A Very Expensive Poison (30 page)

In a long career, Cary had examined murdered children and victims of other gruesome crimes – but not this. ‘It’s been described as the most dangerous post-mortem undertaken … I think that’s right,’ he said. The case was unique. It was the first known example of acute polonium poisoning anywhere in the world.

Slowly, a picture was forming – of mediocre assassins who left behind clues. As Emmerson put it, the nuclear trail was ‘almost as sure as the path of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel’. A senior scientist explained radioactive readings taken from a range of sites associated with Lugovoi and Kovtun. Litvinenko’s deathbed interviews with police were made public. So was the last photo taken of him alive. There was discussion of Litvinenko’s corporate security and investigation work. To what extent might this explain his murder?

For those following the inquiry, this new evidence was fascinating and multi-layered. For the first time, the public could see CCTV footage of Litvinenko arriving at the Millennium Hotel and of his shifty-looking killers in the minutes before he was poisoned. Other guests had their identities blurred out: they looked like surging blobs. There were surprises. Who knew that British spies use Waterstone’s bookshop as a meeting place? Or that Litvinenko’s anonymous monthly payments from MI6 were listed on his bank statement next to a meal from Nando’s in Finchley?

Every evening the new evidence was posted to the inquiry’s website,
www.litvinenkoinquiry.org
. Sometimes the court official responsible – a pleasant New
Zealander called Mike Wicksteed – didn’t finish work until midnight. There were witness statements, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews from Moscow with the two murderers, telephone schedules, forensic contamination reports. The contamination schedule listed every location where polonium was discovered. It ran to an impressive 265 pages.

At lunchtimes, Marina Litvinenko would head over the road from the white neo-Gothic court building to Apostrophe, a sandwich bar. Over soup and green tea, she would discuss the case with her legal team: Emmerson, junior counsel Adam Straw and her solicitor Elena Tsirlina. Sometimes I would join them. Our mood was more cheerful than gloomy. Marina would greet witnesses, kiss old friends on the cheek; her fortitude was amazing.

Back in the courtroom, there were entertaining moments. In April 2012, Andrei Lugovoi took – and apparently passed – a lie detector test in Moscow. A Russian TV documentary producer named Alexander Korobko arranged it. In the wake of the result and with pompous fanfare Russia’s state media announced that Lugovoi’s innocence had been conclusively demonstrated. ‘We did the test because Andrei was so passionate about his innocence,’ Korobko told RT, the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda channel.

To give the test added credibility, Korobko got a British member of the Polygraph Association, Bruce Burgess, to conduct it. Burgess had embarked on a career in lie detection after doing other jobs including working as an apprentice ladies’ hairdresser. He trained
in the US at the Backster School of Lie Detection in San Diego. In the noughties he appeared on various UK daytime TV shows, including
Trisha
and
Jeremy Kyle.
He would carry out tests on individuals accused of marital infidelity; the parties would get the result – usually showing one of them had been unfaithful – live on air in the studio.

Korobko made Burgess an offer: an all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow, plus a £5,100 fee. The producer was enigmatic about who would be taking the test. He merely told Burgess the subject was a ‘celebrity’. Burgess flew to the Russian capital with his son Tristam. There they were introduced to Lugovoi. The Burgesses performed the test, recorded on video, in Moscow’s Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel.

Nearly three years later, the inquiry summoned Burgess to give an account of what transpired. Aged seventy, with shoulder-length white hair and beard, Burgess looked like a 1970s rock star gone to seed. He admitted to feeling uncomfortable after discovering in Moscow that Lugovoi was accused of murder. After discussions, Burgess said he came up with three questions. The two main ones were: ‘Did you do anything to cause the death of Alexander Litvinenko?’ and ‘Have you ever handled polonium?’

The inquiry was shown video footage from the encounter. Lugovoi sits in a leather armchair in the middle of a business suite, legs spread. Seated at a table behind him are an interpreter and the Burgesses. Their subject is hooked up to a polygraph, which measures
breathing rate, pulse, and sweating. When asked the two key questions, Lugovoi replies: ‘
Nyet
.’

