by Luke Harding
It was strange. Lugovoi had a certain charm. In person he was disarming. His tale of virtuous innocence and wrongful insinuation even seemed plausible, until you remembered the chilling facts. He smiled, joked, made rueful expressions with his face, and tossed the occasional word of English into his Russian (‘absolutely’). He was wearing the same kind of clothes – a pink shirt, fashionable cuffs, grey business suit – that had prompted hotel staff in London to snigger.
By this point, Lugovoi had given dozens of interviews to journalists. In each, he stuck to the same blameless formula: he wasn’t a murderer but the victim of conspiracy. At key points, his recall of events was fuzzy. Why couldn’t he remember what drinks he ordered at the Millennium Hotel? It wasn’t an encounter you would forget. He was lying, there was no doubt. Underneath his smooth persona was something cold, cruel and terrifying.
Before my interview with Lugovoi, I bumped into Kovtun outside the office. When I emerged he was waiting for me. He had the air of someone with not much to do. Though he didn’t say so, he seemed jealous of Lugovoi’s fame and obvious material success. In the wake of the CPS’s murder charge, Lugovoi became, for many Russians, a national hero. Kovtun – not charged until 2011 – was a footnote.
We chatted for ten minutes. Kovtun said his situation frustrated him. His attempts to clarify whether he was under suspicion had been unsuccessful. He wanted to go back to Germany but not if that meant arrest and jail. ‘There are no guarantees. I don’t want to risk it,’ he told me. Kovtun said that he was still on good terms with his ex-wife Marina, who had visited him in Russia over New Year. She’d remarried, had kids, started a new life.
Kovtun said he ended up in the Pine Bar because of a series of coincidences – in Germany his passport renewal went quicker than he expected; he and Andrei sat in the bar because Lugovoi’s family hadn’t returned from Madame Tussauds. But what about the polonium? The trail went to his hotel bedroom, didn’t it? ‘By the time the polonium was found, twenty days had passed. There was plenty of time for the British intelligence services to organise lots of things,’ he replied.
Kovtun wrote down his mobile number for me. He was stuck in Russia, but felt things could be worse. ‘We go on holiday in Siberia and Altai,’ he said. ‘It’s a big country.’
Not long after our conversation, Kovtun broke off all contact with Lugovoi. After 2009 they maintained no relations whatsoever. The two murderers, for whatever reasons, had fallen out.
*
One of Russia’s most popular social networking platforms is LiveJournal.com. Alex Goldfarb ran a page on the site devoted to the Litvinenko case. One day, Goldfarb received an intriguing email. Its sender, ‘thepotemkin’, said he had information that might be of interest. It concerned polonium.
Goldfarb suggested that he and the source – his name was Alexei Potemkin – communicate via Skype. Potemkin explained his background. He was, he said, an FSB agent working undercover in Austria. He claimed to have met Litvinenko in the mid-1990s. And been part of the transportation chain that smuggled the polonium from Russia to London.
Goldfarb was wary. Was this an FSB set-up? He met Potemkin in Austria four times. It turned out Potemkin was disillusioned with his job – spying on Austria’s Chechen diaspora – and wanted out. Potemkin said that in 2006 an FSB courier delivered a sealed container with radioactive markings. His job was to deposit it with left luggage at Innsbruck Station. The package was the size of a photo. In it was a sealed vial. The vial had a coded lock.
According to Potemkin, the FSB began to carry out espionage missions abroad from 2000. The SVR, Moscow’s foreign-intelligence agency, resented this. Potemkin said his ultimate boss was Mikhail Nechaev. Nechaev, a three-star general, was the head of the FSB’s counter-intelligence operations department and a very powerful figure.
This was fascinating – but, as Goldfarb recognised, meant little without documents. Potemkin said that in 2003 he’d attended a meeting with Nechaev in Moscow in which polonium was discussed. It had a codename: ‘chemistry’. A representative from the FSB’s research institute in Moscow described it as ‘a perfect poison’. It couldn’t be detected by standard police or hospital equipment, the officer said, and was ‘harmless unless ingested’.
