— I repeat that the goal of our conversation is to some extent to calm people down. I, for example, continue to be afraid: what if something happens again? Then we will enter a period of complete hopelessness.

— I see hope in this. When circumstances forced everyone to work at full strength, it was nevertheless proven that the special services can do a great deal. They found a huge amount of explosives, those six clock mechanisms that had already been set for a specific time—after all, all this is the real prevention of large-scale tragedies. When the 'Whirlwind-Antiterror' operation began, literally everyone was mobilized. It is clear that we must always be on the alert, but it is also clear that a person cannot withstand constant tension. Even a sharpened sense of danger becomes dull. But here the indignation reached such a degree that both our employees and those of the Ministry of Internal Affairs seemed to exceed all human capabilities. Everything has been done to ensure that such mass criminal actions are suppressed. A professional's intuition tells me that the criminals have finally been driven into a corner.

— How is the restructuring currently underway in the work of the special services oriented toward cooperation with your foreign colleagues?

— Work in this direction is proceeding in the most active way. We have always intensively studied the experience of fighting terrorism in other countries. Now this study is entering a new phase. The USA, for example, is already offering official assistance and is ready to send experts... I will not talk about all aspects of international cooperation in this area, but only about those moments in which I participated myself. For example, a joint seminar of the special services of the USA, Great Britain, and Russia on the problems of conducting negotiations with terrorists was held in Moscow. And I must say that the experience we gained turned out to be very significant for us. Because we are still novices in the fight against terrorism... And we are not just learning; we are, for example, trying to simply introduce the American system of conducting negotiations here. We intend to send our 'negotiators' to the FBI Academy to master all the subtleties of this business... Active ties are being established with the Israeli special services. Personal contacts played a wonderful role here. You probably remember the infamous case of the hijacking of a bus with children in Kislovodsk. 'Alpha' and units of the Israeli special services were involved in the operation to hand over and neutralize the terrorists. Since then, on every national holiday of Israel, its embassy is guarded exclusively by 'Alpha'. And our relations with our Israeli colleagues are very warm, if not to say friendly. We have approximately the same relations with South Korea, after the same 'Alpha' released Korean hostages in a bus hijacked on Vasilyevsky Spusk... Terrorism is, unfortunately, not a local phenomenon; it has no nationality. It is an international phenomenon, and it can only be defeated by the whole world. This is clear, and we are actively seeking ways of international cooperation. In this, I see one of the main saving goals of the reorganization of our work.

— And finally, I will ask once more persistently: can terrorism be defeated or not?

— Of course, we will crush it and we will finish it off. Otherwise, there would be no point in me returning to work, in telling in such detail about what our services live for today. All this is being done so that Russia can live a normal life, so that every one of its citizens feels protected. Believe me, for this, we do not spare our own lives... In a fight, it is not the one who knows how to fight better who wins, but the one who wants to win. Terrorism only fears force, and we have such force..

Interviewer: Evgeny Guslyarov