Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  Litvinenko had one request for the police officers. He asked them to pursue the case wherever it took them—he said he knew there would be political interests that might get in the way, but he asked them to make sure the investigation that had started in that hospital room was completed. He would be right that politics would obstruct the search for the truth. But as the final tape finishes, the police officer makes the Russian a promise. “I will do absolutely everything within my power to ensure this case is properly investigated.” The police would not let him down.

  Alexander Litvinenko was beginning to surrender to the radiation that was cooking his body from the inside out. Early on the twenty-second of November he suffered two heart attacks, from which he was resuscitated. He kept fighting. On the afternoon of November 23, a call came into the police from AWE. The presence of polonium was confirmed. A few hours later, Litvinenko suffered a third cardiac arrest. This time his body gave up the ghost.

  A statement that he had agreed to just before he died was read on the steps of the hospital the next day by friends. Journalists had gathered after reports had begun to emerge that there was a former Russian spy claiming he had been poisoned. “I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death,” the statement read, before going on to make clear who Litvinenko held responsible. “You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”

  There was a deeply personal element to the antagonism with Putin. It went back to when Litvinenko had gone to Putin’s office to ask the then head of the FSB to clean house. In London Litvinenko had become increasingly vocal in his attacks on Putin under Berezovsky’s patronage. In 2001, Litvinenko had coauthored a book called Blowing Up Russia, which pushed the theory that elements in the FSB itself were behind the bombing of apartment buildings in Russia in 1999. These bombings, the theory claimed, were designed to provide a pretext for a second intervention in Chechnya to cement Putin’s rise to power. Berezovsky in London helped publicize the book. Berezovsky’s and Litvinenko’s activities infuriated Moscow. Putin and the FSB saw the former officer as a traitor. They even used pictures of Litvinenko for target practice at a special forces training center.

  Litvinenko had seemed determined to aggravate Russia’s leader. In July 2006, he published an article on a website that could not have been more personal in its criticism. He pointed to a picture of Putin kissing a boy on the stomach at a public event and accused the Russian leader of being a pedophile without offering any further evidence. All of this antagonism was why Litvinenko was so sure that Putin was personally to blame for his poisoning. But what would be the verdict of the British state?

  Polonium was the best and worst murder weapon. The best since it was so hard to detect and had not been seen before. The worst because once it had been discovered it left a trail that could be followed. It was incredibly persistent and almost impossible to remove every speck. So as they searched for the point of contact between weapon and victim, the police were able to follow this trail that would eventually stretch from sushi bars to hotels to Emirates Stadium, home of the Arsenal football club. London watched transfixed as more and more sites were closed off and white-suited forensic specialists began their searches for radioactive particles. There was fear over the long-term effects for those ordinary members of the public who had come into contact with it. One place soon became the center of the inquiry.

  The day before he fell ill, Litvinenko had drunk tea at the Millennium Hotel. It sits on one side of Grosvenor Square, just across from what was then the site of the US embassy with its proud eagle overlooking wealthy Mayfair and its busy CIA station buried deep inside. The hotel catered to wealthy tourists and businessmen keen to be near the best shops. The hotel’s wood-paneled Pine Bar, just next to reception, was the kind of place where a few Russians would draw little attention. And while there were CCTV cameras elsewhere in the hotel, there were none inside the bar.

  “There’s still some tea left here,” Andrei Lugovoi had said, indicating the pot on the small table that fateful afternoon. Litvinenko had taken the bus and tube up from home earlier and then had lunch with a contact at an Itsu sushi restaurant before arriving. The Pine Bar was crowded and he was there to meet Lugovoi to discuss some private security work they were undertaking together. They sat at a table in the corner. Lugovoi had been there for a while already—racking up a seventy-pound bill covering cigars and cocktails. He knew Litvinenko was hard up for money and the prices in the hotel bar were so ridiculous he must have assumed his guest would not want to risk ordering his own drinks and having to pay. And so Litvinenko poured out half a cup of green tea. He did not see anyone else drink from the pot. The tea was already cold and did not have the sugar he liked, so he had only a few sips. It was enough to seal his fate. But if he had had more, then the long, drawn-out death he would face might have been much quicker. And that would have left no time for the police interviews or the unusual tests. His death would simply have been chalked up as unexplained. As the police zeroed in on this encounter, they hunted for evidence. The detectives were told the six hundred cups and saucers and hundred teapots the hotel used had gone through forty-two washes since the visit. But three hours later, the tests came back with what an investigator described as a “nuclear teapot.” They had found the murder weapon.

  They were able to correlate the polonium trail with two Russians—Lugovoi, and also Dmitry Kovtun, who had been at that meeting. The airplanes they had flown in would show signs of contamination. At one point the team found so much nuclear material in the bathroom at the Sheraton Park Lane hotel that Lugovoi had used that the detectives literally ran away.

