A Very Expensive Poison

by Luke Harding

  Praise for The Snowden Files

  ‘The saga of Edward J. Snowden, the man whose leaked documents revealed the Orwellian dimensions of the National Security Agency, reads like a le Carré novel crossed with something by Kafka – at least it does in Luke Harding’s new book, The Snowden Files … But the book still gives readers, who have not been following the Snowden story closely, a succinct overview of the momentous events of the past year. And if it leans toward dramatising everything in thrillerlike terms, the book also manages to leave readers with an acute understanding of the serious issues involved: the NSA’s surveillance activities and voluminous collection of data, and the consequences that this sifting of bigger and bigger haystacks for tiny needles has had on the public and its right to privacy.’

  Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  ‘Luke Harding’s breathless page-turner … reads more like a spy thriller than a piece of dry political analysis … this is a riveting read and it unravels the mystery better than anything that’s been published so far.’

  David Runciman, Guardian

  ‘The Snowden Files – as the iPhone episode suggests – is a super-readable, thrillerish account of the events surrounding the reporting of the documents, with a few interludes sketching out what some of the stories have revealed … Harding has done an amazing – and speedy – job of assembling material from a wide variety of sources and turning it into an exciting account.’

  Daniel Soar, London Review of Books

  ‘Harding’s account of how the leaks came to be published is thrilling, full of intrigue, last-minute flights, secret meetings and heroic hacks and editors … it is a vital account of the story of the decade and the issue of our age: when our lives are lived on wires, how safe are we from those who would use our private information against us, whether criminals, foreign agents or our own governments?’

  Padraig Ready, The Irish Times

  ‘Without one man’s courage and a life-altering decision, millions would never know about this most secret abuse of power by the intelligence agencies. This is the story of our age, brilliantly told.’

  Henry Porter

  A VERY

  EXPENSIVE

  POISON

  The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West

  LUKE HARDING

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue: The Men from Moscow

  1. Mafia State

  2. Journalist, Exile, Campaigner, Spy

  3. First Deployment

  4. The German Waiter

  5. Murder in Mayfair

  6. A Bit of a Puzzle

  7. Ruslan and Lyudmila

  8. An Inspector Calls

  9. Death of an Oligarch

  10. Gelsemium Elegans

  11. A Small Victorious War

  12. The Inquiry

  13. Leviathan

  14. The Man Who Solved his Own Murder

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements and Photo Credits

  Index

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dioxin: Any of three unsaturated heterocyclic compounds, two having the formula C4H6O2 and the third C4H4O2

  Gelsemium: A colourless, inodorous, bitter alkaloidal substance obtained from the root of G. sempervirens

  Polonium: A highly radioactive metallic element, discovered in 1898 by Professor and Marie Curie in pitchblende

  Ricin: An extremely toxic lectin present in the seeds of the castor oil plant, Ricinus communis.

  Thallium: The chemical element of atomic number 81, a soft silvery-white metal which occurs naturally in small amounts in iron pyrites, sphalerite and other ores. Its compounds are very poisonous (symbol: Tl)

  Source: Oxford English Dictionary

  Prologue:

  The Men from Moscow

  Passport control, Gatwick Airport, Sussex 16 October 2006

  Two of the Russians arriving that morning stood out. What precisely made them suspicious was hard to identify. But in the mind of Spencer Scott – the detective constable on duty at London’s Gatwick Airport – there was a curious sense of doubt. It was 16 October 2006. Passengers were disembarking from a Transaero flight from Moscow. They were collecting luggage. A stream of new arrivals queued up at passport control, and then proceeded for customs and excise checks.

  The first Russian was of medium height, thirty-something, with blond Slavic hair. He was wearing a casual jacket and carrying an expensive-looking leather laptop case. He appeared prosperous. The second, with dark hair, receding slightly, and a yellowish complexion, was clearly his companion. They weren’t behaving oddly as such. And yet there was something – a furtiveness that pricked Detective Constable Scott’s attention.

  ‘I though they were of interest and basically as they came through immigration controls I stopped them and questioned them,’ he recalled. Scott hadn’t been told to look out for them; he was acting on a hunch. He asked them their names. One man spoke English and identified himself as Andrei Lugovoi. His friend, he said, was Dmitry Kovtun. Kovtun said nothing. It appeared he spoke only Russian. Scott took a grainy low-res photo of them. Lugovoi was on the right. In it they look like dark ghostly smudges. It was 11.34 a.m.

  Lugovoi and Kovtun’s story seemed convincing enough: they had flown into London for a business meeting. Lugovoi said he owned a company called Global Project. Moreover, his friend was a member of the finance department at a respectable Moscow bank. Their travel agent had booked them in for two nights at the Best Western Hotel in Shaftesbury Avenue. The hotel wasn’t cheap: £300 a night. Lugovoi handed over his reservation. It was genuine.

