THE NOBLE MILLENNIUM HOTEL, BUILT AS AN ELEGANT MANSION in the eighteenth century, is situated on Grosvenor Square, in London’s Mayfair district. The neighborhood around the square has several historical ties with the United States. General Dwight Eisenhower established his headquarters there during World War II, and the north side of the square is dominated by a monument to FDR. On the west side, the concrete-and-glass behemoth that is the American embassy clashes with the prevailing Georgian architecture.
This identification with America explained why, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the British feared an assault on the embassy. Authorities beefed up patrols and installed concrete blast barriers around the complex. But some nervous Mayfair residents thought that was not enough. A Swedish financier named Peter Castenfelt organized a neighborhood revolt, demanding that police seal access roads. As long as they were open, Castenfelt said, any attacker could drive up, detonate a bomb, and injure or kill nearby residents. I have known the soft-spoken Castenfelt for several years; well connected in capitals from Washington to Moscow, he has a habit of turning up in the middle of high-profile situations. “This is the No. 1 security issue in London that has not been resolved,” he said, and led the group in buying double-page protest ads in The Washington Post and The Times of London.
About five p.m. on November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko strolled along the square’s south side and entered the Millennium’s sedate green-and-white marble lobby. He turned into the Pine Bar, where he found Andrei Lugovoi sitting with a cigar-smoking associate, Dmitri Kovtun.
Waiter Norberto Andrade knew Lugovoi as a regular and had already brought shots of gin to the wealthy Russian businessman and his companion. Although everyone knew that Litvinenko was a teetotaler, Kovtun offered the former KGB officer a drink; by Russian custom, it would have been impolite not to do so. Litvinenko declined as expected, and sipped the green tea mixed with honey and lemon that the waiter had also set before them.
The three men were there to continue exploring the possibilities of an informal partnership, one that would use Litvinenko’s talents at intelligence gathering to attract British business for Lugovoi’s security company in Moscow. But the meeting was cut short after about a half-hour by the appearance of Lugovoi’s wife and eight-year-old son. Lugovoi and his family had booked a room at the Millennium and planned to attend a soccer match that evening between Britain’s Arsenal and Russia’s CSKA Moscow.
Litvinenko bid them good-bye and caught a ride home with his Chechen friend Akhmed Zakayev. Around seven-thirty p.m., he sat down for dinner with his wife, Marina, and their son, Anatoly. It was six years to the day since they had arrived at Heathrow Airport and were granted political asylum after defecting from Russia.
As Marina later would recall, her husband was expecting to meet again with Lugovoi and Kovtun the next day. He went to bed around eleven, only to complain of nausea and twice throw up “violently,” she said. She gave him milk of magnesia, which made him vomit once more.
Whatever was troubling his system, he wanted it out. So, as Marina slept, Litvinenko continued to drink the milk of magnesia and vomit through the night. He noticed that what came up was oddly gray. Early the next morning, Litvinenko rang Lugovoi to say he couldn’t make their meeting; he felt terrible.
Over the next two days, Litvinenko began suffering stomach pain and intense diarrhea in addition to the vomiting. Paramedics were summoned, and they concluded that he was dehydrated. Give him liquids, they advised. The next day, Marina summoned a Russian friend who was a doctor, and he was alarmed that Litvinenko cried out in pain at the slightest touch. Paramedics were summoned once again, and this time they rushed Litvinenko to nearby Barnet General Hospital. He was so weak he could barely walk.
“Marina, this is something abnormal,” he told his wife. “When I was in school at the military academy, we studied poisoning like this that was caused by a chemical weapon. This really reminds me of that.” Marina said she couldn’t believe it. How could it be possible that he had been poisoned? But Litvinenko was increasingly certain.
Upon his admission to the hospital, doctors immediately administered intravenous hydration. Marina stroked his head, only to become newly alarmed. His hair was coming out in her hand.
During the next week, Litvinenko’s condition fluctuated. He seemed to be recovering, able to stand and swing his arms for exercise. Then he began vomiting again, this time bringing up blood. His doctors said tests indicated bacteria in his intestine, and they prescribed antibiotics.
Marina became frantic. Her husband’s hair covered his pillow. He could barely speak. His skin was yellow. The doctors delivered disturbing news—Litvinenko’s white blood cell count had dropped sharply. His bone marrow was depleted. They flailed about for an answer, testing him for AIDS, hepatitis, and certain strains of radiation sickness. The results were negative. His symptoms seemed typical for a cancer patient, but there was no clear explanation. When the BBC’s Russian-language service reached Litvinenko on his cell phone, he stated the obvious. “Look,” he told the reporter, “now after a serious poisoning I am still in very bad shape, I feel badly and I am staying at one of London’s clinics.”
