Once Upon a Time in Russia

by Ben Mezrich

  On the couch next to him were two other FSB agents, colleagues with just as much to lose, taking the same chances as Litvinenko—but speaking because they also felt they had no other choice. The videotaping session was being done in secret—something Berezovsky called an insurance policy. The plan was not yet to go public with the accusations about the assassination orders: this tape itself would be a weapon with which they could threaten the powers above Litvinenko at the FSB to make changes, and back off from such behavior. Litvinenko had convinced himself that what he was doing wasn’t a betrayal, but rather, an attempt to change the organization for the better.

  Finally, staring into that lens, Litvinenko found his voice. He began to tell the story of how he had been ordered to kill his patron. The other agents chimed in as well, adding their own voices when necessary. Across from them sat one of ORT’s best-known journalists, host of a popular show, who acted as interviewer.

  The order to assassinate Berezovsky was not the only topic covered. Among the agents, they had witnessed other actions they considered overreaching. One of the agents spoke about a kidnapping plot involving a political agitator. Another spoke of a setup involving a different FSB agent. The words one of the men used—“The reasons we have gotten you out of bed are that these actions are against the law, against the criminal code, and are not moral”—seemed to sum up Litvinenko’s own thoughts, and the impetus for the dangerous decision he had made.

  He could feel Marina watching him, nodding slowly as he spoke. I do understand, he said, that an officer is not supposed to give interviews on television—but I realize the time has come. I wouldn’t do what I do now . . . but I fear for the life of my child and my wife.

  The camera continued to roll. Litvinenko was melded into the couch, but he could see that Berezovsky was leaning forward, almost on his toes.

  If nothing is done, if this lawlessness were to continue, it would ruin the country.

  Litvinenko knew that now he had gone past the point of no return.

  He had saved Berezovsky’s life, but perhaps at enormous cost. Berezovsky’s plan was dangerous: Berezovsky intended to go to the FSB, lodge a formal complaint, and use his power with Yeltsin to make the FSB listen to what he had to say. He had promised to protect Litvinenko, but Litvinenko was not naïve enough to think that Berezovsky would risk his own safety or position for a young agent. Which meant that things could easily spiral out of control.

  Berezovsky would know the right people to talk to, and with this tape as his weapon, heads would certainly roll, maybe at even the highest levels of the FSB. But a new man would be brought in to find replacements for them. Whoever took control would have Litvinenko’s fate in his hands. Litvinenko could only hope that such a man would understand.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  November 11, 1998,

  FSB Headquarters, Lubyanka Square

  MOVING THROUGH THE CORRIDORS of the third floor of that damned ominous building, Berezovsky felt a bit of annoyance as he listened to the heavy breathing of the young agent who was chugging along next to him, nervously clutching a binder of evidence under his arm. Litvinenko was acting as if he were on his way to the gallows, when in fact he was really on his way into history. He’d blown the loudest whistle in agency history, and Berezovsky was proud of his employee and friend. Now Litvinenko just needed to keep his head up and trust Berezovsky. After all, Berezovsky was at the height of his powers.

  Winning the election for Yeltsin had been a monumental feat; this next task was simply fixing a flaw that ran like a structural crack down the center of the largest security agency in the world. And he had already accomplished much. Since secretly videotaping Litvinenko and the other agents, he had worked through his contacts to get rid of many of the most corrupt elements in the FSB. That had included replacing the head of the agency with a man he believed would be more acquiescent to the realities of the new regime. And now he was bringing Litvinenko to meet face-to-face with this new director, to put this issue to rest.

  Personally, he wasn’t sure that presenting the man with a binder of evidence was the best strategy. Starting off a meeting by handing the new head man a stack of notations about the flaws of the previous leadership wouldn’t be particularly productive. The new head would have his own way of doing things; the only important thing was that he like you.

  To that end, Berezovsky believed he was already ahead of the game. He had been instrumental in putting the man in that third-floor, corner office.

  “Sasha,” he said to Litvinenko, using his nickname, as they were now close friends. “You need to do something about your face. You don’t look like you’re meeting your new boss. You look like you’re heading to a funeral.”

