by Luke Harding
Asked what might befall him, D3 gave a simple answer. ‘I may also be killed. I heard something,’ he said, adding that he felt guilty ‘because it then actually happened’. It never occurred to him to go to police immediately after the conversation, he explained, because he didn’t consider what Kovtun told him was actually possible.
German detectives were reluctant to believe D3’s account. They were sceptical for several reasons. First, they thought it unlikely that assassins sent by Moscow on a complex mission would be scrambling around at the last moment looking for a cook. Second, what kind of killer would suggest in the same breath that he and his ex-wife might strip off for a porno mag? It was … well, illogical. And improbable. And therefore dubious.
It wasn’t until 2010 that Scotland Yard – using cellular data and interviews with D3’s colleagues – established he was telling the truth.
In conversations with his friends and ex-in-laws in Germany, Kovtun stuck to the script: he was blameless. He called Eleanora Wall, his former mother-in-law, and said: ‘Please do not think that I did this.’ She believed him. ‘Dmitry is not a brutal person who kills people. No member of the KGB would have put poison in Dmitry’s hands,’ she told Hamburg detectives. ‘I do not believe when he visited us he knew he was giving off radioactivity.’
Only once did Kovtun let his guard slip – and then in ambiguous terms. Back in Moscow he was receiving regular infusions, he told Wall, as well as other medicines whose names he couldn’t reveal. Kovtun said he’d been exposed to some of the poison that did for Litvinenko. And told her: ‘These arseholes have probably poisoned us all.’ He didn’t explain who the arseholes were.
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While Kovtun was calling Germany, the Russian authorities were busy covering up their role in the murder. Similar to the Metropolitan Police, Menzel tried to test the Aeroflot plane Kovtun had taken from Moscow to Hamburg. A team was got ready to ground it as soon as it arrived. Somehow, Russia’s spy agencies learned of the plan and at the last minute Aeroflot swapped planes. Kovtun’s plane never came back.
In Hamburg and London, the threads were coming together. The Met has been the focus of much public criticism but its investigation into Litvinenko’s murder was painstaking and exemplary. Around 100 detectives were involved, together with 100 uniformed officers.
Teams were sent out across the capital. Their job was to collect CCTV, identify potential witnesses and to find members of the public who may have been contaminated.
The public-health picture was a horrifying one. Forensic tests showed the murderers left radioactive traces at every location they visited: offices, restaurants, hotel rooms, toilets and aeroplanes. Scientists revisited each location with specialist detection equipment. They scanned every inch – leaving stickers with radiation readings in different locations.
This information was fed back to Scotland Yard’s computer-aided modelling bureau. It reproduced the findings in graphic form. Scientists also tested hair samples from Litvinenko. The results were revealing: they gave a window of dates for the two occasions on which he was poisoned. These coincided exactly with the dates of his meetings with Lugovoi and Kovtun.
The polonium appears on the hair as an area of darkness – first as a constellation of light dots and then as an intense, banded black region. The hair of a dead man.
I arrived in Moscow in January 2007, as the Guardian’s new Moscow bureau chief. My wife Phoebe and our two small children, Tilly and Ruskin, came too. We moved into a cramped temporary apartment in a tower block in the suburb of Voikovskaya. The kids’ new British international school was within walking distance; in the frozen courtyard youths were drinking from tins of beer. The cold felt sharp; it hit you in the face; you breathed it.
It was an inauspicious moment to be a British correspondent in Russia.
When Putin first became president in 2000, relations between Britain and Russia were positive. Putin’s first foreign trip was to London. Russia’s new leader – at this point an enigmatic figure, and the subject of the question ‘Who is Mr Putin?’ – called into Downing Street for talks. The prime minister Tony Blair hailed his guest as a fellow moderniser and defended him in the face of criticism over human-rights abuses and the new war in Chechnya. Putin even met the Queen at Windsor Castle.
