by Luke Harding
Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s director, later claimed that the sacks merely contained sugar, and that they had been left in the basement as a ‘training exercise’. The Duma’s communist opposition queried this. Now, Litvinenko, together with his friend Yuri Felshtinsky in the US, launched his own investigation. The pair concluded the FSB was responsible for the bombings. And that Putin covertly sanctioned the operation – involving the mass slaughter of men, women and children – to provide a casus belli for his pre-planned attack on Chechnya.
Their findings became a controversial book, Blowing Up Russia. It argued that the apartment bombings were the foundational act in Putin’s rise to power, a plot akin to the 1933 burning of the German Reichstag. The war in Chechnya boosted Putin’s public profile and catapulted him into the Kremlin. The Soviet Union’s collapse had put Russia’s spy agencies on the back foot. With Putin’s ascent to the presidency the KGB achieved its ultimate goal: ‘absolute power’. The FSB, Litvinenko argued, is a thoroughly criminalised entity and part of a government– mafia state.
Sometimes the agency makes use of organised criminals; sometimes it eliminates or jails them. Litvinenko gives a gruesome account of the FSB’s special operations in the 1990s – contract killings, shootings, ambushes, abductions, with victims burned alive and their eyes gouged out. The ‘agencies of coercion’ are involved in all sorts of crimes. They include bribe-taking, money-laundering and protection rackets. Their agents are untouchable. They have official ID.
Litvinenko’s knowledge of criminal structures was formidable. In the introduction, Felshtinsky warns the reader that Blowing Up Russia isn’t ‘superficial journalism’ but ‘something between an analytical memoir and a historical monograph’. Dense as it sometimes is, it’s a compelling piece of research. And an empirical one, flowing directly from Litvinenko’s personal knowledge of investigations.
Much of what Litvinenko wrote turned out to be correct. He was the first person to predict what would happen if Putin came to power. According to Felshtinsky, Litvinenko warned in early 2000 that people would be killed and arrested, and Putin’s opponents purged: ‘I can feel this. He will kill all of us as well. Trust me. I know what I’m saying.’ The book was published in 2001. The Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta ran extracts, and a documentary film – Assassination of Russia – followed in 2002.
Claims that the FSB was behind the apartment bombings gained traction. Litvinenko was invited to give video evidence from London to a parliamentary commission which launched its own investigation. Its deputy chairman was a Duma member, Sergei Yushenkov. He recruited a prominent Soviet dissident, Sergei Kovalyov, as chairman. The commission included journalists, lawyers and Tatiana Morozova, the daughter of a woman killed in the explosions. It asked the FSB and prosecutor general for documents, especially in relation to Ryazan.
The FSB’s apparent reply was characteristic. In August 2002, Vladimir Golovlyov, a Duma deputy who had helped to distribute the film, was shot dead. Then, in April 2003, Yushenkov was assassinated outside his Moscow home. Two months later, Yuri Shchekochikhin, a member of the Novaya Gazeta team and a senior Russian MP, was mysteriously poisoned and died in agony.
Felshtinsky had given Shchekochikhin a manuscript copy of Blowing Up Russia for publication. As well as working for the newspaper that serialised the book, Shchekochikhin was also a member of Kovalyov’s commission and had separately investigated FSB corruption. His symptoms – blistering on the skin, dramatic organ failure, coma – suggest he was the victim of a deadly toxin, most probably dioxin. The authorities refused to give Shchekochikhin’s family his medical records. These were classified as a state secret.
The commission’s legal counsel, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested. Trepashkin was Litvinenko’s close friend and had taken part in the 1998 press conference; sacked from the FSB, he became a lawyer. The charges against him were absurd. Road police placed a handgun in his car and then accused him of illegally possessing a firearm. He was further charged with espionage.
An initial print-run of Litvinenko’s book was successfully smuggled into Russia. In 2003, the FSB seized a second shipment and impounded 5,000 copies, on the grounds that it revealed state secrets. This was the first time a book had been banned in Russia since Solzhenitsyn. Nonetheless, it prevailed: in 2002 a poll suggested that 40 per cent of Russians doubted the official version of events. The Kremlin remains twitchy about Blowing Up Russia. In 2015 it was placed on a federal list of so-called ‘extremist’ literature.
