Most of the people become celebrities because of their extraordinary lives. Sasha Litvinenko became a celebrity because of his extraordinary death.
His first claim to fame was on 17 November 1998 when, together with a group of other FSB officers, he took part in a press conference organised by the Interfax news agency. Andrei Ponkin was among those who testified that several months earlier they had been given clear and unmistakable orders to murder Boris Berezovsky, recently the deputy secretary of the Security Council of Russia and a media mogul.
Goldfarb, who is usually well informed and who worked with Marina Litvinenko on his book, describes what happened:
An assistant to the general who commanded Sasha’s unit called the officers in. ‘We are the department of special tasks,’ he said. ‘Have you read this?’ He produced a copy of Special Tasks, the recently published memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, the head of NKVD special tasks under Stalin. ‘This is our role model!’ He waved the book. ‘Everyone is ordered to read it. We have a new set of objectives ahead of us. There are people, criminals, who cannot be gotten in the normal way. They are tremendously wealthy and can always buy their way out of court. You, Litvinenko, you know Berezovsky, don’t you? You will be the one to take him out.’1
The conference caused a great scandal. Not only was the FSB publicly accused of organising murders or conspiring to do so but also it was the first time ever that active duty officers had spoken out against the kontora (‘bureau’), as the security service is mockingly called in Russia.
According to Goldfarb, the event was a sensation, but not in the way the participants hoped. The press focused on only one among the many charges the conference had made: the plot to kill Berezovsky. Boris’s notoriety overshadowed their intended message.
By that time Putin had been the FSB director for four months. He was actively flirting with Berezovsky and Yeltsins group of closest presidential advisers (that had become known as ‘The Family’). But now he firmly took the side of the service. The whistle-blowers were quickly given short shrift. All were sacked from the FSB, and their unit was disbanded. In March 1999 lieutenant colonels Alexander Litvinenko and Alexander Gusak, his department chief, were arrested and sentenced for ‘exceeding their official powers and causing bodily harm to witnesses’ without any mention of the press conference.
Whatever I think of the man, in one thing the director general was right: intelligence officers should not stage public shows.
Litvinenko was put in Lefortovo prison, the same place in which Dr Vil Mirzayanov had spent his term for revealing in a newspaper article that Russia continued experimenting with biological weapons contrary to its international agreements. It was also here that Vyacheslav Zharko, ‘Agent Slava’, would be locked up two years after Litvinenko.
Sasha wrote in his book Organized Crime Group from the Lubyanka:
Initially, I was in shock. The first night I did not sleep, I stared at the ceiling. On the day I was arrested, the weather was lousy, snow mixed with rain, sludge all over. I don’t like this time of the year and by the end of March I live in expectation of the sun. The next day they took me out into a small recreation box, five to six steps across. I looked up – and the sky was blue, with the sun somewhere out there. I was pacing like a beast between those walls. Over me – the iron grid with barbed wire and blue-blue skies. I was in a terrible state: spring had arrived, and I can’t see it. I am here, in the damp, cold box. I got so upset that I asked them to bring me back to my cell.
Later, during our many meetings, Marina Litvinenko told me that friends never stopped supporting her and her husband while he was in jail.
‘Lefortovo crushes you spiritually,’ he further wrote. ‘There is some negative energy coming from those walls. They say that birds avoid flying over it. Perhaps it’s the legacy of the old days when Lefortovo was a place of mass executions and torture.’2
What Sasha almost certainly did not tell Marina is that during his seven months in the FSB prison they had been exerting great pressure upon him to turn him against Berezovsky. That Litvinenko stood firm is proved by the fact that as soon as he was let free, they arrested him for a second time.
Alex and Marina recalled that day:
The trial resumed on November 26. Journalists and TV cameras packed the court building. The defence made its final argument for acquittal. The judge left the courtroom to deliberate. It took him four hours to reach a verdict. Marina waited in the hallway, ‘all frozen inside, feeling as if all this was not real’. Finally, the judge returned and announced his decision: ‘Not guilty. Free to go.’
As the guard unlocked the dock cage to let Sasha out, there was a sudden commotion at the door. A squad of armed men in camouflage and masks ran past Marina and stormed into the courtroom, pushing the guards aside.3
He was rearrested, handcuffed and taken away. The TV cameras recorded Litvinenko being dragged past his wife, an FSB man pushing her away and hitting him with a rifle butt when he moved to protect Marina. The whole country watched the disgraceful scene.
This time they took Litvinenko to Butyrka, the most notorious criminal prison in Moscow.
Berezovsky was still in a position to help. In mid-December the military tribunal released Litvinenko from preventive detention but only on condition that he would not leave Moscow. His internal passport was taken away while his passport valid for international travel (in the name of ‘Alexander Volkov,’ Sasha’s operational alias) was safely locked in the personnel department of the FSB. However, he had another set of identity documents in the same name under which he had operated in Chechnya in 1996. No doubt his second ‘Volkov’ passport and the FSB warrant card were taken away, but what about the driving licence?
When at large he had to have some sort of identity paper to show to the authorities when asked, and he used one set or the other in August 2000 to travel with Marina to Sochi allegedly for vacation on the Black Sea. In reality, Sasha had already been preparing for his escape.
By September Yuri Felshtinsky was deep in research for his new book about the role of FSB in provoking the Second Chechen War. Most of all he was interested in the apartment bombings in several Russian towns that cost so many lives and gave Premier Putin a perfect casus belli and boost for his presidential campaign. But Felshtinsky is a historian and he needed an intelligence professional to give him an inside view. So when he met Berezovsky who was travelling between New York and Washington at the time meeting officials at the Council on Foreign Relations, they agreed that Sasha would have the necessary knowledge. Besides, Boris was seriously worried for Litvinenko’s security in Russia. So he took Felshtinsky with him to Nice from where the latter flew to Moscow and met Sasha.
Like every KGB officer Litvinenko was taught that the best places for meeting his contacts were parks and stadiums. The rule is honoured to this day; I have several times observed, in the Rose Garden that is conveniently located between the Burgtheater and Heldenplatz in Vienna, SVR operatives from the Russian Embassy receiving reports from agents and informers from the local Russian community and giving them instructions. A practised eye can easily spot a KGB officer. Among other signs, he will often have a newspaper in his hand. To identify watchers in the crowd is an essential part of intelligence training, and officers in the field don’t look much different from their colleagues from the surveillance teams whom I spotted many times in Russia. (Before the general restructuring of the service in the 1990s they were part of the 7th Directorate of the KGB.)
As the autumn leaves crunched under their feet, Sasha gave Yuri his take on the apartment bombings. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a kontora job.
‘It’s the signature,’ he said. ‘Every crime has a signature. I have worked long enough in the Anti-Terrorist Centre to tell you right away, this was not some fringe Chechens. The sophistication, the coordination, the engineering expertise needed for bomb placement – all point to a highly professional team.’4
The next day Felshtinsky boarded an early aircraft to London to have a word with Berezovsky.
It is clear that while on holiday in Sochi Sasha had been carefully planning his escape route out of the country. So it was no surprise that at the end of September, telling Marina that he had to visit his father in Nalchik in the Caucasus region of Southern Russia, he again flew to the Black Sea resort only a short distance away from Georgia. Georgia had regained its independence in 1991 and by this time was gradually stabilising after its early post-Soviet years of civil unrest and economic crisis. It was a free land although still under Eduard Shevardnadze, a cunning Soviet apparatchik nicknamed tetri melia (‘white fox’), who rose to the rank of general in the police later becoming Soviet Foreign Minister and finally the President of Georgia. Sasha’s only problem was to get into Georgia.
Marina and their son Tolik stayed at home until further notice.
Litvinenko strongly suspected that Ponkin was moonlighting for the FSB so he fed him the Nalchik legend and explained that he was going to come back in a couple of days. Nothing suspicious, wife and son in their Moscow flat, he set off for the south. He had to solve yet another problem – he needed a new passport in a different name that would allow him to go abroad.
