SIX DAYS AFTER THE OCTOBER 7, 2006, SLAYING OF ANNA Politkovskaya, actress Vanessa Redgrave led mourners in a flower-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey. A tribute to Anna followed at the House of Lords. Days later, a somber panel discussion was held at the Frontline Club, a popular West London inn and saloon run by former war correspondents.
A scruffy-faced blond man in the Frontline audience rose to his feet. “My name is Alexander Litvinenko,” he said in a mixture of English and Russian. “I’m a former KGB and FSB officer. Because I’m here, [I feel] I should speak up.”
The killing of the crusading journalist had unsettled the Russian defector, a fixture in London’s émigré community for nearly six years. He had known Anna during the last few years of her life and had admired her tough reporting on many of the same matters that occupied his interest.
Litvinenko quickly unloaded on Russia’s leader: “Someone has asked who killed Anna Politkovskaya. I’ll give you a direct answer—Mr. Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, killed Anna.”
Toward the end of his remarks, he rephrased the statement, but its essence was unchanged. “Without the sanction of Putin, no one would touch someone of Anna’s stature,” he insisted. “She was their political enemy, and that’s why they killed her.”
As far as I could tell, it was the first time that Litvinenko had publicly blamed Vladimir Putin for Anna’s death. His blunt accusations caused a stir in the room. Afterward, some in the audience invited him to speak elsewhere, and journalists who were present pressed him to elaborate. A five-minute videotape of his impromptu speech eventually found a global audience in the tens of thousands, through the magic of YouTube. Valid or not, Litvinenko’s remarks helped to bolster a growing suspicion abroad: The Kremlin was killing its enemies.
The onetime Russian agent had been tossing rhetorical hand grenades in the direction of the Kremlin ever since he and his wife, Marina, and their six-year-old son, Anatoly, arrived in Great Britain on November 1, 2000. After his nerve-racking escape from Russia and failure to obtain political asylum in the United States, Litvinenko settled into the life of an exile in London. He was a health fanatic who neither smoked nor drank, and ran alone up to twelve kilometers a day through north London. His wife adjusted well, taking English lessons and finding work as a dance instructor at a health club. The jowly, balding Berezovsky, also living in exile in London, made sure they were financially comfortable.
Well before fleeing Russia, the forty-three-year-old Litvinenko had experienced a kind of personal conversion. He found himself questioning the worth of his more than a decade in Russian counterintelligence, and the values that service represented. His gradual disillusionment had led to a change of heart so intense that he sometimes resembled a religious zealot.
In London, he embraced the Chechen struggle for independence from Russia. Two years after his arrival, he and Marina moved into a row house in north London. Soon after, Akhmed Zakayev, the European-based leader of the Chechen opposition, moved in across the street, and the two men became extremely close. At times, Litvinenko seemed to see himself as an adopted Chechen. That was most apparent in his articles for the opposition online news service, called ChechenPress. Marina sometimes felt that his writing was too emotional, “like a person in a bazaar,” causing him to “lose face.” She advised her husband to tone it down so readers would expect that “probably there is something serious” in any article bearing a Litvinenko byline. But her advice does not seem to have influenced what he wrote.
Litvinenko’s rejection of his past could be traced to his service in the First Chechen War; he saw firsthand the brutality of that conflict, including the torture of captured Chechens. His interrogation of a Chechen teenager strengthened his sense that this was no ordinary conflict. When Litvinenko asked the youth why he was not in school, the boy replied that his entire class had gone off to fight the Russian army. Litvinenko’s flight to England coincided with the Second Chechen War, the cruelty of which reinforced his belief that the Russian military campaign there was immoral.
Some friends thought that his well-publicized attacks on Russia’s most powerful men put Litvinenko at risk of assassination. He usually batted away such suggestions, insisting that he felt well protected in the United Kingdom. At the same time, he trusted no one, according to colleague Yuri Felshtinsky. “He thought everyone was working for the KGB,” Felshtinsky said. “He thought people in Boris’s office were working for the KGB, which perhaps one or more were.”
