ON THE NIGHT OF JULY 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, the editor in chief of Forbes Russia, left his office in northeast Moscow a few minutes before 10:00 p.m. and walked toward Botanichesky Sad, a Metro station less than a quarter of a mile away. In the fading summer twilight, a Lada 2115 sedan, known in Russia as a Zhiguli, crept slowly behind him.

It was not unusual for Klebnikov to work late. He had moved to Moscow six months earlier to launch a Russian edition of Forbes, leaving his wife and three young children in New York, and the 41-year-old’s life revolved around the office.

Klebnikov’s magazine had intrigued the nation’s new elites. “It wasn’t just about business coverage,” says James Michaels, the legendary former editor of Forbes, “but also about lifestyle—wine, clothes, travel. He wanted to use the magazine to raise the standards of taste, as well as ethics.” A list of Russia ’s 100 richest people appeared in the second issue and was much discussed in the media—as were the angry responses from several newly minted billionaires who wanted knowledge of their extreme wealth kept private. At that moment, the man on top of the list, Yukos chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was facing criminal prosecution, and other business leaders were anxious. One occupant of the list anonymously told the Russian business paper Vedomosti that inclusion was an invitation for a government investigation. Forbes Russia’ s growing notoriety raised its editor’s profile, and Klebnikov was becoming a frequent commentator on Russian television.

As a reporter for Forbes in the 1990s, during the former Soviet Union’s tempestuous transition to a free market, Klebnikov was among the first Western journalists to expose the dubious manner in which a handful of men—the self-proclaimed “oligarchs”—came to dominate Russian business and politics. His feature on oil-and-media magnate Boris Berezovsky, later expanded into the book “Godfather of the Kremlin,” so incensed Berezovsky that he sued Forbes for libel.

But Russia was more than a great story for Klebnikov; it was a lifelong cause. As the scion of Russian emigrés, Klebnikov had been immersed since early childhood in the country’s language, history, and culture. “There was an attachment to the place that was very powerful,” says his wife, Musa, the daughter of Wall Street financier John Train, whose family had socialized with the Klebnikovs since childhood. “I remember Paul walking up a snow-covered road in upstate New York, reciting Pushkin, or singing loud Russian military marches with the kids. It was a source of joy for him.”

Klebnikov’s strict Russian Orthodox family instilled in him a vision of Russia as a glorious republic deformed by years of Soviet rule, a perception Klebnikov embraced more fully after completing a Ph.D. in Russian economics and political science at the London School of Economics. As a result, he saw the country through the impassioned eyes of a patriot, not the objective lens of a journalist. He became an apostle for economic reform and transparency in Russia, and believed his magazine could be an ideal instrument to help return the country to greatness. His reporting not only would expose the corrupt elements that threatened Russia’s development but would also celebrate the companies and individuals who advanced it. “He was so devoted to the idea of helping Russia,” says Musa. “He wanted to show them a better way, to introduce the best of American civic values.”

Increasingly, Klebnikov was encouraged by Russia’s progress. Before leaving his office that night, he called his brother Peter, his sister, Anna, and Musa. He was thrilled about the prospects for the magazine—and for Russia—and wanted to share his excitement. When Musa had expressed concern for his safety in Moscow, Klebnikov reassured her. “He told me Russian businessmen now settled their disagreements with lawsuits instead of with guns.”

Outside the offices of Forbes Russia, the driver of the Zhiguli closed in on the tall, lean figure in front of him, knowing already where Klebnikov was headed. The driver had monitored the journalist’s movements virtually every night for the past two weeks. As Klebnikov neared the Metro station, the car raced forward and cut him off. Klebnikov caught a glimpse of the driver, a dark-haired Russian in his early 30s. Then the driver raised his 9mm Makarhov pistol and fired, repeatedly, through the open window. Nine of the bullets hit Klebnikov, ripping through his stomach, leg, and chest. He staggered back toward his office, where he begged a passerby for help. “My name is Paul Klebnikov,” he said. “I’m with Forbes . I write about business.”

The next day, the Russian media reported that Klebnikov had died in an ambulance en route to the hospital. But Klebnikov’s life had actually ended inside a hospital elevator that stalled on its way to the operating room. By the time the doors were pried open, he was dead.

