Somewhere in my files there is a photograph. It is a snapshot of a smiling group of people at the BBC office in Moscow on some formal occasion in late 1996. I recognize all of those present - they were friends and colleagues. On the right of the photo, also smiling but a little apart from the main group, is a sharply dressed American - double-breasted grey suit, brightly coloured tie - in his early forties. Paul Tatum was the co-owner of the building that housed the BBC offices and those of other broadcasters from Europe and North America. I say co-owner because he was in partnership with some Russian businessmen of Chechen extraction whom we often noticed in the foyer. That occasion was the last time I saw Paul. A few weeks previously his partners had told him they wanted to buy out his share of the building. Paul refused. On the evening of 3 November 1996 a man with a Kalashnikov walked up to him as he left the building and shot him eleven times. I saw the ambulance take his body away. His mistake had been to underestimate the ruthlessness of some Russian businessmen and the nonchalance with which they use murder as a solution to commercial disagreements.
By the end of December 2006 the theories advanced about Litvinenko's death in the main attributed his poisoning to political reasons. But a new explanation was now emerging, and this time the theory suggested that, like Paul Tatum, Sasha was killed as a result of a business dispute. Having lived in Russia at the time of the gangster wars that swept Moscow, I knew the idea should not be ruled out.
A fifty-three-year-old former FSB major living in Washington DC by the name of Yuri Shvets had been collaborating with Litvinenko in the consulting business he had started after Berezovsky cut his monthly allowance. Shvets, who defected in 1993, revealed that Litvinenko had been hired on behalf of a ‘major British corporation’ to investigate several Russian firms it was thinking of investing in. Sasha had asked him to help in the process known as due diligence and Shvets had agreed. Due diligence means checking that a firm is financially robust and worth investing in, but also that it is not tainted by corruption. When I spoke to Shvets's partner Robert Levinson he made clear how crucial such work can be for deals worth millions, and sometimes billions of dollars: ‘Russia is a big priority. It needs lots of careful due diligence. Few countries need it more than Russia. Large companies want to know should they do business with Russian firms. Are they connected with organized crime? Do they have any kind of record of criminal activities? Is the firm's registration in order? Are they connected with money laundering?’
Levinson is a former FBI man who has been investigating Russian companies for many years. When I spoke to him in a crowded bar he was careful to check our conversation was not overheard. He has himself suffered intimidation by Russian firms who don't like what he has found out about them. T was asked to investigate [a major Russian business group] and their alleged links to two organized crime gangs in Moscow. [The business group] found out that I was investigating them and spread the word that I was taking money [to come up with false information]. The aim was to undermine me, destroy my reputation and discredit whatever I came up with.’
The suggestion now being made by Yuri Shvets was that Litvinenko was also being intimidated by a Russian firm he had been investigating, and that the intimidation in his case had included the ultimate sanction. According to Shvets, he and Litvinenko had been given a one-year contract at a fee of $100,000 to investigate five Russian individuals on behalf of a reputable British company. Their research had revealed serious doubts about the probity of one of the men, a tycoon who was also a ‘close confidant of Vladimir Putin’ and a ‘senior Kremlin official’. The eight-page dossier they produced labels him a ‘powerful and vindictive man’. In rather shaky English, it concludes, ‘Many people view him as a remnant of former times and fits more to the Josef Stalin times than to the modern Russian environment.’ As a result, the British firm had pulled out of a multi-million-dollar deal which had been close to completion.
What happened next, says Shvets, was a chain of events that led directly to Sasha's death. The dossier was completed on 20 September 2006 and Litvinenko took it directly to the headquarters of the company which had commissioned it. Two weeks later he showed it to his supposed friend Andrei Lugovoy. He was hoping to develop a business relationship with Lugovoy carrying out investigations inside Russia, and he gave him a copy of the dossier to explain what a due diligence report should look like. But Shvets says Lugovoy was a long-standing double agent and FSB informer who ‘rushed’ back to Moscow to show the dossier to his bosses. They passed it on to the Kremlin official discredited in the report who thus discovered why the British firm had pulled out of the deal with his company. Shvets says Litvinenko's dossier cost the as yet unnamed man ‘millions of dollars'; it also raised the possibility that Litvinenko was privy to further ‘difficult’ information exposing high-level corruption and might be passing this on to the British secret services. Shvets believes the Kremlin official could have ordered Sasha's execution as a punishment and a warning to others. Neither the British company which ordered the due diligence dossier nor the security firm which acted as its intermediary in hiring Litvinenko - possibly Erinys or Titon International, which confirmed Sasha was indeed working for them - has commented on the matter, although both have been interviewed by British investigators.
For his part, Yuri Shvets passed a copy of the due diligence file to Scotland Yard. He did not publicly name the Kremlin official and businessman he alleges it concerns, but from the extracts I have seen it is clear that the man in question is Viktor Ivanov, a career FSB man and now President Putin's deputy chief of staff.
Putin and Ivanov have known each other for many years, working together first in the Leningrad KGB and later in the mayor's department after the city was renamed St Petersburg. As with so many top officials in Russia today, Ivanov has also carved out an impressively lucrative business career: he is currently chairman of Russia's leading missile defence company, Almaz-Antei, and - since November 2004 - chairman of Aeroflot.