Potemkin gave Goldfarb internal FSB waybills. They appeared to confirm what Professor Dombey claimed – that the polonium came from the Russian nuclear production facility at Sarov. From there, it was sent to another nuclear complex at Balakovo, 250 miles (400 km) away. A driver from the FSB’s garage in Yaroslavl collected the polonium, and delivered it to the FSB’s research institute in Moscow. The shipment took place six to eight weeks before Litvinenko was poisoned.
Goldfarb believes Potemkin’s story is genuine. ‘My personal sense is that there is no sense in him inventing all this,’ he said. ‘It would be too dangerous.’ Potemkin agreed to seek asylum in the UK, holing up for a week at a pension in Vienna, but then changed his mind. He went to ground in a secure place somewhere in Europe. The last contact was in late 2010.
Others are not so sure. Andrei Soldatov, a Moscow-based journalist and expert on Russia’s spy agencies, says that some details on the documents are wrong. For example, one is stamped ‘FSB counter-intelligence service’. At the time, back in 2003, it was still an FSB department, not becoming a service until 2005.
And what of General Nechaev, the man who may have masterminded the Litvinenko operation? In December 2007, he died. He was fifty-six. Potemkin told Goldfarb he didn’t believe Nechaev’s death in Moscow was due to natural causes. Rather, it was punishment for the fiasco in London. Polonium was never meant to be discovered. Nechaev’s team was disbanded, Potemkin said.
The FSB posted Nechaev’s obituary on its website. The citation was brief. ‘Mikhail achieved significant results in the confrontation with foreign intelligence agencies,’ it wrote.
*
Back in Moscow, the intrusions at our apartment continued; the FSB would typically break in after I wrote something which displeased them. The UK Foreign Office raised my case privately with their Russian counterparts. The harassment would stop, only to resume a few months later. By 2010, I wondered how my Moscow assignment might end. Perhaps I would leave normally, when it was time to move on. Perhaps not.
My newspaper was on a roll: publishing a series of articles in collaboration with WikiLeaks, based on leaked US military logs from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That autumn I flew back to London to take part in a third investigation. There was another leak. It was sensational – more than a quarter of a million secret and classified dispatches sent from the US’s embassies and consulates around the world, back to the US state department in Washington.
My task was to examine the cables on Russia and the former Soviet Union. There were 3,000 of them. I and other correspondents worked in an airless room – the air conditioning was broken – on the fourth floor of the Guardian’s Kings Cross office. A search engine allowed you to enter a term that would spill out a set of results. You could also specify which US mission was of interest – Moscow, Paris, Berlin etc. I took a breath. I entered a search term – ‘Litvinenko’.
At a glance, the results were disappointing. The secret cables didn’t reveal who ordered Litvinenko’s murder; apparently Washington didn’t know. Or, if it did, this wasn’t a subject for diplomatic traffic. I looked again. Bingo! The most interesting material came not from the US embassy in Moscow but from elsewhere. I found the secret Madrid cable citing Litvinenko’s work for Spanish intelligence and his thesis that Russia was a ‘virtual mafia state’.
Another intriguing telegram came from the US mission in Paris. It suggested the White House believed Putin knew about, and probably approved, Litvinenko’s murder. Sent on 12 December 2006, it noted a meeting between the US assistant secretary of state, Daniel Fried and Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, a French presidential adviser to Jacques Chirac. The French blamed Litvinenko’s poisoning on ‘rogue officers’. They doubted the Kremlin was involved.
Fried disagreed: ‘Fried, noting Putin’s attention to detail, questioned whether rogue security elements could operate in the UK, no less, without Putin’s knowledge. Describing the current atmosphere as strange, he described the Russians as increasingly self-confident to the point of arrogance.’
There were other striking cables. I discovered that I wasn’t the only one suffering from covert FSB tricks. In 2009, the US ambassador John Beyrle, complained that ‘harassing activity against embassy personnel has spiked in the last several months to a level not seen in many years’. It included libellous attacks against US staff in the Russian media, and claims – made to family members – that their loved ones had met accidental deaths. Beyrle also said: ‘Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold.’
