A Very Expensive Poison (34 page)

May, however, admitted she had little appetite for imposing punitive measures against Moscow. She told MPs there was a wider national security interest in retaining a guarded engagement, including working with Russia to bring about a peace settlement in Syria. Moreover, it was impossible for Britain to impose a travel ban on a serving head of state, she claimed.

Over in Davos, where he was attending the World Economic Forum, Cameron made a similar point. Litvinenko’s murder was a shocking event but, he indicated, it was necessary to keep working with the Kremlin: ‘Do we at some level have to go on having some sort of relationship with them because we need a solution to the Syrian crisis? Yes, we do but we do it with clear eyes and a very cold heart.’

May announced one token reprisal: the treasury was freezing Kovtun and Lugovoi’s UK assets. This didn’t mean much. Back in 2006, Kovtun was so broke he didn’t even own a credit card. He had to get his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Radoslaw Pietras, to pay for his flight from Hamburg to London. It was a fair assumption that his and Lugovoi’s seizable assets were zero.

Critics, led by Marina’s counsel Ben Emmerson, argued that the UK government’s response was weak, wrong-headed, and depressingly predictable. It was predicated on the make-believe that Putin’s strategic and military goals in Syria were the same as Obama’s and
Cameron’s: the defeat of Islamic State. They weren’t. Putin’s objectives, instead, were focused on demonstrating Russia’s status as an indispensable international power; shoring up the pro-Moscow regime of Bashar al-Assad; and protecting Russia’s own naval and army assets in Syria’s western Latakia province.

And, it might be argued, bombing previously peaceful areas held by Syria’s moderate opposition in order to drive more refugees towards Germany and Europe. Crushing Isis, if it were on Putin’s list, was somewhere at the bottom.

As some MPs had long argued, a proper response to the report would be to introduce the UK’s own Magnitsky list. Like the US administration in 2012, Downing Street was perfectly capable of banning Russian officials and entities associated with Litvinenko’s murder. Given that many of them had connections with London, this would be a powerful weapon.

Marina Litvinenko was proposing exactly that. As Owen’s report went live, Marina sent a private letter to Downing Street, via the government’s legal department. In it she called for a ‘firm response’. This was needed, she argued, to ‘secure accountability, to deter others from attempting something like this again, and to properly protect the British public’. She invited the prime minister to consider Ukraine-style sanctions against named Russian officials, with asset freezes and visa bans.

She had a list. It featured Putin, Patrushev and Ivanov. And those involved in the polonium chain, including companies: Rosatom, the state nuclear energy corporation; its head Sergei Kirienko; the boss of the Avangard
laboratory, Radii Ilykaev; Tenex, Rosatom’s export division; and Tenex’s former CEO, Vladimir Smirnov. Plus an assortment of Russian politicians and prosecutors including prosecutor general Yuri Chaika (the man who in 2006 gave Scotland Yard detectives the run-around) and Alexander Bastrykin, investigative committee chairman.

From Russia, meanwhile, came a glacial response. Lugovoi told Interfax: ‘The results released today just show London’s anti-Russian position once again; the narrowness and lack of desire among the British to find the real reason for the death of Litvinenko.’ Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, was mocking. He dismissed the inquiry as a ‘quasi-investigation’. And ridiculed the judge’s use of ‘probably’, calling the report an example of ‘subtle English humour’.

The Foreign Office summoned Russia’s ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, for the dressing-down usual in such cases. Emerging afterwards, the ambassador defiantly accused his British partners of a ‘gross provocation’ that would hurt bilateral ties. The inquiry had ‘whitewashed’ the incompetence of Britain’s spy agencies, he told Russian TV. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, talked of groundless accusations and unanswered questions. It was ‘a farce’.

The Russian blogosphere hummed with alternative explanations, many of them peddled by salaried Kremlin internet trolls working out of a glassy office in St Petersburg. Their argument: the inquiry was clearly a sham, since some of its sessions were held in secret. Oh, and Litvinenko was actually killed by MI6 and Alex Goldfarb.

Russia’s state of denial put one in mind of King Leontes in
The Winter’s Tale,
after the oracle proclaims his wife Hermione chaste and him a ‘jealous tyrant’. Leontes declares: ‘There is no truth at all i’ the oracle … this is mere falsehood.’

