A Very Expensive Poison (20 page)

Major Kuzmin was younger than I expected: late twenties perhaps, with blond hair, neatly cut, and wearing a dark olive-green uniform. Lying on his desk was a colour photocopy of the
Guardian
’s front-page Berezovsky scoop. I had explained that my role in the affair was a small one. Nonetheless, Kuzmin wanted to know under what circumstances the interview had taken place. Who was present? Was there a recording? Kuzmin
typed my replies – there wasn’t much to say – two-fingered onto a computer.

It occurred to me that Kuzmin probably wasn’t the officer’s real name. Was he the guy who had been organising my apartment break-ins? There was nothing in the room that gave clues to his personality – no photos, one small spider plant. On the table in front of me was a bottle of fizzy water and a glass. Drinking didn’t seem like a good idea. The glass was engraved with four sets of initials in Cyrillic letters: Cheka, OGPU, KGB and FSB. These were the names of the Kremlin successive counter-revolutionary agencies, beginning with Dzerzhinsky’s
Cheka
.

After fifty-five minutes, the interview was over. Kuzmin gave me a witness statement to sign. We shook hands. He offered me a gift: a copy of the ‘Investigations department, Lefortovo Prison’ 2007 FSB calendar. It featured the FSB’s sword and shield logo, in dark red, against a purple background. Mirzoyan and I walked out into the corridor. It was empty. There was no noise or office chatter – merely a smooth and unnerving silence.

Despite the apparent end of the Cold War, the FSB clearly saw itself operating in the same tradition of Bolshevik conspiracy as its predecessors. The KGB’s and FSB’s goals were the same: to protect the state against all enemies. The agency’s neuralgic reaction to a single newspaper article suggested the Kremlin continued to view Berezovsky as its enemy in chief, a sort of modern Trotsky. Apparently I’d been marked down as Trotsky’s mini-helper and accomplice.

The FSB’s Lefortovo summons had the opposite reaction to what the agency may have intended. The Litvinenko case was inherently fascinating – and I was being told, through unsubtle KGB-style break-ins, not to investigate. The Kremlin’s extreme sensitivity to the topic suggested there was a lot to uncover. With digging and a little tenacity, perhaps it might be possible to find some answers.

In the summer of 2007, I met Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s urbane English-speaking press spokesman. It was a moment when the Kremlin still cared about Russia’s image abroad, one the Litvinenko affair had dented. A group of western correspondents had been summoned to one of Moscow’s fancier Italian restaurants. Peskov explained the affair from the Russian government’s perspective.

In his version of events, the Kremlin was a blameless victim: a reasonable and forbearing partner, surrounded by hostile and irrational actors. Miliband’s decision to expel four Russian diplomats was ‘totally unexpected’, Peskov said, and a throwback to the bad old days of Cold War confrontation. ‘We consider it unfortunate,’ he added smoothly, his tone – this was classic Peskov – one of faux innocent regret.

Peskov stated that Moscow ‘strongly rejected’ any suggestion of Russian state involvement. Where was the proof? Litvinenko’s death was a ‘terrible crime’ and not a political murder, he said. He reeled off Moscow’s many grievances against London – unsuccessful extradition requests, ‘Mr Berezovsky, Mr Zakayev…’ One quip had annoyed him. Peskov recalled how he flew first-class with
British Airways from New York to London. The stewardess had served him a cup of tea with the words: ‘No polonium this time, Mr Peskov.’

According to Peskov, London was succumbing to the kind of virulent ‘Russophobia’ more usually associated with Eastern European countries like Poland. ‘You want me to encourage my citizens to go to London?’ he asked, adding: ‘It takes two to tango.’ He was adamant the Kremlin was reacting to the aggressive behaviour of others. ‘We weren’t the initiators of this crisis,’ he said. ‘This mirror response [the expulsion of UK diplomats] was actually something we regret, and something we were forced into.’

Peskov’s performance reminded me of the writer and critic Clive James’s observation in his book
Cultural Amnesia
: truly unprincipled states never blush.

Meanwhile, the FSB sent me a further letter. Its investigation was going well; officers had concluded that I didn’t meet Berezovsky. I was therefore ‘not of interest’ to the agency, it wrote. In August we flew back to the UK for our annual summer holiday and a week on a Cornish beach. Later that month I returned to Moscow without my family, who were staying on.

