2024-06-25 00:47:54
<p>Imagine you were a fly on the wall at a dinner between the mafia, the CIA, and the KGB. That’s where this unprecedented story begins. A journey through the dark world of Russian intelligence where, for the first time, a professed “sex spy” tells her story. All of it. </p> <p>Host Neil Strauss (Rolling Stone, The New York Times) brings listeners into the dangerous world of sexpionage, where enemies of the State are not the only victims. So too are the spies themselves, brainwashed to believe that their bodies belong to Russia and meticulously trained to become “the perfect weapons.” Who is Aliia Roza? From the creators of the hit podcast series To Live and Die in LA, this is To Die For.</p>
Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games.
And then, a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause lit a fuse that would change my
life and so many others forever, rippling out for generations.
Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, in a small California mountain town, five women disappeared.
I found out what happened to all of them, except one.
A woman known as Dia, whose estate is worth millions of dollars.
I'm Lucy Sheriff.
Over the past four years, I've spoken with Dia's family and friends, and I've discovered
that everyone has a different version of events.
Hear the story on Where's Dia?
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
All eight episodes of To Die For are available now to binge absolutely free.
But for ad-free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to TenderfootPlus at tenderfootplus.com
or on Apple Podcasts.
Warning, the following episode contains explicit language and sexual themes.
Listener discretion is advised.
Can I ask you, when you talk about Vladimir, it's different than when you talk about other
targets in the past.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
He was special.
And when I'm listening from my position, it sounds not just like a target, but it sounds
like there's a romantic feeling when you're describing him.
No, I honestly, I liked him.
I liked his personality.
Whoever, like, say to me about Vladimir that, oh, he's a killer, he's a murderer, he's a
criminal.
But I've seen by myself, like, how he, he was so respectful to other people and, like,
just honest.
He was justice.
I realize, as Aliyah is speaking, that ever since she'd been sent to Chechnya as punishment
for rejecting her commander's advances, she's constantly told me that she didn't want to
live anymore.
But suddenly, she's stopped saying this.
Now, she seems to want to live.
The problem is that she's finally found her happiness on the wrong side of the law.
It kind of sounds like, to me, like you're getting lost in the role.
You know, when I was sitting in the car with all these guys, Vladimir in front, and all
of them, they were armed, and they have a lot of cash in their pockets, and a big black
car with this, like, crazy loud music.
And I felt I'm, like, in a movie.
I live another life which I never had before, and I never even knew that this life may possibly
exist.
I'm sorry, I had to do it, that I'd go on my own.
You didn't guess that behind, I was loading my gun.
I got you, I tear you apart, I had to kill you.
Cause it's so much fun.
I stand up slowly so he wouldn't wake up.
I didn't go downstairs because I didn't know exactly where these guys were sleeping.
But upstairs on the second floor, there were...
Aliyah's mission was succeeding all too well.
She was now at the home of her target Vladimir, who had just fallen asleep.
This gave her the opportunity to search his home and discover any potential evidence that
could take down the drug trafficking and extortion gang that Vladimir was running.
It also gave her a very good opportunity to get caught.
I wanted to see what was there.
One room was just bedroom.
I quickly checked the wardrobe and everything.
It was just empty bedroom.
And I opened the door of another room and I saw like sofa and a big wardrobe.
Near to the wardrobe, there were like huge black trash bags.
So I walked and I slowly opened it and I saw that it was full of cash.
Lots of lots of money in these black trash bags.
I've never seen anything like that.
I was shocked.
And then I opened the wardrobe and I saw automatic Kalashnikov guns just like in the line.
And I saw some TT guns as well.
And I kind of like even got jealous because it was expensive.
And the aim is just perfect.
It's a perfect gun.
I walked outside and I went to the door which was on the corner.
And I opened the door and it was kind of like an office because it was a table there.
A big map on the wall.
And I saw there was like some little pins on the map of the city.
There's a lot of papers on the table.
Worried that she'd been out of the bedroom too long and might get caught searching the house,
Aliyah decided to return to Vladimir's room.
However, as she's about to walk inside, Vladimir opened the door.
Vladimir just walked out of the bedroom.
And he he said like, where have you been?
I woke up and you were not in the bedroom.
I said like, I'm so thirsty, I don't know where to find water.
