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

1 Mafia State ^{Russia, 1988–1999}

In September 2006, in London, the exiled Litvinenko put the finishing touches to a secret report. It was explosive stuff. The subject was Viktor Ivanov, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends and top advisers. Ivanov was a career KGB officer, the head of Russia’s powerful federal anti-narcotics agency, and one of very few people who had ‘direct access’ to the ear of the president.

Ivanov – so the report alleged – was also a vindictive, sociopathic ‘monster’, with long-standing links to the St Petersburg mafia. This mafia in turn did business with Colombian drug-smugglers. Putin, so the report said, had connections with the same mafia gang in what was Russia’s most criminalised city. He even advised the board of one of the mafia’s front companies.

The report included colourful details about Ivanov’s biography. According to Litvinenko, he’d been a mediocre spy. While his colleagues were sent on important overseas missions, Ivanov had been shuffled into the human resources department of Leningrad’s KGB office – ‘a sort of dump place’, as the report put it, and ‘the dead and gloomy end of a professional career’. It continued: ‘Other KGB men treated human resources people with contempt.’

In human resources, however, Ivanov made useful discoveries. He found himself well placed to collect compromising information on his KGB comrades. He could use this kompromat to destroy other people’s careers. Ivanov also developed a set of personal operational rules that would allow him to thrive in the KGB. And to overleap his more able but less crafty co-workers. His two years serving in Afghanistan – invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979 – confirmed to Ivanov the efficacy of these insights.

Rule one: it was important never to come up with an initiative in the KGB. If you did you’d be asked to implement it and then punished for not doing it successfully. According to the report, Ivanov was silent in meetings. He transformed himself into ‘a sort of professional Mr Nobody’. Rule two: he realised it was necessary to suck up to anybody more senior in the KGB’s hierarchy – to recognise who had ‘more rights in a bureaucratic sense’. The boss was always right.

Ivanov’s rise coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and followed a late-1980s order from the KGB’s top brass to go into business. At the time, the only people who understood the free market were criminals. Ivanov established relations with the Tambovskaya crime gang and its leader Viktor Kumarin, a villain with a mop of dark hair and a neat moustache. Kumarin was then embroiled in a major turf war with his rival Alexander Malyshev, and Malyshev’s gangster army.

The prize was control of St Petersburg’s seaport. The port was a major trans-shipment facility for Colombian drugs, which arrived here before continuing their lucrative journey to Western Europe. According to Litvinenko, Ivanov helped Kumarin wipe out the competition. In return, he got a share of the seaport’s business. The Tambovskaya group structured its criminal activities via a series of subsidiaries and daughter companies; Ivanov set up firms of his own, ‘Block’ and ‘Basis’.

It was the early 1990s. Another KGB spy helped Ivanov. This was Vladimir Putin. Officially, he was no longer with the kontora – as the KGB styled itself. Instead, he was working for St Petersburg’s new mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. As every recruit knew, though, hardly anybody ever quite leaves the KGB. The two spies, Ivanov and Putin, had something else in common: the KGB had marked them down as second-raters, mediocrities unfit for high office, something they must have resented.

Litvinenko’s report said: ‘Ironically, while Ivanov was cooperating with the gangsters, he was promoted to the operational department of [the] fight against smuggling and became its boss. His former subordinates described him as a monster boss – rude, authoritative and stubborn. It was a time when the line between the law enforcement officers and professional criminals was often very thin.’

The next paragraph reads: ‘While Ivanov was cooperating with gangsters, he was protected by Vladimir Putin, who was responsible for foreign economic relations at the office of St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak.’ It adds: ‘Putin was himself not Mr Clean at that time.’

This was something of an understatement. Links between Putin and the criminal underworld turned up in all sorts of places. The report quoted leaked tape-recordings made in 2000 of Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s then-president, who said his own spy agency had got hold of documents concerning a German company named SPAG that was a front for criminal activities. Its main job was ‘laundering [the] money of a Colombian drug cartel by buying out real estate in St Petersburg’. Kumarin, the gangster, sat on the board of a SPAG daughter company. Putin, in the mayor’s office, was SPAG’s adviser.

