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

12 The Inquiry ^{Court 73, Royal Courts of Justice, the Strand, London, January–July 2015}

It looked very much like a murder trial. Seated in the middle of the court was a judge, Sir Robert Owen. In front of him were lawyers. One of them was Ben Emmerson QC, the celebrated human-rights advocate. Owen and Emmerson were familiar figures from the pre-inquest two years earlier. To Owen’s right was another barrister, Robin Tam QC, who assisted the judge. Next to Emmerson was Marina Litvinenko, dressed in black, with her student son, Anatoly. In the corner a witness box. There were shorthand clerks, solicitors, paralegals and ushers padding softly in and out.

At the back of the court was space for the media and public, and video screens for following the evidence. The walls were painted a classic shade of magnolia. From an open window you could hear the sounds of urban life penetrating from one of the world’s great capitals outside: a seagull, a helicopter flying overhead, the whine of police sirens. Outside the grand Gothic entrance there was a row of TV cameras.

There was only one thing missing from room 73 in the east wing of London’s Royal Courts of Justice – defendants. There weren’t any.

In fact, the two men accused of murdering Litvinenko were about 1,500 miles away in Russia. More than eight years after Litvinenko’s poisoning, his assassins – Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun – were still enjoying the favour of the Russian state. There was no prospect of their being extradited. And unless the Putin regime collapsed – an event that few believed would be happening any time soon – neither Kovtun nor Lugovoi would stand trial in Britain.

The date was Tuesday, 27 January 2015. After years of delay, legal challenge and obfuscation, by governments in London and Moscow, a public inquiry was being held into Litvinenko’s murder. The visual grammar inside the court was misleading. This wasn’t a pseudo-trial. Nor was it a court process in which the accused would be convicted and sentenced in absentia. There would be no finding of criminal liability.

Rather, the inquiry was a dispassionate exercise in truth-telling. It was methodical and thorough; inquisitorial rather than adversarial. For the first time, the evidence painstakingly collected by the Metropolitan Police in Operation Whimbrel – its codename for the Litvinenko investigation – would be made public. Participants got 16,000 pages.

More than sixty witnesses testified. Some played a direct role in the events surrounding Litvinenko’s death. Others were professional experts: scientists, doctors, pathologists, historians. A few, like Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili, were dead, their police statements read from beyond the grave.

During Putin’s presidency, numerous Kremlin critics met mysterious and violent ends. Twenty-three investigative journalists were murdered, together with other political activists. Invariably nobody got caught for these crimes. There was an investigation of sorts, maybe even a few arrests. But those in Russia who ordered up these killings were never identified.

What made Litvinenko’s murder special was its extra-territorial location – London. The subsequent British police inquiry into his assassination took place free from political pressure. Detectives were able to follow leads, collect evidence, put together a case. These carefully assembled facts pointed in one direction: to Lugovoi and Kovtun’s guilt.

Over six months, Owen – acting as chairman rather than as a judge – listened to all this evidence.

This was truly a strange British legal affair. A few witnesses gave evidence anonymously. Whenever this happened the room was cleared with the media turfed into a downstairs annex. From here, you could watch proceedings on a video feed. And tweet, which was impermissible in the main court. (The camera was turned away from the witness.) The video ran with a five-minute delay, just in case a secret was revealed by mistake.

The effect was to stimulate your imagination and to make you wonder what the witness might look like. Clues were scarce. Scientist A1, for example, who gave expert evidence on polonium, was a woman with a northern accent. That was it. C2, the cook, sounded Albanian but since he was speaking German, could anyone be sure? These participants in disguise were identified by letters and numbers.

Such measures were understandable. D3 had told German police he was afraid of being killed. Despite the inquiry’s best efforts, he declined to give evidence. Kovtun’s ex-wife and her mother – Marina and Eleanora Wall – refused to cooperate. Letters inviting them to turn up went unanswered.

Still, there was a wealth of material. And once the public hearings ended, the tribunal continued in secret session. Inside these closed hearings Owen examined a significant amount of classified material from the UK government and its various spy agencies including MI6, Litvinenko’s old employer.

Nobody beyond a small circle of spooks, ministers and top civil servants knows what is inside MI6’s files. Even in less sensitive cases, the agency argues that disclosure might threaten its sources. None of MI6’s records have been made public since it was founded in 1909.

Goldfarb believes the Litvinenko files contain a well-grounded conclusion that Putin is a front for organised crime and that Litvinenko was murdered because he’s key to that understanding. We can assume the documents include MI6’s Litvinenko dossier. And its internal assessment – written in 2007 – as to who may have ordered his execution.

There may also be transcripts of intercepted phone calls made by Lugovoi, Kovtun and possible unknown third parties in London, Moscow and elsewhere. And email traffic. That the UK, US and others have the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls was well known, even before the US whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of this surveillance in 2013. Officially, this power isn’t acknowledged. In addition, there may be human intelligence from agents in the field. London says covert work and the effective operation of its intelligence agencies requires secrecy.

At the heart of the inquiry were two simple questions.

The first: why was Litvinenko killed?

The second: was the Russian state responsible for his murder?

In previous hearings, Owen had indicated that there was a prima facie case against the Russian state. But did that mean that Putin – or those around him – had ordered Litvinenko’s liquidation? How much was known? What could be inferred? The judge ruled there were no grounds for saying that the British state had failed to take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect Litvinenko. In short, the UK authorities couldn’t have anticipated a Russian death squad.