Several published accounts suggest that Litvinenko somehow bought a forged Georgian passport. I doubt it. Though he certainly had agents all over Russian territory, several in the law enforcement agencies, it was terribly difficult and risky for him trying to obtain a new ‘book’, as passports are called in the KGB lingo, in an independent country like Georgia. There he would hardly have anyone trusted enough to do the job and not report him to the security service. Besides, I know for sure that Sasha could neither speak, read nor write Georgian, so if asked a simple question anywhere abroad, he would immediately be ‘burned’ with a good chance to be expelled to Russia. So professional logic dictates that he would have obtained a Ukrainian passport, for this was the language he could certainly read and pretend to speak. And he looked Ukrainian all right.
The natural port of call would have been Poti where Litvinenko could have arrived from Sochi in six hours using the hydrofoil. On 8 October he called Yuri Felshtinsky in Boston. In the meantime Marina was instructed to buy a family tour and leave the country as soon as possible.
Litvinenko moved to the capital, Tbilisi, where Felshtinsky promptly joined him, coming from London with Berezovsky’s instructions and a sufficient amount of dollars to secure an easy escape. Felshtinsky didn’t see much of a problem here as Litvinenko was a former FSB officer and for Yuri, inexperienced in such matters, it would be natural for Western authorities to accept his friend. But not in the year 2000.
By that time quotas for defectors were virtually non-existent. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia had been considered a friendly state rapidly moving towards democracy. In less than a year President George W. Bush would meet President Putin in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and describe his Russian counterpart as a straightforward and trustworthy person. ‘I looked the man in the eyes,’ the US President pronounced in a famous phrase (that made him a laughing stock seven years later when Russia ruthlessly invaded Georgia). ‘I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ With the advantage of hindsight, Senator John McCain later went on record as saying that he too looked the man in the eyes, but was only able to see three letters: KGB.
In such an amiable atmosphere it was difficult to get accepted as a fully-fledged defector with all the benefits provided by the resettlement programme, though it was not entirely impossible. During that same year an SVR colonel defected in New York and in the following April the US Embassy in Prague accepted Major Mykola Melnichenko. But they both had more to offer than Sasha, though he was not entirely empty-handed. So when Litvinenko insisted that Felshtinsky should go to the American embassy in Tbilisi to give it a try, Yuri complied. Felshtinsky held several meetings with US diplomats, who did not reject the young lieutenant colonel out of hand. But the bureaucrats took their time to sort things out.
In a comfortable lobby of the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich eight years after the events, I asked a former high-ranking US Government official, who was certainly in a position to decide Litvinenko’s fate, how the machinery worked in Washington. My friend explained that the first and immediate reaction would be mistrust. General wisdom would dictate that the man could be anything from an SVR dangle to a violent lunatic and that defections are not done through the doors of the embassy. ‘It is the policy of the United States,’ he said, ‘not to grant asylum at its units or installations within the territorial jurisdiction of a foreign state.’ He also recalled that even the KGB archivist Mitrokhin had been turned down in 1992 because the material that he offered – not genuine secret documents but hand-made copies mostly of historic value – were not considered good enough to offer him and his family a government-protected shelter for life. Some defectors were only accepted because they proved they possessed information that was of a paramount importance to the US Government at the time of their changing sides. No doubt, most of them delivered. But many, like Oleg Penkovsky, were not taken seriously for quite some time.
My American friend in the Baur au Lac, wearing a golden-buttoned Ralph Lauren blazer with a white button-down dress shirt and a striped yellow silk tie, looked more like a kind grandfather entertaining his family in a luxury Swiss hotel than a former intelligence chief. However, when he spoke about his former job, I detected some metal in his voice.
‘It is also a matter of responsibility,’ he said. ‘What do the Russians do if an American who walks in turns out to be an empty shell?’
‘Dunno. I think they can always send him back.’
‘Here we are. And nothing ever happens to him. But the Agency cannot do that. There are many, many restrictions and obligations. A huge responsibility. And laws. If he were unable to tell us something really important, there was no way we could accept the man.’
Precisely eight years before this discussion of mine in Switzerland, Sasha Litvinenko in Georgia was becoming a petulant, irritable grouch, worrying about his family in Marbella and fearing that Russian agents in Georgia might spot him. One day, not yet having got a final answer from the embassy, he and Felshtinsky boarded a fourteen-passenger luxury charter jet rented by Berezovsky in Paris. They were about to take off for Munich, where Litvinenko wanted to settle, when Berezovsky called and redirected them to Antalya in Turkey. There, Felshtinsky dropped off his friend and flew to Malaga to pick up Marina and Tolik. By now Litvinenko was under considerable stress and the arrival of his family the next day did not ease him much. He started seeing FSB agents everywhere. Felshtinsky was losing confidence. He actually regretted letting Berezovsky entangle him in this affair and wanted to be back home. He even feared that if the Russians really got at them, he might become a target like the former FSB man whom he was helping to escape. So Felshtinsky was genuinely happy when Boris dispatched yet another emigration expert and a US passport holder, Alex Goldfarb, to take over. Yuri hurriedly retreated back to the USA.
Though Goldfarb was of a totally different calibre, he was as inexperienced in defection matters as his predecessor. Alex decided to give it another try and took Litvinenko to Ankara to see an American emigration lawyer who kindly agreed to come for a few hours to consult them. Berezovsky footed the bill.
As might be expected, it didn’t work out at the American embassy in Turkey either. Although they set up a videoconference with CIA headquarters, during which a Russia expert with an extensive knowledge of Sasha’s service grilled him for several hours, the wizards finally decided not to take him. Goldfarb had to improvise.
On 1 November 2000 a lawyer sent by Boris to take care of legal matters met the Litvinenkos at London Heathrow. While they were enjoying their first moments of freedom, Her Majesty’s Government declared Goldfarb persona non grata and sent him back to Turkey.
For Litvinenko, the six-year-and-twenty-three day count began.
***
It is clear that Berezovsky saw Sasha as a trusted associate and considered him a friend. The family was put up in an apartment in London’s upmarket Kensington and Litvinenko was provided with a £5,000 ‘English professor’s’ allowance, a handsome sum by any standard. Boris could have been planning for Sasha to become his counter-intelligence chief – he had always had enough security, he thought, but it was a challenge to learn about Putin’s plans against him, to be able to unmask Russia’s secret agents inside his close circle, and finally, to monitor discreetly the activities of SVR officers in charge of Line EM (émigrés) in the Russian embassy. Their primary target, he was quite convinced, was himself, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. Besides, Litvinenko could do plenty of other things.
To get used to life in Britain, Sasha and Marina started to attend English language courses while Sasha was spending the rest of his time labouring with Felshtinsky over a book that later became known as Blowing Up Russia. Boris Berezovsky considered the book project an important element of his campaign against President Putin.
Berezovsky disdained the man. Only a short time after the billionaire settled in Britain, he visited Oleg Gordievsky in the small, attractive market town of Godalming, Surrey, where the former double agent was spending his days living on a fat government pension. ‘He came here in a limousine, and sat at this table, and told me the story of his life. It was like he felt he had to explain himself to me,’ Gordievsky recalled at a lunch with Steve LeVine, an American journalist who was researching his book, Putin’s Labyrinth, published in 2008.
Steve is a gifted journalist with subtle appreciation of facts and people he is dealing with. He reports that the old spy and the rich man shared a mutual contempt for the Russian president. Gordievsky, who considered himself the ass of espionage, degraded Putin’s modest exploits in Dresden to snooping on his own colleagues. And Boris knew that if it had not been for his colossal effort ‘Volodya’ would never have become Vladimir Vladimirovich. The newly elected President of Russia was his own creature. Ironically, it was this same person who forced Berezovsky to choose between becoming a political prisoner or political émigré. He chose the latter.