Litvinenko kept insisting that he had been poisoned. He told the hospital staff he was a Russian defector, and said that could have something to do with his sickness. Most reacted with skepticism, even long-time patron Boris Berezovsky. But then a nurse appeared with the news that he had tested positive for thallium, a heavy metal, and poisoning was suspected. She gave him a powder, presumably Prussian blue, the same substance administered to Nikolai Khokhlov after the old spy’s poisoning five decades earlier. It was still the accepted treatment to remove certain radioactive materials from people’s bodies, and took its odd name from a dye for Prussian military uniforms.
British police arrived in response to the hospital’s report of a possible poisoning victim. After several hours of questioning, most of it focusing on where he had been in the past few days and with whom, Litvinenko was loaded into another ambulance and moved to University College Hospital, a more secure setting. He was placed under armed guard.
“It was so strange,” Marina said, “because three weeks earlier no one had taken any notice of anything, and now all of a sudden everybody was trying to save him.”
News from Moscow added to the somber atmosphere in Litvinenko’s room. At around six p.m. on November 18, a minor Chechen leader named Movladi Baisarov was gunned down on one of the city’s busiest streets by other Chechens, in full view of policemen across the street. The official account said that his attackers were there to arrest Baisarov for crimes in the republic. Instead of surrendering, he had threatened them with a rocket-propelled grenade, authorities said. The story was totally lacking in credibility. Baisarov, a willing collaborator with the Russian authorities now in command of Chechnya, had found himself on the losing end of a power struggle between pro-Russian factions there. It seemed most probable that unidentified Russian authorities had decided he was fair game for assassination, even if the killing had to be carried out on Leninsky Prospekt, one of Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares. The episode seemed to underline the peril of being perceived to be on the wrong side in Russia.
As for Litvinenko, he assured friends who came to see him that he was fine. But any improvement in his condition was fleeting. On November 20, the sixteenth day of his hospitalization, he seemed to be losing his fight to survive. Doctors moved him into intensive care.
Alex Goldfarb, the Berezovsky operative who had played a central role in getting the Litvinenko family out of Russia, tried with little success to get reporters on the story. He and Berezovsky’s public relations man—Tim Bell, who famously helped to get Margaret Thatcher elected as British prime minister in 1979—finally hit on the idea of photographing Litvinenko. That would tell the whole story. So it was that a previously little-known South African photographer named Natasja Weitsz was slipped into the intensive care ward. Her picture of the stricken defector was shocking—a wasted, completely bald man clad in hospital greens, staring hollow-eyed at the camera. Bell’s company distributed it.
It was as Goldfarb and Bell had hoped—newspapers and television stations around the world splashed the dramatic image before readers and viewers. Litvinenko became a blockbuster story. Reporters poured in to London and wrote vivid accounts of what he was enduring. “Exspy’s poisoning bears hallmarks of Cold War thriller,” said The Daily Telegraph. “Different name, same tactics. How the FSB inherited the KGB’s legacy,” said the Guardian. “Exact Cause of Ex-K.G.B. Agent’s Illness Eludes Poison Experts,” reported The New York Times.
As reporters stood outside the hospital awaiting the latest report on Litvinenko’s condition, filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov visited his bedside. Nekrasov would later say that his friend “looked just like a ghost.” A grimly determined Litvinenko said it was necessary that he endure the suffering. “This is what I have to do to prove I’m right,” he said.
On November 22, his condition worsened. He had been able to answer police questions for three or four hours the previous day, but now it was hard for him to speak. His appearance was “like a seventy-year-old man, bald, gaunt, skin over bones,” said Goldfarb. As Marina prepared to leave the hospital for the evening with their son, Anatoly, Litvinenko spoke his first complete sentence of the entire day. “Oh, Marinochka, I love you so much,” he uttered, using the diminutive of her name.
At Litvinenko’s bedside, his father, Valter, crossed himself and said the Lord’s Prayer. “Father, I’ve converted. I’m a Muslim now,” Litvinenko said. During a visit with Akhmed Zakayev—his neighbor and friend, who was a Muslim—Litvinenko had embraced Islam.
That night, Litvinenko twice had to be resuscitated after his heart stopped. Hospital staff summoned Marina, then after a few hours sent her home.