Gangsters, cocaine, the KGB, spies, sleaze, millions of dollars in cash – all of it on Europe’s doorstep, as Russia morphed in the late twentieth century from communist dictatorship to a new and murky form of hyper-capitalism. It was, as the report frankly put it, a ‘weird time’. The masters of this changing universe were organised criminals and their upwardly mobile friends in Russian politics. What Ivanov and Putin were allegedly doing wasn’t unusual for the standards of the time: taking a cut here, a bribe there. Everybody did that, given a chance.

What was unusual was that they would go on to rule the Russian Federation.

Litvinenko’s 2006 report amounted to an eight-page hand grenade, tossed into the control room of Russian power. It was written for RISC management, a British security company based in London. RISC specialised in due diligence. This meant carrying out extensive checks on Russian firms and prominent individuals at the behest of western businesses. Such reports involved a mixture of official and more sensitive secret sources.

Litvinenko provided the detail on the St Petersburg mafia and its activities in the 1990s. Another exile actually wrote the report, a former KGB major called Yuri B. Shvets. Shvets was everything that Putin and Ivanov weren’t. He was an intelligent and enterprising secret agent blessed with literary gifts. Tall, handsome, and with a sweeping mane of dark black hair, he looked every inch the romantic spy abroad. The KGB had recruited him in 1980, inviting him to join its prestigious external intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate.

Shvets had studied at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow. It was, he wrote, a surprisingly liberal institution by the standards of the late USSR, which attracted young men and women from ninety different countries. He described himself in his memoir as ‘neither a convinced communist nor a dissident’. Not all of the university’s students were so politically ambivalent: one of Shvets’s predecessors was a Marxist-Leninist from Venezuela named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Sanchez, Shvets wrote later, was not your typical student, spending most of his time away and abroad. He would become better known as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

After graduation, Shvets spent two years at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Intelligence Institute. The KGB training school was based in a pleasant forest in Yurlovo, not far from Moscow. There, he said, he was taught the secrets of the trade. He learned from legendary spymasters who had worked with the Cold War’s most famous western defectors – the Rosenbergs, who stole the US’s atomic secrets, and the upper-class Cambridge spy ring, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

Shvets also did a two-month training stint with a Spetsnaz or special forces unit. He parachuted from planes, learned how to handle a variety of weapons and to plant mines. He was taught how to blow up bridges and to interrogate enemy prisoners. He learned guerrilla tactics. He was instructed not to think or query the state. Shvets recalled how one wiry paratrooper colonel told him: ‘Your duty is to execute, at any cost, any task assigned by our motherland.’

One of Shvets’s classmates at the KGB academy was Putin. Putin had grown up in a working-class family in Leningrad; an older brother died during the Nazi siege of the city; his grandfather was Lenin’s cook. As a teenager he learned judo to defend himself from neighbourhood toughs. From an early age he aspired to join the KGB, inspired – he later said – by the Soviet TV spy drama The Shield and the Sword. He studied law. The KGB recruited him in 1975 after he finished Leningrad University.

Putin’s world view reflected the a priori thinking of the KGB. The agency was suspicious, paranoid and prone to conspiratorial reasoning. Putin was convinced that the US and the western world were engaged in an unsleeping plot against the Soviet Union.

Virtually all the graduates from the KGB institute got jobs afterwards in the first directorate and were sent to foreign ‘residencies’, as the KGB termed its covert offices abroad. For reasons which are mysterious, Putin didn’t make the grade, Shvets believed. ‘Putin belonged to the 1 per cent of losers. He was sent back to St Petersburg,’ he said later. Others say Putin went back to his home city and was given the task of recruiting foreigners on Soviet soil. In 1984, Putin did eventually get a foreign assignment. After a second year-long stint at the institute he was moved to Dresden, in the GDR.

