9
THE EMISSARIES DEPART

On the morning of Friday 3 November, two days after they had met Alexander Litvinenko in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, Andrei Lugovoy, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko were on their way to London's Heathrow Airport. Their British Airways flight to Moscow – number BA874 – was due to depart at 12.25. The three men, together with Lugovoy's wife and three children, had been in London for less than three days. They had excess baggage at the check-in – whatever their purpose in coming to London, Russians always enjoy the shopping – but the clerk was in a good mood and waved their bags through. By mid-evening, they were back home in Moscow, 1,500 miles away from the hullabaloo that was about to break out in London.

BA874 was still in the air when Sasha Litvinenko was finally admitted to hospital.

The Russian doctor who had promised to come and see him had turned up at the Litvinenkos’ home and was shocked by what he saw. He knew Litvinenko as a fit, healthy man: a non-drinker, non-smoker who could run five miles barely breaking sweat. The man he saw now was a shadow. He could hardly get to his feet; walking was agony; even the slightest pressure on his stomach was unbearable. The doctor confirmed the diagnosis of a serious stomach infection with acute inflammation and ordered him to be taken immediately to hospital. He had lost eighteen pounds in just a few days and his skin was turning yellow. The doctors at Barnet General Hospital suggested the presence of a virulent bacterium in his intestines, but acknowledged that this would normally cause diarrhoea rather than vomiting. They treated him with powerful antibiotics but to little effect. Then they noticed his blood analyses were indicating a catastrophic fall in white blood cell counts. Litvinenko's immune system was collapsing. The doctors conferred, but the plain fact was that no one in the hospital had seen a case like this before and nobody had a proper explanation for what was happening to him.

During those first days at Barnet Hospital Marina Litvinenko went to see her husband every day. Boris Berezovsky and his people did not. Litvinenko had phoned them to say he had been poisoned, but in recent months they had become a little exasperated with Sasha and his wild allegations – Berezovsky admitted as much when he expressed his regret for not taking him seriously over the Scaramella papers on 1 November. Marina later said, ‘They just wouldn't believe he had been poisoned. They thought he was fantasizing again.’ ‘Fantasizing again’ – it is a phrase that says a lot about the way his patrons had come to think of Sasha Litvinenko. Berezovsky did little except tell Marina not to worry and reassure her that the doctors had things under control.

Marina, however, was getting desperate. With the doctors repeating that they had no explanation for her husband's symptoms, she was increasingly alarmed that no tests appeared to have been carried out for poison in his system. After forty-eight hours in hospital, Sasha's throat was becoming painfully inflamed and swallowing was a problem for him. When Marina asked the medical staff about this, they said it was the likely effect of the antibiotics. By Sunday 5 November Litvinenko's throat was swollen to the point that he had difficulty speaking. Marina had brought some warm tea in a Thermos flask; he could not swallow it, but he asked her to leave it by his bedside ‘for when he was feeling better'. According to Marina, he knew by this stage that he was fighting for his life, but he continued to believe he would survive.

The following day, Monday 6 November, the doctors began feeding Litvinenko through a tube. When she came to see him that morning, Marina was shocked to discover that he could barely talk – his voice was reduced to a hoarse whisper – and she panicked. She went to the reception desk of the ward and shouted, ‘What are you doing? When I went home yesterday, at least my husband could speak! Now look at him!’ The doctors were quick to explain that they were examining other explanations for his condition, including the possibility of hepatitis or Aids. Tests for both were carried out over the next few days, but proved negative.

Marina speaks of her horror when some days later she was stroking Sasha's head – because of the initial diagnosis of a viral infection, all his visitors were made to wear surgical gloves – and found his hair was falling out in handfuls. When she looked, she saw his pillow and pyjamas were covered in clumps of hair. Once again the doctors had no explanation, saying only that it seemed to be the result of the collapse in his immune system.

Ten days after falling ill, Alexander Litvinenko was in a critical and deteriorating condition. He was convinced he had been poisoned and frustrated that few people seemed to be taking him seriously. On Saturday 11 November he decided to air his story on the BBC Russian Service, a radio station that had interviewed him several times in the past. After decades of providing uncensored information to listeners in the repressive Soviet Union, the Russian Service continued to be widely, if perhaps unfairly, regarded as sympathetic to critics of the Kremlin. In any event, if Litvinenko thought talking to the BBC would gain widespread publicity for his case, he was right. Despite his swollen tongue and severely inflamed throat, he was able to summon enough strength to be interviewed by telephone from his hospital bed. In the interview, which was taped and broadcast in Russian, his voice is feeble but he is coherent and firm in his convictions about what had happened to him.

BBC:	Hello, how are you?
AL:	I am listening.
BBC:	The Russian press is reporting that there has been an attempt to poison you. Is this information correct?
AL:	Look, after a serious poisoning I am still in very bad shape. I feel bad and I am staying at one of London's clinics.
BBC:	Do you think what happened is connected to a particular event? There are reports that there was a plan to give you some documents about the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and that after that you felt sick?
AL:	I was contacted by a certain person, he suggested a meeting, and the meeting happened on 1 November at a London restaurant. He gave me some papers which contain the name of a person who might be connected to the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. That's it. After several hours I felt sick with symptoms of poisoning.
BBC:	Could you tell us where this happened? In what area of London?
AL:	In the centre, in central London.
BBC:	Whereabouts?
AL:	I don't want to name the restaurant. Police are investigating this right now – let them work without distraction.
BBC:	Was it Westminster or Chelsea?
AL:	I told you, police are investigating. Let them work quietly.
BBC:	I understand.
AL:	When I feel better, when I am back home, I will pass these papers to Novaya Gazeta [the newspaper Politkovskaya had worked for in Moscow]… to police and to Novaya Gazeta, that's all.
BBC:	But to your mind these two events are connected?
AL:	I don't know whether they are connected. I guess you can make your own conclusion on this.
BBC:	But the name which is quoted in the Russian press, does it make sense?
AL:	It does.
BBC:	And the documents, are they solid; can you trust them?
AL:	The documents are in English. I didn't even manage to study them properly because when I was home I felt sick in just a few hours.
BBC:	Many thanks. Take care. Get well soon.

Two things are immediately clear from Litvinenko's interview with the BBC Russian Service. First, he was in no doubt that he had been poisoned; second, he immediately suspected Scaramella. The interviewer's question about the ‘name which is quoted in the Russian press’ is a reference to items that appeared the previous day on several anti-Kremlin websites, which named the Italian as having met Litvinenko on the day of his poisoning. The fact that Litvinenko did not even mention his meeting with Lugovoy and Kovtun is a reflection of the trust he had in their good faith. His conviction that it could not have been his Russian visitors who had poisoned him endured until just a few days before his death. It was based on the fact that he and Lugovoy had served together in the FSB, that Lugovoy had left the organization in the same sort of acrimonious circumstances as himself, and that Lugovoy had become a trusted friend and partner of Boris Berezovsky, the very man who had been looking after Sasha and his family for many years.

In retrospect, Sasha's faith in his Russian acquaintances may seem tragically naive and his reliance on the Berezovsky connection like a fatal error. When we come to investigate the hidden reality behind the stories of those involved in the last days of Sasha Litvinenko's life, it will become abundantly evident that in many cases all is not what it seems.