by Ben Mezrich
The tension in his body, the way his intestines seemed to coil in on themselves as he stood in the great hall—the entrance to a truly magnificent mansion, the sort of castle most people never set foot in, and only a few owned—told him that in many ways his Georgian friend was correct. It wasn’t simply that he was his own worst enemy, but it was the way perception could become such a skewed and dangerous beast.
One man’s exile, another man’s paradise. His Château de la Garoupe was one of the most exquisite buildings in the South of France. Built on two idyllic hectares at the tip of the Antibes in the early nineteen hundreds, it had been specifically designed to showcase the spectacular setting—a marble-and-stone palace filled with rustic touches, many of the furnishings dating back to the Renaissance. The grounds included some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, built at the top of magnificent stepped terraces that led down to the ocean.
The entrance hall itself, where the three of them stood, was a marvel of architecture, more stone and marble, fronted by three archways that led out to the receiving driveway. The dozen well-armed security guards—a mix of French and Israeli ex-army professionals—did not detract from the elegance of the scenery.
The château was only one of three properties Berezovksy had bought back in 1997, at the beginning of his rise in fortune, for more than 120 million French francs. In the beginning, the château had been a place where Berezovsky could go to settle his thoughts, to take time out from the politics and the business, to simply revel in what he had built. He had come from nothing and was living like royalty in the most pristine setting on earth.
But here he was, barely three years later, twisted up like a spring. An exile, forced out of Moscow, and worse yet, out of his position, out of his power, by a man he believed he had partially created, his own personal Gollum. Badri would have called his thoughts foolish, more self-destructive mental masturbation. Again, a matter of that beast, perception.
But, Berezovsky might have countered, it was a healthy delusion that had been the engine that have driven him so far. Only a deluded man could believe it was possible to buy a government or build an empire out of Lada automobiles.
As Yelena handed him a drink off a silver tray carried by one of their staff, Berezovsky did his best to clear these thoughts from his mind. Paranoid or self-destructive and deluded, Berezovsky still believed he could trust the man they were expecting, Roman Abramovich. He was not an enemy.
A slight commotion from the security staff at the front of the great hall announced that the visitor had finally arrived. Berezovsky guessed that it hadn’t been a simple trip from Moscow. To get to this wealthy playland, situated halfway between Nice and Cannes, meant traveling to private airfields and often at least one helicopter pad and then being chauffeured in limousines. Such were the difficulties of supreme fortune.
The front doors were opened from the outside, and Roman Abramovich stepped through into the hall. His sandy fluff of hair had been touched by the salty wind of the French Riviera, and he was casually dressed. Even so, he looked every bit the businessman and walked with the purposeful gait of someone moving from one important matter to another. Berezovsky recognized that walk—in fact, a part of him believed he had invented it.
Abramovich did not pause to marvel at the Renaissance furniture or the rare artwork on the walls. He had been to the château before. After all, it was the bags of cash that he had delivered to the Logovaz Club that had purchased the place, though Berezovsky thought of every inch of it his own. When Abramovich reached their group, he shook both Berezovsky’s and Badri’s hands, then kissed Yelena hello. Over the years, Abramovich’s wife and Berezovsky’s girlfriend had grown close. At times, the two couples had made quite the foursome, traveling to ski resorts and Caribbean retreats. That now seemed like a long time ago. Still, Yelena smiled warmly at the young man, then led them all out through the back of the château to the terrace.
Even in the fall and winter, the grand terrace doors were always open; Yelena liked to let the breeze from the ocean play across the marble floors and vaulted ceilings. The air was a little cold outside, even for this time of year, but Berezovsky hardly noticed. He was staying only a foot behind Abramovich, leading by way of a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, navigating their progress toward a group of chairs in a far corner of the stone patio. Once outside, Yelena immediately wanted to leave them to their business, but Berezovsky signaled for her to settle herself at a long dining table instead, about five yards from where the men would be sitting. She would be too far away to hear the conversation, but close enough that Berezovsky could still see her. Looking at her was a way of centering himself, of keeping his emotions grounded. At the moment, he was afraid that he was on the verge of losing control once again.
