A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

10 Gelsemium Elegans ^{St George’s Hill, Weybridge, Surrey, 10 November 2012}

The names sound quintessentially English – Silverwood, Horsley, Bassett Lodge, Hawthorn Mill. Each refers to a mansion on the private St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge. The houses here are large – think three-storey mock-Tudor mansions with dormer windows, sweeping driveways and triple garages. Their owners are rich people. Naturally enough, they value their privacy. Signs suggest that outsiders and those who are not members of the local golf club can piss off. Guardhouses limit access at the entrances. Branded estate vehicles buzz along the woody drives.

St George’s is Britain’s bucolic answer to Beverly Hills. Celebrities like this green corner of Surrey, immediately south-west of London. John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Elton John and Tom Jones have all lived here. Others keep a low profile for different reasons. There are hedge fund managers, City bankers, a Nigerian computer tycoon. Their personal accounts and investments – all legal and declared, of course – amount to millions. Contractors are used to installing bulletproof glass and panic rooms for some of the more particular residents.

Granville Road is a typical St George’s address. At its entrance is a white barred gate. A notice in front of a large rhododendron says: ‘Restricted access’. Fifteen-foot-high hedges of laurel and copper beech shield the houses and their enormous gardens from view. CCTV cameras are everywhere. As one police officer told the Observer newspaper: ‘Even the security has security.’ If you want to disappear this is a good spot, a wooded refugium of silver birch and pine.

On 10 November 2012, one St George’s resident was returning from an early-evening jog. It was 5.15 p.m. The runner, dressed in a tracksuit, turned into Granville Road. Ahead of him was his home in exile, the Coach House, which he shared with his wife Tatiana and their two children. The property was at the end of a turning circle. The house was imposing – six bedrooms, £12,500 a month rent, a Porsche parked outside. In the garden was a kids’ trampoline.

Fifty metres from his front door, the jogger collapsed. He didn’t get up. He lay face down on the ground.

Police arriving at the scene jotted down a few details. The man’s name was Alexander Perepilichnyy. He was a Russian citizen and forty-four years old. He had previously been in excellent health. Like Litvinenko, Perepilichnyy had fled to the UK from Moscow after a dispute with some powerful people there. Since 2010, he had been living anonymously and quietly with his family in St George’s, avoiding trouble. Latterly, he’d been receiving some worrying messages from Russia.

Perepilichnyy lay motionless under a white sheet. A single lamp-post illuminated the darkness. Liam Walsh, a local chef, said that when he arrived at the scene the Russian wasn’t breathing. ‘We had to get him on his back and start doing CPR. He was probably dead for a while,’ Walsh told Reuters. There was zero paramedics could do. No obvious cause of death. No obvious sign of foul play either. Unexplained, then.

It would take more than two years before the likely murder weapon was discovered, and then not by men in uniform. The weapon was a rare and deadly toxin. It had been on a journey as improbable as that taken by the polonium from a closed nuclear city in the Urals to the streets of Mayfair. Whoever was responsible had shown a high degree of cunning. Was this the FSB? The toxin came from a plant. A plant that grows on the hillsides of China.

If he’d been born a couple of decades earlier, Perepilichnyy might have been a professor. Maybe even a member of the Soviet Union’s prestigious academy of sciences. He was a talented physicist and maths whizz. Born in Western Ukraine, he moved to Moscow in the 1980s to study at the Physical and Technological University in the faculty of molecular and biological physics. In his student days Perepilichnyy was a vertical, skinny figure, with gangling legs, jet-black hair and pale skin. He preferred black clothes. His expression was somewhat absent, as if he was thinking about something. He was an introvert, serious and deadpan, even when making a joke. Friends called him Stanek.

According to one friend, Yuri Panchul, Perepilichnyy dreamed of moving to the US. In 1989, he wanted to apply to an American university to do a post-grad in biochemistry or biophysics. Leaving the USSR was no longer a problem but he lacked cash. So Perepilichnyy began trading in computers. Gorbachev had allowed private ventures for the first time. Perepilichnyy began selling computers to government organisations, as well as fax machines, which the Soviet Union had effectively prohibited.

In seven months, between mid-autumn 1989 and spring 1990, Perepilichnyy earned a couple of thousand dollars, and then bigger sums. ‘His perspective on life changed. Originally he was a quiet student who had good grades. He discovered this intense drive for earning money,’ Panchul said. Perepilichnyy bought himself a black Mercedes. He parked it several blocks from his faculty so as not to embarrass his badly off lecturers. He was now an intermediary in the new private economy.

Perepilichnyy’s teachers thought him a capable student and invited him to do a PhD. He declined and in 1991 began trading on the country’s first commodity exchanges. ‘He became a private investor,’ Panchul said. ‘He started to move in circles frequented by all sorts of sharks.’ Many of his new contacts were busy acquiring fortunes through dodgy methods. Perepilichnyy, however, worked openly. ‘He didn’t have a criminal mentality,’ Panchul added. ‘He had some feeling of decency, some rules. He just happened to be in a place where these new rules were not mature.’

