by Luke Harding
This was something of an understatement. Links between Putin and the criminal underworld turned up in all sorts of places. The report quoted leaked tape-recordings made in 2000 of Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s then-president, who said his own spy agency had got hold of documents concerning a German company named SPAG that was a front for criminal activities. Its main job was ‘laundering [the] money of a Colombian drug cartel by buying out real estate in St Petersburg’. Kumarin, the gangster, sat on the board of a SPAG daughter company. Putin, in the mayor’s office, was SPAG’s adviser.
Gangsters, cocaine, the KGB, spies, sleaze, millions of dollars in cash – all of it on Europe’s doorstep, as Russia morphed in the late twentieth century from communist dictatorship to a new and murky form of hyper-capitalism. It was, as the report frankly put it, a ‘weird time’. The masters of this changing universe were organised criminals and their upwardly mobile friends in Russian politics. What Ivanov and Putin were allegedly doing wasn’t unusual for the standards of the time: taking a cut here, a bribe there. Everybody did that, given a chance.
What was unusual was that they would go on to rule the Russian Federation.
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Litvinenko’s 2006 report amounted to an eight-page hand grenade, tossed into the control room of Russian power. It was written for RISC management, a British security company based in London. RISC specialised in due diligence. This meant carrying out extensive checks on Russian firms and prominent individuals at the behest of western businesses. Such reports involved a mixture of official and more sensitive secret sources.
Litvinenko provided the detail on the St Petersburg mafia and its activities in the 1990s. Another exile actually wrote the report, a former KGB major called Yuri B. Shvets. Shvets was everything that Putin and Ivanov weren’t. He was an intelligent and enterprising secret agent blessed with literary gifts. Tall, handsome, and with a sweeping mane of dark black hair, he looked every inch the romantic spy abroad. The KGB had recruited him in 1980, inviting him to join its prestigious external intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate.
Shvets had studied at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow. It was, he wrote, a surprisingly liberal institution by the standards of the late USSR, which attracted young men and women from ninety different countries. He described himself in his memoir as ‘neither a convinced communist nor a dissident’. Not all of the university’s students were so politically ambivalent: one of Shvets’s predecessors was a Marxist-Leninist from Venezuela named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Sanchez, Shvets wrote later, was not your typical student, spending most of his time away and abroad. He would become better known as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal.
After graduation, Shvets spent two years at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Intelligence Institute. The KGB training school was based in a pleasant forest in Yurlovo, not far from Moscow. There, he said, he was taught the secrets of the trade. He learned from legendary spymasters who had worked with the Cold War’s most famous western defectors – the Rosenbergs, who stole the US’s atomic secrets, and the upper-class Cambridge spy ring, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
Shvets also did a two-month training stint with a Spetsnaz or special forces unit. He parachuted from planes, learned how to handle a variety of weapons and to plant mines. He was taught how to blow up bridges and to interrogate enemy prisoners. He learned guerrilla tactics. He was instructed not to think or query the state. Shvets recalled how one wiry paratrooper colonel told him: ‘Your duty is to execute, at any cost, any task assigned by our motherland.’
One of Shvets’s classmates at the KGB academy was Putin. Putin had grown up in a working-class family in Leningrad; an older brother died during the Nazi siege of the city; his grandfather was Lenin’s cook. As a teenager he learned judo to defend himself from neighbourhood toughs. From an early age he aspired to join the KGB, inspired – he later said – by the Soviet TV spy drama The Shield and the Sword. He studied law. The KGB recruited him in 1975 after he finished Leningrad University.
Putin’s world view reflected the a priori thinking of the KGB. The agency was suspicious, paranoid and prone to conspiratorial reasoning. Putin was convinced that the US and the western world were engaged in an unsleeping plot against the Soviet Union.
