THANKS TO ITS LIBERAL ATTITUDE TOWARD POLITICAL ASYLUM, the United Kingdom is a haven for the outcasts of autocratic countries around the world. Expatriates from former Soviet nations once ruled by Moscow make up a significant portion of this community of political refugees. My introduction to their universe was provided by a genteel Kazakh man named Akezhan Kazhegeldin, a KGB-trained former prime minister who presumed to lead his homeland’s political opposition from London. Ten years earlier, he had stepped over the bounds of permitted ambition by aspiring to be president of his onetime Soviet country. Now he passed the time by dreaming of political plots against Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Some dismissed him as a self-promoter, but this ungenerous characterization never gained traction with me.
I had known the fifty-seven-year-old Kazhegeldin for a decade. He was an enduring survivor, an admirable but sad figure. Admirable for standing up as an often lone voice against the autocratic politics practiced back home. Sad because, even if he were able to return to his country some day, there was little chance he could ever make a political comeback. And he likely wouldn’t return, not with the discouraging example of Boris Shikhmuradov to consider. This somewhat vain political exile from former Soviet Turkmenistan sneaked back into his native country in 2002, thinking he would force the country’s dictator into retirement. Instead, he was rapidly captured, drugged, forced to give a televised “confession,” and imprisoned for life. Something similar certainly awaited Kazhegeldin were he to return to Kazakhstan. So that meant stewing abroad, forever planning unlikely conspiracies and hoping for a miracle.
Kazhegeldin supplied the number of a friend who could introduce me to the Mayfair district, a London haunt for the kind of people I was seeking: the political exiles, the denizens of the city’s underworld of spies and former spies, and the often shady businessmen who moved comfortably among all factions.
Mayfair enjoyed a certain James Bond mystique, a hangover from the time that MI6, the British spy agency, was based there. But it was also august London writ large, housing Savile Row, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and the Ritz. When I visited in 2007, its office space was the most expensive in the world at $212 a square foot, far higher than mid-town Manhattan, Hong Kong, or Tokyo. You couldn’t know by merely walking Mayfair’s streets, but hedge funds had moved into the district alongside the luxury boutiques and exotic restaurants. The most intriguing businesses of all were the myriad detective agencies. These were run by clubby characters whose success seemed to hinge in part on how well they could create the impression that they knew the darkest secrets and kept company with the most dangerous characters.
Kazhegeldin had availed himself of such services, and sometimes reciprocated with information that enabled the agencies to plumb the vicious Russian business and political rivalries that their clients were keen to understand. With his help, I was able to contact agency detectives who were happy to talk, but not for attribution. While their openness might seem surprising, such professionals often trade information with journalists, particularly foreign correspondents with experience in opaque parts of the world.
One of these operatives, call him Andrew, said his usual clients were lawyers for British companies anxious to vet potential partners before signing a contract. But he also was profiting from a stream of new clients with business interests that involved the former Soviet Union. Some were tycoons in Russia and other newly independent republics who had built thriving enterprises from the wreckage of the Soviet states. They were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for compromising material on their enemies, a defense against rivals doing the same. Others were businessmen in the West, mainly Americans and Europeans, who were wondering if they should deal with such people. They routinely ordered $20,000 to $40,000 background checks on Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian, or Chechen entrepreneurs who were offering what seemed like attractive deals.
The Mayfair detectives reckoned that most of the Western businessmen were just going through the motions; they fully intended to get in bed with these possibly nefarious fellows, if only to demonstrate their executive boldness. But, while they wanted to play near the edge, they hired the detective agencies to show shareholders that they were not doing so recklessly.
The agencies cared little about what motivated their clients. Their main concern was how to check out businessmen with murky pasts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere. Their staffs were thin on Russian expertise, and so their first reports were based on simple data searches on LexisNexis. Clients figured out that racket soon, however, and demanded more. So it was that the Mayfair agencies began to employ active-duty FSB men, reminiscent of the way that 1930s gangsters and Chicago policemen entered into mutually beneficial relationships. The agencies also hired former Russian intelligence agents, based on the assumption that, as with the mafia, no Russian spy ever truly left the service. It seemed that any Russian with an intelligence background who passed through London could pick up work.
The stock-in-trade for these gentlemen became known as the “KGB report.” Once given an assignment, an agent would visit the FSB’s file cabinets, pull records on whoever was of interest to the client, and pass them on. The level of detail delivered—property ownership, salary, marriage status, arrests—was astonishing compared with what was available publicly in the West.
There was no telling how much was accurate, but that didn’t seem to matter. The KGB reports, at $2,000 or so each, would be gussied up and delivered to clients who mainly accepted them at face value and didn’t question their provenance.
