A Very Expensive Poison (19 page)

The first took place soon after the Berezovsky story was published. My wife was away. I had been at dinner with friends. I returned with Tilly and Ruskin to our apartment. We’d moved shortly before to a new tenth-floor flat in the suburb of Voikovskaya. From the living room there was a view of a park – birches and a municipal lake in one direction, where we swam in summer; a courtyard in the other.

That someone had broken in was obvious. My son’s single Ikea bed was next to a low window. We kept the window double locked. Now the window was unlocked. It had been left propped open – with a 15-metre drop to the yard below. We peered down. ‘Has there been a burglar?’ my son wondered. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. It seemed unlikely you would survive a fall from such a height. The message appeared to be: take care, or your son might meet with an accident.

At 4 a.m. that night, I was woken by a loud beeping from next door. I turned on the light, and groped towards
the sound. An alarm clock with a digital display was ringing in the living room. I hadn’t set the alarm. We’d inherited the clock from our landlord, Vadim, but never used it. It appeared my intruders had decided to play a sinister prank on us. Evidently, this wasn’t a conventional burglary. I checked the kitchen. I’d left several thousand dollars in a drawer to pay next month’s rent. The cash was still there.

Putin’s secret policemen were carrying out a different mission: to intimidate and scare us. Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s polonium murder, the FSB’s secret poison factory – all these were apparently taboo themes. I had crossed a line. There would be further break-ins, and further warnings.

Shortly before this covert harassment started, I attended Putin’s annual press conference. The venue was a giant two-tiered auditorium inside the Kremlin. This was a remarkable set-piece event – attended by 2,000 mostly Russian journalists and screened live on state television. They shouted softball questions. What did the president think about gardening? How should Russians bring up their kids?

Putin was also asked about Litvinenko. His dismissive response: that Litvinenko was a small-time agent who’d been fired from the FSB for beating up suspects and who ‘didn’t possess any secrets at all’.

In May 2007, the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service charged Lugovoi with Litvinenko’s murder. This, from Putin’s perspective, was another provocation. He refused Britain’s request to hand over Lugovoi. Putin said that Russia’s constitution forbids the extradition of its
citizens. The request was a sign of Britain’s ‘arrogance’ and a ‘no brains’ colonial mentality, he added.

In the wake of the CPS’s charge, Lugovoi held a press conference. It took place in the Moscow office of the Russian news agency Interfax. This was the same room where in 1997 Litvinenko had accused the FSB of ordering him to snuff out Berezovsky. A photo of the famous event hung on a wall in the corridor. It was a hot day; I turned up in shorts. The room was full. Lugovoi walked in with Kovtun. Lugovoi was wearing a grey pinstriped suit and pink tie. Kovtun’s hair had grown back. Lugovoi began with a polite ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.’

He said he’d called a press conference to defend himself from swirling accusations made by the ‘western mass media’. They had initiated ‘a real war against me and against Russia’, he said.

What followed was a lengthy denunciation – of Berezovsky, MI6 and the UK government, which had ‘hidden traces of the crime’ and ‘made me a scapegoat’. Lugovoi said that MI6 had tried to recruit him. He wasn’t a murderer, or as he put it: ‘Some Russian James Bond, infiltrating a nuclear centre and poisoning his mate in cold blood, contaminating himself, his wife and children along the way!’

Vesti-24, the state-owned TV news channel, broadcast this live. According to Lugovoi, British intelligence had murdered Litvinenko, one of its agents.

This was a serious allegation. I asked Lugovoi if he had any proof.

Lugovoi replied: ‘
Yest!
’ – There is proof!

So what was it?

Lugovoi didn’t offer details.

My question had annoyed him.

He said: ‘The British public must take a serious interest in what some Russian-born people are doing in the UK. They are engaged in recruiting Russian citizens, they sell British passports. The British nationality is for sale, esteemed BBC … sorry I don’t know what other English mass media companies are present here. Your nationality is sold like Chinese rags in a market, and you are doing nothing about it whilst thigh-slapping! I do apologise for the rough expression.’

