Home Office, London—November 2006
Rain was spreading like a fresh bruise across the London sky as the unmarked car rolled up Whitehall toward Big Ben. The Scotland Yard protection officer scanned the road with a well-trained eye, clocking potential hazards as the car passed the spiked iron gates of Downing Street, and swung right on Parliament Square. He had spent years guarding countless government ministers and visiting foreign dignitaries, and there wasn’t an inch of this maze of power that he didn’t know like the back of his hand.
Nothing looked amiss as the car sloshed to a stop outside a modern multicolored glass building. London’s black-cab drivers were doing roaring business in the rain, and the pavements were gray and empty except for a smattering of pedestrians under dripping umbrellas. But the city was in crisis. The protection officer had been summoned as the government scrambled to respond to a nuclear attack in the heart of London.
The doors to the Home Office slid open and the officer strode into the command center of British state security. He was shown upstairs to a large boardroom where a host of grave-faced officials was waiting. A stale sort of mugginess in the air told him they had been cooped up together for some time.
“There were six people on the Kremlin’s hit list,” the woman at the head of the table said as soon as he sat, “and they have already killed Litvinenko.” Officials from MI5, MI6, and GCHQ were seated around the table, the officer noted, alongside the Home Office security chiefs. “This is a direct policy of the Russian state: they are killing dissidents,” the chair continued. “We have some here, and they are coming for them.” She addressed him directly. “Make them safe,” she commanded.
Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev were judged to be under “severe” threat of assassination, the officials around the table explained, meaning an attack was considered “highly likely,” while a Russian journalist living in Britain and the Cold War defector Oleg Gordievsky* had also been identified as Kremlin targets. Another political hit on British soil would be an “unimaginable” disaster for the government as it struggled to salvage relations with Moscow and restore public confidence in the wake of the Litvinenko imbroglio. So the Home Office wanted Scotland Yard’s Specialist Protection Command to work alongside the security services to provide “defense in depth” for each of the exiles on the Kremlin’s hit list.
Specialist Protection was usually tasked with guarding the prime minister and members of the cabinet, so its officers had the same level of security clearance as Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command. That meant they could be briefed on intelligence British spies had gathered about the threats to the Russians on their watch.
Over the week that followed, they learned about the FSB’s poison factory outside Moscow, where armies of state scientists were developing an ever-expanding suite of chemical and biological weapons for use against individual targets. There were poisons designed to make death look natural by triggering fast-acting cancers, heart attacks, and other fatal illnesses. There were labs set up to study the biomolecular structure of prescription medicines and work out what could be added to turn a common cure into a deadly cocktail. And the state had developed a whole arsenal of psychotropic drugs to destabilize its enemies—powerful mood-altering substances designed to plunge targets into enough mental anguish to take their own lives or to make staged suicides look believable.
That Russia had poured such unimaginable resources into providing its hit squads with the tools of undetectable murder made the brazenness of Litvinenko’s killing even more perplexing. Polonium had the potential to be the perfect traceless poison: its alpha rays made it hard to detect, and with a smaller dose Litvinenko would probably have died quietly of cancer a few months later. Perhaps, the security officials thought, the two assassins had overdosed him accidentally in their desperation to get the job done. Or maybe his death was deliberately dramatic, designed to send a signal to Russia’s dissident diaspora in Britain. Either way, there was one thing the protection officer learned for sure: even if it looked like the death of a Russian exile was the result of natural causes, accident, or suicide, that conclusion might well not be worth the autopsy paper it was written on.
To add to the complexity, the FSB was inextricably intertwined with Russian mafia groups, which in turn had deep links to powerful organized crime gangs in Britain, so Scotland Yard needed to be ready for anything from a sophisticated chemical, biological, or nuclear attack to a crude hit contracted out to a London gangster for cash.
The greatest threat, by far, was to Berezovsky. The oligarch had made himself Russia’s public enemy number one through his relentless attacks on the Kremlin and his efforts to foment insurrection in Putin’s backyard, and he had effectively appointed himself the chef de mission of the entire dissident community in the UK. He had already survived several assassination attempts, and the Russia watchers were getting a steady stream of intelligence about new plots to kill him. Russia’s state security and organized crime complex had grown into a multiheaded hydra under Putin’s auspices, and competing factions within the FSB, the mafia, and the country’s military intelligence agency (GRU) were all vying for the chance to harpoon the president’s white whale.
Shielding Berezovsky was now the protection officer’s top priority. It was time to pay a visit to Down Street.
