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The Handler | 267 When I arrived at Kucherena’s office, I was with my translator Zamir. (Kucherena did not speak English.) I arrived ten minutes early, and a receptionist showed me into a well-lit square room with an elegant table in the center. There was a sumptuous basket of exotic fruits on the table and large portraits of racehorses on the walls. Another door opened, and a tall, graceful woman came into the room and introduced herself as Valentina. She was wearing a well- fitting black dress, a striking jade necklace, and high heels. When she asked whether we would like anything to drink, it seemed more like the prelude to an elegant dinner party than an interview about Snowden. Valentina spoke very good English. She apologized for the delay in responding to my requests, explaining that she received “thou- sands of requests” for interviews and did not have time to answer them. When I asked how many were answered, she shrugged and said, “Not many.” At that moment, Kucherena entered with a jaunty step, a cherubic face, and untamed white hair. He was wearing gray slacks, a partially ) buttoned cashmere polo sweater, and a fully engaging smile. © As I had learned from his entry in Wikipedia, he was born in a small village in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia in 1960 and had obtained his law degree from the All-Union Correspon- dence Law Institute in 1991. He opened his own law firm in Mos- cow in 1995. Kucherena’s well-known friendship with Putin had evidently not hurt his law practice. His clients had included such well-connected defendants as Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine overthrown in 2014; Grigory Leps, a Russian singer black- listed by the United States for allegedly acting as a money courier for a Eurasian criminal organization; Valentine Kovalev, a former Russian minister of justice charged with corruption; and Suleyman Kerimoy, a civil servant from Dagestan who had amassed an esti- mated fortune of $7.1 billion. Kerimov had recently been charged for manipulating the price of potash in Belarus. Most of these clients were reputed to be part of Putin’s inner circle. To break the ice, I asked Kucherena about Oliver Stone. I knew he had a small role in Stone’s forthcoming movie, in which he plays Snowden’s lawyer in Moscow. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 267 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019755