Between 1985 and 1987, Shvets found himself in the more glamorous setting of Washington, under journalistic cover at the Soviet embassy. He was a correspondent for TASS, the Russian news agency. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union and, in particular, the KGB. By the 1980s, the KGB had virtually no sources in the west, he thought; instead, its operatives churned out a series of meaningless reports for incompetent and risk-averse bureaucrat-generals back at the ‘centre’ in Moscow.

Shvets quit the KGB in 1990 and sought political asylum in the US. From there he published a lively espionage memoir, Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy In America, which described his successful recruitment of an unnamed American agent, codenamed ‘Socrates’. He began writing due-diligence reports for American corporations seeking to cash in on the new post-communist Russia.

One of the skills Shvets learned at KGB school was analysis: how to craft and present the perfect intelligence report. Often it would include a psychological pen-portrait of a target. The best of these telegrams were done with swift, compressed strokes.

The Litvinenko–Shvets dossier on Ivanov fitted this model. Under a heading titled ‘personal characteristics’, it described Ivanov as ‘a very complex man with [a] difficult personality’. It went on to say: ‘He is masterful at understanding the balance of forces around him, identifies the latent leaders (very important in the surreal world of Russian bureaucracy) and is highly capable of using his knowledge to his personal benefit.’ If offended, Ivanov could become your ‘worst enemy’. He had a ‘vindictive’ streak and would try to identify and then ‘punish’ anyone who leaked ‘negative information’ about him.

It ended: ‘Many representatives of the new generation of the Russian leaders view Ivanov as a remnant of the past who fits more to Joseph Stalin times than to the modern environment. A source who worked with Ivanov told us that Ivanov apparently has a latent complex of inferiority. He apparently realises that he is not intellectually smart and compensates this by Byzantine-style intrigue, in which he feels himself on his turf.’

Litvinenko and Shvets were a good team. Shvets had a wide network of intelligence sources inside Russia who provided him with real information. Litvinenko, meanwhile, had worked for the FSB in the 1990s in the department tasked with fighting organised crime. He had direct knowledge of its operations. Litvinenko’s English was poor, but Shvets, a long-term resident of the US, could write in fluent sentences. They worked together via email and phone calls from America to Britain.

On 19 September 2006, Litvinenko gave the eight-page report to RISC. Litvinenko also passed a copy of the report to another man, a Moscow-based business partner whom he had no reason to mistrust: one Andrei Lugovoi. Doing this was clearly dangerous, but Litvinenko had known the wealthy businessman for over ten years, had been working closely with him for the previous twelve months and believed him to be trustworthy. They had similar backgrounds: both were ex-KGB, moved in Berezovsky’s circle and apparently shared grievances against the Russian state. Indeed, Litvinenko had previously commissioned Lugovoi to write his own version of a dossier on Viktor Ivanov. When it arrived from Moscow, this second Lugovoi report was ‘trash’, RISC felt – inferior to Shvets’s classy document and a mere half-page of A4. Litvinenko handed Lugovoi Shvets’s version while Lugovoi was on one of his frequent business trips to London to show him how it might be done.

Clearly, if the Litvinenko–Shvets report ever fell into the hands of the Kremlin it would provoke anger. Serious anger. Branding Ivanov a vindictive monster was one thing. But implicating Russia’s president in shady deals with the St Petersburg mafia and Colombian drug smugglers was another. There were plenty of general reasons why the Kremlin might want Litvinenko dead. But this report on its own was certainly a strong enough motive to have him killed, British detectives were to conclude.

Shvets claims that Ivanov personally lost $10–15 million in kickbacks after the western company which commissioned the report read it with horror and pulled out of a major deal with Russia. The name of the company has not been revealed. Amongst his other business interests and his KGB role, Ivanov is chairman of Aeroflot, the Russian state carrier. (He denies wrongdoing.)

