A Very Expensive Poison (12 page)

‘I swallowed several times but it was a green tea with no sugar and it was already cold by the way. I didn’t like it for some reason, well, almost cold tea with no sugar, and I didn’t drink it any more. Maybe in total I swallowed three or four times.’ Litvinenko said he didn’t finish the cup.

And then:

The three men discussed their meeting scheduled for the following day at the private security firm Global Risk. The bar was crowded, with ‘lots of people’, Litvinenko said. He felt a strong antipathy towards Kovtun. It was just their second encounter. There was something strange about him, Litvinenko thought – as if he were in the midst of some personal torment.

There is no evidence to say whether it was Kovtun – the former waiter, good at mixing drinks – or Lugovoi who put radioactive polonium in the teapot. From Litvinenko’s testimony, it’s clear this was a joint criminal enterprise. Lugovoi would subsequently explain that he couldn’t recall what drinks he’d ordered in the Pine Bar. And that Litvinenko had insisted upon their meeting, to which he’d reluctantly assented.

Subsequently, police tracked down Lugovoi’s Pine Bar till receipt. Lugovoi was a man who murdered with a certain breezy style.

The order was:

The tea came to £11.25; the total bill £70.60. Lugovoi paid on his credit card.

Andrade, the man who brought the tea, was from Brentwood in Essex. He’d worked at the Pine Bar since 1981, and was in his late sixties by 2006; his slicked-back grey hair recalled an earlier, more glamorous era. He would retire two years later. Over the years he had served many celebrities. They included the actor Sean Connery, probably the greatest James Bond, and the man who owned the 007 spy franchise, film producer Cubby Broccoli, whose second Bond movie starring Connery was
From Russia With Love.

It was a Wednesday. Andrade was working his regular 11 a.m.–7.30 p.m. shift. The bar was extremely busy, he said; there was a property auction going on in the ballroom. Several Russian clients had come to the hotel that week for the football. He was serving drinks, while his ‘very professional’ younger colleague Jacob worked from behind the bar. Lugovoi walked in. He asked for a Havana cigar, and said he would be ‘coming in shortly for drinks’, Andrade said. The barman said he’d add Lugovoi’s cigar to his bill.

Half an hour later, Lugovoi returned, took a seat at table one, strategically positioned in the corner with a clear view of the entrance, and ordered three green teas with fresh lemon and honey. Jacob took a teapot and cups from a stack next to the bar’s Giga coffee machine. Andrade said he delivered the tea to the table but didn’t pour – customers generally preferred to pour themselves, he explained.

Almost immediately, Lugovoi called him back and demanded more honey. Over the next half an hour Norberto said he was shuttling ‘very rapidly back and forth’ between the bar and table one – the Russians were a demanding party and called him back for gin, then ‘a couple of minutes later’ asked for champagne.

At the time, his impression of the men from Moscow was favourable: ‘They were extremely well-behaved and well-dressed gentlemen.’ Andrade said he didn’t notice Litvinenko join Lugovoi at the table. But he did recognise Lugovoi and Kovtun. He said he’d seen them in the bar on a previous occasion.

By this point, Lugovoi and Kovtun must have concluded that their poisoning operation had worked. Litvinenko had drunk the green tea. Not much, admittedly. But, he had drunk. Surely, enough?

Later, in fact, it was found that Litvinenko had an astonishing 26.5 micrograms of polonium in his bloodstream. Less than one microgram would have been enough to kill him (estimates suggest that one gram alone could kill 50 million and sicken another 50 million). His exposure to radiation in this dose was approximately 175,000 times greater than that given off in an X-ray.

The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Then, Litvinenko told police, a tall Russian in a dark cardigan materialised at the bar. It was Sokolenko. Sokolenko ‘said something’ to Lugovoi, who replied: ‘Yes, yes, all right’ and ‘Go on, I will speak to you later.’

Lugovoi gazed at his watch. He said he was expecting his wife, Svetlana. Mrs Lugovaya (Russian surnames have
different feminine versions) appeared in the foyer and, as if on cue, waved her hand, and mouthed: ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ Lugovoi got up to greet her, and left Litvinenko and Kovtun sitting together at the table.

