Controversy Widens Over Ukraine Tapes

KIEV, Ukraine -- Secret recordings of President Leonid D. Kuchma have led to the sharpest rift between Ukraine and the U.S. in a decade, after Washington accused him of approving the sale of military radar to Iraq.

A series of recordings, the first surfacing two years ago, has become Kuchma’s political nightmare. The initial recordings implicated the president in the slaying of a journalist. Recordings of other incriminating conversations have since been released, most dealing with Kuchma’s efforts to limit dissent.

This spring, recordings from the president’s office appeared containing a conversation suggesting that he had approved the sale of Kolchuga radar systems to Iraq for $100 million. There is controversy about how the recordings were made.

Kuchma’s reputation in the West was tainted by the disappearance of journalist Georgi Gongadze. However, the Bush administration’s conclusion that the Kolchuga recordings are authentic -- followed by a report late last month from 13 U.S. and British investigators that there was a “credible possibility” that the radar deal occurred -- have caused a deep split between Ukraine and the U.S., its most powerful ally.

“There is no evidence on which [the U.S.] can base such unambiguous conclusions,” Viktor Medvedchuk, Kuchma’s administration chief, declared last month while arguing that the recordings were manipulated.

Former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnichenko, who now lives in the U.S., contends that he secretly made digital recordings of the July 2000 Kolchuga conversation in Kuchma’s office. He says he also recorded the tapes linking the president to Gongadze’s disappearance in September 2000.

The Gongadze recordings, made public after the discovery of the journalist’s headless corpse in November 2000, engulfed Kuchma in a scandal that weakened him at home, isolated him from the West and forced him to turn to Russia for support.

Since then, Melnichenko has been pilloried by the Kuchma camp and praised by the opposition -- and by many in the West.

But the former bodyguard’s inconsistencies, together with the mysterious appearance early this year of hundreds of hours of additional recordings, are prompting a growing number of people -- including many of Kuchma’s avowed foes -- to question the whistle-blower’s claims about how he made the recordings and for what purpose. Melnichenko has become such a polarizing figure that Ukraine’s few remaining nonpartisan journalists use pseudonyms when they take issue with his story.

“I would lose contacts with opposition politicians and journalists if they knew it was me,” said a Kiev reporter, who used a pseudonym on a recent article on the recordings. “Everyone thinks journalists have to take sides. So if you question Melnichenko, you must be a Kuchma apologist.”

As a result, Melnichenko’s story has not been seriously scrutinized. He often has refused to answer questions, and his public statements have been inconsistent. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

For more than a year, Melnichenko maintained that he had recorded Kuchma with a Toshiba DMR-SX1 digital recorder hidden under a couch in the president’s office and had acted alone with no goal but to bring the Ukrainian leader to justice. This summer, however, Melnichenko announced that he had used several different recorders and had tapes of Kuchma speaking at the president’s country residence and in a sauna.

The new version of events came after Oleksandr Zhyr, an outspoken Kuchma critic and the former chief of a parliamentary commission set up to investigate the Gongadze case, said he was in possession of hundreds of hours of recordings.

Previously, Melnichenko submitted to the commission about 45 hours of presidential conversations on two compact discs, though he has refused to say who made the copies. Copies are widely available, and their contents are on a Harvard Web site: www.wcfia.harvard.edu/academy/melnychenko.

The CDs purportedly contain the complete digital recordings of the Gongadze conversations. The talks were scattered over several months and were spliced together with a computer program called Sound Forge for a continuous recording of episodes dealing with the missing journalist.

Zhyr’s revelation suggests that Melnichenko may not have been the only one with access to recordings. Yuri Shvets, a Washington-based attorney working with Zhyr to disseminate what he says are 700 hours of recordings dating from October 1999 on a Web site www.5element.net, insisted in a telephone interview that he did not get them from Melnichenko. “We got them in Ukraine. And Melnichenko got them from us,” he said.

Shvets, Zhyr and Melnichenko are former KGB agents.

Zhyr, who is in Ukraine, is vague about the recordings’ origins, though he says there probably are more to come. Because the Toshiba automatically notes the date and time of a recording, it is evident that chunks of time are missing, he said.

A lot of what is on the new collection of recordings duplicates the material on the CDs. But there are many new episodes -- including the Kolchuga deal.

In that conversation, Kuchma allegedly tells Valery Malev, then in charge of Ukraine’s arms exports, to go ahead with a $100-million sale of three Kolchuga radars to Iraq. The Kolchuga is a passive radar that gives out no signals of its own and thus isn’t detected by aircraft.

The new collection has led to some bizarre conflicts. In August, when a Ukrainian Web site ran a transcript provided by Shvets that detailed Kuchma purportedly discussing espionage against foreign embassies, Melnichenko successfully asked that it be removed and that the media not publish transcripts without his authentication.

He then produced his own transcripts of the Gongadze conversations and declared them the sole authentic versions. But Ukrainian journalist Olexi Stepura, who has prepared painstaking transcripts of the purported originals on the 45-hour CDs, contends that Melnichenko’s transcripts were of the recordings edited by the Sound Forge program, which removed entire sentences from the original recordings.

None of the edits deal with Gongadze, but Stepura says: “They do suggest that Melnichenko has not listened to the recordings and is unaware of the discrepancies.”

But the evidence showing that Melnichenko is not in exclusive control of Kuchma recordings and that other, more mysterious sources are releasing them raises doubts about his account. Though many people found it possible to believe that one person could record 45 hours with a device hidden under a couch, the existence of 700 hours suggests a much more complex operation.

Shvets is blunt about the logistics. “Melnichenko may have done some recordings himself toward the end of the operation,” he said. “But an entire team had to be involved in this, and they had to have high political protection.”

He says certain Ukrainian oligarchs spearheaded the operation to blackmail Kuchma for their own ends. “But things got out of control, and we got the recordings,” he said.

The situation has become so convoluted that parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn early last month became the first high-ranking Ukrainian official to call for all of the recordings to be made public.

“There are political forces in Ukraine who don’t want the truth to be known,” Lytvyn, whose voice figures in the recordings, told BBC. “But we need to hear about everyone who was in the president’s office -- those who were in power and those that were secretly influencing them.”