A Very Expensive Poison

by Luke Harding

On 17 July, an Associated Press reporter spotted the Buk missile system in the town of Snizhne. He observed seven rebel-owned tanks parked at a gas station. Other witnesses told the BBC they saw the missile-launcher roll off a low-loader around 1.30 p.m. local time. ‘We just saw it being offloaded and when the Buk started its engine the exhaust smoke filled the whole town square,’ the witness said. The crew, he added, appeared to be Russian soldiers. They had pure Russian accents and said the letter ‘g’ differently from Ukrainians.

  The Buk was photographed parked in a residential street in Snizhne. It’s seen next to a shop, ‘Olimpstroi’. Video captures it on the move too, transported on a lorry with a white cab, and rolling past a billboard. The missiles are clearly visible. The body is painted green, the arrow-shaped tips creamy white. As it drives past, a wood pigeon flaps from a hedge across the road.

  According to Bellingcat, a team of investigative journalists, the Buk began its journey in Russia. It was part of a convoy that set off in late June from the Kremlin’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade in the city of Kursk. Social media postings by Russian soldiers chart its progress towards the Ukrainian border. By the afternoon of 17 July it was in separatist hands.

  At 5.50 p.m. Moscow time, Strelkov sent out a tweet. It was headlined: ‘Message from the militia’. The message’s tone was self-congratulatory: the rebels, Strelkov said, had shot down another Ukrainian transport aircraft. Posted on Vkontakte, the Russian social media site, it said:

  We just downed a plane, an AN-26, in the vicinity of Torez. It’s lying somewhere near the ‘Progress’ mine.

  We warned them – don’t fly in ‘our sky’.

  Here’s video confirmation of the latest ‘bird drop’.

  Strelkov posted two videos confirming the crash – taken from a distance and showing a plume of thick black smoke. He described the plane as a ‘bird’. It had fallen, he wrote, on a slag-heap, far away from any residential areas. ‘Innocent people weren’t hurt,’ he added.

  Forty minutes later, Strelkov deleted the tweet. Rebels arriving at the crash site, 9 miles (15 km) from Snizhne, discovered a scene of utter horror: wreckage, bodies, plane seats. There were dead women. Dead children. They found passports – one belonging to an Indonesian student. The debris included clothes, toys, luggage. The signage from the plane said: ‘Malaysian Airlines’.

  Audio intercepts, released by Ukraine’s intelligence agencies, show Igor Bezler, a DNR commander, discussing what happened with Vasili Geranin, a Russian colonel from GRU military intelligence. Bezler tells Geranin: ‘We just shot down a plane.’ Bezler explains that the plane was civilian, not military. There is incredulity. And then self-justification: what was a commercial plane doing above a war zone? Were there spies on board?

  Strelkov’s ‘bird’ was Malaysian Airlines MH17. The Boeing 777 had taken off from Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. It was flying to Kuala Lumpar. There were 298 people on board including fifteen Malaysian crew. Two-thirds of the passengers were Dutch; the others from Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, UK, Germany, Belgium, the Philippines, Canada and New Zealand. MH17 had been at 33,000 feet. Some airlines had ceased flying over Ukraine because of the conflict, others hadn’t. Wreckage from the plane covered 50 square kilometres. Contrary to Strelkov’s assertion, debris did land on houses. Some bodies fell in gardens. Others in cornfields.

  The rebels shot MH17 down in error. They believed it to be a military target. It was a terrible mistake, but one that flowed directly from Putin’s very poisonous contempt for Ukraine’s sovereignty and his decision to reshape Europe’s borders.

  Two days later, amid international outrage over MH17, and with evidence pointing strongly to Kremlin complicity, the Home Office in London made an announcement.

