Read A Very Expensive Poison Online
Authors: Luke Harding
Litvinenko’s action triggered turmoil inside Russia’s power structures. The FSB ran its own ‘investigation’, carried out by the same people who had apparently ordered Berezovsky’s liquidation. Privately, Khokholkov and Kamishnikov were furious. They wanted revenge. In April 1998, meanwhile, together with two URPO
colleagues, Litvinenko recorded a video statement filmed at Berezovsky’s Moscow office. It was for use in case he was jailed. Or worse, killed. They made a deposition to the military prosecutor.
*
Litvinenko was a punctilious officer, and over the coming months noted down the threats made against him. There were many. His phone was bugged; he noticed he was being followed. A well-known journalist with links to the security services, Alexander Khinstein, published Litvinenko’s identity. Another article accused him of torture, extortion and muggings.
One day in May when he came into work, Lieutenant Colonel N. V. Yenin bawled him out in front of his colleagues. Yenin threatened to assault him, and said: ‘You bastard, you traitor. You prevented honest Russian people from murdering this filthy Jew … If you don’t shut your trap we’ll sort you out in our own way.’
Days later, Litvinenko was returning with his wife Marina from their dacha to their Moscow flat. A gang of young people attacked and beat him, kicking him in the face. Litvinenko got his gun out, said he was an FSB officer, and fired a warning shot in the air. He tried to arrest the youths. One of them told him: ‘We know where you live. If you force us to go to the police we’ll cut your wife’s and your children’s heads off.’
Khokholkov and his allies were determined to make Litvinenko suffer. In August he was suspended from his department and told to find another internal job. The FSB’s human resources office made it clear that he
had ‘betrayed the system’ by ‘washing dirty linen in public’. There were further libels in the newspapers, including a claim that he’d failed to pay child support to his ex-wife Natalia.
Faced with a scandal, Nikolai Kovalyov, the FSB’s director, had tried to get Litvinenko to drop his complaint. This didn’t work. Berezovsky, meanwhile, was pulling all the strings he could at the Kremlin. Prosecutors began an investigation. After a few weeks URPO was dissolved; Khokholkov transferred; Kovalyov fired. It looked like victory for Berezovsky and Litvinenko.
President Yeltsin then appointed an unknown mid-ranking officer to replace Kovalyov as head of the FSB. This was Vladimir Putin.
*
Berezovsky had many flaws, but the greatest of them was surely his inability to distinguish friend from foe. He had known Putin since late 1991. He regarded him as a protégé. They’d been on holiday in France. ‘He was my friend,’ Berezovsky would tell Scotland Yard. At the time, Berezovsky viewed Putin as someone who would loyally serve his interests.
Berezovsky encouraged the suspended Litvinenko to go and see this new director, to introduce himself and to tell him everything he knew.
In his memoir,
The Uzbek File
, Litvinenko writes: ‘Putin’s appointment was a shock to everyone. Unlike Kovalyov, who rose through the ranks to a three-star general, Putin was a little-known colonel of the reserves working for the Kremlin administration. Everyone
considered him a Berezovsky puppet. The consensus among the
operativniks
was that the new Director will not last long. He will be rejected by the system.’
Litvinenko continued:
One day Berezovsky called me.
‘Alexander, could you go to Putin and tell him everything you have told me? And everything that you have not. He is a new man, you know, and would benefit from an insider’s view.’
I was surprised. The Director of the FSB could surely find me if he wanted to see me. Nevertheless I called at his office.
‘Litvinenko?’ asked his secretary. ‘We have been looking for you. They tell us there is no such officer.’
That was it, I thought, the system resists a newcomer.
‘I am on suspension,’ I said.
‘Come tomorrow morning. The Director will see you.’
Litvinenko spent that night ‘drawing up a scheme for Putin’. It contained everything he knew about organised crime and corruption, including the principal mob groups with their areas of activity. He drew arrows leading to their connections in government, with the FSB, the interior ministry and the tax service. He listed commercial companies used for money laundering. He included his Uzbek file, setting out the drugs trail from Afghanistan to Europe and America, the branches and
contacts in Russia, and the ‘protection ring’ deep within the FSB.
