A Very Expensive Poison (33 page)

These Russian-aided offensives significantly expanded the territory under rebel control. But they came at a price. At least 220 Russian soldiers were killed fighting in eastern Ukraine, the report says. The figure included 150 killed during the battle for Ilovaisk and at least seventy in January and February 2015, as fighting intensified – including Nemtsov’s seventeen paratroopers from Ivanovo. The figure was based on provable cases. The real death toll was likely much higher, the report adds.

In response to embarrassing evidence of Russian involvement in Ukraine, the Kremlin changed tactics. It ‘fired’ soldiers from the army before sending them as ‘volunteers’ across the Russo-Ukrainian border in small groups.
Other ‘volunteers’ were really mercenaries, recruited from veterans’ organisations and centres inside Russia, and paid average salaries of $1,200 a month. The report estimates the bill to Russia for the first ten months of the conflict at $1 billion – for mercenaries, separatists and the upkeep of military hardware, supplied from Russia.

The DNR and LNR, meanwhile, are under the direct control of the Kremlin, the report says. The republics’ chief political and military leaders are Russian citizens. Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s aide and political spin-doctor, is in charge of the official structures in eastern Ukraine, the report adds. It quotes Andrei Borodai, the DNR’s first ‘prime minister’, who in summer 2014 described Surkov as ‘our man in the Kremlin’.

Nemtsov didn’t live to see its publication. But his document was an important – and damning – piece of work. It features tragic photos: of young men, in their early twenties, wearing military berets and smiling with their girlfriends. And of a row of coffins, decorated in red satin, being unloaded from the back of a truck. And graves. Another photo, extensively examined and verified by the authors, shows a plume of smoke above the town of Torez. There is blue sky, cornfields, trees. The smoke comes from the rocket fired shortly before at Malaysian airlines MH17.

One of the mourners at Nemtsov’s funeral was Vladimir Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza is thirty-three years old, a prominent opposition activist and a member of the board of Nemtsov’s People’s Progress Party. His father – Vladimir
Kara-Murza Sr – is a distinguished journalist with the same name. Kara-Murza Jr was closely involved in the publication of Nemtsov’s report. He works for Open Russia, a pro-democracy organisation funded by Khodorkovsky, with offices in Moscow, London and Prague.

Kara-Murza was an outspoken anti-Putin critic who was well known on both sides of the Atlantic. He was educated in England (reading history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where contemporaries considered him brilliant) and had joint UK–Russian citizenship. There, he met Litvinenko and Bukovsky. He moved to the US and lived with his wife Evgenia and their three children near Washington DC. Latterly, he had gone back to Moscow.

Like Nemtsov, Kara-Murza badly annoyed the Kremlin. He played a key role in rallying support for a Magnitsky act and western sanctions against corrupt Russian officials; he lobbied on Capitol Hill and testified before Congress and European parliaments. He blogged for
World Affairs
, a US journal. Some wondered whether moving back to Russia was a good idea. Marina Litvinenko saw him in London in 2014. ‘I asked him how he felt about going back to Moscow. He told me: “I believe it will be fine.” I wasn’t so sure,’ she told me.

Nemtsov’s murder badly shook Kara-Murza. He spoke at the funeral. ‘A sense of political tragedy for Russia has been overshadowed by an irreplaceable personal loss,’ he wrote, summing up the mood among Nemtsov’s friends, and adding: ‘Boris Nemtsov will not live to see the day Russia becomes a democratic country. But when that day comes, his contribution to it will be one of the greatest.’

In April, Moscow police raided the offices of Open Russia. The NGO hadn’t registered with the authorities in an attempt to avoid the fate of other human-rights groups which had been shut down. Police said they were looking for evidence of ‘extremism’. Kara-Murza’s latest project was a twenty-six-minute documentary film,
Family
. Its subject was Kadyrov. It alleged that the Chechen president is guilty of widespread human-rights abuses, presides over a personal army of 80,000 fighters, and skims off money from the federal budget.