Murder for hire remains disturbingly common in Russia. Klebnikov was the fifteenth journalist assassinated since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000—and there have been many more murders among business figures. But Klebnikov is only the second American—and the first American journalist—assassinated in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union. His murder occurred just as the West was becoming increasingly wary of the Putin regime. Western governments and media outlets have expressed concern over Putin’s oppressive and authoritarian clampdown on the independent media in Russia, particularly journalists covering the brutal war with Chechnya. And last year’s trial and conviction of Khodorkovsky, perceived by some as a witch-hunt, has raised fears about the security of Western investments in Russia.

Consequently, the Russian government, which has largely failed to solve contract murders and seldom puts much effort into investigating them, has devoted significant resources to the Klebnikov case. The U.S. government has raised the case in diplomatic meetings between the two countries, with both presidents discussing the incident face-to-face. Additionally, several leading investigative reporters and news organizations were inspired last summer to launch Project Klebnikov, a collective devoted to shedding light on the murder.

Last June, two weeks before the first anniversary of the murder, Russian prosecutors claimed they had cracked the case. They fingered four members of a Chechen gang, allegedly hired by fugitive Chechen warlord and former mafia boss Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. Klebnikov had published a book about Noukhaev, “Conversations with a Barbarian,” in 2003, and prosecutors argued the Chechen had been so insulted by the book that he ordered the killing. The jury trial of two of the men, including the alleged triggerman, began in late December and has sparked controversy because in his dying moments Klebnikov described his murderer as Russian, not Chechen. But Noukhaev, who has not been seen in two years, and two other suspects remain at large.

Given the lowly reputation of Russian jurisprudence, sources familiar with the evidence say the major surprise so far is that the case against the two Chechens on trial appears to stack up. But no one has seen any evidence against Noukhaev, not even Klebnikov’s own attorneys. And despite protests from the U.S. State Department and the Klebnikov family, the trial has been closed to the public, leaving many expert observers—including the Klebnikovs—skeptical about Noukhaev’s role in the murder.

From the beginning, suspicion about the identity of Klebnikov’s killer has centered on the journalist’s work: that he was targeted as payback for something he had published or was about to publish. But Klebnikov was digging in so many deep, dark places, any one of them could have doomed him. Compounding the mystery is the nature of Russia itself, a place where every truth is relative and must be weighed against a web of constantly shifting interests and alliances. However, nearly two years after Klebnikov’s murder, new details have emerged that suggest a diverse and powerful pool of individuals who may have wanted Klebnikov dead.

“If you want to understand Paul Klebnikov, you have to read “Escape to Adventure,”” says Michaels, who encouraged his protégé’s aggressive reporting in Russia. “Escape to Adventure,” which Klebnikov read and revered, is a first-person account of author Fitzroy Maclean’s extraordinary experiences while serving as a British diplomat in Stalin’s Soviet Union and, later, during World War II, as the brigadier general sent behind enemy lines to aid Yugoslavia’s fight against the Germans. Maclean, described by the New York Times as “an extraordinary man if ever there was one, a scholar, a diplomat, a linguist, a soldier, and an adventurer,” was rumored to be a model for James Bond. “Most journalists think of themselves as observers,” says Michaels. “But Paul thought of himself as an actor. Like Maclean [who went on to become a Conservative MP in Britain], Klebnikov wasn’t only interested in recording what he saw. He really believed he could play a part in public affairs.”

Klebnikov’s grandparents all fled Russia in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution, as part of the exodus of the so-called White Russian ruling class under the czars. As a young boy, he heard stories about his maternal great-great-great-grandfather Ivan Pouschine, a political prisoner in Siberia after the 1825 Decembrist uprising and friend to Pushkin. His father descended from a long line of military officers, including his great-grandfather Arcadi Nebolsine, a navy admiral murdered by his own mutineering sailors during the Bolshevik Revolution.

To Klebnikov, such men were not obscure names on a family tree but forces in the rich Russian reservoir that coursed through the family’s Upper East Side apartment and through his grandparents’ weekend home in Sagaponack, New York. Klebnikov’s grandfather Ross Nebolsine, an MIT-educated civil engineer, was a leading figure in New York’s White Russian emigré community; his grandmother Catherine Nebolsine oversaw the Russian Children’s Welfare Society. “My grandparents were anti-Communist, but they all loved Russia,” recalls Klebnikov’s sister, Anna. “They thought it was a wonderful country gone astray.”

Paul and his three siblings learned Russian as their first language and recited Russian songs and poetry from memory. In the evenings, Klebnikov’s mother read passages from the great Russian novels out loud. “There was a sense we had a responsibility to carry on these ideals and values,” says Klebnikov’s brother, “to be good examples of our heritage.”

