A Very Expensive Poison (13 page)

Litvinenko arrived at University College Hospital on 17 November. Just before midnight, two detectives appeared at his bedside.

To begin with, the British police had a confusing picture – a poisoned Russian who spoke poor English; a baffling plot involving visitors from Moscow; and a swirl of potential crime scenes. Two detectives, DI Brent Hyatt and Chris Hoar, from the Met’s specialist crime unit, interviewed Litvinenko in the critical-care unit on the sixteenth floor of University College Hospital. They address him rather quaintly as Edwin. He is a ‘significant witness’. There are
eighteen interviews, lasting eight hours and fifty-seven minutes in total. These conversations stretch out over three days, from the early hours of 18 November until shortly before 9 p.m. on 20 November.

The interview transcripts were kept secret for eight and a half years, hidden in Scotland Yard’s case file, and stamped with the word ‘Restricted’, white capitals on a stark black rectangular background. Revealed in 2015, they are remarkable documents. They are, in effect, unique witness statements taken from a ghost. But Litvinenko is no ordinary ghost: he’s a ghost who uses his final reserves of energy to solve a chilling murder mystery – his own.

Litvinenko was a highly experienced detective. He knew how investigations worked. He was fastidious too: neatly collating case materials in a file, always employing a hole punch. In the interviews he sets out before the police in dispassionate terms the evidence of who might have poisoned him. He acknowledges: ‘I cannot blame these people directly because I have no proof.’

He’s an ideal witness – good with descriptions, heights, details. He draws up a list of suspects. There are three of them: the Italian Mario Scaramella; his business partner Andrei Lugovoi; and Lugovoi’s unpleasant Russian companion, whose name Litvinenko struggles to remember, and to whom he refers wrongly as ‘Volodia’ or ‘Vadim’.

DI Hyatt begins recording at eight minutes after midnight on 18 November. He introduces himself and his colleague Detective Sergeant Hoar, from the Met’s
specialist crime directorate. Edwin gives his own name and address.

Hoar then says: ‘Thank you very much for that, Edwin. Edwin, we’re here investigating an allegation that somebody has poisoned you in an attempt to kill you.’ Hoar says that doctors have told him Edwin is suffering from ‘extremely high levels of thallium’ and ‘that is the cause of this illness’.

He continues: ‘Can I ask you to tell us what you think has happened to you and why?’

Medical staff had pre-briefed Hoar that Litvinenko spoke good English. In fact, Hoar discovered, this wasn’t the case. Litvinenko’s answers were sometimes spotty and confusing; after this first nocturnal session they took a police interpreter, Nina Tupper.

Despite these hurdles, Litvinenko is able to give a full account of his career in the FSB, his deepening conflict with the agency, and his unhappy encounter in 1998 with Putin. The case file records his words: ‘I have meeting with PUTIN, face to face. About forty minutes. I bring to PUTIN material about criminal inside FSB. PUTIN invite me to his team. I refuse. I know who is PUTIN. I have operation material against PUTIN in some … PUTIN have contract with one criminal group.’

Litvinenko talks of his ‘good relationship’ with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another Putin enemy, and her fear she was in danger. In spring 2006, they met in a branch of Caffè Nero in London. Litvinenko asked her what was wrong. She told him, ‘Alexander, I’m very afraid,’ and said that every time she said goodbye
to her daughter and son she had the feeling she was looking at them ‘for the last time’. He urged her to leave Russia. She said she couldn’t, citing her ‘old parents’ and kids. In October 2006, the journalist was shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment. Previously, in 2004, Politkovskaya was herself poisoned after drinking tea served on a plane to the North Caucasus. She had been on her way to mediate with Chechen terrorists who seized a school in Beslan in North Ossetia. The poisoning was the work of the FSB, she wrote.

Politkovskaya’s murder in October left Litvinenko ‘very very shocked’, he says, adding: ‘I lost a lot of my friends’ and that human life in Russia is cheap. He tells detectives about a speech he made in the Frontline Club the previous month in which he accused Putin directly of having Politkovskaya killed.

From time to time, the interviews stop: the tape runs out; nurses come in to administer drugs; Litvinenko, suffering from diarrhoea, has to go to the bathroom. Mostly, though, he battles on. He tells Hyatt: ‘Meeting you is very important for my case.’ Litvinenko describes his encounter with Scaramella and gives a pocketbook description of the Italian: smart, grey suit, ‘crooked hair’, dark complexion, 1 m 72 cm – a typical man from Naples, with a light beard, and a ‘little bit fat’ round the middle.

The meeting, Litvinenko explains, was exasperating. Litvinenko says he was unimpressed by Scaramella’s fondness for cloak and dagger – they had agreed to meet at Piccadilly Circus next to the statue of Eros. Litvinenko got there first and found himself wondering about the
‘irony’ of the situation. ‘Why play the spies? To my mind, all these James Bonds verge on madness,’ he tells Hyatt.

In the Itsu restaurant, Scaramella delivers a list. It includes both their names. Supposedly, those who feature are targets for assassination by the Russian state. Litvinenko says he isn’t terrified by this development (which, in hindsight, appears to be a bizarre coincidence).

Rather, he’s offended by the grubbiness of the A4 sheet Scaramella handed him. ‘It was all dirty. I’ve worked a lot in my life with documents … When I am given papers like this I feel squeamish taking them into my hands,’ he says. He shows the two detectives his own working notebook. It’s immaculate, without any stains, even after two years. ‘Look how I make notes,’ he tells them.

