by Luke Harding
Afterwards, Lugovoi admits to feeling some ‘internal tension’. Burgess says: ‘Have faith in me.’ Minutes later he delivers Lugovoi the result. ‘You were telling the truth. No deception indicated,’ he says. The next day Lugovoi invited father and son to breakfast at his daughter’s upscale Moscow restaurant. The bill was on the house.
The inquiry adjourned for lunch. Emmerson whispered to me: ‘Big bang coming up.’
At 2 p.m., Emmerson examined Burgess. It was a masterclass in how to eviscerate a witness, like watching a tiger play with a small, whiskery rodent. He asked if Burgess considered himself a ‘reliable evaluator of whether someone is telling the truth’. Burgess mumbled: ‘No, not really.’ This was an odd reply. Its reason became apparent.
The barrister asked: ‘What about yourself, Mr Burgess, do you consider yourself to be an experienced liar?’
In December 2009, Emmerson revealed, Burgess had been convicted of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to twenty-four weeks in jail, suspended for two years. He’d been caught speeding. He told police a fictitious ‘friend’ was behind the wheel. Burgess resigned from the Polygraph Association; the invitation to travel to Moscow came at a time when he was broke and somewhat demoralised. Korobko knew of Burgess’s criminal record: this, it appears, is why he hired him. By way of justification Burgess said: ‘We all lie at one point or another.’
There was more – the test results indicated that Lugovoi had actually failed the second question: ‘Have you handled polonium?’ The inquiry heard it was ‘quite easy’ to dupe a lie detector test – especially if you were a trained spy or intelligence agent. Countermeasures might be physical or mental. Techniques included counting backwards from 100, imagining that you are walking your dog on a promising spring morning, or thinking of an erotic situation. Even with likely coaching from the FSB, Lugovoi flunked it.
This was gripping courtroom theatre. Owen was on form, too. He observed: ‘I’m amused to see that walking the dog on a promising spring morning is compared with thinking of a sexually arousing scene.’
There were more signs that the Kremlin was following events in London closely – and not in a happy way. In an interview with RT, Viktor Ivanov described the inquiry as ‘a spectacle, a farce, a knockabout act’. The allegations against him were, he said, a conspiracy by Britain and its intelligence agencies. Ivanov also expressed bafflement as to why the US had sanctioned him.
The same day Burgess sagged in the witness box, the Moscow agency RIA Novosti put out a short news story. It said President Putin had handed out a state honour. The award was for services to the fatherland, second-class. Its recipient: Andrei Konstantinovich Lugovoi. The presidential citation said the honour was bestowed in recognition of his contribution to Russia’s parliament and to law-making.
Lugovoi was deputy chairman of the Duma committee for security and fighting corruption, the agency noted. The committee wrote legislation for Russia’s spy agencies. In late 2013, Lugovoi had proposed a blacklist of leading opposition news websites. They included a blog written by the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and a news portal run by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, Kasparov.ru. Putin approved Lugovoi’s suggestion. It was part of a wider crackdown on internet freedoms, justified in the wake of Snowden’s revelations on the grounds of ‘digital sovereignty’.
Lugovoi’s law-making efforts were clearly helpful to the Kremlin. But this state honour looked like a reward for something else, namely murder. And a sign of high-level political approval. Surely it was no accident?
As Emmerson remarked: ‘Whatever the pretextual justification for that award, its timing on day twenty-two of this inquiry, after a substantial amount of evidence has been called establishing Mr Lugovoi’s involvement in the murder of Mr Litvinenko, is clearly both a provocation by President Putin and the clearest possible message that he identifies himself with Mr Lugovoi.’
The award was probative, the barrister said. In other words it should be added to the evidence that Owen would consider before writing his report, due by Christmas 2015.
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After a month of hearings it was clear that Scotland Yard had garnered more than enough material to convict Lugovoi and Kovtun, were they to stand trial. But the question of Putin’s personal culpability was more complex, and harder to answer. Several factors had to be considered: the nature of the Russian state, past and present; the interplay between Putin and his spy agencies; and whether Putin micro-managed security operations or merely set broad policy parameters. Plus, what might be read from previous political killings, of which there were quite a few.