Efforts were made to involve Lugovoi and Kovtun. They were invited to give evidence by video-link from Moscow. The investigative committee of the Russian Federation chose not to participate. That left four ‘core participants’: Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko; the Metropolitan Police; the UK home secretary; and the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Each had solicitors and lawyers. And access to evidence – excluding the classified stuff.

Owen was seventy years old, had been a judge for more than two decades and was a popular figure on the legal circuit. He originally came from Wales. His appearance was that of a classic member of the British ruling class – his suits conservative, his white hair neatly combed, top button never undone.

As it turned out, Owen was ‘a pretty cool judge’, in Emmerson’s words, and not as strait-laced as he seemed at first glance. ‘He handles it with masterful calm and good judgecraft. He decides as little as he has to,’ Emmerson said. ‘He’s run these proceedings impeccably. Nobody could challenge his integrity or impartiality.’

Owen had something of a puckish sense of humour. Most of the time he listened. When he did intervene in proceedings his comments could be droll; here was a playful intelligence. One witness told the inquiry that a group of powerful individuals in Russia sought to control the president. Owen responded drily: ‘Some might say the British equivalent is the establishment.’

At 10.30 a.m., the chairman began by setting out the basic facts: that Litvinenko had died on 23 November 2006 after ‘ingesting a fatal dose of the radionuclide polonium-210, a radioactive material’. His murder raised issues of the ‘utmost gravity’. It had attracted ‘worldwide interest and concern’, he said. Owen then explained why it had taken so long for the circumstances of his death to be examined – a saga of delay. He promised his inquiry would be full and independent.

Litvinenko’s death triggered many theories as to who might have murdered him. Tam, counsel to the inquiry, said all of these would be considered. For some there was considerable evidence, for others none. There were numerous versions besides the one Litvinenko himself believed – that the Russian authorities were to blame. They included: Litvinenko accidentally poisoned himself; Berezovsky killed him; British government agencies were responsible; the mafia did it.

For those of us watching from the public gallery there were early revelations. Tam set out in broad terms the evidence against Kovtun and Lugovoi. They had tried, he said, to poison Litvinenko twice, the first time unsuccessfully. Then there was the German restaurant manager D3, to whom Kovtun confessed he was carrying ‘a very expensive poison’. Since Kovtun and Lugovoi apparently had no personal grudge against Litvinenko, they were acting on orders. But whose?

Tam described the question of state responsibility as ‘multi-faceted’ and said: ‘Which elements of the Russian state might have had the motive, the resources and, quite frankly, the daring to carry out the killing of a British citizen on British soil? At what level would such an operation have been authorised? Is it possible that an operation of this nature would have been undertaken without the knowledge, without the express authorisation, of those at the highest levels?’

Furthermore, what was the motive? Did Litvinenko betray Russian secrets while allegedly working for the British and Spanish spy agencies? Or was the Ivanov report he compiled with Yuri Shvets the key to his gruesome murder?

On day one of the hearing I was just outside the courtroom when I received an email from Emmerson. There was an attachment. It was an embargoed copy of the opening speech he would deliver on behalf of Marina Litvinenko a few hours later. I read with excitement. It was gloriously trenchant. It referenced my book, Mafia State, published in 2011 after my forced exit from Russia.

The speech was an unsparing anatomy of twenty-first-century Russian power – an indictment of a criminal regime prepared to murder its enemies, as its Soviet predecessor had done, using inventive methods. And led by a president who, when stripped down, is a mafia boss straight from a Mario Puzo bestseller.

Emmerson is a formidable lawyer. He is known for championing unpopular clients, and for offending governments and the powerful. He is a founder member of the left-wing Matrix chambers. He specialises in international and domestic human rights and appears regularly before the International and European Courts of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights. ‘I’m driven by a passion for open truth and justice,’ he told me.

In the words of Louis Blom-Cooper, a veteran lawyer of progressive views: ‘Ben is a very clever man. Highly intelligent. A very good advocate. One of the leading public lawyers.’

Close up, it was easy to see why Emmerson is regarded as one of the best courtroom performers of his generation. Whenever present, he was the tribunal’s irresistible mid-point, it struck me. There was the booming voice, of course. And the phenomenal work rate. There was a remorseless logic to his questions, too: any witness who lied or equivocated got crushed, as if by a mallet. In person, he looks a bit of a bruiser: broad shoulders, large head, black glasses, closely cropped hair.

Emmerson’s preeminent gift is that he can render a complex legal argument in compelling and intelligible phrases, a process of rapid disassembly. Journalists don’t need to think of a headline: he writes one for you.

At 2.50 p.m., Emmerson delivered his opening statement – a zinger. The barrister began by paying tribute to Marina Litvinenko, and her long, hard campaign for justice. The significance of her search involved broader national and international interests, in that it exposed ‘unlawfulness and criminality at the heart of the Russian state’.

This wasn’t about one murder, Emmerson said, rather about a government that had succumbed to a terrible criminal cancer:

‘The intimate relationship that will be proved to exist between the Kremlin and Russian organised crime syndicates around the world are so close as to make the two virtually indistinguishable. The startling truth, which is going to be revealed in public by the evidence in this inquiry, is that a significant part of Russian organised crime around the world is organised directly from the offices of the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a mafia state.’

Next, he addressed motive. Litvinenko was liquidated ‘partly as an act of political revenge for speaking out, partly as a message of lethal deterrence to others, and partly in order to prevent him giving evidence as a witness in a criminal prosecution in Spain’.