The Russia WikiLeaks material was terrific. It was known that the country suffered from corruption and misrule. The cables went further. They suggested the US shared Litvinenko’s gloomy conclusion that Russia had morphed into a full-blown kleptocracy run along mafia lines. In December, the Guardian ran a front-page story with the headline: ‘Inside Putin’s “mafia state”’. An article citing the Fried cable together with a photo of Litvinenko ran on page two. I was the author; they appeared with my by-line.
Before I flew to London the press and information department of Russia’s foreign ministry summoned me to a meeting. I’d been informed my press accreditation and visa would not be renewed. The British embassy succeeded in postponing this decision – I had to leave by December 2010 – for six months. This would give us enough time to pack up our home, find new schools for the children, and move back to the UK.
In the meantime, the WikiLeaks articles had enraged someone in the FSB, or the presidential administration, or both. In February 2011, I flew back from London to Moscow, and found myself dumped out of Russia. Officials from the Federal Migration Service cancelled my Russian visa, locked me briefly in a cell, and then escorted me back to the plane I’d just arrived on. My four years as Moscow bureau chief ended in expulsion.
9
Death of an Oligarch
Commercial court, Rolls building, Fetter Lane, London, October 2011
‘A genius gambler’
YULI DUBOV ON HIS FRIEND BORIS BEREZOVSKY, 2011
Eight months later, that October, I found myself inside London’s Rolls building. I was no longer reporting from Moscow. But, as with Litvinenko’s dramatic murder, it seemed that Russian feuds had a habit of spilling over into London. The building was Britain’s new commercial court. There was something in the air: the unmistakeable whiff of very large amounts of cash.
Up on the third floor I found two rival entourages. There were supporters in shiny suits, relatives, friends, PR consultants, journalists and a glamorous Russian woman dressed in black, her blonde hair piled into a chignon. There were lawyers, dozens of them. And there were bodyguards, outsize figures with earpieces.
At the centre of all this were two Russians. Once they were friends and business partners. Now they were bitter enemies. They walked separately into courtroom 26 and sat on opposite sides. One of them was a short, balding man in his mid-sixties, the possessor of an immense and restless energy, which compelled him to speak, move, fidget and gesture. His mind was said to be like a powerful computer. His mood – at this point sunny – was written all over his face.
The other was two decades younger, in his mid-forties. This second man seemed quiet, shy, calm and politely aloof. He appeared oblivious to the teeming drama around him. And sympathetic, too: with a boyish face, light beard turning grey, and a clear, open-eyed expression. His suit was smart yet understated. He sat placidly in one corner, listening to the proceedings via headphones, a reluctant participant with a bemused smile.
The first Russian was Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky may have caused my departure from Russia, but this was the first time I had seen him. The second man was Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club in west London. Both were billionaires and among the richest people on the planet.
The dispute between the two of them was the biggest private litigation battle in UK history. At stake was an awful lot of cash. Berezovsky claimed that Abramovich had cheated him out of over $5 billion (£3.2bn). He said that he and Abramovich were partners back in the 1990s in the oil firm, Sibneft, and that he had been forced later to sell his share at a considerable loss. Abramovich denied the claim.
The case was more than a feud over billions. It was the latest instalment in the bitter decade-long public war between Berezovsky and Putin, Abramovich’s friend and political boss. Putin wasn’t in court but scowled above the hearings, which would go on for twelve weeks, like a malevolent ghost. The dispute was also about what exactly happened in the 1990s when President Yeltsin, in effect, gave away state assets to a handful of insiders, the oligarchs.
Both litigants had submitted witness statements to the judge, Mrs Justice Gloster. They made fascinating reading. Berezvosky’s gave an account of his relations with Putin, a tale of friendship and – as both men saw it – betrayal. The two were once close. They first met in late 1991 when Putin was head of St Petersburg’s external-relations committee and Berezovsky was trying to expand his LogoVAZ car franchise. ‘During this time we became friends,’ Berezovsky wrote. They went on holiday together in Russia and abroad, he said. In the early 1990s, Putin stayed with Berezovsky at his chalet in Gstaad in Switzerland for several days.