Virtually all the graduates from the KGB institute got jobs afterwards in the first directorate and were sent to foreign ‘residencies’, as the KGB termed its covert offices abroad. For reasons which are mysterious, Putin didn’t make the grade, Shvets believed. ‘Putin belonged to the 1 per cent of losers. He was sent back to St Petersburg,’ he said later. Others say Putin went back to his home city and was given the task of recruiting foreigners on Soviet soil. In 1984, Putin did eventually get a foreign assignment. After a second year-long stint at the institute he was moved to Dresden, in the GDR.
Between 1985 and 1987, Shvets found himself in the more glamorous setting of Washington, under journalistic cover at the Soviet embassy. He was a correspondent for TASS, the Russian news agency. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union and, in particular, the KGB. By the 1980s, the KGB had virtually no sources in the west, he thought; instead, its operatives churned out a series of meaningless reports for incompetent and risk-averse bureaucrat-generals back at the ‘centre’ in Moscow.
Shvets quit the KGB in 1990 and sought political asylum in the US. From there he published a lively espionage memoir, Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy In America, which described his successful recruitment of an unnamed American agent, codenamed ‘Socrates’. He began writing due-diligence reports for American corporations seeking to cash in on the new post-communist Russia.
One of the skills Shvets learned at KGB school was analysis: how to craft and present the perfect intelligence report. Often it would include a psychological pen-portrait of a target. The best of these telegrams were done with swift, compressed strokes.
The Litvinenko–Shvets dossier on Ivanov fitted this model. Under a heading titled ‘personal characteristics’, it described Ivanov as ‘a very complex man with [a] difficult personality’. It went on to say: ‘He is masterful at understanding the balance of forces around him, identifies the latent leaders (very important in the surreal world of Russian bureaucracy) and is highly capable of using his knowledge to his personal benefit.’ If offended, Ivanov could become your ‘worst enemy’. He had a ‘vindictive’ streak and would try to identify and then ‘punish’ anyone who leaked ‘negative information’ about him.
It ended: ‘Many representatives of the new generation of the Russian leaders view Ivanov as a remnant of the past who fits more to Joseph Stalin times than to the modern environment. A source who worked with Ivanov told us that Ivanov apparently has a latent complex of inferiority. He apparently realises that he is not intellectually smart and compensates this by Byzantine-style intrigue, in which he feels himself on his turf.’
Litvinenko and Shvets were a good team. Shvets had a wide network of intelligence sources inside Russia who provided him with real information. Litvinenko, meanwhile, had worked for the FSB in the 1990s in the department tasked with fighting organised crime. He had direct knowledge of its operations. Litvinenko’s English was poor, but Shvets, a long-term resident of the US, could write in fluent sentences. They worked together via email and phone calls from America to Britain.
On 19 September 2006, Litvinenko gave the eight-page report to RISC. Litvinenko also passed a copy of the report to another man, a Moscow-based business partner whom he had no reason to mistrust: one Andrei Lugovoi. Doing this was clearly dangerous, but Litvinenko had known the wealthy businessman for over ten years, had been working closely with him for the previous twelve months and believed him to be trustworthy. They had similar backgrounds: both were ex-KGB, moved in Berezovsky’s circle and apparently shared grievances against the Russian state. Indeed, Litvinenko had previously commissioned Lugovoi to write his own version of a dossier on Viktor Ivanov. When it arrived from Moscow, this second Lugovoi
report was ‘trash’, RISC felt – inferior to Shvets’s classy document and a mere half-page of A4. Litvinenko handed Lugovoi Shvets’s version while Lugovoi was on one of his frequent business trips to London to show him how it might be done.
Clearly, if the Litvinenko–Shvets report ever fell into the hands of the Kremlin it would provoke anger. Serious anger. Branding Ivanov a vindictive monster was one thing. But implicating Russia’s president in shady deals with the St Petersburg mafia and Colombian drug smugglers was another. There were plenty of general reasons why the Kremlin might want Litvinenko dead. But this report on its own was certainly a strong enough motive to have him killed, British detectives were to conclude.
Shvets claims that Ivanov personally lost $10–15 million in kickbacks after the western company which commissioned the report read it with horror and pulled out of a major deal with Russia. The name of the company has not been revealed. Amongst his other business interests and his KGB role, Ivanov is chairman of Aeroflot, the Russian state carrier. (He denies wrongdoing.)