As might have been predicted, the Kremlin’s reaction was the old cocktail of bluster, evasion and conspiracy theory. For anyone who bothered to look, however, the truth was just a mouse click away. The report was published on the inquiry’s website. Owen’s conclusions and final statement were translated into Russian.

It was, all in all, a model document. Owen’s argument was easy to follow; his prose clear and candid. There were arresting passages. For example: ‘It is, to put it mildly, unusual when inquiring into a death to have available lengthy transcripts of interviews with the deceased, conducted shortly before his death.’ Or: ‘It is apparent that Mr Litvinenko was not mourned long in Russia, at least not by the government.’ There were outings for Latinate words: sometimes a fact would ‘fortify’ his reasoning; Litvinenko faced ‘posthumous opprobrium’.

Beyond this, one got the sense of a strong judicial personality working calmly through the evidence. It was evidence, Owen made clear, that led him to the view that Kovtun and Lugovoi were murderers. When the evidence was inconclusive he found in Russia’s favour: he couldn’t conclude, on the facts available, that Moscow had deliberately frustrated Scotland Yard’s inquiries. The Met had ‘painstakingly pieced together’
the last weeks of Litvinenko’s life, using conventional methods as well as ‘unprecedented sources’, like alpha radiation.

Much hinged on what precisely happened in London. The judge accepted that Lugovoi and Kovtun’s refusal to give oral evidence to the inquiry didn’t necessarily mean they killed Litvinenko. But he took a dim view of the contradictory accounts they’d given over the years. He dismissed these versions – one of which had Litvinenko grabbing the Pine Bar teapot, and gulping down two cups of tea – as having ‘serious deficiencies’. They were consistent with ‘a deliberate attempt to mislead’.

Owen found that one or both men had lied about important details. In an interview with the German tabloid
Bild
, Lugovoi claimed the Pine Bar was fitted out with surveillance equipment (‘he was lying’). Lugovoi said that Litvinenko had repeatedly rung him (‘it’s plain from the telephone schedule that Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun were wrong about this’). The judge dismissed too Kovtun’s ‘elaborate’ explanation as to why he called C2, the cook, in London. Kovtun claimed he wanted to offer C2 a job at a Moscow fish restaurant (‘a tissue of lies’; ‘fabricated’).

By contrast, Owen found the testimony given by D3, Kovtun’s Hamburg restaurant manager friend, to be credible: ‘Mr Kovtun’s boast that he was planning to poison Mr Litvinenko with “
a very expensive poison
” may have appeared outlandish to D3, but there is a wealth of independent evidence before me that shows that that is exactly what he was planning to do.’ He went
on: ‘Making unwise comments is something Mr Kovtun appears to have done from time to time.’

Again and again, the report returned to the polonium trail. The forensic evidence was ‘highly compelling’, the judge found. In part six, under the question ‘Who administered the poison?’, he ruled that the two Russians had indeed handled Po-210 in three of their London hotel rooms. They had even got into a ‘routine’ connected with the ‘preparation and/or disposal’ of the poison. In the Millennium and Best Western hotels, the ‘natural inference’ was that they had tipped it ‘down the sink’.

Sometimes Owen made no finding, especially if the subject was on the margin of his inquiry. If the judge didn’t know something he said so. One intriguing example: when Litvinenko arrived at the Millennium Hotel, Lugovoi made a six-minute call to Vladimir Voronoff. Voronoff was an ex-Soviet ‘diplomat’ who was based in the early 1990s at the Soviet embassy in London. He is now a British citizen. His testimony to the inquiry was evasive. Why the call? ‘It is unexplained,’ Owen wrote.

The other central part was nine – ‘Who directed the killing?’ Owen ruled out many of the fantastical theories supplied by Moscow: Berezovsky, the mafia, Chechens and the UK’s own spy agencies. There were ‘several reasons’, however, why the Kremlin might want him dead, not least the ‘undoubted personal dimension’ to Litvinenko and Putin’s antagonism. A core theme was Litvinenko’s claim that the FSB carried out the 1999 apartment bombings (‘an area of particular sensitivity for
the Putin administration’). The judge said he was satisfied that by 2006, Putin, the FSB, and those around, ‘had motives for taking action’.

But what had prompted them to act? Owen diverged from Emmerson’s view: that there was a causative link between Litvinenko’s scandalous Ivanov report and his subsequent murder. ‘The difficulty is in the timing,’ the judge noted. Litvinenko gave Lugovoi his report in late September 2006; it was only a matter of days afterwards that Lugovoi and Kovtun made arrangements for their first trip to London. Still, Owen conceded that the Ivanov dossier ‘may have provided extra motivation and impetus to a plan that had already been conceived’.