When Lugovoi flew back to Moscow, the FSB detained him at the airport. According to Shvets, they found Litvinenko’s report. By accident or design? We don’t know. Was this the moment that Lugovoi was recruited by the FSB, forced to do their dirty work in order to avoid punishment for his role in handling the report? Or – more likely, perhaps – was Lugovoi working for the FSB from the start and this was therefore a deliberate betrayal?

Either way, the contents of the report were passed back to the Kremlin. The nature of any subsequent conversation between Ivanov and Putin is unknown. But, weeks later, Lugovoi was on his way back to London with his partner Kovtun, this time in the role of assassin – on a mission to kill the author.

The origins of Litvinenko’s own bitter personal feud with Putin go back to the 1990s, and to Litvinenko’s career as an FSB officer. Those who knew him characterise Litvinenko as mercurial, dedicated and obsessive when on a case – a good sleuth or operativnik in an organisation riddled with wrong-doing.

Litvinenko had plenty of antecedents. Think Arkady Renko, the honest Soviet policeman who features in Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb would liken him to the eponymous hero of Serpico, the 1973 movie starring Al Pacino, in which a decent cop goes undercover to expose corruption inside his own force. Others would bend the rules, cheat, lie. Litvinenko refused. He would stick to the truth and the law.

Another friend and fellow exile, Viktor Suvorov, likened Litvinenko to a different literary character, from Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers. Like everyone who knew him, Suvorov referred to Litvinenko as Sasha. ‘Sasha was pure D’Artagnan,’ Suvorov said. ‘He was tall, handsome, sporty and open.’ He added: ‘He met so many real criminals. He understood really bad people, how bad they were. And yet he was very optimistic. He still believed in humankind.’

Litvinenko was born on 12 December 1962 in the Russian city of Voronezh. He had something of a fractured childhood. His parents, Walter and Svetlana, divorced when he was a baby; he grew up with his grandparents in the city of Nalchik, in Russia’s wild north Caucasus, close to the mountains. In between he had stints living with his mother in Moscow and an aunt in a town called Morozovsk. He went to secondary school in Nalchik.

His grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call the Second World War. A month before he was due to be called up for national service at the age of seventeen, Litvinenko enlisted in the army. Between 1981 and 1985 he attended a Soviet military academy in Ordzhonikidze, now called Vladikavkaz. Vladikavkaz, in north Ossetia, is Russia’s gateway to the Caucasus: a place of rugged beauty, hillside fortresses and heavy skies prone to mist and rain.

In 1988, Litvinenko got transferred to a special division of the ministry of internal affairs. Here, in Moscow, the KGB hired him. Litvinenko began work in military counter-intelligence. In 1991, he joined the department that combated organised crime, corruption and terrorism. With the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 the KGB ceased to exist and Litvinenko’s unit became part of the new FSK. In 1993 the FSK was renamed the FSB.

When still at military school and aged just twenty, Litvinenko married Natalia. He became the father of two small children, Sonya and Alexander. The relationship failed and by 1993 the couple were estranged. That summer – on 16 June – Litvinenko met his future second wife Marina, a ballroom dancing teacher. She had been married before too. It was her birthday party.

Marina was slim and attractive, with short blonde hair, boyishly cut, high cheekbones and clear blue eyes. She cut a gamine figure; her clothes smart and understated verging on conservative; earrings a single stud. I got to know her much later. What makes Marina extraordinary is her warm personality. She is someone of high emotional intelligence: concerned for others, friendly, affectionate, tactile. And – this came later too – courageous.

Before the party, two of Marina’s close friends had been receiving threats from some former business partners over a ballroom dancing trip to Sri Lanka that had gone wrong. Frightened, the couple went to a police station. There they met Litvinenko – a senior FSB officer – who took the unusual step of offering them his personal protection. Marina’s friends were impressed. Litvinenko struck them as professional and calm. They brought him along to Marina’s birthday celebration.