To examine all this, the inquiry turned to Robert Service, professor of Russian history at Oxford University and a distinguished writer and scholar on modern Russia. Service had previously been commissioned to write an expert report for the Berezovsky vs Abramovich case, offering guidance on Russian high politics and big business. He had published full-scale biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. These were model studies: lucid, elegant and readable.
Service was asked to provide information in key areas. The first was to explain internal power structures in Russia, and to say if it was possible for ‘the Russian state’ to order the assassination of a critic. Next, he was to give his expert opinion as to what extent it could be credibly said Putin might commission any such killing, or for it to be carried out with his knowledge or approval. Further questions: did Putin and other senior individuals have links to mafia gangs? Could the state kill someone at the behest of such groups? And what was the Russian administration’s attitude to the ‘rule of law’?
Service’s 2015 report was a highly nuanced document. It made clear what was known, and evidentially based, and what was speculation. It avoided simplification or what Service termed ‘unidimensional’ answers.
Analysing Russia was much tougher than it had been twenty-five years ago, he began. During glasnost and the Yeltsin era there was real information about disagreements at the top of Russian politics. High-ranking insiders, including Yeltsin, wrote revealing memoirs. But with Putin’s rise to power in 2000, access to information in Russia underwent a ‘severe constriction’.
Top-level secrecy came back; the country reverted to a pre-1985 Kremlinology – when observers tried to decipher what might be going on by watching who stood next to whom on Lenin’s Red Square tomb. The impenetrable nature of contemporary Russian power diminished what could be said with confidence.
Service took issue with the way some commentators depicted Putin – ‘as the evil dwarf who operates from his secret cave and controls every minute step taken by his robotic minions’. He argued that there were two flaws to this negative school. First, it didn’t give credit to Putin for anything. Second, Russia from the time of Nicholas II onwards has always been a tricky country to rule. Service argued that Russia’s power vertical – its centralised political hierarchy – was in reality ‘patchily organised’. And, he said, even dictators had less power than they might wish for, and couldn’t ignore popular pressures or demands from Russian society.
Another known unknown was Putin’s relationship with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB at the time of Litvinenko’s murder. Putin’s backstory was understood; Patrushev was an old KGB associate of his from Leningrad. But it was unclear whether Patrushev secured Putin’s permission for operations in advance.
Service pointed to one piece of evidence – a memoir by Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s former prime minister. Putin offered Kasyanov the job in 2000. There was a condition: that Kasyanov didn’t meddle in Russia’s ‘coercive structures’ – the FSB and other security organs – which Putin considered his exclusive ‘turf’. Kasyanov stuck to the deal. Putin fired him anyway in 2004. He joined the opposition.
Kasyanov survived, but many other prominent Putin critics wound up dead. Service cautioned that it was difficult to prove the administration’s complicity in these crimes. Putin’s public response to Litvinenko’s killing illustrated ‘a
verbal levity that borders on the macabre’, the professor observed. (Putin mocked Litvinenko’s letter of accusation and said there was no indication he’d suffered a ‘violent death’. ‘The people who have done this are not God, and Mr Litvinenko, unfortunately, is not Lazarus.’)
Putin’s own guilt was unproven. ‘But there can be little doubt about where his feelings lie,’ Service said.
Despite all of these caveats, Service’s conclusions were unambiguous: that Russia’s president set ‘a political climate of tolerance’ in which his agencies could go about their ‘repressive business’ without hindrance.
He went on: ‘The Putin administration has always been demonstrably secretive, manipulative and authoritarian with a ruthless commitment to protecting its interests at home and abroad … It appears to me unlikely that Putin did not exercise – at the very least – some oversight of Patrushev’s activities.’