Following his boss’s example, Litvinenko sought friendship with Vladimir Bukovsky and wanted to meet Gordievsky. But the former spy at first refused to see him. He was not inclined to meet a lieutenant colonel in the FSB who had never worked for the British or American intelligence and was not super rich or famous – just one of Berezovsky’s lieutenants. Finally, Bukovsky vouched for his new friend and from then on Litvinenko and his family became regular guests in the small English town. ‘But he talked a lot,’ Oleg remarked, ‘and carried two mobile phones. He was always on them.’
That was not Gordievsky’s only problem with Sasha. What irritated him was that Litvinenko did not drink alcohol, was young, fit, well paid, busy and had a loving family. Gordievsky’s second wife, Leila, had left him taking their both daughters shortly after a difficult and dramatic reunion when they had finally been allowed to joint him in Britain after both President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked the Soviet leadership to let them go. The reason they left was not because Leila wanted his money and brainwashed the girls that he was a traitor, as Gordievsky told Steve LeVine; they simply realised who he really was. They looked the man in the eyes.
Litvinenko did not have any such complexes and lived a happy live in London. Soon Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen leader in exile became his best friend and neighbour. Litvinenko actively contributed to the Chechen government commission investigating Russian war crimes during the first and the second Chechen wars. The material was to be passed over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, established two years after Litvinenko settled in London. Zakayev was sure that what the Russians did in his country ideally fitted the court’s jurisdiction. Litvinenko, who had been on an intelligence assignment in Chechnya during the war, was supplying the commission with names of the Russian generals who committed crimes against the Chechen people and with facts he knew firsthand that tended to establish violations of human rights, mass tortures and killings.
After the first book was written, printed and almost delivered from Riga to Moscow (only to be intercepted by the FSB and confiscated), Sasha started working on a second book project that he called Organized Crime Group from the Lubyanka (as the old KGB headquarters are widely known) with a foreword written by Alex Goldfarb. The book was published in New York in 2002 and has never been translated into English. I find it fascinating.
As soon as he was granted political asylum in May 2001, Litvinenko also started travelling. He soon got involved in the work of the Mitrokhin Commission of the Italian parliament that was examining Mitrokhin’s documents revealing KGB activities in Italy. He became friends there with Mario Scaramella. Former senator Paolo Guzzanti has recently published the only inside story of the Mitrokhin Commission, of which he was the president, outlining Litvinenko’s contribution in the most precise and detailed way. The book, entitled Il Mio Agente Sasha: la Russia di Putin e l’Italia di Berlusconi al Tempi della Seconda Guerra Fredda became an instant success in Italy when it came out in May 2009, but I expected that there would be a barrage of questions and attacks on the author because of the sensitivity of his revelations. (Needless to say, it has never been even mentioned in Russia.)
After the Peter Shaw experience when Litvinenko was asked to assist Scotland Yard, Sasha realised that his knowledge of the Russian organised crime world might be very useful to law enforcement agencies of many countries. So in addition to Italy, where he went quite regularly, he began to visit Spain, Estonia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Israel.
He also discovered that he had a penchant for writing and soon became quite a prolific journalist contributing mainly to the Chechenpress website.5 Litvinenko also gave interviews to the Russian services of the BBC and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, commenting on important issues mostly related to organised crime and unlawful activities of the FSB. As a former officer of the anti-corruption and anti-organised crime task force, Litvinenko knew better than anyone else about mass corruption in the FSB and about Mafia-style crimes performed by the Russian security officials: abduction of people for ransom, murder of business competitors, money laundering, so-called kryshevanie (‘sheltering’), when state protection against street gangs is offered in exchange for cash.
By the end of summer the film The FSB Blows Up Russia was completed and in March 2002 Boris Berezovsky presided over the world premiere of what the Kommersant daily called ‘An Assault On Russia’ in a packed hall of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies at the heart of Whitehall. The two French producers, Jean-Charles Deniau and Charles Gazelle of the Transparencies Production Company, were present alongside Andrei Babitsky, now with the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as Litvinenko, Felshtinsky and Chekulin. Sasha and Yuri were the film’s principal consultants.
It is interesting that in 1994 Jean-Charles Deniau co-authored a book My Five Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross written by their last KGB controller, Yuri Modin. It has been suggested that that the book had been part of a wide-reaching disinformation operation conducted by the KGB, which passed seemingly unnoticed and quite well accepted even by the specialists.
Four weeks before Litvinenko was granted political asylum, on 11 April 2001, Berezovsky’s long-term business partner Nikolai Glushkov, officially in custody, left his Moscow hospital ward wearing only gown and slippers. Glushkov, a top manager of Aeroflot who had been arrested by Russian authorities on fraud charges, had been hospitalised at Moscow’s Scientific Haematological Centre for a blood condition. That evening he was going home as usual for an overnight stay. A former Aeroflot colleague was waiting at the gate. As Glushkov was about to get into the car, a squad of plainclothes FSB officers appeared out of nowhere, arrested both men, and charged them with ‘attempted escape from custody’. On the next day, the former head of the ORT security, Andrei Lugovoy, was detained and charged with organising the alleged escape. Two months later Badri Patarkatsyshvili, Berezovsky’s closest friend and my former guest in the Vital Hotel Kobenzl on the Gaisberg hill near Salzburg, fled to his native Georgia. The whole group was indicted in the escape plot.6
However, when Goldfarb interviewed Glushkov for his book years later in London, the former airline official (who once noticed that 3,000 people out of the total workforce of 14,000 in Aeroflot were Russian intelligence officers on active duty) offered a different version of the events of that evening. ‘He believed,’ writes Goldfarb, ‘that he had been set up and insisted that he had no intent to escape. He wanted the Aeroflot case to be tried because he knew he was innocent. In fact, he was under the impression that he would be released pending the trial “through a secret high-level deal”, as his lawyers had hinted to him. He was walking in his slippers to the hospital gate simply to go home for the night, with his guards’ knowledge, as he had done a few days earlier.’7
In March 2004 charges of fraud and money laundering were dropped. Instead, Glushkov was found guilty of attempted escape from custody and abuse of authority. He was released from Lefortovo.
When Goldfarb asked him whether his stubbornness was worth three years in gaol, he said, ‘Of course, I proved my innocence.’
Lugovoy was found guilty of conspiracy to organise the escape and served a prison term of fourteen months.
I remember Sasha’s words: ‘Lefortovo crushes you spiritually. There is some negative energy coming from those walls.’ Strangely, Lugovoy marched out of prison a businessman and a millionaire and quickly obtained a license to run his own security firm of armed guards. Just as in the case of Roman Tsepov, his company, named Ninth Wave (he served in the KGB’s 9th Directorate, the home of government bodyguards), became one of the prime security agencies in Moscow providing services to visiting celebrities, leading businessmen and banks. No wonder Berezovsky used Ninth Wave to guard his daughter in Russia. The tycoon also invited Lugovoy to his pompous birthday party in January 2006.
By this time the assassination operation codenamed VLADIMIR was in full swing. Known only to a handful of people, all pertinent reports of the operation were classified ‘Top Secret’ and flashed either to Mr Lebedev at the Yasenevo foreign intelligence headquarters or to Mr Patrushev at the Lubyanka – but they finally landed at yet a third secret service, the one that in fact supervised the whole affair.
* * *
2006 was perhaps both the most difficult and the most fruitful year for Alexander Litvinenko. In February he went to Italy where, with the help of Mario Scaramella, he recorded a sensational video testimony openly accusing Romano Prodi, who would soon be prime minister again after defeating charismatic Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 elections, of being ‘a KGB man’. This was the last help Sasha could provide to the Mitrokhin Commission, because at the end of March its mandate expired.
Litvinenko’s articles for the Chechenpress became fierce and crushing, recalling the style of Anna Politkovskaya whom he greatly respected and sympathised with. His work for the Chechen commission, preparing evidence for the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, became more organised and systematic. He had already visited Georgia using his new British identity in an attempt to find the key witness of the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, and was now actively assisting security services and law enforcement agencies in Europe and Israel to arrest Russian gang bosses many of whom, he knew, were tightly linked to the SVR and FSB.
