A Very Expensive Poison

by Luke Harding

  According to Marina Litvinenko and Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko began working for MI6 in 2003, some two years after he fled to London. The secret service agency put him on its payroll the next year. In Britain, he was never a full-time agent.

  Instead, Litvinenko worked for the agency as an expert adviser. MI6 consulted him on Russian organised crime in Europe, with Litvinenko travelling to various European countries, especially Spain, but also to the Baltic states, Italy and Georgia, assisting their law-enforcement efforts. He spent more time away on ‘business trips’. He continued his journalistic work but kept a lower profile.

  In line with its long-standing policy, the British government has neither confirmed nor denied that Litvinenko was an MI6 employee. Its file on Litvinenko hasn’t been made public. We don’t know who hired him. Or if Sir John Scarlett – MI6’s prickly then chief, known by the initial ‘C’ – ever perused Litvinenko’s personnel record.

  Scarlett knew about Moscow agents. He had been involved in the operation to recruit Gordievsky, the UK’s most prized defector. Scarlett was fluent in Russian and lived in Moscow in the 1970s. In 1994, Scarlett, by this point Moscow station chief, was expelled from Russia in a political row.

  Marina Litvinenko says she knew of her husband’s undercover job. After all, she says, how else might Alexander explain the mysterious £2,000-a-month payments? She didn’t know details. She was uncertain if Litvinenko worked for MI5 or MI6, the numbers a source of confusion.

  MI6 gave Litvinenko the tools of the trade. He got a British passport for trips abroad – not in his name, of course, but under an as-yet-unrevealed pseudonym. MI6 also assigned him a handler, codename ‘Martin’, and he was given a dedicated encrypted phone for calling him. Since Litvinenko’s English was spotty, ‘Martin’ was almost certainly a Russian-speaker.

  The pair would typically meet in coffee shops in London’s West End, including in the basement of the Waterstone’s bookshop in Piccadilly – an inconspicuous spot for a rendezvous, with a backdrop of novels and historical biographies. ‘Martin’ drank coffee; Litvinenko ate pastries. A Russian oligarch, Alexander Mamut, later bought the Waterstone’s chain and launched a dedicated Russian-language section upstairs.

  According to Goldfarb, MI6 spies were nice guys – a procession of well-bred Johns and Tims. Goldfarb, an expert microbiologist, says MI6 contacted him in 2003. The agency wanted to know if Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had biological weapons. He didn’t know. He met the spooks in a Piccadilly branch of Caffè Nero.

  What did Litvinenko do for MI6? Litvinenko had spent ten years investigating the Russian mafia and its links with Kremlin officials, including Putin. He knew names, faces, backstories. Goldfarb says Litvinenko asked him to translate the ‘Uzbek File’, which features as a chapter in his book The Gang from the Lubyanka.

  The Blair government’s take on Russia was increasingly negative, but framed through the prism of Putin’s rollback of civil society and democracy. This was something new – apparent evidence of how crime lords and politicians conspired to send Afghan drugs to European capitals via St Petersburg. One of those allegedly involved, directly and indirectly, was Putin. Litvinenko writes: ‘As an operative officer I have well-founded suspicions regarding Mr Putin – that he is a member of this gang.’

  Like all foreign spy agencies, MI6 has a network of agents in the field. It also relies on electronic intelligence, supplied by the UK government’s monitoring station, GCHQ, in Cheltenham, and passed to government ‘customers’. In addition, the UK is part of Five Eyes, a spying alliance encompassing the US and its National Security Agency (NSA), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s probable that Litvinenko reviewed intercept material gleaned from eavesdropping operations against mafia targets. Marina Litvinenko says her husband identified individuals who featured in surveillance photographs.

  In Moscow, former FSB colleagues claimed Litvinenko revealed the names of Russian ‘sleeper agents’ in the UK to MI6 – another act, from the Kremlin’s viewpoint, of treason. This seems fantastical. Litvinenko never worked in Russian intelligence. So it’s unlikely he would have known the identities of undeclared Russian spies, living long-term in Britain, the US and elsewhere.