The estrangement began in 2003, when a British judge granted Berezovsky political asylum. A court turned down Russia’s extradition request for Zakayev, whom it accused of terrorism. Putin took these decisions as a personal snub.
In the Russian system, judges typically do what the Kremlin expects of them. Putin interpreted the court’s rulings as a betrayal by Blair, who had failed to ensure the correct result. Russia lodged twenty-one applications for the extradition of Russian citizens from the UK. All were unsuccessful. Judges refused them on the understandable grounds that the individuals were unlikely to get a fair trial back in Russia and were, in many cases, being persecuted for their anti-government views.
Relations with the west in general were cooling, too. The Kremlin didn’t perceive the pro-western revolutions in Georgia, in 2003, and in Ukraine, in 2004, as popular movements for democratic reform. They were, it claimed to believe, the product of a US-engineered conspiracy. And a further sign of America’s insidious encroachment in Russia’s post-Soviet neighbourhood. US president George W. Bush – an early enthusiast for Putin – found that Russia’s president was a prickly and unpredictable adversary, opposed to Bush’s Iraq misadventure and much else.
From these alleged slights flowed a series of hostile actions by the Russian government. The British side did some daft things, too. In January 2006, Russian state TV broadcast footage showing an alleged British intelligence officer retrieving information from an artificial ‘rock’ concealed in a Moscow park. The 30-cm rock looked like a small, innocuous light brown boulder – the kind of boulder familiar to fans of The Flintstones. The FSB claimed UK diplomats used the rock to communicate with their Russian ‘agents’. (Jonathan Powell, Blair’s special adviser, later admitted the spy rock was genuine.)
Berezovsky remained a toxic figure for Putin’s administration. Just how toxic I found out for myself in April 2007. Two colleagues interviewed him in London. Berezovsky told them he was plotting nothing less than a revolution. He was, he said, bankrolling people close to the president who were conspiring to mount a palace coup. ‘We need to use force to change this regime,’ he said. Democratic methods were pointless – they wouldn’t work.
Berezovsky acknowledged that such statements were risky: ‘I don’t have any doubts that the Putin regime has become criminal, killing those they calculate as their personal enemy.’ Why? ‘Because they [the regime] identify themselves as Russia. Putin’s understanding is who is against him is against Russia.’
The oligarch’s latest claims were incendiary. He’d said similar things before but in less vehement tones. My bosses at the Guardian asked if I might get a reaction from the Kremlin. I reached Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spin-doctor, and faxed over the key quotes to his office inside the president’s HQ. I had visited Peskov there before, soon after taking up my new Moscow job; he’d told me it was a sadness that the country’s opposition was weak.
The story appeared on the Guardian’s front page the following day, with a photo of Berezovsky and the headline: ‘I am plotting a new Russian revolution’. Peskov’s comments were included: ‘In accordance with our legislation [his remarks] are being treated as a crime.’ My by-line – Luke Harding in Moscow – appeared on the story, placed third, behind that of my two colleagues who’d done the work. At this point I’d never personally met Berezovsky or had any dealings with him.
A more self-assured regime would have dismissed Berezovsky’s claims as self-aggrandising baloney. They were ridiculous. Berezovsky didn’t have a secret army working inside Russian power. The FSB’s purpose, however, was to uncover plots against the state. Here – in lurid black and white – seemingly there was one. Someone inside the spy agency decided to hu
nt the conspirators. A good place to start, he thought, would be with the Guardian’s Moscow reporter.
I woke up the next morning to find myself inside a sort of sub-John le Carré spy novel. Over the next few weeks a succession of FSB agents followed me round the streets of Moscow. They were easy to spot: unpromising young men wearing cheap leather jackets and brown shoes. Once I met a friend in the deserted basement of a café. Two FSB operatives turned up ten minutes later and, ignoring the many empty tables, sat right next to us. They didn’t order anything; the spy agency doesn’t pay expenses for its officers on duty, I discovered. We laughed, and left.