The following evening, the phone rang again in the Litvinenko home. It was the hospital. “Come quickly,” the voice at the other end told Marina.
Though her husband was unconscious, Marina arrived in time to say good-bye.
At 9:21 p.m., Litvinenko was declared dead.
Outside University College Hospital, Alex Goldfarb read a statement that he said Litvinenko had dictated two days earlier. Addressed directly to Vladimir Putin, it said in part, “You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty, or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”
The stunning photograph by Natasja Weitsz and the ghastly manner of his death generated international sympathy for Litvinenko and outrage toward Russia. Many viewed his life story and the way it ended as epic tragedy, and in Hollywood there was a flurry of competition to put it all on the big screen. The contest was won by Johnny Depp, who left open the possibility that he himself would play the slain Russian defector.
What killed Litvinenko? When his doctors saw his hair falling out and his white blood cell count dropping, they had immediately suspected radiation poisoning. So they tested for what they thought to be the most likely culprits—gamma and beta radiation. Finding no evidence of either in his blood, they assumed that they were on the wrong trail. A day before Litvinenko died, however, someone at Britain’s Health Protection Agency had a hunch. Samples of Litvinenko’s urine were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, or AWE, an agency uniquely equipped to solve the mystery.
AWE was just what its name implied—it developed and kept watch over Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal. At AWE, scientists tested the urine samples for alpha-emitting elements, the rarer, relatively large, and slow-moving particles that, unlike gamma and beta radiation, cannot pass through objects but pack a wallop when they are taken into the body.
The tests came back positive for polonium-210, an alpha emitter.
Around six p.m. on November 23, the news was passed along to Litvinenko’s doctors. But it was too late. He died about three hours later.
The AWE discovery was important in more ways than one. If Litvinenko had not been in such good health when he was first stricken, he probably would have died much sooner. There would have been no urgency to continue testing for radiation poisoning, and the isotope that killed him probably would have gone undetected. Without that clue, investigators might not have found their way to the evidence that Litvinenko had been murdered. Litvinenko himself died without learning the truth.
His doctors could be excused for not knowing that their patient’s body had been ravaged by a few specks of a nuclear isotope so arcane that scientists were startled to hear of its use as a murder weapon. Once upon a time, polonium-210 was something of a household name, at least as far as known elements go. It was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, and named for her native Poland. Some called it the deadliest element, gram for gram, on the periodic table. A researcher working for Marie Curie died from exposure to polonium. So did Curie’s own daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, who, like her mother, was a winner of a Nobel Prize.
During World War II and through the 1960s, polonium-210 was used as a triggering device for nuclear weapons. Mixed with beryllium, it emits a neutron and starts the fission process. But by the early 1970s, the substance had fallen out of favor among atomic bomb makers because its relatively fast deterioration rate meant it had to be replaced every few months. More recently its use had been more benign—to eliminate static in smoke detectors and dust from film and lenses, for example. The commercial market’s demand for polonium-210 was so small that its entire global production was just one hundred grams a year—almost all manufactured in Russia and then exported to the United States.
Few were even aware of its existence. Polonium-210 was on no published list of potential poisons, and as far as I could tell had never been used as one. The silvery isotope was so exotic that, even five years after the imposition of heightened security measures in response to the 9/11 attacks, airports around the world were ill equipped to detect it. It was absent from the usual lists of weapons of mass destruction. Its properties were so peculiar that, unlike more familiar radioactive elements such as plutonium-239, it could be stored safely in, say, an ordinary cigarette pack or an aspirin bottle. Anyone with a mind to—and the right credentials—could slip it through almost any ostensibly secure environment.
It was unclear why the isotope had never been employed in any known assassination before Litvinenko’s. Yes, there were far simpler and cheaper methods of killing. But if an assassin favored the use of radioactive poison, polonium-210 was an ideal candidate. First was its novelty, meaning it was less likely to attract suspicion than its brother thallium, which assassins, including the Soviets, had used in its nonradioactive form numerous times over the decades. Second was its nature to wander: Once it invaded an organism, polonium-210 went in many different directions. This set it apart from isotopes that gravitated toward, say, kidneys or bone marrow, thus inflicting largely localized and treatable damage. And polonium-210 threw off its mass with astonishing speed—it dispensed half its atomic particles in just 138 days, a barrage superior to almost any other relatively stable isotope. By comparison, an alternative element such as americium took 432 years to accomplish the same task. A terrorist could release polonium-210 into a crowd in an enclosed space, through food or air, and cause many fatalities in a compressed period of time, with no one learning the cause—and with reduced odds of being caught.