There was one final, scarcely believable scene. According to Litvinenko, Lugovoi came back to the Pine Bar accompanied by his eight-year-old son Igor. Another guest, Duncan Cunningham, noticed Igor in the hotel, holding a bag from the Hamley’s toy store in London, and looking uninterested, fed up and bored by dull adult company.

Lugovoi introduced his small son to Litvinenko. He said to Igor: ‘This is Uncle Sasha, shake his hand.’

Igor was a good boy. He obediently shook Litvinenko’s hand, the same hand that by now was pulsing with radiation. When police examined Litivnenko’s denim jacket they found massive contamination on the sleeve – Litvinenko had picked up and drunk the tea with his right hand. The party plus Litvinenko exited the bar. The Lugovoi family and Sokolenko went off to the match. Kovtun declined to go, declaring: ‘I’m very tired, I want to sleep.’

Forensic experts would test the entire bar area, the tables, dishwasher and crockery. They examined 100 teapots, as well as cups, spoons, saucers, milk jugs. Litvinenko’s teapot wasn’t difficult to discover – it gave off readings of 100,000 becquerels per centimetre squared, a satanically high number. The highest reading came from the spout. (The teapot was put in the dishwasher afterwards and unknowingly reused for
subsequent customers.) The table where they sat registered 20,000 becquerels.

Polonium was a miasma, a strange creeping fog. It was found inside the dishwasher, on the floor, till, the handle of a coffee strainer. There were traces on bottles of Martini and Tia Maria behind the bar, the ice cream scoop, a chopping board. It turned up on chairs – with large alpha radiation readings from where the three Russians sat – and the piano stool. Whoever sent Lugovoi and Kovtun to London must have known of the risks to others. Apparently they didn’t care.

The most crucial piece of evidence was discovered several floors above the Pine Bar. It was found in Kovtun’s room, number 382. When police forensic teams took apart Kovtun’s bathroom sink they found a mangled clump of debris. The debris was stuck in the sediment trap of the sink’s waste pipe. Tests on the clump showed it contained 390,000 becquerels of polonium. The levels were so high that they could only have come from primary contamination – from polonium itself.

After putting the poison in Litvinenko’s teapot, Kovtun went back upstairs to his room. There in the bathroom he poured the rest of the liquid polonium solution down the sink. No one else – other than Lugovoi and Sokolenko – had access to the room. Police concluded that Kovtun had knowingly handled the murder weapon, and afterwards got rid of it. It was an intentional act of disposal.

The science was objective, conclusive and utterly damning. As an inquiry into Litvinenko’s poisoning would later hear, it had the simplicity of undeniable fact. 
Kovtun would claim innocence. He was never able to explain away this pivotal piece of evidence.

The Russian operation to murder Litvinenko would have had a codename – so far unknown. It could finally be marked down as a success. It was the sixth anniversary of Litvinenko’s arrival in Britain, on 1 November 2000. He didn’t know it yet, but he was dying. The agent used to kill him had been chosen in order to leave no trace of how death was brought about. It was working. From this point on nothing – not even the most gifted medical team, not even a miracle from the heavens – could save him.

That evening Alexander Litvinenko began to feel violently unwell. Earlier, Marina had cooked him a light dinner.

The meal was something of a celebration. Six years previously, on 1 November 2000, the Litvinenkos had escaped Russia and arrived in the UK. The years had been good ones. Litvinenko had found work. He was a self-employed writer and a part-time British spy. Marina had made friends, learned English. Anatoly, now twelve, was studying at an elite London boys’ school.

Russia wasn’t forgotten, of course: Anatoly remembered the fierce winters, sledging in the snow, the Moscow metro with its grandiose ceilings and art deco lamps. There was no prospect of going back there, and in the meantime Britain had become home. Litvinenko viewed his newly acquired British citizenship – it came through three weeks previously – as a kind of marvellous protective shield. In the past his enemies had hounded him in London: there had been menacing phone calls,
firebombs tossed outside his Muswell Hill home. But surely these ghosts were gone?

