It was hard to imagine that five weeks earlier, at the beginning of November, the world had never heard of Alexander Litvinenko, or Sasha as he was known to his friends. As an old Russia hand and an habitue of Russian exile circles in London, I knew who he was and that he was closely associated with the kingpin of the exiles, Boris Berezovsky. I had had dealings with Berezovsky over the years.
Sasha Litvinenko was both a complex and a very simple man. Those who knew him well speak unfailingly of his naivety and an unrelenting stubbornness which made many regard him as an obsessive. His widow Marina describes him as boyish and emotional, but she says he had ruthlessness in him too. He was no angel. Even his closest friends say he probably had the blood of more than one victim on his hands. But they were victims he dispatched while carrying out his duty. And duty was important to Litvinenko; his constant refrain to those who would listen was that he had always behaved loyally and honestly. He spent his youth and most of his adult career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first to the communists, then to Boris Yeltsin's reformers, and then to the hardline autocracy imposed by Vladimir Putin, Sasha's former boss at the FSB. But in the course of a few turbulent weeks in 1998 he was transformed from a Putin ultra-loyalist to an acrimonious, diehard foe. As we will discover, Litvinenko challenged Vladimir Putin in the most bizarre circumstances; Putin rebuffed him, and Sasha felt slighted. His hurt – and his obsessive nature -meant he would not sue for peace, even when his comrades in arms were doing so. He threw in his lot with the Kremlin's public enemy number one, Boris Berezovsky. When Berezovsky fled to England in 2000, he fled with him. Since then Litvinenko had been venting his bile on Putin, hurling ever more outrageous accusations and insults at the man he used to speak of as his own role model, the man he once idolized with an intensity bordering on love. From London he had directed increasingly bitter polemics at his former colleagues in the FSB. He had become involved in murky business dealings, with dark suggestions of blackmail plots. And he had exasperated and finally fallen out with Berezovsky himself. Many had a motive for murder. In the end, someone's patience snapped.
The aim of this book is to discover who that someone was. Who had the motive, and the means, to carry out a murder that was for all intents and purposes the world's first act of international nuclear terrorism? This account will examine the movements and actions of a key group of players, both friends and suspects. It will weigh, and ultimately pronounce on, their guilt or their innocence. And it will look beyond the hired hands and killers to those who gave the orders. The truth behind the Litvinenko story lies in the dubious and colourful past of the man himself, the battles he fought and the enemies he made; it lies in the years of social and political upheaval which have shaped today's Russia and brought the current regime to power; it lies in the murky economic and business conflicts, the vested interests and the corruption of the body politic, which have divided a great nation into warring camps. All this has forced men like Sasha Litvinenko to take sides in a confrontation where they are the expendable pawns of ruthless masters. When pawns threaten -or when they lose their usefulness – they can easily be sacrificed…
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Back on 1 November 2006 neither I nor anyone except a small, secretive group of conspirators had any idea that the fate of this fugitive from the Russian secret services was about to change the face of international politics and strain relations between Russia and the West.
That evening, I was invited to the Emirates soccer stadium in north London to see the London team Arsenal play the Russian champions CSKA Moscow. It was an important game, with both sides seeking a victory that would guarantee their safe passage to the knockout stages of the prestigious and lucrative European Champions League. Two weeks earlier, Arsenal had lost 1-0 in Moscow and they were out for revenge. Other people in the crowd that evening may have had revenge on their minds too. Within weeks, some of them were to become the focus of attention in one of the most spectacular murder inquiries the world of international espionage has ever witnessed.
The new 60,000-seat stadium was filling up with expectant Arsenal fans in red and white shirts and scarves, their chants rolling noisily round the banks of spectators. In one corner of the ground, less garishly clad and very much quieter, a small throng of visiting Russian supporters struggled to make their voices heard. In the Soviet era there had been no tradition of fans chanting or singing at Russian soccer matches; the stadiums were largely quiet and respectful.
The CSKA fans there that night belonged to the small minority of Russians who had the financial means to pay for a trip to London. Some came for the soccer; some for the bright lights and shopping; some perhaps for less innocent purposes.
Dmitry Kovtun, a burly, rather handsome man in his early forties, had flown into London that morning from Hamburg on the 6.40 a.m. Germanwings flight, a low-cost subsidiary of the German airline Lufthansa, but there was nothing low-cost about his accommodation plans. Kovtun travelled from London's Gatwick Airport directly to the swanky Mayfair district in the city centre and checked in at the Millennium Hotel, where rooms start at £170 ($330) plus tax. The Millennium Mayfair is a converted eighteenth-century mansion on the same leafy square as the US embassy, not far from Hyde Park. In the light of the events that were to unfold that day, the leaflet Dmitry Kovtun picked up from the check-in desk, describing the hotel as a ‘welcoming, peaceful haven in the heart of London’, now has an air of some poignancy about it.
Waiting for him at the hotel on the morning of 1 November was an old friend and colleague, Andrei Lugovoy. With the same muscular build and close-cropped grey hair as Kovtun, Lugovoy wore a look of professional wariness, his eyes sharp and mistrustful, darting constantly to and fro. He had flown to London from Moscow the previous evening, with his wife, two daughters and young son in tow, but he immediately told his wife he would be tied up with business matters for the whole of the day – she should occupy herself with the shops of Oxford Street and the galleries of nearby Bond Street. Kovtun, recently estranged from his German wife of eleven years, had no such problems.
The two men's greeting in the hotel foyer that morning was a brief, manly hug in the Russian manner. They seemed to understand each other almost instinctively, an easy sense of partnership and common purpose built on the experience of many years working together in frequently hazardous situations. They had known one another since childhood days; they had grown up in the same neighbourhood, in the same apartment block, and trained together at the elite Soviet Military Command Academy in Moscow in the mid-1980s. Kovtun and Lugovoy came from military backgrounds -their grandfathers had distinguished war records; their fathers served together in the Defence Ministry – so as teenagers in 1983 they had had little trouble getting into the academy. Its students were regarded as the chosen few, marked out for powerful careers and nicknamed the ‘Kremlin cadets’. Both had excelled at their studies and training. When scouts from the security services came to the academy looking for promising recruits, Kovtun and Lugovoy were selected. Kovtun graduated in 1986, Lugovoy in 1987, and both went straight into the Kremlin Regiment of the KGB's Ninth Directorate, charged with the protection of senior state officials in the government and party.
There was a third soccer fan at breakfast at the Millennium Hotel that November morning. His name was Vyacheslav Sokolenko, in his late thirties, three years younger than the other two, but also a graduate of the Moscow military academy and acquainted with Kovtun and Lugovoy for many years. Like them, he too had joined the KGB's Ninth Directorate and the three had served together until they all officially left the service in 1996. Afterwards, like so many former KGB agents, they had gone into the security business.
For three men looking forward to a night out at a big sporting event, the talk over the fried eggs, sausages and black tea was surprisingly restrained. Although the hotel staff serving breakfast in the plush, white-napkinned dining room were unable to make out the subject of the low, almost whispered Russian conversation, it is now clear that it centred largely on another Russian man who had been living in the British capital for exactly six years and whom Lugovoy – although not Kovtun and Sokolenko – had known for at least a decade. The man in question was Alexander Litvinenko.