tape titan cops out

former presidential guard mykola melnychenko was a no-show at his planned press conference in warsaw to shed light on recordings canned due to 'foreign intelligence operatives.'

melnychenko opted out of the event the last minute on oct. 13, blaming foreign intelligence operatives for interfering with his planned media appearance.

attempts to contact melnychenko by phone and e-mail were unsuccessful. ukrainska pravda, the internet news site acting as melnychenko’s press service, wrote on oct. 12 that polish intelligence officials had made inquiries about the planned press opportunity.

melnychenko was a member of a group who secretly recorded conversations in the president’s office during 1999 and 2000. he fled ukraine to moravia in the czech republic in november 2000 and then leaked snippets from recordings implicating president leonid kuchma in the disappearance of opposition journalist georgy gongadze. businessman and entrepreneur volodymyr tsvil took the ex-guard to the czech republic at the invitation of socialist party supporter volodymyr boldanyuk, a czech citizen, who hid the guard for four and a half months until the guard was granted refugee status in the united states.

melnychenko’s audio archive – comprising some 35 cds containing an estimated 700 hours of recordings – was kept separately by boldanyuk, who periodically brought discs to the ex-guard to be transcribed and analyzed. the discs remained with boldanyuk after melnychenko flew to the u.s. on april 15, 2001.

tsvil told the post in a series of interviews this summer that melnychenko spent the first two months in hiding learning how to type. he said he first used a computer only to play back the recordings, which he transcribed laboriously by hand.

handwritten letters and notes written by melnychenko while in hiding, along with photographs, eyewitness accounts and taped conversations obtained after melnychenko left europe, have led journalists writing about the gongadzegate and tapegate scandals to question many of the whistleblower’s claims.

according to tsvil, an arrangement to keep the recordings “under wraps” was reached in 2002 with former state security services (sbu) chief volodymr radchenko after a scandal erupted over a recording in which kuchma allegedly approved the sale of the kolchuga passive radar system to iraq’s saddam hussein.

tsvil, who returned to ukraine on oct. 7, told the post that he believes that a thorough public examination of all the recordings could shed light on kuchma’s involvement in gongadze’s murder, and other crimes.

speaking then before a gaggle of u.s., ukrainian and british journalists, melnychenko claimed that top-ranking officials in the summer of 2000 wanted to stop gongadze from exposing shady arms deals in which these officials were allegedly involved.

so, melnychenko said, they decided to kill the journalist.

gongadze disappeared in kyiv on sept. 16, 2000. his headless corpse was found outside of kyiv on nov. 2, the same day that melnychenko received a passport to travel abroad. despite numerous official government investigations into gongadze’s disappearance, no one has yet been charged with his abduction and murder.