Litvinenko hammered at the idea of Putin and the Russian intelligence apparatus as the unseen hands behind all sorts of outrages. He declared that the FSB trained Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy chief of al-Qaeda; that Putin was responsible for the Beslan school massacre; that the FSB organized the Nord-Ost hostage-taking (Anna alleged an FSB role as well); and that the FSB killed Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov. He made a link to the 2004 dioxin poisoning of the Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko as he campaigned against a pro-Moscow candidate. Litvinenko told The New York Times that the assault fit the profile of a Russian undercover operation. “The view inside our [intelligence] agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol. It’s not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool,” he told the newspaper.
He got exceedingly personal with Putin. The president’s career in the KGB had been initially derailed because “his bosses learned that [he] was a pedophile,” Litvinenko said. He claimed to have a videotape of Putin cavorting with underage boys, but never made public the purported recording or any other evidence to support what most regarded as a preposterous assertion.
Some who knew him said Litvinenko also exaggerated certain personal relationships. Anna Politkovskaya, for example, was unable to disregard his past as a KGB agent and remained highly suspicious of him, according to her family. Her only interest was whatever information he could provide on the FSB and Chechnya, they said. Litvinenko, on the other hand, regularly said he and Anna were close personal friends. Perhaps he thought his contact with her lent him credibility, allowing him to bask in her reflected glory.
Skeptics abounded when Litvinenko once cast himself as concerned for Vladimir Putin’s safety. He rang the London police to say that two Russian men had approached him with plans to assassinate their president. The allegation received wide attention in the British press and resulted in the men’s brief incarceration, after which they were sent back to Russia. Suddenly, if only briefly, Litvinenko appeared to be the soul of moderateness.
More often, he seemed to be a man of contradictions. Most of his allegations appeared wide of the mark. Yet he had solid sources within Russian security agencies, according to his wife and Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel. They told me that he was able to reach FSB contacts by phone, and through them obtained access to inside information and documents. His judgments were accurate at times simply because he knew from personal experience how the FSB and its companion agencies worked.
His claim that Putin okayed or knew in advance of the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya is highly improbable. But his broader accusation that the Russian intelligence community was involved is far less so. In fact, as Russian prosecutors themselves later alleged, at least one FSB officer did assist in Anna’s murder by telling the killers where she lived.
Some journalists reported his assertions as straightforward news, while others treated him as a crank and possibly unhinged. Even some admirers thought he sounded shrill.
Yet Litvinenko found an ear in British intelligence. The country’s domestic and overseas intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, both debriefed him after his 2000 defection. What he told his interrogators has never been made public, but the questions likely paralleled those asked by American agents when he first sought asylum, in Georgia—for example, the identities of Russian spies in Britain and British double agents anywhere in the world. He cooperated with enthusiasm. After the rough methods of the KGB, the more polished, low-key style of the Britons appealed to him. For a while, he was disgruntled in that his hosts refused to provide him with a salary. But that was to be expected since he hadn’t negotiated his defection in advance, when he might have had some leverage. In addition, he was not a truly high-value catch, not like Oleg Gordievsky, for instance, or even Nikolai Khokhlov, the first officer to defect from Stalin’s assassination unit. By those standards, he failed to qualify for a regular salary; political asylum and the chance to attain British citizenship would have to suffice.
Litvinenko’s best-known broadside against the FSB was Blowing Up Russia, the book he coauthored with Felshtinsky. It argued that the FSB had engineered the four apartment house bombings that terrorized Russia in 1999 and killed some three hundred people, and that the blasts had been part of an elaborate plan to catapult the agency’s boss, Vladimir Putin, into the presidency.
Berezovsky, now in full-throated opposition to Putin, financed the book as a political weapon. He and Litvinenko were united in their desire to upend the Russian regime, with Berezovsky anxious to discredit the president and Litvinenko going after the FSB. Blowing Up Russia had the virtue of attacking both.