  Lugovoi had joined the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, which provided security for senior officials. In 1996, he left to work as head of security for a TV station run by Berezovsky. In 2001, after Berezovsky fled, Lugovoi was arrested for trying to help one of Berezovsky’s allies, Nikolai Glushkov. Lugovoi was said to have served a fifteen-month prison sentence. One possibility is that this was when he might have been approached by the FSB to work for them and infiltrate Berezovsky’s circle (perhaps in return for a shorter sentence). Others wonder if the prison sentence itself was a ruse to bolster his credentials. Whatever the case, his criminal past did little to hinder his new career on release, running a private security firm in Moscow. In 2004, Lugovoi had gotten in contact with Litvinenko. Litvinenko trusted Lugovoi, introducing him to his wife at Berezovsky’s flashy sixtieth birthday party at Blenheim Palace.

  The relationship seemed a potential godsend. Litvinenko’s relationship with Berezovsky was on the decline. The money from his paymaster was drying up and Litvinenko was worried and casting around for new ways of making use of his knowledge. He had moved into commercial due diligence work. Companies considering going into business in Russia or doing joint deals wanted to know who their partners might be, and an array of British firms offered their help.

  Lugovoi—a man who had good contacts in Moscow—was potentially a useful source of information and Litvinenko suggested they start working together. Lugovoi would later introduce Litvinenko to Kovtun. Kovtun had known Lugovoi since they were children, as their fathers had served together in the army. Kovtun had joined the army and been posted to East Germany, where he met his first wife. “He had all sorts of dreams and plans, none of which he realized, however,” she later said. This included wanting to star in pornographic films. He also drank too much, she said. He had later become involved in technical surveillance—bugging—a useful skill set in the murky world of “due diligence”—checking out your business contacts.

  Litvinenko had been asked by a private security company in the summer of 2006 to produce a report on a former KGB man who had risen with Putin from his St. Petersburg days and whom their client was considering doing a deal with. The first report Litvinenko ha
nded over was only a third of a page long and he was told it was not good enough. The main author had been Lugovoi. Litvinenko turned to Yuri Shvets, a former KGB officer now living in America, who sent a more impressive eight-page report back. Litvinenko showed it to Lugovoi as an example of what was wanted. When Shvets found out, he was unhappy. “Do you understand what you are doing, because it may be dangerous for us both,” he told Litvinenko. Who might it be shown to? And with what risks? The report led to the collapse of the business deal and losses for Putin’s ally of perhaps ten to fifteen million dollars. Here was another motive for why someone might want Litvinenko gone—he had cost powerful people a lot of money. But peel away the surface and there were still more, hidden layers.

  As the money from Berezovsky dried up, Litvinenko had turned to MI6 to work as a consultant. From around 2003 they put him in touch with European security services. He was paid two thousand pounds a month and MI6 gave him a passport and a cover name—Edwin Carter. The Russian mafia had put down deep roots in Spain and this proved the most fertile territory for Litvinenko as he started to travel there from late 2004. The Spanish judge leading the investigation would later say that Litvinenko’s “thesis”—that the intelligence agencies controlled organized crime in Russia—had proved accurate as the FSB was “absorbing” the mafia and eliminating noncompliant bosses. Just before he was poisoned, Litvinenko suggested Lugovoi could meet some people in Spain whom he was working with there. This was why he had phoned Lugovoi from the hospital before he had fallen ill to say that the trip was off.

  And there was another, final, crucial layer to the relationship with Lugovoi that was swept under the carpet. Litvinenko was keen to prove his worth to MI6. He had not been an MI6 agent when he was in Russia but had been debriefed when he left and then became an “access agent”—someone who does not provide secrets themselves but helps provide access to people who might. A major in the Russian tax police claimed Litvinenko in 2002 had introduced him to an MI6 officer who started paying him two thousand euros a month for “consulting services.” Meetings with MI6 took place over whisky in third countries like Turkey and Finland with Litvinenko sometimes attending, he claimed, as he was provided with a mobile phone with a special SIM card. Litvinenko was working for MI6 but those who know the details say he was not always easy to control and was always keen to do his own thing and prove his worth. Senior MI6 officers from the time speak with regret and concede they were not aware enough of what those beneath them had been doing with Litvinenko and the risks the activity entailed.

  Litvinenko was trying to provide access to Andrei Lugovoi for Britain’s spies. Lugovoi himself would later talk about being approached by MI6. These claims would be initially dismissed as attempts to muddy the water but one British source with knowledge of events confirms that there was an attempt to recruit Lugovoi. Lugovoi’s meetings with Litvinenko to discuss business consultancy had taken place through late 2005 into spring 2006. “It began to dawn on me, that all was not what it seemed,” Lugovoi later said, claiming he had been overpaid for his minor consulting work through an offshore company in Cyprus. “I was alarmed, because it was public domain information, which could be easily found on the internet. It became clear, that the purpose of the remuneration was to involve me gradually into cooperation.” He said the British were interested in his contacts with security services and what the FSB was up to in the United Kingdom. They were even after information on people who might be close to Putin. “They started to try and recruit me openly as an agent for British Intelligence.” Lugovoi claimed he was given a special phone by MI6 that he was to use when calling from Moscow.