The post in Moscow was unreliable; sometimes packages arrived, sometimes not. I had hand-carried a video taped by a friend, the poet Heathcote Williams. He had recorded two documentaries he thought might be of interest. One was a BBC
Panorama
investigation into Litvinenko’s death,
How to Poison a Spy
, presented by the journalist John Sweeney. The other was
My Friend Sasha
– a Very Russian Murder
by Andrei Nekrasov, the filmmaker who had shot the deathbed footage of Litvinenko.

I dumped the tape under the TV, and forgot about it. Williams had Sellotaped programme notes to the side of the cassette, including the photo of Litvinenko in intensive care. One Sunday evening I slotted the video in to watch. The recording began normally – a slice of BBC
Newsnight
hosted by Jeremy Paxman. After this, something very strange. The Litvinenko documentaries had been erased. Instead of pictures, there were scratchy black-and-white lines; the sound, just audible, was a high-speed squeak.

It was hard to be sure, but it appeared the FSB had broken in again, taken umbrage at the tape’s contents, and deleted them. I emailed Williams. He’d checked the tape before he sent it; it played fine. The
Panorama
documentary, I found out later, featured interviews with all the major players. Peskov – who else? – denied Kremlin involvement.

There was also a clip from an interview with Litvinenko. In it, he remarked: ‘There were two ideologies in the Soviet Union, communist and criminal. In 1991, the communist ideology ceased to exist and only the criminal remained. The KGB was renamed, it became the FSB, but nothing really changed. Everything stayed the way it was before. The only difference was that a KGB officer killed for his ideology while an FSB officer kills for money.’

Lugovoi had friends in high places; that was obvious. They were keeping a close eye on his case. I caught
up with the man himself four months later. He was on the campaign trail, embarking on an unlikely career as a deputy in Russia’s parliament. Lugovoi was number two on the federal list of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), an outfit set up by the KGB and led by the flamboyant Zhirinovsky. In his new role as a would-be politician, Lugovoi zigzagged across the country, traveling to the Far East, the Urals and European Russia.

It seemed that Lugovoi was going to make the best of his notoriety. His campaign, such as it was, had an anti-British flavour.

I went with Lugovoi to Manturovo, a village 60 miles (100 km) outside the western city of Kursk. It was always good to get out of Moscow; here were crumbling dachas, snow-covered fields and poplar trees. Lugovoi toured a farm, peered into its cowshed and visited an orphanage. That evening he talked to locals in a pink-walled hall decorated with an icon and a bust of Lenin. His audience listened politely.

Lugovoi, it struck me, wasn’t a natural politician. With his modish suit, purple tie with swirls and Italian shoes, he cut an incongruous figure. Since elections in Russia were fake political exercises – vote rigging on behalf of the ruling United Russia party was rampant – this didn’t matter. At a press conference in his hotel, the Nightingale, Lugovoi blamed Britain for Russia’s woes. The British had invaded Crimea, forged the Zinoviev letter in 1924 and carried on behaving like ‘Anglo-Saxon imperialists’.

I scribbled his remarks in my notepad. ‘If you look at Russian–British relations, the Cold War never started and never ended,’ he declared.

Locals seemed bemused by his performance. Did it matter that Lugovoi was accused of murder? ‘It’s difficult to say,’ Viktor Shumakov, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, told me. ‘In Russia many strange things happen all the time.’

A year after Litvinenko’s death, Lugovoi was elected as a deputy to Russia’s Duma. His meteoric rise, most observers in Moscow felt, could have happened only with the Kremlin’s endorsement. Lugovoi, meanwhile, gave numerous audiences to the domestic and foreign press. They took place in Moscow, on the remote and beautiful Kamchatka peninsula, and while he sat on the back of a horse.

My own on-off investigation into Litvinenko’s murder had not met with a breakthrough. But there were clues. I went to see Olga Kryshtanovskaya, an expert on elite politics, and a researcher in sociology at Russia’s academy of sciences. Kryshtanovskaya was an interesting figure, who would go on to became a United Russia MP. She had described how under Putin former KGB officers rose to senior positions – by 2007, 42 per cent of those in top Kremlin jobs had a military or intelligence background. She had good contacts inside Russian intelligence.

I asked her about Litvinenko. She said that FSB officers had privately admitted that his murder must have been one of their operations. They had no regrets about the target – Litvinenko was a traitor and merited the
punishment – but expressed surprise at the shoddy way in which his execution was carried out. These things were done much more tidily by the KGB, in particular when Yuri Andropov – the only KGB officer to lead the Soviet Union – was communist party general secretary.