By the mid-nineties, Perepilichnyy was a successful investment fund manger. The promising student who played cards and read sci-fi novels now looked after the money of some extremely well-connected Muscovites, who believed him to be a financial genius. They included Olga Stepanova, a top Moscow tax official, and her husband Vladlen. Panchul last spoke to Perepilichnyy in the early noughties. He was doing well and had acquired a flat in London. He was still dealing with ‘strange people’ and ‘taking risks’ but hadn’t lost his ‘moral standards’, Panchul said.

In 2007, Stepanova, and others in a circle featuring interior ministry officials, suddenly acquired very large sums of money. Perepilichnyy sprinkled some of it through accounts he managed on their behalf in Cyprus and Switzerland.

From where had this windfall come?

In 2005, Bill Browder, a US-born financier, was unexpectedly deported from Russia. Browder was the CEO of Hermitage Capital, an asset management company and a major investor in Russia. Browder had been a fan of Putin’s in the early years, seeing him as an ally in the fight against oligarchic malfeasance. Like many others, Browder found the new president inscrutable. He had failed to appreciate that Putin wasn’t interested in cleaning up corruption. Rather his aim was to redistribute the state’s resources among his KGB friends.

The Kremlin-approved attack on Browder left Hermitage vulnerable. In 2007, a group of officials, led by a convicted fraudster, Dmitry Klyuyev, seized three Hermitage firms. They claimed the firms had lost $1 billion and were therefore entitled to a tax refund from the state. On Christmas Eve, a $230 million transfer was secretly approved in a matter of hours – by Perepilichnyy’s client Olga Stepanova, the head of Moscow tax office No. 28. The stolen funds were then laundered though different countries using shell companies.

The criminals made only one mistake: they underestimated Browder. Browder is driven, obsessional and unrelenting. I got to know him after my forced departure from Russia. His personal story – told in a page-turning memoir, Red Notice – is interesting, too. The grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the US Communist Party in the 1930s, Browder had rebelled against his brainy left-wing family and become a capitalist, venturing into Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Stuck in London, he hired a team to investigate back in Russia. It included an idealistic young anti-corruption lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky. In 2008, Magnitsky found out where the stolen money had gone. He filed a complaint to Russian prosecutors. The same officials who had carried out the fraud, including an investigator at the interior ministry, Major Pavel Karpov, had Magnitsky arrested. He was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment.

Magnitsky suffered from pancreatitis and gallstones, and spent months in pain. The officials wouldn’t allow his family to visit. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. Threats were sent to Hermitage in London; one of Browder’s colleagues received a text, quoting from The Godfather Part II, which said: ‘History has taught us that anybody can be killed.’

In Moscow, Magnitsky’s condition grew critical. In November 2009, guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to death. He was thirty-seven, married, the father of two small boys, and a representative of Russia’s decent middle class. He had believed that the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgement. At least three other people who testified against the fraud in Russia died in unclear circumstances.

Browder began a global campaign to bring Magnitsky’s killers to justice. Since they occupied mid-ranking positions in the interior ministry and FSB there was no prospect of this happening inside Russia’s own legal system.

Perepilichnyy, meanwhile, was facing big problems of his own. His job, it appears, had been to offer semilegal financial services to a range of clients, including corrupt ones.

During the 2008–9 financial crash he lost much of his clients’ funds. They accused him of robbing them and demanded he repay their market losses. One of them was said to be Dmitry Kovtun, Litvinenko’s killler. Kovtun and Perepilichnyy may have had business together. More probably, though, Perepilchnyy’s enemies invoked Kovtun’s name in order to frighten him.

Perepilichnyy fled Russia and moved with his family to Surrey. In July 2010, he sent an anonymous email to Hermitage under a false Spanish name, Alejandro Sanches.

The email began:

Perepilichnyy signed off as ‘Sergei’. He said he couldn’t give his real name ‘as my relatives live in Russia’.

His information was astonishing – details of an alleged money-laundering ring involving the Russian mafia and state. It included the identities of those who had pulled off the fraud, print-outs from the Stepanovs’ secret bank account with Credit Suisse, and an explanation as to where the money had gone – on Range Rovers, Moscow real estate and tacky properties in Dubai.

One mansion bought by the Stepanovs was on Palm Jumeirah, the world’s largest man-made island, reclaimed from Dubai’s coast. The island forms the shape of a palm tree as viewed from the air: some residents lived on its ‘trunk’, others on ‘fronds’. The Stepanovs’ villa, number 48, was on Frond F – out of the way by Palm standards, and at the end of a sun-bleached and desolate cul de sac. There are few shops and amenities here. Barriers, cones and a Filipino security guard keep out the uninvited.

At first, Hermitage was suspicious of this unknown Russian. Jamison Firestone, a US lawyer and ally of Browder’s who had hired Magnitsky and knew him well, sent emails back. There was no immediate answer. In August, however, ‘Alejandro’ gave further details. And offered to meet in London.

