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THE THIRD MAN?

As Scotland Yard awaited a decision from the Crown Prosecution Service, suspicions were emerging that the hit squad sent to kill Litvinenko may have contained a third man. With the media speculating that only Lugovoy and Kovtun were named in the indictment, several sources who had given evidence to the police were keen to let it be known that they had told detectives about another, third suspect. The sources of the evidence were former KGB and FSB men themselves, now living in the UK. One of them, Oleg Gordievsky, told me that Moscow would never send just a two-man team: ‘This was a very well organized KGB operation… in all the details. A rehearsal in the middle of October, and then repeated on 1 November. It was a classic three-man KGB operation, with the classic agent group. That means a group of three agents, a troika.’

Former FSB special operations officer Boris Volodarsky agrees. He told me that the mission involved one operative carrying out surveillance on the target, and that Lugovoy had been tracking Litvinenko for a full year; a second agent would bring in the weapon, in this case the polonium; and a third man would carry out the actual killing.

Lugovoy, Kovtun and Sokolenko are not professional murderers, despite serving in the Federal Protection Service. They are not the actual killers. Lugovoy and Kovtun scouted out the ground and the professional killer came in at the last moment to do the murder and then disappeared without trace. That is his job; that is how we have been trained - you enter the country and you leave the country unnoticed, in a quite short space of time. Planning a special operation takes a long time but he appears and disappears, that is normal operational practice.

Russians refer to a professional assassin as a keelyer, a rather sinister adaptation of the English word. I asked Gordievsky if he knew the identity of this third man.

He was a KGB killer; he was trained to kill. He joined them just for a moment solely to put the poison down. And that man who put the poison, he disappeared. He came to the country certainly under an EU passport because he had to come into Heathrow without any checks, which he did, and then he disappeared from the country in an unknown way. They've been checking the airports and there is no record of him. So he most probably changed his passport twice. For me as a former member of the department, it is absolutely clear. He changed his passport when he arrived; wherever he stayed in some hotel under some different passport; and in the evening of the same day - or maybe in the morning of the next day - he left Britain under another passport. So now when the British will demand extradition of the main killer, it will be very difficult.

I asked both Gordievsky and Volodarsky if they thought the mysterious Vyacheslav Sokolenko could have been the third man, but they said that he was at most backup for the logistics men, Lugovoy and Kovtun. Gordievsky says the keelyer would have been a specialist, whereas the others were double agents trained in infiltration. ‘[In 1996] Lugovoy and Kovtun were told to officially leave the FSB because that made it easier for them to distance themselves from the security forces. The FSB can say, “We don't know them; they left our service long ago.” Lugovoy even spent time in prison, so he's “a criminal” and “not one of us” and so on. They officially left the FSB. That makes it easier for them to carry out such a dangerous mission; to get close to their target.’

Lugovoy himself vehemently denies that any third person was with him and Kovtun at the meeting in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel: ‘There was no third man. I want to make that perfectly clear. Dmitry and I met Litvinenko on our own… As for the man supposedly sitting next to Dmitry Kovtun on the plane coming to London from Hamburg, there was none. Kovtun was on his own… We didn't bring anyone to meet Litvinenko.’

According to my former KGB contacts, the anonymity of the keelyer in an FSB-style troika is always carefully preserved. He is not known by the victim and his true identity is kept secret even from the other members of his team. As with the spy rings of cold war times, the agents operate in cells; no cell can implicate another because it does not know names or identities. In a troika the key feature is deniability: the third man comes and goes with no trace and no connection to the logistics men who have paved the way for him.

Such a structure does of course presuppose an overarching command, a person or group of people with overall control of the agents in the field. Oleg Gordievsky says the organizers of the assassination were efficient to the point of ruthlessness; they put operational priorities first and were prepared to sacrifice the safety of their own agents. Crucially, he believes, the operatives were not told about the danger they were running by handling polonium. Lugovoy and Kovtun both reported radiation poisoning when they returned to Moscow and Gordievsky says the keelyer in particular would have been exposed to a potentially lethal dose.

They didn't realize that they were being exposed to such toxic poison. The KGB [sic] didn't tell them; the KGB framed them, set them up. They even framed their own illegal, the man who put the poison ampoule in the tea. He didn't realize what the ampoule was all about - that you touch the ampoule and three years later you are dead. The KGB needed to conceal the truth from them in order to use them, to exploit them. Now he will die probably in three years of cancer. Those three people didn't realize what kind of poison it was - they knew it was a poison, but they didn't know they will also die because of leukaemia. It is the greatest shock in their lives. Now they will die - they are people in their fifties, strong, fit men. All three of them will die in a few years.

In fact, the medical evidence is not as conclusive as Gordievsky claims. There is no certainty the men will contract leukaemia, although there are instances where polonium has had that effect. The daughter of Marie Curie-Sklodowska, who discovered the isotope and named it after her native Poland, was accidentally exposed to a very small dose of it when a vial was broken and she died of leukaemia ten years later. Yuri Felshtinsky agrees that those arranging the kill would probably have kept the nature of the poison secret from those who were handling it: ‘It's of course understandable that Lugovoy knows Litvinenko is going to be poisoned, but I'm sure that Lugovoy would not ask, “By the way, how are you going to poison him? What kind of poison am I going to use?” He is a military man. He was working for the FSB for many years. I'm sure he would not ask extra questions because the general rule is that the less you know, the better it is for you.’

With such a level of secrecy within the operation and the identity of the putative keelyer deliberately cloaked in anonymity, the chances of ever finding the alleged third man seemed remote. The British police believed they may have identified a suspect from CCTV airport footage from 31 October. He was described as tall and powerfully built, in his early thirties with short black hair and distinctive central Asian features. But no pictures of the man were published and no arrests made.

A picture of Alexander Litvinenko was hitting the headlines, though. A video recording of a government shooting range in Moscow showed a blown-up photograph of his face peppered with bullets from FSB agents. As a ‘traitor’ Sasha was obviously considered fair game.