He said, oh, I'll bring you, don't worry.
Go to bed, it's fine.
And I was thinking, oh my god, he almost caught me.
If he would walk around the house and see me in that different like doors checking everything,
he could kill me that moment straight away.
I didn't sleep at all, all night.
I was thinking about what I'm doing next.
And what should I report exactly to my commander?
Aliyah had discovered, no doubt much to her relief,
that there was some evidentiary benefit to spending more time in Vladimir's home.
In order to help ensure that she'd be invited back,
that morning she tried one last seduction gambit.
In her bag, she had a small vial of a perfume
that she'd learned to formulate in her seduction training.
I sprayed on the pillow.
So every time he would go to his pillow and sleep there,
he will remember me, like remember my smell.
And I said to him, well, I have to go home because I have to study
and my lesson starts very soon.
And I walked outside and then his security drove me home.
I came back home and I called to Sasha.
I just said that, listen, we need to meet
and I will explain everything in person.
Later that day, Aliyah left her apartment.
In case she was being followed,
she walked to the university campus where she claimed to be studying.
There, she waited for her colleague in the FSKN, Sasha, to arrive.
They met at a table in the student common area
and she filled them in on her progress the night before.
I told him everything and he said,
if he would caught you like in the night,
do you understand what he would do to you?
I said, like, I know.
And he's like, please be careful.
Don't do this again.
Listen, for now, just try to be close to him as you can.
Listen to his conversations.
Listen to his telephone calls.
And he said that you should start to bring more information
about next places of hearing supplies.
I said, okay, I'll do my best,
but just in the beginning, give me some time.
And I went back through the university
and then I returned to my house.
So just in case, I tried to make it look like I was really a student there.
That night, around 10, she received a text from Vladimir.
He said to me,
how are you, beautiful?
I'm thinking about you.
Well, I knew that he was thinking about me because the smell was there.
He invited her out that night,
but she said she needed to stay home and get her homework done.
So I thought it's good that I didn't come straight away the minute he called me,
because in this case, I show him that I'm not so desperate
about our communication and so needy.
A few days later, her colleague Sasha called.
He said that the team had decided
that she should try to get photos of the map and papers she'd seen.
The next morning, he brought me a small little tiny camera,
which I could put to my purse.
And he brought me a wire as well.
The wire which you basically put into the room
and you can hear it on the distance.
And I had to put this device somewhere where people would hang out the most.
So I thought that it would be better to put this device into the dining kitchen area
rather than to his office.
Aliyah's plan was to cook dinner for Vladimir and his friends
as a way to get some alone time in the kitchen and plant the bug.
First of all, they say if you want to do your man fall in love,
you need to cook for him.
And I got some potatoes, some tomatoes, I got some meat.
Then the driver came and I brought the bag with the food with me.
And they were finishing some conversations while I was cooking.
So I searched the kitchen very well.
I only found a good place which was underneath the vase.
There was no flowers or something, but there were like some kind of like decoration.
So I put this device inside in the vase, like in the very bottom.
And then I put back this decoration.
And then the next task was to photograph all the important papers in his office.
I served the table and I call everybody and say like, the food is served.
And while they were eating, I was standing and just like looking at them and thinking,
okay, so if they eat it, so they trust me that I wouldn't poison them.
After dinner, Vladimir took Aliyah upstairs.
On the way, she asked for a tour of the house.
So he opened every door and he showed me, oh, this is like the bathroom.
He even showed me the room where I saw these like bags of cash,
but they were not there anymore.
And then he said like, this is my office.
He didn't open it.
And I said like, I would love to see the place where you work.
And I would love to learn more about you.
He opened the door and then I said like, oh, that's where like the whole magic happens.
And I said, oh, wow, this table is so solid.
Do you think it can handle us both?
He's like, what do you mean?
And I started to kiss him.
And then I went into the position where he can take me from behind
where I was leaning at the table.
So in this case, I could see the map and I could see exactly where it was.
And it wasn't too dark.
So I could read numbers, streets, names on the papers.
And when he was taking me from behind, I was looking at the table
and like just trying to read these names on it and what exactly was there.
I couldn't remember everything, but I remembered some names.
The next morning, Vladimir's driver brought Aliya home.