The exiled billionaire spent generously to promote his creation. He launched the book with a London party worthy of royalty and flew some four dozen journalists in from Moscow to attend a press conference. Novaya Gazeta, Anna’s newspaper, published excerpts in a special issue. Berezovsky also bankrolled a fifty-two-minute documentary, entitled Assassination of Russia, which was based on the book. The French-produced film had its premiere in London but was also shown to a select audience in Moscow.
Putin’s regime labored to defend itself against the book and other attacks by Litvinenko and his billionaire ally. Boris Labusov, spokesman for the foreign arm of the FSB, scorned the defector’s claim that Russia’s secret services had escalated their activities in North America and Europe. “There is no need to analyze Litvinenko’s fabrications. You can say at once that he is fulfilling another social order by his superiors,” Labusov said, seeming to refer to Berezovsky. Early one morning in 2004, someone lobbed Molotov cocktails at the north London homes of Litvinenko and Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled Chechen leader. Litvinenko blamed Russia, and Labusov responded with scorn. “Discussing our involvement is really a laugh,” he said, suggesting instead that the exiles might have torched their own homes. “History knows a lot of cases when some individuals imitated attempts on their lives, trying to attract the public’s attention to themselves for various purposes.”
But there was no denying that Litvinenko had struck a nerve in Moscow. FSB marksmen used large portraits of their former colleague for target practice—all the better, it seemed, to motivate their accuracy. The Russian embassy left a summons at his London home to appear in Moscow and be tried on charges of beating a suspect and stealing explosives when he was an FSB agent (he had been cleared of similar allegations in 1999). Litvinenko, naturally, had no desire to return to Moscow under the threat of a prison sentence, and ignored the summons. He was convicted in absentia a month later, and a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence was entered against him. Putin’s priorities seemed misdirected—pursuing an empty conviction with the likely intent to vilify a political exile, while exerting little energy to solve the country’s biggest murder cases.
Later in the year, word reached Litvinenko that the FSB apparently had hatched a plot to kill him. The tip came from Mikhail Trepashkin, who said he had been threatened with murder by the boss of Litvinenko’s FSB anti-crime unit and sat with him at the famous whistle-blower press conference in Moscow in 1998. In the end, the FSB turned against both of them, but he and Litvinenko became close friends.
A former FSB colleague of theirs had proposed that Trepashkin, still in Russia, go to London and be the point man in a surveillance operation targeting Litvinenko. In Trepashkin’s telling, the former colleague defined the purpose of the mission as sorting out “all matters linked to Litvinenko and Berezovsky once and for all.”
Apparently, the agency expected that Trepashkin’s loyalty to FSB tradition and his Russian patriotism would overcome whatever misgivings he might have at violating an important friendship. But Trepashkin quickly concluded that the agency was trying to draw him into a scheme to murder Litvinenko, and friendship prevailed.
Trepashkin told an interviewer how he responded to the ex-colleague: “‘Are you out of your mind?’ I said to him. ‘Are you trying to recruit me to help carry out an assassination? Forget it.’”
Episodes such as the surveillance plot did nothing to calm the paranoia and sense of drama that seemed to overwhelm Litvinenko at times. A Russian-born doctoral student named Julia Svetlichnaja, writing in a British newspaper, provided a vivid account of grandiose-to-eccentric behavior on his part. She had spent time with Litvinenko while doing research on Chechnya, and her article depicted him as a somewhat pathetic figure. Acting the superspy, he made abrupt turns in his car to lose a “tail” and insisted on standing and walking while being interviewed, supposedly to foil any attempts by unseen persons to record him. He posed in front of a British flag, belligerently brandishing a Chechen sword, and said of the Kremlin, “Every time I publish something on the ChechenPress website, I piss them off. One day they will understand who I am!” She said Litvinenko described plans to blackmail one or more Russian oligarchs with evidence he had of their corruption. He even invited Svetlichnaja to partner with him on the project, she said.
Felshtinsky, his writing partner, doubted that the latter invitation was genuine. Litvinenko, he said, would have been suspicious of a Russian woman he did not know claiming she was in London conducting research on Chechens. “He was probably thinking she worked for the KGB; all of it was his checking if she worked for the Russians or not,” Felshtinsky said. That rang true. Always, it seemed, Litvinenko was on the lookout for another plot.