In June 2005 in a sweeping police operation, codenamed AVISPA, that involved 400 officers from the Costa del Sol and elsewhere in Spain, twenty-eight alleged ‘Russian Mafia’ members were arrested, many of them high-level capos (Mafia bosses), according to the Spanish police. The operation involved the national police forces of six countries. In the weekend raids, carried out mostly in the Costa del Sol, Catalonia and Alicante, police searched 41 homes or premises, froze 800 bank accounts at 42 banks and seized 42 high-end vehicles, according to the Costa del Sol News. The authorities said the mobsters, mostly from former Soviet Bloc republics, brought criminally acquired money from their home countries to launder it in Spain via commercial or financial entities created for the purpose. Among the many properties held by the gang were a number of luxury ‘chalets’, some with high-security ‘safe rooms’, as well as a 16,621-square-metre property in Benalmádena on which the mobsters planned to build a 38-house development called Los Eucaliptus.8 This demonstration of unprecedented police competence and expertise in dealing with Russian serious organised crime was only the beginning, the first experience of the Spanish police that would culminate in Operation TROIKA in 2008.
Litvinenko knew and was eager to share much more information than the Spanish authorities could process quickly. He knew, for example, that in November 1996 a group of eight cofounders had signed an agreement to establish a cooperative on the shore of a picturesque lake in the most expensive and fashionable area near St Petersburg. One was a former petty spy who then headed the presidential property management department in the Kremlin. His name was Vladimir Putin. The business was being protected by Rif, a private security firm owned and headed by Vladimir Barsukov-Kumarin, known as ‘Kum’ in the local underworld. Kumarin was an associate of Roman Tsepov, chief of Putin’s bodyguards during his time as an official at St Petersburg City Hall. Russia’s police also considered Kumarin to be the founder, leader and brains behind the Tambov gang.9 Litvinenko, who had investigated Russian organised crime for years, was aware that many members of this gang moved to Spain in the 1990s and were setting up and running businesses using KGB money.
As his relations (but not friendship) with Berezovsky gradually cooled down, Sasha was eager to start earning money independently by getting a permanent job in one of many London private companies providing a discreet service ‘of comprehensive business intelligence, investigation and security risk management to its financial, legal and corporate clients around the world’ as it was elegantly formulated on the website of the company of his friend Martin Flint. After evident flops with Melnichenko, Chekulin, Sultanov and Teplyuk, Sasha realised that he might be failing to meet Boris’s job requirements for counter-intelligence chief. But he knew that on occasion Berezovsky retained the services of Risk Analysis and others, so he expected to be of use by working in or with one of them. Therefore he had high expectations for his newly formed friendships with Andrei Lugovoy and Vyacheslav Zharko, whom he regarded as possible sources in Russia. He also maintained relations with Evgeny Limarev, a registered consultant in France, though he had a low opinion of Limarev’s possibilities.
The previous year Sasha had met Lugovoy in London for the first time after their casual acquaintance in Moscow ten years earlier. It happened after the former ORT10 security chief called him on an unregistered mobile number and suggested a meeting to discuss some possible business together. Sasha first hesitated but then agreed. He badly needed money because several months earlier Berezovsky had reduced his monthly allowance to £1,500.
In April Lugovoy was again in London – one of a dozen visits over the course of a year. Before he had contacted Sasha the previous autumn he had never been to Britain. Along with an interpreter they went to a meeting arranged at 1 Cavendish Place, at a company called RISC Management. It was probably Yuli Dubov, a long-time business associate and another friend of Berezovsky, who set up a meeting on Boris’s behalf. He was acquainted with Keith Hunter – an appropriate name for the chief executive of such a company.
Keiths initial career in the Metropolitan Police Service involved investigating serious and organised crime on a national and international level while based at New Scotland Yard and the then Regional Crime Squad. He subsequently ventured into the private sector and successfully established a company specialising in corporate investigations for law firms, media and medium- to large-size companies. In 2001 he moved to ISC Global UK Ltd as joint CEO, rebranding it in 2005 as RISC Management.
ISC Global’s founder and chairman was Stephen Curtis, a lawyer whose contacts in Russia included Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the CEO of the Yukos Oil Company, one of the world’s largest private oil companies. Curtis died in a helicopter crash close to his palatial home in Dorset in March 2004 – a fortnight after he had gone to Scotland Yard saying that he had received death treats and feared that a hit team had been sent from Moscow to assassinate him.11 ‘If anything untoward happens to me, it will not be an accident’, were his words.
RISC offered a diverse range of services, including risk management, corporate investigations, litigation support, business intelligence and physical security. Now Lugovoy said he had some first-class material to offer so they took a lift to the fifth floor and were soon escorted to a conference room. According to Alan Cowell, a British journalist and author, the meeting with RISC did not go very well.
The visitors were offering consultancy services, claiming access to first-hand, non-public information about businesses and personalities in Russia – something that is always of great interest and value to such companies as RISC. To demonstrate their capabilities, Lugovoy handed over a document that he claimed was based on information that could not have come from an open source. The RISC official accepted the document and later cross-checked the information. After some time Litvinenko was informed that the product was found satisfactory. He started cherishing hopes for quick and easy profits. Sasha even called Limarev to boast about the success. When he finally received the fee from RISC, he left 20 per cent to himself and gave the rest to Lugovoy.
But there was no reason to celebrate.
In reality, the document had been concocted by the FSB in Moscow, based on two sources: one was an open directory entitled The System of Moscow Clubs: Elite, Lobbyists, ‘Brain Centres’ by E.A. Kozlova and N.V. Melnikova, published early in the year, and another a report (No. 122) reflecting the changes of power balance in the power structures that was distributed to a very limited group of paying subscribers in March 2006. Both were produced by the organisation named Centre for Political Information (CPI) and could be accessed from the CPI Internet site polit-info.ru. (I read both.) Obviously, the FSB forgers knew their job well. The quasi-analytical report was allegedly based on the CPI’s sources in the ‘power structures’ but in fact was nothing more than a non-official estimate of what its writer imagined was going on behind the Kremlin walls. If presented in its original form, any security company in London would reject such a paper at once, so a certain amount of plastering was applied by specialists to make it look at least acceptable.
Sasha did not know that leading security companies normally employ competent experts.
In July Litvinenko accused Putin of being a paedophile. The Daily Mail reported: ‘Putin was walking in the Kremlin grounds when he stopped to chat some tourists, among them a 5-year-old boy. The president lifted the boy’s shirt and kissed his stomach. The incident was covered by the Russian and international media at the time but Litvinenko wrote: ‘The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy’ President Putin later explained why he had kissed the young boy on the stomach in the Kremlin saying he wanted to ‘stroke him like a kitten’. The normally dour former KGB officer insisted that it was a spontaneous decision to approach the 5-year-old, who was in a group of tourists, to lift his shirt and kiss his stomach. ‘People came up and I began talking to them, among them this little boy. He seemed to me very independent, sure of himself and at the same time defenceless so to speak, an innocent boy and a very nice little boy,’ Putin said. The report ended: ‘Some political analysts suggested that the kiss was a clumsy attempt to soften Mr Putin’s image in the run-up to the G8 summit in St Petersburg. The Kremlin had launched a huge publicity drive, with the help of Ketchum, an American PR firm, to counter critics of its campaign to curb democracy.’12
One day when Marina and Tolik were on holiday at a camp with other children and their parents and Sasha was ‘home alone’, Lugovoy suddenly arrived in London with his wife saying that he wanted to buy some property in England. Litvinenko invited them to his house being happy to show what a real English house looked like. He felt it natural to help his friend establish himself in the British capital and started looking for an appropriate property. Evidently the Moscow planners were trying to lull any possible suspicions that Sasha, as former FSB operative, might have.