Klebnikov’s father, George, was a master linguist who had pioneered the art of simultaneous translation while working at the Nuremburg tribunals and later headed the interpretation department at the United Nations. He often quizzed his children at the dinner table, asking them to translate words from English to Russian to French. Even around three quick-witted older siblings, Paul was not easily intimidated. Anna recalls that when her younger brother was about nine, he had a heated argument about Napoleon’s strategy in the War of 1812 with a well-known historian who was attending a dinner party at the Klebnikov home. “To the astonishment of all the guests,” she says, “the discussion went on for a full hour.”

Klebnikov attended the private St. Bernard’s School in Manhattan and later Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was voted student-body president. At boarding school, Klebnikov arranged student demonstrations, including one against the Seabrook nuclear-power plant. “Paul object[ed] to the arbitrary imposition of unfair, oppressive, or dangerous decisions by powerful people,” says his former classmate Ashok Chandrasekhar, who remained a close friend.

After Exeter, Klebnikov graduated from Berkeley and attended the London School of Economics, where he conducted his Ph.D. on Piotr Stolypin—the man who would have the greatest impact on Klebnikov’s views about Russia. As prime minister under Czar Nicholas II, Stolypin initiated a land-reform policy that created more than a million private farms and made Russia the world’s largest agricultural exporter. Klebnikov was convinced that if the Bolshevik Revolution hadn’t happened, Stolypin’s privatization reforms would have put the country on a path toward capitalism. (Stolypin’s methods were not without controversy: He had so many dissenters executed that Russians began to refer to the hangman’s noose as the “Stolypin necktie.”)

In 1989 Forbes hired the 26-year-old Klebnikov just as the prospects for capitalism in Russia were brightening after seven decades of Soviet rule. “Here we are on the brink of what would become one of the biggest business stories of the century,” says Michaels. “And into my lap drops a guy who is fluent in Russian and has a Ph.D. in Russian economic history.”

Moscow in the 1990s was like the American Wild West—or the “Wild East,” as Klebnikov described it in early articles about the Soviet Union. “Change the accents, change the costumes, change the scenery,” he wrote in November 1990, “and Moscow today is Dodge City . . . the biggest piece of virgin territory open to capitalism this century.” After decades of state control, it was as though a giant For Sale sign suddenly had been erected over the entire country. Thousands of government-owned businesses, including some of the world’s richest petroleum, natural-gas, and aluminum deposits, were freed from their Soviet overseers and put on the auction block. To raise public support for privatization, the government of President Boris Yeltsin issued vouchers to every Russian citizen—148 million in all—that could be used to buy shares in newly privatized businesses or mutual funds. With ownership no longer against the law, the gold rush was on. But the media at large were so focused on the end of the evil Soviet empire they largely ignored the story of how Russia’s considerable spoils were being divided by oligarchs with private armies. As Klebnikov witnessed and reported on Russia’s transformation, he began to experience one of his own. The objective reporter became an impassioned crusader out to expose corruption and fraud.

Scrutinizing the way the state’s vast natural resources and business holdings fell into private hands, Klebnikov realized that Russia’s rapid and chaotic transformation to a free market had been a shell game. With the Yeltsin government’s active cooperation, the state was simply being replaced by a small number of unscrupulous opportunists who profited wildly at the nation’s expense. In 1996, there was not a single Russian billionaire on Forbes’ s annual list of the world’s richest people. By 2004 there were 36—more than in every other country except the United States. “When Paul got up close,” says Musa, “he became outraged and horrified by the way the country was being depleted and abused.”

In 1996 Klebnikov met Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who personified for him much that was wrong with Russia—and who would occupy him for much of the next four years. During the Soviet era, Berezovsky had been an academic, a math Ph.D. who headed a research institute devoted to developing practical applications for decision theory. By 1997 he had become Russia’s richest man, with stakes in the country’s largest car dealership and its most-watched television network.

Klebnikov documented Berezovsky’s improbable rise in a 1996 profile that appears to portray the Russian tycoon as a powerful gangland boss and a key suspect in Russia’s most famous murder investigation. The murder in question was that of Vladislav Listiev, a popular Russian television-talk-show host and the former head of Berezovsky’s network. In the article, titled “Godfather of the Kremlin?,” Klebnikov intimated that Berezovsky may have been involved in the death of Listiev in a dispute over control of the network’s advertising revenue. “The Berezovsky article made his name,” says Andrew Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time. “It was a landmark and was widely picked up in the Russian press.”