The rendezvous took place in the upscale surroundings of the Westbury in Mayfair. The five-star hotel is close to Grosvenor Street and the scene of Litvinenko’s twin poisonings. Firestone was waiting in the Polo Bar. Security guards had taken up positions undercover; they had already waved a Geiger counter up and down. Perepilichnyy sauntered in – now a chunky, somewhat dowdy figure, wearing a tracksuit and no tie. He was distinctly underdressed for his posh surroundings and not quite the ‘minigarch’, or minor oligarch, they’d expected.

According to Jamison, Perepilichnyy began by saying in Russian: ‘It’s really terrible what happened to your colleague. I admire your work.’

Gradually it became clear that Perepilchnyy was genuine, and someone from the inside. Someone with a grudge. Stepanov had used his wife’s tax connections to destroy Perepilichnyy’s business empire – and now Perepilichnyy was retaliating. ‘This was a move in a war to get the heat off, to get them [the Stepanovs] to back down,’ Jamison said. ‘It was a business dispute between partners. Perepilichnyy wanted to rip the legs from under them.’

There were further meetings in the same bar in London, over green tea and biscuits. According to Ivan Cherkasov, a Russian lawyer working for Browder, who fled Russia, Perepilichnyy was uninterested in his surroundings. ‘He was someone who existed in a world of maths and logic,’ he said.

Perepilichnyy turned over more documents. They included statements showing payments of several million euros to Stepanov’s private Credit Suisse bank account. The money came from a Cyprus-based company, Arivust Holdings, also belonging to Stepanov. One source, who met Perepilichnyy several times, said: ‘He was a nice chap. He was bright. He seemed rational.’

Hermitage gave this material to the Swiss attorney general. Some sources say Perepilichnyy ignored advice from his brother-in-law in Moscow to drop his complaint. Swiss prosecutors then froze Stepanov’s account, containing €8 million. Other ‘investors’ using the same dubious schemes also saw their funds seized.

Soon afterwards, the threats from Moscow began. In 2011–12 Perepilichnyy told his Hermitage contacts that his situation was looking dangerous. ‘He tried to be cautious. He was a bit fatalistic,’ the source – who doesn’t want to be named – said. Perepilichnyy’s name turned up on a hit list recovered from a group of Chechen assassins arrested in France. The gang had a pretty accurate dossier on Perepilichnyy’s whereabouts in the UK, though some details were out of date.

More warnings followed. Perepilichnyy met in Geneva with someone who presented himself as an informal representative of Russia’s interior ministry. The representative passed on a message: that Perepilichnyy was to make a public statement saying that the wire transfers to Stepanov’s offshore accounts were completely legitimate. Failure to do so would result in the authorities in Moscow opening a money-laundering case against him.

In May 2012, Perepilichnyy held talks with Stepanov’s lawyer, Andrei Pavlov. Pavlov was on his way back to Russia; the venue was a café on the upper floor of London Heathrow Airport terminal five. It’s unclear what they discussed – though Pavlov claims that Perepilichnyy said he wanted a reconciliation with the Stepanovs and other unhappy former customers in Russia.

As for Stepanov himself, he denies wrongdoing. In a public letter in 2011, he said that he and Olga were divorced. He claims that the value of his designer mansion near Rublyovka – Moscow’s most exclusive district – has been overstated. Of Perepilichnyy, he said: ‘This man owes me a lot of money. As a matter of fact not only to me but to scores of other creditors. He cheated me by pocketing my money and assets.’

On 5 November 2012, Perepilichnyy held his last meeting with the team from Hermitage. ‘He was casually dressed. The photos of him are accurate, but the final time I saw him he was looking a bit skinnier,’ the source said. Like Litvinenko in Spain, Perepilichnyy had agreed to testify in a forthcoming trial in Switzerland into the $230 million fraud, where he would be the star prosecution witness.

Next, Perepilichnyy took the Eurostar to Paris. He spent three or four days there. Some sources suggest Ukrainian women were involved. Perepilichnyy appears to have worried about his security. He booked into three different hotels: the five-star George V, the Bristol, and a three-star guesthouse. He spent €1,200 in a Prada shop.

He returned by train to London. Back at home, his wife cooked him some sorrel soup. He told her he was feeling somewhat groggy. He decided to run this feeling off. And then he collapsed.

Detectives in Surrey were slow to grasp Perepilichnyy’s story – his links with shadowy figures in Moscow, his name on a Russian death-list, the emissaries and warnings. Instead, they treated his death as routine. There was, after all, no proof that this was murder. Nor were there any obvious suspects. Their assumption, it appears, was that Perepilichnyy’s death was due to cardiac arrest.

For those who knew FSB methods, however, the case looked deeply suspicious.

Before Litvinenko’s death, it might have seemed improbable verging on incredible that Russian assassins might murder someone on the streets of London. After Litvinenko, these doubts disappeared. Such murders had happened and were happening. The question for police was: was this one of them?