No matter how much he trusted Roman Abramovich, no matter how much he thought of the entrepreneur as a partner, he believed Roman had come to France to discuss the sale of Berezovsky’s share of ORT, the television network he had used to put Yeltsin and Putin in power. Badri had been going back and forth between them since the Kursk incident, and it was Badri who, after his own meeting with Putin at the FSB headquarters, had presented Abramovich with the proposition that had now brought them together.
As usual, the three men dispensed with pleasantries quickly and then got directly to the point. Berezovsky felt a dark storm rising inside him. Badri and Abramovich seemed to be talking around him, as if he were a petulant child who had brought them to this point—a place where none of them seemed to want to be. And yet here they were.
According to Abramovich, he had initially resisted the idea of stepping in as buyer of the TV network; he had no interest in being in the media business and no use for Berezovsky’s shares. Between Sibneft and the aluminum industry, his hands were full, his attentions stretched to its limit. But in Moscow, and at the Kremlin, he was, in his words, always in the shadow of Boris Berezovsky; as long as Berezovsky held onto his percentage of ORT and was an enemy of the Kremlin, it was bad for Sibneft’s business and dangerous for Abramovich’s future prospects.
Badri seemed to agree. The situation was dire, and he was extremely pessimistic about the way things were heading. For that reason, Badri had set out to convince Abramovich to take the ORT shares off their hands, to take the pressure of the negative relationship with the exiled Oligarch away from Sibneft, and to lower the heat on Berezovsky himself. Both Badri and Abramovich hoped and believed that Berezovsky would eventually calm down. Perhaps one day things could return to normal, and he could even get his ORT shares back.
Reluctant though he was, Abramovich had even taken the step to meet with Putin, to see if such a deal would be acceptable to the Kremlin. The president had informed him that he really didn’t care who took over Berezovsky’s forty-nine percent of the television network. The only thing that mattered to Putin was that Berezovksy had been using the media empire for his own purposes, and this needed to stop. Putin had apparently gone even further—he had asked why a rising star like Abramovich was sticking his neck out to help Berezovsky—and Roman had only explained that he was trying to do his mentor a favor, that Berezovsky had been a helpful ally in building Sibneft, that he wasn’t an enemy, despite his recent behavior. Putin had shrugged this off, but Abramovich had left the meeting with the feeling that his purchase of ORT might smooth the situation to some degree.
Berezovsky wasn’t sure what he thought about the idea of his protégé meeting with the president to discuss taking away his company, but as the talk on the terrace of his château now turned to numbers—one hundred fifty million dollars, the sum that Badri and Abramovich had negotiated—Berezovsky’s anger began to rise. It was a lot of money, but to Berezovsky, it was still a forced sale. In his eyes, Putin had threatened him until he had fled in fear of his safety, and now Abramovich was going to take his company. He definitely didn’t care for Abramovich and Badri’s explanations—that the price, one hundred fifty million, was more than he would get from the sta
te or from any other buyer, and that they were actually doing him a favor with such a deal, that it would be enough money to continue funding his extravagant lifestyle, the elegance around them.
Looking at the French garden spread out below them, the thirty-foot-tall rosebushes, the terraced landscape leading down to the azure water, he guessed that all Abramovich and Badri saw were numbers on a ledger. But Berezovsky didn’t see numbers, or even the beauty of the place—he saw Aeroflot criminal charges, Putin hitting him over the head with a damn cudgel. He saw the threats, the blackmail, the exile, and forced sale. Even though Abramovich might not have been using such words, might not have mentioned Nikolai Glushkov, prison, or potential arrest, Berezovsky believed his protégé was becoming aligned with the Kremlin.
Berezovsky wasn’t selling ORT because he wanted to, but because he had no other choice. He believed that Putin would use Aeroflot to go after him with criminal charges, and that Glushkov would rot in jail if he didn’t acquiesce.