The few scientists familiar with polonium-210 struggled for metaphors to describe its agonizing effects. Perhaps the most chilling likened the relatively large atomic particles it released to bullets, firing away mercilessly at Litvinenko’s soft tissue. Another evoked a football image, the particles knocking over cells like a rampaging fullback flattening every defender in his path. All said, polonium-210 was many times more hazardous than poisons usually associated with excruciating death, such as hydrogen cyanide.
In Litvinenko’s case, once the isotope had reached his stomach, it began to shoot off particles in a ferocious attack on his intestinal lining. Internal bleeding resulted, causing him to feel pain and nausea. By the end of the first day, up to half the poison was lodging in his spleen, kidneys, liver, lymph nodes, and bone marrow. It was delivering a massive punch to his red blood cells, whose natural response was to stop multiplying, and his bone marrow stopped replenishing his body with new blood cells. Ultimately, his organs were ripped apart and his immune system rendered inoperable.
In the early hours of the day after Litvinenko’s death, British police and AWE scientists appeared at the family home. They told Marina to pack her things—she had to get out, and probably wouldn’t be coming back. She wondered what the fuss was about, until they told her for the first time that a nuclear poison had been used to kill her husband.
“You have to understand that we’ve never encountered this before, that we don’t even know what it is, and we don’t know what the consequences will be,” said one of the emergency workers.
Then began an exhaustive effort to retrace Litvinenko’s movements in the last days and hours before he fell ill. Spectrography equipment revealed a clear trail of polonium in places he was known to have visited. Boris Berezovsky’s office was found to be contaminated and was sealed off. Traces of polonium were detected at the sushi restaurant where Litvinenko had dined with Lugovoi and Kovtun on October 16. It was shut down. Investigators also found polonium at the Pine Bar, where Litvinenko had sipped tea with the two Russians on November 1, only to fall ill a few hours later at home. Authorities closed the bar, and would later conclude that Litvinenko had been poisoned there—that the fatal dose of polonium had been slipped into his tea.
Britain’s Health Protection Agency, anxious to avert panic, issued daily briefings on what steps were being taken to secure the public’s safety. In the first weeks afterward, its telephone hotlines fielded some four thousand calls from people around the world concerned that they might have been exposed. The agency found traces of polonium-210 at more than two dozen sites in London. About a dozen people, including Litvinenko’s wife and son, had been exposed to levels high enough to pose long-term health risks.
The painstaking investigation found traces of polonium at a number of locations—other than the Pine Bar—where Lugovoi and Kovtun had been. In some cases, such as Berezovsky’s office and the sushi restaurant, the polonium traces were detected on the very seats that were known to have been occupied by one or both Russians. Investigators also established to their own satisfaction that the polonium had entered the United Kingdom from Russia. The clincher was evidence of the substance found on a British Airways plane that had flown from Moscow to London. It showed up on a seat that had been occupied by Lugovoi.
All signs seemed to point to either Lugovoi or Kovtun—or both—as having carried out Litvinenko’s assassination, or at least participated in it.
But judging by their outward behavior, the two had been as bewildered as anyone about Litvinenko’s illness. Lugovoi had telephoned his business partner in the hospital to offer his sympathy, and also called Marina.
“Marina, this is Andrei Lugovoi,” he said. “Everything that happened strikes me as very strange. I’ll do everything I can to figure it out.”
He and Kovtun voluntarily underwent questioning by officials at the British embassy in Moscow while Litvinenko was still alive. After the ex–KGB agent died, Kovtun telephoned British authorities and said he was willing to talk further if they wished. They didn’t take him up on the offer until some time later, when their investigators arrived in Moscow for interviews.
Lugovoi and Kovtun were examined by doctors in Moscow, who said that both indeed had been exposed to polonium. Lugovoi said someone must have planted the substance on his person to falsely implicate him in Litvinenko’s murder. He dismissed the entire affair as a British plot to discredit Putin. Kovtun confirmed his diagnosis but said an agreement with Russian investigators prevented him from saying anything more.
Some Russians said Boris Berezovsky in London had probably masterminded the killing, and the Kremlin soon added its support to this theory. Another suspect was Semyon Mogilevich, a notorious mafia figure whose supposed motivation was to win the favor of certain powerful Russians. But he was a less than credible candidate.
