A Very Expensive Poison

by Luke Harding

  Western intelligence experts believe its efforts were originally directed towards using poison on the battlefield. Tests were unsuccessful. The KGB concluded that poisons were better used to eliminate individuals.

  The KGB had a track record of killing in Britain. Oleg Kalugin, a former high-ranking KGB officer and defector, now living in the US, said that the KGB’s poisons unit was involved in one of the most notorious murders of the Cold War. In September 1978, the Bulgarian dissident and writer Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus at Waterloo Bridge in London. He was on his way to his job at the BBC. Markov felt a sharp pain on his leg from what he thought was an insect bite; next to him he saw a man stooping to pick up a dropped umbrella.

  Markov’s assassin had fired a pellet of ricin into Markov’s leg from close range. Four days later he was dead. According to Kalugin, the then head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, agreed to a request from the Bulgarian security services to facilitate the assassination. Kalugin told Radio Free Europe: ‘Through the KGB laboratory we transferred the poison that was used in the umbrella. There was literally a milligram of poison, a small drop of ricin placed in a capsule at the tip of the umbrella.’

  In the 1980s, the KGB’s lab was still operational. Litvinenko’s co-author Yuri Shvets, at the time an upwardly mobile KGB colonel, recalls meeting a laboratory staffer in Moscow. Against Shvets’s judgement, his KGB bosses had decided to use a truth-telling drug on his American source, codenamed ‘Socrates’. The secret KGB laboratory was at No. 1 Academician Varga Street, in south-west Moscow.

  Shvets describes the use of speciality drugs as ‘among the most delicate of intelligence operations’. Documents relating to such operations were stamped with a ‘Special Importance’ classification. The Technical Operations Directorate of the KGB had to approve any use. The lab, Shvets wrote, produced a wide variety of drugs, including poisons, narcotics and psychotropic substances.

  The drug used on ‘Socrates’ was SP-117 – concentrated alcohol dropped into his champagne glass. After ten minutes, the subject was drunk. At that point he was ready for interrogation. Shvets nicknamed the ‘small, portly’ lab worker who briefed him on the chemical side of the operation Aesculapius, after the Greek god of medicine. He noted that if this drug was number 117, the KGB’s arsenal probably included at least another 116 potions.

  Political killings – of domestic opponents or troublesome exiles – were a hallmark of the Soviet Union and Russia from 1917 onwards. Under Yeltsin, these murders dwindled. But from 2000, prominent critics of the Kremlin once again began to meet mysterious deaths. The evidence of official complicity in these crimes was circumstantial. Defectors claim the KGB’s special poisons department was back in business, under a new and deliberately anonymous name, the FSB research institute.

  The lab was in the same building as before. Its formal title is Nauchno-Issledovatelsky Institute No. 2 – Scientific-Research Institute No. 2. Or NII-2, for short. Photos of the institute show a squat, gloomy, beige edifice, dating from the Andropov era, built in impregnable isolation, with lights visible through its windows and a few scrawny trees.

  According to locals, it’s a quiet spot. There is a guarded perimeter fence. When the building first went up in the 1980s, they assumed it was a hospital for injured Soviet veterans from the war in Afghanistan.

  As well as Ismailov and Tsepov, there were others who appear to have been poisoned. The FSB admitted that it was behind a deadly poisoned letter sent in 2002 to Amir Khattab, a militant living in Chechnya. Journalist and Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin died in July 2003. His cause of death was mysterious: his skin peeled off and his internal organs had swollen up. According to Dombey, radioactive thallium probably poisoned him. In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western presidential candidate in Ukraine, narrowly survived an assassination attempt. He was poisoned with dioxin; his face erupted in blisters.

  *

  Dombey’s report went to the heart of the row over who had killed Litvinenko and the question of state responsibility. In the days immediately after Litvinenko’s gruesome death, Kremlin regulatory officials told the media that Russia’s nuclear facilities were under tight control.