It was more likely, in his view, that the plot to assassinate Litvinenko was cooked up earlier, possibly much earlier. Lugovoi had first flown to London to meet with Litvinenko as far back as October 2004. Owen: ‘I regard it is entirely possible that Mr Lugovoi was already at that stage involved in a plan to target Mr Litvinenko, perhaps with a view to killing him.’ There was ‘no evidence at all’ that either Kovtun or Lugovoi had ‘any personal reason’ for murder. Someone else had directed the ‘protracted and costly operation’.

From the High Court, the protagonists minus Sir Robert headed across Holborn to Gray’s Inn Road and the offices of Matrix Chambers, Emmerson’s law firm. Here, Marina and Anatoly gave a small press conference. Marina thanked her son for his ‘extraordinary support’. She said she found the government’s non-response to
Owen’s report unpersuasive. Yes, Russia played a role in international relations. But this was no reason to ignore the judge’s ‘very important message’, she said.

Emmerson pointed out that David Cameron had always taken a tough line on terrorism, promising that he had ‘zero tolerance’ for this modern scourge. It appeared, the QC suggested, that Cameron was only tough on terrorism done by non-state actors.

‘It would be surprising if the prime minister, who prides himself in keeping London safe from terrorism, could sit on his hands in the face of a judicial finding of state-sponsored terrorism. I don’t think the British people think this is the right outcome.’ As it was, he risked looking cowardly. ‘It would be the abdication of his responsibility to do the thing which is the first function of a state: to keep its citizens safe.’

Others, including Bill Browder, said the UK government was making an error that might later haunt it. In a letter to the prime minister, Browder argued: ‘Had this attack been perpetrated by Isis or al-Qaida there would be bombing runs, huge intelligence operations and pledges to never let it happen again.’ Cameron’s analysis was wrong: ‘Putin and others like him look for weakness wherever they can find it.’ The government’s inaction, he wrote, would embolden Putin and ‘surely lead to more killings on British soil’.

In the wake of Owen’s report there was recognition that neither of Litivnenko’s killers would face a jail cell in the near future. ‘It would only be possible after the final fall of Vladimir Putin. It’s inconceivable he could send
them for trial after he sent them to commit a murder,’ Emmerson said. And what about Putin? Might he stand trial in the international court? The short answer, according to Emmerson, was no.

The lawyer had a word of caution, though. ‘History shows us that political sands shift. People who seem invincible suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of an indictment. Mr Putin is not in a position to sit comfortably.’

In the meantime, Marina was going to sue the Russian government in London. Inevitably, Moscow would claim state immunity. Nevertheless, Emmerson thought, there was a reasonable chance of success. She would also revive a 2007 claim made against the Kremlin in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. To anyone who had been following the case, it was obvious that Marina was broke. She had, for some years, been living on a pittance. She was entitled to compensation from Russia, Emmerson said. He added that MI6 hadn’t made her an
ex gratia
payment.

Afterwards, I met Marina in a side-room. We kissed on the cheek. Through high windows came a delicate winter light; you could see trees, a moving car, city life. It had been an overwhelming morning. Minutes earlier, Anatoly had shifted uncomfortably when asked what he remembered of his father. ‘It isn’t easy. It’s still difficult for him,’ she told me, adding that he was months away from his final summer exams.

Had she expected that Owen’s report would be so bold? ‘We looked at it and thought: “Yes!” It surprised
us.’ Not because she disagreed with his conclusions, but because few people were willing to accuse Putin so directly. ‘It was a very strong message,’ she said. Marina added the classified intelligence material – which she hadn’t seen – was decisive, adding: ‘One day we will know the details.’

The report marked another victory, over sceptics who doubted that she could beat Britain’s political establishment, which had fought her most of the way. ‘We have achieved a tremendous amount. So many people said: “You’ll never get an inquiry. It won’t happen.” Then they didn’t believe Sir Robert would deliver his report. Now we have hard facts. I feel very emotional.’

She acknowledged that Sasha’s murder would invariably be seen as a ‘political moment’ and another low in the UK’s eternally vexed relations with Moscow. But, she said: ‘For me it’s personal. I was able to get through all these long years because it was my personal case. It was my husband who was killed. It was my thirst to know who killed him and who was responsible.’