After dinner, Litvinenko sorted out his files, sat at his computer and watched the news. A journalist contact called him from the US. At about 11 p.m. he and Marina turned in.

Then, ten minutes later, Litvinenko was retching and vomiting. ‘I started to feel nauseous,’ he told police. ‘Gradually, Marina said: “Maybe it will pass,” and I said: “No, I don’t think it will pass.” And then I started vomiting. I managed to run as far as the toilet bowl in our room and that’s it. About twenty minutes later I vomited again.’

Marina said: ‘Suddenly, he started to feel unwell. He said he felt sick. It was very sudden. Of course, he couldn’t say anything. He just vomited.’ When it stopped, Litvinenko said that the feeling was similar to that he’d had on 16 October, after his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun. Later that evening he’d thrown up once and afterwards recovered.

Marina assumed that this new episode would also pass. First, Litvinenko threw up his dinner. He vomited again. This time his sick looked like water, Marina noticed, and was ‘a very strange colour’. Marina prepared a common Russian remedy for stomach problems: a little magnesia added into water. Her husband drank it. Still he didn’t feel any better.

After an hour, Litvinenko moved into the study, so as not to disturb his wife and son, who had school the next day. He passed a wretched night. ‘Every twenty or thirty
minutes I had to run to the toilet and I was vomiting, vomiting, vomiting,’ he said. The manganese hadn’t worked – the foam was coming out of his mouth.

At 6 a.m. Marina woke and peered inside. Litvinenko was awake, looked terrible, and told her: ‘I can’t stop vomiting.’ He said that the stomach contractions kept coming, even though there was nothing to throw up. Additionally, Litvinenko complained he couldn’t breathe properly. He said: ‘I need more oxygen.’ It was a cold day outside; she threw open the windows. Something was very wrong. Litvinenko said later: ‘I was feeling really bad.’ The strong pains in his stomach grew. He said to his wife: ‘Marina, I think I have been poisoned.’

That morning Marina dropped Anatoly off at East Finchley tube station as usual, and called a Russian doctor, Yuri Prikazchikov, who advised her to buy mineral salts. She visited the chemist’s. Litvinenko drank the salts. He threw them up immediately. He was increasingly exhausted, unable to eat or drink.

Litvinenko was forty-three years old, and in extremely good physical shape. Every week while Anatoly was at a taekwondo class, Litvinenko would run 10 miles (15 km). Afterwards, he swam vigorously up and down the East Finchley leisure centre pool. In central London he walked everywhere. He was never ill. Except now he was.

Marina suggested calling an ambulance. ‘It was a very strange feeling. We didn’t know what to do,’ she said. Her husband said no. Then, in the early hours of 3 November, at 2 a.m., Litvinenko relented, and said: ‘Please Marina, we should call.’ She dialled 999 and
the ambulance arrived within five minutes; two women paramedics checked his blood pressure and pulse; they concluded he probably had some kind of bacterial infection. They advised water and painkillers and departed.

The pain got worse. Litvinenko was also suffering from diarrhoea; he noticed he was passing blood. Marina rang Dr Prikazchikov again. At 2 p.m. he arrived at the Litvinenkos’ home in Osier Crescent; the doctor took one look at Litvinenko and, without examining him further, took a step backwards, wide-eyed. The doctor told him: ‘I don’t know what illness it is, but it looks very much like typhoid fever but it is not typhoid fever.’ Prikazchikov said he needed immediate hospitalisation. An ambulance came and took him to Barnet and Chase Farm Hospital in north London.

For doctors at Barnet Hospital, Litvinenko was one of numerous admissions – another patient tossed their way during a hectic winter season, punctuated by flus, superbugs and a spike in elderly visitors.

That Litvinenko was in poor shape was obvious. His symptoms were abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting. Medical staff diagnosed gastro-enteritis with mild dehydration. They prescribed ciprofloxacin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic. As a precaution, to prevent possible infection spreading, they put him in a side-room. He was admitted as Edwin Redwald Carter, his British pseudonym. The hospital’s assumption was that Mr Carter would start to recover in a few days.