Others speculated—without any supporting evidence—that Litvinenko was attempting to smuggle nuclear material and accidentally poisoned himself. This scenario sounded to me like the old Soviet habit of blaming the victim. But it was widely accepted within the Russian intelligence community.
“It’s natural that you’re getting sick from what you are transferring,” said Josef Linder, a lecturer and self-described expert on political assassination who subscribed to the Litvinenko-as-smuggler theory. The forty-seven-year-old Muscovite had a shaved head, a tenth-degree black belt in jujitsu, and an apartment that resembled the laboratory of the gadget master Q, of James Bond fame.
Swords, rifles, medals, a thirteenth-century Russian wooden mace, and a fifteenth-century Malaysian knife with an ivory handle were all on display in his foyer. Linder was especially proud of his collection of knives, one of which did double duty as a small pistol. Another, he said, was “a flying knife that can be ejected five to six meters. You push the button and the knife flies.”
Linder was the author, co-author, or editor of twenty books on Russian espionage, which he had tracked back a thousand years. He beamed at the opportunity to relate some of his discoveries. In the ninth century, Russian princes were so fearful of treachery that they paid for multiple layers of intelligence gathering. Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-grandfather served as a sort of spy for Peter I, sleuthing around Ottoman Turkey. Then there was the agent for Czar Nicholas II who snatched a notebook from the inside pocket of a jacket worn by Kaiser Wilhelm II as the two lunched together. By the time the meal ended, the agent had photographed the pages of the notebook and returned it to the jacket pocket without being noticed. The story sounded a bit unbelievable, but that did not bother Linder. He was a romantic who celebrated what he viewed as the most patriotic of Russian professions—spying and its associated black arts.
Linder excluded Alexander Litvinenko from his pantheon. The look on his face conveyed contempt for the very notion of Litvinenko as intelligence agent. “He joined the FSB from the Interior Ministry. He is not an intelligence officer,” Linder said. He added that Litvinenko “tried to make it as though he was a personal enemy of Putin’s. But nobody was interested in him here.”
Mikhail Golovatov, the former commander of the KGB’s elite Alpha troops, was similarly dismissive. Now the director of one of Moscow’s largest security companies, Golovatov was an influential man. When he spoke, the KGB cadre heard the voice of a true comrade who had served in Afghanistan, Vilnius, Tbilisi, Baku, Kishinau, and Dushanbe—all places where the Kremlin sought to put down localized rebellions during the last years of Soviet rule. After years of ostracism during the Yeltsin era, men like Golovatov were back among the cream of Moscow society.
So what did he think of Litvinenko?
“Negative. The most negative.”
Why?
Litvinenko was on Boris Berezovsky’s payroll, Golovatov noted. “How can you work for the state, then join the ranks of someone working against the state? If I gave an oath to protect the state, how can I betray it? If I don’t agree with state politics, I would retire and not fight against the state.”
Senior Kremlin officials, while welcoming the opportunity to cast the exiled Berezovsky in a bad light, cautioned that no one could say with certainty who killed Litvinenko. Lots of people in lots of countries could be responsible, they said, and it was reckless to point the finger at Russia, as many abroad were doing.
At a news conference in Helsinki a day after Litvinenko’s death, Putin went on the offensive. He falsely asserted that authorities in Britain “offer no indication that this was a violent death.” He questioned whether Litvinenko in fact dictated the memo that accused him of murder. “If such a note really did appear before Mr. Litvinenko’s death, then this raises the issue of why it was not made public during his life,” Putin said.
Finally, the Russian president chalked up all the fuss to politics. “The people that have done this are not God and Mr. Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus,” he said. “And it is very much a pity that even such tragic events like a person’s death can be used for political provocations.”
I wondered why Litvinenko’s assassins didn’t simply shoot him or run him over. Novelist Martin Cruz Smith, for instance, thought a more “perfect” criminal would have simply pushed him off a subway platform.
If the purpose was to warn others who might have been tempted to follow in Litvinenko’s defiant footsteps, then any of these methods would have sufficed. But simply rendering him dead probably was the least challenging part of the mission. The question of how to carry out the killing in the most unobtrusive manner seems to have been uppermost in the minds of the assassins. Shoving the former KGB agent in front of a moving car or planting a knife in his back could cause an ugly scene in public and make it difficult for the assassins to escape unseen. Worse yet, if they were captured, the identity of whoever organized the murder might become known.
Hence the decision to use poison. Thallium must have been immediately rejected because any half-aware doctor would respond by immediately treating Litvinenko with Prussian blue, and the plot would likely fail. Biological poisons and other radioactive substances probably were rejected because of the risks entailed in handling and administering them.