During that summer Litvinenko had been investigating possible wrongdoing by the Russian authorities in connection with the Yukos Oil Company. While the president was softening his image in the Kremlin, the company was bankrupted. Putin strongly defended his government’s record in the crisis over Yukos and the arrest of its CEO. In September the company’s cofounder, Leonid Nevzlin, who had fled to Israel, met with Litvinenko in the beach resort of Herzliya (named after Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism). Litvinenko said he had uncovered an FSB plan to claw back millions of pounds from the former executives of Yukos who had managed to leave the country and settle in London and other Western capitals. Litvinenko had visited some of the alleged targets to warn them that the Russian intelligence and security services planned to intimidate them and their families to recover the money. Litvinenko came to Israel to warn Nevzlin and handed him the so-called ‘Yukos Dossier’.13 Later The Times quoted Nevzlin as saying the Litvinenko investigation ‘shed light on most significant aspects of the Yukos affair’. He passed the dossier to Scotland Yard.
On 6 September Sasha met Peter B. Reddaway, professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University and former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, for a seven-hour-long interview. They discussed Litvinenko’s relations with Berezovsky and his take on other oligarchs, Sasha’s life and work after he stopped being a regular employee of Boris, the Teplyuk affair, and an array of other topics including Russian organised crime. In particular, Litvinenko told Reddaway that Sergey Lalakin, nicknamed Luchok, leader of the Podolsk organised crime group, had recently hired Vyacheslav Ivankov, nicknamed Yaponchik, a notorious mobster with convictions in both the former Soviet Union and the United States, to control and orchestrate organised crime groups that were closely associated with Gazprom, the giant Russian gas monopoly.
A week after their meeting, on 13 September, the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia, Andrei Kozlov was murdered in Moscow. Men wielding pistols walked up to the banker in the parking lot of a soccer stadium and shot him in the head.
Natalia Morar wrote in The New Times, a liberal Moscow magazine: ‘According to the MVD [the interior ministry], the examination uncovered a unitary scheme for sending abroad the money of officials close to the oil companies controlled by the Kremlin and lieutenant-general Alexander Bortnikov, deputy director and head of the Economic Security Service of the FSB. Bortnikov is known for his close relations with the deputy head of the presidential administration Igor Sechin and with Vladimir Putin’s assistant Viktor Ivanov. According to the sources of The New Times, Bortnikov supposedly oversaw the outflow of the money of various commercial structures engaged in the sale of electronics in Russia.’14 During the course of one working day $60 million were wire-transferred from two Russian firms to the accounts of three foreign companies: Ennerdale Investments Ltd, Ideco Engineering Ltd and Fontana Invest Inc. Ltd. These companies were registered in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands and held accounts at the Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) in Vienna. On that day the books of the Diskont Bank in Moscow, an obscure ‘pocket bank’ that operated discreetly and without visible customers (and whose licence Kozlov revoked shortly after) showed no turnover. The next morning, Diskont instructed RZB to transfer money from the three companies’ accounts to twelve foreign banks. The whole amount believed to be laundered exceeded $1.5 billion.
Two weeks before his murder, Kozlov had been cooperating closely with the Austrian authorities on the money laundering case, a detail made public in a report posted on the website of the Austrian Ministry of Interior. It said the Austrian police could not rule out ‘official corruption’ in Russia as a motive for murder. I was in Vienna at the time and learned that the state attorney passed important information to his Russian colleagues but it was disregarded and no answer ever received.
Sasha could clear up the puzzle. He would explain that for almost thirty years (1975–2004) Bortnikov, a Brezhnev-era functionary, worked in the Leningrad KGB and before his transfer to Moscow in February 2004, was the chief of the St Petersburg and Leningrad district directorate of its successor organisation. Putin had been his pupil all along. On 12 May 2008 General Bortnikov was appointed director of the FSB.
While Litvinenko was helping Novaya Gazeta in their investigation of the poisoning of Yuri Schekochihin, its deputy editor, bad news came from Moscow announcing the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.
Anna wrote:
Why do I so dislike Putin? This is precisely why. I dislike him for matter-of-factness worth than felony, for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents, which went on throughout his term as President… His outlook is the narrow, provincial one his rank would suggest; he has the unprepossessing personality of a lieutenant colonel who never made it to colonel, the manner of a Soviet secret policeman who habitually snoops on his own colleagues. And he is vindictive.
In the Frontline Club near the Paddington Station Sasha, speaking through interpreter, addressed the gathering:
The question was asked here who killed Anna Politkovskaya. I can give an answer. It was Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. After her book Putin’s Russia was published in the West, Politkovskaya started to receive threats from the Kremlin. Only one person in Russia could kill a journalist of her standing, only one person could sanction her death. And this person is Putin.
As if all those insults were not enough, Sasha continued to be very close to Boris Berezovsky, Putin’s ‘Enemy No. 1’.
* * *
The executive phase of the Litvinenko operation started in London days after the death of Politkovskaya. As reconstructed later by the Scotland Yard investigators, it began with a puzzle.
For several weeks members of an FSB special surveillance team who arrived from Moscow under various guises followed Sasha in London. They studied, analysed and cross-checked all his movements and regular places of meeting his contacts, and recorded his telephone calls.
But they probably missed one important event: on 13 October Alexander Litvinenko and his family were granted British citizenship.
On 16 October the commercial Transaero flight from Moscow landed on schedule at London Heathrow. Two Russian passengers in economy class proceeded to the immigration hall to join the crowd waiting in the line of passport control officers. Above and to one side a mirrored wall contained a two-way mirror with a room behind it. The Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector in charge of the airport security, whom his friends called simply Matt, stood in that room looking down. I later met him during a reception at Windsor Castle.
The Russians did not cause any suspicion and soon came out through the ‘Nothing to Declare Green Channel’. They were followed but noticed nothing.
In about an hour they checked into a four-star Best Western Premier Shaftesbury Hotel in Soho. Just around the corner were Piccadilly Circus where Sasha always arranged his meetings and Leicester Square where he met Ponkin. The KGB had long before marked Leicester Square as a recommended meeting place. The files hold many pictures of secret rendezvous here; a very old one showed agent NORMA (Kitty Harris) waiting for agent LYRIC (Donald Maclean) on 10 April 1938. (And the latest one probably featured Michael Mann, Johnny Depp, Alex Goldfarb, Marina Litvinenko and myself gathering at the very same place on 1 June 2009 to watch the premier of Public Enemies and discuss the Litvinenko movie.)
Though the Shaftesbury venue advertises itself as ‘a boutique hotel that embodies a haven where you can be sure of warm traditional hospitality’, only one room was available for the guests wken they arrived there. So they left their luggage in this room and rushed to the meeting at the entrance to the Nike shop on Oxford Street.
Sasha did not expect to see Lugovoy with anybody else, but was not surprised when Lugovoy introduced his partner as Dmitry Kovtun who had recently joined Ninth Wave. According to Lugovoy, they graduated from the same military school and were friends since childhood. Kovtun had never served in the KGB but was an army officer stationed in Germany before the collapse of the USSR and disappearance of the DDR
Litvinenko was satisfied. After an introductory meeting at Erinys International, a private security company (whose motto is ‘Creating a safe and secure environment rather than just security management within an unsafe and insecure environment’) he invited his guests to Itsu on Piccadilly, his favourite Japanese eatery.
In the evening the two Russians were left on their own and dined at the Dar Marrakesh, a Moroccan restaurant on Rupert Street just off Shaftesbury Avenue, and then mooched around the attractions of Soho.
The following day, 17 October, Lugovoy and Kovtun checked out of the Shaftesbury Hotel and moved into the upmarket Parkes Hotel, a luxury establishment located in a tree-lined cul-de-sac a hundred yards from Harrods in London’s exclusive Knightsbridge. No doubt by pure coincidence their elegant new lodgings were conveniently placed between the unmarked doors of the Special Forces Club and the Berezovsky’s favourite Lanesborough Hotel.