Andrew and the other detectives depicted their Western clients as strange combinations of voyeurs and cowboys, wanting to peek inside the strip show and boast to their friends about what they saw, but terrified to enter. Company lawyers ordered up the KGB reports, one detective said, but forbade his agency to conduct live interviews or hunt down revealing documents outside the KGB files. Such investigative methods could “violate little-understood laws,” the lawyers said. I could not fathom what laws they were talking about. Most likely, they themselves didn’t know and were simply trying to insulate themselves from whatever legal troubles might arise later.
William was the operations director of an agency that specialized in particularly gritty investigations. When he examined a Russian company, his aim was to provide a reality-based judgment on whether or not a client should do a deal, and if the answer was the former, how to do so prudently. He offered this theoretical example: If a client came to him with a Moscow property deal, it was not necessary to collect the voluminous detail that would appear in a KGB report. The sole relevant question was whether the deal included Yelena Baturina. She was Russia’s only woman billionaire, the wife of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and the queen of Moscow property development. If she was a participant, well, that would be fantastic, full steam ahead. But if not, it might be best to pass; a reasonably successful deal was probably unlikely. While such a calculation might seem rather crude, in fact it reflected some sophisticated sleuthing—it reflected how deals really got done in Russia.
The detective industry had its turbocharged side as well. I learned this from Dmitri, once an officer of GRU, an intelligence arm of the Russian military that deploys more spies abroad than any of the nation’s other espionage agencies. Dmitri worked now on contract for the Mayfair detective agencies, and a British friend recently retired from MI6 provided me the necessary introduction. Dmitri described his specialty as public relations—pee-yar’ in its Russian adaptation of the English acronym, except that in Russia it was more often than not essentially a black art. Its objective was the destruction of a client’s opponent through defamation. “We gather information for businesses that have problems,” Dmitri explained. “We can find out what are your rivals’ strong points, and can suggest how to damage the rival’s strategy. Everyone has skeletons.”
Unsolicited, Dmitri offered up Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative reporter, as an example. He argued that her fundamental honesty could be challenged because she was in violation of Russian law by holding dual citizenships (she was born in New York when her father was a diplomat at the United Nations). Thus, he said, she should be regarded not as a crusading truth teller, but a questionable reporter who framed innocent Chechens and Russian soldiers.
It is best in such company to hold one’s breath and focus on blinking normally so as not to betray any particular opinion. Dmitri occupied a ruthless world.
Yet I was sure that Dmitri himself had skeletons, so I ventured a question: Given his inclinations, why was he living in London and not in Russia? His reply: That’s where he had found employment once he decided in the mid-1990s to leave the GRU, whose central tenet—discreet penetration of foreign militaries and businesses—had been watered down to a naïve belief that “Russians have nothing to be afraid of. Everybody is our friend.”
“It was like a kindergarten” during the 1990s, Dmitri said, echoing Putin’s realpolitik disdain for that period in Russia. In fact, in dealings with other states, “interests are eternal and friendships transitory.”
Dmitri was a bag of hot air—a spinmaster with a huge mouth, an annoying attitude, and a bucket of money from his employment by the U.K. detective agencies.
I liked him. He was wholly transparent.
One reason such individuals sound like mafiosi is that the two camps regularly associate, said Mark Galeotti, a bearded professor at Keele University. He is an expert on the intersection of Russian organized crime and intelligence services, and was introduced to Russian gangs while working on a doctoral degree in the 1980s. Russian-based detective agencies are often partners with criminal gangs, said Galeotti. The gangs, in turn, are tolerated by Putin as long as they respect the Kremlin’s domination of politics and business. Putin “doesn’t go out to cleanse the stables,” Galeotti said. “He just wants [the regions] to run efficiently.”
Alexander Litvinenko’s road to political exile in London began with a similar observation—that Putin was inexplicably tolerating criminality within the Russian state. His accusations would become more incendiary over the years, sometimes crossing into the fantastic. Galeotti, who once attended a speech by Litvinenko, found him to be earnest and committed, a decent person who was simply out of his depth. That was a perceptive observation. For all of Litvinenko’s precautions as a KGB-trained officer accustomed to attack and betrayal, he was ultimately unprepared for the precarious course his life took.
Litvinenko was raised by his paternal grandfather in the northern Caucasus city of Nalchik, left there by parents who divorced when he was a young boy. His first wife thought his upbringing in this relatively wild region of southern Russia contributed to his being a bit of an odd character. Natalia Litvinenko, who had met the blond, blue-eyed Alexander in the suburbs of Moscow when he was fourteen and she a year younger, told me that he glorified his boyhood. As they fell in love, wed, and had two children, Litvinenko would abruptly turn cold and intimidating, and defend himself by saying that Caucasus people “have hotter blood so are capable of more cruelty,” Natalia said. But ultimately Litvinenko was a self-pitying sort, “like an abandoned puppy,” she said, troubled by an indifferent mother who refused to cook for him, an abusive stepfather who once forced him to jump on and off a couch one hundred times as punishment, and the general feeling that no one at all loved him.