Perhaps an old-timer among the conspirators would have recalled the existence of polonium-210. Its advantages would be immediately apparent. Litvinenko’s killers could carry a tiny amount of the substance to London wrapped in an ordinary piece of paper and pass undetected through airport security. Their personal health would not be at risk unless some of it got into their mouths or lungs. Once taken into Litvinenko’s body via food or drink, the polonium would likely defy discovery. And even if its presence were detected after a day or so, their victim would be beyond saving because of the horrible damage to his organs. Meanwhile, the assassins would be long gone from the scene of the crime. Polonium-210 had an additional appeal: If the killers were thirsting for revenge after his harsh attacks on Putin and the Russian security agencies, they could take pleasure in knowing that Litvinenko would suffer maximum pain while dying. And that it would all occur on the anniversary of his defection to Britain might have added satisfying symbolism to the affair.
I was curious to know what other Russian exiles in London were thinking about the means and methods of Litvinenko’s assassins. Boris Volodarsky, a former military intelligence officer, especially interested me. He claimed to have documented some twenty murders by poisoning that the Russian government had carried out since the 1920s—all of them employing substances that had left no trace.
It was easy to be put off by Volodarsky’s manner. He had adopted the persona of a high-born Briton, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, speaking with a cultivated English accent, and wearing a beautifully tailored suit with purple tie and matching silk handkerchief. The extent of his service in Russian intelligence was somewhat murky; as best I could tell, he was operating in the West when the Soviet Union collapsed, and simply never went back to Russia. He portrayed himself as a defector and was a critic of the Russian government, but there was no sign that Kremlin leaders ranked him high among exiles who irritated them. Still, I respected his knowledge of the ways of Russian intelligence.
He suggested we meet in the Cigar Room of the Connaught Hotel near Berkeley Square, an upper-crust Mayfair establishment. He flashed a pleasant, smallish smile, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes curving upward, and exhaled the smoke of a small cigar. When I invited Volodarsky to join me in the dining room for lunch, he brought me up short: “Let’s get one thing straight. You have to pay. This is a consultation and it’s not free. I’ll give you ten minutes’ free consultation, then you pay.”
It was not possible, ethically speaking, for me to pay for the interview, although I felt a twinge of sympathy. The man did have to earn a living, and I had no idea how I would support myself if I were a former spy. Still, all I could do was buy lunch. He asked me to explain the difference between paying his accustomed fee and forking over £150 for a meal. I had no answer.
He declined lunch, but lingered for a while to talk about his business ventures. He had participated in British television programs about the Litvinenko case, and was now contributing to the making of two films. One was based on a 2005 article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal under the headline “The KGB Poison Factory,” recounting nearly nine decades of attacks on Kremlin enemies, including Nikolai Khokhlov and Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko. (After Litvinenko’s death, he updated the title to read “The KGB Poison Factory, Lenin to Litvinenko.”) “We are talking to several important studios,” Volodarsky said.
He described thirty-five minutes he spent in an Italian prison speaking with Mario Scaramella, who famously shared sushi with Litvinenko the day he was poisoned and was first thought—mistakenly—to be a suspect. No one else had gotten to Scaramella yet, Volodarsky boasted; he had left the prison with video footage and documents that might earn him some cash from curious U.K. journalists.
His theory about the Litvinenko case ran something like this: Several small teams in several countries would have come together on November 1, 2006, to carry out the mission and then disappear. He agreed with those who doubted that Lugovoi was a key player. The wealthy Russian may have known there was to be a poisoning, but didn’t actually do it himself, Volodarsky believed. The person who actually dropped the poison into Litvinenko’s tea probably has yet to be identified, at least not publicly, he said. He didn’t think that person would have accompanied Lugovoi or Kovtun to London because “that wouldn’t be professional.” On balance, he judged the Litvinenko killing to be the most momentous such exploit in three decades, “a model assassination” that seemed perfectly executed.
He recited this narrative with studied bravado, though he complained that, unlike superspy Oleg Gordievsky, he was vulnerable to a revenge attack. “I don’t have security, and neither did Litvinenko,” Volodarsky said. “I’m not easy to find, although if they want they can find me.”
Gordievsky had a different view of the need for security. The former KGB spymaster had been a high-value defector when he sought asylum in the United Kingdom two decades ago. His home outside London had been well protected before Litvinenko’s killing, and the security was stepped up afterward.