Shortly afterward, she walked to the university in case she was being watched
and waited for a colleague, Sasha, to arrive.
He said, since you installed the microphone, like the back, let's just see like what will happen.
And then we'll give you more like details.
And he asked me for pictures, which I didn't do.
And I told him like, listen, I didn't do it because it was not possible that time,
but I'll do it later.
But for now, I gave him names and I gave him addresses.
Sasha and his team researched this information and got back to Aliya with the news.
These properties were in the exact same area that Aliya had seen
on her first horrible mission with the FSKN.
He checked the streets and these buildings.
He said it's exactly where we were like having our operation.
Exactly in some houses there, we saw all these overdosed young kids and teenagers.
And there were the places where were sex slavery,
prostitution basically, where also they sold some heroins.
At Vladimir's map, there were like three pins in that area.
I asked Aliya how she felt knowing that the target she was developing feelings for
was complicit in the horrible things she'd seen,
even if he was just taking protection money from the traffickers.
I knew that he was my target.
And I knew I was doing this for my job, my mission, my country,
for those kids who were killed and overdosed and kidnapped for human trafficking.
I knew all that.
I just wanted to,
I wanted to succeed in my mission,
but at the same time, I just wanted to understand,
is he really so much deeply involved in that?
Sasha told Aliya that if she wanted answers and to complete her mission,
it was important to get the photos he'd asked for of all the documents in Vladimir's office.
When Aliya explained that she was worried that Vladimir would wake up
and find her there, Sasha came up with this solution.
He said, why don't you do it while he will be sleeping,
like really, really deep.
And I said to him, like, so how are we supposed to do it?
And he said, like, just give him, just give him some sleeping pills.
And I was like, okay, which one?
He said, like, I'll, next time I'll give you some good sleeping pills.
It's just like kills you for like 10 hours straight.
It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.
A backpack that contained a bomb.
While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect,
a serial bomber planned his next attacks.
Two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar.
But this isn't his story.
It's a human story, one that I've become entangled with.
I saw, as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out.
The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces,
forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death.
Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever.
It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom.
And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long,
and ugly reckoning with a growing threat.
Far-right, homegrown, religious terrorism.
Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Idlewild, California,
five women disappeared in the span of just a few months.
Eventually, I found out what happened to the women.
All except one.
A woman named Lydia Abrams, known as Dia.
Her friends and family ran through endless theories.
Was she hurt hiking?
Did she run away?
Had she been kidnapped?
I'm Lucy Sheriff.
I've been reporting this story for four years,
and I've uncovered a tangled web of manipulation, estranged families, and greed.
Everyone, it seems, has a different version of events.
Hear the story on Where's Dia,
my new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcasts.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Chapter 29.
Two Friends.
What city do you live in?
I'm in Los Angeles.
If I didn't like you and I found you in Los Angeles and stabbed you on the sidewalk,
I would immediately have heat on me.
I'm speaking with Matt Tipton, an Army Ranger veteran and internal medicine doctor
trained in chemical and radiological weapons response.
I'll explain why in a second.
But first, let's listen a little more.
In minutes, somebody's going to find you, and they're going to see that you've been stabbed,
and they're going to do what's called a geofence,
and they're going to look at what cell phones were in that little area at the time.
So they're going to nail me.
But if you have a drunken interaction with a guy outside a bar,
and he shoves you or coughs on you or smears something on you,
like, gross, that guy's hand was wet, and you don't think anything of it,
and then you don't feel sick for 48 hours,
and you don't get really sick for 72 more hours after that,
you're not going to immediately say,
hey, I bet that strange guy that bumped into me outside the restaurant poisoned me.
So it's a way for the spy to get in the country, do that,
and then they go to the airport, you know, decon themselves,
take an antidote if there's one needed.
Aliyah has talked often about poisons, about sleeping pills,
and about so-called truth serums.
So I decided to speak to a few experts to get a better understanding
of one of the most sinister aspects of Russian intelligence.
It's deadly use of chemical compounds to silence its enemies around the world.
Why does this seem to be such a common Russian state security tactic
that it's in the news all the time?
Poison sends a message, and it gives you a way to put more time
between you and the victim before there's a body involved.
It's a cheap way to do it, and it's also terrifying.