To Browder, the Perepilichnyy case looked like Litvinenko II. A week after his death, Hermitage’s lawyers wrote to the police detailing their concerns and asking for extensive toxicology tests to be carried out. The police didn’t reply. Another week passed. In frustration, Browder leaked the story to the Independent, owned by Alexander Lebedev, the Russian businessman and former KGB intelligence officer who had worked in the 1980s at the Soviet embassy in London.

There were many possible lines of inquiry. Hermitage’s lawyers urged the police to cooperate with the French authorities, and to obtain video surveillance in Paris and from Weybridge. Other avenues to examine included the movements of members of the Klyuyev group (the criminal gang headed by fraudster Dmitry Klyuyev), some of whom had travelled to the UK. There was Perepilichnyy’s possible dispute with Kovtun. And the fact that Eastern European contract killers were still entering the UK with ease.

Seven months earlier, a Moldovan assassin had ambushed another Russian in Canary Wharf in east London. The assassin, Vitalie Proca, had fired six shots into German Gorbuntsov, a 44-year-old Russian banker, as he returned home to his flat in Byng Street. Proca was caught on CCTV, gun raised. Gorbuntsov had fled to Moldova and then the UK after falling out – like Perepilichnyy – with wealthy clients in Moscow. They allegedly included senior figures in Russian Railways and the Solntsevo mafia gang. Gorbuntsov was badly wounded but survived.

The Surrey police investigation into Perepilichnyy’s death continued for some months. Toxicology tests conducted after twenty-two days drew a blank. Two post-mortems failed to uncover a cause of death. In 2013, detectives announced that there was no evidence of ‘third-party involvement’. The case – tragic, but apparently not homicide – was passed on to Surrey’s coroner. Browder was furious. ‘I’m certain he was murdered. The police kicked it into the long grass. This is a travesty of justice,’ he told me.

It wasn’t until spring 2015 that Browder’s suspicions were confirmed, and in quite spectacular fashion. Shortly before his death, Perepilichnyy insured his life for £3.5 million. He took out a flurry of policies. One, with Legal & General, worth £2 million, became active just eight days before he died. The insurer was reluctant to pay out. It asked a plant expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, south-west London, Professor Monique Simmonds, to conduct her own tests.

Simmonds was a figure who might have sprung from the pages of Agatha Christie – a distinguished botanist in late middle age, thin, dressed in a severe black trouser suit and with short cropped hair. She had previously been involved in some extraordinary cases. In 2001, the limbless and headless body of a boy had been found floating in the river Thames. Forensic tests at Kew revealed traces of the toxic calabar bean in the lower intestine. The plant trail led to West Africa, where witch doctors use the bean to paralyse their victims. The police concluded the boy – aged five or six – had been ritually murdered.

Simmonds’ latest findings were similarly sensational. They were revealed at a pre-inquest hearing in Woking. She had tested samples taken from the dead man against a range of deadly plants. Perepilichnyy had been poisoned. He was the victim of a twining climber found in scrubby mountain forests.

The poison came from one of five possible varieties of the lethal gelsemium plant. The plant contains gelsemine, a compound similar to strychnine. The plant is a weapon of choice among Chinese and Russian assassins. Simmonds discovered traces of an ion linked to gelsemium in Perepilichnyy’s stomach. The most toxic variety is Gelsemium elegans. It grows only in Asia. The poison’s last known victim was Long Liyuan, a Chinese billionaire who died in 2011 after eating cat meat stew believed to have been laced with Gelsemium elegans.

This was a dramatic development. The focus now was on Perepilichnyy’s last meal. What was it and who was his dining companion? There were clear parallels with Litvinenko – here, once again, was an apparent reprisal killing of someone with potent enemies in Moscow.

But there were differences, too. Perepilichnyy’s widow Tatiana insisted her husband wasn’t murdered. There was no direct evidence, she said. She accused Hermitage of peddling ‘lazy stereotypes’. Not every Russian exile who dropped dead was the victim of foul play, she added.

The case went on, disputed and unresolved, into 2016. Surrey Police continued to insist Perepilichnyy’s death was wholly ordinary. At the same time, however, it refused to release forty-two documents, on the grounds of national security. Three years on, this was a surprising move. It raised another possibility. Before his murder, had Perepilichnyy talked to Britain’s spy agencies?

In March 2009, the US secretary of state and future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with a small green box tied with a ribbon. The venue was Geneva; the mood was warm; there were smiles and handshakes from the American and Russian delegations.

Lavrov opened the box. Inside it was a red button on a yellow background, and the word peregruzka. As Lavrov noted with some glee, the word ‘peregruzka’ actually means ‘over-charged’. The Obama administration had meant to write perezagruzka – the Russian noun for ‘reset’.

