in a clear demotion, he was transferred from his top position within the presidential administration to become head of the recently formed FNCS. ... The idea creating a special federal agency for drug control came from another one Putin’s St. Petersburg security associates, Viktor Cherkesov, in 2002. It was largely modeled on the US Drug Enforcement Administration, which was created in the early 1970s to fight drug smuggling. ... The idea creating the new agency came naturally enough. The drug threat had by the early 2000s become very serious, with Russia forming a huge market for opiates coming from Afghanistan and Central Asia. As a former security services official says, the Internal Affairs Ministry was simply unable to deal with the inflows due to its own involvement in drug trafficking. The new agency was given priority resourcing: 40,000 officers, all necessary operational hardware and, more importantly, the authorization to use it. The FNCS wiretapping department gained legendary status. ... Their investigators were given a full forensic set their own and didn’t need to stand in line to get it, explains one former FNCS official. This was quite a big deal. ... Every Russian law-enforcement agency has a natural inclination to look to expand its authority and area control, and the FNCS was no exception. As the years passed, it began to prosecute businesses that had little to do with trafficking but dealt with, for example, industrial drugs or chemicals. They targeted veterinarians, industrial chemical entrepreneurs, and even bakers producing poppyseed muffins.