In later years, Litvinenko would regard the period spanning his boyhood and first marriage as something of a lost time before he found his bearings. But he seemed to appreciate Natalia’s main point, according to Death of a Dissident, a memoir cowritten by his second wife, Marina, and his colleague and spokesman Alex Goldfarb. Rather than loved, he “felt sidelined” while growing up, the authors write. Absent an autobiography, I treated Death of a Dissident as a primary source for Litvinenko’s mind-set. Unsurprisingly, it differs from Natalia’s description of some events, especially Litvinenko’s abandonment of his family after eleven years of marriage. Natalia said that his departure was sudden, coming on a tempestuous 1993 night when he returned home smelling of perfume. She accused Marina of stealing him from her. Death of a Dissident, however, describes the first marriage as an unhappy one that collapsed of its own accord.
I found both wives attractive. Marina, a ballroom dance teacher, has more city sophistication and flair, and is less prone to paranoid and eyebrow-raising remarks. (For example, Natalia told my assistant that Litvinenko is still alive, and that his funeral was faked.) Yet I also felt sympathy for Natalia and the two children she had with Litvinenko; twenty-two-year-old Alexander and sixteen-year-old Sonya were both bitter and clearly hurt over growing up without their father for long periods.
Meeting Marina clearly was an important personal turn for Litvinenko. Death of a Dissident says that their relationship enabled him to finally shed his feelings of alienation. But far more dramatic in terms of Litvinenko’s ultimate fate was his crossing paths the next year with Boris Berezovsky, the wealthy Russian oligarch.
Moscow was bursting with swaggering billionaires in the 1990s, but few matched the outsized figure of Berezovsky. Made rich by his media empire, he presumed to influence all matters within the Kremlin, where he was part of President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. Litvinenko at the time was a major in an anti-terrorism and organized crime unit of the former KGB.
The two met when Litvinenko was investigating a reported assassination threat against Berezovsky, and they spoke again a few times after that. Then, eight months later, Litvinenko received an urgent message on his pager. Berezovsky said he was in trouble—Moscow police had shown up at the club he owned with the intention of taking him in for questioning in the investigation of a sensational murder. Vlad Listyev, general director of the Berezovsky-controlled television station ORT, had been shot dead. Litvinenko rushed to the club and held off the police until more members of his own unit arrived, and the altercation was defused. Berezovsky underwent police questioning, but at the club rather than some remote location.
The event quickly cemented the relationship between Berezovsky and Litvinenko. Both felt that, short of the latter’s intercession, the oligarch might have been taken away, only to disappear and later be reported as accidentally killed. Such things happened in Moscow with disturbing regularity. “[T]hey developed a bond shared only by people who have faced mortal danger together—not friendship or attachment, but a special kind of loyalty that no other can surpass,” Marina Litvinenko and Goldfarb wrote in Death of a Dissident.
In other words, Berezovsky more or less owed Litvinenko a blood debt.
In 1997, Litvinenko took command of a four-member team that was part of a shadowy anti–organized crime unit. A superior officer summoned the team and told the men that Berezovsky had to be killed. Speaking directly to Litvinenko, he said, “You will be the one to take him out.” The officer did not say who was ordering the assassination, but implied that the decision had been reached within the leadership of the anti-crime unit itself.
The events that followed reminded me of the old KGB agent Nikolai Khokhlov and his life-changing knock on the door of an anti-Soviet émigré—“I can’t let this murder happen.” Like Nikolai forty-four years earlier, Litvinenko did not perceive his assigned target as a “grave threat to our country”—the words of the superior officer that day. Extreme measures were warranted in wartime Chechnya, but not in peacetime Moscow. The order to kill the oligarch made Litvinenko and his men uneasy; he balked at it inwardly, but was careful to guard his feelings.
During the following three months, Litvinenko’s squad did nothing to carry out the order, and the superior officer never brought it up again. It was a curious situation, to say the least. Litvinenko and his men were dismayed that, whatever criminality had crept into their profession, someone was trying to reinvent them as a moneymaking political hit squad. That was not what they had signed up to be. At the same time, they suspected the threat wasn’t necessarily serious, and they might be able to outwait the officer who had issued the assassination order. So they dragged their feet, and heard nothing more from the officer.
Litvinenko did not immediately make Berezovsky aware of the order to assassinate him. When he later briefed the oligarch on the odd situation, Berezovsky thought the whole business sounded outlandish, but went straight to the director of the FSB. Was it true, what Litvinenko and his men said?
The FSB boss, Nikolai Kovalev, seemed to know nothing about the assassination order. But the accusations were explosive, and he assured the oligarch and Litvinenko that he would investigate. Soon they received word that whatever order had been issued—serious or not—was no longer in effect. Berezovsky would not be killed. However, the officer whose directive had set off the entire brouhaha went unpunished.