The blooper was emblematic of how US know-how on Russia had degraded in the post-Cold War era, as Washington became distracted with international wars (Afghanistan, Iraq); grappled with the hydra-headed threat after 9/11 of radical Islamist terrorism; and assumed that Russia, its defeated Cold War adversary, was moving slowly towards liberal democracy. It wasn’t. The US State Department still had Russian area specialists, of course. But it appeared that none of them could spell.

During the presidencies of George W. Bush, relations with Moscow sank. Putin supported the US-led war in Afghanistan but opposed Iraq. The Russian president’s list of grievances against Washington grew. Briefly summarised, they included Nato expansion, the US’s putative missile defence programme in Europe, and the pro-western and pro-reform revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, which Putin claimed were an American-inspired plot.

Relations reached a nadir in August 2008, when Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president and a US ally, tried to seize back the rebel province of South Ossetia using military force. Russia responded with a full-scale invasion. It was a brutal lesson in regional geo-politics. And a practical articulation of the Kremlin’s new big power doctrine: that it had ‘privileged interests’ in its post-Soviet back and front yards.

The Obama administration’s decision to ‘reset’ relations with Russia was pragmatic. The goal was not to turn Russia into a progressive law-based state – an unlikely prospect that could only be achieved by Russians themselves – but to secure Moscow’s co-operation on key international challenges. These were Obama’s first-term priorities. They included Iran’s nuclear programme; Afghanistan; the common threat from Al Qaida; and – as the Arab Spring took hold – the disastrous war in Syria.

The White House’s calculus was strategic, though there was an element of wishful thinking too. Between 2008 and 2012, Dmitry Medvedev – an ex-lawyer who grew up in the 1970s and was a fan of the British rock group Deep Purple – was Russia’s titular president. Leaked US diplomatic cables show that the US was keen to treat the liberal-seeming Medvevev as a genuine interlocutor. In reality, it was the hawkish Putin who pulled the strings.

When Browder turned up in Washington it was unsurprising that the state department responded coolly to his plan to punish Magnitsky’s killers. Browder was seeking to use an obscure law passed by President Bush in 2004 that allows the US to impose visa sanctions on corrupt foreign officials. He lobbied senators, journalists and anybody who would listen to him. His aim was to pass into law a Magnitsky act. The act would freeze the assets of those involved in his lawyer’s death.

Browder had found Putin and co.’s Achilles heel. In Soviet times, the politburo lived quite a bit better than the average Soviet citizen. It had special shops and holidays on the Black Sea. In Putin’s Russia, however, the difference was vast. Top bureaucrats, including the Klyuyev gang, were worth millions. They enjoyed international lifestyles. What was the point of stealing all that money if you could only spend it in Sochi, with its scruffy pebbly beach?

In December 2012, weeks after Perepilichnyy’s death, Congress passed a landmark Magnitsky law. It blocked eighteen Russian officials from entering America. Most importantly, the law denied them access to US banking facilities.

The law drew an apoplectic, asymmetric response from Putin. He ended the adoption of Russian babies by American couples. And, in a twist that might have been written by Gogol, the Kremlin put Magnitsky on trial. That he was already dead was apparently not an obstacle. In summer 2013, a judge convicted him of tax evasion, announcing a surreal verdict to an empty barred cage.

Britain’s David Cameron once took a tough stance on the Kremlin. In 2008, as Russian troops overran Georgia, Cameron flew to the capital Tbilisi to show solidarity with Saakashvili. At the time, Cameron was leader of the opposition Conservatives. It was a piece of opportunism that embarrassed the UK’s then prime minister Gordon Brown. Cameron called for Russia’s suspension from the G8 and offered a memorable line: ‘Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.’

After entering Downing Street in 2010, Cameron’s attitude towards the Russian government softened. Brown had refused to meet with Putin following Litvinenko’s murder. Cameron, by contrast, appeared keen to move on from the polonium episode. Britain still sought the extradition of Lugovoi and Kovtun, of course. But, Cameron indicated, these bilateral differences could be ‘negotiated around’ and shouldn’t prevent cooperation in other areas, especially trade.

In foreign affairs there is always a balance to be struck between national self-interest and values. There is Realpolitik versus Moralpolitik, with foreign-policy realists pitted against liberals who believe in universal rights. Under Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition, the UK’s foreign policy moved decisively towards the first camp. It showed new understanding towards regimes that had scant regard for human rights.

In theory, of course, London still believed in principles. The BBC’s political comedy Yes Minister expressed the gap between political reality and lofty aspiration well. The much-loved series features Jim Hacker as the well-meaning but inept prime minister and his Machiavellian cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby.

One exchange springs to mind:

Twenty-first-century Britain was a post-imperial, postindustrial island of middling importance. Its role in the world was … what exactly? Unlike the US, it was no longer a superpower, though its government still nurtured the fantasy that Britain punched above its weight on the world stage. American observers noted that the UK was becoming increasingly parochial, and in many international questions looked mostly irrelevant.

Cameron’s foreign policy objective, meanwhile, was quite simple: to sell stuff to foreigners.

