by Luke Harding
Back at home in Muswell Hill, Litvinenko felt mildly unwell. He threw up, just once. His vomiting spasm was due to exposure to radiation – just from being near the poison. Litvinenko thought little of this episode. He had unwittingly survived his first encounter with polonium and an attempt to kill him.
*
At 1 a.m. the would-be killers returned to the Best Western Hotel. At some point that day or the next Lugovoi handled polonium in the privacy of his room, 107. He appears to have transferred it here from one container to another. And to have disposed of it down the bathroom sink.
We know this because Lugovoi’s plughole showed exceptionally high alpha radiation readings of 1,500 counts per second. There are lower readings elsewhere in the bathroom, and in the bedroom next door. Kovtun’s room, 306, is also heavily contaminated. There are 1,500 cps on a chair and coat-hanger, with lower readings from a radiator and phone directory.
The two Russians had booked into the Best Western for two nights, with Lugovoi paying in advance. The next day, 17 October, they abruptly checked out and took a taxi to the Parkes Hotel in Beaufort Gardens, Knightsbridge. Lugovoi explained the switch by saying he ‘didn’t like the condition of the rooms’. The real reason, most probably, was to distance himself from the poison, which he had efficiently tipped down the bathroom u-bend.
The Parkes Hotel was the scene of two encounters, both blackly comic. Front office manager Giuliana Rondini was on duty that afternoon. At 2 p.m. two guests walked in: Lugovoi, wearing a beige or brown casual-type jacket with a zip at the front, and Kovtun, in a grey jacket and black round-necked T-shirt. They told her they had moved hotels because their previous one was ‘overbooked’. Rondini checked them into the hotel’s last available rooms, 23 and 25.
The Russians returned to the lobby ten minutes later. Lugovoi asked Rondini where she was from. When she replied Sardinia he said he’d been there, to the capital Cagliari. They chatted. She asked if they needed a restaurant for the evening. Lugovoi then made a request. Was there was somewhere fun for later where he and Kovtun ‘might meet some girls’?
Rondini was used to dealing tactfully with these kinds of delicate enquiries from lonesome international travellers. She recommended a place just across the street – 1 Beaufort Gardens. ‘It was well known with girls. It was a brothel,’ Rondini said.
Failing that, she suggested an Italian restaurant, Pizza Pomodoro, in Beauchamp Place. Rondini said: ‘It was a place where you could go and have a pizza but also have fun and pick up girls. Pizza with extras, I would say.’
Meanwhile, a regular Australian guest staying at the hotel spotted Kovtun and Lugovoi in the lift. She told Andrea Furlani, who worked at reception, that they had struck her as strange.
She asked them: ‘Where are you from?’
Lugovoi replied in English: ‘Russia.’
She then said in tones of ice-breaking amusement: ‘Are you guys from the KGB?’
The two Russians started backwards. They looked horror-struck. Neither of them responded. The lift continued its descent in awkward silence. Later that day the Australian saw Kovtun and Lugovoi again in the hotel lobby and said a friendly hello. They ignored her. The pair must have been confused. Was this an uncomfortable coincidence? Was the Australian a spy? A British agent? Fuck!
At 6 p.m. Lugovoi and Kovtun met Litvinenko again outside the Oxford Street branch of Nike. They visited the offices of RISC Management. Daniel Quirke, one of RISC’s investigators, took them into the fifth-floor boardroom.
According to Litvinenko, Kovtun produced a small minidisc. Quirke fetched his laptop. There was a beep. Kovtun inserted the disc and typed in a four-digit access code. This program, apparently, enabled Kovtun to pick a telephone number in Russia and to listen in. He played two audio files. The room was filled with the sound of Russian voices; the quality was crisp and clean.
Quirke was surprised. It appeared Lugovoi and Kovtun were keen to monetise information collected by eavesdropping, by selling it potentially to British clients. The legal dimension didn’t feature. ‘When he [Quirke] saw it, his eyes started out of his head,’ Litvinenko said. Kovtun, it appeared, had good technical skills.’ He took out his own computer and demonstrated it himself. Andrei [Lugovoi] doesn’t know how to use this kind of stuff,’ Litvinenko added.
Afterwards, the three Russians took a taxi to Chinatown and went for dinner. Nothing happened to Litvinenko’s tea. Lugovoi paid the bill on his card and they went on to a pub.
