By the end of 1997 Litvinenko's disenchantment with his job and his animosity towards Khokholkov were at their peak. Sasha was disgruntled and spoiling for a fight; the cue for hostilities was not long in coming. The most dramatic and important events of Alexander Litvinenko's career in Russia were about to unfold, events that would change the course of his life.
A regular part of Sasha's duties in URPO was the physical intimidation of criminals, but since parts of the FSB were deeply involved in illegal activities, the definition of a criminal was becoming more and more elastic. By 1997 it had come close to meaning anyone the URPO bosses defined as a criminal, and that included anybody who threatened the FSB's own criminal interests, whether rival gang bosses, innocent businessmen or those who sought to uncover the truth about corruption in the heart of the security services.
Mikhail Trepashkin belonged to the last category. He was a lieutenant colonel in the FSB who had been running an investigation into allegations that high-ranking officers were involved in illegal arms sales, extortion and murder. Trepashkin claimed he had found proof that could convict several important men, but when he took it to his superiors he says he was told to drop the case; too many vested interests were connected to the crime ring he had uncovered and too many FSB people stood to lose out.
Trepashkin, though, was a stubborn man and told his bosses he would not let the matter drop. ‘So I was removed from the case,’ he later reported. ‘When I said I would challenge this order, they told me I would be fired.’ But Trepashkin was a trained and able lawyer and he brought a legal challenge against his immediate superior, an FSB colonel called Nikolai Patrushev. Shortly afterwards three men came round to his apartment block, ambushed him in the stairwell, gave him a violent working over and confiscated his FSB badge. Yet Trepashkin would not be dissuaded. He spent the years after he was fired from the FSB fighting cases of alleged corruption in the Russian security forces with some measure of success. In 2003 he was arrested. He is currently in a Russian prison camp; Nikolai Patrushev, the man he challenged, is currently director of the FSB.
Mikhail Trepashkin is an important character in the story of Sasha Litvinenko, but their relationship began inauspiciously. Litvinenko was one of the three men who went to beat him up that night. There was little Trepashkin could do to avoid the professional kicking from Sasha and his colleagues – Trepashkin is not a strong man and the others certainly were – but he did manage to talk to them. He begged Sasha to give him the opportunity to explain what he had found out about FSB corruption, and Sasha agreed to meet him later in secret. The moment was charged with drama: the man who could easily have killed him was now prepared to listen to Trepashkin's case.
Marina Litvinenko says Trepashkin helped convince Sasha that things were badly wrong in the FSB and that someone had to do something about it. Sasha looked at the files Trepashkin had collected and came to the conclusion that he was right. The two men became friends and remained so until Litvinenko's death. With Trepashkin's encouragement and moral support, Sasha began to question the orders he was receiving from his URPO bosses. Angry with both Khokholkov and the FSB, Litvinenko was now looking for an excuse to pick a fight. He didn't have long to wait. On 27 December 1997 Sasha said he and four other URPO officers were called into Khokholkov's office and told they had been selected for a special mission: they were going to assassinate Boris Berezovsky…