According to Alan Cowell, Moscow’s emissaries had another meeting this day with RISC Management at Cavendish Place, at which, one source asserted, Lugovoy and Litvinenko were accompanied by a third man [not Kovtun] with striking black hair, possibly Georgian, who pronounced not a word but had a laptop containing what was said to be the product of ‘black bag’ operations in Moscow15 – surreptitious entries into structures to obtain information, usually into denied areas like houses and apartments of foreign diplomats or businessmen.
After the meeting they went back to the Parkes Hotel, then dined together in Chinatown. Says Lugovoy:
On October 17 we met again with Litvinenko in the afternoon. We went together for a meeting at another security firm. After the meeting we went back to the hotel where I had a meeting with an old acquaintance while Litvinenko waited for us downstairs. Then we went for dinner with him in Chinatown.16
Litvinenko felt quite at ease. Later in the evening Lugovoy and Kovtun, who had a few drinks in Chinatown, proceeded to the Hey Jo/Abracadabra lap-dancing club on fashionable Jermyn Street that some say is frequented by the ‘new Russians’.
On Wednesday, 18 October, they went back to Moscow on Transaero landing at the airport of Domodedovo. They were duly met and reports collected from both at once.
As was learned weeks later, both hotels, Itsu, the Moroccan restaurant and the club were found to be contaminated with polonium-210. Hey Jo and Dar Marrakesh had lower levels while the Best Western and the Japanese eatery gave higher readings, exceeding 10 megabecquerel (MBq).17 As for the aircraft that had carried Lugovoy and Kovtun to London, Russian authorities refused to provide it for inspection.
Litvinenko had not left any radioactive trail until later in the afternoon of 1 November. And his guests knew nothing about radiation.
How was it possible that the two men left so many traces behind them two weeks before they met Litvinenko again on 1 November? While discussing the puzzle with my contacts from the SO15 Metropolitan police team in December, I was able to suggest only one version. Now I think there may be more.
Lugovoy came to London again on 25 October. He checked into the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel where Litvinenko and Chekulin met Martin Flint four years before.
After a full dress rehearsal with Kovtun the week before, it appears that they decided to stage yet another final practice run. To cover his tracks, Lugovoy brought with him a hastily compiled report, part of a due diligence check that Litvinenko had been commissioned to prepare which he had split between Lugovoy, Shvets and himself. The larger portion was given to Shvets, a former Russian intelligence officer living in Washington, who was involved in the Tapegate operation. According to Shvets, the work was for a risk analysis company and included a due diligence report on five Russian figures.
Litvinenko had called him in September and Shvets provided an eight-page document that he emailed to Sasha on 20 September. ‘Within the next two weeks Litvinenko gave the report to Lugovoy,’ Shvets told Tom Mangold, a British journalist, in a programme for BBC Radio 4. Two Scotland Yard detectives had been promptly despatched to the United States to interview Shvets.
During this customarily brief visit, Lugovoy is reported to have had a meeting at Erinys International. Lugovoy claimed that he also visited Boris Berezovsky, near whose office the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel was conveniently located. He said Boris called him to discuss security measures to protect Elena Tregubova, a former Kommersant correspondent accredited in the Kremlin. She showed a certain disdain towards ambitious and politicking Kremlin staffers, labelling them ‘mutants’ in her best-selling tell-all, Tales of a Kremlin Digger, published in October 2003.18 Though this visit must have taken place before Lugovoy’s departure on 28 October, Berezovsky was later strangely adamant, in interviews and in meetings with investigators, that the meeting had taken place on 31 October.
Berezovsky said they drank a bottle of wine à deux and that the chairs Lugovoy sat in, both in his private office and in the reception area, contained ‘an awful lot’ of polonium traces. ‘I trusted Lugovoy completely,’ Berezovsky stressed. ‘And of course the fact that he had been jailed [for an alleged attempt to free Nikolai Glushkov] enhanced my trust, my level of trust to him.’
For two days, 26 and 27 October, Lugovoy had met Litvinenko in the evening in the Sheraton bar, the same place where Sasha had discussed ways of helping the English banker, Shaw, with Martin Flint of Risk Analysis. Pattern, always establish a pattern.
On Thursday, 28 October, Lugovoy left for Moscow. Later British Airways discovered traces of radiation on its aircraft making flights BA875 Moscow – Heathrow and BA872 Heathrow-Moscow on the same dates as Lugovoy arrived and departed.
Precisely four weeks later the HPA statement for the day noted that ‘the key public areas of the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel’ had been monitored for radiation. For months later, two rooms on the eighth floor were sealed and a makeshift barrier confronted reporters trying to approach them. Two rooms? Lugovoy was supposed to be travelling alone that time.
In the course of the frenzied preparations, Kovtun flew to Hamburg on 28 October. A good planner must foresee everything and the possibility that his visit was a false trace to mislead the investigation should not be dismissed. Kovtun could have been advised just to visit his former family in Germany with whom he maintained good relations and who were the only people close to him.
His ex-mother-in-law picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Altona district where his former wife shared an apartment with her boyfriend and their children. Kovtun went shopping and spent the night on a sofa.
While Kovtun entertained his former family in Germany, on Monday, 30 October, Scaramella received the first message ‘to be continued tonight’ from ‘Eugenio Lomov’. The subject was MARIO SCARAMELLA (MS)/PAOLO GUZZANTI (PG) – SECURITY-2. It read (quoted verbatim):
1. Names of MS and PG are often mentioned in confidential talks of intelligence officers of Russia who work in SVR, Kremlin, Shebarshin’s RNSES19 and (starting from August 2006) ‘SVR veterans association DIGNITY AND HONOR’ (Moscow, headed by acting SVR colonel Velichko Valentin).
1.1. All SVR officers are sure that PG and MS still closely collaborate with ‘enemy No. 1 of Russia’ – Boris Berezovskiy and his ‘companions-in-arms’ – first of all A. Litvinenko and V. Bukovsky.
1.1.1. They suspect that recent rumours initiated by Litvinenko about his receiving of the UK citizenship are false, are designed to mislead Russia’s endeavours to obtain his/Berezovskiy extradition to Russia and are (at least partially) inspired by PG/MS, who, in their turn, try to obtain citizenship of Italy for Litvinenko for his ‘outstanding services for the ‘Mitrokhin commission’ investigations’, which are in considered in Moscow as purely provocative towards Russia.
1.2. A.m. [above-mentioned] intelligence officers also think that MS and PG in fact formed ‘stable criminal group which serve interests of the most conservative/rightist wings of special services of Italy, USA and UK’, falsify investigations and reports on KGB/Russia international affairs and seek to profit from it by any possible mean (including financing from SISMI,20 FBI and CIA).
1.2.1. In the frames of this general understanding they take all activities of and latest developments connected with MS and PG.
1.2.2. They think that the case of arms traffickers – Ukrainians (now under court hearings in Teramo, Napoli region) and presumable attempt to assassinate PG in November 2005) were trumped up by PG and supported by false evidence of A. Litvinenko, set up by Ukrainian ‘unscrupulous’ friends of MS from secret services. They say this case is under investigation now in Kiev in SBU and very likely ‘plot will be revealed with help of Russia’s colleagues’.
1.2.3. Anyhow, possibility that Russian intelligence side could be involved in this attempt seems to be invalid (there is no single indication of it).
2. Meanwhile above mentioned Russian intelligence officers speak more and more about necessity to use force against PG and MS, considering their ‘incessant anti-Russian activities’ – as well as against Berezovskiy and Litvinenko.