Recollecting their conversation, Litvinenko said: ‘They found a place in a corner, ordered some beer and started to order for me. But I said, no, guys, I can’t stay in such dirty places like that.’ Litvinenko told the police he didn’t like the noise or ‘the prostitutes’. He took the 134 bus home.
About 11.30 p.m. Lugovoi rang Litvinenko to say that he was missing out on fun times. He said that he and Kovtun had hired a rickshaw and that they were going on an hour-long joyride through central London – two off-duty assassins enjoying themselves amid the bright lights of Soho. They trundled past red double-decker buses, crowded bars, West End theatreland. Their rickshaw driver was Polish. He spoke ‘not bad’ Russian. It appears they asked again about girls. The driver recommended a private members’ place in Jermyn Street popular with big-spending Russians.
This was Hey Jo’s, an erotic club founded in 2005 by a former fruit-and-veg stall owner from Essex called Dave West. It featured mirrored walls, frilly pink cubicles, waitresses dressed as naughty nurses, and a bronze phallus. There was a dance-floor and a Russian-themed restaurant, Abracadabra, with silver tables. The bordello theme extended to the bathrooms, where water spouted from penis-shaped gold taps.
Lugovoi and Kovtun spent two hours at Hey Jo’s, leaving at 3 a.m. Detectives were able to piece together where they’d been. They found traces of radiation in cubicle nine – on the backrest and cushions. There were low levels on a bench, a table in the restaurant, and on a door in the gents’. No polonium was found on the phallus, also tested. The floor was clean. Apparently the men from the KGB didn’t dance.
Even in these promising surroundings, their side-mission to pick up women was unfruitful. The next morning, checking out of the Parkes Hotel for the flight back to Moscow, Rondini asked Lugovoi how they had got on.
His reply was uncharacteristically honest. ‘We were not lucky that night,’ he told her.
*
Lugovoi’s conversations back in Moscow following his first unsuccessful attempt to poison Litvinenko can only be imagined. In short, he had failed. ‘Probably the chief yelled at them and said they weren’t good enough. It meant they had to go back and get another vial [of polonium],’ Goldfarb suggested.
The upshot was that within days Lugovoi returned to the UK, this time alone, taking with him another container of radioactive poison. He flew on 25 October from Moscow to London, on British Airways flight 875. He sat in business class, seat 6K. He arrived shortly after midnight at the Sheraton Park Lane, a grandly positioned hotel overlooking Piccadilly, with a frontage of black classical pillars. Inside, the hotel was rather worn. Lugovoi stayed in room 848, on the eighth floor.
After six years in Britain, Litvinenko was careful about security. He was akkuratny – a Russian word meaning neat, careful, punctual, exact, thorough. As a former FSB officer he practised good operational security. He didn’t discuss sensitive matters on the telephone. He told Quirke that he was concerned about London, describing it as such an open city and a place where people from Russia can come and do anything they want.
Despite these precautions and the litany of death threats in the past, Litvinenko trusted Lugovoi, who had now returned for a second time to kill him. Why?
For one thing, there was a sense of shared history. Both were ex-KGB. Both, seemingly, had spent time in Russian jails on false charges, victims of state injustice. In 2001, Lugovoi served eighteen months behind bars after apparently trying to free Berezovsky’s friend Nikolai Glushkov from jail. Glushkov was later rel
eased and fled to the UK in 2005. The Russian authorities had accused him and Berezovsky of embezzling funds from Aeroflot.
Glushkov was never convinced that Lugovoi actually went to prison. It’s an open question when precisely he began cooperating with the FSB. Some believe it was as early as 2001 at the time of his dubious ‘jailing’, and that the spy agency gave him a long-term mission to penetrate enemy circles in London. Others think that Lugovoi was forced to turn assassin after the Kremlin got hold of Litvinenko’s Ivanov report in the autumn of 2006.
Certainly other compatriots trusted Lugovoi. The morning after his return to London, Lugovoi set off in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to an estate near Leatherhead, Surrey. His driver, Bruno Bonnetti, remembers him sitting on the back seat, talking in Russian on his mobile. They pulled up outside a palatial home; an iron security gate swung open. A tall man with a white moustache wearing a jogging suit, and in his early fifties, appeared. The man embraced Lugovoi. This was Badri Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian billionaire and associate of Berezovsky who had assisted in Litvinenko’s escape. Nearby, another chauffeur was washing the oligarch’s Maybach car.
