The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Soon after the December 28 press conference, the authorities in Pakistan, according to the U.N. commission’s report, “essentially ceased investigating the possibility of other perpetrators, particularly those who may have been involved in planning or directing the assassination by funding or otherwise enabling the assassination,” and, by doing so, “ended its efforts to identify the suicide bomber.” The closing-down of an investigation that threatens the stability of a fragile state is not unusual after political assassinations, but it leaves unanswered the question of who killed Bhutto.

  At least three theories are consistent with the facts of the case. First, there is the official theory, proposed by then–President Musharraf that the suicide attack had been arranged by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The problem here is that the announced evidence in support of it turns out to be either bogus or vague. Second, it has been suggested by Bhutto supporters that the attack was allowed to take place by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, the ISI, to prevent Bhutto from winning the election. The proponents of this theory point to videos showing men in dark glasses along the motorcade route and at the scene of the assassination as evidence of the ISI’s close surveillance of Bhutto. (These videos can be viewed on YouTube.) Finally, there is the theory that Bhutto’s security detail was intentionally reduced by a cabal of ambitious politicians inside Bhutto’s own political party to put her in harm’s way. The proponents of this theory cite the fact that despite credible assassination threats against her, there were gaping holes in her protection.

  It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the activities in support of the cover-up, such as literally washing away the evidence at the crime scene, with the assassination itself. We know, as can be seen from the videos, that a young suicide bomber first fired shots at Bhutto and then detonated his suicide vest. The forensic evidence indicates that he was most likely a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy from the tribal areas. As Owen Bennett-Jones pointed out in the London Review of Books in December 2012, part of the mechanism used in the suicide bomb that was recovered matched those used in eleven other suicide bomb attacks that year in Pakistan. The teenager used in such attacks is in effect a remote-controlled weapon. His actual identity is no more important to solving the mystery than the serial number of a missile fired from a drone. The issue here is: who operated the remote control? My assessment is that that the suicide bomber was trained and dispatched on this mission by a jihadist organization associated with the Pakistani Taliban. The purpose of the attack was to undermine the U.S. initiative to bring about a regime change in Pakistan.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE CASE OF THE

  RADIOACTIVE CORPSE

  On December 1, 2006, one of the eeriest autopsies in the annals of crime was conducted at the Royal London Hospital. Three British pathologists, covered from head to toe in white protective suits, stood around a radioactive corpse that had been sealed in plastic for nearly a week. The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, a forty-four-year-old ex-KGB officer who had defected from Russia to England six years earlier. He had been brought to the Barnet General Hospital by his wife, Marina, on November 3, complaining of abdominal pain. During his stay at the hospital his condition continually worsened. The initial diagnosis was that he had been poisoned by thallium, a non-radioactive toxin used in Russian rat poison. Since the KGB had reportedly used thallium as a poison in the Cold War era, and Litvinenko was one of the most severe critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the theory gained traction in the press that Litvinenko might have been the victim of the Russian security service, the FSB, which had been created in April 1995 out of the remnants of the KGB. As Litvinenko had been writing exposés of putative FSB operations in London, it seemed at least plausible that the FSB had taken revenge on him. The possibility that Russia was poisoning opponents abroad resonated in the world press, since, less than a month earlier, Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist, had been murdered in Moscow.

  Meanwhile, Litvinenko was moved to University College Hospital and given massive doses of the cyanide-based antidote for thallium, which did not work. As his condition grew critical, one of his associates, Alex Goldfarb, prepared for Litvinenko’s end by writing out his “deathbed” statement, which, according to Goldfarb, was drawn from statements that Litvinenko had dictated to him accusing Putin of orchestrating his murder. When Litvinenko died on November 23, 2006, Goldfarb released the sensational deathbed accusation at a hastily called press conference at the hospital. It made headlines around the world.