Afterwards, Lugovoi admits to feeling some ‘internal tension’. Burgess says: ‘Have faith in me.’ Minutes later he delivers Lugovoi the result. ‘You were telling the truth. No deception indicated,’ he says. The next day Lugovoi invited father and son to breakfast at his daughter’s upscale Moscow restaurant. The bill was on the house.

The inquiry adjourned for lunch. Emmerson whispered to me: ‘Big bang coming up.’

At 2 p.m., Emmerson examined Burgess. It was a masterclass in how to eviscerate a witness, like watching a tiger play with a small, whiskery rodent. He asked if Burgess considered himself a ‘reliable evaluator of whether someone is telling the truth’. Burgess mumbled: ‘No, not really.’ This was an odd reply. Its reason became apparent.

The barrister asked: ‘What about yourself, Mr Burgess, do you consider yourself to be an experienced liar?’

In December 2009, Emmerson revealed, Burgess had been convicted of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to twenty-four weeks in jail, suspended for two years. He’d been caught speeding. He told police a fictitious ‘friend’ was behind the wheel. Burgess resigned from the Polygraph Association; the invitation to travel to Moscow came at a time when he was broke and somewhat demoralised. Korobko knew of Burgess’s criminal record: this, it appears, is why he hired him. By way of justification Burgess said: ‘We all lie at one point or another.’

There was more – the test results indicated that Lugovoi had actually failed the second question: ‘Have
you handled polonium?’ The inquiry heard it was ‘quite easy’ to dupe a lie detector test – especially if you were a trained spy or intelligence agent. Countermeasures might be physical or mental. Techniques included counting backwards from 100, imagining that you are walking your dog on a promising spring morning, or thinking of an erotic situation. Even with likely coaching from the FSB, Lugovoi flunked it.

This was gripping courtroom theatre. Owen was on form, too. He observed: ‘I’m amused to see that walking the dog on a promising spring morning is compared with thinking of a sexually arousing scene.’

There were more signs that the Kremlin was following events in London closely – and not in a happy way. In an interview with RT, Viktor Ivanov described the inquiry as ‘a spectacle, a farce, a knockabout act’. The allegations against him were, he said, a conspiracy by Britain and its intelligence agencies. Ivanov also expressed bafflement as to why the US had sanctioned him.

The same day Burgess sagged in the witness box, the Moscow agency RIA Novosti put out a short news story. It said President Putin had handed out a state honour. The award was for services to the fatherland, second-class. Its recipient: Andrei Konstantinovich Lugovoi. The presidential citation said the honour was bestowed in recognition of his contribution to Russia’s parliament and to law-making.

Lugovoi was deputy chairman of the Duma committee for security and fighting corruption, the agency noted. The committee wrote legislation for Russia’s spy agencies.
In late 2013, Lugovoi had proposed a blacklist of leading opposition news websites. They included a blog written by the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and a news portal run by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, Kasparov.ru. Putin approved Lugovoi’s suggestion. It was part of a wider crackdown on internet freedoms, justified in the wake of Snowden’s revelations on the grounds of ‘digital sovereignty’.

Lugovoi’s law-making efforts were clearly helpful to the Kremlin. But this state honour looked like a reward for something else, namely murder. And a sign of high-level political approval. Surely it was no accident?

As Emmerson remarked: ‘Whatever the pretextual justification for that award, its timing on day twenty-two of this inquiry, after a substantial amount of evidence has been called establishing Mr Lugovoi’s involvement in the murder of Mr Litvinenko, is clearly both a provocation by President Putin and the clearest possible message that he identifies himself with Mr Lugovoi.’

The award was probative, the barrister said. In other words it should be added to the evidence that Owen would consider before writing his report, due by Christmas 2015.

After a month of hearings it was clear that Scotland Yard had garnered more than enough material to convict Lugovoi and Kovtun, were they to stand trial. But the question of Putin’s personal culpability was more complex, and harder to answer. Several factors had to be considered: the nature of the Russian state, past and present; the interplay between Putin and his spy agencies; and whether
Putin micro-managed security operations or merely set broad policy parameters. Plus, what might be read from previous political killings, of which there were quite a few.

To examine all this, the inquiry turned to Robert Service, professor of Russian history at Oxford University and a distinguished writer and scholar on modern Russia. Service had previously been commissioned to write an expert report for the
Berezovsky vs Abramovich
case, offering guidance on Russian high politics and big business. He had published full-scale biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. These were model studies: lucid, elegant and readable.

