Trick Phone Call Tracked Down Plotter Boris Pugo, Official Says

A trick telephone call helped track down Boris K. Pugo, the interior minister who killed himself rather than face arrest for his part in this week’s coup attempt, an adviser to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said Friday.

“It was like something out of Hitchcock,” Grigory A. Yavlinsky, an internationally known radical economist, said in an interview.

Yavlinsky said the head of the Russian KGB, Viktor Ivanenko, invited him to witness Pugo’s arrest early Thursday.

The others on the arrest team were the Russian Federation’s deputy interior minister and deputy prosecutor, he said.

They looked for Pugo for several hours at his dacha and at friends’ homes before finding him in his own apartment by letting the telephone ring twice, then hanging up and calling again. Pugo answered, thinking it might be a friend.

“We told him, ‘We are coming to talk to you,’ ” Yavlinsky said. “He said, ‘All right.’ ”

When they arrived 10 minutes later, the door was locked and no one answered. As they were preparing to break down the door, an elderly man let them in, he said.

“So we went in and saw him (Pugo) lying on the bed. The gun was on the table. His wife was sitting on the floor, covered with blood,” Yavlinsky said.