  Still, there was something unsettling about their answers, Scott felt: ‘They were very evasive as to why they were coming to the UK.’ Normally, those subjected to a random stop would open up – about families, holiday plans, the lousy English weather. The two Russians, by contrast, were elusive. ‘As I asked them questions, they weren’t coming out with the answers that I wanted to hear or expected to hear. They were giving me very, very short answers,’ Scott said. Their replies offered ‘no information’.

  Scott looked on the internet but couldn’t find Global Project. The Russians told him that their business meeting was with ‘Continental Petroleum Limited’, a company based at 58 Grosvenor Street in London. Scott rang the firm’s landline. A man answered, confirmed they were registered with the UK’s financial authority. OK, then. The constable checked the police database. Nothing. Britain’s intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, hadn’t flagged Lugovoi and Kovtun either. Apparently, they weren’t of interest.

  A copper’s nose was one thing; hard facts another. With no evidence to go on, Scott took soundings from his sergeant, who advised him to let both men ‘go forward’. Britain’s judicial and police system rests on a presumption of innocence – unlike in Russia, Lugovoi and Kovtun’s homeland, where judges take informal guidance from above. After twenty minutes the Russians were told they were free to leave. They collected their luggage and headed for central London. Scott put their photo in a file. It was stamped: ‘For intelligence purposes only.’

  It was little more than a month later that Scotland Yard – faced with a situation of unprecedented international horror – realised Scott’s instinct had been preternaturally correct. The two weren’t businessmen. They were killers. Their cover story was just that. It had been painstakingly constructed over a period of months, possibly years. And it worked.

  That morning, Lugovoi and Kovtun were bringing something into Britain that customs had failed to detect. Not drugs, or large sums of cash. Something so rare and strange and otherworldly, it had never been seen before in th
is form in Europe or America.

  It was, as Kovtun put it, talking in confidence to a friend in Hamburg, ‘a very expensive poison’. A toxin which had started its surreptitious journey to London from a secret nuclear complex in south-west Siberia. An invisible hi-tech murder weapon.

  Lugovoi and Kovtun were to use it to kill a man named Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko was a Russian émigré who had fled to Britain six years previously. He’d become a persistent pain for the Russian government. He was a remorseless critic of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s secret policeman turned president. By 2006, Litvinenko was increasingly anomalous: back in Russia many sources of opposition has been squashed.

  There was a particular reason why Putin might want Litvinenko dead. Before escaping in 2000, Litvinenko had worked for the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, and the main successor agency to the KGB. Putin himself had been, briefly, his boss. But Litvinenko now had another employer: Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6.

  Her Majesty’s Government had given Litvinenko a fake British passport, an encrypted phone and a salary of £2,000 a month, paid anonymously into his HSBC account and appearing on his bank statement incongruously next to his groceries from Waitrose. He had an MI6 case officer, codenamed ‘Martin’.

  Litvinenko wasn’t exactly James Bond. But he was passing to British intelligence sensitive information about the links between Russian mafia gangs active in Europe and powerful people at the very top of Russian power – including Putin. According to Litvinenko, Russian ministers and their mobster friends were, in effect, part of the same sprawling crime syndicate. A mafia state. It was his contention that a criminal code had replaced the defunct ideology of communism.

  Litvinenko knew about this mafia’s activities in Spain; he was, in the words of one friend, a walking encyclopedia on organised crime. So much so that MI6 loaned him out to colleagues from Spanish intelligence in Madrid.

  All of this made Litvinenko a traitor, and the KGB’s punishment for spies who betrayed their country was understood. From the very beginning of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Moscow had used poisons, bullets, bombs hidden in cakes and other lethal methods to snuff out its ‘enemies’, at home and abroad, from Leon Trotsky to Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident and writer poisoned on Waterloo Bridge in 1978 with an ingenious ricin-tipped umbrella. As Stalin famously observed, ‘No man, no problem.’

  There was a spectrum. It went from killings that were demonstrative, to those where the KGB’s fingerprints were nowhere to be found, however hard you looked. Boris Yeltsin had stayed those methods in the post-communist 1990s; the KGB’s poison factory seemingly mothballed; Russia’s democrats briefly in the ascendant. Now, under Putin, such methods were back. The FSB was Russia’s pre-eminent institution. It was all-powerful, beyond the law, and – like its Leninist predecessors – a purveyor of state terror.

  In the glory days of the Soviet Union, the KGB dispatched professionals and undercover ‘illegals’ to carry out extra-judicial murders – known in the spy trade as ‘wet jobs’. Lugovoi and Kovtun’s mission to London was supposed to be exactly such an operation: ruthless, clinical, undetectable – an iron fist concealed in a velvet glove. It was to be done in the best traditions of the Cheka, the counter-revolutionary police force founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s friend. Dzerzhinsky’s statuette with its cold, pinched features sat in Putin’s office.

  But, despite a resurgence under Putin, Russia’s spy agencies had suffered the same degradation that had blighted all Russian institutions – the presidency, Russia’s parliament or Duma, medicine, science and technology. Critics said the country, despite its great power pretensions, was slowly dying. Its modern assassins were a shambolic lot.