Litvinenko would not be soothed, and for good reason. Other troubling propositions were put before him: One superior asked if he was willing to help kill a former FSB man named Mikhail Trepashkin, who had accused the agency of corruption. Another sought his assistance in kidnapping a Chechen hotel owner. It seemed to Litvinenko that he and his men were still being pressured to act as an outlaw force.
Over subsequent months, Berezovsky arranged for Litvinenko’s men to air their complaints outside the FSB—to a Kremlin security official, who passed them on to the federal prosecutor’s office, which took formal depositions. It seemed they were being taken seriously, particularly when Kovalev was fired as FSB chief and replaced by someone whom Berezovsky recommended—Vladimir Putin.
Litvinenko and the other whistle-blowers were now on temporary suspension pending an investigation, but they thought the momentum was going their way. Their testimony could well lead to the reform of the FSB and promotions for all. Litvinenko in particular thought he might be in line for a senior position in the agency, given Berezovsky’s influence. The powerful oligarch had become a Putin zealot and was championing the new FSB boss as a presidential candidate to succeed Yeltsin. Within a relatively short time, he would emerge as one of Putin’s most important political strategists.
But the whistle-blowers had underestimated Putin’s fealty to the intelligence community. When Litvinenko provided a briefing on questionable events at the FSB, Putin listened silently without committing to any action. Whatever had been said about killing Berezovsky reflected “thoughtless statements,” but “did not constitute an intent to commit murder.” Putin reassigned all members of the anti-crime unit—except the Litvinenko group. Litvinenko and his men seemed not to grasp it, but they had become outcasts within the FSB.
It was clear that Putin cared most about being solidly loyal to the intelligence agency he held dear, and less about changing the FSB’s practices.
One day in November—almost a year after the original threat to Berezovsky—Russian émigré Yuri Felshtinsky flew in to Moscow to assume his new duties as a political adviser to the oligarch. Felshtinsky, now a scholar living in Boston, was no fan of the FSB. When, some two years hence, Russia would be shocked by a string of apartment house bombings, he would become a proponent of the theory that the FSB had been involved and that Vladimir Putin had been in on the planning.
But for now, his main interest was “a strange-looking man who was talking and talking and talking” while Felshtinsky and Berezovsky looked on. The talkative man was Litvinenko, who was preparing his men for a press conference the next day at which they would air their grievances against the FSB in public for the first time. There was much cursing and raising of voices as they debated whether to wear masks, weighed the risk of arrest, and wondered if their wardrobes were suitable for such an event. Litvinenko set about writing an opening statement to be handed to reporters.
“Do you mind if I look over the text?” Felshtinsky asked. Berezovsky agreed, and the new man concluded that Litvinenko could write pretty well.
The next day, Litvinenko and five FSB colleagues faced the press. Litvinenko was one of two who did not wear masks. He told reporters that he was deeply troubled by his unit’s activities, and he recounted kidnapping and murder plans to which he had been witness. The FSB had become a criminal organization, “used for settling scores and carrying out private and criminal orders for payments. Sometimes the FSB is being used solely for the purpose of earning money.” Senior officials within the agency were complicit, he said.
There simply was no precedent for such a public confession, at least not in Moscow itself. (Nikolai Khokhlov’s dramatic 1954 news conference had been at a safe distance, in Frankfurt.) The Litvinenko event was televised and widely reported around Russia and in the West as well. The London Independent called it “extraordinary” and a New York Times report said later that “Moscow has talked of little else since.”
What had brought matters to such a remarkable turn? Berezovsky, Litvinenko, and his men had lost faith that the FSB would reform itself and decided their only hope was a dramatic gesture that would marshal public opinion. But still they were not blaming Putin, and indeed shielded him by only citing events that had occurred before he took over the agency. They blamed the system, not the man.
Before the end of the year, they had their answer. FSB chief Vladimir Putin fired Litvinenko and the others for making “internal scandals public.”
Berezovsky stuck by Litvinenko and his men. The whistle-blowers continued to nurse the hope that they would prevail, and the relationship between Felshtinsky and Litvinenko warmed. The latter, prone to non-stop banter, “was glad to have me as a listener,” Felshtinsky recalled. They were opposites in physical appearance, as was apparent in the jacket photo of Blowing Up Russia, the book that they would later coauthor. Standing beside each other, the hulking Felshtinsky and the comparatively small, boyish Litvinenko reminded me of the broad-chested John Steinbeck and his diminutive Hungarian photographer, Robert Capa, in a snapshot taken during research for their classic Russian Journal. In the case of the two Russians, it was the smaller man who had the spellbinding stories to tell.