If you're actively speaking out against Putin,
and you start to get a tummy ache, you're like, is this it?
Am I dying?
It's a psychological warfare aspect to it,
and it's cheaper than a predator drone with a satellite-guided missile.
As an example of the intimidating psychological effect
that Matt Tipton is talking about, this is journalist Amy Knight,
author of several books critical of the Putin regime,
most recently, The Kremlin's Noose.
In the early 2000s, I wrote for The Globe and Mail fairly regularly,
and I was terribly, terribly critical of Mr. Putin.
At some point, the Russian embassy phoned up The Globe and Mail
and said that they were going to kick their journalist
who was in Moscow out of the country,
and they were going to do all sorts of repercussions
if Amy Knight didn't stop writing about Putin.
Amy Knight was eventually banned from entering Russia.
But before that, while she was in Moscow,
something strange happened to her that she still wonders about.
I was writing about Boris Nemtsov.
I spoke with him.
Russian politician Boris Nemtsov,
a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin,
is shot dead on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin.
Second to last day that I was there,
I had lunch with my research assistant,
who was Russian, at the hotel.
And about three hours later, I got so violently ill
that I just couldn't do anything.
Just, you know, terrible stomach issues.
And I was able to get myself on the plane a couple days later,
but that stomach thing took a long time to go away.
And they couldn't figure out why I, you know,
had this terrible stomach thing.
And I was thinking to myself that, you know,
unlikely that it was like standard food poisoning
in a very upmarket hotel like the Marriott
with lots of foreign tourists.
And after that, I wondered whether somebody had
slipped something into my food,
not to kill me, but to warn me.
So poisoning doesn't just work for eliminating
a specific political target.
It also creates fear and uncertainty
in every other enemy and potential enemy.
I haven't really mentioned that in any of my writings
because it's speculative.
And, you know, it could have just been bad luck.
But I do wonder.
Poisons, of course, have been used throughout history
for political ends, taking down kings, emperors,
religious leaders, and philosophers.
But why, I asked journalist Amy Knight,
does Russia seem to employ this method
more than any other country in modern times?
In Russia, this seems to be the method of choice.
If you want to assassinate someone,
either within the country or abroad.
The Russians started way back when in the Soviet period
what they called a secret poison lab.
They have a technical expertise that has continued
and been passed on.
And the original poison lab was set up
under Stalin's secret police.
And it continued on through the KGB.
And now, of course, there are secret laboratories
that belong to the FSB.
The poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny
has taken an even more bizarre turn.
A Russian agent sent to tail opposition leader Navalny
has accidentally revealed how he was poisoned in August.
The agent, a member of an elite toxins team
in Russia's FSB security service,
said the lethal nerve agent Novichok
was planted in Navalny's underwear.
You heard that right.
Underwear.
One of the experts who's perhaps been the closest
to an actual poisoning is Dr. Yuri Felshtinsky.
We'll get into that exact story in the next episode.
But for now, I called Dr. Felshtinsky,
a leading Russian historian and author,
to better understand why literally part
of the core curriculum for an FSB agent
is learning the use and concealment of poisons.
Now, drugs, of course, have a great advantage.
Number one, and this is extremely important,
it gives you time to escape.
And for example, if we take recent poisonings,
in case of Litvinenko, who was poisoned,
and in case of Skripal, who was poisoned.
Both of these are former FSB agents
who were poisoned in England for betraying Putin.
One survived, along with his daughter,
who was also poisoned.
The other didn't.
Those people who poisoned him had time
to escape back to Russia.
While, for example, Mr. Krasikov,
who killed a Chechen military leader in Berlin
in the middle of the day using a gun,
was arrested.
Or those people who killed former president
of the Chechen Republic, Zelimkhan Yendarbeev,
in Qatar, using bomb,
they successfully killed him,
but they were arrested.
So you see, this is the advantage,
when you poison a person.
But number two, it is not always known
that the person is poisoned.
We know some, of course, in some cases.
But in some other cases, who knows?
Maybe we even do not know
why the person was found dead.
And there are some questionable deaths
in London as well,
where we still do not know
why the person actually left his life
and was found dead.
So this is the advantage,
and that's why they're using it successfully.