  Sergei Kirienko, the head of Rosatom, the state agency in charge of Russia’s nuclear facilities, said that ‘control over production is very strict’. He added: ‘I don’t believe that someone stole from it.’ Boris Zhuikov, head of the radioisotope laboratory at the Nuclear Studies Institute, echoed this: ‘Everything connected with polonium production and application is controlled by governments … It is regulated and checked by many people.’

  Dombey’s view was that such statements were true. Polonium was a state affair: made using reactor and production facilities belonging to the Russian state, supervised by the state. The facilities used to irradiate bismuth – a process involving highly radioactive materials – belonged to the state as well. These facts didn’t diminish the theory that the state was involved. Instead, they confirmed it, and led Dombey to conclude that the Russian state or its agents were responsible.

  Litvinenko’s friends agreed. Goldfarb described the plot as an ‘interdepartmental effort’. Rosatom, formerly the atomic ministry, was an ‘extremely powerful’ organisation with its own hierarchy, Goldfarb said, pointing out that the agency’s chief Kirienko is a former prime minister. It was improbable the FSB would call him up and ask for a special delivery of polonium.

  Something of this nature would require Kremlin authorisation. Since Rosatom officials stressed that no polonium had been withdrawn from their system there would need to be some sort of cover-up. ‘It would really be a very serious bureaucratic exercise,’ Goldfarb said.

  As Yuri Felshtinsky put it: shooting someone in the head was one thing. Anybody could do that. Killing someone with a rare nuclear isotope was another. It would require collaboration between ministries and spy agencies as well as ‘coordination from the very top’.

  All Scotland Yard had to do was to get the evidence.

  8

  An Inspector Calls

  Moscow, December 2006

  ‘What one man can invent another can discover’

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, IN THE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING MEN BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  In early December, nine Scotland Yard detectives flew to Moscow. The weather when they landed was noticeably colder than in London – a sharpness that pricked the lungs. The sky was a forbidding grey. British embassy staff met them at Domodedovo Airport. The press was there too: TV cameras, lots of them, and noisy reporters. Litvinenko’s murder was front-page news around the world. The men from the Met declined to comment.

  They were driven north towards the centre of Moscow, along a forest of silver birch trees bent under snow. The route passes Gorky Leninsky, an official sanatorium used by Lenin, and rows of wooden dachas. Once you are inside the capital’s orbital motorway the landscape grows urban: there are depressing ranks of dull tower blocks and the blue domes of a neo-Byzantine church. Then, in the centre, a giant titanium statue of Yuri Gagarin and the Moskva river, already white and encrusted with plates of ice.

  The British embassy is a modern building on Smolenskaya embankment; new diplomatic flats overlook the river. Here the visitors got security passes and a temporary office. Outside is a bronze statue of the great sleuth Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has many fans in Russia. Poems by British and Russian authors are displayed on stone tablets in the embassy wall.

  Even before Litvinenko’s killing relations between the UK and Russia were sticky. They were about to get a lot stickier.

  Scotland Yard’s mission was diplomatically sensitive. The detectives’ main task was to interview Lugovoi and Kovtun and to collect as much evidence from Moscow as possible. At this point, the two Russians were officially witnesses, not suspects. But the detectives knew Kovtun and Lugovoi were in the frame for murder. This was an unprecedented international inquiry. Seemingly the trail led back to the Russian state itself.

  The Kr
emlin had promised to ‘actively assist’ the UK government in its inquiries. The Russian prosecutor general’s office offered ‘full support’. It even hailed the ‘constructive and dynamically developing cooperation’ between law-enforcement agencies in both countries.

  At the same time, senior Russian politicians from Putin downwards had noisily denounced Litvinenko as a nobody and ‘third-rate small fry’ – in short, as someone not worth murdering. Sergey Ivanov, a spokesman for Russia’s foreign-intelligence agency, claimed his service hadn’t assassinated anybody since 1959 and the operation to kill the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. Why start now? The police should turn their attention, Ivanov suggested, to Litvinenko’s entourage in London.

  Others suggested that Litvinenko had it coming. During a debate in the Duma a day after his death, deputy Sergei Abeltsev said: ‘The traitor received the punishment he deserved. I am confident that this terrible death will be a serious warning to traitors of all colours, wherever they are located. In Russia, they do not pardon treachery.’