Speaking from the witness box, Service said his findings might be ‘inscribed on my tombstone’. As befits an Oxford don, he employed a sparkling vocabulary. There was a rare outing for the word ‘desuetude’. (Service complained that the tradition of looking at the big picture had fallen away, replaced by compartmentalised scholarship.) The professor also talked about how Russia’s post-1991 market economy had ‘immiserated’ large sections of the country’s population.
In a supplemental report, Service further considered whether Putin’s Russia could be called – as Litvinenko originally hypothesised – a mafia state. The inquiry wanted to know the answer. Did Putin and senior figures in the Russian government have links with St Petersburg’s Tambov-Malyshev crime gang? Or with members of Russian organised-crime groups in Spain? And what about Litvinenko’s claim that Putin had good relations in the 1990s with the mobster Semion Mogilevich?
Mogilevich is an almost mythical Ukrainian-Russian mafia don who features on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted. The US accuses him of running a trans-national crime empire. It deals in weapons, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking and prostitution. And operates in America. According to Litvinenko, Putin met Mogilevich and gave him a krysha, or protection. Mogilevich lives in Moscow, shielded by the FSB and beyond the reach of US law enforcement. (Some sources say Mogilevich is now in Hungary.)
Mogilevich crops up in the leaked conversations from 2000 between Ukraine’s president Leonid Kuchma and his intelligence chief Leonid Derkach. Derkach says the mafia boss is on his way to Kiev to sort out various disputes, and adds: ‘He’s on good terms with Putin. He and Putin have been in contact since Putin was still in Leningrad.’ Was this in any way proof?
Service answered that such matters were ‘highly contentious’. There were few reliable sources. And the phenomenon wasn’t new. Organised crime had rooted itself in the USSR after Stalin’s death. It had truly flourished under perestroika, and had grown exponentially under post-communist conditions. The ‘corruption of the political process’ visible with Yeltsin had continued under Putin, Service said.
Russia, of course, wasn’t the only country with criminality at its core. Organised crime has penetrated practically every state in Latin America. Likewise Africa. And the state is geographically more extensive than just the capital. In Mexico, for example, criminal gangs have subverted entire regional administrations.
There was crime in other parts of Europe, too. Italy under the Christian Democrats harboured a huge mafia problem in the south – and in the north as well. In Italy, though, mafia interests never wholly predetermined public policy.
Service offered his own taxonomy as to what ‘mafia state’ meant. He gave ten definitions. He agreed that the ninth offered the best fit when talking about contemporary Russia: ‘a state in which criminal methods and organised crime play a substantial part but which also has countervailing features’. Undoubtedly, ministers and other top Russian officials were keen to enrich themselves. At the same time, Service told the tribunal, ‘not everything that happens in the Putin administration is unconstitutional and illegal and run for criminal purposes’.
It was illuminating. At times the conversation between Emmerson and Service took on the quality of a highbrow BBC or NPR discussion. Putin wasn’t Stalin; his popularity was, ‘alas, real’; like interwar Germany, post-1991 Russia was tempted towards extremism after economic depression and military defeat. Service said he didn’t see many positive sides to Putin. He was bad enough without the overdrawn comparisons made by some Russian democrats to Hitler. And he was the ‘luckiest ruler of the twentieth century’, who had benefited from a steeply ascending oil price.
There was some disagreement on method. Service took the long view: that the truth about Putin would emerge but that we’d have to wait. ‘It will be knowable eventually. It always is. We now know a lot of what we needed to know for decades about even Joseph Stalin. So I am confident that one day we will know about Putin, but it will be too late then. It will just be a matter for historians and not for people engaged in public affairs.’
*
Other witnesses took a less detached view. Litvinenko’s co-author Yuri Shvets, the former KGB agent, pointed out that ‘active measures’ – such as state assassinations – were always authorised at the highest political levels. This was, Shvets said, one of the KGB’s main traditions. It would be unthinkable for an FSB general, whether Viktor Ivanov or anybody else, to murder a political dissident without Putin’s express approval.
