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

A Note on Sources

The Litvinenko inquiry website, www.litvinenkoinquiry.org, is an invaluable source of information about the Litvinenko case, much of it used in this book. For more than eight years, details of Scotland Yard’s murder investigation remained secret. Now the evidence is publicly available: witness statements, including Litvinenko’s; a forensic report into every location contaminated by polonium; testimony by expert scientists; police interviews with the two killers in Moscow. The website features transcripts of all thirty-four days of hearings at the High Court, and the evidence of sixty-two witnesses.

This was one of the UK’s most extensive murder inquiries. Many details are remarkable. The Met’s modelling department mapped radiation readings onto graphic 3D reconstructions of key locations. We can see for the first time the object used to murder Litvinenko. (The actual photo reveals an ordinary white ceramic teapot. The graphic version is a lurid purple; purple is the colour code used to illustrate deadly levels of alpha radiation.)

There is CCTV footage of Litvinenko arriving at the Millennium Hotel; it freezes the moment before he was poisoned. Plus phone logs that confirm Dmitry Kovtun, one of history’s more inept murderers, was looking for a cook to administer what he called ‘a very expensive poison’. We get some of the official record: confidential e-grams from Britain’s ambassador in Moscow; a brush-off from the Home Office to Litvinenko’s solicitor, in the wake of death threats from Moscow. And Litvinenko’s own writings and interviews.

The evidence we are missing belongs to the UK government. This was presented in secret to Sir Robert Owen. It informed his final report, but wasn’t made public. I asked one former MI6 officer when the agency’s files on Litvinenko might be released. He replied: ‘Never.’ He added: ‘We haven’t declassified anything since the beginning of the service in 1909.’ These documents might compromise serving agents, he said.

Still, we live in an era of large data leaks: Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, the banking secrets of the rich and powerful. I’m confident that the files will eventually find their way into daylight. (If anyone wants to hasten this process, please send me what you can in a brown envelope.) Inside Russia there are likely to be few written documents: state murder is a clandestine business; Stalin’s instruction to assassinate Trotsky was delivered orally. But when Putin’s reign in Russia ends, new details may emerge, including from inside the FSB itself.

Most of the quotations in this book come from two primary sources: my conversations with those involved, and their public evidence before the inquiry. I’m grateful to the following who agreed to be interviewed: Marina and Anatoly Litvinenko; Alex Goldfarb; Ben Emmerson; Yuli Dubov; Nikolai Glushkov; Viktor Suvorov; Vladimir Bukovsky; Akhmed Zakayev; Olga Kryshtanovskaya; Professor Norman Dombey; Bill Browder; and others. One or two of my interlocutors didn’t want to be named.

In Moscow, I interviewed Andrei Lugovoi twice, in 2008 and 2010, and Dmitry Kovtun in 2008. In Italy, I interviewed Litvinenko’s father and siblings. Before their deaths I met Boris Nemtsov, in Sochi, and Boris Berezovsky, in London.

I give a fuller account of the harassment my family and I faced in Moscow in my 2011 book Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia (published in the US in 2012 as Expelled). Some details are retold here when they are relevant to Litvinenko’s story. Others are new: the fact that I inadvertently flew to Moscow on Lugovoi’s polonium plane, sitting a few rows away from his contaminated seat.

I’m grateful to my colleagues at the Guardian – especially Kath Viner, Paul Johnson and Jamie Wilson – for allowing me to combine book writing with international reporting. And to Laura Hassan and my wonderful publisher Guardian Faber. Most of all, thanks to my wife Phoebe Taplin, my first and best reader.