It also provoked a lawsuit. Berezovsky sued Forbes in the London courts, whose libel laws are significantly favorable to plaintiffs. In 2003, following a six-year legal battle, the two sides settled. Forbes read a statement in open court making it clear that they accepted there was no evidence that Berezovsky was responsible for Listiev’s murder and that it would be wrong to characterize him as a mafia boss. In return Berezovsky agreed to withdraw his suit—though he later took out full-page ads in the New York Times and two London papers denying any illegal conduct and proclaiming his victory. When Klebnikov released a book with the same title in 2000, however, the question mark at the end of “Godfather of the Kremlin” had been removed, but this time Berezovsky did not sue.

During his research for the Berezovsky book, Klebnikov interviewed Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev, the man the Russian government has accused of ordering his murder. At the time, Noukhaev was in exile in Baku, Azerbaijan, ducking an arrest warrant. His discussion with Klebnikov so disturbed the journalist that he decided to make it the subject of his second book, “Conversations with a Barbarian.”

Noukhaev was a legendary Chechen figure who entered Moscow’s criminal underworld in the 1980s and became a leader of the Chechen mafia. He spent time in prison in Russia but somehow managed to escape. When war broke out in Chechnya, Noukhaev helped lead the resistance. Though still wanted in Russia, Noukhaev became an international ambassador for the Chechen cause, flying to meetings with world leaders and entertaining British lords in grand style in Chechnya and Azerbaijan.

By the time Klebnikov interviewed Noukhaev, however, the Chechen had become decidedly undiplomatic. “For us, Russia is an enemy, but an even bigger enemy is the West,” Klebnikov quoted Noukhaev as saying. “America has no need to wage war. It has another weapon: a virus called civilization.”

During interviews, Klebnikov’s missionary zeal toward Russia often rubbed his subjects the wrong way. Passages from the Noukhaev book have been interpreted as strongly anti-Islamic or anti-immigrant and even wholly racist. But a Russian journalist who knew Klebnikov well says the book simply related what he believed was a struggle for the survival of his worldview. “He believed liberal tendencies to excuse other cultures have gradually deteriorated European Christian civilizations,” says the journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

After nearly a decade of frustration, Klebnikov once again grew optimistic, following the 2000 presidential election of Vladimir Putin. The new president launched investigations of some of the oligarchs and their empires. Media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky fled Russia for Israel, and Berezovsky found asylum in London. (He left Russia after being charged with embezzling funds from state airline Aeroflot; Berezovsky insists the charges were politically motivated, and the London courts rebuffed efforts by Russia to extradict him.) Yukos chief Khodorkovsky, of course, suffered a harsher fate: Last year he was sentenced to eight years in prison. “While not exactly civilized yet, the Russian marketplace is benefiting from the stability brought by . . . Putin,” wrote Klebnikov in March 2003. “Gone is the gangster free-for-all of the Yeltsin era. Putin has chosen a more measured pace of market liberalization, as well as more predictable rules.” These were the rules that Klebnikov had hoped to enforce, but in the end, they couldn’t protect him.

In a world of gray, criminal trials often provide a reassuring sense of black and white. But Russians have been so conditioned to view the judicial process as a tool of the state, the actual guilt or innocence of a defendant often seems irrelevant. Paul Klebnikov’s accused murderers, Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vahaev, are Chechens from the town of Urus-Martan. When the doors of the Moscow City courtroom swung open, it was possible to catch a glimpse of them—enclosed in a bulletproof-glass cage. Yet little else about the trial can be known, except for the vague outline of the state’s case.

Dmitry Shokhin, the federal prosecutor renowned for securing the conviction last year of Khodorkovsky, alleged that Dukuzov shot Klebnikov, and that Vahaev, together with two associates who are still at large—Dukuzov’s brother Magomed and Magomed Edilsultanov—assisted with the planning of the murder. The prosecutor further charged that the men were hired by Noukhaev, who allegedly was so enraged by Klebnikov’s book that he ordered the murder as revenge.

Despite the characteristically low standards of Russian jurisprudence, sources familiar with the evidence in the Klebnikov case say that while it is entirely circumstantial, it is seemingly quite convincing. Most compelling are records that allegedly put Dukuzov’s gang’s cell phones in the vicinity of Klebnikov’s office nearly every evening for a two-week period before and including the night of the murder—but never prior, never after, and never during the day. The Zhiguli allegedly driven by Dukuzov was discovered near the crime scene; Vahaev’s fingerprints were found on the car, as were clothing fibers traced to Dukuzov. Cell-phone records placed both men at the murder location around the time of the murder, and the prosecutor alleged Dukuzov had called to arrange a pickup after shooting Klebnikov. In addition, witnesses testified that the defendants showed signs of having come into a significant sum of money soon after Klebnikov’s death.