By 2005, Litvinenko began to feel as if he were living on the dole. He had been in England for almost five years, but was still entirely dependent on Berezovsky’s goodwill and monthly stipends. He had exhausted all the evidence that he and Felshtinsky had gathered to portray the FSB and Putin as complicit in the apartment house bombings. Their investigations had resulted in a book and a film, and Litvinenko had written a second anti-FSB screed called Lubyanka Criminal Group. Now what would he do? He knew he was no businessman, but he excelled at intelligence work. That, he told Marina, “I can really do well.” Everyone was for sale in Russia and “everything has its price,” he said confidently.
Litvinenko was familiar with the detective agencies that had blossomed in London’s Mayfair district, especially their hunger for the kind of information he could provide. Their clientele included Western businessmen exploring joint ventures in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, who were anxious to know more about their potential partners before taking the plunge. The detective agencies were happy to supply the needed intelligence in exchange for handsome fees.
And so Litvinenko, drawing on his sources inside and outside of Russia, began selling information to the Mayfair operatives. His initial experiences were not encouraging. The agencies were relative tight-wads when it came to paying their investigators. Sometimes they refused to pay anything for the information that he submitted, scoffing, “We ourselves could have discovered this.” Litvinenko was awkward in the art of wheeling and dealing, and accepted these financial slights.
But over time, he developed good relationships with a few select companies, especially one called Titon International Security Services. Titon was a boutique operation known for in-the-trenches investigations that larger rivals were reluctant to undertake—just the type that were Litvinenko’s forte. One of his notable successes at Titon was a probing report on Viktor Ivanov, a longtime Putin intimate and former KGB officer. After Putin appointed Ivanov chairman of Aeroflot, Litvinenko profiled Ivanov for a British firm thinking of doing business with the state airline.
At the same time Litvinenko was feeling his way as a private investigator, his relationship with Berezovsky was becoming strained. Given their long history together, this seemed a surprising development. The billionaire Russian had been his mentor and a willing provider for the Litvinenko family. Back in 2000, it was Berezovsky who had made possible Litvinenko’s cloak-and-dagger flight from Russia and had overcome Marina’s doubts about uprooting herself and her son from their native country. Berezovsky’s pledge to take care of them financially had persuaded Marina to go along with the plan to flee, she told me. In London, the exiled oligarch had installed them in an apartment in the desirable Kensington district, paid for their son’s schooling, and provided Litvinenko with a generous salary of £5,000 a month. (Litvinenko chronically griped that he had no cash. A skeptical colleague who knew his habits when it came to managing money once remarked to him, “Sasha, if I deposited my entire salary in the bank, I also would have no money in my pocket.”)
But Berezovsky didn’t regard himself as a philanthropist. He was a businessman who always demanded something in return for his investments. And Litvinenko, despite his obvious gifts as an investigator, seemed unable to come up with new projects that were worthwhile, nothing like Blowing Up Russia, which Berezovsky had been willing to support because he thought it could wound the reviled Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky began to avoid meetings with him, no longer willing to listen to Litvinenko’s highly emotional and long-winded presentations. As Berezovsky put it, his fellow exile “demanded considerable attention,” while the oligarch had more pressing matters to attend to. On top of that, Litvinenko seemed obsessed with matters he regarded as absolutely vital but others thought were inconsequential at best. He seemed consumed by his conspiracy theories. At least that was how Berezovsky saw it.
Yuri Felshtinsky knew firsthand what it meant to be sought-after by Litvinenko. Phone calls came at all hours, and the voice at the other end usually was filled with urgency. But Litvinenko seldom had anything pressing to say. More often, it was “something that could wait two months, [much] less until the next day,” Felshtinsky told me. “I’d say, ‘You’re waking everyone up. Next time, please wait before you call.’ He’d say, ‘I don’t care. What’s the problem? So I woke them up.’”