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In 2001, the Home Office granted Litvinenko indefinite permission to remain in the UK. This made his position more secure, at least on paper. In fact, there were continuous threats emanating from Moscow. Bukovsky recalls how Litvinenko and Anatoly, then eight, visited him in Cambridge:
‘It was springtime. We were walking in Cambridge, beautiful sight, the birds are singing and suddenly there was a call on his phone, so he answered it and became rather gloomy. By his replies, I understood that it’s some kind of threat. I asked him after the phone call was over: what was it?
‘Litvinenko said: “Some former colleagues from Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB. They said to me: ‘Do you feel yourself safe, secure in Britain? Come on! Remember Trotsky.’”’
Trotsky’s ice-pick murder in Mexico in 1940 was probably the most spectacular extra-territorial assassination of the communist era. Stalin had personally ordered it; the NKVD carried it out. Asked if Litvinenko understood the threat, Bukovsky replied: ‘Oh, definitely.’
The person who called Litvinenko in Cambridge was Ponkin, his old associate, now apparently back informing for the FSB. Ponkin told him that Russia’s prosecutor general was making up a case against him. According to Litvinenko, the prosecutor’s message was unambiguous.
Litvinenko said Ponkin told him that he should return alone to his own country as soon as possible, and then nothing would happen to him. ‘And if you do not return yourself then you will either be brought back in a body bag, or you will be pushed under a train,’ he reported his saying. Litvinenko interpreted the call as an attempt at negotiation. He told Ponkin: ‘This is a very nice offer but I refuse it.’ Ponkin relayed that Marina ‘wouldn’t be touched’.
The warnings continued via different channels. Russian spies traced Litvinenko’s home address in London – at the behest, Litvinenko believed, of FSB chief Patrushev. FSB agents shadowed him in Britain. In March 2002, a diplomat from the Russian embassy, Viktor Kirov, turned up at the family’s flat. He rang the doorbell, demanded to speak to Litvinenko, and said he wanted to give him ‘a package’. Marina refused to let him in. He came back the next morning.
Litvinenko went to his local police station and complained. He told them Kirov was the deputy rezident, that is, the number two in the UK bureau of the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence service. Litvinenko’s solicitor George Menzies wrote to the Home Office asking it to ‘take whatever steps are in your power’ to stop the embassy from harassing the family. The Home Office said there was nothing it could do.
That autumn, Trepashkin emailed from Moscow with gloomy news. He had met Colonel Viktor Shebalin, another former FSB colleague, and a man with vast contacts among serving officers. Trepashkin wrote that Litvinenko’s publication of Blowing Up Russia had sealed his fate:
‘In the course of the conversation, he [Shebalin] said that “you have been sentenced to extrajudicial elimination”, i.e. after the publication of this book, you will definitely be killed. Saying this, he asked me to stress that he would not be involved in this killing. He repeated several times about his non-involvement in the murder. Who specifically was going to eliminate you, Shebalin did not name, but he hinted that such people do exist (so you better write your will in advance).’
Litvinenko gave the email to Bukovsky, who translated it. It was passed to the Metropolitan Police. According to Goldfarb, Litvinenko was fatalistic about this and other threats. Menzies also sent the email to the Home and Foreign and Commonwealth O
ffices. In retrospect his letter seems poignant. Menzies wrote:
‘Our client [Litvinenko] does not consider that there is likely to be any substance behind this threat. That is to say, he considers that whilst he stays in the UK it is extremely unlikely the “sentence” as described would be carried out. However, given the nature of the threat, we felt it proper to draw this matter to your attention and to invite you to remind the Russian Embassy in London of the attitude of Her Majesty’s Government to the contemplation, let alone the carrying out, of such actions.’
The Home Office came back to Menzies with a polite brush-off: ‘We have no remit to intervene with the Russian Embassy in such matters.’