  Litvinenko’s attitude towards spying appears pragmatic rather than romantic. The tradecraft didn’t interest him much. He was also very discreet. Litvinenko was frequently in contact with Scaramella, the Italian, while helping the Mitrokhin Commission in Rome. Scaramella asked Litvinenko repeatedly if he was a British agent.

  Litvinenko told Scotland Yard later: ‘During all our initial meetings he always, insistently, importunately, asked every day whether I was working for MI5 and MI6. He was the only person who asked me so often about it. I told him, Mario, what difference does it make for you? I said, you know, if I say yes you’ll think I’m an idiot because such things like this are not spoken about. And if I say no, you won’t believe me.’

  Litvinenko denied he was working for British intelligence, telling Scaramella: ‘I have played spies in my life up to here. And the main thing is, I write books, why would they need me? Think yourself.’

  Litvinenko’s consultancy work for Her Majesty’s Government threw up two important questions. Neither has been properly answered.

  One, did the Kremlin discover that Litvinenko worked for MI6?

  Two, did MI6 consider Litvinenko to be at risk from Moscow’s assassins? If not, why?

  *

  In addition to his work for MI6, Litvinenko began in 2005 to provide regular information to Spain’s intelligence services. In fact it was British intelligence that introduced Litvinenko to its Spanish counterpart. The Spanish security service assigned Litvinenko a Russianspeaking handler named ‘Jorge’. The £2,000-a-month retainer paid by MI6 also covered Litvinenko’s work with Spanish spooks and Spanish prosecutors. With increasing frequency, Litvinenko began flying to Madrid and Barcelona. Marina said her husband would return from his trips to Spain with presents – a Real Madrid T-shirt, porcelain souvenirs. As an undercover spy he flew business class, on one occasion even managing to get the autograph of David Beckham, a fellow passenger, for his son Anatoly. But his reason for being in Spain was far from frivolous.

  The Spanish authorities were at the time grappling with a serious and chronic problem. From the mid-1990s onwards, vory v zakone – in Russian, thieves in law – began to enter Spain. Vor v zakone was the highest rank in Russian organised crime. Spain provided a useful haven for Russian mafia bosses, as a base for operations, and a territory safer than Russia itself. Their influence grew. Their activities in Russia included contract killings, kidnappings, drug-running, prostitution and arms-smuggling. Profits in Russia, including from illegal casinos, were laundered in Spain and invested in real estate.

  In 2004, Spanish prosecutors created a formal strategy to ‘behead’ the Russian mafia.

  The biggest group active in Spain was the Tambov gang, the same St Petersburg outfit that Litvinenko investigated in the 1990s as an FSB officer. It also included Alexander Malyshev, once the Tambov’s competitor, and now its Spain-based criminal partner. The authorities began extensive investigations. They discovered the mafia had no known jobs or sources of income but were living in lavish mansions. The cash clearly came from money-laundering. The challenge was to prove this.

  According to the Spanish daily El Pais, Litvinenko provided information on top mafia figures. They were Vitaly Izguilov, Zakhar Kalashov and Tariel Oniani. In the early 1990s, Litvinenko’s FSB department had investigated Oniani, a Georgian-born Russian citizen, in connection with a string of kidnappings. One of its victims was the chairman of the Bank of Russia. The case against Oniani was dropped after Litvinenko got a call from above ordering him not to touch him. Kalashov was a hit man. He, too, enjoyed protection from official Russian structures.

  Spanish security officials launched two major operations against the Russian mafia, codenamed Avispa (2005–7) and Troika (2008–9). The first phase of Avispa in 2005 saw the arrest
of twenty-eight people, twenty-two of them alleged thieves in law. Litvinenko provided the Spanish with details of locations, roles and activities of gang members. The Spanish hailed the operation as the biggest ever undertaken against a global mafia network.

  In reality, the results were somewhat mixed. The biggest targets – Kalashov and Oniani – both managed to escape the country on the eve of the raids following a tip-off, most probably from the Russian security services or a corrupt Spanish official. Kalashov was arrested in Dubai in 2006 and extradited to Spain. His fortune, according to court documents, was €200 million.