Litvinenko was about to expose the ‘odious and deadly corruption among the cabal surrounding President Putin’. He had given information to Spanish and Italian officials about links between Russian organised crime groups and the Kremlin. Therefore: ‘He had to be eliminated, not because he was an enemy of the Russian people, but because he had become an enemy of the close-knit group of criminals who surrounded and still surround Vladimir Putin and keep his corrupt regime in power.’

Litvinenko’s killing, it appeared, wasn’t about ideology, as in Soviet times. Moscow spymasters used to believe that the murder of enemies – both domestic and foreign – could be justified on the grounds that the Soviet Union was waging a life-and-death struggle to defend communism, a noble experiment. And that they were surrounded by hostile forces: Hitler, the west, etc.

Here, there could be no appeal to what you might term Leninist ethics. Communism was gone. Rather, Litvinenko’s modern assassination was about money. He threatened the revenue streams of some very powerful people. So they killed him.

According to Emmerson, there was no doubt who gave the order – Russia’s president. He dismissed alternative theories proposed by the Kremlin as outlandish and absurd. There wasn’t the ‘slightest doubt’ that Lugovoi and Kovtun were the assassins. The forensic evidence confirmed this, Emmerson said. So did what had happened since 2006: Lugovoi’s unexplained wealth and his successful career in Russian politics, none of which would have been possible without a Kremlin leg-up.

The ‘cold, hard facts’ said that Litvinenko’s murder was a political crime. It bore all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored assassination, the QC asserted.

The polonium used to murder him came to London from Russia. It was very expensive, Emmerson said. ‘The scientific evidence shows that the quantity of polonium of the purity used in the assassination of Mr Litvinenko would have cost tens of millions of dollars if it was purchased by end users on the commercial market. Just the amount that was used for the assassination. Well, obviously, a commercial transaction of that magnitude … would have to be recorded, and if it had happened, the authorities would know about it. It is, we say, moreover, unlikely in the extreme that any private individual or purely criminal enterprise, a pure bunch of hoodlums involved in an organised crime gang, why on earth would they choose such a costly method of assassination, tens of millions of dollars, when they could simply put a bullet in someone’s head?’

For the Russian state, on the other hand, the costs were by no means prohibitive. It just had to divert some of the material it was producing already. Polonium was selected ‘in order to leave no clear trace as to how death was sustained’. It very nearly worked.

Emmerson’s conclusions were blunt, and framed in highly personal terms: ‘We say, sir, that when all of the open and closed evidence is considered together, Mr Litvinenko’s dying declaration will be borne out as true: that the trail of polonium traces leads not just from London to Moscow but directly to the door of Vladimir Putin’s office and that Mr Putin should be unmasked by this inquiry as nothing more than a common criminal dressed up as a head of state.’

The barrister’s opening statement was bold and provocative – an accusation against a major world leader expressed in language not usually heard in a court.

The Russian government had ostensibly paid little attention to the inquiry, viewing it as biased, unreliable and the latest manifestation of an anti-Russian campaign waged by the west and its puppet media. From Moscow, Lugovoi dismissed it as a ‘judicial farce’. Traditionally, Russian officials were insouciant in the face of what they dubbed ‘provocations’.

On this occasion, though, someone was watching. That someone was irritated.

Two days after the inquiry began, RAF controllers noticed two dots moving at high speed towards the south coast of Britain. The dots kept going. These were Russian Tupolev Bear bombers – giant, lumbering, Soviet-era aircraft capable of carrying nuclear bombs on long-range missions, their bright red communist stars still visible on a gleaming silver fuselage. The Bear bombers were heading directly towards the Channel. Downing Street scrambled two RAF typhoons to intercept them.

Since the war in Ukraine, the Russian airforce had dispatched Bear bombers on similar probing missions to European countries and to the Pacific coast of the US and Canada. They had buzzed military and civilian aircraft. There were repeated forays into the airspace of the Baltic republics. In one incident in April 2015, a Russian SU-27 fighter missed a US military jet flying above the Baltic Sea by a few metres.

These sorties were a crude expression of displeasure. And a reminder that the Russian government presides over a nuclear arsenal and isn’t to be messed with. Even David Cameron, a prime minister who showed little interest in international affairs, got the memo. ‘Russia is trying to send some kind of message,’ he said.

In the weeks before the inquiry began, I met Anatoly Litvinenko at University College London. In the spring of 2015 he was a second-year student of politics and East European studies; his last piece of coursework an essay on Putin. His choice of university was a nod to his father, who died just across the road in University College Hospital.

Anatoly is quiet, low-key and speaks with a typical London student accent. He seems mature for a twenty-year-old – something his friends attribute to his close relationship with his mother, a loving and affectionate parent. ‘I’m so glad we can still hug,’ Marina told me. ‘After it happened, I realised I couldn’t just be strict. I remember Sasha saying: “Be soft on him.” I try and tell him every time that I love him.’

The UCL café was crowded, so we descended past the stuffed body of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham to an empty basement bar. Anatoly was dressed in a quilted overcoat and wearing fashionable lightweight black specs, bought in Berlin when his last ones broke.

We talked about his expectations of the inquiry. ‘I’m pretty sure there will be some kind of closure for me and my mum,’ he said. What would it bring? ‘Probably a chance for us to move on. To move on past the whole thing, which has been central to my life for eight years.’ He paused. ‘I want to remember him as Dad, to have a chance to grieve properly.’

Anatoly recalled visiting his father in hospital nearby, and his last words to him: ‘If I do die from this, take care of your mum, look after yourself and study hard.’ He said he didn’t recognise his father at the end: ‘It wasn’t my dad at all.’ Alexander’s death put him in a strange place; he coped by immersing himself in schoolwork (‘I got a bunch of stupidly good marks’) and shutting out his grief. ‘There was a huge media storm. For a while I was lost in the chaos,’ he said.

