the third man
stories about tapegate and gongadze are one thing, reality is something quite different.
more than a dozen excerpts from digital audio files recorded in former president leonid kuchma's office actually reference former journalist georgy in a dozen episodes. one of the most infamous is the an 2-minute conversation between three men in kuchma’s office, dated july 3, 2000.
listen to the snippet closely with a good set of earphones. this is the record in which kuchma allegedly (twice) says what is roughtly translated into “kidnap the son of a bitch [gongadze] and ransom cocksucker in georgia.”
the transcript of the the chit chat is here. anyone can read while listening to the “tape” here.
former presidential guard mykola melnychenko claims he used "various digital devices" from 1998-2000 to record up about 1,000 hours of held in former president kuchma’s office and the presidential administration. but only a small portion of these records, about 60 hours, has been made available to the public.
the lion’s share of melnychenko's recordings, about 45 hours worth, was made available by the vienna-based international press institute in early 2001 after saying it was unable to authenticate them. a second batch, about 65 hours worth, was released by 5element.net from washington, d.c. during 2002, and melnychenko himself has made another 10 hours of snippets availabe since fleeing ukraine for ostrava, czech republic in april 2001.
gongadze
the investigation into whether kuchma abused office leading to the death of journalist georgy gongadze is widely known as the cassette scandal, or “gongadzegate,” which erupted in late 2000 after socialist party leader oleksandr moroz released minutes-long excerpts from several recorded episodes in which kuchma speaks disparagingly about the journalist.
a 24-minute digtal audio file, made using a pirated version of the audio software program soundforge on sept. 18, 2000 - two days after gongadze had been kidnapped and beheaded - was first made available in the form of cassette tape.
the recording you just listened to was excerpted to a WAV file from an hours-long highly compressed DMR file (0026.dmr) and is available to the public in digital form, along with 45-hours from melnychenko’s audio archive, by an internet project based on the ipi disks funded by harvard university’s weatherhead center for international affairs.
