You're reading: Debate over secret tapes looms large over Kuchma case

Secret recordings made of former President Leonid Kuchma are a Pandora’s Box of crimes that could rattle the nation’s foundation.

Historians, politicians, lawyers, journalists and crisis-control managers are again scrambling to accurately transcribe and understand what former President Leonid Kuchma allegedly said more than 10 years ago, resuscitating up to 1,000 hours of digital recordings.

The collection, which has been used by scholars as “a unique data source” to examine how Kuchma ran the country in 2000, have been dubbed the “The Crown Jewels” for those who believe the recordings and say it provides a unique window into how top officials used graft under Kuchma in running the nation.

The allegedly authenticated “core” of the prosecutor’s criminal case against Kuchma are the bits about former journalist Georgiy Gongadze, according to First Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin, who is also overseeing the state’s case against the alleged murderer ex-police general Oleksiy Pukach.

To date, only a handful of people, including Mykola Melnychenko, the former presidential guard who claims he made them, have actually listened to the entire archive, much less understood or accurately transcribed what was actually said, according to lawyers for Kuchma, who deny their authenticity altogether.


The ‘core’

Melnychenko claims he used “various digital devices” from 1998-2000 to record up about 1,000 hours of conversations in Kuchma’s office, but only a small portion of the collection, about 60 hours, has been made available to the public.

Mykola Melnychenko

The lion’s share of recordings, about 45 hours worth, was first made available by the Vienna-based International Press Institute in early 2001. Some 200 hours worth of recordings from a second 500-hour batch were published on the Internet a year later by a project (5element.net) funded by Russian exile Boris Berezovsky. Melnychenko himself has only released several hours of unflattering audio files since fleeing Ukraine to the Czech Republic in 2000.

The so-called cassette scandal, also known as “Gongadzegate,” is based on less than two dozen minutes-long excerpted audio files purportedly “authenticated” by an international panel of forensic linguists in late 2010, at the request the General Prosecutor’s Office. According to Kuzmin, the snippets prove Kuchma abused his office leading to Gongadze’s death. Other recordings, many of them lengthier and more audible, could be used in criminal cases against current and former officials.

The third man

One of the most famous conversations relating to Gongadze is a meeting on July 3, 2000 among Kuchma, his chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn and perhaps a third unidentified speaker. It’s impossible to say for sure how many people are in the room discussing what to do with the muckraking journalist But the man in the snippet, purported be Kuchma, says: “Deport the son of a bitch [journalist Georgiy] Gongadze. Take him to Georgia and dump him there. Hold the cocksucker for ransom.”

Much like tapes secretly recorded in former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s White House during the early 1970s, Kuchma and his associates in Kyiv interrupt each other, curse frequently, talk at the same time and do not pronounce words according to either the Ukrainian or Russian dictionaries.

Kuchma says the recordings have been doctored. U.S. criminal defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is defending Kuchma, maintains the eight-minute long snippet from July 3 and others like it should be inadmissible as evidence in a court of law.

“The prosecution claims they have new evidence [confirming the authenticity of the Melnychenko tapes.], Dershowitz said in an interview on April 15. “We will see if we can replicate it and come to the same conclusion with our world-renowned experts. Unless and until it’s done, the case doesn’t have any scientific grounds.”

Gongadzegate

Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz on Nov. 28 played a 24-minute analog cassette generated from a WAV audio file, dated Sept. 18, 2000, two days after Gongadze disappeared in Kyiv.

Copies of allegedly untampered digital audio files used to make Moroz’s “tape” remain available to the public in digital form on the Internet, thanks to a project funded by Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Kuzmin on April 17 said Melnychenko’s audio collection could also be used in more criminal cases involving other former and current top officials, including Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who figured in them prominently when he headed the State Tax Administration in 2000.

“The recordings can be evaluated in other criminal cases. It’s possible that [the prosecutor’s office] will take other measures,” he said. “At this stage, it’s absolutely logical that we are using them to prove the guilt of those involved in Gongadze’s murder.”


Lawyers

The decision to take the Kuchma case to court has many longtime Ukraine observers asking whether it may be a ruse to use the nation’s notoriously subservient courts to whitewash his acquittal or discredit the recordings altogether.

Alan Dershowitz

What used to be considered a Pandora’s box of official government secrets might turn into a Russian matryoshka doll, according to Andrew Wilson, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“No one knows how the Kuchma case and Tapegate will pan out,” he said, adding that resurrecting controversial archives could produce more political turmoil.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Kuchma’s defense and prosecutors still disagree about exactly who said what when to whom about Gongadze 10 years ago.

Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer for Gongadze’s wife, Myroslava, said the possible manipulation of the recordings and the way prosecutors have presented them as “material evidence” in their case against Kuchma “gives us cause for concern.” Viktor Petrunenko, Kuchma’s Kyiv-based attorney, said prosecutors so far haven’t identified the specific recordings that prosecutors want to use to try Kuchma.

“It’s a mystery,” Telychenko said. “We are still waiting.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Peter Byrne can be reached at [email protected]