At first, this seemed to happen. ‘He did feel a little bit better when he was hospitalised,’ Marina said. The
antibiotics stopped the vomiting; Litvinenko felt less exhausted.

Nevertheless, there were two issues of concern. One was medical: tests showed that Litvinenko’s white blood-cell count was unusually low. In fact his white blood-cell and platelet count was steadily sinking. This didn’t really fit with a diagnosis of gastro-enteritis. It might be a side effect of the fairly powerful antibiotics he was taking, doctors thought.

The other was scarcely believable, from the realm of spy thrillers and John le Carré rather than real life. On 7 November, Mrs Carter – as medical notes reference her – first raised the possibility that her husband may have been poisoned. He had, she said, worked for the Soviet KGB. And knew ‘dangerous people’. Was it possible that someone might have put something in his food or drink?

The story made little sense. Doctors reassured her that this was ‘unlikely’, though they did record on Edwin Carter’s file: ‘Patient and wife concerned about intentional infection of patient, query poison?’

Litvinenko and his wife were increasingly convinced that his ever more painful symptoms were not the result of contaminated food or bad sushi. They suspected foul play. Was this some kind of reckoning? Litvinenko gave an interview to the BBC Russian Service, explaining that he’d narrowly survived a poisoning attempt and was now recovering in a London hospital. He mentioned his lunch with the Italian Mario Scaramella, but kept quiet about his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun.

The poisoning claim was sensational indeed. But was it true?
Chechenpress
, the Chechen website for which Litvinenko worked, picked up the story, as did the independent opposition radio station
Echo of Moscow.

Alex Goldfarb got a call from one of its journalists. Goldfarb was in Paris. He perused the internet – where the story was starting to bubble – but was disinclined to take it terribly seriously. He rang his friend Alexander, who confirmed he thought he’d been poisoned. An incredulous Goldfarb told him: ‘But come on, who would poison you? It’s too much. Probably you have some sort of stomach ailment.’

Others were similarly sceptical. From his hospital bed, Litvinenko called his friend and fellow exile Viktor Suvorov and told him: ‘I’m poisoned.’ (Suvorov had previously advised Litvinenko to be careful, and suggested he might do well to move out of London, as he had, to a quieter part of the country.)

Suvorov replied: ‘Sash, come on! It’s rubbish.’

Litvinenko persisted: ‘No, really. I’m poisoned. I’m calling you from hospital.’

It was proving equally difficult to persuade hospital staff to take his theory seriously.

Then on 11 November, a week after he was admitted, something terrible and strange happened.

Litvinenko’s hair began to fall out. At first, in small clumps. Marina was visiting her husband in hospital every day; sometimes Anatoly went too. She saw him on Sunday, 12 November; he complained of pain in his throat. When she returned the next morning Litvinenko looked much
worse: a spectral figure, weak, pathetic and ‘completely different’. Marina stroked her husband’s head, a calming gesture. She looked at her hand in horror: his hair was on her glove. It was on his shoulder and pillow too – everywhere. Marina was distraught. And, uncharacteristically, angry. She railed at medical staff: ‘What’s this? Can anyone tell me what’s happened to my husband?’

With Marina was Valentina Michena, a Russian ex-nurse in her late fifties whom Marina had befriended. Michena had arrived in the UK from Russia in 2000. She knew nobody, was lonely, and began chatting to Marina in a shop. ‘Marina is a lovely, lovely person,’ she said. Michena became a surrogate granny to Anatoly. When Litvinenko fell ill she moved into the family’s Muswell Hill home. She offered to cut Litvinenko’s hair, what was left of it. The doctors agreed. They asked Michena to collect the hair in a plastic bag, so they could test it.

Litvinenko was unperturbed by his dramatic hair loss. He was a good-looking man but had never been vain or preening. Michena tugged at the hair from the front; the hair at the back yielded less readily. ‘My appearance does not bother me at the moment,’ he told her. She finished the job with clippers. He was bald.