In his statement, Berezovsky took credit for Putin’s rapid rise in politics. He said that he introduced Putin to Yeltsin’s team, and supported his appointment as FSB chief. When Litvinenko revealed the plot to kill Berezovsky, the oligarch was ‘disappointed’ by Putin’s cool reaction. Nevertheless, they remained friends. In February 1999, Putin turned up to the birthday party of Berezovsky’s partner Elena Gorbunova. Later the same year, Berezovsky backed Putin as prime minister. He even flew to Biarritz that summer to persuade him to take the job – shades here of a reluctant Julius Caesar refusing to take the crown.
Like many others, Berezovsky appears to have found in the inscrutable Putin what he wanted to see. There were warning signs but he chose to ignore them. During one meeting, he spotted that Putin had a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, Lenin’s murderous secret police, in his office. Berezovsky was astonished but said: ‘He [Putin] had never before seemed to be a chekist – someone who believed that the security organisations were entitled to do as they pleased.’
Once Putin was in the Kremlin, these tensions escalated into full-blown conflict. ‘I am not the kind of person who can remain silent when someone, even the president, is acting politically in a way with which I disagree,’ he told the court, truthfully.
The end came when Berezovsky’s ORT TV station criticised Putin for his apparent indifference over the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk. The navy vessel suffered an explosion in the Barents Sea; everybody on board drowned. Putin, meanwhile, was on holiday near the resort of Sochi, riding around on a jet ski. Berezovsky said he rang Putin and told him he had to get back to Moscow, otherwise the criticism would get worse. Putin was furious.
During their last meeting in August 2000, Putin told Berezovsky to sell ORT or go to jail. The president accused Berezovsky of ‘hiring prostitutes to pose as the widows and sisters of sailors killed aboard the Kursk to attack him verbally’. The allegation was crazy, probably invented by the FSB, and Berezovsky said so. Putin’s parting words were stiff: ‘Goodbye, Boris Abramovich,’ he said, using the formal patronymic. Berezovsky’s sorrowful reply, addressing Putin’s informally, was: ‘Goodbye, Volodya.’
In October 2000, and under criminal investigation, the oligarch left for France and then Britain, never to go back.
Berezovsky’s fall coincided with Roman Abramovich’s rise. By the late 1990s, Abramovich was a Kremlin insider in his own right. (In 1999, he allegedly approached Berezovsky and suggested they buy Putin a $50 million yacht as a present. Berezovsky declined; Abramovich bought the
yacht anyway.) By 2000 – according to Berezovsky – Abramovich ‘played a central role in the selection of members of President Putin’s cabinet’, and had the power to open and shut criminal cases.
Abramovich took advantage of his position, Berezovsky said. In exile he was compelled to sell his interest in Sibneft at a ‘gross undervalue’. His stake was worth at least $7 billion, Berezovsky claimed. Abramovich paid him a measly $1.5 billion. Berezovsky didn’t think much of Abramovich’s intellectual gifts either. But, he said, his former friend had one magical talent: everyone liked him. Berezovsky wrote: ‘He is good at psychology in this way. He is good at appearing to be humble. He is happy to spend days socialising with important or powerful people if that is what is needed so that he can get closer to them.’
By the time of Litvinenko’s poisoning, Abramovich was a Kremlin insider and loyal functionary, serving as governor of Chukotka, a barren and backward federal district on Russia’s remote north east Pacific coast. He ploughed many of his millions into the territory – apparently at Putin’s request. Unlike Berezovsky, Abramovich obeyed the rule laid down by Putin at a meeting with Russia’s plutocrats in summer 2000. It said, in essence: keep your mouth shut and obey the state.
Abramovich’s witness statement was a chunky white booklet. He disputed practically everything Berezovsky said. His main claim was that he’d hired Berezovsky as a top-level Kremlin fixer because of Berezovsky’s connections with Yeltsin. A Russian word defined this arrangement – krysha, or roof. In return for his political services, Abramovich paid Berezovsky ‘more than $2.5 billion’ and funded the latter’s lavish lifestyle. This meant yachts, planes, a villa in France and jewellery for his girlfriend. Abramovich said he didn’t owe Berezovsky anything. He rejected his financial demands as ‘fantastic’.