  Just two hours before Litvinenko died, another startling surprise developed in the story: new tests at the hospital discovered that he had not been poisoned with thallium or a rat poison based on it. Instead, they showed that he had in his body one of the world’s most tightly controlled radioactive isotopes, polonium-210. Polonium was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and named in honor of Poland, where Marie was born. The reason that this rare isotope was controlled is that it is a critical component in early-stage nuclear bombs. Both America and the Soviet Union used it as part of the trigger in their early bomb designs. So did most, if not all, countries with clandestine nuclear programs, including Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. North Korea had also used it for its nuclear test just six weeks before Litvinenko’s contamination in London. Although most of the major nuclear powers shifted to more sophisticated tritium-based triggers after they tested their weapons, for nuclear-ambitious countries, obtaining polonium-210 was crucial step toward obtaining a bomb. And, as a declassified Los Alamos document notes, the detection of polonium-210 remains “a key indication of a nuclear weapons program in its early stages.” When polonium-210 was detected in Iraq in 1991, Iran in 2004, and North Korea in October 2006, it immediately raised suspicions of rogue bomb-building programs. Therefore, its presence would normally be of great interest to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.’s nuclear-proliferation watchdog, as well as the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, and Israel.

  When polonium-210 was discovered in Litvinenko’s body in late November 2006, however, no such proliferation alarm bells went off. Instead, the police assumed that this component of early-stage nuclear bombs had been smuggled into London solely to commit a murder. It would be as if a suitcase nuclear bomb had been found next to an irradiated corpse in London, and everyone assumed the bomb had been smuggled into the country solely to murder that person. Michael Specter, in The New Yorker, for example, called it the “first known case of nuclear terrorism perpetrated against an individual.” But why would anyone use a nuclear weapon to kill an individual, when a knife, bullet, or conventional poison would do the trick more quickly, efficiently, and certainly?

  The mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Litvinenko from radiation poisoning spawned a different kind of international crisis. British authorities told the press, “We are one-hundred percent sure who administered the poison, where and how,” but they refused to disclose their evidence. Nonetheless, the consensus that the Russian secret service was behind the poisoning was so powerful that a Washington Post editorial could assert that the poison “dose was almost certainly carried by one or both of the former Russian security operatives—one of them also a KGB alumnus—whom Litvinenko met at a London hotel November 1.” The KGB alumnus was a forty-two-year-old Russian security expert, Anatoli Lugovoi. Like Litvinenko, Lugovoi had been exposed to polonium-210, and after Litvinenko’s death he was hospitalized. Based mainly on the fact that Lugovoi had been in contact with Litvinenko shortly before his death, and contaminated by polonium-210, Great Britain demanded that Russia extradite him, so he could be tried for the murder of Litvinenko. When Russia refused, Great Britain expelled four Russian diplomats from London, in reprisals reminiscent of the Cold War.

  To find out what had brought Lugovoi in contact with Litvinenko, I went to Moscow to see him in May 2008. There was no doubt that he had been with Litvinenko in London. On
November 1, 2006, witnesses saw Lugovoi with Litvinenko in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, where Lugovoi was staying with his family. A waiter recalled bringing Litvinenko tea. This was less than a day before Litvinenko became ill. Subsequently, the Pine Bar as well as Lugovoi’s room tested positive for polonium-210, leading to an early theory that Litvinenko had been poisoned in the Pine Bar. But then it turned out that Litvinenko had had a sushi lunch at the Itsu restaurant some four hours earlier, and that restaurant, as well as Litvinenko’s lunch partner, Mario Scaramella, tested positive for polonium-210. This suggested that Litvinenko had been contaminated prior to his tea at the Pine Bar. Lugovoi had also had a number of earlier meetings with Litvinenko, including one on October 16, 2006, at a lap-dancing club called Hey Jo. The owner, David West, and others recalled seeing both men seated in a VIP booth. The booth then tested positive for polonium-210, as did the seat Lugovoi had occupied on the British Airways flight back to Moscow on October 19. If so, both men were exposed to polonium-210 over a month before Litvinenko died. But how?

  When I met Lugovoi in his office in Moscow, he had just been elected to the Duma, the Russian parliament, which gave him immunity, and with that protection he talked freely about his relationship with Litvinenko. He told me that they both had been intelligence officers in the KGB and FSB in the 1990s, but that then he had become a supporter of Putin, while Litvinenko had done everything he could to discredit Putin, and then defected to London. I asked how they came together a decade later. Lugovoi answered in a single word: “Berezovsky.”