Considering all these poisonings,
not to mention shootings and bombings,
and we didn't even mention the Putin critic
who fell to his death out of a hotel window,
I tell Dr. Felshtinsky
that this is a lot of assassinations.
His answer, to my surprise,
is to explain to me that it's the law.
The Russian parliament passed the law
which allowed Russian special services
to kill enemies of the state abroad.
I asked Dr. Felshtinsky
how the Russian government determines
whether someone should be assassinated
without a trial,
or arrested and put on trial.
And here's his answer.
They kill, I have to say, in three cases.
The first case is when the person
commits treason from the point of view
of the government.
And this is a case of both Litvinenko
and Skripal, for example.
The same was true about that helicopter pilot
who was recently killed in Spain.
Prior to this, he defected to Ukraine
with his helicopter.
Case number two,
when people are competing for power
against Putin.
And in these cases,
they kill preventively.
And this is an order of, for example,
Boris Nemtsov, who was killed
right at the walls of the Kremlin.
And the same is true, of course,
about Alexei Navalny, who was killed
because he was competing
for presidential power.
And the third case, I think,
when it's connected to big money.
Then we're probably going back
to the mafia aspect of political life
in Russia.
But yes, when big money is involved,
we see usually some killings.
Clearly, Russian intelligence
is a deadly world that operates
by its own rules,
which sound a lot closer
to the code of the Vory, the mafia,
than that of an elected government.
Even Aliyah, who was working
on what she felt was the right side
of the law, had already been involved
in a possible poisoning.
We'll go deeper into Russia's poison factory
next episode.
But for now, let's return
to Aliyah's experiences
with these chemical agents.
It started with a backpack
at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.
A backpack that contained a bomb.
While the authorities focused
on the wrong suspect,
a serial bomber planned
his next attacks.
Two abortion clinics
and a lesbian bar.
But this isn't his story.
It's a human story.
One that I've become entangled with.
I saw, as soon as I turned the corner,
basically someone bleeding out.
The victims of these brutal attacks
were left to pick up the pieces.
Forced to explore the gray areas
between right and wrong.
Life and death.
Their once ordinary lives,
and mine, changed forever.
It kind of gave me a feeling
of pending doom.
And all the while,
our country found itself
facing down a long and ugly reckoning
with a growing threat.
Far-right, homegrown,
religious terrorism.
Listen to Flashpoint
on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the summer of 2020,
in the small mountain town
of Idlewild, California,
five women disappeared
in the span of just a few months.
Eventually, I found out
what happened to the women.
All except one.
A woman named Lydia Abrams,
known as Dia.
Her friends and family
ran through endless theories.
Was she hurt hiking?
Did she run away?
Had she been kidnapped?
I'm Lucy Sheriff.
I've been reporting this story
for four years,
and I've uncovered
a tangled web of manipulation,
estranged families, and greed.
Everyone, it seems,
has a different version of events.
Hear the story on Where's Dia,
my new podcast
from Pushkin Industries
and iHeart Podcasts.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Aaliyah had just been asked
to administer sleeping pills
to her target Vladimir.
She agreed to the mission,
but first asked for more time
to build trust
with Vladimir and his gang
before taking the risk
and potentially blowing the operation.
After all,
the FSB agents who poisoned Navalny
had supposedly been following him
for years.
I said to Sasha, I said,
I need more time to just, like,
literally become his right hand.
And I would need, like,
at least a month to do that.
He said, like, well, you have time
as long as you give us places
of their distribution.
There is, like, one technique
which agents use sometimes
when they try to infiltrate,
like, you know, big circles.
The technique calls, like, shadow.
So in this technique,
I had to be really invisible
for everyone.
But if, like, Vladimir needs something,
I'm there,
always ready to do what he wants.
So I had to make myself
to be like a shadow of Vladimir.
So everybody would start to feel
that, okay, so where is Vladimir,
there's his girl.
But as Aliyah spent more time
with Vladimir and his fellow gang members,
there was one person
she couldn't win over.
Vladimir's old friend,
the gangster who was always looking
at her in the club
with cold, dispassionate eyes.
Even I knew some techniques,
NLP techniques and everything.
For me, it was super difficult
to establish connection with him.
I just couldn't.
And he was always remaining silent.