In Litvinenko’s mind, his behavior was perfectly reasonable—for an oper, that is. This is FSB jargon for a special kind of intelligence agent, the operations man who tracks criminals in anticipation that they will commit illegal acts. Litvinenko had been trained as an oper, a word he used so often that Berezovsky soon picked it up. Now Litvinenko’s prey was the FSB; he was in constant battle with its shadowy operatives, always attempting “to provoke, to see how they react to him,” Felshtinsky said.
He sometimes struggled to decipher Litvinenko’s assertions. “When he is saying he has a tape that Putin is a pedophile, there are several possibilities of what that means,” Felshtinsky offered as an example. “There is the possibility he has a tape; another possibility is that he knows someone who has the tape; a third is that he is trying to provoke a reaction, such as that Putin may think he has a tape, or that someone who has the tape will understand he wants the tape, or that someone might make such a tape.”
In addition to being exhausting, the process of trying to understand Litvinenko tended to discourage friendship. In fact, Felshtinsky recalled his colleague saying that intelligence agents “don’t have friends.” People were either sources of information or they were targets of investigations. His wife and son were the only exceptions to this rule, Litvinenko said. “After that was when I stopped calling him a friend,” Felshtinsky said.
Litvinenko’s estrangement from Berezovsky worsened. Marina recalled her husband saying, with emotion, that their billionaire patron no longer seemed to require his services. Finally, toward the end of 2005, Berezovsky carved out time for a chat. It ended with Litvinenko informing the oligarch that he would seek work elsewhere—he was doing little in return for the money that Berezovsky was providing, and it was time to move on. Litvinenko had hoped to hear some mention of regret from the billionaire, even a suggestion that he reconsider. His old anxiety about being unwanted seemed to be in play, the unsettled sensation that went back to his boyhood. But Berezovsky expressed no misgivings. It was a good idea and Litvinenko was free to go, the billionaire said. But he promised not to abandon the Litvinenko family; they could remain in the home that he subsidized, he would still pay a salary to the ex–KGB man—though reduced to £1,500 a month—and he would continue to cover the cost of son Anatoly’s tuition.
Berezovsky’s pledge to continue his patronage after severing their business relationship might seem utterly contradictory. But the oligarch still felt indebted to Litvinenko for favors carried out before the two had separately fled Russia. Most prominent of these was Litvinenko’s courageous stand in 1994 to prevent Moscow police from taking Berezovsky into custody for closed-door questioning in a murder investigation. Their intentions seemed threatening, and the billionaire thought that Litvinenko’s action had probably saved his life. He also was fulfilling his old promise to Marina—made as she agonized over joining her husband in exile—that she and her son would be kept financially secure. I regarded Berezovsky as an ambitious conniver, but had to respect him for adhering to a certain code of honor, at least where the Litvinenkos were concerned.
On January 23, 2006, Berezovsky observed his sixtieth birthday in lavish style. He hosted a black-tie celebration at Blenheim Palace, the famous birthplace of Winston Churchill. It was always that way with the oligarch’s milestone birthdays—he had thrown a similar affair five years earlier in Nice, near his seaside villa on the Côte d’Azur.
Alexander and Marina Litvinenko were among the guests, invited as a nod to old times. So too was a snappy dresser named Andrei Lugovoi, former security chief for Berezovsky at ORT, the Russian television station that was once a valuable part of the oligarch’s empire. He was also a former KGB bodyguard for senior government officials.
Litvinenko was an FSB officer when the two last had contact, in the mid-1990s. At the time, he suspected Lugovoi of attempting to limit his access to Berezovsky, and their relationship was frosty as a result. But on this night, over dinner, the two veterans of Russian intelligence found that their interests might coincide. Lugovoi, now the multi-millionaire proprietor of Moscow security and soft drink companies, was thinking about expanding into the British market. Litvinenko had developed contacts with U.K. businessmen, thanks to his work at Titon and other Mayfair investigative agencies. Perhaps both men could profit from an informal partnership.
During the next several months, they tried to make the idea a reality. Progress was slow. Lugovoi provided a background report for a shared project at Titon, but the company’s managers were not impressed by his work. They also were uncomfortable in his presence; there was something vaguely disturbing about his look and his manner. No one said anything to Litvinenko—he surely would have shrugged off their concerns. Instead, the managers found excuses to absent themselves if Litvinenko called to say he was dropping by with Lugovoi.