It became obvious that someone was listening to my phone calls. The Guardian’s bureau was a ground-floor apartment in a block close to Moscow’s Belorusskaya train station. Two low-ceilinged apartments knocked into one. From the tiny kitchen you could see a small area of green where locals walked their dogs. I had a large desk with a landline. Whenever I called London and mentioned the word ‘Litvinenko’ or ‘Berezovsky’ the connection was cut. There was an ominous crackling. The same thing happened if I made jokes about Putin.
Other western correspondents experienced eaves-dropping too; the Brits and Americans were routinely monitored, it seemed. The KGB had perfected these techniques during the Cold War. Female agents listened to targets for hours on end in secret chambers dotted around Moscow. (This was tedious low-level work; it took hours to transcribe conversations.) A caller from the presidential administration, meanwhile, asked for my cellphone number. It looked as if someone had hacked my Gmail account too. Emails tagged with Berezovsky disappeared and then reappeared in my inbox.
None of this was perhaps surprising. Litvinenko’s murder had put a deep chill on UK–Russian relations; I was a British correspondent. The KGB taught its recruits that all western journalists were spies. The belief flowed from mirror thinking: in Soviet times, correspondents abroad, like the talented Yuri Shvets, used journalistic cover to conceal their real jobs as KGB operatives.
What was more unusual in my case were the break-ins by the FSB – a series of intrusions into the apartment where I lived with my family. These were sinister and unwelcome. They became a recurring feature of our Moscow life.
The first took place soon after the Berezovsky story was published. My wife was away. I had been at dinner with friends. I returned with Tilly and Ruskin to our apartment. We’d moved shortly before to a new tenth-floor flat in the suburb of Voikovskaya. From the living room there was a view of a park – birches and a municipal lake in one direction, where we swam in summer; a courtyard in the other.
That someone had broken in was obvious. My son’s single Ikea bed was next to a low window. We kept the window double locked. Now the window was unlocked. It had been left propped open – with a 15-metre drop to the yard below. We peered down. ‘Has there been a burglar?’ my son wondered. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. It seemed unlikely you would survive a fall from such a height. The message appeared to be: take care, or your son might meet with an accident.
At 4 a.m. that night, I was woken by a loud beeping from next door. I turned on the light, and groped towards the sound. An alarm clock with a digital display was ringing in the living room. I hadn’t set the alarm. We’d inherited the clock from our landlord, Vadim, but never used it. It appeared my intruders had decided to play a sinister prank on us. Evidently, this wasn’t a conventional burglary. I checked the kitchen. I’d left several thousand dollars in a drawer to pay next month’s rent. The cash was still there.
Putin’s secret policemen were carrying out a different mission: to intimidate and scare us. Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s polonium murder, the FSB’s secret poison factory – all these were apparently taboo themes. I had crossed a line. There would be further break-ins, and further warnings.
Shortly before this covert harassment started, I attended Putin’s annual press conference. The venue was a giant two-tiered auditorium inside the Kremlin. This was a remarkable set-piece event – attended by 2,000 mostly Russian journalists and screened live on state television. They shouted softball questions. What did the president think about gardening? How should Russians bring up their kids?
Putin was also asked about Litvinenko. His dismissive response: that Litvinenko was a small-time agent who’d been fired from the FSB for beating up suspects and who ‘didn’t possess any secrets at all’.
In May 2007, the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service charged Lugovoi with Litvinenko’s murder. This, from Putin’s perspective, was another provocation. He refused Britain’s request to hand over Lugovoi. Putin said that Russia’s constitution forbids the extradition of its citizens. The request was a sign of Britain’s ‘arrogance’ and a ‘no brains’ colonial mentality, he added.
In the wake of the CPS’s charge, Lugovoi held a press conference. It took place in the Moscow office of the Russian news agency Interfax. This was the same room where in 1997 Litvinenko had accused the FSB of ordering him to snuff out Berezovsky. A photo of the famous event hung on a wall in the corridor. It was a hot day; I turned up in shorts. The room was full. Lugovoi walked in with Kovtun. Lugovoi was wearing a grey pinstriped suit and pink tie. Kovtun’s hair had grown back. Lugovoi began with a polite ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.’