Service was asked to provide information in key areas. The first was to explain internal power structures in Russia, and to say if it was possible for ‘the Russian state’ to order the assassination of a critic. Next, he was to give his expert opinion as to what extent it could be credibly said Putin might commission any such killing, or for it to be carried out with his knowledge or approval. Further questions: did Putin and other senior individuals have links to mafia gangs? Could the state kill someone at the behest of such groups? And what was the Russian administration’s attitude to the ‘rule of law’?

Service’s 2015 report was a highly nuanced document. It made clear what was known, and evidentially based, and what was speculation. It avoided simplification or what Service termed ‘unidimensional’ answers.

Analysing Russia was much tougher than it had been twenty-five years ago, he began. During glasnost and the Yeltsin era there was real information about disagreements
at the top of Russian politics. High-ranking insiders, including Yeltsin, wrote revealing memoirs. But with Putin’s rise to power in 2000, access to information in Russia underwent a ‘severe constriction’.

Top-level secrecy came back; the country reverted to a pre-1985 Kremlinology – when observers tried to decipher what might be going on by watching who stood next to whom on Lenin’s Red Square tomb. The impenetrable nature of contemporary Russian power diminished what could be said with confidence.

Service took issue with the way some commentators depicted Putin – ‘as the evil dwarf who operates from his secret cave and controls every minute step taken by his robotic minions’. He argued that there were two flaws to this negative school. First, it didn’t give credit to Putin for anything. Second, Russia from the time of Nicholas II onwards has always been a tricky country to rule. Service argued that Russia’s power vertical – its centralised political hierarchy – was in reality ‘patchily organised’. And, he said, even dictators had less power than they might wish for, and couldn’t ignore popular pressures or demands from Russian society.

Another known unknown was Putin’s relationship with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB at the time of Litvinenko’s murder. Putin’s backstory was understood; Patrushev was an old KGB associate of his from Leningrad. But it was unclear whether Patrushev secured Putin’s permission for operations in advance.

Service pointed to one piece of evidence – a memoir by Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s former prime minister. Putin
offered Kasyanov the job in 2000. There was a condition: that Kasyanov didn’t meddle in Russia’s ‘coercive structures’ – the FSB and other security organs – which Putin considered his exclusive ‘turf’. Kasyanov stuck to the deal. Putin fired him anyway in 2004. He joined the opposition.

Kasyanov survived, but many other prominent Putin critics wound up dead. Service cautioned that it was difficult to prove the administration’s complicity in these crimes. Putin’s public response to Litvinenko’s killing illustrated ‘a verbal levity that borders on the macabre’, the professor observed. (Putin mocked Litvinenko’s letter of accusation and said there was no indication he’d suffered a ‘violent death’. ‘The people who have done this are not God, and Mr Litvinenko, unfortunately, is not Lazarus.’)

Putin’s own guilt was unproven. ‘But there can be little doubt about where his feelings lie,’ Service said.

Despite all of these caveats, Service’s conclusions were unambiguous: that Russia’s president set ‘a political climate of tolerance’ in which his agencies could go about their ‘repressive business’ without hindrance.

He went on: ‘The Putin administration has always been demonstrably secretive, manipulative and authoritarian with a ruthless commitment to protecting its interests at home and abroad … It appears to me unlikely that Putin did not exercise – at the very least – some oversight of Patrushev’s activities.’

Speaking from the witness box, Service said his findings might be ‘inscribed on my tombstone’. As befits an Oxford don, he employed a sparkling vocabulary.
There was a rare outing for the word ‘desuetude’. (Service complained that the tradition of looking at the big picture had fallen away, replaced by compartmentalised scholarship.) The professor also talked about how Russia’s post-1991 market economy had ‘immiserated’ large sections of the country’s population.

In a supplemental report, Service further considered whether Putin’s Russia could be called – as Litvinenko originally hypothesised – a mafia state. The inquiry wanted to know the answer. Did Putin and senior figures in the Russian government have links with St Petersburg’s Tambov-Malyshev crime gang? Or with members of Russian organised-crime groups in Spain? And what about Litvinenko’s claim that Putin had good relations in the 1990s with the mobster Semion Mogilevich?