Anatoly had brought along some old family photographs. One from 1997 shows a grinning, small Anatoly lying above Alexander on a sofa at their Moscow home. It’s a happy symmetry. The photo was taken at his parents’ apartment in the Moscow suburb of Chertanovo. Like many Russian kids, Anatoly spent the long summer vacation at a dacha 25 miles (40 km) outside Moscow that belonged to Marina’s parents. There was a vegetable plot and a pagoda.

Anatoly’s maternal grandparents were regular Soviet citizens. His grandfather, also named Anatoly, spent his life working in a components factory and lost two fingers in machines; his grandmother, Zinaida, always insisted young Anatoly finish his food. Anatoly Sr was highly intelligent, but at the age of twelve, with the Soviet Union fighting for its existence against the Wehrmacht, he was forced to leave school and find a job. He finally went to technical college in his thirties.

Anatoly was named after his grandfather, now aged eighty-three and still living in Moscow. He said they are similar in character. ‘He’s quiet and introverted. He loves chess and mental games. He was unbeatable at dominoes. His colleagues at the factory got angry because he won every single match. If he were born later, he’d have been an avid gamer.’

As a child in Russia, Anatoly thought his father worked in some kind of law enforcement. After he moved to England he told his schoolmates his dad was a journalist and a police officer. He remembered his father as the more indulgent parent. Marina was the strict one – a ‘typical communist mum’, as she put it to me. Father and son would play chess. Anatoly always won – Alexander was a lousy opponent.

‘My dad loved England. He felt extremely safe here. He loved the freedom of expression, the fact that people could vote for whomever they liked,’ Anatoly said. One photo shows a visit to Hyde Park. Alexander introduced Anatoly to Speakers’ Corner; they posed together next to two London bobbies in uniform. Litvinenko is grinning and wearing a pair of knee-length khaki shorts. Alexander told his son that, unlike in Russia, you could trust British justice. You could stand up on a box and say anything.

Anatoly was aware his father was a personal enemy of Putin’s. But, by 2006, Moscow felt like the past. ‘It was over. We were having a quiet normal life,’ he said. The family would go for pizza at La Porchetta, their favourite local Italian restaurant on Muswell High Street. Once a week the two of them went to Finsbury leisure centre. Anatoly had a taekwondo class; Alexander went for a 10-mile (15-km) run. Afterwards, Anatoly would splash in the kids’ pool, while Alexander swam lengths of vigorous front crawl.

On the way home to Osier Crescent, Anatoly would make a short cut – taking the diagonal across a muddy park and crawling through a hole in the fence. Alexander would go on the path. He was, Anatoly said, reluctant to get mud on his trainers. Like other Russians who had grown up with very little, Alexander had something of a ‘a post-Soviet rush’ towards consumer stuff, he said.

Sometimes his father was away on business trips. ‘When he was there, he was fun,’ Anatoly said. ‘He was quite relaxed, happy to joke around with me.’ That summer of 2006, they watched the World Cup on a giant screen, cheering on England against Trinidad and Tobago. Alexander flew a Union flag from their balcony. When they first arrived in London, Anatoly asked Alexander which team he should support. His reply: not Chelsea, Abramovich’s club. ‘I picked Arsenal,’ Anatoly said.

I had asked Anatoly if he might write something for the Guardian. We had discussed this during earlier conversations. He was considering becoming a journalist after university, maybe specialising in Russia. He handed me several handwritten pages of A4.

His piece was moving. One of the hardest aspect of losing his father, Anatoly wrote, was not having had the opportunity to become friends with him – as he had with Marina:

‘As a kid, you tend to perceive adults, be it parents or anyone else, differently from how you would at age sixteen, eighteen or older. These days I’m able to joke around and have interesting conversations with my mother. We have discussions and arguments. I have gained a certain maturity that allows for mutual respect. And through this sort of relationship you are able to get an insight into the other person: how they think, what troubles them, what forms their views on life and so on. You get to understand what really makes the person.’

With his dad, Anatoly wrote, he was forced to reconstruct the person from what was left – from ‘little titbits’ here and there. ‘From small things I remember. How I used to run to him if I did something wrong and was getting scolded by my mother, how I could run to him for sanctuary, or how incredibly proud he was of my smallest academic achievement.’

Alexander had loved rock music. Anatoly hadn’t much liked it as a child, but now found himself as a young adult listening to the same bands as his father. ‘But I can never share my opinions of the music with him,’ he wrote.

He continued: ‘This, perhaps, is why the inquiry is so important to me. When there is a story of a death so sensational, it’s very easy to get lost in the events of the few days and weeks, those of November 2006, with facts, accusations and intrigue. For me personally, this isn’t paramount. For me, it’s important to understand what Alexander Litvinenko was like behind the scenes, beyond the press conferences and the polonium; to construct an image, even half a one, in order to have a role model to look up to.

‘And most importantly perhaps, to always remember him as a person, a human being and my father, rather than just an aspect of political history.’

After coffee and croissants we set off together to visit his father’s grave. Litvinenko is buried in Highgate West Cemetery in north London. We took the Northern line to Archway and then waited at a bus stop in the chill. ‘That’s about as weird as it gets,’ Anatoly said, pointing to the electronic sign that tells us which bus is arriving when. One of the buses that go to the cemetery is the 210 – as in polonium-210. ‘How crazy is that?’ he smiled.