In July, Vladimir Putin signed a law that caused a ripple of nervousness among Russian exiles in London. It granted the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies the right—if Putin gave his approval—to assassinate Russia’s enemies outside the nation’s borders, including “those slandering the individual occupying the post of president of the Russian Federation.” In other words, making a defamatory statement about Putin could be punishable by death. The new law lifted a quasi-moratorium that Moscow had observed on overseas assassinations for almost a half century, since the disastrous defection of Nikolai Khokhlov and two other Soviet killers who spilled secrets to the West in the 1950s.
I didn’t think that Putin necessarily had any specific slanderers in mind. Rather, he seemed to be reminding his countrymen—and other nations, especially in the West—of his new persona as the chisel-faced, muscular leader of Russia reborn. His we-won’t-be-pushed-around attitude certainly played well at home. It meshed with a new sense of nationalism that he encouraged, a Russia-first policy verging on xenophobia.
For example, the Kremlin formed a youth movement with a paramilitary bent, called Nashi. Literally the group’s name meant “Ours,” but its sense was “Our People.” The proximate trigger for its creation was the Orange Revolution of 2004 in neighboring Ukraine that overthrew the pro-Moscow president. Putin was determined that what he regarded as a Western-inspired movement would not spill into Russia and threaten his own government. Viewed that way, Nashi existed to defend Russian territory against dangerous foreign influences. Its loyalists famously pursued Estonia’s ambassador on foot when the Balkan country had the temerity to shift a Soviet war memorial from the center of the capital, Tallinn, to the city outskirts. Nashi followers demonstrated for a week in front of the Estonian embassy while the normally proactive police stood by. Concurrently, the Putin government expelled natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia from Moscow—people whom Russians call “the blacks.” In the nation’s capital, it became understood that the government would tolerate open racism; non-Russians, particularly dark-complected ones, were subject to street attacks by toughs.
Some of the exiles in London felt personally threatened by Putin’s legitimizing of assassination abroad. They remarked on how neatly the new law seemed to fit Litvinenko, who had been labeled a “traitor” by some former colleagues. Litvinenko himself observed that he, his neighbor Akhmed Zakayev, and Boris Berezovsky must be among the “terrorists” the Russian leader had in mind. His friends worried anew for his safety.
“I was there with him a few times when he got a call from Moscow,” said Vladimir Bukovsky, a fellow Russian exile.
“What, do you think it’s safe in London?” a caller once asked Litvinenko. “Remember Trotsky.”
In an interview, Marina said her husband believed he could outwit any potential assassin. “He believed that he would be able to sense something first,” she told the Russian newspaper Kommersant. “He said, ‘Marina, you can’t imagine how keen my nose is. I’m like a blood-hound—I sense danger, my hair stands on end, and I take care of everything immediately.’”
He did confess to “a feeling of danger,” she said, “but nothing concrete. He was very earnestly concerned about the law that was passed in Russia concerning the possibility of special operations being carried out abroad. He believed they would do such a thing.”
By October, Litvinenko had acquired what could be considered a layer of protection. He saw Felshtinsky and filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov at the Westminster Abbey memorial service for Anna Politkovskaya and whispered that he had finally received a British passport. “I’m British,” he said elatedly. “I’m an Englishman.”
When his father, Valter, a retired psychiatrist still living in Russia, expressed concern about Litvinenko’s safety, the son said not to worry. His new citizenship made him untouchable—his enemies in Russia would never risk attacking a Briton. Did Litvinenko, the oper, truly believe that? Not if one overheard what he told a confidant, Yevgeni Limarev, a France-based former KGB officer. More than once, Litvinenko raised the possibility that he would be killed, as though “expecting an attack, an assassination attempt or a murder.” Perhaps Litvinenko was genuinely conflicted about the dangers he faced. Still, he seemed to take few security precautions. Unlike Zakayev, his Chechen neighbor, he rather freely gave out his phone number and home address.
