by Luke Harding
Britain’s David Cameron once took a tough stance on the Kremlin. In 2008, as Russian troops overran Georgia, Cameron flew to the capital Tbilisi to show solidarity with Saakashvili. At the time, Cameron was leader of the opposition Conservatives. It was a piece of opportunism that embarrassed the UK’s then prime minister Gordon Brown. Cameron called for Russia’s suspension from the G8 and offered a memorable line: ‘Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.’
After entering Downing Street in 2010, Cameron’s attitude towards the Russian government softened. Brown had refused to meet with Putin following Litvinenko’s murder. Cameron, by contrast, appeared keen to move on from the polonium episode. Britain still sought the extradition of Lugovoi and Kovtun, of course. But, Cameron indicated, these bilateral differences could be ‘negotiated around’ and shouldn’t prevent cooperation in other areas, especially trade.
In foreign affairs there is always a balance to be struck between national self-interest and values. There is Realpolitik versus Moralpolitik, with foreign-policy realists pitted against liberals who believe in universal rights. Under Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition, the UK’s foreign policy moved decisively towards the first camp. It showed new understanding towards regimes that had scant regard for human rights.
In theory, of course, London still believed in principles. The BBC’s political comedy Yes Minister expressed the gap between political reality and lofty aspiration well. The much-loved series features Jim Hacker as the well-meaning but inept prime minister and his Machiavellian cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby.
One exchange springs to mind:
JIM HACKER: Humphrey, are you saying that Britain should not support law and justice?
SIR HUMPHREY APPLEBY: Of course we should, prime minister. We just shouldn’t let it affect our foreign policy.
Twenty-first-century Britain was a post-imperial, postindustrial island of middling importance. Its role in the world was … what exactly? Unlike the US, it was no longer a superpower, though its government still nurtured the fantasy that Britain punched above its weight on the world stage. American observers noted that the UK was becoming increasingly parochial, and in many international questions looked mostly irrelevant.
Cameron’s foreign policy objective, meanwhile, was quite simple: to sell stuff to foreigners.
The large influx of Russians to Britain was good for business, the prime minister appears to have concluded. Wealthy Russians buy property in London and the Home Counties, send their children to British private schools, and go shopping in Harrods (and Selfridges). Increasingly, Russians come to the UK to settle their legal disputes, commercial and matrimonial. All this is a boon to headmasters, divorce lawyers, estate agents and purveyors of sushi.
Domestic political calculations explained Britain’s attempt at a US-style ‘reset’ with Moscow. Russian investment helped the UK economy. A strong economy in turn helped deliver the Conservatives’ election victory in 2015, after their failure in 2010 to win an outright majority. There were ideological commonalities, too. The right wing of the Tory party is Eurosceptic and wants Britain to exit the EU. The Kremlin is keen to torpedo EU power; it prefers to negotiate with weaker sovereign states.
In 2011, Cameron flew to Moscow. He met Medvedev and Putin. Then in summer 2012 – after Putin became president for the third time – Cameron hosted him in Downing Street and at the London Olympics. It was Putin’s first trip to the UK since 2005 and Litvinenko’s radioactive murder. They watched the judo, Putin’s favourite sport. The two leaders sat together, somewhat awkwardly, as contestants from Holland and the Czech Republic rolled around on a yellow mat.
The same month, guests attended a launch party in Kensington, west London, for a new organisation, the Conservative Friends of Russia. Some 250 guests gathered in the garden of the Russian ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko. They included Tory MPs, peers and Russian diplomats. The event featured a barbecue, drinks and a raffle, with prizes of vodka, champagne and a biography of Putin. The group was apparently the brainchild of a PR consultant, Richard Royal; its stated goal to boost UK–Russian dialogue.