We got on another bus and walked up to the cemetery’s imposing black gates. They are locked to visitors, but Anatoly was known here; a woman radioed her colleague inside: ‘There’s a grave-owner; can you let him in?’ Anatoly, Marina and a few close friends visit every year to mark the anniversary of Litvinenko’s death.

We walked up a small bucolic path. It’s an incongruous resting place for a patriotic Russian officer. Litvinenko’s grave is set among mid-Victorian tombstones and fluted funerary columns. There are squirrels and magpies in a tranquil clearing; opposite lies an admiral whose family vault resembles a grand naval warship.

The conversation returned to the question of Putin’s guilt. ‘You have to ask yourself, which countries have the capability to produce polonium? Which country did my dad have a problem with? It’s simple,’ he said. And added: ‘There was a radioactive trail that leads back to Lugovoi. You can’t make that up.’ Of Putin, he said: ‘Dad used to get irritated about how many people in the west trusted Putin. The reality is: he’s dangerous. He shouldn’t be appeased.’

After Emmerson’s opening statement, Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko gave evidence from the witness box. It must have been harrowing for Marina to relive it all again. Over two days she told the story of her husband’s life and death.

There was also testimony from Dr Nathaniel Cary, the consultant forensic pathologist who examined Litvinenko’s body. The scene in University College Hospital was extraordinary, like something from a horror movie. Cary said that he and other officials examining the corpse wore two protective suits, two pairs of gloves taped at the wrists and large battery-operated plastic hoods into which filtered air was piped.

Cary said that medical staff left Litvinenko’s radioactive corpse in situ for two days. It fell to him to remove drips and disconnect tubes. He took a small sample of muscle from the right thigh to test for polonium. He then put the corpse in two body bags. Following this ‘very hazardous’ recovery operation, Cary said he conducted a post-mortem on 1 December 2006, together with a full team wearing protective gear.

In a long career, Cary had examined murdered children and victims of other gruesome crimes – but not this. ‘It’s been described as the most dangerous post-mortem undertaken … I think that’s right,’ he said. The case was unique. It was the first known example of acute polonium poisoning anywhere in the world.

Slowly, a picture was forming – of mediocre assassins who left behind clues. As Emmerson put it, the nuclear trail was ‘almost as sure as the path of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel’. A senior scientist explained radioactive readings taken from a range of sites associated with Lugovoi and Kovtun. Litvinenko’s deathbed interviews with police were made public. So was the last photo taken of him alive. There was discussion of Litvinenko’s corporate security and investigation work. To what extent might this explain his murder?

For those following the inquiry, this new evidence was fascinating and multi-layered. For the first time, the public could see CCTV footage of Litvinenko arriving at the Millennium Hotel and of his shifty-looking killers in the minutes before he was poisoned. Other guests had their identities blurred out: they looked like surging blobs. There were surprises. Who knew that British spies use Waterstone’s bookshop as a meeting place? Or that Litvinenko’s anonymous monthly payments from MI6 were listed on his bank statement next to a meal from Nando’s in Finchley?

Every evening the new evidence was posted to the inquiry’s website, www.litvinenkoinquiry.org. Sometimes the court official responsible – a pleasant New Zealander called Mike Wicksteed – didn’t finish work until midnight. There were witness statements, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews from Moscow with the two murderers, telephone schedules, forensic contamination reports. The contamination schedule listed every location where polonium was discovered. It ran to an impressive 265 pages.

At lunchtimes, Marina Litvinenko would head over the road from the white neo-Gothic court building to Apostrophe, a sandwich bar. Over soup and green tea, she would discuss the case with her legal team: Emmerson, junior counsel Adam Straw and her solicitor Elena Tsirlina. Sometimes I would join them. Our mood was more cheerful than gloomy. Marina would greet witnesses, kiss old friends on the cheek; her fortitude was amazing.

Back in the courtroom, there were entertaining moments. In April 2012, Andrei Lugovoi took – and apparently passed – a lie detector test in Moscow. A Russian TV documentary producer named Alexander Korobko arranged it. In the wake of the result and with pompous fanfare Russia’s state media announced that Lugovoi’s innocence had been conclusively demonstrated. ‘We did the test because Andrei was so passionate about his innocence,’ Korobko told RT, the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda channel.

To give the test added credibility, Korobko got a British member of the Polygraph Association, Bruce Burgess, to conduct it. Burgess had embarked on a career in lie detection after doing other jobs including working as an apprentice ladies’ hairdresser. He trained in the US at the Backster School of Lie Detection in San Diego. In the noughties he appeared on various UK daytime TV shows, including Trisha and Jeremy Kyle. He would carry out tests on individuals accused of marital infidelity; the parties would get the result – usually showing one of them had been unfaithful – live on air in the studio.

Korobko made Burgess an offer: an all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow, plus a £5,100 fee. The producer was enigmatic about who would be taking the test. He merely told Burgess the subject was a ‘celebrity’. Burgess flew to the Russian capital with his son Tristam. There they were introduced to Lugovoi. The Burgesses performed the test, recorded on video, in Moscow’s Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel.

Nearly three years later, the inquiry summoned Burgess to give an account of what transpired. Aged seventy, with shoulder-length white hair and beard, Burgess looked like a 1970s rock star gone to seed. He admitted to feeling uncomfortable after discovering in Moscow that Lugovoi was accused of murder. After discussions, Burgess said he came up with three questions. The two main ones were: ‘Did you do anything to cause the death of Alexander Litvinenko?’ and ‘Have you ever handled polonium?’

