Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  Berezovsky, twenty years Abramovich’s senior, had not fared as well financially. The vast sums he had spent in support of Russian opposition groups, and the millions of dollars he had been ordered to pay his ex-wife Galina Besharova in a divorce settlement, had taken a heavy toll on his finances. As Masha Gessen, who attended the court proceedings, observed: “This year Berezovsky fell off the Sunday Times list of the thousand richest people in Britain. Unless he receives an infusion of capital, he will not be able to afford his lifestyle much longer and will be a very poor excuse for an oligarch.”26

  Berezovsky and Abramovich had met for the first time in late 1994, on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Abramovich had a plan for making large amounts of money by buying two Siberian oil businesses that were part of the state-owned oil conglomerate Rosneft and creating a new private oil company. He wanted Berezovsky to be his partner in the venture, and Berezovsky agreed. The two men set about getting a line of credit that would enable them to bid at an auction for shares of government oil companies—as part of Yeltsin’s controversial “loans-for-shares” scheme, which many would later say robbed ordinary Russians of what was rightfully theirs (the auctions were rigged) and created a new class of super-rich oligarchs.27

  As part of the plan to create what would be called Sibneft, Berezovsky went to Yeltsin and persuaded him to support the Sibneft venture in exchange for Berezovsky using funds from the venture to take over the main state television channel and promote Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996. Berezovsky used his close personal relationship with Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana and her future husband Valentin Yumashev in order to help persuade Yeltsin to agree to his plan. He also enlisted Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, to lobby on his behalf.

  In fact, it was never clear who ended up owning Sibneft. At the 2011 London trial, Berezovsky claimed that he and Badri Patarkatsishvili each gained 25 percent of Sibneft shares and Abramovich 50 percent. But it was a gentleman’s agreement with Abramovich, because Berezovsky was heavily involved in politics and did not want it to be known that he was a shareholder. Abramovich disagreed with Berezovsky’s version, saying that he had sole ownership of Sibneft and that the substantial payments he subsequently made to Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili were payback for their using their influence to help him acquire Sibneft. He said that he made the final payment of $1.3 billion to them in 2001.

  It was Berezovsky’s word against that of Abramovich, because there was no documentation of the financial deal they had made in 1995. And the judge, on August 31, 2012, dismissed Berezovsky’s case. She had this to say about Berezovsky: “On my analysis of the entirety of the evidence, I found Mr. Berezovsky an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be molded to suit his current purpose.”28

  Meanwhile, Berezovsky had been doing some soul-searching. In February 2012, well before his legal case against Abramovich collapsed, Berezovsky wrote a “letter of repentance” to be posted on his blog at Ekho Moskvy. But the editors, accused of “extremism” by deputies of the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party for posting Berezovsky’s previous inflammatory statements, refused his submission. Berezovsky then put his letter on his Facebook page. Here is part of what he had to say:

  I have led a long and wonderful life, and on the way I have inevitably made a lot of mistakes. Some of my wrongful actions I did intentionally, but even more of them when I did not know what I was doing.… I repent and ask forgiveness for greed. I longed for riches, with no hesitation.… I was not alone in doing this, but that does not excuse me. I repent and ask forgiveness for bringing Vladimir Putin to power. For the fact that I was obliged, but unable, to see in him a future greedy tyrant and usurper, a man who trampled on freedom and stopped the development of Russia. Many of us did not recognize it then, but that does not excuse me. I understand that repentance is not only a word, but also a deed. And that will follow.29

  The last two sentences were puzzling. What deed was to follow? A single-handed effort to bring down Putin? The act of suicide? This letter was written months before the judge handed down the verdict in his suit against Abramovich, which Berezovsky expected to win. So he still had something to live for. Nonetheless, his reference to his “long and wonderful life” had a note of finality to it. At the very least, he was becoming contemplative, although he was still obsessed with Putin.