Patarkatsishvili had hired Lugovoi in the 1990s to be head of security at his ORT TV channel. According to his friend Yuli Dubov, the Georgian later loaned Lugovoi $7 million. Generally speaking, the tycoon thought that ex-FSB officers made bad businessmen. Nonetheless, Patarkatsishvili told police that Lugovoi was a nice bloke, hard-working, a good employee. Lugovoi and Patarkatsishvili talked for some hours, sitting at the bottom of the garden in the gazebo. Lugovoi tried to persuade Patarkatsishvili to come in as an investor in a new water business. He declined.
‘Badri never liked slaves,’ Dubov said, reflecting on Lugovoi’s charm. ‘Lugovoi was a very good guy, nicelooking and nice-talking. He gave the impression of being absolutely on the level, straightforward, one of us.’
Undoubtedly, Patarkatsishvili thought more favourably of Lugovoi than he did of Litvinenko – someone, in his view, ‘who had crazy ideas about Russian politics’ and who was ‘obsessed by the FSB’, as a result of his unhappy career. The police later impounded Lugovoi’s radioactive Mercedes.
On his return from Surrey, Lugovoi met Litvinenko in his hotel. They sat in the ground-floor Palm Court, an afternoon tea room furnished in high art deco style, with Chinese screen paintings, vases and lamps. Litvinenko produced two Orange SIM cards so that he and Lugovoi had a secure way of communicating. As ever, Litvinenko drank tea, from a silver teapot. Lugovoi ordered three glasses of red wine and a Cuban cigar.
According to Lugovoi, Litvinenko revealed here that he worked for Spanish intelligence. He suggested that Lugovoi accompany him the next month on a joint trip to Spain. In Madrid they’d meet Litvinenko’s Russian-speaking Spanish handler, Jorge. It’s unclear if Litvinenko was acting under MI6’s direction here or simply wanted to present Lugovoi to his Spanish contacts as a useful Moscow-based source.
Litvinenko also had another important appointment. He was due on 8 November to meet Grinda, the Spanish public prosecutor. It would be their first encounter. All Litvinenko’s previous dealings had been with the Spanish secret service, which fed evidence to his prosecutors.
For Litvinenko, this was a serious escalation in his war with the Kremlin. It meant he was willing to testify in open court about the activities of the Russian mafia – and its friends in government. It’s unclear when Lugovoi learned of the planned meeting. According to Goldfarb, it may have triggered Moscow’s frantic efforts to kill Litvinenko, and to silence him as a witness. ‘That gives you a motive,’ Goldfarb said. Grinda was more circumspect, later saying he didn’t believe it was the cause.
Either way, this was the moment for Lugovoi to poison Litvinenko again. For unknown reasons, Lugovoi failed to deploy the latest vial of polonium he had brought. One possible explanation is that the Palm Court bar had video cameras, which Lugovoi would have seen. Or perhaps he suspected he was being watched. Did the British have him under counter-surveillance? (The answer – no.) It’s possible he had got fresh orders from Moscow. Either way, Lugovoi decided to abort the operation.
This left him with a problem: what to do with the poison?
Lugovoi’s solution was simple. In his hotel room he tipped the polonium away down the bathroom sink again, this time mopping it up with a couple of towels. He left the towels for the cleaner. And he appeared to have dumped the container in the white pedal bin next to the lavatory.
When scientists later tested Lugovoi’s hotel room on the eighth floor they walked into a scene from an atomic horror story. The door to Lugovoi’s room was highly contaminated. It showed full-scale deflection and a reading of more than 30,000 counts per second. Inside, there was further contamination – on the carpet, guest directory, and telephone book in a cupboard.
The situation in the bathroom, white-painted and with a tiled floor, was even worse. The inside of the pedal bin registered another full-scale deflection, with 30,000-plus. There was radiation everywhere: on the wall under the sink, the floor and bath, plus another massive reading from the bathroom door.
The two scientists wearing protective gear gazed at their instruments incredulously. They asked to be withdrawn from the room. The team was stood down on safety grounds.