  A secret diplomatic cable, leaked in 2010, and sent from the US embassy in Madrid, suggests that Litvinenko was key to these Spanish operations. His main contribution was to untangle the intimate links between the Russian mafia, senior political figures and the FSB. They were, in effect, a single criminal entity.

  In January 2010, Jose Grinda Gonzalez, a special prosecutor for corruption and organised crime, met with US officials in Madrid. In a ‘detailed, frank’ briefing to a new US–Spain counter-terrorism group, Grinda said that the mafia exercised tremendous sway over the global economy. He said that Russia, Belarus and Chechnya had become ‘virtual “mafia states”’ and predicted that Ukraine – under its new Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych – was ‘going to be one’.

  The special prosecutor said it was an ‘unanswered question’ whether Putin was personally implicated in the Russian mafia and whether he controls its actions.

  The leaked cable reads: ‘Grinda cited a “thesis” by Alexander Litvinenko … that the Russian intelligence and security services – Grinda cites the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and military intelligence (GRU) – control organised crime in Russia. Grinda stated that he believes this thesis to be accurate.’

  There was evidence that certain Russian political parties operate ‘hand in hand’ with the mafia, the prosecutor said. This evidence came from the intelligence services, witnesses and phone taps. He said that the KGB and its successors created the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), which is home ‘to many serious criminals’. He also claimed there were ties between politicians, organised crime and arms trafficking.

  According to Grinda, organised criminals in Russia ‘complement state structures’, with Moscow employing the mafia to do whatever the ‘government of Russia cannot acceptably do as a government’. He said that Russian military intelligence, for example, used Kalashov to sell arms to the Kurds, with the aim of destabilising Turkey.

  Grinda added: ‘The FSB is absorbing the Russian mafia but they can also eliminate them in two ways: by killing organised crime leaders who do not do what the security services want them to do, or by putting them behind bars to eliminate them as a competitor for influence. The crime lords can also be put in jail for their own protection.’

  The evidence collected by Spanish investigators would lead to the arrest in 2008 of Gennady Petrov, the Tambov gang’s alleged boss; his number two, Alexander Malyshev; and Izguilov. Leaks to the Spanish press talked of the ‘hair-raising’ contents of wire-tapped conversations. In them, senior mafia figures boasted of their connections with Russian government ministers to ‘assure partners that their illicit deals would proceed as planned’.

  *

  It wasn’t until 2015 that the names of some of these ministers were revealed. Grinda, together with a colleague Juan Carrau, presented a 488-page complaint to Spain’s Central Court. The petition brought together ten years of investigative work against the Russian mafia.

  According to the news agency Bloomberg, which got hold of the petition, Petrov had his own top-level government network in Moscow. It features many of Putin’s allies. They include Viktor Zubkov, Russia’s prime minister between 2007 and 2008 and the chairman of Gazprom, the natural gas extractor and one of the world’s largest companies. Zubkov’s son-in-law Anatoly Serdyukov, Russia’s former defence minister, also features.

  Other officials mentioned as being ‘directly related’ to the alleged gang leader are deputy prime minister Dmitry Kozak and Alexander Bastrykin, who studied law with Putin in Leningrad. Bastrykin is the head of Russia’s investigative committee that opens (and shuts) major criminal cases. It was Petrov who allegedly secured Bastrykin’s appointment. One other name is Leonid Reiman, a former communications minister.

  Putin appears three times, including in a 2007 conversation between two Tambov operatives. (They are discussing a house in the Alicante region – and say that Putin owns a neighbouring property in nearby Torrevieja. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, describes this as ‘nonsense’.)

  The most intriguing name is that of Nikolai Aulov. Aulov is deputy chief at Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service. His boss is none other than Viktor Ivanov, the politician and former KGB officer who had the ear of Putin and who was the subject of Litvinenko’s 2006 report. The dossier logs seventy-eight phone calls between Aulov and Petrov and describes Aulov as ‘one of the most important persons for Petrov’. In 2008, the petition says, Petrov asked an associate to get Aulov to put pressure on Russia’s new customs chief. The mafia boss wanted to facilitate port shipments for his group.