  There would be a public inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

  12

  The Inquiry

  Court 73, Royal Courts of Justice, the Strand, London, January–July 2015

  ‘Vladimir Putin is nothing more than a common criminal dressed up as a head of state’

  BEN EMMERSON QC, JANUARY 2015

  It looked very much like a murder trial. Seated in the middle of the court was a judge, Sir Robert Owen. In front of him were lawyers. One of them was Ben Emmerson QC, the celebrated human-rights advocate. Owen and Emmerson were familiar figures from the pre-inquest two years earlier. To Owen’s right was another barrister, Robin Tam QC, who assisted the judge. Next to Emmerson was Marina Litvinenko, dressed in black, with her student son, Anatoly. In the corner a witness box. There were shorthand clerks, solicitors, paralegals and ushers padding softly in and out.

  At the back of the court was space for the media and public, and video screens for following the evidence. The walls were painted a classic shade of magnolia. From an open window you could hear the sounds of urban life penetrating from one of the world’s great capitals outside: a seagull, a helicopter flying overhead, the whine of police sirens. Outside the grand Gothic entrance there was a row of TV cameras.

  There was only one thing missing from room 73 in the east wing of London’s Royal Courts of Justice – defendants. There weren’t any.

  In fact, the two men accused of murdering Litvinenko were about 1,500 miles away in Russia. More than eight years after Litvinenko’s poisoning, his assassins – Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun – were still enjoying the favour of the Russian state. There was no prospect of their being extradited. And unless the Putin regime collapsed – an event that few believed would be happening any time soon – neither Kovtun nor Lugovoi would stand trial in Britain.

  The date was Tuesday, 27 January 2015. After years of delay, legal challenge and obfuscation, by governments in London and Moscow, a public inquiry was being held into Litvinenko’s murder. The visual grammar inside the court was misleading. This wasn’t a pseudo-trial. Nor was it a court process in which the accused would be convicted and sentenced in absentia. There would be no finding of criminal liability.

  Rather, the inquiry was a dispassionate exercise in truth-telling. It was methodical and thorough; inquisitorial rather than adversarial. For the first time, the evidence painstakingly collected by the Metropolitan Police in Operation Whimbrel – its codename for the Litvinenko investigation – would be made public. Participants got 16,000 pages.

  More than sixty witnesses testified. Some played a direct role in the events surrounding Litvinenko’s death. Others were professional experts: scientists, doctors, pathologists, historians. A few, like Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili, were dead, their police statements read from beyond the grave.

  During Putin’s presidency, numerous Kremlin critics met mysterious and violent ends. Twenty-three investigative journalists were murdered, together with other political activists. Invariably nobody got caught for these crimes. There was an investigation of sorts, maybe even a few arrests. But those in Russia who ordered up these killings were never identified.

  What made Litvinenko’s murder special was its extra-territorial location – London. The subsequent British police inquiry into his assassination took place free from political pressure. Detectives were able to follow leads, collect evidence, put together a case. These carefully assembled facts pointed in one direction: to Lugovoi and Kovtun’s guilt.

  Over six months, Owen – acting as chairman rather than as a judge – listened to all this evidence.

  This was truly a strange British legal affair. A few witnesses gave evidence anonymously. Whenever this happened the room was cleared with the media turfed into a downstairs annex. From here, you could watch proceedings on a video feed. And tweet, which was impermissible in the main court. (The camera was turned away from the witness.) The video ran with a five-minute delay, just in case a secret was revealed by mistake.

  The effect was to stimulate your imagination and to make you wonder what the witness might look like. Clues were scarce. Scientist A1, for example, who gave expert evidence on polonium, was a woman with a northern accent. That was it. C2, the cook, soun
ded Albanian but since he was speaking German, could anyone be sure? These participants in disguise were identified by letters and numbers.

  Such measures were understandable. D3 had told German police he was afraid of being killed. Despite the inquiry’s best efforts, he declined to give evidence. Kovtun’s ex-wife and her mother – Marina and Eleanora Wall – refused to cooperate. Letters inviting them to turn up went unanswered.

  Still, there was a wealth of material. And once the public hearings ended, the tribunal continued in secret session. Inside these closed hearings Owen examined a significant amount of classified material from the UK government and its various spy agencies including MI6, Litvinenko’s old employer.