Behind the scenes, the Russian embassy itself was pulling the strings on this curious new body. The diplomat in charge, Sergei Nalobin, has close links with Russian intelligence. His father, Nikolai Nalobin, was a KGB general. According to Marina Litvinenko, Nikolai Nalobin was Litvinenko’s former boss in the FSB. Nalobin Jnr’s brother worked as an FSB agent. Nalobin’s CV includes a stint in the ministry of foreign affairs. He described himself on his Twitter feed as a ‘brutal agent of the Putin dictatorship :)’.
Leaked emails from Nalobin suggest Moscow’s goals went beyond mere cultural understanding. The Kremlin was keen to rebuild ties with Britain post-Litvinenko and to mute criticism of Russia’s human-rights record. It also wanted to deepen an alliance with the Conservatives, who sit with Putin’s ruling United Russia party in the Council of Europe. Most of all, the Russian government was desperate to stop top officials from being denied entry to the UK, as part of a US-style ‘Magnitsky list’.
Critics pointed out that the timing of the organisation’s launch was dreadful. Days earlier, three members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot were jailed following an anti-Putin punk protest in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral. The former Labour Europe minister Denis MacShane noted: ‘Friendship groups with Russia used to be a speciality of the left in the days of communism. Now we have Putinism, it is the Tory party that is creating a pro-Russian group of fellow travellers. It reflects the shambolic incoherence of Tory networking.’
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the group’s honorary president, took a different view, arguing that there was nothing wrong with engagement. ‘It would be silly to boycott everything Russian. Even during the Cold War, as a British foreign office minister, I had lunch with the Soviet ambassador in his residence. The worst thing is to have no contact.’ Three months later, however, Rifkind quit the group after its apparent links with Russian spies were uncovered by my exposé in the Guardian. The organisation collapsed, to be rebranded in 2013 as the Westminster Russia Forum.
Russia’s soft-power initiatives, which included hiring lobbyists in Washington, London and Brussels, may have seemed clumsy. In fact, they showed strategic ambition. From at least 2009, the Kremlin actively cultivated ties with the far right in eastern Europe. It established links with Hungary’s Jobbik, Slovakia’s People’s Party and Bulgaria’s nationalist, anti-EU Attack movement. The Kremlin wooed the far right in Western Europe too, loaning €9.4 million via a Moscow bank to France’s Front National.
It also attracted support from Europe’s far left. In Soviet times, the KGB used ‘active measures’ to sponsor front organisations in the west, including pro-Moscow communist parties. Radical left-wing coalitions such as Greece’s Syriza expressed solidarity with Moscow. So did Jeremy Corbyn, a backbencher and veteran anti-imperialist who in 2015 would go on to become leader of the opposition Labour Party. (The Russian embassy in London greeted the election of the anti-Nato Corbyn with an ecstatic press release.)
The Kremlin didn’t invent the European far right or British Euroscepticism or Corbyn. But in an analogous way Moscow was lending these parties and individuals support, political and sometimes financial. Moscow’s goal was to promote its economic and political interests – and in particular to ensure that the EU remains heavily dependent on Russian gas. The tactic was clever: to exploit popular dissent against the EU, fuelled by immigration and austerity.
*
Marina Litvinenko had always believed in British justice. The men who murdered her husband were beyond the reach of UK law enforcement and safely in Russia. But surely the legal system in London would afford her some kind of closure – a full, fair and transparent explanation of how her husband died and who might have killed him? It had been a long wait. Six years on, her private tragedy had become a public quest for some answers.
The mos
t obvious vehicle for inquiry was an inquest. The inquest had been delayed in the hope that Moscow might give up Lugovoi and Kovtun. It was now evident there was no realistic prospect of a criminal trial. In autumn 2011, Marina Litvinenko moved to have the inquest – stalled since 2006 – reopened. In 2012, Sir Robert Owen, a High Court judge acting as assistant deputy coroner, convened a series of pre-inquest hearings in London. He began by apologising for the delay: ‘It’s manifestly in the interests of his widow Marina and his son, Anatoly … and in the wider public interest that [this] is brought to a conclusion.’