The government is not required by law to release its evidence against Noukhaev until he is apprehended, so the strength of the evidence against him is not yet known. Few doubt that he is capable of such an act; while describing the feudal culture of Chechnya to Klebnikov, Noukhaev explained that if someone kills or even insults a member of your clan, “he will be hunted for the rest of his life.” But the prosecutor’s hard-to-prove theory hinges on whether Noukhaev was ever insulted by Klebnikov’s book. Several journalists who have spent time with Noukhaev say he is a publicity hound, likely to have been flattered by the ministrations of a famous American scribe. “Given that Noukhaev has been plausibly accused of a great many murders, the thought that he would have ordered this is entirely plausible,” says journalist Anatol Lieven, author of “Chechnya : Tombstone of Russian Power.” “It is just as plausible that he had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

For years a visible leader of the Chechen cause, Noukhaev disappeared from view near the beginning of 2004, roughly half a year before Klebnikov’s murder. Several Chechen newspapers have reported him dead, and E-mail sent to an address on his Web site went unanswered. While the Russians have been unable to locate Noukhaev, they were suspected of setting off the car bomb that killed his close friend Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, Chechnya’s former separatist leader, in Qatar in 2004.

Since Klebnikov’s murder, and even after charges were filed against Noukhaev and his cohorts, the Russian media have reveled in proposing their own theories about who might have had Klebnikov killed. Unsubstantiated allegations have been made against a number of powerful men whom Klebnikov appeared to be investigating before his death. Michael Klebnikov says that a cursory reading of his late brother’s computer files revealed “no smoking gun,” but showed that he “had his hands in many pots.”

Various political names have cropped up during Klebnikov’s murder investigation. A senior telecom executive in Russia, for example, has told investigators that less than a month before the murder he gave Klebnikov secret documents that suggested that Leonid Reiman, the Russian telecommunications minister, may have been involved in the embezzlement of shares and assets at Russia’s state-owned telecom company Svyazinvest. A multi-billion-dollar scandal involving Reiman was first reported last summer in the Wall Street Journal, but it turns out Klebnikov had already been investigating Reiman several years earlier. No charges have been brought against Reiman in connection with the telecom scandal and the minister denies any wrongdoing. There is no evidence to link the murder of Klebnikov with the scandal, and, indeed, the government has expressed confidence that they have the right man in Noukhaev. During a trip to New York last fall, President Putin himself met with some of Klebnikov’s family and assured them of Noukhaev’s guilt—but not his capture. Yet many of those closest to Klebnikov have been struck by the number of well-known figures whose names have been bandied about in association with the murder investigation, even though there’s no evidence of their involvement. “We are grateful to the Russian government for their efforts,” says Peter Klebnikov, “but we would have liked a more thorough investigation of other potential suspects before the case was closed.”

In Russia there remains scant belief in the concept of independent media. The country’s older generation was raised with the idea that the media were indistinguishable from propaganda, while the younger generation was exposed to what the Russians call kompromat, the notion that the media can be used as a tool to disseminate negative stories about one’s enemies. Of course, the state of the Russian media is emblematic of the country as a whole. Today the country’s political, economic, and judicial systems are manipulated by those in power, like pieces on a chessboard, to strip their rivals of wealth and status. Twenty years into its experiment with democracy, Russia still bears more resemblance to a corrupt Central American dictatorship than to its counterparts in the G8.

In the midst of this place, one American family has lost its youngest, brightest son. And neither Klebnikov’s wife, his family, nor his government have been able to play a meaningful role in the search for justice. The Klebnikovs are optimistic about the case against the Dukuzov gang, but they are withholding judgment about Noukhaev until they see evidence of his involvement. They also have expressed disappointment that the Russians refused help from American and other Western authorities in the hunt for Noukhaev.

Musa Klebnikov has sought to continue her husband’s legacy with the Paul Klebnikov Fund, a foundation dedicated to promoting an independent press in Russia and contributing to all the causes—the strengthening of small community churches, the preservation of Russian architecture—that her husband believed were the foundation for a civil society in Russia. “The idea of helping Russia was his greatest motivator,” says Musa. “He felt that was his duty. And a lot of Russians found it remarkable that an American would be so determined, and so effective.” Unfortunately for Klebnikov’s family and for Russia, these were precisely the qualities that cost him his life.

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