  Nobody beyond a small circle of spooks, ministers and top civil servants knows what is inside MI6’s files. Even in less sensitive cases, the agency argues that disclosure might threaten its sources. None of MI6’s records have been made public since it was founded in 1909.

  Goldfarb believes the Litvinenko files contain a well-grounded conclusion that Putin is a front for organised crime and that Litvinenko was murdered because he’s key to that understanding. We can assume the documents include MI6’s Litvinenko dossier. And its internal assessment – written in 2007 – as to who may have ordered his execution.

  There may also be transcripts of intercepted phone calls made by Lugovoi, Kovtun and possible unknown third parties in London, Moscow and elsewhere. And email traffic. That the UK, US and others have the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls was well known, even before the US whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of this surveillance in 2013. Officially, this power isn’t acknowledged. In addition, there may be human intelligence from agents in the field. London says covert work and the effective operation of its intelligence agencies requires secrecy.

  At the heart of the inquiry were two simple questions.

  The first: why was Litvinenko killed?

  The second: was the Russian state responsible for his murder?

  In previous hearings, Owen had indicated that there was a prima facie case against the Russian state. But did that mean that Putin – or those around him – had ordered Litvinenko’s liquidation? How much was known? What could be inferred? The judge ruled there were no grounds for saying that the British state had failed to take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect Litvinenko. In short, the UK authorities couldn’t have anticipated a Russian death squad.

  Efforts were made to involve Lugovoi and Kovtun. They were invited to give evidence by video-link from Moscow. The investigative committee of the Russian Federation chose not to participate. That left four ‘core participants’: Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko; the Metropolitan Police; the UK home secretary; and the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Each had solicitors and lawyers. And access to evidence – excluding the classified stuff.

  Owen was seventy years old, had been a judge for more than two decades and was a popular figure on the legal circuit. He originally came from Wales. His appearance was that of a classic member of the British ruling class – his suits conservative, his white hair neatly combed, top button never undone.

  As it turned out, Owen was ‘a pretty cool judge’, in Emmerson’s words, and not as strait-laced as he seemed at first glance. ‘He handles it with masterful calm and good judgecraft. He decides as little as he has to,’ Emmerson said. ‘He’s run these proceedings impeccably. Nobody could challenge his integrity or impartiality.’

  Owen had something of a puckish sense of humour. Most of the time he listened. When he did intervene in proceedings his comments could be droll; here was a playful intelligence. One witness told the inquiry that a group of powerful individuals in Russia sought to control the president. Owen responded drily: ‘Some might say the British equivalent is the establishment.’

  At 10.30 a.m., the chairman began by setting out the basic facts: that Litvinenko had died on 23 November 2006 after ‘ingesting a fatal dose of the radionuclide polonium-210, a radioactive material’. His murder raised issues of the ‘utmost gravity’. It had attracted ‘worldwide interest and concern’, he said. Owen then explained why it had taken so long for the circumstances of his death to be examined – a saga of delay. He promised his inquiry would be full and independent.

  Litvinenko’s death triggered many theories as to who might have murdered him. Tam, counsel to the inquiry, said all of these would be considered. For some there was considerable evidence, for others none. There were numerous versions besides the one Litvinenko himself believed – that the Russian authorities were to blame. They included: Litvinenko accidentally poisoned himself; Berezovsky killed him; British government agencies were responsible; the mafia did it.

  For those of us watching from the public gallery there were early revelations. Tam set out in broad terms the evidence against Kovtun and Lugovoi. They had tried, he said, to poison Litvinenko twice, the first time unsuccessfully. Then there was the German restaurant manager D3, to whom Kovtun confessed he was carrying ‘a very expensive poison’. Since Kovtun and Lugovoi apparently had no personal grudge against Litvinenko, they were acting on orders. But whose?