  Litvinenko tried to smile, but he was obviously nervous. When they reached the office, Berezovsky didn’t wait for Litvinenko to knock—he simply reached for the knob.

  The young man on the other side of the sparsely decorated office hopped up out of his chair with the grace of a natural athlete, ushering the two of them inside with a friendly but spare wave of his hand. He wasn’t exactly smiling, but his narrow face was amiable, his intelligent eyes taking them both in with rapid flicks, top to bottom. He wasn’t tall, but he was obviously very fit, dressed immaculately, and he seemed to have taken to his new role with a confidence that impressed Berezovsky. This wasn’t at all the minor functionary Berezovsky remembered. When Berezovsky had met this man years earlier, he was little more than an assistant.

  At the time, Berezovsky had needed aid in setting up a car dealership in St. Petersburg, and the mayor of the city had handed him off to his deputy—a former long-term KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky had been impressed immediately by the young man’s efficiency, and at a dinner party, he had learned a bit more about the man’s background. A child of poverty, like so many in Russia, Putin had grown up for a time in a communal apartment. He hadn’t been a wonderful student, but he was an impressive athlete who had gone on to become a judo champion. After stints studying law and language, he had matriculated right into the KGB, and had then put in more than sixteen years as a dutiful agent. His main job had apparently been analyzing foreign agents and trying to turn them. He had been stationed in Germany, where he’d married, had a couple of daughters, and then come back home to work at the University of St. Petersburg for a former teacher—who, in turn, was elected mayor of the city. And even though Putin had spent so much time in the security agency, he had democratic leanings; in 1991, when Yeltsin took power and communism fell, he left the KGB.

  His ascension to the head of the FSB had come on the heels of being brought to Moscow by Yeltsin and the Family. Berezovsky had been privy to that decision; the most important characteristics Yeltsin had been looking for in appointments had been loyalty, efficiency, and strength—and these were things that defined the former KGB man. When Putin’s boss, the mayor, had lost his own election in 1996, Putin had the opportunity to work for the winning party. Instead, he resigned, remaining loyal to his mentor. That meant more to Berezovsky than all the efficiency in the world. When you were placing a man in a position of power, you wanted someone who was loyal in the best meaning of the word—you wanted a perfect cog. Berezovsky firmly believed Putin to be that perfect cog; a strongman who could be controlled, who could see the importance of not making waves.

  Which was exactly why Berezovsky had brought Litvinenko to meet with Putin, now that he was the new head of the FSB. First, Berezovsky had written a letter, demanding that the FSB address the assassination order—but he had felt the extra step of bringing his whistle-blower to meet with the new head of the agency would be icing on the cake. He felt sure Putin would show them the respect they deserved.

  After the brief introductions were over, Putin ushered them to their seats in front of his desk. As Berezovsky had remembered from the brief encounter in St. Petersburg, Putin was not a man for idle chitchat. He quickly steered the conversation to Litvinenko’s c
laims and the stack of evidence the young agent had brought with them. Putin then immediately assured Berezovsky that he was taking the charges very seriously, not simply because his predecessor had lost his job, but because he was a man who believed in law and order. But Berezovsky could also see, in the way Putin avoided looking at the young agent, from the way he skimmed through the evidence without any sense of shock or disgust about what he was seeing, that his years with the KGB had made him inherently suspicious of a man who had turned on the security agency.

  Putin finished the meeting on a high note, telling them both he would look into these things, and if he found any more issues that needed to be dealt with, he would make sure the right things were done.

  Even so, it wasn’t until Berezovsky and Litvinenko were out in the hallway, Putin’s door shut behind them, that the young agent seemed to relax, if only a fraction, loosening his shoulders beneath his jeans jacket. Berezovsky could tell that Litvinenko was waging an inner battle with himself, wondering if he had done the right thing, wondering if this new FSB director was really going to make an effort to root out the bad elements in his agency—or instead root out the agent who had blown the whistle in the first place.