The large influx of Russians to Britain was good for business, the prime minister appears to have concluded. Wealthy Russians buy property in London and the Home Counties, send their children to British private schools, and go shopping in Harrods (and Selfridges). Increasingly, Russians come to the UK to settle their legal disputes, commercial and matrimonial. All this is a boon to headmasters, divorce lawyers, estate agents and purveyors of sushi.

Domestic political calculations explained Britain’s attempt at a US-style ‘reset’ with Moscow. Russian investment helped the UK economy. A strong economy in turn helped deliver the Conservatives’ election victory in 2015, after their failure in 2010 to win an outright majority. There were ideological commonalities, too. The right wing of the Tory party is Eurosceptic and wants Britain to exit the EU. The Kremlin is keen to torpedo EU power; it prefers to negotiate with weaker sovereign states.

In 2011, Cameron flew to Moscow. He met Medvedev and Putin. Then in summer 2012 – after Putin became president for the third time – Cameron hosted him in Downing Street and at the London Olympics. It was Putin’s first trip to the UK since 2005 and Litvinenko’s radioactive murder. They watched the judo, Putin’s favourite sport. The two leaders sat together, somewhat awkwardly, as contestants from Holland and the Czech Republic rolled around on a yellow mat.

The same month, guests attended a launch party in Kensington, west London, for a new organisation, the Conservative Friends of Russia. Some 250 guests gathered in the garden of the Russian ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko. They included Tory MPs, peers and Russian diplomats. The event featured a barbecue, drinks and a raffle, with prizes of vodka, champagne and a biography of Putin. The group was apparently the brainchild of a PR consultant, Richard Royal; its stated goal to boost UK–Russian dialogue.

Behind the scenes, the Russian embassy itself was pulling the strings on this curious new body. The diplomat in charge, Sergei Nalobin, has close links with Russian intelligence. His father, Nikolai Nalobin, was a KGB general. According to Marina Litvinenko, Nikolai Nalobin was Litvinenko’s former boss in the FSB. Nalobin Jnr’s brother worked as an FSB agent. Nalobin’s CV includes a stint in the ministry of foreign affairs. He described himself on his Twitter feed as a ‘brutal agent of the Putin dictatorship :)’.

Leaked emails from Nalobin suggest Moscow’s goals went beyond mere cultural understanding. The Kremlin was keen to rebuild ties with Britain post-Litvinenko and to mute criticism of Russia’s human-rights record. It also wanted to deepen an alliance with the Conservatives, who sit with Putin’s ruling United Russia party in the Council of Europe. Most of all, the Russian government was desperate to stop top officials from being denied entry to the UK, as part of a US-style ‘Magnitsky list’.

Critics pointed out that the timing of the organisation’s launch was dreadful. Days earlier, three members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot were jailed following an anti-Putin punk protest in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral. The former Labour Europe minister Denis MacShane noted: ‘Friendship groups with Russia used to be a speciality of the left in the days of communism. Now we have Putinism, it is the Tory party that is creating a pro-Russian group of fellow travellers. It reflects the shambolic incoherence of Tory networking.’

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the group’s honorary president, took a different view, arguing that there was nothing wrong with engagement. ‘It would be silly to boycott everything Russian. Even during the Cold War, as a British foreign office minister, I had lunch with the Soviet ambassador in his residence. The worst thing is to have no contact.’ Three months later, however, Rifkind quit the group after its apparent links with Russian spies were uncovered by my exposé in the Guardian. The organisation collapsed, to be rebranded in 2013 as the Westminster Russia Forum.

Russia’s soft-power initiatives, which included hiring lobbyists in Washington, London and Brussels, may have seemed clumsy. In fact, they showed strategic ambition. From at least 2009, the Kremlin actively cultivated ties with the far right in eastern Europe. It established links with Hungary’s Jobbik, Slovakia’s People’s Party and Bulgaria’s nationalist, anti-EU Attack movement. The Kremlin wooed the far right in Western Europe too, loaning €9.4 million via a Moscow bank to France’s Front National.

It also attracted support from Europe’s far left. In Soviet times, the KGB used ‘active measures’ to sponsor front organisations in the west, including pro-Moscow communist parties. Radical left-wing coalitions such as Greece’s Syriza expressed solidarity with Moscow. So did Jeremy Corbyn, a backbencher and veteran anti-imperialist who in 2015 would go on to become leader of the opposition Labour Party. (The Russian embassy in London greeted the election of the anti-Nato Corbyn with an ecstatic press release.)

The Kremlin didn’t invent the European far right or British Euroscepticism or Corbyn. But in an analogous way Moscow was lending these parties and individuals support, political and sometimes financial. Moscow’s goal was to promote its economic and political interests – and in particular to ensure that the EU remains heavily dependent on Russian gas. The tactic was clever: to exploit popular dissent against the EU, fuelled by immigration and austerity.

Marina Litvinenko had always believed in British justice. The men who murdered her husband were beyond the reach of UK law enforcement and safely in Russia. But surely the legal system in London would afford her some kind of closure – a full, fair and transparent explanation of how her husband died and who might have killed him? It had been a long wait. Six years on, her private tragedy had become a public quest for some answers.