Two days after a screening in Moscow, Kara-Murza collapsed in his office. He lost consciousness. His symptoms – a sudden incapacitating illness leading to immediate multiple organ failure – were troubling and strange. An ambulance took him to Moscow’s First City Clinical Hospital. Doctors put him on life support. His condition was critical. As he hovered on the edge of death, Kara-Murza’s father said his son was suffering from some kind of ‘intoxication’. He believed he may have been poisoned.

Kara-Murza’s illness remained undiagnosed and undetermined. Doctors appeared reluctant to give an explanation or to use the word poisoning. His family were circumspect. They seemed fearful that even in hospital Kara-Murza might not be safe.

Later he recovered. It appeared the FSB’s poisons factory was still in business.

For the Fourth Estate it was an early start. Soon after 7 a.m., the first reporters began to arrive at Gray’s Inn in London, one of four ancient Inns of Court. The entrance was a little hard to find, sandwiched between the Cittie of Yorke pub and the stationers Ryman’s. You went through a narrow passage. A little further on was a peaceful square. Here were Georgian buildings and a statue of the inn’s first senior member, going back in time some five centuries, Francis Bacon. The reporters filed through a doorway: the Benchers’ entrance.

They had come for an event known in the news business as a ‘lock-in’. At 9.35 a.m., Sir Robert Owen’s long-awaited report into the death of Alexander Litvinenko was due to be presented to parliament. What was in it? Nobody knew. There’d been no leaks. Sixty media representatives – ranging from the
New York Review of Books
to Germany’s ARD channel – had been invited to an
embargoed preview, starting at 8 a.m. This was a sensible arrangement. It gave time to grasp the judge’s conclusions – if not, perhaps, his fine argument.

An usher ticked the journalists off against a list. They climbed to the first floor, past an ante-chamber hung with lawyers’ black cloaks, and up a grand oak staircase. Portraits of distinguished former members lined the walls. Here was Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, and a series of bewigged gentlemen. All electronic devices had to be left in the library, a condition of entry. Once inside the lock-in you couldn’t leave. A bloke in uniform guarded the exit, just in case.

The mood was one of excitement. Over the previous half-year, Owen had privately sifted the evidence and cogitated. He then set down his independent conclusions. The media consensus was this: Owen would certainly rule that Kovtun and Lugovoi were murderers. After all, a fraction of the forensics available would have doomed them. His report, it was assumed, would find the Russian state guilty. Few expected him to point the finger directly at Putin.

Owen was the oracle. Now he was to deliver. Or, to use the language of Shakespeare, we were about to break up the seals and read.

The journalists filed into a red-carpeted space known as the Large Pension Room. Arrayed on a series of tables, and illuminated by chandeliers, were several copies of a chunky-looking booklet. It had a cerulean blue cover and was titled
The Litvinenko Inquiry: Report into the Death of Alexander Litvinenko.
There was a stuck-on
note: ‘Strictly embargoed’. We took our places. This felt a little gigglesome: here were a group of middle-aged professionals, sitting together as if on the cusp of a high school test. At 8 a.m. we picked up the report. We began reading.

The report was 328 pages long but it took mere seconds to locate the judge’s stunning final ruling. On page 246 was a single sentence. It featured at the end of part ten, ‘Summary of Conclusions’.

The sentence said:

‘The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin.’

These eighteen words had an empirical solidity. They were hard judicial fact.

The sentences running up to this point were equally damning, and couched in psalm-like terms, with one striking repeated phrase: ‘I am sure’. These words had an especial legal meaning. They meant Owen was satisfied his conclusions met a criminal standard of proof.

And:

Then:

Owen had gone further than anyone predicted. Though with a degree of caution, he had ruled that Russia’s president was, in effect, a murderer who wiped out his personal enemies in spectacularly vindictive fashion. It was an unprecedented conclusion.

And one that raised a host of further questions. How had the judge arrived at this? What should the UK government do by way of response? And how should other world leaders behave the next time that Putin popped up among them? Could Barack and David really shake Vladimir warmly by the hand?