The following morning, Litvinenko turned up with this impressive dossier. He brought along two colleagues, but Putin wanted to see him alone. Litvinenko recalled that he was unsure how to greet his new boss – should he address him as ‘Comrade Colonel’ or ‘Comrade Director’? He felt sorry for Putin. ‘We were of the same rank and I imagined myself in his shoes – a mid-level
operativnik
suddenly put in charge of some 100 senior generals with all their vested interests, connections and dirty secrets.’
In the end, Putin pre-empted Litvinenko, came up from his desk, and shook his hand. ‘He seemed even shorter than on TV,’ Litvinenko noticed.
It was to be their first and last substantial meeting. It was also unsuccessful. And rather surreal.
Litvinenko wrote:
From the first moment I felt he was not sincere. He avoided eye contact and behaved as if he was not the Director but an actor playing the Director’s role on stage. He looked at my schematic, made some face movements as if he was studying it for a couple of minutes. Asked a couple of questions – ‘What is this? What is that?’ – pointing at random points in the scheme.
But he obviously could not grasp the details in that short while. ‘Why is he doing this?’ I thought. ‘Is he trying to impress
me
?’
‘Would you like to keep the scheme?’ I asked.
‘No, no, thank you. You keep it. It’s your work.’
Litvinenko handed Putin a list of FSB officers whom he regarded as ‘clean’, and remarked that there were still ‘honest people in the system’. He added that with Putin’s backing they could fight the corruption that was rife in Russia and the security services. Together they could ‘strike a blow’ against organised crime. Litvinenko told Putin: ‘If we decide to tackle the Russian mafia seriously it will be very dangerous.’
Putin nodded, feigning agreement. He took the list as well as the part of the dossier dealing with drugs. Putin wrote down Litvinenko’s home phone number. He said he’d be in touch. He never called.
It was months later that Litvinenko discovered what happened as soon as he shut the door and left the director’s office. Putin picked up the phone. He ordered the FSB’s internal affairs unit to begin an immediate criminal investigation against Litvinenko, and to bug Litvinenko’s telephone.
Putin’s indifferent attitude at their meeting bewildered Litvinenko: why would he not want to investigate criminal wrongdoing at the top of his own service? Later, Litvinenko said that his contacts inside the FSB gave an explanation. Putin, Litvinenko alleged, had connections with Khokholkov’s team from his time as deputy mayor for economic affairs in the St Petersburg administration of Anatoly Sobchak. Putin had ‘common money’ with Khokholkov and the Uzbeks. At the very least,
Litvinenko wrote, Putin was personally involved in ‘a cover-up of organised criminal activities connected with drug traffic in Russia and Europe’.
The meeting with Putin lasted ten minutes. It took place in August 1998. From this moment on, Litvinenko’s already tricky situation got worse. His weapon was confiscated and salary stopped. His friend Berezovsky, however, seemed oblivious to the worsening relations. In November, Berezovsky wrote an open letter to Putin, which began: ‘Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich.’ The
Kommersant
newspaper owned by Berezovsky published it. Berezovsky’s tone was friendly – he still regarded Putin as an ally, and as an enemy of the communists, widely regarded as Yeltsin’s chief political foe.
Berezovsky said he’d been ‘inspired to write this letter by the pressing issues of national security’. He mentioned his ‘good long-term relations’ with the FSB chief, whom he commended for ‘honesty and professionalism’. Berezovsky then explained how he had learned of the plot to kill him – and how Litvinenko and the four other whistleblowers had written up a report for the presidential administration. The investigation into the plot had gone nowhere, though, Berezovsky complained. He urged Putin to pursue the matter and to secure ‘the constitutional order’.
Four days later, the stakes were elevated further when Litvinenko and his URPO colleagues staged an extraordinary press conference at the Interfax news agency in Moscow. They were to do something no FSB officers had done before: publicly to accuse their superiors of
grievous crimes. Litvinenko, the main actor, sat in the middle. He did most of the talking. He made no attempt to hide his identity.
His companions were more bashful. One, Viktor Shebalin, wore a ski-mask; three others, Ponkin, Shcheglov and Latyshonok, put on dark shades. They looked like off-duty bank robbers. Only one other participant was unmasked: Trepashkin, the former FSB officer who had raised his own complaint against the agency. He was one of the men whom Litvinenko had been ordered to beat up.