  Berezovsky, for his part, was waging no inner war. The Oligarch wasn’t going to leave these things to chance or fate or faith, or even to the efficient, loyal cog who Yeltsin and the Family had pulled from the wilds of St. Petersburg. Berezovsky had a plan. If the FSB did not act immediately to finish cleaning up its own mess, Berezovsky intended to force its hand.

  November 17, 1998,

  Interfax Press Center, Tverskaya Street, Moscow

  Berezovsky watched with a choreographer’s pride, as a palpable hush swept through the crowded conference room; the five men on the dais moved in a single file, choosing their seats behind a frenzied bloom of microphones from a dozen different news organizations—many of them owned by Berezovsky himself—and beneath the watchful eye of a pair of oversize television cameras. Flashbulbs went off like fireworks, and then the hush was replaced by an awed rumble, the gathered journalists jockeying with each other for a better view of the bizarre spectacle.

  Four of the men on the dais were wearing black balaclavas, and two more had donned large, dark sunglasses. Only Litvinenko himself was unadorned, dressed in a jacket with a poorly matching tie.

  He was without a mask or sunglasses not because of any sense of newfound fearlessness. He was out there, for the world to see, because the media had already identified him as the lead whistle-blower, shortly after Berezovsky had published his own open letter to Vladimir Putin in the Kommersant, Berezovsky’s newspaper—demanding that the FSB restore order and law to the security agency. That letter had been published six days ago—but Berezovsky had come to the conclusion that the dramatic changes he was asking for demanded an even more dramatic presentation.

  It hadn’t been easy to convince Litvinenko and the other agents he had gathered to go public like this; but in the end, they had realized that the cameras and journalists provided much more security than a false anonymity. Did these men really think that those black masks would keep a determined FSB from exacting vengeance, if that was the route the agency intended to take? The men’s only real option, in Berezovsky’s opinion, was to go big and go public—an approach directly in Berezovsky’s wheelhouse.

  Concealing himself in a corner of the Interfax conference room, obscured by the shadows cast by the drawn shades of the long hall filled with row after row of journalists, Berezovsky listened as Litvinenko kicked off the conference—speaking carefully into the microphones, telling much the same story he had told in the private videotaping session, for the secret tape that Berezovsky still had in his possession. Detailing the orders to assassinate Berezovsky and a number of other wealthy businessmen, detailing kidnapping plots and any number of corrupt decrees from their superiors at the FSB. In the end, asking, begging Mr. Putin to clean up the agency.

  In the circus-like atmosphere that Berezovsky had orchestrated, it was once again hard for the Oligarch not to marvel at the incredible changes in his fortune. Not four years earlier, when someone had attempted to take his life, he had been forced to slink off to Switzerland, wrapped up in bandages, a joke people pointed and laughed at, a man they called Smoky behind his back. Now here he was, a president in his pocket, waving a finger at the most-feared security agency in perhaps the world. How the FSB would eventually respond to Litvinenko’s whistle-blowing was an unknown—many would certainly see such a public press conference as an embarrassment.

  Whatever the fallout for the agents, Berezovsky was certain of one thing. The world would hear what Litvinenko had to say—and that meant that Berezovsky, himself, would be untouchable.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  January 1999,

  Krasnoyarsk, Siberia

  THE MI-8 HELICOPTER BANKED low over the frozen landscape, tilting hard to the left as it narrowly avoided a sudden bristle of Siberian fir trees, rising up from the foot of a nearby cliff face. In the heated interior of the copter’s leather-paneled cabin, Roman Abramovich tested his harness once again, while avoiding, as best he could, leaning with too much of his weight against the cold glass window to his side. Across the cabin, seated facing him, Badri Patarkatsishvili grinned from behind his thick, white mustache. If he thought for a moment that Abramovich was scared of either heights or unchecked velocity, he was mistaken; but being in a fifteen-year-old helicopter that hadn’t seen zero degrees in months and was now flying through icy Arctic air was another story altogether.

  Of course, Abramovich was no stranger to this frozen corner of Russia. He had grown up a long stone’s throw from this section of Siberia, and he had built his trading business in the oil fields and refineries just a few stops down along the trans-Siberian railroad. The snowy, ice-covered mountains he could see on the horizon to his left, the thick, lush forests that seemed to rise up out of the ground like verdant brushstrokes across the permanently frozen tundra—these were as familiar to him as the heavy scent of burned oil coming from the helicopter’s overtaxed, twin turbines.