Tony Blair’s government, it appeared, was unwilling to make a fuss on Litvinenko’s behalf. And it’s doubtful that an official British complaint would have caused the intelligence officers serving at the Russian embassy in Kensington, west London, to break into a sweat. In any case, with UK officials seemingly unbothered, secret operations against Litvinenko continued.
Next, Ponkin flew to London with a Russian businessman. Litvinenko agreed to meet them at the Piccadilly branch of Wagamama, a Japanese noodle bar. Ponkin had a suggestion: Litvinenko should assassinate Putin! Ponkin said he had a friend in the Federal Protection Service, General Yuri Kalugin, who could provide details of Putin’s movements two weeks in advance. All Litvinenko needed to do was to get hold of some Chechens to do the hit …
The offer was a classic FSB ‘provocation’, and not a very good one. Its apparent goal was to add to the mountain of ‘evidence’ being gathered against Litvinenko in Moscow. This eventually resulted in Litvinenko being convicted in absentia of treason. Ponkin, meanwhile, delivered another message: ‘Don’t discredit our president. Stop writing articles.’ This was, Litvinenko said, one of the many hints that he should cease his critical journalism and shut up.
Litvinenko did the opposite. He wrote a second book, The Gang from the Lubyanka. It is based on extended interviews with Litvinenko, conducted by a Moscow journalist, Akram Murtazaev, and edited by Goldfarb. Litvinenko was one of the first writers to allege links between Putin and his associates and organised crime groups.
His thesis – at the time novel – was that Russia’s police and intelligence agencies had been perverted. They had started to make money from the very activity they were supposed to investigate, disrupt and prevent. There were other damaging allegations. Litvinenko claimed Putin was a KGB informant at university. And that he’d been on an undercover mission to penetrate Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, his long-term goal being to preserve the power of the FSB and Russia’s security agencies.
Litvinenko and Felshtinsky also continued to pursue the apartment bombings. They flew to Georgia to seek out Achemez Gochiyaev, a Chechen accused of planting one of the bombs. Gochiyaev was hiding in the Pankisi Gorge, a hideout used by Islamist rebels. They had been in contact with Gochiyaev via third parties. They failed to meet him and were forced to leave Georgia in a hurry after they received a message from Berezovsky, warning them he had heard they were in danger. Immediately after they left, their driver, who was working for the Georgian security services, was murdered.
There were further ominous warnings. In 2004, the Litvinenkos heard a noise outside their home in London – and the smell of fire. It was just before midnight. Marina rang the police. The blaze turned out to be small. It emerged that two Chechens had firebombed their house, as well as the neighbouring property of Litvinenko’s new friend, the Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev.
Handsome, groomed and with an immaculately trimmed white beard, Zakayev had begun his career as an actor playing Shakespearean roles in Grozny’s theatre. He fought in the first Chechen war and became foreign minister of Chechnya’s breakaway government. In 2000, after a car accident, he sought treatment in Western Europe, moving to Britain two years later.
Zakayev was the main emissary abroad of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria. By this point Ichkeria no longer existed: Russian troops had recaptured Grozny. Like Litvinenko, Zakayev was a noxious figure for the Russian government, which accused him of terrorism. By the end of the decade most of Chechnya’s independent leaders had been wiped out; Zakayev was the last man standing.
As well as Zakayev, Litvinenko became friends with a curious Italian called Mario Scaramella. Scaramella was the secretary to an Italian parliamentary commission that investigated links between Italian politicians and the KGB. Set up in 2002, the Mitrokhin Commission was politically motivated – an attempt by Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government to smear its enemies, in particular the former and future centre-left prime minister Romano Prodi.
Scaramella claimed that Prodi was a KGB operative. To support this controversial thesis he fed fake documents to Litvinenko in London. Litvinenko certified them as genuine. Whether he did this because he believed them or simply because he was paid to do so, we don’t know. Perhaps it was a combination of both factors. In fact, the Mitrokhin archive itself – based on notes made by a KGB defector – was more damning about other Italian officials at the Moscow embassy, who came out of the investigation far worse. (There was no evidence Prodi was ever KGB, but plenty showing Italian diplomats in Moscow falling into honeytraps and scrapes.)