  The idea was that nobody would notice the visiting Russians. Once they had poisoned their victim they would escape back to Moscow, leaving few ripples on the busy surface of London life. Their target, of course, would die horribly. But the Kremlin’s hand would be hidden. The British would mark his death down as a baffling case of gastro-enteritis and those who carried out the murder would return to a life of shadowy anonymity. And, one imagines, reward. The payment for murder, Kovtun hinted, was a Moscow flat.

  It didn’t quite work out like that. Russia’s poisoning project, when finally accomplished, would prompt a British public inquiry costing millions of pounds. One that examined the masses of evidence collected by the Metropolitan Police, from hotels, restaurants, car seats – even from a bronze phallus at a nightclub visited by the assassins in Soho. Scotland Yard was able to reconstruct minute by minute the events leading up to the murder. Its investigation – made public more than eight years later – was one of the most extensive in criminal history.

  Yet despite this exposure there were soon to be other victims – opponents felled in murky circumstances abroad or, like the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, killed outside the very gates of the Kremlin. Moscow would send tanks across borders, start a war in Europe, and annex a large chunk of neighbouring territory. Its proxies – or possibly Russian servicemen – would blow a civilian plane out of the sky.

  The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.

  1

  Mafia State

  Russia, 1988–1999

  ‘You realise, of course, that you can be poisoned here and we cannot really help you?’

  UNKNOWN FSB OFFICER TO ALEXANDER LITVINENKO, BUTYRKA PRISON, MOSCOW, 1999

  In September 2006, in London, the exiled Litvinenko put the finishing touches to a secret report. It was explosive stuff. The subject was Viktor Ivanov, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends and top advisers. Ivanov was a career KGB officer, the head of Russia’s powerful federal anti-narcotics agency, and one of very few people who had ‘direct access’ to the ear of the president.

  Ivanov – so the report alleged – was also a vindictive, sociopathic ‘monster’, with long-standing links to the St Petersburg mafia. This mafia in turn did business with Colombian drug-smugglers. Putin, so the report said, had connections with the same mafia gang in what was Russia’s most criminalised city. He even advised the board of one of the mafia’s front companies.

  The report included colourful details about Ivanov’s biography. According to Litvinenko, he’d been a mediocre spy. While his colleagues were sent on important overseas missions, Ivanov had been shuffled into the human resources department of Leningrad’s KGB office – ‘a sort of dump place’, as the report put it, and ‘the dead and gloomy end of a professional career’. It continued: ‘Other KGB men treated human resources people with contempt.’

  In human resources, however, Ivanov made useful discoveries. He found himself well placed to collect compromising information on his KGB comrades. He could use this kompromat to destroy other people’s careers. Ivanov also developed a set of personal operational rules that would allow him to thrive in the KGB. And to overleap his more able but less crafty co-workers. His two years serving in Afghanistan – invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979 – confirmed to Ivanov the efficacy of these insights.

  Rule one: it was important never to come up with an initiative in the KGB. If you did you’d be asked to implement it and then punished for not doing it successfully. According to the report, Ivanov was silent in meetings. He transformed himself into ‘a sort of professional Mr Nobody’. Rule two: he realised it was necessary to suck up to anybody more senior in the KGB’s hierarchy – to recognise who had ‘more rights in a bureaucratic sense’. The boss was always right.

  Ivanov’s rise coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and followed a late-1980s order from the KGB’s top brass to go into business. At the time, the only people who understood the free market were criminals. Ivanov established relations with the Tambovskaya crime gang and its leader Viktor Kumarin, a villain with a mop of dark hair and a neat moustache. Kumarin was then embroiled in a major turf war with his rival Alexander Malyshev,
and Malyshev’s gangster army.

  The prize was control of St Petersburg’s seaport. The port was a major trans-shipment facility for Colombian drugs, which arrived here before continuing their lucrative journey to Western Europe. According to Litvinenko, Ivanov helped Kumarin wipe out the competition. In return, he got a share of the seaport’s business. The Tambovskaya group structured its criminal activities via a series of subsidiaries and daughter companies; Ivanov set up firms of his own, ‘Block’ and ‘Basis’.

  It was the early 1990s. Another KGB spy helped Ivanov. This was Vladimir Putin. Officially, he was no longer with the kontora – as the KGB styled itself. Instead, he was working for St Petersburg’s new mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. As every recruit knew, though, hardly anybody ever quite leaves the KGB. The two spies, Ivanov and Putin, had something else in common: the KGB had marked them down as second-raters, mediocrities unfit for high office, something they must have resented.

  Litvinenko’s report said: ‘Ironically, while Ivanov was cooperating with the gangsters, he was promoted to the operational department of [the] fight against smuggling and became its boss. His former subordinates described him as a monster boss – rude, authoritative and stubborn. It was a time when the line between the law enforcement officers and professional criminals was often very thin.’

  The next paragraph reads: ‘While Ivanov was cooperating with gangsters, he was protected by Vladimir Putin, who was responsible for foreign economic relations at the office of St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak.’ It adds: ‘Putin was himself not Mr Clean at that time.’