Other people were speaking about Sasha that first day after his death. Walter Litvinenko, who had helped care for his son during the last two days of his life, was on the steps of the hospital, blinking under the glare of the cameras. A little overweight but with the residual military bearing of an army career and smartly cropped grey hair, he was fighting back both rage and tears. ‘A terrible thing happened yesterday. My son died yesterday and he was killed by a little tiny nuclear bomb. It was so little that you could not see it. But the people who killed him have big nuclear bombs and missiles and those people should not be trusted. He was very courageous when he met his death and I am proud of my son. He was a very honest and good man and we loved him very much. Now he is not with us.’
It was the first public reference to the nuclear theme – a slight distortion of course, because radioactive material had been used to poison rather than blow up its target – but it was a shot across the bows of Western politicians. If this was indeed the world's first act of international nuclear terrorism, it was going to be headache time for those like Tony Blair and George Bush who were seeking to contain the threat of nuclear proliferation. If these killers had gained access to radioactive material, how many others had done the same, how many dirty bombs and poisonings were already being prepared? Walter Litvinenko pointed the finger at the Kremlin:
This regime is a mortal danger to the world. Sasha fought this regime. He understood it, and this regime got him and he is not with us any longer… If we let this go, if we go about our business as usual, this regime will get to all of us. Marina and Sasha were the most wonderful couple. They loved each other so much. They were so happy here in London, but the long hand of Moscow got them here on this soil. I feel extremely sorry for Marina, who has lost a wonderful, wonderful husband, as I have lost a wonderful son. If this regime falls, and I think it will fall, because a regime with no morality and conscience is doomed, then the street where Alexander was born in the city of Voronezh will be named after him… He will always be in our hearts and in the hearts of the Russian people.
Pictures of the grieving, angry father were fed to news agencies and TV stations around the world. Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki for an EU-Russia summit, could hardly fail to take note. He conveyed his condolences to ‘those close to Mr Litvinenko’ and said, rather grudgingly, that ‘the death of a person is always a tragedy'. But he was evidently well prepared for accusatory questions when he appeared at the final press conference. He categorically denied any Kremlin involvement and questioned whether there had even been a crime at all. ‘The medical statement of the British physicians doesn't say that this was the result of violence. This was not a violent death. So there are no grounds for speculation of this kind.’ Putin called Litvinenko's deathbed statement a ‘political provocation’ and questioned why it had not been published before his death, when he could still be challenged about it. ‘Mr Litvinenko is not Lazarus. I think these tragic events are being used for political provocations. The Russian authorities will offer any help needed for the British investigation. And I hope the British authorities will not contribute to the instigation of political scandals.’ Meanwhile, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Putin's aide for EU relations, sounded the opening note in the Kremlin's fightback against the Berezovsky camp with the first suggestion that Sasha's death may have been a deliberate and cynical piece of mischief by the president's enemies. ‘I am hardly someone who believes in conspiracy theories,’ he told journalists, ‘but in this case I think that we are witnessing a well-rehearsed plan by Russia's enemies to discredit Russia and its leader.’
In London Tony Blair was fighting fires on all fronts. Aware of its importance to both security in the UK and international relations with Russia, he had asked to be kept personally informed of developments in the Litvinenko case. By the middle of the afternoon, he was beginning to wish he hadn't. The Health Protection Agency had been in touch with the news that traces of alpha radiation – the characteristic signal of polonium – had been found first in Litvinenko's north London home and now in the Itsu sushi bar on Piccadilly. The house had been sealed and the dead man's widow and son moved. Similar measures were being implemented at the restaurant but, said the HPA, this was a public place which had been frequented by hundreds, possibly thousands of people since the radiation had been left there. If the level of contamination proved to be high, then the prime minister might like to consider a public screening programme to trace possible victims. To cap it all, the agency was now dispatching investigators to the Millennium Hotel and several other unnamed premises in the central London area.
The prospect of a major public health scare was looming. At the same time the Foreign Office was asking for an urgent meeting and the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, was due in Downing Street to update the prime minister. The Litvinenko case had already caused one acrimonious discussion between cabinet ministers after Beckett informed them that she had received an official complaint from the Russian Foreign Ministry over the way London was handling the affair. In particular, she said, Moscow was angry that Sasha's deathbed statement had received such widespread media coverage while Putin was in the public eye at the Helsinki summit. The Russians had, she said, apparently failed to understand that Litvinenko was under police supervision rather than in custody for any crime and that the British government could not in any event control what is and what is not carried by the media.
Blair had told the cabinet meeting that he viewed the UK's long-term relationship with Moscow as the key issue to bear in mind in the current climate, which some ministers had interpreted as a sign that he wished to minimize fallout from the affair and perhaps restrict the police investigation into the presumed murder. One minister, Peter Hain, objected strongly to any suggestion that London should go soft on Russia and pointed out that Vladimir Putin's human rights record was far from perfect: under his leader-ship, he said, there had been ‘huge attacks’ on liberty and democracy and some ‘extremely murky murders'; in view of the Litvinenko case, it was going to be ‘tricky’ to maintain good relations with the Kremlin.
Alarmed by the vehemence of Hain's remarks, several ministers including Blair were at pains to point out that Britain relies heavily on Russian oil and gas; one senior minister expressed ‘alarm’ that supplies might be disrupted and described the Russians as ‘too important for us to fall out with them over this'. John Reid, the ultra-loyal Blairite home secretary, was said to have cautioned his colleagues against ‘making assumptions’ about who was to blame for the murder, pointing out that Litvinenko had been ‘involved with’ organized crime during his time in Russia – presumably one way of referring to his KGB duties combating mafia-style operations.
Blair concluded the session by announcing that he was calling a meeting of Britain's emergency response committee, COBRA, to assess the implications of the Litvinenko affair. The committee, which meets at times of national crisis and which had last convened over the alleged plane hijack plot of August 2006, includes the heads of British Military Intelligence, MI5, the police and the civil contigencies secretariat, as well as senior cabinet ministers. It would convene the following day, Saturday, and report back to him on Monday morning.
Later that afternoon, Scotland Yard notified Downing Street that Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the Counter Terrorist Command SO 15, would be personally leading the inquiry into the murder. He would be asking the British counter-intelligence service MI5 to hand over all its files on Litvinenko in order to conduct a thorough investigation of his activities and contacts since he arrived in Britain, as well as tracing his career in the FSB before he arrived. If Downing Street had been hoping the police could be persuaded to go easy on their inquiries in the name of British-Russian relations, they were going to be disappointed.
Peter Clarke spent that weekend reading MI5's Litvinenko file at home. A member of his team says Clarke was ‘flabbergasted’ by the extent of the dead man's activities, both in Russia and since his arrival in the UK, which could have provided a motive for his murder. Scotland Yard has Russia specialists permanently on its staff – since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian mafia-style gangs have flooded into many west European countries including Britain – but even they were taken aback by the number of potential enemies Litvinenko seemed to have made.