  Tam described the question of state responsibility as ‘multi-faceted’ and said: ‘Which elements of the Russian state might have had the motive, the resources and, quite frankly, the daring to carry out the killing of a British citizen on British soil? At what level would such an operation have been authorised? Is it possible that an operation of this nature would have been undertaken without the knowledge, without the express authorisation, of those at the highest levels?’

  Furthermore, what was the motive? Did Litvinenko betray Russian secrets while allegedly working for the British and Spanish spy agencies? Or was the Ivanov report he compiled with Yuri Shvets the key to his gruesome murder?

  *

  On day one of the hearing I was just outside the courtroom when I received an email from Emmerson. There was an attachment. It was an embargoed copy of the opening speech he would deliver on behalf of Marina Litvinenko a few hours later. I read with excitement. It was gloriously trenchant. It referenced my book, Mafia State, published in 2011 after my forced exit from Russia.

  The speech was an unsparing anatomy of twenty-first-century Russian power – an indictment of a criminal regime prepared to murder its enemies, as its Soviet predecessor had done, using inventive methods. And led by a president who, when stripped down, is a mafia boss straight from a Mario Puzo bestseller.

  Emmerson is a formidable lawyer. He is known for championing unpopular clients, and for offending governments and the powerful. He is a founder member of the left-wing Matrix chambers. He specialises in international and domestic human rights and appears regularly before the International and European Courts of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights. ‘I’m driven by a passion for open truth and justice,’ he told me.

  In the words of Louis Blom-Cooper, a veteran lawyer of progressive views: ‘Ben is a very clever man. Highly intelligent. A very good advocate. One of the leading public lawyers.’

  Close up, it was easy to see why Emmerson is regarded as one of the best courtroom performers of his generation. Whenever present, he was the tribunal’s irresistible mid-point, it struck me. There was the booming voice, of course. And the phenomenal work rate. There was a remorseless logic to his questions, too: any witness who lied or equivocated got crushed, as if by a mallet. In person, he looks a bit of a bruiser: broad shoulders, large head, black glasses, closely cropped hair.

  Emmerson’s preeminent gift is that he can render a complex legal argument in compelling and intelligible phrases, a process of rapid disassembly. Journalists don’t need to think of a headline: he writes one for you.

  At 2.50 p.m., Emmerson delivered his opening statement – a zinger. The barrister began by paying tribute to Marina Litvinenko, and her long, hard campaign for justice. The significance of her search involved broader national and international interests, in that it exposed ‘unlawfulness and criminality at the heart of the Russia
n state’.

  This wasn’t about one murder, Emmerson said, rather about a government that had succumbed to a terrible criminal cancer:

  ‘The intimate relationship that will be proved to exist between the Kremlin and Russian organised crime syndicates around the world are so close as to make the two virtually indistinguishable. The startling truth, which is going to be revealed in public by the evidence in this inquiry, is that a significant part of Russian organised crime around the world is organised directly from the offices of the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a mafia state.’

  Next, he addressed motive. Litvinenko was liquidated ‘partly as an act of political revenge for speaking out, partly as a message of lethal deterrence to others, and partly in order to prevent him giving evidence as a witness in a criminal prosecution in Spain’.

  Litvinenko was about to expose the ‘odious and deadly corruption among the cabal surrounding President Putin’. He had given information to Spanish and Italian officials about links between Russian organised crime groups and the Kremlin. Therefore: ‘He had to be eliminated, not because he was an enemy of the Russian people, but because he had become an enemy of the close-knit group of criminals who surrounded and still surround Vladimir Putin and keep his corrupt regime in power.’

  Litvinenko’s killing, it appeared, wasn’t about ideology, as in Soviet times. Moscow spymasters used to believe that the murder of enemies – both domestic and foreign – could be justified on the grounds that the Soviet Union was waging a life-and-death struggle to defend communism, a noble experiment. And that they were surrounded by hostile forces: Hitler, the west, etc.

  Here, there could be no appeal to what you might term Leninist ethics. Communism was gone. Rather, Litvinenko’s modern assassination was about money. He threatened the revenue streams of some very powerful people. So they killed him.