The most obvious vehicle for inquiry was an inquest. The inquest had been delayed in the hope that Moscow might give up Lugovoi and Kovtun. It was now evident there was no realistic prospect of a criminal trial. In autumn 2011, Marina Litvinenko moved to have the inquest – stalled since 2006 – reopened. In 2012, Sir Robert Owen, a High Court judge acting as assistant deputy coroner, convened a series of pre-inquest hearings in London. He began by apologising for the delay: ‘It’s manifestly in the interests of his widow Marina and his son, Anatoly … and in the wider public interest that [this] is brought to a conclusion.’

Owen promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. He said that he would examine the theory that ‘Russian state agents’ were behind the murder. He identified various ‘interested parties’ including Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko; the two alleged Russian killers; the UK Home Office; and the investigative committee of the Russian Federation. They would be given Scotland Yard’s previously restricted forensic report on the case, and much other evidence.

There was discussion of the inquest’s scope. Two issues were central. One was the question of Kremlin culpability. There was, Owen said, a ‘prima facie’ case of the Russian state’s involvement. The other was whether the British government could have prevented Litvinenko’s killing.

All of this seemed reasonable. However, by 2013, the hearings had turned into a tug of war. On one side was Marina Litvinenko and her counsel, Ben Emmerson QC. On the other a government apparently unwilling to annoy Putin and fearful that British investors in Russia might suffer reprisals. The foreign secretary William Hague submitted something called a public interest immunity or PII certificate. This meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko wouldn’t be made public. Crucially, it meant that the inquest wouldn’t be able to consider whether the Russian state had murdered Litvinenko.

Hague justified this drastic move on the grounds that openness would cause ‘serious harm to national security and/or international relations’. The reasoning was bizarre. As the Observer columnist Nick Cohen pointed out, which one was it? The submission was at odds with several centuries of jurisprudence and principles laid down by the late Law Lord Thomas Bingham.

Emmerson accused Cameron and Hague of cover-up. He added that they were ‘dancing to the Russian tarantella’ – an image that didn’t improve the more you thought about it – with Owen ‘steamrollered by two states acting in collaboration with each other’. I attended the High Court hearing. Whenever the colourful Emmerson spoke, the journalists picked up their pens. The lawyer said: ‘The British government, like the Russian government, is conspiring to get the inquest closed down in exchange for substantial trade interests which we know Mr Cameron is pursuing.’

The accusation was well grounded. It was left to Goldfarb to summarise what was really going on. He told me in the corridor: ‘HMG is worried about fallout with Putin; MI6 is worried about its agent being killed by polonium; the Russians are worried about being caught red-handed; Putin is concerned about being called a mafia boss.’

The same month Cameron flew to Sochi for talks with Putin. It was a friendly encounter; the pair discussed Syria; there was no mention by the British of the awkward subject of human rights. Putin must have been pleased. In a concession, Cameron agreed that British intelligence would resume cooperation with the FSB for the first time since Litvinenko’s death. It would work with its Russian counterpart to ensure the security of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

Cameron’s blossoming friendship with Putin left the coroner in an invidious position. Reluctantly, he upheld in part the government’s request to keep secret material out of court. Without MI6’s files, the inquest would be a meaningless exercise. It would be unable to examine the question of Russian state guilt. In a further act of meanness, justice secretary Chris Grayling was refusing to pay Marina Litvinenko’s legal costs.

Owen came up with a solution. He wrote to home secretary Theresa May requesting a public inquiry. ‘I have formed the firm view that a public inquiry is necessary if Mr Litvinenko’s death is to be properly investigated,’ he told her. Owen offered himself as chairman.

The advantage of an inquiry, he argued, was that the chairman could consider the secret material in closed hearings, an option not available to an inquest. This was a pragmatic way forward which balanced the government’s security concerns with the need for open justice.

May, however, was having none of this. In a reply in June 2013, she rejected Owen’s request. She offered six reasons for her refusal, including public expense. It was the sixth, however, which stuck out:

‘It is true that international relations have been a factor in the Government’s decision-making. An inquest managed and run by an independent coroner is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners, and the integrity of the process more readily grasped, than an inquiry established by the government … which has the power to see government material, potentially relevant to their interests, in secret.’

May’s reasoning was legally dubious. That autumn, Marina Litvinenko filed a judicial review claim, asking the High Court to re-examine the government’s decision. In February 2014, three High Court judges ruled unanimously in her favour. They described May’s refusal as ‘irrational’ and ‘legally erroneous’. They asked her to reconsider.

In its keenness to put trade above principle, the Conservative-led government had forgotten what the case was about.

Marina Litvinenko observed: ‘I have never been able to see why the British government should want to protect the people in the Kremlin who ordered my husband’s murder. This was the murder of a British citizen on the streets of London using radioactive poison. You would have thought that the government would want to get the bottom of who was behind it.’