Owen promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. He said that he would examine the theory that ‘Russian state agents’ were behind the murder. He identified various ‘interested parties’ including Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko; the two alleged Russian killers; the UK Home Office; and the investigative committee of the Russian Federation. They would be given Scotland Yard’s previously restricted forensic report on the case, and much other evidence.
There was discussion of the inquest’s scope. Two issues were central. One was the question of Kremlin culpability. There was, Owen said, a ‘prima facie’ case of the Russian state’s involvement. The other was whether the British government could have prevented Litvinenko’s killing.
All of this seemed reasonable. However, by 2013, the hearings had turned into a tug of war. On one side was Marina Litvinenko and her counsel, Ben Emmerson QC. On the other a government apparently unwilling to annoy Putin and fearful that British investors in Russia might suffer reprisals. The foreign secretary William Hague submitted something called a public interest immunity or PII certificate. This meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko wouldn’t be made public. Crucially, it meant that the inquest wouldn’t be able to consider whether the Russian state had murdered Litvinenko.
Hague justified this drastic move on the grounds that openness would cause ‘serious harm to national security and/or international relations’. The reasoning was bizarre. As the Observer columnist Nick Cohen pointed out, which one was it? The submission was at odds with several centuries of jurisprudence and principles laid down by the late Law Lord Thomas Bingham.
Emmerson accused Cameron and Hague of cover-up. He added that they were ‘dancing to the Russian tarantella’ – an image that didn’t improve the more you thought about it – with Owen ‘steamrollered by two states acting in collaboration with each other’. I attended the High Court hearing. Whenever the colourful Emmerson spoke, the journalists picked up their pens. The lawyer said: ‘The British government, like the Russian government, is conspiring to get the inquest closed down in exchange for substantial trade interests which we know Mr Cameron is pursuing.’
The accusation was well grounded. It was left to Goldfarb to summarise what was really going on. He told me in the corridor: ‘HMG is worried about fallout with Putin; MI6 is worried about its agent being killed by polonium; the Russians are worried about being caught red-handed; Putin is concerned about being called a mafia boss.’
The same month Cameron flew to Sochi for talks with Putin. It was a friendly encounter; the pair discussed Syria; there was no mention by the British of the awkward subject of human rights. Putin must have been pleased. In a concession, Cameron agreed that British intelligence would resume cooperation with the FSB for the first time since Litvinenko’s death. It would work with its Russian counterpart to ensure the security of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.
Cameron’s blossoming friendship with Putin left the coroner in an invidious position. Reluctantly, he upheld in part the government’s request to keep secret material out of court. Without MI6’s files, the inquest would be a meaningless exercise. It would be unable to examine the question of Russian state guilt. In a further act of meanness, justice secretary Chris Grayling was refusing to pay Marina Litvinenko’s legal costs.
Owen came up with a solution. He wrote to home secretary Theresa May requesting a public inquiry. ‘I have formed the firm view that a public inquiry is necessary if Mr Litvinenko’s death is to be properly investigated,’ he told her. Owen offered himself as chairman.
The advantage of an inquiry, he argued, was that the chairman could consider the secret material in closed hearings, an option not available to an inquest. This was a pragmatic way forward which balanced the government’s security concerns with the need for open justice.
May, however, was having none of this. In a reply in June 2013, she rejected Owen’s request. She offered six reasons for her refusal, including public expense. It was the sixth, however, which stuck out:
‘It is true that international relations have been a factor in the Government’s decision-making. An inquest managed and run by an independent coroner is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners, and the integrity of the process more readily grasped, than an inquiry established by the government … which has the power to see government material, potentially relevant to their interests, in secret.’
May’s reasoning was legally dubious. That autumn, Marina Litvinenko filed a judicial review claim, asking the High Court to re-examine the government’s decision. In February 2014, three High Court judges ruled unanimously in her favour. They described May’s refusal as ‘irrational’ and ‘legally erroneous’. They asked her to reconsider.
In its keenness to put trade above principle, the Conservative-led government had forgotten what the case was about.
