Gradually, Litvinenko moved from anti-terrorist work to full-time cooperation with the Moscow police organized crime squad. Once again, he distinguished himself by his obsessive dedication, unflagging loyalty and relentless energy. Even his widow says that beneath his ‘boyish exterior’ she glimpsed an underlying zhestokosty literally cruelty but in this context more suggestive of ruthlessness. Sasha's friend, the distinguished and respected dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, describes him as one of the Three Musketeers, always eager for action, always keen to impress. ‘He was like a hunting dog,’ says Bukovsky. ‘When he took a scent, he would rush off and you could never stop him. He was enthusiastic, keen, almost obsessive. That's why he was a good detective: his great determination.’
It appears that Litvinenko's qualities were noticed where it matters. According to his later account, in the winter of 1996 he was approached by a senior FSB officer who told him a new unit was being created to spearhead the battle against organized crime. The name of the unit, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Organizations, or URPO, barely hinted at the reality. URPO was to be composed of hand-picked officers who would be given special powers to wipe out the country's top crime bosses. Their target was the men who ran the syndicates in drugs, extortion, kidnapping, blackmail and people-trafficking which were plundering Russia and terrorizing its population. To tackle such a powerful enemy, the FSB boss said, the unit would be granted immunity from the law: virtually any means would be acceptable, as long as they achieved the required results. He looked Sasha in the eye and told him he had been selected to be one of the unit's senior figures. Now that he knew the truth about URPO, he was of course at liberty to decline the invitation, but the FSB hierarchy would be honoured if he would accept.
Sasha's reaction to the invitation was pride. In 1996 he was still the old Litvinenko at heart – loyal, unthinking and dedicated to the system he was engaged to serve. He told Marina it was a great honour to be selected; he seems to have had no qualms about the nature of the work he would be doing; his self-esteem had been pleasantly boosted.
Andrei Nekrasov told me that Sasha was reticent about discussing what he had done in his prior career that made his bosses think he would be suitable for such ruthless work.
It was a super-elite outfit. It had strong overtones of a unit that was charged to pursue, threaten, blackmail and possibly kill. That unit, to be completely frank, was composed of people that the leadership thought were capable of pulling off quite violent operations and blindly obeying orders, without ever disclosing… just doing the jobs and never talking about them. Those were the prerequisites for that unit. And later on Sasha actually said that the bosses had formed that unit with exactly those criminal intentions. And I asked him: So why did they pick you? and his answer was that one of his subordinates had used his firearm – lawfully, to neutralize a criminal, but not to kill him… shot him masterfully in the legs and so forth – and Litvinenko knew about this, and about another similar case of a subordinate carrying out such an act… and he defended them in a court case over the legality of using firearms or something similar – he defended them and effectively got them off the hook. So it was a combination of those incidents and his own reputation as a tough guy that got him selected for the special department.
It is an explanation that sounds like Litvinenko was being a little economical with the truth about his own ruthlessness, but he was keen to stress to Andrei Nekrasov that compared to some of the other founder members of URPO, he was a model of propriety.
He certainly said that others in the department had been considerably tougher than him in the past, including his immediate superior, Mr Gusak. They were all recruited at the same time and then Gusak was made the boss. He was the guy who recently made the claims about Sasha torturing a Chechen prisoner… Well, Gusak had been involved in really tough operations, rounding up criminals and businessmen – in Russia, the distinction is not always very clear – and there were certainly some deaths. So Sasha hinted that all the guys who were invited to join were tough guys, but at the time he thought they were fundamentally good people.
When URPO started its activities in early 1997 it was clear that its members were expected to make full use of the special powers – and immunity from the law – granted to them. Most of the recruits had served together in Chechnya, where questions of legality and human rights rarely impeded FSB operations. Now the same bespredel (lawlessness within the state) was going to be unleashed in Moscow. Litvinenko would later describe URPO as the ‘bureau of non-judicial executions', responsible for illegal punishments and blackmail of businessmen, politicians and other public figures. ‘The Department's job was to “neutralize sources of danger to the state”. In other words, extra-judicial executions. In theory, it was all fine: there's a vicious criminal; you can't get him with lawful methods, but you can get him with a bullet. The problem is that the system itself started to decide who to define as sources of danger. It meant the special services got a free hand to shoot who they wanted.’