The inquiry was shown video footage from the encounter. Lugovoi sits in a leather armchair in the middle of a business suite, legs spread. Seated at a table behind him are an interpreter and the Burgesses. Their subject is hooked up to a polygraph, which measures breathing rate, pulse, and sweating. When asked the two key questions, Lugovoi replies: ‘Nyet.’

Afterwards, Lugovoi admits to feeling some ‘internal tension’. Burgess says: ‘Have faith in me.’ Minutes later he delivers Lugovoi the result. ‘You were telling the truth. No deception indicated,’ he says. The next day Lugovoi invited father and son to breakfast at his daughter’s upscale Moscow restaurant. The bill was on the house.

The inquiry adjourned for lunch. Emmerson whispered to me: ‘Big bang coming up.’

At 2 p.m., Emmerson examined Burgess. It was a masterclass in how to eviscerate a witness, like watching a tiger play with a small, whiskery rodent. He asked if Burgess considered himself a ‘reliable evaluator of whether someone is telling the truth’. Burgess mumbled: ‘No, not really.’ This was an odd reply. Its reason became apparent.

The barrister asked: ‘What about yourself, Mr Burgess, do you consider yourself to be an experienced liar?’

In December 2009, Emmerson revealed, Burgess had been convicted of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to twenty-four weeks in jail, suspended for two years. He’d been caught speeding. He told police a fictitious ‘friend’ was behind the wheel. Burgess resigned from the Polygraph Association; the invitation to travel to Moscow came at a time when he was broke and somewhat demoralised. Korobko knew of Burgess’s criminal record: this, it appears, is why he hired him. By way of justification Burgess said: ‘We all lie at one point or another.’

There was more – the test results indicated that Lugovoi had actually failed the second question: ‘Have you handled polonium?’ The inquiry heard it was ‘quite easy’ to dupe a lie detector test – especially if you were a trained spy or intelligence agent. Countermeasures might be physical or mental. Techniques included counting backwards from 100, imagining that you are walking your dog on a promising spring morning, or thinking of an erotic situation. Even with likely coaching from the FSB, Lugovoi flunked it.

This was gripping courtroom theatre. Owen was on form, too. He observed: ‘I’m amused to see that walking the dog on a promising spring morning is compared with thinking of a sexually arousing scene.’

There were more signs that the Kremlin was following events in London closely – and not in a happy way. In an interview with RT, Viktor Ivanov described the inquiry as ‘a spectacle, a farce, a knockabout act’. The allegations against him were, he said, a conspiracy by Britain and its intelligence agencies. Ivanov also expressed bafflement as to why the US had sanctioned him.

The same day Burgess sagged in the witness box, the Moscow agency RIA Novosti put out a short news story. It said President Putin had handed out a state honour. The award was for services to the fatherland, second-class. Its recipient: Andrei Konstantinovich Lugovoi. The presidential citation said the honour was bestowed in recognition of his contribution to Russia’s parliament and to law-making.

Lugovoi was deputy chairman of the Duma committee for security and fighting corruption, the agency noted. The committee wrote legislation for Russia’s spy agencies. In late 2013, Lugovoi had proposed a blacklist of leading opposition news websites. They included a blog written by the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and a news portal run by Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, Kasparov.ru. Putin approved Lugovoi’s suggestion. It was part of a wider crackdown on internet freedoms, justified in the wake of Snowden’s revelations on the grounds of ‘digital sovereignty’.

Lugovoi’s law-making efforts were clearly helpful to the Kremlin. But this state honour looked like a reward for something else, namely murder. And a sign of high-level political approval. Surely it was no accident?

As Emmerson remarked: ‘Whatever the pretextual justification for that award, its timing on day twenty-two of this inquiry, after a substantial amount of evidence has been called establishing Mr Lugovoi’s involvement in the murder of Mr Litvinenko, is clearly both a provocation by President Putin and the clearest possible message that he identifies himself with Mr Lugovoi.’

The award was probative, the barrister said. In other words it should be added to the evidence that Owen would consider before writing his report, due by Christmas 2015.

After a month of hearings it was clear that Scotland Yard had garnered more than enough material to convict Lugovoi and Kovtun, were they to stand trial. But the question of Putin’s personal culpability was more complex, and harder to answer. Several factors had to be considered: the nature of the Russian state, past and present; the interplay between Putin and his spy agencies; and whether Putin micro-managed security operations or merely set broad policy parameters. Plus, what might be read from previous political killings, of which there were quite a few.

To examine all this, the inquiry turned to Robert Service, professor of Russian history at Oxford University and a distinguished writer and scholar on modern Russia. Service had previously been commissioned to write an expert report for the Berezovsky vs Abramovich case, offering guidance on Russian high politics and big business. He had published full-scale biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. These were model studies: lucid, elegant and readable.

Service was asked to provide information in key areas. The first was to explain internal power structures in Russia, and to say if it was possible for ‘the Russian state’ to order the assassination of a critic. Next, he was to give his expert opinion as to what extent it could be credibly said Putin might commission any such killing, or for it to be carried out with his knowledge or approval. Further questions: did Putin and other senior individuals have links to mafia gangs? Could the state kill someone at the behest of such groups? And what was the Russian administration’s attitude to the ‘rule of law’?

Service’s 2015 report was a highly nuanced document. It made clear what was known, and evidentially based, and what was speculation. It avoided simplification or what Service termed ‘unidimensional’ answers.

Analysing Russia was much tougher than it had been twenty-five years ago, he began. During glasnost and the Yeltsin era there was real information about disagreements at the top of Russian politics. High-ranking insiders, including Yeltsin, wrote revealing memoirs. But with Putin’s rise to power in 2000, access to information in Russia underwent a ‘severe constriction’.