  Death of an Oligarch

  At approximately 3:20 P.M. on Saturday, March 23, 2013, Berezovsky was found dead by his bodyguard of six years, Avi Navama, hanging from a shower rail in the bathroom of his mansion outside London. (The home actually belonged to his ex-wife.) His black cashmere scarf was tied around his neck. Navama had last seen Berezovsky the night before, at 9:05 P.M. The initial determination of investigators was that the death was a suicide. There were no signs of trauma suggesting force had been used. No intruders were seen on the CTV cameras that surrounded the home.

  Although Berezovsky did not leave a note, there was good reason to assume that he had taken his own life. He had, by several accounts, been depressed. In fact, according to his son Artem, Berezovsky had been taking anti-depressants but had stopped shortly before he died because they were affecting his liver. Both Artem and Navama said that Berezovsky had talked frequently of suicide ever since he lost his suit against Abramovich. He asked Navama: “Should I jump, or should I cut my vein?”30

  The day before he died, Berezovsky had an interview with the editor of Forbes Russia, Il’ia Zheguliev, at the Four Seasons Hotel in London. As Berezovsky had stipulated, the interview was just to be a conversation with nothing recorded. The oligarch had not given any interviews since the ruling on his court case against Abramovich had been announced the previous August. When Zheguliev asked him if he missed Russia, Berezovsky responded: “There is nothing that I want more than to return to Russia.… The main thing that I underestimated was how dear to me Russia is, that I cannot be an emigrant.… This does not mean that I have lost myself. I have been through a lot more times when I have had to re-evaluate things and [lived through] disappointments.… I have lost the meaning of life.” Berezovsky ended by saying that he did not want to engage in politics any more, adding that “I am sixty-seven years old and I do not know what to do next.”31

  Berezovsky’s death seemed a straightforward suicide until new evidence was introduced at an inquest a year later. Professor Bern Brinkmann, a German forensic scientist retained by the Berezovsky family, concluded in no uncertain terms that the marks on Berezovsky’s neck were not consistent with strangling through suspension: “The strangulation mark is completely different from the strangulation mark in hanging.”32 Also, the paramedic who arrived on the scene revealed that his radiation alarm went off as he entered the property, and he was puzzled by the fact that Berezovsky’s face was purple, when usually faces of people who hang themselves are “quite pale.” There was also a mystery fingerprint found in the bathroom that police were unable to identify.33 In light of these developments, the coroner left open the question of whether the death was a suicide or murder. “I can either return a verdict that Boris Berezovsky has committed suicide, or that he was killed. Any of these versions should definitely be supported with evidence.”34

  On March 25, 2013, two days after Berezovsky’s death, the Moscow weekly the New Times (Novoe vremia) published an interview with Berezovsky’s longtime girlfriend, Katerina Sabirova, in which she discussed the couple’s imminent plans to meet in Israel. Sabirova, who was living in Moscow, could not get a visa to come to the UK. “He was definitely planning to come to Israel, I know that for sure,” she said. They had last spoken late on the previous Friday evening, to discuss the logistics of their meeting at Tel Aviv airport, after which they had planned a vacation on the Dead Sea. According to Sabirova: “There was nothing extraordinary in the conversation, except that his voice sounded better than usual. His mental state was always reflected in his voice. And I had the impression that he was better.” Sa
birova said that Berezovsky was planning on seeing his daughter Nastia on the Saturday, when he was found dead, and Avi, his bodyguard, was supposed to pick her up in London. She insisted that it was not possible that Berezovsky had taken his own life.35

  Sabirova confirmed what President Putin’s press officer, Dmitrii Peskov, later claimed—that Berezovsky had written a letter to Putin not long before his death, asking to be allowed to return to Russia: “I saw the written text. He read it to me. He apologized [to Putin] and asked to be allowed to return.… He asked me what I thought of the letter. I said that if they published the letter, he would look bad. And it would not help him. He said he didn’t care, that they had already hung all these sins on him and it was his only chance.”36

  Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko stayed close to Berezovsky after Sasha’s death. He treated them like family and continued to pay for Anatoly’s schooling. They told me that they have no doubt that Berezovsky was murdered. While acknowledging that Berezovsky was depressed before he died, after losing the lawsuit against Abramovich, Anatoly, who spent a lot of time with him, observed: “It just was not his style [to kill himself]. He was not the type of man who could do such a thing to himself.… Besides, hanging himself would have been difficult because he did not really have a neck.” Marina added that Berezovsky had a lot to live for, especially his six children and his elderly mother, to whom he was devoted, along with his lady friend, Sabirova.37

  Akmed Zakaev concurred in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph soon after the murder: “I can assure you that Boris was not the kind of person who would harm himself. His friends and family can confirm that as well. He loved life and was not planning on leaving it any time soon.”38 It is true that Berezovsky was deeply in debt at the time of his death. He reportedly had assets of around £34 million and owed creditors £309 million.39 But his close friend Iulii Dubov did not think that would have caused Berezovsky to take his own life: “He had financial problems his entire life.… He never had enough to do what he wanted. But he was not one of these people who let material concerns unsettle him.”40

  Berezovsky’s death remains a mystery. But Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky’s close associate for years, put the issue into perspective when I spoke with him recently. Goldfarb himself thinks that Berezovsky probably did kill himself, because he was very depressed. Yet in the end, as he put it to me: “It does not matter whether Boris killed himself or not. In the final court, one way or another, Putin was responsible for Boris’s death. It was Putin who drove him to this condition of hopelessness.”41

  Postscript: Alexander Perepilichnyi

  Not long before Berezovsky’s death, another London-based Russian tycoon died. In November 2012, Alexander Perepilichnyi, married and the father of two young children, dropped dead at age forty-four while jogging at his lavish estate in Surrey. He had earlier in the day flown into London after a three-day trip to Paris. The cause of his death was reported to be a heart attack, and police insisted that there was no foul play involved. But further events suggested otherwise.

  It was learned, during prolonged on-and-off inquest proceedings, that Perepilichnyi took out a $5 million life-insurance policy not long before he died. (A requirement for the policy was a medical exam, and Perepilichnyi received a clean bill of health.) The insurance company ordered forensic tests that revealed the presence in his stomach of a rare and deadly fern called Gelsemium elegans, known to have been used in previous assassinations. It also emerged that the oligarch had received more than one anonymous death threat.

  Perepilichnyi was a whistleblower, or what Russians call a “super-informer,” on Russian money laundering. Before he fled to Britain in 2010, Perepilichnyi had managed money for certain officials from the Russian MVD and the tax police, who had ties to a mafia gang run by one Dmitrii Kliuev. Once in exile, Perepilichnyi claimed that members of the Russian government, including a senior tax official named Olga Stepanova, had siphoned off $230 million in tax money paid to the Russian government by the American William Browder’s investment company, Hermitage Capital. The money ended up in a Credit Suisse account in Switzerland. (Sergei Magnitsky, the earlier-mentioned Russian lawyer for Hermitage who died in prison in 2009, first drew attention to this tax fraud.) As a result of Perepilichnyi’s revelations, Stepanova was put on the so-called Magnitsky list and forbidden entry into the United States.42

  A prime suspect in what now appears to have been the poisoning of Perepilichnyi is Russian lawyer named Andrei Pavlov, who was reportedly acting as a go-between between the victim and Olga Stepanova and her business allies. Pavlov was in Britain on the day Perepilichnyi died, and he flew out of Heathrow the next day. Speaking at a pre-inquest hearing in May 2016, a lawyer for the company that took out life insurance for the oligarch said: “Pavlov was in the country at the time of Mr. Perepilichnyi’s death. He was a prominent member of the Kliuev organized crime group. He is certainly in any view a candidate for the killing of Mr. Perepilichnyi.”43 (Pavlov later denied that he had been in Britain when Perepilichnyi died. He claimed that he flew in and out of Heathrow the day afterwards.)44

