Having been turned down for political asylum by the Americans, Litvinenko and Goldfarb had to find a Plan B. Waiting for an ordinary US visa was a long process and they had little time to spare; Goldfarb feared the Turkish authorities might get wind of the defector in their midst and decide to curry favour with Moscow by sending him back home. So at the end of October 2000, Alex Goldfarb bought the Litvinenkos air tickets from Istanbul, via London, to Moscow. No visa was needed because their flight was scheduled to end in Russia, but the Litvinenkos had no intention of using the second leg of their tickets. When the plane landed at London's Heathrow Airport on the morning of 1 November 2000 they followed the yellow and black signs for ‘International Transit’ until they reached the central hub where onward flights are indicated. There Sasha told Marina to take a seat with young Anatoly and walked calmly up to a British police officer. In halting English he said, ‘Good morning, sir. I am Russian security agent and I wish to claim political asylum.’
It was the start of a six-year stay in England that Litvinenko, Berezovsky and all their followers believed would end with a triumphant return to a post-Putin Russia.
Goldfarb's role in the Litvinenkos’ defection was to cause him trouble in the future: for several months he was barred from entering the UK as he was considered to have aided and abetted an illegal immigrant. Even now an entry in the computer files of the US Immigration Service means he is regularly stopped and questioned every time he flies into New York.
As for Sasha, he was detained and interviewed by the British police and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. After ten hours of questioning he was told he could remain in the country while his case was being reviewed; he and Marina would have to report to immigration officials on a regular basis, but otherwise they were free. Sasha was astonished when a senior police officer treated him with respect and sympathy (‘I remembered how Russian policemen would treat you!’) and said to him, ‘Now you are on the territory of Great Britain and you are under the protection of the British government. If ever you feel you are being threatened in any way, you must immediately report it to the police. We will protect you.’
Luckily for Litvinenko but less fortunately for Boris Berezovsky, his patron had arrived in the West several weeks earlier and he too had requested asylum from the pursuing wrath of Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. In the months after Sasha fled from Moscow Berezovsky had been trying desperately to defend both his political power and business empire, signally failing on both counts. In early July Putin had moved from grudging toleration of the oligarchs who had wielded such clout under his predecessor to all-out attack. As we will see in a later chapter, Berezovsky had tried to fight but was eventually forced to accept the inevitable.
After the Litvinenkos were released from police custody, Gold-farb and Berezovsky took good care of them. Berezovsky, who was living in France at the time, came to London to see Sasha. The pleasantries of the reunion between the two men and their families were tempered by the circumstances they found themselves in, but there was genuine pleasure at finding old friends so far from home. Marina and Berezovsky's wife, Yelena, busied themselves preparing lunch while Sasha and Boris discussed politics and the best tactics to persuade the British to grant them political asylum. Over coffee and biscuits they drafted a statement for Sasha to release to the press, stressing the danger he would be in if he were sent back to Russia: ‘My family and I fled from Russia as the result of permanent persecution on the part of the Russian special services. Threats have been made against the lives of my wife and child. I have repeatedly asked prosecution agencies to protect me and my family, but there was no reaction to my requests.’ Few newspapers printed the story, but those that did speculated that the mystery Russian was likely to be granted leave to stay, if only because he claimed to possess information on who was behind the mysterious apartment bombings in Moscow the previous year that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen rebels.
If the British media was showing little interest in Alexander Litvinenko, the British authorities were showing even less. According to Viktor Suvorov, a Russian military intelligence agent who defected in 1978 and who knew Litvinenko, his offers to provide information about his past in the FSB were politely turned down. ‘I raised the question: “Look, here's a man who has lots of information about organized crime.” No one else had so much information, but no one questioned him about it, British, French, Americans. He had incredible knowledge.’
It was the start of a frustrating six years for Sasha Litvinenko, years in which he would repeatedly be rebuffed trying to make the world take notice of his allegations about the misdeeds of the Kremlin and its master.
In material terms Sasha and Marina had little to complain about. For their first few months in London Berezovsky found them a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment in a Victorian white-stucco terrace in the central Earls Court district. Later he bought them a modern red-brick house in the affluent suburb of Muswell Hill, although he kept the deeds to the property in his own name. In recognition of his past services and in return for his continuing work for the Berezovsky cause, Sasha was paid £5,000 ($9,800) a month. He was given few official duties to carry out for his patron, but was tremendously self-motivated in seeking out information and stories he thought would be useful in the anti-Putin propaganda campaign Berezovsky was now waging.