2.1. The most troubling and dangerous development is Velichko’s involvement into planning of actions against PG and MS.
(Velichko and his fund are well known in the security community in Russia and Europe, mostly because it was him who ‘liberated’ MsF’s21 representative in Dagestan Arian Erkel in April 2004, in cooperation with SVR/FSB, for the cash ransom of USD 1 mln, paid by the Netherlands’ government, which is still under legal proceedings against MsF (Geneva) on this case. Besides, Velichko’s agents are presumably involved in the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006 as well as in elaboration of other similar assassination plans in Russia and Baltic states – by order and on behalf of FSB/SVR…)
2.1.1. Yesterday an agent who works with Velichko’s deputy and closest collaborate Ubilava Anatoliy (intelligence officer) said that Ubilava mentioned that he has an agent who stays in Napoli for over 1 month already, follows up displacements of MS and PG (who visit the Teramo court hearings), has local network of KGB agents as his disposal and prepares ‘final act’ (could be serious provocation or even assassination attempt – Ubilava at least once mentioned that it’s ‘decided by our superiors’, meaning chiefs of SVR (or FSB)).’22
Mario was frightened. He was going to London to attend the next session of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as he had done for years before and decided to take this alarming two-page message with him to show to his friend Litvinenko. Scaramella knew the warning came from Evgeny Limarev.
When he arrived in London, an even graver message was awaiting him in his mailbox, though he would only see it later.
While Scaramella was driving to the Naples Capodichino International Airport to catch his EasyJet flight to London (as the logbook would soon record ‘NAP to STN’) on 31 October, Lugovoy arrived at Heathrow accompanied by his wife, two daughters, his 8-year-old son and good old friend and Ninth Wave employee Vycheslav Sokolenko. This time there were many Russians on board, mainly soccer fans coming to ‘Londongrad’ to watch Moscow TsSK play Arsenal at the newly opened Emirates Stadium. Perfectly mingled with the shuffling column moving through the Green Channel were several FSB watchers who had little interest in sports but were fully concentrated on the ‘rabbit’ in front of them.
Lugovoy with his wife and children and Sokolenko in tow went directly to the four-star Millennium Hotel near the US Embassy where they took three rooms: one on the first and one on the fourth floor for the Lugovoy family, and one on the third for Sokolenko. The booking for Lugovoy specifically asked for room 441. There was a little confusion at the reception as only a double room was initially allocated for the whole family but that was quickly sorted out.
Kovtun spent his last night in Hamburg drinking and talking with his former family until early hours. At about 05:00 a.m. of 1 November his ex-mother-in-law took him to the airport to be in time for a Germaniawings flight to London.
His presence in the old Hansa town on the River Elbe would have passed unnoticed if one December morning a postman had not put a thick copy of Der Spiegel in the post box of the Hamburg police headquarters. The article ‘Todesurteil aus Moskau’ on page 124 immediately attracted attention. It occupied half of the magazine and mentioned Kovtun by name saying that he came from Hamburg.
Officers who read the article reported to the chiefs and soon a special radiation unit from the German Federal police supported by specialists from the Federal Office of Radiation Protection arrived at the site.
The officer who took over the case was Thomas Menzel, the head of the organised crime branch.
Menzel was tall and slender, a thirty-year veteran of the police force who wore his greying hair swept back and who worked out of an office at the Polizeipräsidium in a pleasant suburb of Hamburg.
He codenamed the Kovtun operation THIRD MAN after the Orson Welles movie, and used the signature tune – the ‘Harry Lime Theme’ – as a ring tone on his cell phone.23
The German police began by searching the apartments where Kovtun had stayed, and followed the trail from there. They did not have to wait long for results: a pale lilac glow of polonium-210 lit up across Hamburg. Suddenly an operation that began with an idle glance at Der Spiegel became a major police inquiry. Some 600 officers were drafted on to the case, scouring stores and restaurants. White-suited inspectors with radiation detection equipment appeared outside suburban homes. The apartment building where Kovtun spent the night on his ex-wife’s sofa was evacuated and her children hospitalised to be tested for radiation. Detectives tracked Kovtun’s movements from the moment he touched down to the moment he left. Polonium traces seemed to be everywhere.24
On 1 November Mario Scaramella woke up in the Thistle Victoria Hotel on Buckingham Palace Road at 7:30 a.m. London time. He had a modest breakfast of some melon juice and a bun that he bought a night before at Marks & Spencers at the station. At about nine he called Litvinenko from the hotel. Marina responded and handed over the receiver to Sasha.
Mario suggested a meeting before noon but Sasha explained that he was having a meeting shortly after twelve so they agreed to meet at three at the usual place, Piccadilly Circus, under the statue of Eros.
Scaramella was at the Victoria tube station at 9:25 and had to wait five minutes before buying a day travel card. He then went to his conference at the offices at 22 Berners Street. He was here for the first time as usually the IMO conferences were held in a different building.
Mario was at the conference about ten o’clock. At one a lunch break was announced and he went to a nearby ‘all you can eat’ joint and had a snack. He was much troubled by the email that he received the day before from Limarev and expected more. So he decided to look for an internet café, a difficult task in those narrow streets of Soho if you don’t know them well. He finally found one at Dansey Place in Chinatown, a shabby access road south of Shaftesbury Avenue, where few would care to linger. But there was a computer and he found his message and printed it out.
It was from Limarev again. I have a copy (see Document 4). The Russian was brazenly frightening poor Mario, telling him stories about the stern Spetsnaz instructor Vlasov and a gang of professional killers from St Petersburg, all of whom had already arrived in Naples. Add this to the atmosphere of one of London’s back alleys where the young Italian was reading all that, and one can imagine how quickly he left the place and rushed towards sun-lit and noisy Piccadilly.
Arriving there a little early, Mario decided to go charge his mobile phone. He managed to do so in the Pizza Hut at the corner of Regent Street and Piccadilly where he also feasted on a chocolate cake and a Pepsi. Then he looked at his watch that still showed European time, an hour later, and decided it was time to move to the meeting point.
At about eleven Marina was ready to leave. It was agreed that she had a lot to do that day and they were going to celebrate in the evening, so would Sasha take a bus to the centre? He said ‘no problem’ like a real English gentleman, wished her a good day and Marina left. Litvinenko stayed at home a little longer and then dashed off to town without breakfast. He never took his breakfast alone.
In six years he had come to know London public transport well and caught a bus to Charing Cross. Shortly after noon he was strolling towards the American Embassy.
Document 4
Dmitry Kovtun arrived at the Millennium Hotel on Grosvenor Square about nine o’clock but did not check in, as he had no reservation. Instead he went to Sokolenko’s room. He knew him well from their years in the military school. Like Lugovoy, Sokolenko had been invited and accepted to serve in the KGB’s 9th Directorate (government bodyguards) and later transferred to the newly established Federal Protection Service (FSO).
After the sleepless night, a lot of booze and an early flight, Kovtun immediately went to bed and slept until late afternoon.
The taxi that had brought him from the airport was later found to be contaminated with polonium-210.
Lugovoy woke up as usual and they all took lifts to go down to the breakfast room where Sokolenko joined them.
The plans for the family were to go shopping and sightseeing for the whole day and Slava, a pet name for Vyacheslav (Sokolenko), was prepared to accompany them. He was a bodyguard by profession and training so it was a familiar job. They left at about ten.
Andrei Lugovoy remained in the hotel ‘to do some business’.
An undistinguished man dressed like all others in the service staff entered the Millennium from the back door on Adam’s Row, casually flashing his hotel ID at the uniformed girl. He knew the building well, having spent a few nights there recently as an American tourist using a forged passport. Somebody, obviously from the same department, had been there even before he arrived in London, and had provided him with a detailed plan that he had memorised during his preparation. The man quietly went up the stairs to the fourth floor emerging from the personnel entrance five yards away from the door to room 441. Exactly as agreed, at 10:30 a.m. a blond man inside the room made a few steps and unlocked the door. The visitor crept in. The CCTV camera on the other side of the corridor close to the guest lifts caught an image of him but only in a blur – too dark and too far away. Bingo! Nobody in the hotel turned a hair. In fact, nobody saw him at all.