Amazingly, two months later, detectives located the towels that Lugovoi had chucked away. They had ended up stuck in a laundry chute in the hotel’s basement. A three-foot-by-three-foot metal service tube ran the full height of the building. At its bottom was a mountain of unwashed sheets and towels.
Lugovoi’s bath towel was found in a green laundry bag on a shelf. His hand towel was discovered at the base of the chute.
The levels of radiation were so alarming that the towels were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the UK government nuclear facility. The contamination was massive. The bath towel gave a reading of 6,000 counts per second, or 130,000 becquerels per square centimetre. (The unit of radioactivity is named after Henri Becquerel, the French physicist who shared a Nobel prize with Marie and Pierre Curie.)
The most extreme object, though, was Lugovoi’s white hand towel. The initial reading came in as full-scale deflection, greater than 10,000 counts per second. Retested at Aldermaston, it yielded an astonishing result: in excess of 17 million becquerels per square centimetre. To give an idea of context, the equivalent of 10–30 million becquerels absorbed into an adult male’s blood would be likely to be fatal within one month.
The towel was the single most radioactive object recovered by Scotland Yard during its decade-long inquiry. Probably the most radioactive towel in history.
4
The German Waiter
Hamburg, Germany, 1996–2006
‘I have a very expensive poison’
DMITRY KOVTUN TO HIS FRIEND D3 IN HAMBURG,
30 OCTOBER 2006
Dmitry Kovtun had big dreams. Dreams of a better life in the west, of a well-paying job, of a successful career. One day the fantasy took the shape of a vodka factory. Kovtun would be the owner. The factory would be based in Moscow. It would produce vodka with a new and revolutionary type of seal! Another dream was rather more saucy. Kovtun would star in movies. Not just any old movies: specifically, porn movies, with Kovtun playing the role of the stud. Or soft-core magazines. The sex industry would bring him cash, lots of it, maybe fame as well.
Somehow, though, reality never quite matched up to Kovtun’s expectations of it. For him, at least, it was a disappointment. The glamorous career never quite materialised. He didn’t get the breaks. The same could not be said for his silver-tongued friend Andrei Lugovoi. Everything Lugovoi touched turned to gold. But perhaps some of Lugovoi’s good fortune might rub off on him?
Kovtun first met Lugovoi in 1978 or 1979. The boys grew up in the same building where his family and Lugovoi’s family had been granted flats at the same time. ‘Our fathers were friends and worked together at the army general HQ of the USSR armed forces,’ Kovtun said. ‘We were p
upils at different schools – I am one year older than Lugovoi – but we spent a great deal of time together as children, visited each other, exchanged books.’
The two families had a shared military story. Kovtun’s father Vadim was a high-ranking officer. (His mother, who lives in Moscow, is a vet.) Lugovoi’s family had a record stretching back to the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. Lugovoi’s father was a colonel in the Soviet army; his grandfather fought with the Red Army against the Nazis in the battle for Berlin in 1945. A brother worked on Russian nuclear submarines. Lugovoi would make much of this patriotic tradition.
It was inevitable that Kovtun and Lugovoi would don uniforms too. In 1982, Kovtun joined an elite Soviet military command academy in Moscow; Lugovoi followed the next year. ‘We saw each other regularly and associated on friendly terms while studying there,’ Kovtun said. He was trained as an engineer for wheeled and tracked vehicles; a practical course took him to Murmansk oblast in Russia’s frozen north; a few old snaps show him there in the sub-arctic.
In 1986, Kovtun graduated as second lieutenant. He was sent to Czechoslovakia and then to Parchim, a town with a large Soviet airfield surrounded by the countryside and forests of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in East Germany. Times were changing, though. Back home, Mikhail Gorbachev was trying to reform a tottering USSR. Lugovoi had stayed in Moscow and got a job as a Kremlin bodyguard with the KGB’s ninth directorate. As ever, his assignment was starrier than Kovtun’s.
When the Berlin Wall came down Kovtun was stuck in Parchim, seemingly on the wrong side of history as the communist bloc fell apart. In 1990, he began dating a Russian girl from home, Inne Hohne; they’d met at a Moscow hotel while he was back on leave. In 1991, they married in Russia. Inne, together with her young daughter from a previous relationship, moved with Kovtun to East Germany.