Litvinenko told the journalists he was holding a press conference to draw the attention of Russia’s leadership and parliament to abuses going on inside the FSB. He said that he and his subordinates had received illegal instructions to kill and kidnap people and to extort money. Instead of protecting the state, senior FSB officials were busy lining their pockets.
Asked if he was scared, Litvinenko said he perfectly understood there would be retribution. ‘I know the habits of this organisation and therefore suspect that we shall all be strangled like blind puppies,’ he replied, adding that ‘as a citizen’ he considered it his duty to act. He said the plot against Berezovsky demonstrated that there was ‘anti-semitism’ in Russia at the very top. It was clear, he said, he was being hounded for his opinion that ‘nationalism is evil’.
The press conference was a sensation, massively reported on Russian TV and in print. Soon afterwards, in December, Putin gave an interview to the journalist Elena Tregubova at his office in the Lubyanka. Putin said
he could understand why Berezovsky was alarmed – after all, Berezovsky had survived one assassination attempt. However, Putin took a dim view of Litvinenko’s actions. He told Tregubova: ‘FSB officers should not stage press conferences and should not expose internal scandals to the public.’
In January 1999, Putin fired Litvinenko, personally signing an order kicking him out. Putin also disbanded his unit. ‘Sasha knew it [the press conference] was a very extraordinary event, that the FSB will not take it so easy,’ Marina Litvinenko said. Her husband had told her, in darkly humorous tones, that one of two things would now happen to him.
‘They will kill me or I will be arrested,’ he predicted.
He was right: on 25 March 1999, Litvinenko was arrested. Four men dressed in civilian clothes grabbed him near Moscow’s Rossiya hotel, shouting: ‘FSB, you’re under arrest!’ They bundled him into the back of a van and started beating him with fists on his back.
After being interrogated by a military prosecutor, Litvinenko was hauled off to Lefortovo Prison. This is a drab, yellow three-storey Moscow building lined with spiraling razor wire. I would later visit it myself under unpropitious circumstances.
Lefortovo was the KGB’s most notorious jail. Its former inmates included ‘enemies of the state’ during both the Stalinist and late Soviet periods. One was the writer Yevgenia Ginzburg, who was held there before being transported to Siberia. Another was the Soviet dissenter Vladimir Bukovsky, who would become
Litvinenko’s friend and guru. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and dissident, wrote about Lefortovo in
The Gulag Archipelago.
The FSB uses Lefortovo for its highest-profile cases. One wing serves as the FSB’s investigative department. There are a series of upstairs suites – small, boxy rooms where FSB officers in olive-green uniforms interview suspects; downstairs a K-shaped prison. On arrival, Litvinenko was stripped, searched and dumped in a solitary cell. He immediately began a hunger strike. The prison governor persuaded him to abandon it. Litvinenko would spend the next eight months in Lefortovo, including thirty-six days in solitary confinement.
Litvinenko was charged with abusing his position and beating up a suspect. According to Marina Litvinenko, the military prosecutor in charge of his case, Vladimir Barsukov, told her that Litvinenko’s real crime was to have gone public with his complaint against the FSB. Now he had to be punished. Barsukov added that if Litvinenko were acquitted, he would simply open another case against him. And, if necessary, ‘another and another’. The goal was to lock Litvinenko away.
Barsukov was telling the truth. Litvinenko denied the charges against him and in November 1999 a judge at the Moscow garrison military court found him not guilty. Court officials removed his handcuffs. Immediately a group of masked FSB officers burst into the room and re-arrested him. It was an ambush. This time Litvinenko was transferred to Butyrka, a Moscow prison controlled and administered by the federal penitentiary
service. He spent the next twenty-four hours in solitary, in a tiny shoe-box-like cell, without food, water or sanitation. The cell was so small he could only stand or sit.
Inside Butyrka a group of unknown people summoned Litvinenko twice. They asked what he knew about Putin, urged him to confess, and said frankly: ‘You realise, of course, you can be poisoned here and we cannot really help you?’
Even by the standards of Russian justice, the new charge against him was ridiculous: he was accused of stealing from a vegetable warehouse. Litvinenko complained via his attorneys that the charge was fabricated, and in December he was released on bail. It was clear, though, that the FSB had no intention of giving up. In April 2000, military prosecutors dropped this charge and came up with another more serious one – stealing explosives and ammunition.