  He was referring to Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, a billionaire living in London, who had been the single most powerful oligarch in Russia in the 1990s. He not only controlled whole sectors of the Russian economy and the country’s largest television channel, but he was part of the government apparatus, serving as the deputy secretary of its National Security Council. Both he and Litvinenko acted as Berezovsky’s protectors in the FSB. Litvinenko was deputy head of its organized-crime unit, while Lugovoi was in the Ninth Directorate, which was responsible for guarding top Kremlin officials, including Berezovsky. He said that Berezovsky was so impressed with his work that he hired him as head of security at the television channel, ORT, which Berezovsky co-owned. With an enigmatic smile, Lugovoi said that both Litvinenko and he had performed extraordinary services for Berezovsky. With a gun in one hand and his FSB credentials in the other, Litvinenko had prevented Moscow police from arresting Berezovsky on a murder charge. He then ended his own career in the FSB by exposing an FSB faction’s alleged plan to assassinate Berezovsky. As a consequence, Litvinenko was imprisoned. For his part, Lugovoi helped Berezovsky’s partner break out of a Moscow prison—an act for which he also served prison time. Meanwhile, Berezovsky moved to London and became Putin’s arch-foe. In November 2000, he helped Litvinenko escape to England, where he financially supported him and sponsored his investigations for the next six years.

  I asked how Berezovsky had repaid him. Lugovoi answered with a wry smile: “By bringing me to Litvinenko.”

  The reunion came in January 2006 in London. Berezovsky had rented Blenheim Palace—the birthplace of Winston Churchill—to give himself a lavish sixtieth birthday party. There were some 300 guests in formal attire and, in the center of the room, a giant ice sculpture representing St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, covered with Caspian caviar. Berezovsky’s seating plan placed Lugovoi at a small table with three men: on his right was Litvinenko, who was now engaged in conducting investigations into Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Across from him was Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled leader of the Chechen resistance who headed the Committee on Russian War Crimes in Chechnya. On his left was Alexander Goldfarb, who ran Berezovsky’s foundation, which helped support both Litvinenko’s and Zakayev’s activities.

  As it turned out, the people at his table that night would be among the last to see Litvinenko alive ten months later. Lugovoi saw him in the Pine Bar at 5:00 p.m. on November 1. Zakayev then picked up Litvinenko at the Pine Bar and drove him to Berezovsky’s office. Goldfarb later wrote Litvinenko’s dramatic deathbed statement. But that evening, as Lugovoi recalls it, there was nothing but good cheer and celebratory toasts.

  Soon afterward, Lugovoi explained, Litvinenko called him with a “business proposal.” They would form a joint venture, backed by Berezovsky, to gather information in Moscow. The idea, according to Lugovoi, was to use his connections in Moscow to get “business data” that Litvinenko could sell to London clients, including, as it turned out, the former owners of Yukos, the largest oil enterprise in Russia. Yukos was no ordinary oil company: with tens of billions of dollars stashed away in accounts in Cyprus, Gibraltar, and other offshore havens, it had become by the early 2000s a virtual counter-state to the government. In the battle that ensued between Yukos and Putin, Yukos was charged with tax fraud and, through enormous fines, its assets in Russia were effectively expropriated.

  Since this “joint venture” would involve Lugovoi in a collaboration with some of President Putin’s most determined enemies abroad, including Litvinenko, Berezovsky, and the former owners of Yukos—all of whom Russia was then attempting to extradite from Great Britain and Israel—I asked Lugovoi if he had been concerned that this engagement could cause him problems with the authorities in Moscow. He answered, “I had no such worries.” Did this mean that he had informed Russian authorities about his participation in this venture, I asked. He shrugged, and said, “I am now a member of the Duma. What does that tell you?”