Gordievsky was most interested in the role of Andrei Lugovoi, Litvinenko’s companion at the Pine Bar. He had two opposing theories: that Lugovoi was the team leader in “a typical KGB operation,” or had been used as bait to befriend Litvinenko and finally lure him to the bar, where the actual assassins could do their work. In support of the latter scenario, Gordievsky cited Lugovoi’s “slow approach, the cultivation of Litvinenko for ten months, inducing him, promising him deals.” Once Lugovoi had cemented his relationship with Litvinenko, the trap was sprung, he surmised.
Nick Priest was not a Russian exile, but he had some intriguing ideas as to how the poisoning might have taken place. The affable Priest, one of the world’s few polonium experts, was a little-known professor of environmental toxicology at London’s Middlesex University. When the role of polonium-210 in Litvinenko’s death became known, he was deluged with phone calls from journalists, other scientists, and security experts from around the world. Through it all, he remained a patient gentleman.
I asked the bespectacled Priest to conjure up a probable chronology, starting with the poison being transported into the United Kingdom.
Unlike others, Priest thought airport security might have been a problem. Even though polonium-210 is an alpha emitter, it throws out a tiny bit of gamma radiation, which could have been detected during airport screening, he said. Priest speculated that before it was taken to London the polonium would have been divided between four people, to lessen the risk of detection. “It’s quite possible each guy came with one-fourth of the total” dose intended for Litvinenko, he said. The deadly substance probably would have been carried in vials, perhaps mixed with an acid solution to keep it from sticking to the sides or bottoms of the vials, but not so acidic as to be detectable by taste. “Then they recombined it in a hotel room,” Priest said. That’s when the trouble would have begun—the first release of minute traces of polonium that eventually would be found throughout London. “The moment the seal [on the vials] was broken, you started the contamination,” he said.
“It’s entirely possible,” Priest continued, “that they didn’t know what they were handling or [else] they would have taken precautions. It’s possible they were only told it was poison. Otherwise they might have been frightened. Also, if you had known the properties of polonium, you would have changed your clothes [after lacing the tea], then thrown them away. You’d have used gloves. You’d have to be an idiot to leave a contamination trail behind.”
That didn’t necessarily explain why Lugovoi left polonium on the seat of the airliner on which he arrived in London from Moscow on October 31; perhaps he was also involved in the original mixing or pouring of the polonium solution in Moscow. Still, Priest’s explanation made sense. Lugovoi and Kovtun seem not to have known that they were leaving a radioactive trail. Priest’s conclusion roughly tracked with Oleg Gordievsky’s second scenario—that Lugovoi had been used as bait by other, unseen hands who actually dropped the polonium-210 into Litvinenko’s tea.
It seems safe to say that the assassination was not a seat-of-the-pants, rogue operation. After all, polonium-210 was not easy to procure, and it was pricey—one needed some $2 million to $3 million in cash, the commercial cost of the probable dose that experts say killed Litvinenko.
Organized crime experts considered whether Litvinenko was killed by professional Russian criminals, hired by someone whom Litvinenko had angered. But they rapidly dismissed this possibility because even the most hardened thugs would not risk Putin’s wrath by murdering such a high-level target on their own. They would have participated in such a killing only if they understood that it was acceptable to the senior ranks of Russian government.
Many thought the ruthless, calculated, and convoluted method of Litvinenko’s assassination clearly implicated Russia’s spy agencies.
“That’s Russian,” said a pin-striped British private eye who formerly served as a Soviet specialist for MI6, the country’s overseas espionage agency. During his spying days, he and his colleagues would marvel at the elegance of Soviet missions, finding that “an overcomplicated intelligence operation is their signature. You either admire its complexity, or decide it’s all out of proportion to what you want.”
Would the Kremlin dare to carry out, or bless, such an audacious scheme—murder by nuclear isotope, in a major Western capital, against a British citizen? An indignant Kremlin said no. Yet the notion of Russian state responsibility could not be easily put to rest. There was the law that Putin had approved just four months before Litvinenko’s death, granting the president authority to sanction the assassination of an enemy outside the nation’s borders. And there was the matter of Russia’s unrivaled access to polonium-210. Ninety-seven percent of the world’s commercial supply came from a single state-controlled nuclear reactor 450 miles southeast of Moscow, in a shipbuilding town called Avangard. The reactor complex was well secured, but it could not be ruled out as the source of the radiation that killed Litvinenko.