Afterwards, the Kremlin announced that Lugovoi’s vague accusations – clearly based on talking points supplied to him by others – were worthy of ‘further investigation’.

Later that day, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton, sent off a confidential eGram – a diplomatic telegram – to the foreign office in London. Brenton summarised Lugovoi’s claims, noting that Kovtun ‘was present but said little’.

He concluded: ‘Lugovoi’s story sounds like nonsense to us, but is shrewdly judged for its plausibility to Russian ears – particularly in view of the “rock” incident last year. The fact that he was given nearly two hours on a government news channel to make his allegations strongly suggests official involvement in the stage management of his “revelations”.’

Britain’s security agencies compiled their own report on the murder, based on police evidence and secret
sources. Its contents have not been divulged. The conclusion, it appears, is that this was a Russian state-sponsored assassination – not just an unfriendly act, but one involving dangerous nuclear material, which potentially endangered hundreds of lives.

In July 2007, the new UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, expelled four Russian diplomats from London. This was in protest at Moscow’s refusal to hand over Lugovoi. Miliband told parliament he believed the FSB was involved. He severed cooperation with the Russian spy agency and introduced a new visa policy for Kremlin politicians travelling to London. Up until this point MI6 had communicated with the SVR, its Russia’s foreign-intelligence counterpart. These channels were cut as well, even though the SVR was apparently not involved in Litvinenko’s poisoning, an FSB operation.

The Kremlin’s response was comparatively restrained. It expelled four diplomats in turn from the UK embassy in Moscow.

The mood among British diplomats based in Moscow was understandably embattled. They found themselves at the front end of the worst stand-off in relations since the Brezhnev era. Brenton held regular breakfast briefings for journalists. The ambassador’s residence was just off the Old Arbat – a nineteenth-century building in Bolshoi Nikolopeskovsky Lane that had once belonged to a merchant or senior official.

Brenton admitted that the Litvinenko case made better relations with Moscow impossible and said that there was no prospect of an early meeting between Putin
and Gordon Brown, the UK’s new prime minister. ‘I don’t know what happens next. Lugovoi remains a wanted man,’ Brenton said. Lugovoi’s support came from the top and from ‘quite influential chunks of the Russian state’, he said, adding: ‘This guy is a suspected murderer. In normal places you don’t find a government giving support and encouragement to such a person.’

It was the use of a radioactive nucleotide that convinced the UK government this was a Kremlin plot, Brenton said. ‘Our private judgement is that you have to be a state or state organisation to get hold of polonium in the quantities it was used.’

The day after Litvinenko’s death, Lugovoi and Kovtun had visited the British embassy. They met Brenton’s deputy Sian MacLeod and his security officer David Chitty. The two Russians insisted they had nothing to do with the murder – and signed declarations to that effect.

Subsequently, the room was tested for contamination. Scientists picked up traces of polonium. The highest readings came from Kovtun’s chair – four to five becquerels per centimetre squared. They found it at the table in front of which Kovtun had been sitting, and in the storage hole where he’d left his mobile phone. ‘He sat in a chair. We had to burn the chair,’ Brenton said.

Actually this wasn’t quite true. Embassy staff locked the conference room used by Lugovoi and Kovtun, with the chairs still in it. Only a small number of diplomats knew about the radiation. Paul Knott, the embassy’s second secretary, told his colleagues the room wasn’t available because he’d ‘lost the key’. The atmosphere
at the time was ‘sort of Le Carré’, he said, adding: ‘We had that Cold-War-is-here-again feeling. We knew things were worsening. But to do what they did in the heart of London seemed to us incredible.’

Brenton was an unusually frank diplomat. His reward was a campaign of Kremlin-sponsored harassment: the pro-Putin youth group Nashi picketed his public events, jumped in front of his car, and waved unflattering placards outside the embassy. The placards bore a photo of the ambassador with the word ‘Loser’ stamped in red ink across his forehead.