Marina Litvinenko observed: ‘I have never been able to see why the British government should want to protect the people in the Kremlin who ordered my husband’s murder. This was the murder of a British citizen on the streets of London using radioactive poison. You would have thought that the government would want to get the bottom of who was behind it.’
The ball was back in May’s court. Marina said: ‘As one woman to another, I ask her to consider how she would feel in my position. If her husband had been murdered in this horrible way, wouldn’t she want to get to the truth?’
*
In 2010, I had flown from Moscow to Italy. My destination was the seaside town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast. Two years previously Walter Litvinenko and his wife Lyuba had left Russia. After his son’s death, the harassment Walter had already suffered from the authorities continued. He joined his younger son Maxim – Litvinenko’s half-brother – in Italy. Other family members followed. They included Litvinenko’s half-sister Tatiana, her husband and their two kids.
By the time I caught up with them, the family were in poor shape. They had opened a restaurant in the tourist resort of Rimini. Maxim had been in Italy for nine years and was a professional chef. The local police accused them of operating illegally; during a late-night raid a cop pushed Tatiana over so she banged her head on the floor. The restaurant, La Terrazza, went bust. They were forced to move into a cheaper flat down the coast.
Walter blamed their misfortunes in exile on Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, whose close friendship with Putin was well known. The family’s claim for asylum was going nowhere. ‘We have fallen victim to a political game,’ he told me. Walter blamed Putin for Alexander’s death, reasoning to me that – as in Stalin’s times – only Putin could have authorised the murder. ‘I know it was Putin who killed him. He’s a sick person,’ Walter said.
Tatiana, however, refused to impugn Russia’s president. She bristled at the mention of Berezovsky. The oligarch had initially supported the Litvinenkos in exile, but had eventually stopped payments; his money had run out. Tatiana and her husband had good careers with the FSB in Nalchik, Litivnenko’s home town; the international scandal surrounding her brother had cost them everything. ‘He’s clearly not interested in us,’ she said, of Berezovsky. ‘I wouldn’t stop to take money from him.’
The Litvinenkos – all eight of them, including two young children and Maxim’s wife – were living in a small three-bedroom flat. They were broke. A local church was donating bread and apples; they ate pancakes and prawns salvaged from the f
reezer of their former restaurant. Walter and his wife were both over seventy. It was clearly too late for them to start a new life. On the wall was a map of Russia and several Orthodox icons; I spotted an Italian–Russian dictionary on a bookshelf.
Walter and I went for a walk outside. He put on the same flat cap he’d worn to his son’s drizzly funeral at Highgate Cemetery in London back in December 2006. Since then he had urged the US congress to support a resolution that blamed the Russian government for Litvinenko’s death. A public role didn’t suit him. Walter was, it struck me, a broken figure – and a pitiful one. He was afraid. ‘In Nalchik I didn’t fear because I knew everybody’s faces. Here it is different. At any moment a person could come up to you and that would be the end.’
In signed statements, Walter listed persecution in various forms by the Russian state. The police had beaten him up, he wrote, in an attempt to force him to incriminate his son. For five years he’d held one person responsible for these woes: Putin. In May 2011, Tatiana called me with further bad news. Lyuba had died. The Italian government was still refusing basic income support. Walter had moved out, into a one-bedroom flat. He was too poor to pay the electricity, so would sit on his own in the dark.
Then, in 2012, something very odd happened. Walter gave a tearful interview from Italy to Russian state TV. He told the Russian public: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, if you are watching this programme please forgive me for all the slander that I said and wrote about you.’ Walter said that he had come to understand that his son was a traitor. He wanted to go back home to Russia.
Walter ascribed his radical change of heart to encounters with an Orthodox priest from Rimini. In an affidavit, sworn in September 2012 before Russian officials, he said he now believed Lugovoi was innocent, and that polonium had been ‘skillfully placed’ to incriminate him. The real murderer, he suggested, was Alex Goldfarb.