And he always gave me this
very kind of, like,
disgusting feeling.
And then through the conversation,
I understood that
he was the one who was controlling
the whole distribution,
all these tones of heroines
coming from Afghanistan
to Russia at that time.
As the weeks passed,
and Aliyah and Vladimir began
to go on proper dates
and even take short trips together,
he began to trust her
and open up more.
Eventually, Aliyah was able
to find out more
about this silent, ominous friend.
Eventually, slowly, slowly,
but he opened up
and he told me his story.
So he was sent to Afghanistan war.
And it was a moment
where he met this guy
with shark eyes,
this cold guy.
And apparently,
they were in the same troop
and that's how they met.
And he said to me
that I trust him so much
because he literally saved my life.
After leaving the army,
Vladimir's friend
became part of an operation
smuggling heroin
from Afghanistan to Russia
on military airplanes.
Meanwhile, Vladimir joined the police,
where like Aliyah,
he was disappointed
to find extensive corruption
and very few financial opportunities
for a low-ranking officer.
Soon, he found better opportunities
on the other side of the law.
So when Vladimir started
to go to the gym
and he met some
of criminal members
of the gang at that time,
and then eventually Vladimir
just basically was recruited
into the same gang.
He said that I wanted
to help my mom.
Um, she was sick.
My father was like,
you know, just drinking every day.
And he started
from the very low position,
kind of like a soldier in the gang,
but he gained a lot of respect
from others.
And eventually,
he was actually crowned
to becoming a boss of others.
And then his army friend
approached him again,
and he said,
listen, I have one business
which your criminal gang
would be happy to collaborate.
And that's how he brought
the heroin supplies
from Afghanistan to the gang.
As she spoke with Vladimir
about this,
Aliyah struggled to reconcile
the seemingly kind,
charismatic man
she was developing feelings for
with a drug trafficking gang leader
she was there to bring down.
I was laying in bed
and I looked into his eyes
and I asked him,
I said, like,
do you really know
what's happening,
you know, with these drugs?
And he's like,
like, what do you mean?
And I said, like,
did you know that
so many young people dying
because of, like,
bad quality of drugs?
He said, well,
I don't know anything about it,
but I'm not responsible
for this part
because my army friend,
he is controlling the whole thing.
Like, I'm more focusing
on businesses,
like factories
and more like government businesses.
In other words,
probably protection money,
bribery,
money laundering,
and who knows what else.
And I said, like,
why don't you just check it out
and just know it yourself?
I wanted just him to understand
that one of the businesses
which he was doing,
it was just like killing
other young,
innocent people
who were really just children.
Vladimir told Aliyah
that he actually wanted the gang
to get into more legitimate
businesses anyway,
where people maybe lived
a little longer and easier.
And because of that,
they had some kind of, like,
arguments with the army friend.
He felt that it's becoming too risky.
Meanwhile,
Aliyah continued delivering information
to her colleague Sasha
until he told her
they were ready to make a move
and raid some of the addresses
that Aliyah had given him.
When the operation happened,
Sasha asked Aliyah
to stay close to Vladimir,
so she made up an excuse
to go shoe shopping with him.
And only when he sat into the car,
he noticed that he had
so many missed calls
from his army friend.
And he called him back
and he said, like,
like, what's going on?
And I heard that his army friend
who never really gave any emotions,
that moment,
I heard, like, him screaming.
It was something about, like,
where the hell were you?
I couldn't reach you.
Like, what the hell you doing?
And Vladimir was, like, upset.
But I think, like,
he was more upset
because of his partner screaming.
And he said to me,
sweetheart,
I have to deal with something right now.
Let's go to the club
a little bit later, OK?
And he dropped me home.
And I texted Sasha.
I said, like, is everything OK?
He's like, yeah, you did a great job.
I will give you all the information
when I will see you in person.
As Aliyah tells the story,
I ask her if it seemed too risky
to bust Vladimir's drug operation
while she was still undercover in the gang
and also relatively new there.
Was it sloppy at all
for them to act on the information
that's accessible in the house
while you're still
maybe in the relationship?
And B, while this is happening
for you to do something
that breaks your normal pattern
of what you do with them,
was he risking the asset at all?
The asset being you.
Me?
Yeah, the asset.