Top-level secrecy came back; the country reverted to a pre-1985 Kremlinology – when observers tried to decipher what might be going on by watching who stood next to whom on Lenin’s Red Square tomb. The impenetrable nature of contemporary Russian power diminished what could be said with confidence.

Service took issue with the way some commentators depicted Putin – ‘as the evil dwarf who operates from his secret cave and controls every minute step taken by his robotic minions’. He argued that there were two flaws to this negative school. First, it didn’t give credit to Putin for anything. Second, Russia from the time of Nicholas II onwards has always been a tricky country to rule. Service argued that Russia’s power vertical – its centralised political hierarchy – was in reality ‘patchily organised’. And, he said, even dictators had less power than they might wish for, and couldn’t ignore popular pressures or demands from Russian society.

Another known unknown was Putin’s relationship with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB at the time of Litvinenko’s murder. Putin’s backstory was understood; Patrushev was an old KGB associate of his from Leningrad. But it was unclear whether Patrushev secured Putin’s permission for operations in advance.

Service pointed to one piece of evidence – a memoir by Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s former prime minister. Putin offered Kasyanov the job in 2000. There was a condition: that Kasyanov didn’t meddle in Russia’s ‘coercive structures’ – the FSB and other security organs – which Putin considered his exclusive ‘turf’. Kasyanov stuck to the deal. Putin fired him anyway in 2004. He joined the opposition.

Kasyanov survived, but many other prominent Putin critics wound up dead. Service cautioned that it was difficult to prove the administration’s complicity in these crimes. Putin’s public response to Litvinenko’s killing illustrated ‘a verbal levity that borders on the macabre’, the professor observed. (Putin mocked Litvinenko’s letter of accusation and said there was no indication he’d suffered a ‘violent death’. ‘The people who have done this are not God, and Mr Litvinenko, unfortunately, is not Lazarus.’)

Putin’s own guilt was unproven. ‘But there can be little doubt about where his feelings lie,’ Service said.

Despite all of these caveats, Service’s conclusions were unambiguous: that Russia’s president set ‘a political climate of tolerance’ in which his agencies could go about their ‘repressive business’ without hindrance.

He went on: ‘The Putin administration has always been demonstrably secretive, manipulative and authoritarian with a ruthless commitment to protecting its interests at home and abroad … It appears to me unlikely that Putin did not exercise – at the very least – some oversight of Patrushev’s activities.’

Speaking from the witness box, Service said his findings might be ‘inscribed on my tombstone’. As befits an Oxford don, he employed a sparkling vocabulary. There was a rare outing for the word ‘desuetude’. (Service complained that the tradition of looking at the big picture had fallen away, replaced by compartmentalised scholarship.) The professor also talked about how Russia’s post-1991 market economy had ‘immiserated’ large sections of the country’s population.

In a supplemental report, Service further considered whether Putin’s Russia could be called – as Litvinenko originally hypothesised – a mafia state. The inquiry wanted to know the answer. Did Putin and senior figures in the Russian government have links with St Petersburg’s Tambov-Malyshev crime gang? Or with members of Russian organised-crime groups in Spain? And what about Litvinenko’s claim that Putin had good relations in the 1990s with the mobster Semion Mogilevich?

Mogilevich is an almost mythical Ukrainian-Russian mafia don who features on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted. The US accuses him of running a trans-national crime empire. It deals in weapons, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking and prostitution. And operates in America. According to Litvinenko, Putin met Mogilevich and gave him a krysha, or protection. Mogilevich lives in Moscow, shielded by the FSB and beyond the reach of US law enforcement. (Some sources say Mogilevich is now in Hungary.)

Mogilevich crops up in the leaked conversations from 2000 between Ukraine’s president Leonid Kuchma and his intelligence chief Leonid Derkach. Derkach says the mafia boss is on his way to Kiev to sort out various disputes, and adds: ‘He’s on good terms with Putin. He and Putin have been in contact since Putin was still in Leningrad.’ Was this in any way proof?

Service answered that such matters were ‘highly contentious’. There were few reliable sources. And the phenomenon wasn’t new. Organised crime had rooted itself in the USSR after Stalin’s death. It had truly flourished under perestroika, and had grown exponentially under post-communist conditions. The ‘corruption of the political process’ visible with Yeltsin had continued under Putin, Service said.

Russia, of course, wasn’t the only country with criminality at its core. Organised crime has penetrated practically every state in Latin America. Likewise Africa. And the state is geographically more extensive than just the capital. In Mexico, for example, criminal gangs have subverted entire regional administrations.

There was crime in other parts of Europe, too. Italy under the Christian Democrats harboured a huge mafia problem in the south – and in the north as well. In Italy, though, mafia interests never wholly predetermined public policy.

Service offered his own taxonomy as to what ‘mafia state’ meant. He gave ten definitions. He agreed that the ninth offered the best fit when talking about contemporary Russia: ‘a state in which criminal methods and organised crime play a substantial part but which also has countervailing features’. Undoubtedly, ministers and other top Russian officials were keen to enrich themselves. At the same time, Service told the tribunal, ‘not everything that happens in the Putin administration is unconstitutional and illegal and run for criminal purposes’.

It was illuminating. At times the conversation between Emmerson and Service took on the quality of a highbrow BBC or NPR discussion. Putin wasn’t Stalin; his popularity was, ‘alas, real’; like interwar Germany, post-1991 Russia was tempted towards extremism after economic depression and military defeat. Service said he didn’t see many positive sides to Putin. He was bad enough without the overdrawn comparisons made by some Russian democrats to Hitler. And he was the ‘luckiest ruler of the twentieth century’, who had benefited from a steeply ascending oil price.