  Abeltsev was a member of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic party. Its leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a clever clown licensed by the Kremlin to send out politically useful messages, called Litvinenko a ‘scoundrel’. MI6 killed him, Zhirinovsky said. Gennady Gudkov, a Duma deputy and ex-FSB colonel, accused Berezovsky. Nikolai Kovalyov, the former FSB chief, observed that high-profile defectors to the west like Gordievsky (in Britain) and Oleg Kalugin (in the US) still enjoyed ‘good health’. No one had murdered them.

  Then there was the polonium. Senior figures argued that the use of polonium demonstrated that Moscow had nothing to do with his death. As Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, put it, why make a spectacle? Lavrov told the Trud newspaper: ‘Why would the intelligence services spend millions [on polonium] in order to send to kingdom come a former rank-and-file agent, whose absurd accusations against them have long ceased to be taken seriously?’

  These statements made a kind of sense – if the aim of Litvinenko’s murder was to make a spectacle. They were less persuasive if Litvinenko’s assassins – and those in Moscow who sent them – had assumed the poison used to murder him would never be found. These were early days. But to the inspectors – now encamped in the Radisson Hotel, overlooking Europe Square and the frozen Moskva, from where cruise boats depart in summer – this seemed the most likely version.

  The British police force is an egalitarian organisation, with a fine disregard for rank when it suits. The team in Moscow included senior officers from the Yard’s SO15 counter-terrorism unit: Chief Superintendent Timothy White and Inspector Brian Tarpey. White dealt with the embassy and the Russian authorities; Tarpey was in charge of day-to-day operations. There were three Russian-speaking constables. The investigators took with them standard police equipment: recording devices, tapes, notebooks.

  The next morning, 5 December, they headed to the Russian prosecutor’s office. The building in Tekhnichesky Lane is in the same part of town as Lefortovo Prison, the FSB pre-detention and investigation centre where Litvinenko spent eight months in jail. The area on the east side was once Moscow’s foreigners’ quarter. The young Peter the Great held all-night drinking parties there with his Swiss mercenary friend and mentor Franz Lefort.

  Waiting in the prosecutor’s office was a high-level Russian delegation. It included Russia’s deputy chief prosecutor Alexander Bastrykin, later promoted to head the investigative committee. He was one of the men linked to the Russian mafia in Spain by Grinda, the Spanish special prosecutor for corruption and organised crime. It also included senior investigators, the head of the legal assistance division, and other specialists. Twelve people in all.

  This, surely, was a good sign?

  The detectives, however, soon found that the Russian authorities intended to manage all parts of the investigation. Bastrykin announced a series of rules. Scotland Yard wouldn’t be allowed to question witnesses directly. Russian officials would do that. The British side could submit questions – in writing and in advance. Scotland Yard’s tape equipment wasn’t needed; only the Russian side would be permitted to carry out audio recordings. ‘I found that a little bit strange,’ Tarpey said.

  This initial meeting set the tone for what followed. Over the next two weeks the Scotland Yard team found itself in a bizarre and sometimes ridiculous bureaucratic pantomime. ‘We were very obviously being railroaded into a situation where we had little or no control,’ Tarpey said. He reluctantly agreed to the prosecutor’s conditions. The Kremlin’s apparent goal was to give the impression of cooperation – while sabotaging the investigation where necessary.

  Moscow was insisting that Lugovoi and Kovtun, Litvinenko’s assassins, were actually victims. In reality, both men were fine; they, after all, hadn’t ingested radioactive polonium. The Russian authorities claimed that their condition was ‘rapidly deteriorating’. This might be the only opportunity to talk to them.

  Kovtun was being ‘treated’ in Hospital No. 6, a Moscow state clinic. The clinic was named after a USSR deputy health minister, Avetik Burnazyan, who helped to develop the Soviet atomic bomb. It specialised in radiation victims. Some of those affected by the Chernobyl disaster were sent there. The building – a Lego-like seven-storey block – is in the capital’s Shchukino district, on a street of Khrushchev-era apartments and lime trees. Nearby is a wooded park with a lake and natural spring, from where pensioners fill plastic water bottles; this would shortly become my Moscow jogging route.