Speaking by video-link from the US, Shvets said that KGB ‘rule number one’ was to cover your back. That meant getting permission from your superior; in Russia the most important decisions were made by just one person. ‘I rule out the possibility that a decision to assassinate Sasha [Litvinenko] or anybody else outside of Russia would have been made without approval of the top authority of Russia, which is Vladimir Putin,’ Shvets told the inquiry.
In Litvinenko’s case, there were special factors as well. As Goldfarb put it, Putin’s conflict with Berezovsky and Litvinenko was deep-rooted and highly personal. ‘Nobody in his right mind, knowing how things run there [Russia], would authorise such an operation when one could be sure that Mr Putin would take a very close look at it after the fact,’ Goldfarb said. He characterised Litvinenko’s killing as not just a crime of politics but an emotional act – a work on Putin’s part of ‘passion’.
There were other good reasons to believe that Putin authorised the operation, Goldfarb added. One was polonium – non-state players couldn’t get hold of it. Russia’s atomic industry ministry would give it to the FSB only with presidential permission. Goldfarb cited a lengthy interview Putin gave state TV on the annexation of Crimea. The president boasted the operation had worked so smoothly because ‘I personally micro-managed it.’
There were few leaks from inside Putin’s Kremlin. What happened in its corridors was an enigma.
What there is is a literature from earlier times: a previous generation of Soviet spies had given details of Litvinenko-like operations. Goldfarb mentioned Sudoplatov, the Soviet intelligence chief whose department, the Administration for Special Tasks, was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of enemies abroad. Sudoplatov’s book corroborated rumours that the KGB had a poisons institute – Lab X – set up by order of Lenin. It functioned throughout the Soviet period. ‘As to whether it still exists, I don’t know,’ Goldfarb said.
If Soviet practices were anything to go on, orders to murder political enemies were never written down. There was no documentation for missions of the highest secrecy – only an oral instruction. (In an interview with Nick Lazaredes in 2003, Litvinenko recalled how in December 1997 he was summoned to the Lubyanka, the KGB and FSB HQ. His deputy boss Alexander Kamishnikov berated him for arresting rather than ‘removing’ criminals, in other words, snuffing them out. He showed him a copy of Sudoplatov’s memoir and said: ‘That’s what you should be doing.’)
Conversations like this were usually phrased in an oblique way. Sudoplatov recalls how in 1937 Stalin summoned him to discus
s the fate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist sentenced in absentia to death. Stalin urged Sudoplatov to exploit Konovalets’s personal weaknesses. Sudoplatov said that Konovalets liked chocolates. When the meeting broke up, Stalin asked him if he understood the political importance of his mission.
Six months later, Sudoplatov met Konavalets in Rotterdam and presented him with a box of chocolates containing a bomb. He walked away; it blew up soon afterwards; the target was killed. Stalin was pleased.
Sudoplatov also masterminded the operation to murder Leon Trotsky, carried out in Mexico in 1940 by a communist agent, Ramón Mercader, using a small, sharp mountain-climbing pickaxe concealed under a raincoat. The previous year Stalin had summoned Sudoplatov to the Kremlin and in the presence of Laventry Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, said that Trotsky should be eliminated. The plan was discussed in euphemistic terms. Sudoplatov writes: ‘Stalin preferred indirect words like “action”, noting that if the operation was successful the party would forever remember those who were involved and would look after not only them, but every member of their family.’
The spy chief carried out further operations against other Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom were executed by injections of poison, under the guise of medical treatment. These murders were made to look like natural deaths, Sudoplatov said. Assassinations continued after Stalin’s death, always sanctioned at the highest level of the Communist Party.
According to Sudoplatov, the KGB’s special toxicological department fascinated successive Soviet bosses, including Gorbachev. ‘Our leaders were always interested in poisons; afterward the doctors who were involved in these experiments were purged,’ he wrote.
Inevitably, Sudoplatov was himself arrested after Stalin’s death. He spent fifteen years in jail before being released in 1968. At first, he had no doubts about the morality of killing Trotskyites and fascists – his country’s enemies. Later, he regretted the way in which communism chewed up so many innocents, including those who fought bravely against the Nazis.