Berezovsky's explanation is that he helped Litvinenko because he owed him a debt of gratitude. ‘I was more than happy to pay him,’ he says, ‘because he was very professional and he was helping me with the story I was starting already in this country. The story is very simple – I start to create political opposition to Putin, to his political regime. And Sasha was very helpful because when he went abroad, he took more than a hundred kilos of documents about the FSB's crime activities and it was very helpful for him and for me to help develop opposition against the existing regime.’
If it is true that Litvinenko brought with him a hundred kilos of compromising documents about the activities of the FSB – it is unlikely he personally carried them on his hurried flit through southern Russia and Georgia to Turkey, but it is quite possible that he smuggled them out in some other way – it is not hard to see that he would indeed be ‘very helpful’ to Berezovsky in his fight against Putin. It may even explain why Berezovsky himself ‘took the decision that Sasha must leave Russia’ back in the summer of 2000. But most of all it would have made Litvinenko mortal enemies among his old colleagues – among the former URPO men who had carried out crimes as part of their job description, and among the top brass of the security forces who condoned and encouraged such illegal behaviour.
Shortly after his arrival in the UK a court in Moscow tried Litvinenko in absentia. He was found guilty of the misuse of office and the illegal possession of firearms and ammunition, with all the charges dating back to his time in Kostroma in 1997. The judge in the case ruled that a voice-match analysis of the disputed video-tape showing the brutal interrogation of a prisoner had proved that the man dishing out the beating was indeed Litvinenko. For good measure, his former URPO colleague Viktor Shebalin confirmed it was him in testimony to the court. He could not see the man's face, he said, but he knew from the way he moved and talked that it was Litvinenko. There could no longer be any doubt that Shebalin was back in harness with the FSB. In all, thirty-five witnesses and six ‘victims’ who had allegedly suffered at Sasha's hands were called to testify. Litvinenko was given a suspended sentence of three and a half years. It was bad news for Sasha's relations with Moscow, but good news for his pending UK asylum appeal, which the prison sentence made all the more credible.
The Litvinenkos were getting used to life in London and Marina says her husband quickly grew to appreciate his adopted country.
Almost every month he would ask me, ‘Marina, are you happy here? Are you happy to be in England, to be in London?’ And I told him, ‘Sasha, it really doesn't matter for me because I can't compare; I've never been with you in Paris, or some other place.’ Maybe he still had some contact from Russia with some people who he knew before, but it wasn't people who he felt could harm him, you know what I mean?
Marina should not have been so sure.
One of the first things Sasha did after arriving in London was to ring his former URPO comrades who were still in Moscow. As far as he was concerned, these were the men who had fought with him in Chechnya and had stood by him on the day of the infamous press conference two years earlier. Sasha felt he could trust them, and in their telephone conversations he spoke openly about his experiences and plans. His comrades listened attentively and expressed their understanding of his worries and homesickness. But two of them at least were back in the fold of the FSB and were making notes on Sasha's calls and running to inform their bosses of everything he had told them. Viktor Shebalin in particular was zealous in his efforts to vilify his former colleague, as he revealed in a self-serving report:
Yes, he rang Ponkin from England to ask him what was going on back here in Moscow. And he was always ringing his so-called businessmen friends… The night he ran off to England, Gusak called me and said, ‘Did you hear? That freak's in England.’ That's the word he used – that freak. ‘He never thought about his family or his colleagues, did he? The only person he thought about was himself.’
Gusak himself says Litvinenko was constantly ringing him. When he did so, he would call Gusak's cellphone so the conversation could not be monitored by Russian security. Gusak says he found the calls highly suspicious. Far from dissociating himself from his FSB past, Litvinenko was reaching out from London, trying to re-establish contact. He invited Gusak to meet him outside Russia, first in England and then in Italy. ‘I refused,’ says Gusak, ‘because judging from certain signs I understood that he was being controlled and was collaborating with the British special service.’ Gusak says his suspicions were confirmed when British intelligence began to round up Russian citizens living in the UK who had been placed there by the FSB for covert operations. Litvinenko knew the names of these undercover FSB contacts, and Gusak believes it was he who betrayed them to MI5 in an effort to prove he had valuable information to offer. And no intelligence agency shows mercy to traitors who betray its agents…