And even though Abramovich’s tone might not have been threatening, his demeanor certainly seemed to have changed. In the past, Berezovsky had always seen the young man as humble, deferential, even obsequious. Berezovsky had been the mentor, the powerful kingmaker, and Abramovich had been the young, ambitious charge. The way Berezovsky saw it, he had taken Abramovich under his wing, and had helped him build himself into a successful businessman.
But now, sitting outside the château, it appeared that their roles had reversed. Abramovich believed he was buying ORT to protect and help Berezovsky. Abramovich was friendly with the Kremlin, ran a huge oil company, and was going to take ORT out of Berezovsky’s hands.
Abramovich may have believed he was acting in all of their best interests, but as Berezovsky saw it, Abramovich had decided that Berezovsky was a threat to his business, a heavy weight hanging around his neck, and he was going to free himself by taking Berezovsky out of the equation, shoveling him off into his quiet exile. Putin was the future, and for Abramovich to continue to thrive in Russia, he needed to be at peace with the Kremlin. Which meant drawing a line between him and his former mentor.
In his head, Berezovsky was reassessing his relationship with the younger man, rethinking all of his previous opinions. He had considered the two of them close friends, in the way of a mentor and a student. But perhaps he hadn’t fully taken into account the differences between himself and the younger man—not just in their personalities, but in their histories—generational differences. Berezovsky believed himself to be a true capitalist, a believer in what he called democracy, in modernity—but he couldn’t deny that a part of him was a product of the older, Soviet era. And he was also, at heart, an academic. Abramovich shared his outsider status, but the younger man had been formed in the chaos of their nation’s new capitalism, his business sense honed in the streets and alleys of post-perestroika Russia.
Berezovsky had put his trust in Abramovich, and he wondered now, had this been yet another miscalculation? One day, would he see this moment as the end of their friendship, and the beginning of a vaster betrayal?
Abramovich believed that the rift between them had begun after the Kursk tragedy. Abramovich had told Badri many times that he thought Berezovsky was misusing the event to take his shots at Putin, that he was being hostile at exactly the wrong time, that he was using a national drama for a personal attack. But Berezovsky felt that this was beside the point, and it wasn’t Abramovich’s place to criticize but to support. And if the rift had begun then, with the Kursk, well, here in this beautiful setting, in a place so evocative of a heaven built on his success, this moment seemed to be the final shattering of what was left of the ties between them. What Abramovich wasn’t saying—but what Berezovsky knew, deep in his soul—was that the older Oligarch wasn’t useful to the younger man anymore. A krysha in exile wasn’t a krysha anymore—he was a liability. Abramovich’s 150-million-dollar offer was a quick and simple attempt to get rid of this liability.
Well, Berezovsky didn’t intend to go quietly, to slink off into exile because he no longer seemed useful. And Abramovich was dead wrong if he believed that a check—even such a large one—would solve their situation. Threats, money, explanations, whether they came from Roman Abramovich, or Vladimir Putin himself, wouldn’t change a damn thing.
Boris Berezovsky wasn’t going anywhere.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
* * *
Winter 2001,
Serpentine Bridge, Kensington Gardens, London
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as an ex-KGB agent. . . .
Alexander Litvinenko had to smile at the ironic words reverberating through his thoughts, as he leaned against the railing of the aging stone bridge, looking down into the dark swirls of the Serpentine Lake. The artificial body of water had been dug sometime in the early eighteenth century by Queen Caroline. It squatted directly between the Italian Gardens—often brimming with tourists, though quite empty this deep into winter—and the swimming area known as Lansbury’s Lido. The lake itself fed underground into the Thames, which ran like a twisting snake through the bustling, cosmopolitan city of London, the metropolis that Litvinenko now called home. As of late, he’d often found himself here, on this bridge; but this was the first time that precise thought about the eternity of belonging to the KGB had entered his head. Funny, that a quote attributed to Vladimir Putin, supposedly uttered sometime during his campaign for president, would seem so apt to Litvinenko, living in exile, at Putin’s hand.