  As this project developed, much of the “business data” requested from Lugovoi concerned individuals connected in one way or another with Yukos. The two principal owners of its holding company were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned in Siberia, and Leonid Nevzlin, who had fled to Israel. In Tel Aviv, Nevzlin had set up a private intelligence company, ISC Global, with divisions in London and Tel Aviv, to gather information that would help him fight Russian efforts to get control of the offshore accounts. It was in its London office, renamed RISC Management, Ltd., that Lugovoi said he next met with Litvinenko. According to Lugovoi, RISC asked him to obtain in Moscow relatively innocuous reports, such as one entitled, “Main characteristics of Russian Organized Crime in 2003–2005.” He acquired the report from former FSB officers, and delivered it to Litvinenko, who paid him. Litvinenko then gave him a list of other data to acquire for RISC, including government files on Russian tax officials. Litvinenko threatened that if he did not get this material, Lugovoi might have a “problem” renewing his British visa, and his visa was indeed held up. When he then agreed to get this sensitive data, not only was his visa renewed, but $8,000 was wired to his bank account. This joint venture now had all the earmarks of a classic espionage operation. Lugovoi was compromised, threatened, and paid to deliver intelligence. This incident made him suspicious that Litvinenko, aside from working for Berezovsky, was involved with British intelligence. “How else could he get my visa withdrawn—and reinstated?” he asked rhetorically. (Four years after my meeting with him, Lugovoi’s suspicions were confirmed when on December 13, 2012, in a preliminary hearing for an inquest in London, it was disclosed that Litvinenko was indeed on the payroll of the British intelligence services at the time of his death in 2006.)

  The game took a further turn in September 2006, when Litvinenko made a trip to Tel Aviv to personally deliver to former Yukos holding-company owner Nevzlin what he called the “the Yukos file.” According to Lugovoi, it contained much of the information that he had provided. Nevzlin admits receiving the dossier from Litvinenko, although he insists it was unsolicited. In any case, after Litvinenko returned from Israel, Lugovoi says he found him increasingly on edge. About a month later, on October 27, Lugovoi was summoned to London by Berezovsky. A few hours after he arrived, he recalled that Litvinenko turned up at his hotel. Litvinenko said he needed to retrieve the cell phone that Lugovoi had been given to use for RISC business. After Lugovoi gave it to him, Litvinenko removed the SIM card, which contained a
digital trail of his contacts. Litvinenko then told him that the next meeting with RISC would be on November 2.

  Lugovoi said that the last time he saw Litvinenko was at 5:00 p.m. on November 1 at the Pine Bar. Litvinenko had come to discuss their planned meeting the next day at RISC, and, as Lugovoi was on his way to a soccer match, he stayed only briefly. The next day, Litvinenko called to say he was sick and canceled the meeting. So Lugovoi returned to Moscow.

  When I asked Lugovoi who was providing the expenses for his trips to London, he said Litvinenko gave the money to him in cash but he assumed it came from Berezovsky. Not only had the exiled billionaire been financing Litvinenko ever since he had defected to London, but he owned the house in which Litvinenko lived and the office that he used. He had also come to one of the meetings at RISC, and he frequently called Litvinenko on the cell phone reserved for RISC activities. So, even though Litvinenko did not say so, Lugovoi had little doubt that Berezovsky was behind their venture.

  Had he kept the FSB informed about his meetings with Litvinenko, Berezovsky, and RISC officials? I asked. “I did what was necessary,” Lugovoi replied, smiling knowingly.

  He insisted that he had no knowledge about how Litvinenko, or he himself, got contaminated with polonium-210. Subsequently, he provided the same answer on a polygraph examination, and, according to the examiner, showed no signs of deception.

  I next went to see Dmitry Kovtun, who had accompanied Lugovoi to London for the last two meetings with Litvinenko. Like Lugovoi, Kovtun had been contaminated with polonium-210. Since his seat on the Transaero plane on which he had arrived in London on the morning of October 16 showed no trace of polonium-210, but his flight out of London tested positive for it, he had most likely been contaminated in London. But how?

  I met him at the Porto Atrium, an expansive restaurant on the Leninsky Prospect known for its extensive wine cellar. A compact man in his mid-forties with greying hair, Kovtun explained how he got, as he put it, “into this mess.” He had just returned from Germany, where he had served in a Soviet Army intelligence unit and married, then separated from, a German woman. He was looking for international business contacts, and Lugovoi had proposed he go to London with him. When they arrived, they were met by Litvinenko, who spent most of his next two days with them. Kovtun’s next encounter with Litvinenko came two weeks later, when Lugovoi invited him to come to London for a major soccer match, for which Berezovsky was providing tickets. When he arrived on November 1, he joined Lugovoi and Litvinenko for a pregame drink at the Pine Bar.