As Felshtinsky listened, Litvinenko described torture he witnessed during his months of service in Chechnya, including once when soldiers burned a Chechen captive alive over an open fire and another occasion when they flayed a Chechen man. A startled Felshtinsky wondered why he didn’t halt the outrages. Litvinenko replied that he couldn’t have even if he wanted to, and that if he had tried, his companions would surely have killed him.
Then and later, Felshtinsky heard Litvinenko defend himself against implied and direct accusations that he had blood on his hands. Litvinenko said he never broke any law, Russian or international. Felshtinsky interpreted this to mean that while he killed men in battle, as dutiful soldiers must do, he never tortured anyone, nor violated any other standard of civility such as the Geneva Conventions.
But Felshtinsky decided there was something over the edge about these whistle-blowers. Hearing them bicker, he thought they sounded much like the gangsters they were trained to round up.
Berezovsky was providing them with monthly stipends of $500 to $1,000, good pay for Moscow. But that wasn’t how the whistle-blowers—indeed, almost anyone around the oligarch—saw things. His retainers clung to the largely unsupported belief that anyone working for him inevitably would become rich, even super-rich. “When you are dealing with Boris, you are not thinking of tens of thousands of dollars, but hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars,” Felshtinsky said. “Even if you are getting enough or a lot, you are disappointed or getting angry at him.”
When one of the whistle-blowers angrily demanded a lump sum payment of $100,000, Litvinenko replied that “We didn’t do it for money.” After a few more rounds of similar sniping, everyone calmed down and the men recovered much of their optimism. Berezovsky was the key to promotions for all; the big money would come eventually. All they needed to do was push the oligarch harder.
Litvinenko himself thought so, too, until the moment, around three p.m. on March 25, 1999, when he was imprisoned.
The FSB charged him with beating up a suspect about two years earlier and planting bomb-making evidence to force the man to confess he was a terrorist. Litvinenko spent seven months in prison before being acquitted, then was jailed again, this time for three weeks. According to Death of a Dissident, Berezovsky obtained his release the second time by intervening with Putin.
One had to question Litvinenko’s judgment in pursuing the FSB corruption matter so assertively. For instance, if the threat against Berezovsky was so serious, why didn’t he call the oligarch at once and tell him the details? After all, he and the oligarch had developed “a special kind of loyalty” to each other, according to Death of a Dissident. And if the order to kill the oligarch was genuine, didn’t the whistle-blowers think it odd that no superior officer demanded to know whether it was being carried out? Perhaps one answer is that, like Nikolai Khokhlov, Litvinenko wasn’t satisfied with quietly saving a life. Rather than remaining behind the scenes, he had indulged a flair for the dramatic and an appetite for the public spotlight.
Almost everyone involved seemed to be looking out mainly for his own interests—the whistle-blowers hoping for enhanced status and more money, and Berezovsky seeking to tame the FSB and extend his political influence. When FSB boss Kovalev was fired and replaced by Putin, the dissidents saw it as evidence that “Berezovsky was winning,” Felshtinsky recalled. Instead, “Litvinenko was fired and imprisoned…. Put in was not Berezovsky’s friend, and Berezovsky was the last person who knew this.”
That Litvinenko was no longer safe seemed obvious. He began planning his escape from Russia. Felshtinsky’s recollection is that the two of them met at Litvinenko’s dacha after his release from prison. Felshtinsky and Berezovsky had recently discussed Litvinenko’s safety in Russia, and both figured it was time for him to leave the country. Now at Litvinenko’s dacha, Felshtinsky related the conversation to him.
“What will I do? Where will I go?” Litvinenko asked. Felshtinsky said he could help. During the early 1980s, difficult years when the border was closed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he had run an illicit emigration scheme in which he charged Soviets $6,000 each to get out by marrying a Swede or a Finn. Given that he managed to settle people fairly easily during those years, he didn’t see much of a problem once Litvinenko got over the Russian border.
In the meantime, Felshtinsky said, give Marina some money, and tell her to depart separately and meet him—Felshtinsky—somewhere abroad. Berezovsky would help. Litvinenko agreed.
According to Death of a Dissident, Litvinenko had already decided to flee before his émigré friend suggested it. He had been doing his best to evade FSB surveillance, which he was certain was under way. But how would he get out of the country, since he had been refused a passport the last time he applied? He began studying a lengthy land route south.
Not too long after, Natalia Litvinenko—his first wife—had a rare visit from her former husband. He had some plans, he said. It had become too dangerous for him, and he was going to go live on an island somewhere, write a book, and live off the royalties. Did she think that was all right? If he no longer felt safe, she replied, he indeed should go.
A month after the meeting at Litvinenko’s dacha, Felshtinsky was back in Boston. His telephone rang. It was Berezovsky calling from London. “You know we have a common friend in Moscow?” the oligarch said in the vague way that former Soviets speak when they fear their phone is tapped. “Well, he’s no longer in Moscow.”
Felshtinsky understood instantly. Litvinenko had not taken long to act.