Down Street, London—November 2006
Berezovsky was in typically rambunctious spirits. The murder of Litvinenko was a sickening blow, but it was also a resounding vindication. The assassination had, as the defector said in his dying statement, shown Putin to be just as brutal as his critics claimed, and finally the world was listening. Down Street was abuzz as the oligarch and his acolytes made sense of what had happened and conspired to ram home the message of their friend’s murder.
The exiles were still reeling from the revelation that Andrey Lugovoy had been an enemy in their midst, and opinion was divided as to how long he’d been working against them. Nikolai Glushkov insisted that Lugovoy had been working for the FSB all along, ever since staging his escape attempt at Lefortovo. But the others found that almost impossible to believe. Had Lugovoy already been in Putin’s pocket when he first reached out to Badri Patarkatsishvili after getting out of prison? Was he working for the enemy already when he mingled at Berezovsky’s birthday party? Or had he been recruited later? One theory was that Lugovoy had been stopped at the border on his way back from visiting Litvinenko in London and found to be in possession of the incendiary report on Viktor Ivanov that the defector had prepared for Dean Attew. Perhaps he had been threatened with more jail time for treason if he didn’t start cooperating.
Only Patarkatsishvili flatly refused to believe that his former security chief had gone rogue. The Georgian oligarch had always preferred Lugovoy to Litvinenko, whom he’d regarded as a dangerous obsessive full of “crazy theories.” He insisted that Lugovoy had been framed and horrified his friends by continuing to take the assassin’s calls when he rang from Russia to protest his innocence.
For his own part, Berezovsky had no doubt about who had administered the polonium—but he did disbelieve that the poison had really been meant for Litvinenko. Hadn’t he himself been warned, years before, of a radioactive plot to kill him on British soil? Wasn’t he Putin’s true nemesis? The oligarch was busy telling everyone that Lugovoy had really been sent to eliminate him but must have failed and seized the chance to poison Litvinenko instead. So when the protection officer showed up in his office with the news that he was at the top of the Kremlin’s UK hit list, he was thrilled. Finally the state was endorsing what he had been saying all along: Vladimir Putin was trying to kill him.
The protection officer was a tall, elegant man with close-cropped silver hair and pale blue eyes. He was a shade more erudite than many of his Scotland Yard colleagues, and he formed an easy rapport with Berezovsky. It would be necessary, he explained, to scour every detail of the oligarch’s lifestyle for weak spots that could be exploited by the Kremlin’s assassins. The first step was to perform a full “ingestion audit”—cataloging everything Berezovsky consumed to assess his susceptibility to poisoning. During a series of interviews, officers filled their notebooks with an exhaustive list of anything the oligarch ate and drank, learning more than they ever thought they would about the finest wines and whiskys money could buy, as well as documenting all the creams and lotions he applied to his body and the medication he was taking. It did not take long to identify a major problem.
Berezovsky was heavily reliant on Viagra, and, worse, he was taking a penis-enlargement formula that he had specially shipped over from Moscow. Still more alarming was his appetite for teenage girls, which made him a sitting duck for honey traps. The oligarch was constantly being contacted by disturbingly young sex workers from the former USSR and he frequently ferried them over to Britain for sessions on his private plane.
I have the absurd responsibility of trying to persuade a sixty-year-old billionaire that he has to rein all this in, the protection officer reflected wearily as he reviewed the results of his lifestyle audit. But he was used to this sort of ethical dilemma from years of guarding the great and the good in London. When an ambassador did drugs in the back of the car, or a diplomat brought a hooker back to his hotel, it was part of the job to look away.
“I’m not going to sit here giving you a lecture on morals or ethics, but you’re very vulnerable here,” was all he said to his charge. “This is how they’ll kill you.”
The problem wasn’t just the girls. Berezovsky was forever being approached over the transom by would-be business partners and political allies who wanted his funding for this new enterprise and that new opposition party, and he was all too free and easy about meeting anyone who asked to see him.
Then there was the challenge of separating the Kremlin-sanctioned threats from those arising from the oligarch’s own risky business dealings. Berezovsky had tangled often enough with organized crime to acquire some nasty private adversaries who had tried to take him out before, but the officer’s remit was limited to protecting him from government assassins. The problem was that Berezovsky’s private enemies could easily hire a moonlighting FSB hit squad to go after him, and the state was equally capable of enlisting another oligarch or mafia boss to orchestrate his killing as a cutout, so it was all but impossible to be sure where any given threat really originated.
The officer reasoned that there was no point confronting Berezovsky about the darker side of his life. After all, he would never answer truthfully anyway. But he instructed the oligarch not to meet anyone who approached him out of the blue on any pretext—be it sexual, commercial, or political—without first passing on the details to Scotland Yard for vetting.