But it is the two Russians who are at the centre of his suspicions. Litvinenko recounts his meeting with them at the Millennium Hotel. He says that he hadn’t been to the hotel before and had to find it on a map. He insists this ‘special’ information remain secret – not to be made public or shared with his wife Marina. ‘These people, it’s interesting. Most interesting,’ he muses. Litvinenko’s logic is that if Scaramella is the culprit he can easily be arrested in Italy. But if it’s the Russians they will be trickier to catch: ‘If this Andrei and Vadim from KGB poison me, if I speak it, KGB cover it [up].’

With time running out, Litvinenko is working furiously to solve the conundrum. The transcript reads:

After four or five hours of interviews, the case begins to cohere. There are moments when it appears that there are three officers hard at work: Hyatt, Hoar and Litvinenko, the punctilious ex-cop. By this point Litvinenko is speaking Russian. The investigation gains new momentum. Information is passed back to SO15, the counter-terrorist command at Scotland Yard, headed by Detective Superintendent Clive Timmons.

Litvinenko explains that his most important papers are kept at home, in the lower shelf of a large cupboard. The papers include critical information on Putin, and the people around him, from newspapers and other sources, as well as background on Russian criminal gangs. He gives the police his email password and bank account. He tells them where they can find receipts for two Orange SIM cards, bought for £20 from a store in Bond Street – in a black leather wallet on his bedside table. Litvinenko explains that he gave one of the SIMs to Lugovoi; they used these secret numbers to communicate. He hands over his diary.

It was, Litvinenko says, Lugovoi who insisted the pair of them meet at the Millennium Hotel on 1 November. They were originally scheduled to meet the following day, at the offices of security company Global Risk. Litvinenko shows Hyatt his note of the appointment. He uses a code for ‘Lugovoi’ – tragic in hindsight – calling him ‘Friend 2’.

‘We were to meet on the second. But he called me in the morning and said he had already arrived and he would like to meet me for a short time on the first,’ Litvinenko says.

DI Hyatt produces a map of central London. With a little difficulty, Litvinenko retraces his probable route to Grosvenor Square – north along Old Bond Street, along Grafton Street, and then Berkeley Square.

He describes meeting Lugovoi in the Millennium lobby and going with him to the Pine Bar. Lugovoi was dressed, Litvinenko says, in clothes he had bought three months earlier on a shopping trip to Harrods, London’s most famous department store – ‘a kind of cardigan’, dark blue and orange. Litvinenko said he didn’t think much of Lugovoi’s expensive, flashy style. ‘We were in Harrods … I said to him then, “Why do you need this Harrods?”’ There were further details – Lugovoi was wearing greyish jeans, ‘fashionable’ shoes, ‘but not English make’, and a big gold watch with a black face. ‘It was very visible. Before he [Lugovoi] had told me that this watch cost $50,000.’

Ever helpful, Litvinenko phones his wife and asks her to locate a photo of Lugovoi at their home. Hyatt suspends the interview to secure the photograph. Lugovoi is now a prime suspect. Litvinenko describes him like this: ‘Andrei is a pure European, and even he looks a little bit like me, sort of. The same type as like me … I am 1 m 77 cm, 1 m 78 cm, so he is probably 1 m 76 cm. He is two years younger than me, light hair.’ He has a small, ‘almost invisible’ bald patch.

The transcript says:

At the end of his second day of interviews, on 19 November, Litvinenko describes getting a lift back home with his Chechen friend Zakayev: ‘Now the paradoxical thing is that I was still feeling very well but then somehow I had some kind of feeling that something might happen to me in the nearest future. Maybe subconsciously.’ The detectives turn off the tape.

It’s a full and frank account of events leading up to his poisoning – with one exception. During these two days Litvinenko doesn’t mention his secret life and his job working for British intelligence. It’s only the next day that he speaks of his meeting on 31 October with his MI6 handler ‘Martin’, in the basement café of the Waterstone’s bookshop on Piccadilly. Litvinenko is chary, evidently reluctant to discuss his undercover MI6 role.

The conversation runs:

The interview abruptly stops. It’s 5.16 p.m. Hyatt dials the long telephone number, reaches ‘Martin’, and tells him that Litvinenko is gravely ill in hospital, the victim of an apparent poisoning by two mysterious Russians.

It appears to be the first time that MI6 – an organisation famed for its professionalism – learns of Litvinenko’s plight. Litvinenko, of course, wasn’t a full-time employee. But he was a salaried informant, with his own encrypted cell phone, and MI6-provided passport. The agency appears not to have classified Litvinenko as being at risk, despite numerous threatening phone calls from Moscow and the firebomb attack on his north London home.

MI6’s reaction is unclear. The British government has still refused to release the relevant files. One can imagine panic and embarrassment. And the agency shifting into full-blown crisis mode. The transcripts show that after speaking to DI Hyatt, ‘Martin’ scrambled to Litvinenko’s hospital bedside. He talked to his poisoned agent, and left around 7.15 p.m. The police interview then resumes; Litvinenko continues his account of his Waterstone’s meeting with ‘Martin’ in coy terms:

The final exchanges deal with earlier threats against Litvinenko from the Kremlin and its emissaries. The detectives ask if there is anything Litvinenko would like to add.