There was some disagreement on method. Service took the long view: that the truth about Putin would emerge but that we’d have to wait. ‘It will be knowable eventually. It always is. We now know a lot of what we needed to know for decades about even Joseph Stalin. So I am confident that one day we will know about Putin, but it will be too late then. It will just be a matter for historians and not for people engaged in public affairs.’

Other witnesses took a less detached view. Litvinenko’s co-author Yuri Shvets, the former KGB agent, pointed out that ‘active measures’ – such as state assassinations – were always authorised at the highest political levels. This was, Shvets said, one of the KGB’s main traditions. It would be unthinkable for an FSB general, whether Viktor Ivanov or anybody else, to murder a political dissident without Putin’s express approval.

Speaking by video-link from the US, Shvets said that KGB ‘rule number one’ was to cover your back. That meant getting permission from your superior; in Russia the most important decisions were made by just one person. ‘I rule out the possibility that a decision to assassinate Sasha [Litvinenko] or anybody else outside of Russia would have been made without approval of the top authority of Russia, which is Vladimir Putin,’ Shvets told the inquiry.

In Litvinenko’s case, there were special factors as well. As Goldfarb put it, Putin’s conflict with Berezovsky and Litvinenko was deep-rooted and highly personal. ‘Nobody in his right mind, knowing how things run there [Russia], would authorise such an operation when one could be sure that Mr Putin would take a very close look at it after the fact,’ Goldfarb said. He characterised Litvinenko’s killing as not just a crime of politics but an emotional act – a work on Putin’s part of ‘passion’.

There were other good reasons to believe that Putin authorised the operation, Goldfarb added. One was polonium – non-state players couldn’t get hold of it. Russia’s atomic industry ministry would give it to the FSB only with presidential permission. Goldfarb cited a lengthy interview Putin gave state TV on the annexation of Crimea. The president boasted the operation had worked so smoothly because ‘I personally micro-managed it.’

There were few leaks from inside Putin’s Kremlin. What happened in its corridors was an enigma.

What there is is a literature from earlier times: a previous generation of Soviet spies had given details of Litvinenko-like operations. Goldfarb mentioned Sudoplatov, the Soviet intelligence chief whose department, the Administration for Special Tasks, was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of enemies abroad. Sudoplatov’s book corroborated rumours that the KGB had a poisons institute – Lab X – set up by order of Lenin. It functioned throughout the Soviet period. ‘As to whether it still exists, I don’t know,’ Goldfarb said.

If Soviet practices were anything to go on, orders to murder political enemies were never written down. There was no documentation for missions of the highest secrecy – only an oral instruction. (In an interview with Nick Lazaredes in 2003, Litvinenko recalled how in December 1997 he was summoned to the Lubyanka, the KGB and FSB HQ. His deputy boss Alexander Kamishnikov berated him for arresting rather than ‘removing’ criminals, in other words, snuffing them out. He showed him a copy of Sudoplatov’s memoir and said: ‘That’s what you should be doing.’)

Conversations like this were usually phrased in an oblique way. Sudoplatov recalls how in 1937 Stalin summoned him to discuss the fate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist sentenced in absentia to death. Stalin urged Sudoplatov to exploit Konovalets’s personal weaknesses. Sudoplatov said that Konovalets liked chocolates. When the meeting broke up, Stalin asked him if he understood the political importance of his mission.

Six months later, Sudoplatov met Konavalets in Rotterdam and presented him with a box of chocolates containing a bomb. He walked away; it blew up soon afterwards; the target was killed. Stalin was pleased.

Sudoplatov also masterminded the operation to murder Leon Trotsky, carried out in Mexico in 1940 by a communist agent, Ramón Mercader, using a small, sharp mountain-climbing pickaxe concealed under a raincoat. The previous year Stalin had summoned Sudoplatov to the Kremlin and in the presence of Laventry Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, said that Trotsky should be eliminated. The plan was discussed in euphemistic terms. Sudoplatov writes: ‘Stalin preferred indirect words like “action”, noting that if the operation was successful the party would forever remember those who were involved and would look after not only them, but every member of their family.’

The spy chief carried out further operations against other Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom were executed by injections of poison, under the guise of medical treatment. These murders were made to look like natural deaths, Sudoplatov said. Assassinations continued after Stalin’s death, always sanctioned at the highest level of the Communist Party.

According to Sudoplatov, the KGB’s special toxicological department fascinated successive Soviet bosses, including Gorbachev. ‘Our leaders were always interested in poisons; afterward the doctors who were involved in these experiments were purged,’ he wrote.

Inevitably, Sudoplatov was himself arrested after Stalin’s death. He spent fifteen years in jail before being released in 1968. At first, he had no doubts about the morality of killing Trotskyites and fascists – his country’s enemies. Later, he regretted the way in which communism chewed up so many innocents, including those who fought bravely against the Nazis.

In Sudoplatov’s view, Stalin and Beria were tragic and criminal figures – but also visionaries who played a constructive role in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward peasant state into an atomic superpower. ‘Victorious Russian rulers always combined the qualities of statesmen and criminals,’ the general observed.

Like Service, Sudoplatov believed the truth of any conspiracy would eventually emerge: ‘History shows that no top-secret decisions, no secret crimes or terrorist plans can be concealed forever. This is one of the great lessons of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Communist party rule. Once the dam is broken, the flood of secret information is uncontrollable.’