His first stop was the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, from which he took a steamer south to the neighboring republic of Georgia, a trip that didn’t require a passport. He traversed seaside towns before finally turning inland and reaching the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. He knew people there and could purchase a false passport.
Litvinenko needed to obtain asylum in a Western country if he was to be out of Russia’s reach. But where? One possibility was London. Another was Germany. Litvinenko had a sister there, and his father had other connections. The Berezovsky machine went into motion.
Berezovsky himself was in trouble with Putin at the moment. The strain had begun a half year earlier, soon after Putin won election as president. In Berezovsky’s estimation, Putin’s rise meant business as usual for him, meaning that he would maintain his profit-making enterprises and continue to exercise influence in the Kremlin.
And that’s how their relationship was initially. But quickly, Putin became offended by Berezovsky’s attitude, which smacked of entitlement. The billionaire argued forcefully against Putin’s plan to rein in much of the country’s power and transfer it to the Kremlin. Berezovsky’s television station, ORT, strongly criticized Putin’s performance during the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster. And, in an interview, Berezovsky had seemed to compare Putin to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Berezovsky had stepped out of line. The punishment would be Kremlin seizure of ORT, Putin decided.
In their final Kremlin meeting, recorded in Death of a Dissident and confirmed by Berezovsky, each seemed to regard the other’s behavior as betrayal.
“Tell me Boris, I don’t understand,” Putin asked. “…Why are you attacking me? Have I done anything to hurt you?…You are supposed to be my friend.”
“…You forgot our conversation after the election, Volodya,” Berezovsky replied, using Putin’s nickname. “I told you that I never swore allegiance to you personally. You promised to continue the Yeltsin way. He would never even think of shutting up a journalist who attacked him. You are destroying Russia.”
That was about it.
“Good-bye, Boris Abramovich,” Putin said.
“Good-bye, Volodya,” said the oligarch.
The two never spoke again. By the time Litvinenko decided to flee, Berezovsky was already an exile living in Europe.
It was vindication for Felshtinsky. Berezovsky’s relationship with his political consultant had gone through a rocky period, mainly because the oligarch felt that Felshtinsky didn’t understand the changes that had transformed Russia in the last two decades. But now, Berezovsky wanted Felshtinsky to serve as his man on the ground, and get Litvinenko to safety. The oligarch instructed Felshtinsky to come meet him in London. Working as a team, they would spirit Litvinenko into Munich via commercial flights and even private planes if needed. Berezovsky provided $10,000 in cash to be funneled to Litvinenko.
At this point, Marina and her six-year-old son, Anatoly, learned for the first time what was going on. Her husband had left Moscow saying he was going to visit his father in the Caucasus. Later, he had called to suggest that she take a vacation in Spain. It was left to Felshtinsky to go to Marina and explain the escape plan.
He began to shuttle between the husband in Georgia and the wife in Spain. Arriving in Tbilisi, Felshtinsky found Litvinenko in a petulant state. He now had Berezovsky’s cash, along with an authentic-looking Georgian passport, and wanted to go straight to the U.S. embassy. He threw a tantrum when Felshtinsky refused to take him there. Berezovsky had ordered that they stay away from the Americans—the oligarch wanted no one to know of the pair’s presence in Georgia, worried in particular that the episode would be associated with one of his longtime business partners who had a reputation for criminal connections.
Litvinenko would have none of it. “If we don’t go to the American embassy, I’m going back to Moscow,” he said defiantly.
Finally, Felshtinsky relented. Okay, we will go, he said, but on one condition—that you never tell Berezovsky. Litvinenko agreed.
Felshtinsky held several meetings at the embassy. The American diplomats were mainly interested in gauging Litvinenko’s usefulness as an intelligence source. Did he know any Russian agents operating in the United States? Or Americans operating for the Russians? Beyond that, the diplomats seemed in no hurry to move things along.
Felshtinsky and Litvinenko became increasingly nervous. For security purposes, they carried several cell phones, including one with Felshtinsky’s Boston number. But only his Russian phone worked in Georgia—and it began to ring. Acquaintances in Moscow were calling, having noted the absence of the entire Litvinenko family and concerned that something was amiss. Felshtinsky worried that it had become too dangerous to remain in Georgia.
He and Litvinenko rushed to the airport and boarded a fourteen-seat luxury Fokker jet rented by Berezovsky in Paris. On the tarmac as the pilot prepared for takeoff, Felshtinsky heard his cell phone ring. It was the American embassy in Tbilisi.
“Call me in an hour,” Felshtinsky said, notwithstanding that they would be in the air at that moment. Then Berezovsky called. Felshtinsky briefed him. In line with the original plan, he said, they were headed for Munich.
“I think you should go to Turkey, not Munich,” Berezovsky replied.