The ball was back in May’s court. Marina said: ‘As one woman to another, I ask her to consider how she would feel in my position. If her husband had been murdered in this horrible way, wouldn’t she want to get to the truth?’

In 2010, I had flown from Moscow to Italy. My destination was the seaside town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast. Two years previously Walter Litvinenko and his wife Lyuba had left Russia. After his son’s death, the harassment Walter had already suffered from the authorities continued. He joined his younger son Maxim – Litvinenko’s half-brother – in Italy. Other family members followed. They included Litvinenko’s half-sister Tatiana, her husband and their two kids.

By the time I caught up with them, the family were in poor shape. They had opened a restaurant in the tourist resort of Rimini. Maxim had been in Italy for nine years and was a professional chef. The local police accused them of operating illegally; during a late-night raid a cop pushed Tatiana over so she banged her head on the floor. The restaurant, La Terrazza, went bust. They were forced to move into a cheaper flat down the coast.

Walter blamed their misfortunes in exile on Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, whose close friendship with Putin was well known. The family’s claim for asylum was going nowhere. ‘We have fallen victim to a political game,’ he told me. Walter blamed Putin for Alexander’s death, reasoning to me that – as in Stalin’s times – only Putin could have authorised the murder. ‘I know it was Putin who killed him. He’s a sick person,’ Walter said.

Tatiana, however, refused to impugn Russia’s president. She bristled at the mention of Berezovsky. The oligarch had initially supported the Litvinenkos in exile, but had eventually stopped payments; his money had run out. Tatiana and her husband had good careers with the FSB in Nalchik, Litivnenko’s home town; the international scandal surrounding her brother had cost them everything. ‘He’s clearly not interested in us,’ she said, of Berezovsky. ‘I wouldn’t stop to take money from him.’

The Litvinenkos – all eight of them, including two young children and Maxim’s wife – were living in a small three-bedroom flat. They were broke. A local church was donating bread and apples; they ate pancakes and prawns salvaged from the freezer of their former restaurant. Walter and his wife were both over seventy. It was clearly too late for them to start a new life. On the wall was a map of Russia and several Orthodox icons; I spotted an Italian–Russian dictionary on a bookshelf.

Walter and I went for a walk outside. He put on the same flat cap he’d worn to his son’s drizzly funeral at Highgate Cemetery in London back in December 2006. Since then he had urged the US congress to support a resolution that blamed the Russian government for Litvinenko’s death. A public role didn’t suit him. Walter was, it struck me, a broken figure – and a pitiful one. He was afraid. ‘In Nalchik I didn’t fear because I knew everybody’s faces. Here it is different. At any moment a person could come up to you and that would be the end.’

In signed statements, Walter listed persecution in various forms by the Russian state. The police had beaten him up, he wrote, in an attempt to force him to incriminate his son. For five years he’d held one person responsible for these woes: Putin. In May 2011, Tatiana called me with further bad news. Lyuba had died. The Italian government was still refusing basic income support. Walter had moved out, into a one-bedroom flat. He was too poor to pay the electricity, so would sit on his own in the dark.

Then, in 2012, something very odd happened. Walter gave a tearful interview from Italy to Russian state TV. He told the Russian public: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, if you are watching this programme please forgive me for all the slander that I said and wrote about you.’ Walter said that he had come to understand that his son was a traitor. He wanted to go back home to Russia.

Walter ascribed his radical change of heart to encounters with an Orthodox priest from Rimini. In an affidavit, sworn in September 2012 before Russian officials, he said he now believed Lugovoi was innocent, and that polonium had been ‘skillfully placed’ to incriminate him. The real murderer, he suggested, was Alex Goldfarb.

It wasn’t difficult to piece together what lay behind Walter’s stagey recantation. The death of his second wife had devastated him; he’d been very attached to her; now, in the final years of his life, he felt lonely and overwhelmingly homesick. Moreover, Walter wanted to help his surviving son Maxim. After Walter’s TV confession, the family’s business affairs were said to have suddenly improved.

Astonishingly, Walter said he wanted to contact Lugovoi in Russia. Goldfarb likened the encounter – between a father and his son’s unrepentant killer – to a scene from Homer’s Iliad. ‘It has a proportion of drama akin to the Trojan War, with Priam and Achilles,’ Goldfarb said.

Priam was king of Troy; his son Paris caused the Trojan War by abducting Helen from the Greeks. The Greeks fought a war to get her back. Their best warrior Achilles kills another of Priam’s sons, Hector. Achilles refuses to give back the body and so Priam goes to the Greek camp to plead with him for his dead son’s return. He invokes memories of Achilles’ own father and says: ‘I kiss the hand of the man who killed my son.’

In Goldfarb’s analogy, Walter is the ageing Priam, seeking out his son’s killer, Achilles/Lugovoi, to make peace with him in return for personal favours. Marina Litvinenko said her father-in-law surprised and disappointed her. Contact between them stopped. ‘I was very sad,’ she said.