Britain sent investigators to Moscow and asked to interview Lugovoi, Kovtun, and other Russians. In response, the Kremlin said it was conducting its own investigation and asked to question one hundred people in London, including exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky and other Russian dissidents. It was a transparent effort to turn the tables on Britain. Critics said Putin seemed to regard the murder as a public relations problem rather than a matter of criminal justice, and they appeared to be right. If, as Moscow suggested, London exiles were truly culpable, why did Russia not aggressively cooperate with Scotland Yard? It was an opportunity to prove once and for all that the West was providing safe haven to unsavory characters who did not deserve anyone’s protection. But Putin’s statements and actions made it appear he had little real interest in absolving Russia of outside suspicion.
Britain was in a predicament. The evidence plainly implicated both Lugovoi and Kovtun. But would the British request the pair’s extradition from Russia, triggering a judicial process that could lead to courtroom accusations against senior Kremlin officials? Putin himself, the sovereign president of a much-valued country, might become entangled in the drama. Were the British prepared for this to balloon into an international incident? I had my doubts. The British conducted much business with Russia—BP, the United Kingdom’s biggest company, was heavily invested there—and had a less-than-vigorous history of taking diplomatic risks. It was more of a go-along, get-along country.
Yet I was proved wrong. Six months after Litvinenko’s death, the United Kingdom said it would charge Lugovoi with murder, and it officially requested his extradition. Putin refused, saying that the Russian constitution prevented sending citizens abroad for trial. He said that the Britons should present their evidence to Moscow prosecutors and allow the Russian judicial system to decide the case. Britain regarded his offer as an effort to thwart justice, which seemed a correct assumption to me.
The case went nowhere. Rather, it turned into a diplomatic fracas: Britain expelled four Russian diplomats, and Moscow responded by ordering the closure of two British cultural offices in Russia, and expelling British diplomats.
Meanwhile, Lugovoi was treated as a Russian hero. In December 2007, he won election to the Russian parliament, and he was often cheered as he traveled around the country.
The foreigner who gained the closest access to Lugovoi was Mark Franchetti, the British journalist who seemed always to end up at the center of the news. After a series of interviews with Lugovoi, Franchetti aligned himself with Oleg Gordievsky and Nick Priest’s relatively benign view of the accused multi-millionaire’s culpability.
“Lugovoi has often asked me if I think he killed Litvinenko,” Franchetti wrote. “I confronted him with the theory, which I support, that he did murder but is not a cold-blooded killer. I told him I think he was recruited by Russia’s secret service but was tricked and used without his full knowledge. He did not flinch. He again voiced his innocence, and agreed he was framed, but by MI5,” meaning the domestic British intelligence service.
Franchetti wrote: “‘C’mon, Andrei, we both know that if you did take part in Litvinenko’s murder, you are hardly going to tell me, are you?’ I often said to him. Every time he smiled a wide, spontaneous grin. For me, that has always been revealing.”
As Franchetti suggested, Lugovoi seemed genuinely not to believe he had put polonium-210 into that tea. Was he delusionary? Did he spike the tea thinking it was another substance? Did he put nothing into the tea himself, but actively or unknowingly provide cover for the person who did lace it? Was the triggerman actually Kovtun?
Lugovoi now embraced the Litvinenko-as-nuclear-terrorist theory, accusing the defector of contaminating himself, Lugovoi, and Kovtun by accidentally spilling polonium-210 he intended to sell on the black market. I could not accept that Lugovoi actually believed that; now a political celebrity, he was playing to his constituents. Who knew how far he could rise by casting himself as the brave survivor of a traitor’s treachery? The sky seemed the limit.
Franchetti believed that Russia would never hand over Lugovoi to the British, and that felt right. Short of someone making a deathbed confession, there seemed to be almost no chance that the world would ever know for sure who was responsible for Litvinenko’s murder.
Litvinenko had put himself in peril by turning his back on the Russian intelligence services and defecting from his native land. He had exhibited undeniable bravery before and after his exile by speaking his mind, sometimes recklessly so. He had died an agonizing death after twenty-three days of atomic war within his body. But I had difficulty viewing him as heroic or especially admirable, as a number of articles and documentaries rushed to describe him after his death. Litvinenko pursued his goals—first the reform of the FSB spy agency, then the downfall of Vladimir Putin—with much energy, but did not exhibit towering morality or intellect. In the end, he was a determined but ordinary man consumed by events far larger than him.
One thing was certain, though. Those who had scoffed at Litvinenko’s paranoia had been proven wrong—the devilish forces he said he was battling turned out to be all too real.