When Lugovoi flew back to Moscow, the FSB detained him at the airport. According to Shvets, they found Litvinenko’s report. By accident or design? We don’t know. Was this the moment that Lugovoi was recruited by the FSB, forced to do their dirty work in order to avoid punishment for his role in handling the report? Or – more likely, perhaps – was Lugovoi working for the FSB from the start and this was therefore a deliberate betrayal?
Either way, the contents of the report were passed back to the Kremlin. The nature of any subsequent conversation between Ivanov and Putin is unknown. But, weeks later, Lugovoi was on his way back to London with his partner Kovtun, this time in the role of assassin – on a mission to kill the author.
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The origins of Litvinenko’s own bitter personal feud with Putin go back to the 1990s, and to Litvinenko’s career as an FSB officer. Those who knew him characterise Litvinenko as mercurial, dedicated and obsessive when on a case – a good sleuth or operativnik in an organisation riddled with wrong-doing.
Litvinenko had plenty of antecedents. Think Arkady Renko, the honest Soviet policeman who features in Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb would liken him to the eponymous hero of Serpico, the 1973 movie starring Al Pacino, in which a decent cop goes undercover to expose corruption inside his own force. Others would bend the rules, cheat, lie. Litvinenko refused. He would stick to the truth and the law.
Another friend and fellow exile, Viktor Suvorov, likened Litvinenko to a different literary character, from Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers. Like everyone who knew him, Suvorov referred to Litvinenko as Sasha. ‘Sasha was pure D’Artagnan,’ Suvorov said. ‘He was tall, handsome, sporty and open.’ He added: ‘He met so many real criminals. He understood really bad people, how bad they were. And yet he was very optimistic. He still believed in humankind.’
Litvinenko was born on 12 December 1962 in the Russian city of Voronezh. He had something of a fractured childhood. His parents, Walter and Svetlana, divorced when he was a baby; he grew up with his grandparents in the city of Nalchik, in Russia’s wild north Caucasus, close to the mountains. In between he had stints living with his mother in Moscow and an aunt in a town called Morozovsk. He went to secondary school in Nalchik.
His grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call the Second World War. A month before he was due to be called up for national service at the age of seventeen, Litvinenko enlisted in the army. Between 1981 and 1985 he attended a Soviet military academy in Ordzhonikidze, now called Vladikavkaz. Vladikavkaz, in north Ossetia, is Russia’s gateway to the Caucasus: a place of rugged beauty, hillside fortresses and heavy skies prone to mist and rain.
In 1988, Litvinenko got transferred to a special division of the ministry of internal affairs. Here, in Moscow, the KGB hired him. Litvinenko began work in military counter-intelligence. In 1991, he joined the department that combated organised crime, corruption and terrorism. With the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 the KGB ceased to exist and Litvinenko’s unit became part of the new FSK. In 1993 the FSK was renamed the FSB.
When still at military school and aged just twenty, Litvinenko married Natalia. He became the father of two small children, Sonya and Alexander. The relationship failed and by 1993 the couple were estranged. That summer – on 16 June – Litvinenko met his future second wife Marina, a ballroom dancing teacher. She had been married before too. It was her birthday party.
Marina was slim and attractive, with short blonde hair, boyishly cut, high cheekbones and clear blue eyes. She cut a gamine figure; her clothes smart and understated verging on conservative; earrings a single stud. I got to know her much later. What makes Marina extraordinary is her warm personality. She is someone of high emotional intelligence: concerned for others, friendly, affectionate, tactile. And – this came later too – courageous.
Before the party, two of Marina’s close friends had been receiving threats from some former business partners over a ballroom dancing trip to Sri Lanka that had gone wrong. Frightened, the couple went to a police station. There they met Litvinenko – a senior FSB officer – who took the unusual step of offering them his personal protection. Marina’s friends were impressed. Litvinenko struck them as professional and calm. They brought him along to Marina’s birthday celebration.