That did not go over well with Litvinenko. Turkey was a nether-world that swallowed up all manner of people. It sounded like Berezovsky intended to abandon him, and he insisted that they head for a Western country—Germany, he said.
Felshtinsky handed the phone to Litvinenko.
Berezovsky went to work on him: I’m not going to abandon you. We just need more time to figure this out.
Berezovsky had a commanding manner. It also mattered that he was financing the escape. Even Litvinenko, prone to argue with anyone, didn’t challenge him too vigorously. Finally he told the billionaire that he trusted him, and switched off the phone.
But then he resumed bargaining with Felshtinsky. Litvinenko would go to Antalya—the Turkish resort region that Berezovsky had in mind—only if Felshtinsky dropped him off, then flew at once to Spain to retrieve Marina and Anatoly.
By now Litvinenko was under tremendous stress, and the arrival of his family the next day with Felshtinsky didn’t ease him that much. He was suspicious of certain men he saw in the hotel lobby. “I know these people,” he insisted. “They are FSB. I know them from Chechnya.” He was sure they were preparing to kill them. Felshtinsky ignored him. He thought that was Litvinenko’s game—using staged nervousness to get what he wanted, which could range from checking into a new hotel, to going to a new city, or simply attracting attention.
Whichever was the case, Felshtinsky was losing confidence. A month earlier, he had thought it would be easy to arrange asylum for Litvinenko. The obvious route was the Americans, but so far that wasn’t working. In Tbilisi, the U.S. embassy had seemed more interested in bargaining for information than rescuing an FSB defector. Berezovsky’s camp had made Felshtinsky even more anxious by suggesting they rent a yacht and sail into international waters—they could wait at sea while asylum was arranged. But Felshtinsky thought that could leave them exposed to an attack, with no escape route should Putin learn their location.
Now Berezovsky dispatched an additional adviser, Alex Goldfarb, to the mission. Goldfarb had an unusual talent for public relations. While still a Soviet citizen in the 1970s, this microbiologist came to be known by Western journalists as a conduit to Moscow dissidents. After the Soviet breakup, he ran the Moscow office of the Open Society Institute, an organization established by hedge fund billionaire George Soros to promote democracy in formerly communist states. Berezovsky eventually hired him to run a foundation that financed anti-Putin political activities. With Goldfarb, it was often difficult to determine where the truth ended and the propaganda began. But if you wanted something to happen, he was your man.
Felshtinsky and Goldfarb began instantly to quarrel. Goldfarb’s first suggestion was that Litvinenko be brought to American diplomats in Turkey, accompanied by a lawyer to protect his interests. Felshtinsky thought this was a terrible idea after their Tbilisi experience, but couldn’t let slip that they had defied Berezovsky’s instructions and already gone to the Americans.
“It’s an idiotic idea,” Felshtinsky said.
Goldfarb said he would dispatch a lawyer.
“If you are going to send in a lawyer, you might as well go yourself, because I’m not going to go with a lawyer,” Felshtinsky replied. He announced that he was leaving, causing Litvinenko to become even more alarmed and his wife to sense betrayal. Felshtinsky had deliberately escalated the argument out of dread that this mission was going very wrong. But his departure would turn out to be a welcome development. While a nice guy, he was not an operator of Goldfarb’s caliber.
Within hours after Felshtinsky left, Goldfarb and the Litvinenko family were on the road to the capital, Ankara. There, they met with diplomats at the U.S. embassy—but again, no one seemed prepared to make a deal.
That night, Litvinenko went into his familiar routine. He called Goldfarb’s attention to a fellow in the hotel lobby. “They’re here already…. We have to get out of here,” he declared, identifying the manas an FSB agent. Goldfarb took Litvinenko seriously and hustled the family out of the hotel. They drove all night to presumed safety in Istanbul. Along the way, Litvinenko stepped up the drama. He directed Goldfarb to stop the car and wait ten minutes to see whether anyone was following them. “I won’t go alive,” Litvinenko said. “If the Turks turn me in, I’ll kill myself.”
Was there a genuine danger? One couldn’t tell, Felshtinsky had said of Litvinenko. And even if you knew he was bluffing, and kept saying to yourself, “He is bluffing, he is bluffing,” Litvinenko was a very good actor, and it was hard to be absolutely sure.
Felshtinsky, back in Boston, received a call from local CIA agents. Could they come meet with him? Before long, a man and a woman showed up at his door. “You left Tbilisi without talking to our friend who was expecting to meet with you,” one said.
“I was trying to check how quick you are,” Felshtinsky replied, remembering the snippet of phone conversation moments before taking off from the Tbilisi airport. He explained what was going on in Turkey. “We left Tbilisi because it’s dangerous, and it’s more dangerous in Turkey.” Could these agents help rescue his Russian friend? “It’s difficult,” the U.S. agents said simply. “It’s difficult.”