This was a murky business indeed. Litvinenko was apparently trading in compromising material, for which there is always a ready market in Russia, known as kompromat.
Some of Litvinenko’s campaign work struck his friends as a little loopy. He blamed the 7/7 bombings – a series of coordinated bomb attacks in central London, carried out in 2005 by four British Islamist men – on the FSB. He also wrote in an article for the Chechenpress website that Putin was a paedophile. The incident that inspired it was certainly somewhat bizarre: the president, encountering a group of tourists in the Kremlin, pulled up the shirt of a small boy and kissed him on the tummy. Still, as Goldfarb observed: ‘Putin is probably not a paedophile.’ To Litvinenko’s critics the article was further proof of his sheer public wildness.
Asked later if Litvinenko was a bit of a conspiracy theorist, Goldfarb added: ‘Well, at the time I thought so, but with what has happened since, I have become a conspiracy theorist myself, so it’s very hard to judge.’
In July 2006, the Duma rushed through two new laws that seemed to have a direct bearing on Litvinenko. The new legislation allowed Russia’s spy agencies to eliminate ‘extremists’ anywhere abroad, including in the UK. The definition of ‘extremism’ was also expanded. It now included ‘libellous’ statements about Putin’s administration.
Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky – the former KGB colonel turned high-profile MI6 informant – understood perfectly what these changes meant: that state murder in western countries now had official cover. In a letter to The Times, they wrote: ‘Thus, the stage is set for any critic of Putin’s regime here, especially those campaigning against Russian genocide in Chechnya, to have an appointment with a poison-tipped umbrella. According to a statement by the Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov, the blacklist of potential targets is already compiled.’
Russia was about to host the G8 summit in St Petersburg. Western leaders should be prepared ‘to share responsibility for these murders’ or not go, Bukovsky and Gordievsky wrote. Needless to say, there was no boycott.
Litvinenko’s activities in exile were multifarious: campaigner, journalist, security consultant, investigator. In London he gave interviews and attended public meetings. The common thread that linked these personas was Litvinenko’s hatred of Putin, the man who had put him in jail, and of the FSB. He was the Russian president’s most persistent and ebullient critic.
One important activity, however, remained hidden.
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The bank entries speak of middle-class normality. Shopping trips to Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, direct debits for Sky Digital, and London’s congestion charge. The account is with HSBC. Its holders are ‘Mr Edwin Redwald Carter & Mrs Maria Anna Carter’. The balance in 2006 fluctua
tes between £969.02 and £8,076.36. The Carters don’t appear to be especially well-off. Nor are they broke.
In fact, Litvinenko’s bank statements tell us a lot. They give a picture of a typical, health-conscious family (purchases from The Natural Choice), with one child and a car. The Litvinenkos were living at 140 Osier Crescent, a terraced house of yellow brick with a small balcony and a parking spot. The modern estate is in Muswell Hill, in the north London borough of Haringey.
The bank statements root the Litvinenkos in their area. There are debits of £5.40 from Transport for London in East Finchley and Highgate – Litvinenko’s regular off-peak travel-card. Visits too to The Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill. And Japanese food: Yo! Sushi at Gatwick Airport and Itsu, Litvinenko’s favourite restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. The odd small sum of money comes in from time to time – a £75 payment from the David Lloyd centre, where Marina taught a kids’ class in ballroom dancing.
One regular credit entry is unusual, though.
On the 26th of each month, Litvinenko received an anonymous payment. It appears on the statement simply as ‘Transfer’, from an unnamed bank account. The account ends with the digits ‘3698’. The sum in sterling is always the same: ‘2000.00’. The paying organisation appears – one might think – to be rather bashful.
The sum of £2,000 found in among the groceries and trips to Tesco came from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6.
British intelligence didn’t recruit Litvinenko in Moscow. Nor was he ever a spy in Russia: his career in the KGB and FSB involved detective work against criminals, not intelligence. When he arrived in the UK at the end of 2000 seeking political asylum, Litvinenko told Home Office officials truthfully: ‘I didn’t work in intelligence and I didn’t work against England.’ He added: ‘I have as yet had nothing to do with British intelligence.’