  The court document seeks to charge twenty-seven people, including Vladimir Reznik, a deputy in Putin’s ruling United Russia party and chair of the Duma’s financial markets committee. Petrov was spotted on the island of Mallorca with Reznik. Spanish police raided Reznik’s Mallorca mansion, allegedly a gift from the gangmaster.

  It was an extraordinary picture – mobsters and ministers; money-washing and gun-running; the Kremlin not so much a government as a well-entrenched international crime group with truly big ambitions.

  The accused Russian politicians deny wrongdoing. Reznik told Bloomberg his relationship with Petrov is ‘purely social’. Meanwhile, Spain’s prosecution of Russian mafia suspects ran into various legal snafus. The suspects would hire Spain’s best lawyers; often they got bail. The strategy to behead them, though, was working.

  All of this was thanks to Litvinenko. He made clear to ‘Jorge’ that he was willing to testify in court against Putin and Ivanov, spilling everything he knew about Putin’s alleged links with the Tambov gang.

  This would be some court case. And enough reason for powerful people in Moscow to want Litvinenko silenced.

  3

  First Deployment

  25 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, Summer–Autumn 2006

  ‘Are you guys from the KGB?’

  AUSTRALIAN HOTEL GUEST TO LUGOVOI AND KOVTUN, 17 OCTOBER 2006

  There is something surreal about Mayfair. It is London’s wealthiest district, a dark-blue square on the Monopoly board and home to successive influxes of the international super-rich. Arabs rich from oil, Greek shipping tycoons, African dictators – all find a home here, washed in by a global tide of credit crises, coups and recessions.

  In Mayfair’s Hanover Square, boys and girls in red uniforms play games at the end of the school day, among plane trees and an exotic palm from the Canary Islands. It’s all rather English pastoral. The girls sport straw boaters. Around the square are boutiques, florists, a library and pigeons; nannies chatting in Russian sit on park benches.

  North of the square you find Grosvenor Street and a row of fashionable eighteenth-century Georgian townhouses. This was once the abode of earls, lords, admirals and the odd poet. Now there are the understated brass plaques of commerce. It’s not entirely clear what many of the businesses based here do. Hedge funds? Corporate PR? Wealth management? The location radiates prestige, reliability, trustworthiness.

  And a little mystery. If London is the spy capital of the world, Mayfair is its centre. It is the traditional home of private intelligence companies. There are casinos, luxury car showrooms and exclusive nightclubs. Nearby is Pall Mall. Here, in gentlemen’s clubs, the establishment comes together. Defence officials, spooks and ministers meet to do deals and exchange gossip. The Houses of Parliament are
down the road.

  Most of those who work in private intelligence have at some point been on the other side. They include exspies, army officers and former Scotland Yard detectives – sometimes ones prepared to bend the law.

  Their work includes providing business intelligence, investigating employee fraud and supplying personal protection. Another lucrative market is due diligence. Companies looking to expand internationally need information on prospective partners, especially in jurisdictions with lousy records of governance, like Africa, the Middle East and the ex-Soviet Union.

  Litvinenko visited Grosvenor Street often. He would arrive here on foot, walking past the Bentleys, Porsches and Ferraris, before disappearing into an entrance with an ornate classical portico and heavy oak front door. This was 25 Grosvenor Street. On the fourth floor were two companies, Titon and Erinys. Both were bespoke intelligence firms. They operated in the commercial market but also had links – never quite defined – with the world of British spying.

  When Litvinenko first fled to Britain, Berezovsky was paying him a salary of $6,000 a month. The money came from Berezovsky’s New York-based International Civil Liberties Foundation. It was reduced in 2003 and again in 2006. Berezovsky told police there was nothing malicious about these cuts. They were done by mutual agreement, he said, as Litvinenko became more ‘independent’, and started working for British and Spanish intelligence.

  Litvinenko was understandably upset as his income fell. And, according to Goldfarb, ‘a little bit worried’ about his financial future. He was forced to seek other sources of income. He’d hoped that MI6 might give him a full-time job. It didn’t.

  The agency did, though, introduce Litvinenko to Dean Attew, Titon’s director. It asked Attew if he might help Litvinenko to develop a commercial footprint. Litvinenko would conduct investigations into Russians who were of interest to clients. In return he’d get a fee.