‘My FSB friends told me that this [Litvinenko’s bungled poisoning] would never have happened under Andropov,’ Kryshtanovskaya told me. ‘They told me the KGB was much more efficient at murdering back then.’

Lugovoi and Kovtun may have been third-rate killers, but they continued to enjoy support from where it mattered. In April 2008, I interviewed Lugovoi for the first time. The location was his first-floor office in Moscow’s Radisson Hotel in Kievskaya, the same place where the detectives from Scotland Yard had stayed.

Despite his contempt for the British ‘establishment’, Lugovoi turned out to be an Anglophile. He was a fan of English literature; the works of Arthur Conan Doyle sat in a glass-fronted cabinet case. ‘I’ve read all Conan Doyle. I’m very fond of
The Lost World
,’ he explained. His son went to the same British school in Moscow as my son, though at a different campus. His daughter spent a year on an English course in Cambridge.

Lugovoi’s assistant, Sophia, brought us tea. On the wall was a photo of Putin shaking hands with Berezovsky; another jokey montage showed the president chopping the head off the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There were framed snaps from Lugovoi’s days in the Federal Protection Service, when he accompanied Kremlin politicians including Boris Yeltsin and prime
minister Yegor Gaidar. I spotted two photos of his trips with Gaidar to Washington.

I asked Lugovoi why he had joined the KGB’s ninth directorate, responsible for government security. ‘They invited me. Any normal Soviet officer would take it as an honour to be in the KGB. It means that you are the best.’ Lugovoi denied that he was ever a spy and said his job in the early 1990s, as head of a Kremlin platoon, was rather boring. Instead of intelligence work he trained new recruits to perform ceremonial drills in Red Square.

What happened in London? Lugovoi’s answer: nothing much. He claimed Litvinenko insisted on a meeting, picked the Millennium Hotel as venue, and called him ‘at least five times’. This was, as phone logs later demonstrated, untrue: it was Lugovoi who called Litvinenko. As for the tea: ‘I’ve always said I can’t remember whether we ordered tea at all. I remember that I drank some whisky or gin. Then Litvinenko arrived. He said next to nothing. He was very excited.’

Not all of what Lugovoi said was deceitful. He recounted how Litvinenko rang him at 8.30 a.m. on 2 November and explained he was feeling ill and couldn’t make their meeting later that morning. Lugovoi phoned Litvinenko in hospital on 7 November (‘We had an excellent conversation’) and on 13 November – the last call before his death. Lugovoi said Litvinenko had told him he worked for British intelligence: ‘He was definitely an agent of the English security services.’ Lugovoi took a dim view of MI6, which recruited its agents ‘in the pub’.

It was strange. Lugovoi had a certain charm. In person he was disarming. His tale of virtuous innocence and wrongful insinuation even seemed plausible, until you remembered the chilling facts. He smiled, joked, made rueful expressions with his face, and tossed the occasional word of English into his Russian (‘absolutely’). He was wearing the same kind of clothes – a pink shirt, fashionable cuffs, grey business suit – that had prompted hotel staff in London to snigger.

By this point, Lugovoi had given dozens of interviews to journalists. In each, he stuck to the same blameless formula: he wasn’t a murderer but the victim of conspiracy. At key points, his recall of events was fuzzy. Why couldn’t he remember what drinks he ordered at the Millennium Hotel? It wasn’t an encounter you would forget. He was lying, there was no doubt. Underneath his smooth persona was something cold, cruel and terrifying.

Before my interview with Lugovoi, I bumped into Kovtun outside the office. When I emerged he was waiting for me. He had the air of someone with not much to do. Though he didn’t say so, he seemed jealous of Lugovoi’s fame and obvious material success. In the wake of the CPS’s murder charge, Lugovoi became, for many Russians, a national hero. Kovtun – not charged until 2011 – was a footnote.

We chatted for ten minutes. Kovtun said his situation frustrated him. His attempts to clarify whether he was under suspicion had been unsuccessful. He wanted to go back to Germany but not if that meant arrest and jail. ‘There are no guarantees. I don’t want to risk it,’ he told
me. Kovtun said that he was still on good terms with his ex-wife Marina, who had visited him in Russia over New Year. She’d remarried, had kids, started a new life.