He said he’d called a press conference to defend himself from swirling accusations made by the ‘western mass media’. They had initiated ‘a real war against me and against Russia’, he said.
What followed was a lengthy denunciation – of Berezovsky, MI6 and the UK government, which had ‘hidden traces of the crime’ and ‘made me a scapegoat’. Lugovoi said that MI6 had tried to recruit him. He wasn’t a murderer, or as he put it: ‘Some Russian James Bond, infiltrating a nuclear centre and poisoning his mate in cold blood, contaminating himself, his wife and children along the way!’
Vesti-24, the state-owned TV news channel, broadcast this live. According to Lugovoi, British intelligence had murdered Litvinenko, one of its agents.
This was a serious allegation. I asked Lugovoi if he had any proof.
Lugovoi replied: ‘Yest!’ – There is proof!
So what was it?
Lugovoi didn’t offer details.
My question had annoyed him.
He said: ‘The British public must take a serious interest in what some Russian-born people are doing in the UK. They are engaged in recruiting Russian citizens, they sell British passports. The British nationality is for sale, esteemed BBC … sorry I don’t know what other English mass media companies are present here. Your nationality is sold like Chinese rags in a market, and you are doing nothing about it whilst thigh-slapping! I do apologise for the rough expression.’
Afterwards, the Kremlin announced that Lugovoi’s vague accusations – clearly based on talking points supplied to him by others – were worthy of ‘further investigation’.
Later that day, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton, sent off a confidential eGram – a diplomatic telegram – to the foreign office in London. Brenton summarised Lugovoi’s claims, noting that Kovtun ‘was present but said little’.
He concluded: ‘Lugovoi’s story sounds like nonsense to us, but is shrewdly judged for its plausibility to Russian ears – particularly in view of the “rock” incident last year. The fact that he was given nearly two hours on a government news channel to make his allegations strongly suggests official involvement in the stage management of his “revelations”.’
Britain’s security agencies compiled their own report on the murder, based on police evidence and secret sources. Its contents have not been divulged. The conclusion, it appears, is that this was a Russian state-sponsored assassination – not just an unfriendly act, but one involving dangerous nuclear material, which potentially endangered hundreds of lives.
In July 2007, the new UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, expelled four Russian diplomats from London. This was in protest at Moscow’s refusal to hand over Lugovoi. Miliband told parliament he believed the
FSB was involved. He severed cooperation with the Russian spy agency and introduced a new visa policy for Kremlin politicians travelling to London. Up until this point MI6 had communicated with the SVR, its Russia’s foreign-intelligence counterpart. These channels were cut as well, even though the SVR was apparently not involved in Litvinenko’s poisoning, an FSB operation.
The Kremlin’s response was comparatively restrained. It expelled four diplomats in turn from the UK embassy in Moscow.
The mood among British diplomats based in Moscow was understandably embattled. They found themselves at the front end of the worst stand-off in relations since the Brezhnev era. Brenton held regular breakfast briefings for journalists. The ambassador’s residence was just off the Old Arbat – a nineteenth-century building in Bolshoi Nikolopeskovsky Lane that had once belonged to a merchant or senior official.
Brenton admitted that the Litvinenko case made better relations with Moscow impossible and said that there was no prospect of an early meeting between Putin and Gordon Brown, the UK’s new prime minister. ‘I don’t know what happens next. Lugovoi remains a wanted man,’ Brenton said. Lugovoi’s support came from the top and from ‘quite influential chunks of the Russian state’, he said, adding: ‘This guy is a suspected murderer. In normal places you don’t find a government giving support and encouragement to such a person.’
It was the use of a radioactive nucleotide that convinced the UK government this was a Kremlin plot, Brenton said. ‘Our private judgement is that you have to be a state or state organisation to get hold of polonium in the quantities it was used.’