Both SAS sergeants on attachment to SO 15 and two plainclothes Met detectives in the room nodded and made notes. Should have been exactly like that. A trained illegal. A car to Calais. A sandwich in the shuttle while crossing the Tunnel. Thirty-five minutes to Folkstone. Roger.
Litvinenko was very interested and paid little attention to a new face in the room, whom Lugovoy introduced as another businessman with good connections. The man did not say much. Lugovoy was doing most of the talking, explaining incredible new opportunities that might open up for Sasha and his new friends. It was about liquidised gas and copper. Direct exports to Latin America, fantastic prices. We shall deliver by sea via Latvia, minimal taxes. Do you have anybody there?
Sasha had. He immediately called the mobile phone of David Kudykov, who lived in London but originally came from Latvia. Moreover, David was a partner in a private shipping company.
As usual, David answered his friend’s call at once. He was abroad taking care of one of their cargo vessels in the Netherlands and was now on the way to Berlin. He listened to Sasha attentively and then asked several questions. As he later told the police, he didn’t like what he heard.
The people in that room were clearly ill prepared for discussing the details of the deal. They didn’t know elementary terms, could not specify the conditions, were confused about prices, and could not tell CIF from FOB.
David told Litvinenko that the deal looked unrealistic and advised against it.
But Sasha was overexcited. Millions, man, bloody damn millions! He’ll be rich and won’t have to bother about stupid and complicated analytical reports for which he was not qualified. Money, money, money! Now he will travel and take Marusya and Tolik around the world.
He stayed for a while longer, then looked at his watch and said he had to go to meet his Italian friend but could see them again at about an hour.
‘Give me a call,’ said Lugovoy. ‘We may be at a conference, but surely there will still be time.’
Litvinenko shook hands, picked up his khaki bag with a long shoulder belt of the kind usually used to carry laptop computers and, smiling, left the room, turning right to reach the lifts.
The man’s instructions were brief. Lugovoy must leave the room at once. He’ll do the cleaning. They will not see each other again. Bye.
Lugovoy went one floor down to collect Kovtun who had woken up and was waiting as instructed. They proceeded to the familiar address just a short walking distance away at 58 Grosvenor Street.
In the meantime, the undistinguished man in room 441 quickly but very carefully collected an empty cup of tea wearing special gloves and a mask, which he brought with him, and put it all in a small container that was standing near the dustbin. He did his best not to leave a drop but that was hardly possible. ‘The assassins … dropped the polonium on the floor of a London hotel room,’ a senior government source told the Daily Telegraph on 1 December. Looking back and checking whether everything was in order, the man quiedy closed the door and vacated the premises. By 5:15 p.m. he would be in Harwich ready to board a ferry to Esbjerg, Denmark. An officer from the illegal support unit would take care of his cargo.
According to the Daily Telegraph, a senior government source who was aware of the discussions of the Cabinet’s emergency committee, Cobra, said: ‘Clear traces of the radiation were found on the floor in a room, thought to be in the Millennium hotel in central London, as well as on a light switch in the same room. The traces were so strong that they indicated the actual source of the radiation was present, not a secondary source such as excretions from Mr Litvinenko’s contaminated body.’25
The room was sealed and guarded by the police for almost half a year.
Sasha was only a few minutes late and as usual arrived unnoticed. They greeted each other in a friendly way and Mario kissed Sasha twice in the Italian fashion saying ‘in Italy we give two’. Litvinenko was very relaxed and looked casual. He was wearing blue jeans and a jeans jacket, a khaki T-shirt matching his bag, and was hungry. Sasha said in English: ‘Mario, there is a good restaurant; they have very good fish at a very low price.’
So they walked down Piccadilly talking. Litvinenko said that he was interested in starting to deal in natural resources. He explained that in Russia the secret services had complete power over companies that were exporting oil, gas, metals and other commodities and the companies would do what they were told. ‘I have a friend in the secret services,’ Sasha said, ‘who knows a president of one such company and for whom goods will be offered at very special prices.’ He told Mario that he was about to make a deal for shipping a cargo of copper. ‘Millions, Mario, millions!’
When they finally settled at table on the lower ground floor of the Itsu, it was Mario’s turn. He showed Litvinenko the second message from Limarev that the Russian was not able to understand properly as it was in English. Nevertheless, he dismissed all threats as ‘bullshit’ and told Mario that he would check with his Moscow sources. In about twenty minutes they parted. Litvinenko never saw his Italian friend again.
In the meantime, Sasha hurried to the offices of Berezovsky at Down Street just off Piccadilly. He wanted to show the papers to Boris.
Meanwhile the Russians, having made an appointment from Moscow, were being received in the offices of ECO3 Capital, an independent financial advisory firm acting on behalf of companies for which they did consultancy work.26
For Lugovoy and Kovtun the alleged purpose of the meeting was to solicit a new commission. For its part, ECO3’s client wanted them to produce the report they had already promised but failed to deliver. During that meeting, Lugovoy’s mobile phone jangled as Litvinenko called him suggesting that they all meet up.27
‘We will be at the Millennium in half an hour,’ said Lugovoy. ‘Let’s meet at one of the bars. Call us when you come.’
Sasha had not managed to see Berezovsky who was busy preparing for a trip abroad, but left copies of the Limarev’s messages for him by the secretary. ‘Gosh, this is important’, he thought, ‘Boris should see it.’
At about 4:30 p.m. he was at the hotel calling Lugovoy’s number as he moved.
They were already celebrating at a table at the centre of a rather small hotel bar. Kovtun started to feel much better, had six gin and tonics and was now smoking a cigar. Lugovoy also had a few and was quite relaxed. He met Litvinenko at the lobby and they turned to the Pine Bar on the left side. Sasha was generously offered a drink though they knew perfectly well he was a teetotaller and pointed to the cup of green tea that was already cold. Sasha drank a little and asked for a fresh pot. While the elderly headwaiter, Norberto, was preparing it, Lugovoy went upstairs to check his room and found it in perfect order. He would later be exasperated by the fact that his clothes and personal items as well as those of his wife and children appeared to be contaminated with polonium-210.
There was actually nothing to discuss, so after a few minutes of jokes and idle talk Sasha left for the Gents and was soon prepared to leave. At that moment, through the open bar door, he saw Sokolenko and Lugovoy’s children entering the lobby. It was five o’clock, the time set for them to return. A good English tradition.
Sasha greeted Sokolenko, whom he saw for the first time but who reminded him of the man he had met earlier that day in the Lugovoy’s room, and left. Everyone started getting ready for the soccer match they had come to see.
The bar was later found to be one of the most contaminated places in London, except, perhaps, the gentlemen’s washing room visited by Litvinenko. The Government Decontamination Service took nineteen days in March 2007 to clean it up. The operation ranged from a somewhat domestic wipe-down to the destruction of hotel bathrooms with hammers.
Sasha went straight from the hotel back to Berezovsky’s office. This time he managed to meet him and quickly explained that Mario brought a paper that possibly identified the murderers of Politkovskaya.
‘Who’s the source of this paper?’ asked Boris.
‘Limarev.’
‘Give it to my assistant.’
But Sasha insisted, so Berezovsky agreed to take the four pages with him and read them on the plane if he had time.
From the office Litvinenko called Akhmed Zakayev to ask whether he was in the centre and could perhaps give him a lift home. Zakayev indeed appeared to be on Shaftesbury Avenue where he was having a meeting with a PR agency that was retained by the Chechnya Peace Forum in London. They agreed to meet, Akhmed picked Sasha up and they drove north to Muswell Hill where they were close neighbours.
By 7:30 p.m. Litvinenko was at home checking emails in his computer and preparing for a festive dinner – his favourite, Russian ‘chicken-on-a-bottle’. There had been exactly six years since he, Marina and Tolik stepped on British soil once and for all.
At about 11:00 p.m. Sasha Litvinenko began to die.