The intelligence flowing into Specialist Protection from Britain’s spy agencies indicated an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of new threats against Berezovsky. The officers were deluged with the names and photographs of a rapidly changing cast of individuals linked to the Russian security services or organized crime who were believed to be involved in plans to kill the oligarch. When a fresh plot emerged, officers would track Berezovsky down and yank him out of whatever dinner or business meeting he was attending to warn him he was in imminent danger.
The protection officer began to feel he was living in a John le Carré novel, meeting Berezovsky furtively at night on misty street corners in Belgravia to show him mug shots of his latest would-be assassins under the lamplight and implore him, please, for God’s sake, not to agree to meet them.
The others on the Kremlin’s hit list had adapted well enough to their new security regimes. Zakayev accepted an armed guard at his house when the threat level was deemed high, and the rebel leader never met anyone new without careful vetting and countersurveillance measures. Gordievsky and the Russian journalist were conscientious about their safety. But Berezovsky was impossibly unruly.
On more than one occasion, he called the protection officer to announce that he had just met someone he had been warned might be part of a plot to kill him. And he flatly refused to stop antagonizing the Kremlin. He kept traveling to Belarus and Georgia to stoke unrest right on Putin’s doorstep—even after being told that Scotland Yard could do nothing to protect him when he was overseas. And every time he gave another interview in which he took a potshot at Putin, fresh intelligence would flood in from Britain’s listening posts in Moscow indicating that new plans were being laid to silence him. It was almost, the protection officer thought, as if you could feel the chill wind blowing in from the east.
But the oligarch seemed to thrive on it. “I am what I am,” he would say. “I am Boris Berezovsky, and I crave conflict.” It was as if he had a strange sort of destructive energy, the officer thought, that made him want to run right into danger.
Berlin, Germany—2007
Scot Young was spinning out. He had spent months lying low in Miami before his Coconut Grove mansion was sold to pay his debts, and his extended spell in the land of the cocaine cowboys had only exacerbated an already spiraling addiction. He was drinking copiously, too—so much so that even Jonathan Brown was worried. Young still acted the wheeler-dealer, with his rolls of fifties and his flashbulb grin, but something was clearly very wrong. Was it all the booze and blow that made him so glassy-eyed and unreadable these days, his friend wondered. Or was that fear?
Brown had been deeply spooked by Litvinenko’s murder, and he’d tried to bring it up in earnest, but Young was flippant.
“Can you imagine, drinking a cuppa tea and your hair falls out?” he’d quipped. “Fucking nuts, Jon!”
Brown was worried about the danger to Berezovsky, too, but Young didn’t have much to say about that, either, and he still stubbornly refused to be drawn out on what had really caused his sudden financial collapse. After leaving Miami, he’d decamped to Berlin, where he was staying in high style at the Ritz-Carlton on a friend’s tab, ostensibly to scout for new property investments—but when Brown called him he rambled incoherently about strange deals involving cars with trunks full of cash. Whatever he was really up to, Brown got the distinct impression that his friend was running from something.
By then, Michelle’s ever-growing team of lawyers and investigators were crawling all over Young’s affairs. He was scrambling to keep a lid on his Russian business dealings—moving boxes of documents to remote rural storage spaces, wiping his hard drives, deleting his emails, and destroying his phones—but his secrets had sprung a leak. Michelle had swiped an old laptop that he’d given to his daughters, and she hired a computer forensics expert to restore its deleted files. The trove of evidence she uncovered included two asset schedules appearing to show that Young had been sitting on properties and investments worth hundreds of millions of pounds in the run-up to his apparent financial collapse.
Michelle had also uncovered files suggesting that Young had set up a network of opaque offshore vehicles to carry out a complex series of transactions code-named Project Marriage Walk before announcing his intention to leave his wife and had sent cryptic emails to friends suggesting he was secretly rearranging his affairs. “I am signing my life away at the moment,” he wrote in one email a year before Project Moscow collapsed. The transactions were so complex that Michelle’s lawyers, accountants, and investigators were stumped as to what it all meant, but they were using the files to pursue disclosure orders in the divorce courts that would force Young to come clean about where his money had gone.
Young begged his wife to desist, promising to find a way to pay her tens of millions of pounds if she stopped digging. People were trying to “crucify” him, he warned her in one legal meeting, and if she didn’t leave well enough alone he wouldn’t be alive to pay her a penny. But Michelle rejected every offer. She was convinced that her husband was hiding billions—and she wasn’t going to stop until she got her fair share.