Litvinenko tapped his fingers on the attaché case that sat atop the ledge of the railing, right next to him. The case was full of files, many of them loose documents Litvinenko had collected for a book he was working on, together with another of Boris Berezovsky’s many protégés. Also in the attaché were other files of a more private nature, information for a project he was working on that involved the Italian government, and assistance he would soon be providing them, in identifying former FSB agents in Rome.
Litvinenko had to give Putin credit, the man wasn’t wrong. Here Litvinenko was no longer an agent and yet was still practicing his stagecraft, with fingers in so many different pies. A lifetime away from Moscow, and he was still surrounded by the same sort of people with whom he had always surrounded himself—men with secrets to trade or sell, often dangerous individuals who lived in the gray edges of the real world, operating in the dark corners, mostly invisible to the average citizens moving past.
On cue, a taxi rumbled behind him, traversing the center lane of the bridge that divided sprawling Hyde Park from Kensington Gardens. The bulbous, insect-like vehicle was no doubt filled with tourists or perhaps carried a financial worker to the office. Whoever it was in that taxi would have no idea that the man they’d just passed on the bridge was a former spy who had just completed a terrifying sprint to freedom, from halfway across the world.
Litvinenko had no doubt that, had he remained in Moscow—perhaps even a day longer—he would have been thrown back in prison, or worse. His official asylum in London might not protect him forever, but it was a fresh start—and he owed everything, as usual, to his patron, Boris Berezovsky.
A short family vacation to Sochi on the Black Sea had been Litvinenko’s cover for his escape. Using an identification card from his days as an undercover agent in Chechnya, he had managed to land travel documents; then he made a terrifying journey to Turkey, followed by a flight to Heathrow. Once Litvinenko arrived in London, Berezovsky, who had also moved there, had taken over arrangements. Without any prodding, the Oligarch had set up Litvinenko and his family in an apartment in Kensington, renting him a flat that might not have been luxurious, but compared nicely to his old apartment in Moscow. Kensington itself was a sparkling, upper-class corner of London, bordered by the same gardens that now splayed out behind him, and right up next to the center of the bustling city.
Berezovsky’s largesse hadn’t ended there; the Oligarch was also providing Litvinenko with a salary of five thousand pounds a month. His job description hadn
’t ever been spelled out, but the way he saw it, he was essentially an “associate on call”; if Berezovsky ever needed his particular skill set, he would be available, no questions asked. He hadn’t taken over Berezovsky’s security concerns—the Oligarch used more seasoned professionals available for that—but Berezovsky liked having him around. Perhaps he believed that an ex-FSB man would be helpful in identifying threats that a bodyguard might miss. To paraphrase Putin, once an agent, always an agent, and Litvinenko had a particular ability to sniff out other members of his tribe.
The fact that both he and Berezovsky were residing in the UK was one of those strange coincidences of timing that seemed to speak to a greater destiny. Litvinenko had no doubt this destiny involved both of them, albeit at different heights. Berezovsky’s flight from Russia, via France, had nothing to do with the FSB agent’s troubles with Putin, but they had certainly faced off against the same enemy.
Both of them were now starting fresh, because of the actions of the Kremlin. Shortly after arriving in the UK, the Oligarch had sold off his entire stake in the television network ORT to his young partner, Roman Abramovich. The sale had not gone down easy; Berezovsky had resisted, even refused—until halfway into December, when Putin had stepped up his pressure. Nikolai Glushkov, Berezovsky’s friend and business colleague at Aeroflot, was arrested. Berezovsky had immediately seen the action as the conclusion of an implied threat, although it certainly might have been a coincidence. Either way, Berezovsky had the notion that by selling his shares in ORT, he could help Glushkov gain his freedom from prison—and shield himself from criminal charges.
Berezovsky’s notion had been wrong. Even after Berezovsky had begun divesting himself of ORT, Glushkov remained in prison, which had enraged Berezovsky, and had also hardened his resolve to continue to fight against Putin and the Kremlin. But that fight would have to take place from exile, gilded by the influx of money that Abramovich had helpfully provided.