  Lugovoi would claim he was no admirer of Putin but says he was taught to defend his motherland and not to betray it. “When the British agents started to approach me, one of the first things that I did was to inform the FSB so that they wouldn’t accuse me of being a traitor or a spy,” he later said. And so now, the FSB knew what Litvinenko was doing for the British and that he was approaching people to try to recruit them. Litvinenko and MI6 thought they were cultivating Lugovoi with a view to recruiting him as an agent. Instead, they would be outplayed by the Russians. Litvinenko’s target would become his killer. MI6 had failed to appreciate that the Kremlin would contemplate murder in London. Now its headquarters in Vauxhall Cross were in deep shock. “It was a kick in the guts,” one British intelligence source closely involved in the case told me. “We never thought they would do it.” The doubling back of Lugovoi was all part of the game the Russians had been playing for decades, but that game had normally been played on Russian territory and for lower stakes. Now they were playing it on the streets of Britain and exacting the ultimate punishment for those they saw as traitors even when they were abroad. Russian intelligence was changing and the old Cold War rules of the spy game were no longer in play.

  Just because the murder weapon was so advanced, that did not mean the men using it were competent. Both Lugovoi and Kovtun have consistently denied any role in the killing but police would eventually conclude that there had been multiple attempts before the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel. A week before, Lugovoi had dropped a container holding polonium in his hotel bathroom and had used hotel towels to clean it up. And in one of the most extraordinary pieces of evidence, a friend of Kovtun’s who ran a restaurant in Hamburg said Kovtun had asked him if he knew a cook, because he had a “very expensive poison” and he needed a cook to “to put poison in Litvinenko’s food or drink.” Lugovoi and Kovtun, it seems, had no idea that the poison they were carrying was radioactive. Lugovoi’s own family was with him at the Millennium Hotel and he had his son shake hands with Litvinenko after the poisoning.

  It was always implausible that this was a private hit. If the Russian mafia wanted you dead, they shot you or staged an accident. They did not use a rare nuclear isotope, like polonium, that could only come from a state’s nuclear program. Britain should not have been blind to the new aggression coming out of the Russian security services, either. The year Litvinenko was killed, a new law had been passed in Russia. It gave the FSB the right to kill terrorists and other “extremists” abroad. It came in the wake of the brutal killing of a group of Russian diplomats in Iraq. But treachery was also in their sights. A colonel in the FSB who was Litvinenko’s superior told a reporter years later what he thought should happen to traitors. “For me, a traitor, you spit on them, grab them and shoot them. Or hang them and piss on their grave.”

  Russia had killed a British citizen using radioactive material, leaving tiny particles scattered across London. The West was obsessed in these years about Al Qaeda and terrorists getting hold of “weapons of mass destruction”—even going to war with Iraq under the pretext of preventing that possibility. And yet the first use of nuclear material as a weapon against civilians was carried out not by jihadists but by Russian spies. And the response was . . . feeble. More than half a year after the murder, four Russian diplomats were expelled. And this was only in response to the failure to extradite Lugovoi rather than the result of any accusation of Russian state involvement in the murder itself. It seemed as if the British state did not want to confront the truth of what had happened. And so it did its best over the coming years to bury it. The Cold War was past and the attitude in the Foreign Office was that the two countries needed to get back to a normal footing and put all this spy stuff behind them. By September 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron was visiting Moscow with the aim of boosting business ties. The following year Putin was in London sitting awkwardly alongside Cameron as they watched a judo game at the Olympics.

  The British state did its best for years to block an inquiry into Litvinenko’s death. The revelations might damage national security, it was said, including relations with Russia. It was only the tenacity of Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, that kept the fight going, year after year, even after the money for the lawyers ran out. Eventually the government relented and allowed a public inquiry under an independent-minded judge, Sir Robert Owen. H
e was allowed to see some of the intelligence. His conclusions were powerful, making clear that Lugovoi and Kovtun were acting as part of an FSB operation. “Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev [the head of the FSB] and also by President Putin,” he concluded.

  And so, a full decade on from the murder, this was at last the conclusion that many had been expecting. But what was the government’s response to confirmation that Russia had carried out an act of nuclear assassination on the streets of London against a British citizen? Nothing. Given two opportunities, two different British governments had failed to take any significant action that might deter the Russian state from thinking it could murder on the streets of Britain with impunity. The feebleness of the response had meant that those in power in Moscow would not be deterred from trying to act again. There were multiple attempts on the life of Boris Berezovsky in London. One came in 2007—after Litvinenko’s death—when MI5 and police followed a Chechen criminal arriving in London who Britain believed had links to Russian intelligence. This—one police officer said—was going to be the single most expensive “hit” ever ordered in Britain, with a price tag potentially in the millions. The assassin had brought his son as cover to make it look like he was a tourist, but the police were watching and arrested him before he could do anything. Amazingly, government officials were worried about the diplomatic fallout of making a public arrest. And so the assassin was quietly deported back to Russia. Soon after he returned, he was outside a restaurant in central Moscow when two armed men forced him into a car. He was never seen again. Failure has a price. There would be other suspicious deaths. In 2013, Boris Berezovsky would be found hanging by a scarf from a shower rail at a house in Britain. The coroner recorded an “open verdict,” saying the evidence was contradictory, which left him unable to conclude whether the Russian had taken his own life or been unlawfully killed.