As Owen made clear, he had relied on two types of evidence. One was the public stuff laid out in open hearings during January, February, March and July 2015. This material alone, he wrote, established ‘a strong circumstantial case that the Russian state was responsible for Mr Litvinenko’s death’.

The judge’s reasoning was set down in numbered paragraphs. He noted that the two Russian killers had ‘no personal animus against Mr Litvinenko’. There was a ‘possible relationship between Mr Lugovoi (who was clearly the leader of the two men) and the FSB in the years leading up to and including 2006’. Polonium was made in a nuclear reactor. Its use for the hit suggested the pair were ‘acting for a state body’ rather than, say, mafia interests.

On the logistics chain inside Russia, Owen noted: ‘Although it cannot be said that the polonium with which Mr Litvinenko was poisoned
must
have come from the Avangard facility in Russia, it certainly
could
have come from there.’

There were, he added, ‘powerful motives’ for individuals and organisation inside Russia to take action against Litvinenko, ‘including killing him’. They included – from the agency’s point of view – his betrayal of the FSB.
Additionally, there was his work for British intelligence, his association with leading opponents of the Putin regime, his possible attempt to recruit Lugovoi for MI6, and his ‘highly personal public criticism’ of the president.

Owen was further persuaded by contextual evidence. It said that prior to Litvinenko’s death the Russian state ‘had been involved in the killing of a number of opponents of President Putin’s administration’. The chairman observed: ‘The pattern was of killings both inside and outside Russia. There was evidence of poisons, including radioactive poisons, being used in some cases.’

Then there was Putin’s strange behaviour in the aftermath of the murder. Putin had ‘supported and protected’ Lugovoi, and latterly handed him an honour for ‘services to the fatherland’. ‘Whilst it does not follow that Mr Lugovoi must have been acting on behalf of the Russian State when he killed Mr Litvinenko, the way in which President Putin has treated Mr Lugovoi is certainly consistent with that hypothesis,’ Owen found. ‘Moreover, President Putin’s conduct towards Mr Lugovoi suggests a level of approval for the killing of Mr Litvinenko.’

So far, so commonsensical. But the judge signposted that he had relied heavily in his conclusions on material presented in closed sessions – ‘all the evidence and analysis available to me’, as he put it. He had conducted what he termed a ‘global analysis’. The most intriguing section of his report was part seven. It wasn’t very long, just two pages. It dealt with material covered by restriction notices issued by the home secretary.

So just how much evidence had MI6 and GCHQ presented to Sir Robert? As it turned out, rather a lot: ‘There is a considerable quantity of closed documentary evidence in this case. I have also received a number of closed witness statements, some of which are lengthy,’ he admitted.

The details of these closed sessions had previously been fuzzy. Now, Sir Robert revealed, he’d held secret hearings ‘over several days’ in May 2015. They had taken place ‘in a government building in London’. MI6’s HQ overlooking the Thames? The Home Office? This was the private part of the public inquiry. Those present had included only Sir Robert, the counsel and solicitor to the inquiry, and home secretary Theresa May’s legal team. Plus, of course, ‘a number of witnesses’ who were called to give evidence.

It’s unclear who these anonymous witnesses were. But it’s a fair guess they might have included ‘Martin’, Litvinenko’s Russian-speaking MI6 contact. And ‘Jorge’, who performed the same role in Madrid. Senior figures from MI6 may have testified too. Almost certainly there was electronic intercept evidence: the report allows the inference that chatter might have been picked up between Lugovoi and his FSB bosses. Did this come from British spooks at GCHQ? Or from Washington via the NSA, the world’s most potent government eavesdropping organisation?

The judge, then, had produced two versions of his report: a public version, and a closed version for a small official readership. Only those in government who had signed the Official Secrets Act got appendix twelve. This
featured transcripts of the secret sessions, closed documents and witness statements. The restricted version dealt with two key themes: the nature and extent of Litvinenko’s relationship with the UK’s security and intelligence agencies; and the question of whether the Russian state murdered him.