In the murky world of Russian high finance Shvets's theory is far from implausible. Ivanov certainly has the business connections that could make him of interest to a big British investor… and the target of an investigator like Sasha Litvinenko. As a senior Kremlin official and long-time KGB man, he would also have had little problem gaining access to polonium or any other poison.
But there are serious flaws in the scenario. For a start, the timings seem implausible. Shvets says Litvinenko gave the dossier to Lugovoy some time around 4 October. Lugovoy then had to take it to his FSB boss, who had to pass it on to Ivanov, who then had to make all the arrangements for an assassination that seems to have begun just a few days later with the 16 October meeting in the sushi bar. It seems a remarkably tight timetable for such a complex plot to be hatched and executed. Neither does the theory explain why surveillance on Litvinenko appears to have been going on for almost a year before the dossier was produced; according to all accounts, Lugovoy had been courting him since the end of 2005. Even if we accept that the Shvets-Litvinenko dossier was the last straw, the final impetus to trigger a plot which was already under way for other motives, it is hard to lay the blame at Ivanov's door. Journalists who saw him at the EU-Russia summit in Helsinki the day after Litvinenko's death report that he was ‘in a panic’ and anxiously going round the press asking who they thought was behind the killing… but that of course is no evidence of anything. In fact the fingering of Ivanov is almost too convenient: from the point of view of the anti-Kremlin camp it has all the right ingredients, including a dossier of dirt and allegations of murder against a man who incarnates the values of the FSB and, to top it all, is close to the hated Vladimir Putin.
Even some of the Kremlin's harshest critics find the scenario hard to swallow. Litvinenko's friend and neighbour Akhmed Zakayev says he was not aware of any dossier or investigation that could have led to Sasha's murder. ‘I'm doubtful of Shvets's version. [Litvinenko] was conducting a general case against the FSB and the Kremlin regime… not a special commission for, or from, someone.’ But Boris Berezovsky is less categorical: he says there might have been business considerations behind, at the very least, the timing of the poisoning.
I think there were reasons why it was Sasha… and why it was now. Sasha had been telling me what operations he was engaged in at the time - not actual operations, but the people on whom he was gathering very serious evidence of participation in criminal dealings. Knowing Sasha, I understood that this was in fact very serious, because he was truly a very good operative… Certainly he was investigating in favour of - I don't know who - in favour of some people who pay interest to that… His interest was to discover the crimes created by the FSB and personally by people in the top level of the government.
This sounds like it might fit the bill for the Shvets dossier theory; Viktor Ivanov is undeniably a ‘person in the top level of the government’.
But the biggest drawback to the dossier theory is the dossier itself. The extracts I have seen contain material which is already widely known, which is taken from anti-Kremlin websites or which comes directly from Litvinenko's own book The Criminal Gang from the Lubyanka. After a factual biography of Ivanov, the tone of the dossier's allegations is very similar to the attacks Litvinenko made on Vladimir Putin, accusing him and several other Kremlin figures of links to organized crime, specifically to the Tambov mafia group. Litvinenko advances the same allegations of drug trafficking and consorting with Colombian mafia groups, the same story of money laundering through a named German company and the same accusations of smuggling precious metals out of Russia. All the allegations relate to the early 1990s when Ivanov was working with Vladimir Putin in the St Petersburg city administration and all have been in the public domain for several years. None of them is substantiated with any new evidence, nor seems especially damaging to Ivanov. The Kremlin will not comment on the dossier or the allegations it contains, but it seems very unlikely on its own to have served as the trigger for a murder.
What it does do, however, is raise the possibility that Litvinenko's assassination is linked to internal Kremlin politics. Under the current Russian constitution Vladimir Putin must step down as president when his second term of office expires in March 2008. Jockeying for position by his potential successors was already beginning in the latter part of 2006 just as Sasha was killed, and the emerging favourite seemed to be the liberal-minded first deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. But Medvedev's hard-line enemies within the Kremlin were said to be horrified by the thought of a pro-Western, pro-market figure becoming president.
The theory runs that the hard-liners, led by the Chief of Staff Igor Sechin, his deputy Viktor Ivanov and Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov (no relation to Viktor), may have organized the Litvinenko affair to destabilize the political scene in the run-up to 2008. Their aim would be to persuade Putin that he needs to anoint a successor tough enough to keep a dangerous international situation under control and to stand up to the threat from the exiles and the West, or to declare a state of emergency, cancel the elections and suspend the constitution so that he could himself stay on as president. The hard-liners - the aptly named siloviki or power group - are considered anti-Western and anti-democratic with speculation that they would be willing to tear up the constitution in order to preserve their own power. Nothing can be proved, but they were the group that had the most to gain from killing Litvinenko and, as the faction to which the FSB is most loyal, they were the people with the means to do it.
Three months after Alexander Litvinenko lay dying in a London hospital bed, on Valentine's Day 2007, the siloviki seem to have got their reward: President Putin announced he was promoting Sergei Ivanov to the post of first deputy prime minister. The liberal Medvedev was no longer the favourite in the presidential race.