Days after my first break-in I had had my own meeting with MacLeod and an embassy security officer. I’d reported the intrusion to the
Guardian
and mentioned it to the embassy’s press attaché, who suggested I drop by. The venue for our chat was the embassy’s secure
room from which mobile phones were banned. It looked rather like a music studio; a map of the Russian Federation hung on a wall. The room appeared to be the only part of the building which Putin’s security agents were unable to bug.

The conversation was helpful. And demystifying. It turned out the embassy knew all about FSB burglaries. They were Moscow’s worst-kept diplomatic secret, I learned. British and US diplomats and Russian nationals working for western missions found themselves on the receiving end of demonstrative break-ins. So, I later discovered, did Russian opposition activists. Recently, the break-ins had grown more frequent. ‘We don’t talk about it publicly. But no, you’re not going mad,’ the officer told me. ‘There’s no doubt this was the FSB. We have a thick file of similar cases. Generally we don’t make a fuss.’

The FSB’s tactics were weird, to say the least. They included defecating in loos, and not flushing afterwards; turning off fridges while the occupant was away on holiday; and introducing items of low value, like a cuddly toy, which hadn’t been there before. Sometimes a TV remote control would vanish, only to reappear weeks or months later. The same break-in team would install listening devices. Apparently, our flat was now bugged. ‘There’s not much you can do about them. Trying to identify or remove them will merely trigger the FSB’s return,’ the officer said.

On the surface, the FSB’s methods looked like bad-taste practical jokes. Actually, the KGB knew that such tactics – repeated over time – could have a destructive
effect. The KGB developed and codified these techniques in the 1960s and 1970s. They had a name: operational psychology.

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, and the KGB’s sister organisation, employed the same tactics against dissidents, church leaders and others. One former Stasi officer told me proudly: ‘We always did it better than the Russians.’ Such methods were wonderfully deniable. It was easy to deride anyone who complained of sprite-like intrusions by unknown third parties as paranoid and mad.

I discovered that Stasi officers had written entire theses about what they called
Zersetzung
. The word in German means corrosion or decay. The goal of this harassment – in which the state’s hand remained hidden – was to ‘corrode’ a target so he or she ceased all hostile anti-state activity. With me, that appeared to be writing articles on themes the FSB deemed unacceptable. In the GDR,
Zersetzung
became a pseudo-scientific discipline. Putin had certainly come across
Zersetzung
when he served as a junior KGB spy in Dresden.

The embassy officer told me there was no evidence the agency hurt children, despite the ominous window left open next to my son’s bed. This was somewhat consoling.

That summer I received a letter from the FSB. It said that the agency had opened a criminal inquiry into Berezovsky’s
Guardian
interview. It added that Berezovsky had taken part in activities against state power, an offence under Russia’s penal code, article 278. An FSB agent called our Moscow office. He informed me I was being summoned
as a ‘witness’ in connection with the case. I was to report to Lefortovo Prison. Oh, and I’d need a lawyer.

Three weeks later, I turned up outside Lefortovo jail. The letter had indicated the address – Energeticheskaya St 3a – useful since Lefortovo didn’t appear on maps. The building was as forbidding as I’d imagined, set among anonymous grey apartment blocks. There was a single tree in the courtyard. I entered through a heavy metal door with my lawyer, Gari Mirzoyan. Inside there was a large waiting room. It was devoid of tables and chairs. The agent on duty sat behind a silvered one-way window. He could see us; we couldn’t see him.

A hairy hand shot out and took my passport. Since there was nowhere to sit, we stood. After five minutes we were told to proceed to room 306, where Major Kuzmin was waiting for us. We walked down a corridor. The carpet was a worn red-green. I noticed an old-fashioned lift, with a heavy metal grille. It sank to the prison’s lower depths where Litvinenko had been kept. Above us were old-style security cameras. The atmosphere was one of shabby menace and institutional gloom. Seemingly little had changed since KGB times.