Owen’s closed findings remain unreleased. They include one ‘recommendation’, under the terms of the UK’s 2005 Inquiries Act, so far mysterious. What is clear, however, is that this secret material played a crucial role in convincing the judge that Putin ‘probably approved’ Litvinenko’s exotic, near bungled execution. Like an invisible springboard, it vaulted his understanding of what had gone on in the febrile months of October and November 2006 to another level.

Marina Litvinenko had seen the report twenty-four hours earlier. She and Anatoly, plus their legal team, paged through it in a secure room, on condition that they said nothing about its contents. At 9.35 a.m., the embargo was lifted. The excited journalists locked in at Gray’s Inn promptly shared the findings around the world. I did the same, before running over to the next venue of interest, the High Court.

Events were moving at pace. At 10 a.m., Owen was due to read a short televised statement.

I arrived at Court 73. The public gallery was full. Some there knew that Owen was about to deliver his bombshell; others didn’t. I spotted DI Craig Mascall and other Scotland Yard coppers. They were grinning. Litvinenko’s surviving friends had come along: Zakayev,
with his wife and wearing an astrakhan hat; Goldfarb; Dubov. Oxford historian Robert Service had dropped in. Owen, he would soon discover, had praised his ‘impressive’ expert evidence.

There were London-based Russian dissidents, and a reporter from
Novaya Gazeta,
who’d flown in from Moscow. There was a buzz of voices, speaking Russian and English. Marina Litvinenko and Anatoly sat at the front. She looked radiant; her son, understandably, somewhat wiped out and dazed.

Owen came in, made a nod, began. He explained why it had taken so long to get to this point – more than nine years – and stressed that he’d drawn on open and closed evidence for his findings of fact. The government hadn’t influenced his conclusions, he said. He stressed: ‘They are mine and mine alone.’ Owen said the open scientific evidence had demonstrated conclusively Lugovoi and Kovtun’s guilt. Then he got to the dramatic finale – Patrushev and Putin had ‘probably approved’ the FSB’s London poisoning operation. From the public rows came cries of ‘Yes!’

The judge thanked all of those who had assisted him. He praised the ‘exemplary’ job done by Scotland Yard and had kind words too for the lawyers and courtroom staff. It was made clear that Sir Robert wasn’t giving interviews. He didn’t need to. His report – completed on budget and done by English judicial standards with Usain Bolt-like speed – spoke for itself.

No one, it appeared, had quite seen this coming. ‘I’m gobsmacked,’ Service told me. ‘It shows the autonomy of
the judicial process from politics.’ He added: ‘Anglo-Russian relations are not going to be easy for the next few weeks, months or years.’ Goldfarb was exultant. ‘I didn’t expect the role of Putin,’ he said. ‘Now it’s become a legal fact.’

Marina Litvinenko gave her reaction outside the High Court:

‘I am of course very pleased that the words my husband spoke on his deathbed when he accused Mr Putin have been proved true in an English court with the highest standards of independence and fairness.

‘Now it is time for David Cameron [to act]. I am calling immediately for the expulsion from the UK of all Russian intelligence operatives, whether from the FSB (who murdered Sasha) or from other Russian agencies based in the London embassy.’

As well as a wholesale chuck-out of Russian spies, Marina called for the imposition of targeted economic sanctions and travel bans against named individuals, including the duo of Putin and Patrushev. ‘I received a letter last night from the home secretary promising action. It is unthinkable that the prime minister would do nothing in the face of the damning findings of Sir Robert Owen,’ she said.

In fact, the unthinkable was entirely thinkable. It soon became clear that the government’s response was going to be – well, not much. Speaking in the House of Commons, May described Litvinenko’s murder as a ‘blatant and unacceptable breach of international law’. The probable involvement of Putin’s Kremlin came as no
surprise, she said. It was ‘deeply disturbing’. Britain had no illusions about the state of Russia. The subtext: we know what’s going on.