Litvinenko was meant to be on holiday but he worked on the case flat-out. This was characteristic: once gripped by an assignment Litvinenko would often not sleep for three days. After rows with Natalia he moved out and lodged with his mother. That autumn he and Marina began living together. In summer 1994 they had a son, Anatoly; they married a few months later. It would be a happy partnership.
Three months later, in December 1994, Boris Yeltsin launched an attack on the rebel republic of Chechnya, in what was to become the First Chechen War. The goal was to wipe out Chechnya’s bid for independence. The Kremlin anticipated quick, decisive victory. Instead, the invasion turned into a bloody disaster for Moscow, with the Russian tank force sent on New Year’s Eve to re-take Chechnya’s capital Grozny destroyed and the army humiliated.
Litvinenko had grown up in the Caucasus; he understood the mentality of southern Russia’s majority Muslim population. In 1995, the FSB sent him back to Nalchik, to offer communications support to the forces fighting close by. At first Litvinenko supported Yeltsin’s war. Gradually, however, he grew disillusioned – with the Russian army’s brutal methods and with the president’s political goals, seemingly driven by imperial pique.
In January 1996, the Chechen guerrilla leader Salman Raduyev raided the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan, near the Chechen border. His fighters seized the local hospital. They took 3,000 people hostage. After negotiations, Raduyev was allowed to return to Chechnya, with his fighters and 160 hostages. His convoy got as far as the last village before the border, Pervomaiskoye. A Russian helicopter gunship opened fire on the lead bus; the Chechens took cover in nearby cottages.
Litvinenko was sent with his FSB team into what was to become a hellish siege. Russian forces surrounded the village for five days – then bombarded it with tank fire and Grad missiles. On the ninth day of the crisis, the surviving rebels with their hostages broke out of the encirclement at night, fleeing across a field under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. At least twenty-nine civilians and 200 combatants from both sides perished.
According to Marina, the slaughter had a profound affect on Litvinenko. The themes were familiar: the Russian state’s indifference to civilian casualties, and the incompetence of its military command. He returned to Moscow in poor shape. ‘He looked very bad, his hands and feet were frozen, and he needed a week to recover,’ Marina said. His sympathy for Chechens and their struggle against the centre grew; it would later become a journalistic obsession and a future area of conflict with Putin.
During this same period, Litvinenko met and became friendly with a man named Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was a mathemat
ician and academic who had gone into business as the Soviet Union collapsed. Like a determined object pushing at a tough membrane, he had penetrated Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. He published the president’s memoirs and became friends with Yeltsin’s influential daughter Tatyana Yumasheva.
Berezovsky was Jewish, clever, unscrupulous, self-promoting, ambitious, solipsistic, chameleon-like – a whirlwind of restless energy and speech. Asked years later what the appeal was of being with Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb – who worked for him – answered simply: ‘It was fun.’
This was a moment in which Yeltsin, his poll ratings dismal ahead of Russia’s 1996 presidential election, made a deal with a small group of businessmen. These were the oligarchs. They agreed to get Yeltsin re-elected. In return the president, in effect, sold them Russian state assets at crazily low prices. Berezovsky acquired an interest in a major oil firm, Sibneft, together with a young oil trader called Roman Abramovich.
As Berezovsky told it, his rise to power and influence made him enemies. Especially inside the former KGB. Russia’s spy agencies were on the back foot following the KGB’s failed coup in August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev. Berezovsky said he urged Yeltsin to rein in the new FSB, and to debar former KGB operatives from high office. Russia needed to go through the same ‘lustration’ process that east Germany and the new Czech Republic went through after the fall of communism, he said.
The FSB, however, had plans of its own. Its goal was to regain the KGB’s lost supremacy. As Berezovsky later put it to British detectives: ‘KGB never disappeared. They were shocked because of [democratic] revolution in Russia. Step by step they start[ed] to understand what happened and to get back control.’ Yeltsin, he said, did ‘strong damage’ to them, but ‘nevertheless they were trying all the time to organise’. The FSB ‘didn’t like’ him, he said.