Goldfarb telephoned from Istanbul. If the Americans didn’t act quickly, he told Felshtinsky, he would hold a press conference and say that an American’s life was being put in danger, meaning his own. Felshtinsky should pass that message on to his CIA contacts. Felshtinsky advised against such an approach.
“It’s my life, not yours,” Goldfarb replied. “The FSB is already here. It’s our lives, and I ask you to do this on my behalf.”
So Felshtinsky called his contact at the CIA.
“We can’t be subject to blackmail and pressure,” the CIA contact replied. “You’re on your own.”
Goldfarb, left to his wilier instincts, improvised. He bought Turkey-to-Moscow tickets for everyone—with a transit stop in London. At Heathrow Airport, Goldfarb introduced Litvinenko to an immigration officer and requested asylum on behalf of him and his family.
Within hours, the Litvinenkos were under the protection of the British government. As for Goldfarb, the United Kingdom declared him persona non grata and sent him on his way.
Berezovsky put up Litvinenko and his family in an apartment in London’s upscale Kensington district and arranged a £5,000 monthly allowance, a handsome sum, considering that their housing expenses were already covered.
Litvinenko and Felshtinsky saw much of each other, laboring over Blowing Up Russia, their book about the 1999 apartment blasts. Berezovsky published the resulting work in Russian, but the Kremlin security services foiled his attempt to smuggle five thousand copies into Russia. The opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta came to the rescue by printing several chapters in one hundred thousand copies of a special edition.
But the transition to life in London was hard for Litvinenko. Unlike Berezovsky, now in self-exile there, he did not speak English and was not very diligent about learning it. That left him isolated, glued to satellite television shows beamed in from Moscow, and unable to wander much beyond the Russian-speaking community.
He sought a meeting with Oleg Gordievsky, the ex–KGB station chief who was the hub and glue of all the U.K.-based spies and former spies. Gordievsky had become a cause célèbre in 1985 when he defected and was spirited out of the Soviet Union by British spies in the trunk of a car. He had traveled to the United States a dozen times, visited Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the White House, and by his own count had written some ten thousand intelligence reports for the West.
Newly arrived Russian exiles regularly made pilgrimages to Gordievsky’s home in Godalming, a village outside London. But the old spy at first refused to see Litvinenko. This new defector from the FSB was not the type of exile he was inclined to meet. This fellow was a mere operative for Boris Berezovsky, and not a genuine dissident.
Berezovsky, on the other hand, was always an interesting guest, especially with all the billionaire’s supplication. Gordievsky recalled their first meeting, at which Berezovsky presented himself as “quite a positive figure” who spent his money on good causes.
“He came here in a limousine, and sat at this table, and told me the story of his life. It was like he felt he had to explain himself to me,” Gordievsky recalled. The two shared a mutual contempt for Vladimir Putin. Gordievsky dismissed the Russian president as one of the “blanket lifters” who spied on Russians abroad when he was a KGB officer based in Dresden, Germany, during the 1980s. Not a professional he could respect.
Litvinenko was finally able to see Gordievsky after another exile vouched for the newcomer. The two quickly hit it off, and Litvinenko visited regularly for lunch, sometimes bringing his wife and son. “Like Berezovsky, he carried two mobile phones,” Gordievsky recalled. “He was always on them.”
Once, Litvinenko brought along Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Russian journalist with whom he had been exchanging stories of Putin’s war in the restive region of Chechnya, and her glamorous elder sister, Elena Kudimova, a London-based derivatives trader. They dined at the village hotel, called Inn on the Lake, with a view of the surrounding forest.
I took the train down to Godalming, where Gordievsky met me in a blue blazer, with a peach shirt and a violet silk hanky sprouting from his jacket pocket. There was no visible security at his home, but I knew this man—the West’s biggest Cold War catch ever—was well protected by surveillance. Gordievsky was cordial, inclined toward coarse humor punctuated with hearty laughs. At dinner with his English girlfriend along, he whispered conspiratorially, alerting me that she shouldn’t hear.
“Russians want to hear rough language. They think it brings life to the conversation,” he said, giving both sides of his face a light slap for emphasis. This is why Russian men can speak impolitely to their wives, he said.
Like Nikolai Khokhlov, Gordievsky fled Russia without his family. There was much explaining to do when he and his wife, Leila, reunited a few years later. She flew into London with their two daughters—eleven-year-old Mariya and ten-year-old Anna—but reconciliation proved elusive. After a few days, the wife and daughters returned to Moscow, and divorce followed. By the time I met Gordievsky, no one in the family was speaking to him.
I asked why his wife had bothered to make the trip. “She wanted the money,” he replied. He was clearly bitter. “There was £200,000 to her, plus £170,000 of private education for the two girls. Plus she receives £1,250 a month as compensation for being an ‘abandoned wife.’ She brainwashed the girls that I am a traitor.”