‘During those five days while I was visiting, his hair was falling down easily,’ Michena said. ‘It was like you would blow a dandelion.’

By this point Litvinenko was convinced he’d been the victim of a serious poisoning. He even knew who he thought had done it. In his BBC interview, he’d pointed
to Scaramella, his Italian contact. In fact, he was certain that it was the two Russians – the known Lugovoi and the unknown Kovtun – who were to blame. Litvinenko was by nature an optimist, and remained confident he would beat his illness. By concealing Lugovoi and Kovtun’s role, he was hoping to draw them back from Moscow to the UK, where the authorities might then arrest them.

Meanwhile, his physicians were becoming concerned. On 13 November, Dr Andres Virchis, a haematologist at Barnet Hospital, reviewed his case. It was, he admitted, a ‘bit of a puzzle’. A diagnosis of gastro-enteritis now seemed less likely. Litvinenko was exhibiting a whole set of different, troubling symptoms; his platelet count had fallen through the floor and then there was the alopecia – abrupt, alarming hair loss. Nothing really fitted together.

‘It just struck me that he looked like one of my patients who had had chemotherapy,’ Virchis said. ‘If you look at cancer treatment, there’s various levels of intensity. There’s outpatient treatment, but there are patients with acute leukaemia, a serious form of blood cancer, given very intensive chemotherapy. He looked just like a patient of mine that had had treatment.’

The senior team managing Litvinenko started to explore other possibilities. The idea that he had been poisoned was beginning to look less fanciful. The next day, 14 November, Virchis began discussions with a toxicologist at Guy’s Hospital in London; they agreed to test for heavy metals and to carry out a biopsy. Litvinenko was extremely unwell. Virchis thought he looked like someone with acute radiation sickness. He wrote in the
medical file: ‘Ask radiology re. check radioactive sources of poisoning.’

The doctors were groping slowly towards an answer. On 15 November they brought a Geiger counter over Litvinenko for the first time. It looked like a chunky pocket calculator; if it found beta or gamma emissions the instrument would emit a loud whine. There was nothing. The notes record: ‘Geiger Counter – No Emission.’ The hospital didn’t have equipment to measure much rarer alpha radiation; the only institution capable of doing that was the British nuclear weapons centre at Aldermaston.

As news of Litvinenko’s condition spread, visitors arrived. That evening, Goldfarb dropped by. He was worried by what he discovered. Litvinenko was neutropenic. Goldfarb was a microbiologist by training and perfectly understood what this meant: Litvinenko’s immune system was in ruinous shape, and collapsing.

Litvinenko told him about his suspicion that Lugovoi was the culprit. Goldfarb felt it was imperative the police get involved. The next day Goldfarb returned to Barnet Hospital with George Menzies, Litvinenko’s long-time lawyer. They spent two hours at his bedside. Though weak, Litvinenko was in no doubt who was behind the plot, croaking to Menzies: ‘You see, they have poisoned me’ – ‘they’ being Russia’s secret services.

Litvinenko continued to ring his friends. But he was fading. During one conversation with Suvorov his voice slowed up ‘like a gramophone’; his voice faltered; the mobile tumbled from his grasp. Suvorov promised to come and see him in ‘three or four days’ when he was better.

Later that day, Guy’s poisons unit came back with news. The biopsy pointed to a provisional diagnosis of poisoning by thallium, a deadly metal. But the levels of thallium were weirdly faint and not much above environmental levels – 30 nanomoles per litre. The data were confusing. Further verification was needed.

The diagnosis sounded an alarm. Medical staff contacted Scotland Yard and said they suspected a malicious poisoning. Virchis talked to Litvinenko. Litvinenko confirmed that the Russian intelligence service uses radioactive thallium. Doctors began treating him with Prussian blue, an antidote and counter-poison.

Plans were drawn up, meanwhile, to shift Litvinenko from Barnet to a specialist ward at University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, round the corner from the London university of the same name, and a short walk through a green square of veteran plane trees to the British Museum.