  “Over there,” shouted Eugene, seated to Abramovich’s right, hoping to be heard over the immense racket of the helicopter’s rotors. “Another few hundred yards, past those trees.”

  The third man who had joined them on the short chopper ride from the center of the city of Krasnoyarsk, Eugene was Abramovich’s most trusted employee, his business partner and right-hand man. He was the only man Abramovich would have dragged so far—the long trek from Moscow had taken them most of a day, and had involved a car, a private jet, and a train, not to mention this chopper—to contemplate something as crazy as the proposition that Badri, assuredly in partnership with Berezovsky, had proposed.

  To be fair, Krasnoyarsk itself was a unique and beautiful place; a sort of jewel tucked away in the Siberian tundra, a glistening, rapidly modernizing city situated right on the twisting banks of the Yenisei River. Once upon a time, this area had held Stalin’s gulags—prison camps out of every Russian’s nightmares, grim places in the middle of a wilderness of icy mountains and wolf-ridden woods. But in modern times, Krasnoyarsk had transformed into a place of factories, mining corporations, oil concerns, and much more; one of the three largest metropolises in the entire region, after Novosibirsk and Omsk, the cities out of which Abramovich had built Sibneft.

  “Now, that is something,” Badri responded, jabbing a thick finger at the window, inches from Eugene’s face. “Isn’t it just as beautiful as I described?”

  The Georgian wasn’t talking about Krasnoyarsk, the trees, the cliffs, or the mountains. Abramovich glanced past his business associate Eugene at the low, barracks-like buildings that spread out in front of the helicopter for what appeared to be at least a quarter mile. There were low, windowless cubes and rectangles that could only be factories. Interspersed between them, smelting plants with smokestacks rising high enough to give the helicopter pilot something to test his skil
ls against. High barbed wire topped chain-link fences around circular storage facilities and many parking lots full of flatbed trucks. Even train cars, lined up in sleek black rows, next to a very large open loading dock filled with gargantuan machinery.

  But the most notable aspect of the view below was not the enormity of the factories, the smelting plants, the storage and loading facilities—it was the fact that those smokestacks were obviously dormant; no exhaust at all came from the giant plant. Abramovich guessed that the air outside the chopper was as crisp and clean as he remembered from his childhood, a wind gusting out of the Arctic Circle, cleansed by the river and the trees.

  “I’m not sure I see anything beautiful about a dead factory,” Abramovich responded, but his words just made Badri laugh even louder.

  Abramovich had grown fond of the Georgian strongman. He was amiable and direct—and in many ways the most straightforward man Abramovich had ever met. He had a keen sense of humor, an ability to put people completely and immediately at ease; at the same time, something about him always meant business, and one look from him could send shards of terror down even a born mobster’s spine. Even so, with Badri—unlike Berezovsky, who was impulsive, emotional, perhaps even bipolar—you always knew where you stood.

  Over the past year and a half since the Sibneft “loans for shares” deal had been finalized, Abramovich and his right-hand man, Eugene, had gotten to know the Georgian quite well—mainly because Berezovsky, their patron, had proven to possess an appetite for excess that even Abramovich had underestimated, the sort of ravenous hunger that made him think of a mythical beast from some Siberian fairy tale. Not a week had gone without a phone call requesting money for some escapade or another—sometimes involving ORT, but just as often involving some personal purchase that Berezovsky simply couldn’t do without. Sometimes the call would come from Berezovsky himself, but more often, as the months progressed and the Oligarch became more and more caught up in his political machinations, the requests came through Badri; the Georgian would show up at the Sibneft offices, grinning widely behind his mustache. The demands for money ran from the banal—fifteen thousand dollars here, eighteen thousand dollars there—to the practically insane. Millions—one, two, ten—and usually it had to be right away, cash if possible. Often, the requests came without any description of what the money was going to be used for, but sometimes Badri would explain what it was that Berezovsky so desperately needed.