  As The Guardian observed about the case: “Whether he was a whistleblower who had gone to the police after his conscience got the better of him, or a corrupt financier who had ratted on his associates after he fell into financial ruin, there is no doubt that Perepilichnyi had powerful enemies.”45 In September 2016, British authorities postponed the ongoing inquest into Perepilichnyi’s death on the grounds that sensitive documents in the case would pose a threat to Britain’s national security if they were revealed publicly. In response, William Browder had this to say: “The coroner is not able to do his job. This is where it gets confusing. The police are saying there is nothing suspicious about the death. The government is saying it is a matter of national security. Those two things are mutually inconsistent. I would like to see a full ventilation of the facts. I believe that will lead to the conclusion that Alexander Perepilichnyi was murdered. That means people are getting away with murder in the UK.”46

  The issue of national security and the so-called Public Interest Immunity of certain documents was finally resolved in May 2017. Unlike the Litvinenko case, where a public inquiry allowed the judge to consider secret intelligence material in closed sessions, the Perepilichnyi case will proceed as an inquest, set to begin on June 5, without the coroner using secret documents to reach his findings. The coroner has stated that the absence of these documents will not hinder him in ascertaining how Perepilichnyi died. Whatever the outcome of the inquest, it could have serious implications for Britain’s relations with Russia.47

  Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

  (Photograph courtesy of Unknown)

  11

  THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBINGS: RUSSIA’S FOOTPRINT

  “The Russians have been very cooperative with us since the Boston bombing.… I’ve spoken to President Putin directly. He’s committed to working with me to make sure that those who report to us are cooperating fully in not only this investigation, but how do we work on counterterrorism issues generally.”

  —President Obama at a White House press conference, April 30, 2013

  “I will die young.”

  —Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Twitter, April 20, 2012

  Tamerlan Tsarnaev

  In the four years that followed the attempted reset by the Obama administration in 2009, relations between Washington and Moscow did not improve. As noted, Putin’s sudden announcement in September 2011 that he would run again for the Russian presidency made it clear to the West that Medvedev, the supposed liberal in the government, had just been holding a place for Putin and was never a leader in his own right. Russia was losing its status as a powerful player on the global scene and also was beset with terrorist attacks by insurgents from the North Caucasus. In November 2009, an explosion on the train between St. Petersburg and Moscow, the Nevsky Express, killed twenty-eight people and injured many others. In January 2011, a suicide bomber at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport left
thirty-eight dead and many others injured. There were many other incidents of terrorism in the North Caucasus.

  Putin had secured the Winter Olympic games for Russia, to be held in Sochi in February 2014, but the terrorism issue was making Olympic officials nervous about the safety of the games. The Kremlin needed to distract Western attention from Russia’s insurgency and show that other nations faced the same problem. Enter the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out bombings at the Boston Marathon, resulting in three dead and 260 wounded on April 13, 2013.

  On November 6, 2011, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers who would carry out the bombings in Boston, purchased a one-way ticket on Aeroflot from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Moscow. Although the FBI had been warned earlier in the year by the Russian FSB that Tamerlan was a security risk because of his politically extreme views, U.S. agents concluded, after interviews with him and his family, that the FSB message did not warrant anything more than putting Tamerlan’s name on a watch list of the Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP) in the event of his international travel. But the FSB had apparently given two incorrect birth dates for Tsarnaev, and the transliteration from Cyrillic of his last name that appeared on the watch list was Tsarnayev, with an extra y. On the day of his travel, January 12, 2012, the CBP was apparently overtaxed with possibly suspicious travelers, so Tamerlan went through customs and immigration unimpeded. He arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport the next day and was back six months later, on July 17, 2012.1