The director of the FSB at the time, Nikolai Kovalyov, says Litvinenko himself was a prime mover in making URPO what it was. ‘Litvinenko and Co. supported the creation of so-called White Death Brigades – in plain language, hit squads. Their reasoning was that it was impossible to combat organized crime in Russia with legal methods, so illegal methods would have to be used. That is to say, murders
Vladimir Bukovsky told me that Sasha baulked at some of the most outrageous abuses, but raised no objection to what he saw going on around him.
They were used to murder some influential figures in the underground, in the underworld, among the organized crime. Sasha and some of his colleagues were very much against that. He didn't take part; it was not compulsory; someone else would do it if you did not. But then he and his colleagues were asked to murder a businessman. Sasha objected. He said, I will not do that; if anyone else wants to do it, then let them, but I won't… Within a year, he had discovered that things weren't so clean and honest as he had thought. He discovered that most of the organized crime groups they were investigating had links within their own building! In the next offices!
In late 1997, following an internal power struggle, URPO was put under the control of a senior FSB colonel by the name of Yevgeny Khokholkov. Unfortunately for Litvinenko, Khokholkov was a man with whom he had crossed swords in the past. A few years earlier Sasha had been detailed to investigate a drugs and extortion racket which some members of the FSB had been running with a criminal gang. Such was the atmosphere of the times and so deeply was corruption ingrained in the system that few people batted an eyelid at the thought of Russia's law enforcement agencies collaborating with organized criminals. But Litvinenko claims to have carried out the investigation with his usual zeal and made some inconvenient discoveries. In particular, he alleged that he found a videotape of Khokholkov and leading mafia bosses discussing how they would divide the Russian drugs market between them. At the time Litvinenko was still working with the Moscow police and was frustrated when the case against Khokholkov was dropped. It was another blow to Sasha's faith in the system and, he claims, opened his eyes to the corruption and double-dealing which permeated the Russian state. ‘I had never felt more betrayed,’ he would say much later. ‘I was knee-deep in the dirty system.’
Of more immediate concern, however, was the fact that Khokholkov had been given command of URPO and was in effect Litvinenko's boss. The two men were destined to clash. Marina Litvinenko remembers her husband's reaction at the time but was evidently unaware of the details behind it.
Sasha's problems seemed to start all of a sudden. He had been working on some case and they came and told him to drop it; he'd been digging too deep and in places where he should not have been digging. He started getting disillusioned. He wanted to work in a system where cases got seen through to the end. But the URPO unit was just a place of bespredel, lawlessness. Its bosses had acquired the right to carry out murders, in Russia or abroad. They could order their men to rob people and beat them up – completely unpunished.
It is clear that Litvinenko was losing his faith in the system. It is also clear that he hated his boss Khokholkov. But throughout the whole of this time he retained a touching faith – bordering on hero worship – in one influential figure in the FSB pantheon: former colonel and now significant political figure Vladimir Putin. Andrei Nekrasov told me that Sasha had an obsessive fascination with the man he would later turn so violently against.
Litvinenko was always comparing himself to Putin, you know. It was a little love-hate… or hate-love. There was hate and fascination. He disliked him profoundly for being immoral, for doing everything ‘by the book’… like looking away when something wrong was happening or even countenancing criminal activities. Nothing like that could have happened without the knowledge of Putin, who was the director of the FSB. That was one thing. But this moral thing was quite important to him too. He was very like Putin. He was ten years younger of course, but their careers were very similar, almost parallel: they were both lieutenant colonels; they were not recruits; they both volunteered for the force. Like Putin, Sasha thought he was doing a good thing, serving the country.
And yet, just a few years later, Litvinenko was devoting his whole life to accusing and insulting the man he had formerly held so high. When, after his flight to the West, Sasha railed against Vladimir Putin and accused him of bestial crimes including murder and paedophilia, was his fury perhaps driven by the memory of the love he had once borne the man, a love that had been spurned and rebuffed?