October also was a time when some of the central characters in Litvinenko’s life crossed paths in London. Yuri Felshtinsky flew from his suburban Boston home in search of more ivory for his private collection. He had been promised a ride on Boris Berezovsky’s jet to Israel, where carved mammoth tusks might be purchased. Best of all, he would not be subject to global export controls on the return trip because no one would check the billionaire’s private plane. On an evening stroll toward Piccadilly Circus, he encountered Andrei Lugovoi, Litvinenko’s putative business partner. The two hadn’t seen each other since Berezovsky’s birthday party ten months earlier. “Are you in town to see Boris?” Felshtinsky asked. No, said the wealthy Russian, and after a few more words they parted. Minutes later, Felshtinsky encountered Alex Goldfarb, the onetime Soviet dissident who had run George Soros’s Moscow human rights office and then went to work for Berezovsky. He had just seen the oligarch; they had dined and gone on to see a performance of King Lear, but Goldfarb had left early “because all the men were naked.”
Litvinenko and Lugovoi met often in October, sometimes with prospective clients, attempting to build some momentum for their budding partnership. On October 16, for instance, the multimillionaire flew in from Moscow and brought along an old school buddy, Dmitri Kovtun. The pair dined on sushi with Litvinenko at a restaurant called Itsu on Piccadilly. But not much is known about what transpired at their meetings. Kovtun said that Litvinenko excessively talked politics. Lugovoi said that he pushed would-be clients clumsily about money, describing one meeting at which Litvinenko pestered potential partners to “transfer 100,000 pounds to us.” Marina, who appears to have been uninvolved in her husband’s business affairs, could shed no light on the conversations.
I was more intrigued by the almost nonchalant manner that characterized Lugovoi’s dealings in London. In Moscow, he was the rich proprietor of a successful security company. A business such as that relies on operatives within Kremlin intelligence agencies to provide the information and skills that are critical to its success. Such a business cannot operate without the assent of the Kremlin. So why was Lugovoi willing and able to go into business with Litvinenko, a self-exiled FSB defector who had been convicted of a crime in Russia? And how was it that he could openly consort with Boris Berezovsky, himself a wanted man in Russia and the blood enemy of Putin? It didn’t add up.
On the morning of November 1, Litvinenko called his friend and neighbor Akhmed Zakayev. “I’m about to get information. A list of people who might be responsible for killing Anna Politkovskaya,” he said. The list was being offered by Mario Scaramella, a dubious figure on the margins of Italian politics who would later be arrested in a criminal investigation in Italy. Litvinenko had served as a source of sorts for the Italian’s attempts to undermine Romano Prodi, the country’s prime minister. Scaramella several times had paid him to fly to Italy and help build the case that Prodi was a stooge of the KGB; once he even videotaped Litvinenko saying so.
The two met that afternoon at Itsu, the sushi bar. Scaramella handed over a four-page e-mail—a purported hit list from Dignity and Honor, an association of former KGB agents with a history of issuing threats against supposed traitors. Among the names on the death list were those of Scaramella, Litvinenko, Berezovsky, and Anna. Litvinenko didn’t think it stood up to scrutiny. Nevertheless, he went by Berezovsky’s office to make photocopies, and gave one to the billionaire. Then he headed for a meeting with Lugovoi, who just the night before had shared a bottle of red wine with Berezovsky, his old boss.
By most accounts, Litvinenko was in good spirits. That night, he and Marina were planning to celebrate the sixth anniversary of their escape to England. They would have a quiet dinner together—Marina was planning to prepare chicken, a favorite dish.
He was also buoyed by the potential profits from a Lugovoi partnership. The two had agreed that Litvinenko would receive a 20 percent cut of any business he brought to the multi-millionaire’s security company. If things went well, Litvinenko told his friend Oleg Gordievsky, he could earn a half million pounds. Among other things, that would allow him to end his financial reliance on Boris Berezovsky.
Sometime after four p.m., Litvinenko made his way down the street to the Millennium Hotel, to look for Lugovoi in the Pine Bar. It would be their last business meeting.