Nobody cares about...
OK, I did explain this in the beginning,
but, like, you can fail
and you can be killed,
but nobody really cares
because the whole mission
is the most important.
As a human being, you're nothing.
And Sasha was just
a good professional agent,
even risking my life.
At our next meeting with Sasha,
Aliyah asked him how the operation went.
He said, like, it was one of the big places
which were distributing drugs.
So I wrote the report to our commander,
do you want to read it?
I'm like, whatever, I trust you.
So he's like, OK, so just behave as normal
and do everything you do,
just like in the same way,
just nothing happened.
So Aliyah continued
to get closer to Vladimir,
planning specific kinds of dates
to the movies and the beach.
I wanted to bring him to that memories,
to that period of his life
where he was happy boy
without knowing that it will be Afghani war
or him becoming criminal gang leader.
That's how I established that trust.
However, it's hard to tell
sometimes Aliyah speaks
who was seducing who.
It's also interesting to think
that this was her first relationship
with someone she actually liked.
She shares many memories of this time,
including a trip to the countryside.
He said, this is my land.
This is my motherland.
I was born here.
I will die here.
I belong here.
And it's very sad what's happening
right now in my country.
And I want to do right, you know.
And I looked at him,
I thought like, you know,
he speaks exactly like my dad,
but he was exactly on the opposite side
from my father.
Aliyah would soon find out
that maybe these two worlds,
the military and the mafia,
weren't so different after all.
I met Sasha on Monday
and he was completely lost.
He said,
so I came to the department
and I found out that
instead of these like four kilos
of the heroin,
there are only like just a few grams left.
So apparently the whole report
which Sasha provided to our commander
was changed by him.
And the whole report was given
to the upscale commander
that Sasha's group only confiscated
just a few grams of heroin.
Sasha went on to tell Aliyah
that he'd just checked the evidence locker
and almost all the heroin was gone.
Just a small bag remained.
And I was like having this kind of like,
you know, like when your brain basically is stuck
and you just cannot accept the information.
And after a couple of minutes I said like,
do you think that he actually reported
instead of like four kilos,
just a few grams?
Because he basically took this heroin for himself.
Sasha said,
well, I just don't understand what to do.
And, you know, like,
do you think we should,
we should spy on our commander?
I said, well, if you can't do it,
do it from your side
because I'll do from my side
what I can do with Vladimir.
And just, it will be between us.
And I left with this kind of like,
understanding that it's something shady.
There's the whole big thing going on
just behind our eyes,
which we don't know.
And I couldn't obviously speak and ask Vladimir
even though I really wanted,
but I decided that that night
I really need to put him to sleep
to find out what the hell is in these papers.
Ilya's story continues in episode 14.
Sasha was the first who entered
as the commander of the team.
He was the one who received the first bullet.
To Die For is a production of Tenderfoot TV
in association with iHeart Podcasts.
The show is hosted and written by me,
Neil Strauss,
with additional writing assistance
by Tristan Bangston.
Executive producers are myself,
Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay.
For iHeart Podcasts,
executive producers are Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams.
Lead producer and editor is Tristan Bangston.
Additional editing by Miles Clark
and Christian Brown.
Supervising producer, Tracy Kaplan.
Consultants include Nushin Velizadeh,
Chelsea Gooden, and Jamie Albright.
Artwork by Byron McCoy.
Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.
Mixed and mastered by Dayton Cole.
Our theme song is Killer Shangri-La
by Psychotic Beats featuring Patti Amour.
Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum
and the team at UTA,
Beck Media and Marketing,
Oren Siegel,
Becky Jensen,
The Nord Group,
Mirda Stedman,
Rose Baruch,
and Alex Vestberstad.
Back in 96,
Atlanta was booming with excitement
around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games.
And then,
a deranged zealot
willing to kill for a cause
lit a fuse that would change my life
and so many others forever.
Rippling out for generations.
Listen to Flashpoint
on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020,
in a small California mountain town,
five women disappeared.
I found out what happened to all of them,
except one.
A woman known as Dia,
whose estate is worth millions of dollars.
I'm Lucy Sheriff.
Over the past four years,
I've spoken with Dia's family and friends
and I've discovered that everyone
has a different version of events.
Hear the story on Where's Dia.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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