  The detectives set off for the hospital, following a lead Russian vehicle. It drove at high speed – and then seemingly got lost. Tarpey was informed that only one of his officers – Russian-speaking constable Oliver Gadny – would be allowed to see Kovtun. After two hours in heavy traffic they arrived at the federal clinic. It was 8.45 p.m. The official in charge, Vadim Yalovitsky, said that under Russian law a witness couldn’t be questioned after 10 p.m.

  Gadny was ushered inside. He met the hospital’s chief doctor, Konstantin Kotenko, who appeared nervous, and discussed with the Russian investigator Alexander Otvodov the list of questions. The mood between the sides was ‘cold and suspicious’, Gadny said. The constable donned a protective suit. He was escorted into cabinet number eight.

  There was Kovtun – dressed in cream-coloured pyjamas and wearing a paper face-mask and a blue plastic head covering.

  Kovtun seemed tired but not visibly ill. Kovtun’s hair might have been shaved off but it was difficult to tell, Gadny thought. He had dark rings under both eyes, two bags under the right, one under the left. He was almost blind in the right one – an injury going back to a brawl with Russians, according to his ex-wife. His breathing was normal. In his notebook, Gadny wrote: ‘KOVTUN was a white male, with (yellow) tanned skin; aged mid thirties; with brown eyes, full brown eyebrows and full eyelashes.’ And: ‘He had a 5 mm round pock-like scar on the right side of the bridge of his nose.’

  It seemed Kovtun was unperturbed by the accusations against him. He offered a ‘look of resignation bordering on boredom, particularly when being addressed by the Russian prosecutor,’ Gadny said.

  Otvodov asked the questions in a rapid, stern manner, speaking clearly and loudly.

  Kovtun described seeing Litvinenko in the Millennium and said that he and Lugovoi were with him ‘for half an hour’. On first meeting they had hugged, as is the Russian custom. After leaving the bar, they chatted for eight minutes near the hotel entrance, Kovtun said. Litvinenko’s poisoning was a mystery, he added.

  OTVODOV: What do you know about the reasons for Litvinenko’s illness?

  KOVTUN: About this I do not know anything.

  OTVODOV: Do you know about polonium-210? Do you know anything about this substance?

  KOVTUN: Now I know, yes. Polonium is a radioactive isotope, with which one can be infected through respiration or food. Its half-life is a period of 130 days. I know no one who knows more details about this subject.

  OTVODOV: Did you have anything to
do with this substance?

  KOVTUN: I never had anything to do with polonium.

  After ten minutes, the chief doctor announced the interview had to end imminently. Gadny protested and was allowed to ask a couple of questions. Then:

  OTVODOV: How are you now?

  KOVTUN: Very nervous. I feel serious weakness.

  OTVODOV: What is the matter with your hair?

  KOVTUN: I shaved it bald. Don’t pay any attention to that.

  And that was that. The party left and went down a corridor to a small conference room. There they were tested for alpha radiation. An older doctor waved a scope – a kitchen-roll-sized tube with a flat circular plate – over Gadny’s skin. The detector made an irregular high-pitched beep. There was no contamination. The constable left the hospital. It was dark. He rejoined his colleagues, who had been waiting in the car park. Back at the embassy, he photocopied his notes and put them in a tamper-proof evidence bag.

  The interview had lasted a mere thirteen minutes. From the 118 questions submitted to Russian prosecutors Kovtun answered eighteen.

  Meanwhile, Scotland Yard’s attempts to meet Lugovoi were going nowhere. The next morning, 6 December, the team arrived outside the prosecutor’s office. Staff allowed only one person inside – Detective Superintendent Alan Slater – taking him on an odd circuitous tour of the building. Inside, officials berated Slater about SO15’s alleged failings. The complaints concerned minor administrative details; Slater felt them overblown. ‘I think I’d been summoned there just to be told off,’ he said.