London—2007
Yuri Golubev had kept a low profile since arriving in London. He knew Berezovsky—everyone who was anyone did—but had stayed well away from his provocative antics. Golubev was the oligarch’s antithesis: cautious, cool-tempered, and devoutly religious. He was one of the cofounders of Yukos, and though he had fought to save the oil giant after its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was thrown in prison, he had done so without much fuss. Golubev had worked alongside Stephen Curtis to fend off the Kremlin’s attacks, and when the lawyer was killed he quietly continued the fight alone. But it had all been to no avail: Yukos had been crushed under the weight of the multibillion-dollar backdated tax bills the Kremlin had cooked up, and it had eventually been declared bankrupt the previous year.
Golubev was sixty-four, and life was winding down now that the battle was over. He lived quietly in a Mayfair apartment a stone’s throw from Selfridges, read voraciously, prayed often, and recited W. H. Auden to his visitors. It was a pleasant enough life, but he never felt truly happy in London. As levelheaded as he was, he was sentimental about one thing, and that was mother Russia. Some days, the homesickness threatened to get the better of him, and he longed to return to Moscow for good—but that was a dangerous dream. Ever since Khodorkovsky had fallen afoul of Putin, Golubev had received a continual stream of threats, and he knew it wasn’t safe to go back for good.
Back in Moscow, Golubev kept a prized collection of Eastern Orthodox icons—hundreds of brightly colored depictions of Jesus, Mary, and the apostles painted on canvas or sculpted from metal and wood. It was among the most significant collections in Moscow, and many of the icons were rare enough to be very valuable, so Golubev made sure it was well guarded with round-the-clock private security. But soon after Litvinenko’s murder, he confided in friends that all the icons had been stolen in a break-in. Golubev was heartbroken at the loss of his collection, and he was frightened. The intruders had somehow penetrated every layer of security without leaving a trace, he said. In his mind there was only one entity capable of pulling off such a feat, and that was the state. He feared the break-in was part of a campaign of government intimidation.
In January, Golubev flew to China for surgery on his knee but started to feel unwell and returned to London earlier than planned. His flight was routed via Moscow. Nobody heard from him for a few days after he got home to Mayfair. On January 7, a friend gained entry to his apartment and found his body slumped in an armchair. Golubev was dead.
London was still on high alert after the killing of Litvinenko, and the death of another exile caused a small stir, but the police quickly shut down the case. Golubev wasn’t one of the Russians under Scotland Yard’s protection, there was no sign of foul play, and tests suggested he had died from a heart attack, so police released a statement declaring that the former Yukos executive had died of natural causes. But then Moscow countered with an unexpected move.
Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, gave a statement declaring that there were “all grounds to suppose” that Golubev had suffered a “violent death,” and he called on the UK authorities to investigate fully. Chaika deepened the intrigue by claiming that the Russian government had evidence of attempts to use mercury to poison several other people connected to Yukos. The situation did not sit well with the Russia watchers. They reached out to the CIA to request any information the US spies had gathered about the latest death on British soil—and, once again, their American counterparts sent back intelligence pointing to Russian involvement in Golubev’s death.
Scotland Yard publicly dismissed the suggestion of foul play, and in the absence of any tangible evidence, the case remained closed. But the protection officer knew too much to draw any comfort from the notion of a death by natural causes, and he doubled down on his efforts to protect Berezovsky.
The oligarch had stayed relatively quiet immediately after Litvinenko’s slaying, but by the spring he was ready to launch his next broadside. The protection officer woke one day in April to discover that his charge had given an interview to the Guardian renewing his declaration that he was plotting the violent overthrow of President Putin. Berezovsky claimed he had forged close relationships with members of Russia’s ruling elite and was bankrolling secret plans to mount a palace coup.
“We need to use force,” he told the newspaper. “It isn’t possible to change this regime through democratic means.”
The Kremlin immediately hit back, denouncing Berezovsky’s call for revolution as a criminal offense that should void his refugee status in Britain. Scotland Yard said it would investigate those allegations, but the oligarch was unconcerned: Judge Workman had already ruled that he couldn’t be sent back to Russia to stand trial.
The protection officer was horrified. Berezovsky’s latest pronouncement was followed by yet another flood of intelligence indicating that the FSB was setting up a fresh plot to kill him. And this was no empty threat. Soon after the first reports came in, Specialist Protection received an urgent call: word had just come over the wire that an assassin was on his way to Britain.
* The other name believed to be on the Kremlin’s hit list was Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard to Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin president, Ramzan Kadyrov. Israilov had fled to Austria to file court papers implicating his boss in torture, rape, and murder. He was shot dead in 2009 outside the apartment in Vienna where he lived with his pregnant wife and three children.