Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 17

Many Poles, inevitably, found it hard to believe the Smolensk crash was a random, arbitrary accident. It seemed too cruel, too savage and too painfully ironic that it should have happened on the way to the cursed forest of Katyn.

In Warsaw and around the world, people reacted to the shock of the Smolensk tragedy with fear and suspicion. There is too much history between Poland and Russia for everyone to accept uncritically that the crash was a spontaneous accident, and many Poles wondered out loud if the Russian authorities could be trusted to carry out a thorough and objective crash investigation.

There were soon calls for the international community to get involved in finding out what happened in Smolensk and a petition calling for an international commission of inquiry quickly attracted 300,000 signatures.

But the rumour mill was already churning within hours of the accident and no accusation seemed too outrageous.

Film clips from the crash site posted on YouTube caused a frenzy of sinister speculation, as they appeared to show Russian troops moving through the still-burning wreckage, swearing, laughing and firing at least four gunshots (see bit.ly/smolenskcrash). Translations offered by those who posted the videos claimed the muffled, distant voices of the soldiers were saying, among other things, ‘Look in his eyes’, ‘Kill them all’, ‘He’s getting away’ and ‘Come here, bastard’ (followed by shots).

It is obviously easy to fake or manipulate the sound on videos, but these clips clearly were filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Tu-154 crash. Some people believed the troops were firing to ward off dogs or wolves near the wreck of the fuselage or that the bangs were exploding ammunition from the Polish security guards’ weapons but others alleged that survivors of the crash were being shot.

There were accusations, later found to be true, that Russian army conscripts who were supposed to be guarding the crash site had stolen credit cards and personal items from the smoking debris. There was a cashpoint withdrawal on one of the bank cards within two hours of its owner’s death, though it was another four days before the last of the human remains were recovered from the wreckage.

The dead president’s twin brother identified his body in Russia, before the post mortem examination, but some Poles later claimed that the body returned to Krakow for burial a few days later was not that of Lech Kaczynski.

Crude suggestions that Russia’s political elite might have reverted to Cold War ways and arranged the death of an awkward and noisily anti-Communist and anti-Russian Polish leader were never far from the surface.

President Kaczynski had been a strong supporter of ‘lustration’, the process of dragging out into the light every instance of collaboration with the Communist authorities. This had caused embarrassment to many former friends of Russia – and even to Poland’s first non-Communist president, Lech Walesa. There was certainly no love lost between Kaczynski and the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, Kaczynski’s political rival, had been invited to Putin’s official memorial ceremony for the Katyn massacre victims on 7 April 2010, flying to Smolensk with the same plane and crew. The president’s party on the crashed plane was heading for a second ceremony, three days later, which was carefully framed as an unofficial event.

Immediately after the disaster, Putin’s reaction was noted by many as being unexpectedly sensitive and sympathetic. The Russian authorities gave many assurances that a painstaking crash investigation would be carried out and that the details and background data would be shared with Poland.

But, as the months wore on, Polish investigators found it harder and harder to get the information they needed. When the draft of the Russian air accident investigation report was handed to the Polish government for comment in October 2010, six months after the crash, officials were appalled and refused to accept its findings. The initial response was 150 pages of queries and criticisms and a statement by the prime minister, Donald Tusk, that some of its conclusions were ‘without foundation’, though the president, Bronislaw Komorowski, said he was satisfied with the explanation that it had simply been too foggy to attempt a landing.

Within hours of the crash, Russian TV stations had reported that the plane was in trouble and dumping fuel before starting its approach to Smolensk, leaving the crew with no choice but to try to land. The cockpit voice recordings show this version to be untrue. But Russian TV commentators also referred back to reports that Lech Kaczynski had a track record of bullying pilots who refused to attempt risky landings on safety grounds. On a flight to Tbilisi, in Georgia, a couple of years earlier, he had become so angry that he fired the pilot for diverting in bad weather.

Some commentators, in Poland as well as Russia, suggested the president might have suspected a political motive behind the air traffic controllers’ instructions to divert to Moscow, four hours’ drive away. If he thought this was a move to spoil his big day and make it impossible for him to get to Katyn, the president might have ordered the pilots to ignore the advice and land at Smolensk as planned.

While Kaczynski probably did not put direct pressure on the crew, the cockpit voice recorder showed there were two extra people on the flight deck before the attempted landing. They are believed to have been Lieutenant General Andrzej Blasik, head of the Polish Air Force, and Mariusz Kazana, diplomatic protocol chief at the foreign ministry. They were unlikely to have been joyriding in the cockpit without a purpose and it seems quite likely that they urged the pilots on in the fatal attempt to put the plane down.

There is just one more ugly aspect of the Smolensk tragedy. Because of the number of top military and security service officials on the plane, it quickly became obvious that the laptops, USB drives and documents on board would probably have great security implications. While Russian soldiers secured the crash site after the accident, officers from the electronic intelligence service, the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information, combed the wreckage and searched through bags, pockets and personal belongings to find what they were looking for.

The head of Poland’s military counterintelligence service, the SKW, claimed there were no ‘secret codes, devices or cryptographic materials’ on board, but NATO military ciphers were changed afterwards in response to this situation. The crash may have given the Russians the keys to a great deal of encrypted military information, as it is routine practice these days to intercept and hoard vast amounts of encrypted traffic, even when you have no way of reading it. When a ‘break’ like this occurs, it can provide access to all the information in this archived back catalogue of secret messages.

Western intelligence experts believe the Smolensk tragedy may have presented Russia with its biggest intelligence windfall for many years, including details of ultra-secret military codes used for satellite communications. But this was almost certainly a question of ruthless opportunism after the event, rather than evidence of a murderous Russian plot.

Like the internet rumours of deliberately misaligned landing beacons, ‘gravity waves’ and fog machines – and the claim that there were no bodies in the wreckage – the suggestion of a secret service conspiracy to bring down the president’s aircraft is simply an attempt to make sense of a pattern of events that should not have occurred. The idea that Poland’s elite was wiped out because of some badly judged decisions and a few wisps of fog is just too hard for many people to accept without challenge and questioning. But it seems to be the truth.