Litvinenko was meant to be on holiday but he worked on the case flat-out. This was characteristic: once gripped by an assignment Litvinenko would often not sleep for three days. After rows with Natalia he moved out and lodged with his mother. That autumn he and Marina began living together. In summer 1994 they had a son, Anatoly; they married a few months later. It would be a happy partnership.

Three months later, in December 1994, Boris Yeltsin launched an attack on the rebel republic of Chechnya, in what was to become the First Chechen War. The goal was to wipe out Chechnya’s bid for independence. The Kremlin anticipated quick, decisive victory. Instead, the invasion turned into a bloody disaster for Moscow, with the Russian tank force sent on New Year’s Eve to re-take Chechnya’s capital Grozny destroyed and the army humiliated.

Litvinenko had grown up in the Caucasus; he understood the mentality of southern Russia’s majority Muslim population. In 1995, the FSB sent him back to Nalchik, to offer communications support to the forces fighting close by. At first Litvinenko supported Yeltsin’s war. Gradually, however, he grew disillusioned – with the Russian army’s brutal methods and with the president’s political goals, seemingly driven by imperial pique.

In January 1996, the Chechen guerrilla leader Salman Raduyev raided the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan, near the Chechen border. His fighters seized the local hospital. They took 3,000 people hostage. After negotiations, Raduyev was allowed to return to Chechnya, with his fighters and 160 hostages. His convoy got as far as the last village before the border, Pervomaiskoye. A Russian helicopter gunship opened fire on the lead bus; the Chechens took cover in nearby cottages.

Litvinenko was sent with his FSB team into what was to become a hellish siege. Russian forces surrounded the village for five days – then bombarded it with tank fire and Grad missiles. On the ninth day of the crisis, the surviving rebels with their hostages broke out of the encirclement at night, fleeing across a field under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. At least twenty-nine civilians and 200 combatants from both sides perished.

According to Marina, the slaughter had a profound affect on Litvinenko. The themes were familiar: the Russian state’s indifference to civilian casualties, and the incompetence of its military command. He returned to Moscow in poor shape. ‘He looked very bad, his hands and feet were frozen, and he needed a week to recover,’ Marina said. His sympathy for Chechens and their struggle against the centre grew; it would later become a journalistic obsession and a future area of conflict with Putin.

During this same period, Litvinenko met and became friendly with a man named Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was a mathematician and academic who had gone into business as the Soviet Union collapsed. Like a determined object pushing at a tough membrane, he had penetrated Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. He published the president’s memoirs and became friends with Yeltsin’s influential daughter Tatyana Yumasheva.

Berezovsky was Jewish, clever, unscrupulous, self-promoting, ambitious, solipsistic, chameleon-like – a whirlwind of restless energy and speech. Asked years later what the appeal was of being with Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb – who worked for him – answered simply: ‘It was fun.’

This was a moment in which Yeltsin, his poll ratings dismal ahead of Russia’s 1996 presidential election, made a deal with a small group of businessmen. These were the oligarchs. They agreed to get Yeltsin re-elected. In return the president, in effect, sold them Russian state assets at crazily low prices. Berezovsky acquired an interest in a major oil firm, Sibneft, together with a young oil trader called Roman Abramovich.

As Berezovsky told it, his rise to power and influence made him enemies. Especially inside the former KGB. Russia’s spy agencies were on the back foot following the KGB’s failed coup in August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev. Berezovsky said he urged Yeltsin to rein in the new FSB, and to debar former KGB operatives from high office. Russia needed to go through the same ‘lustration’ process that east Germany and the new Czech Republic went through after the fall of communism, he said.

The FSB, however, had plans of its own. Its goal was to regain the KGB’s lost supremacy. As Berezovsky later put it to British detectives: ‘KGB never disappeared. They were shocked because of [democratic] revolution in Russia. Step by step they start[ed] to understand what happened and to get back control.’ Yeltsin, he said, did ‘strong damage’ to them, but ‘nevertheless they were trying all the time to organise’. The FSB ‘didn’t like’ him, he said.

Berezovsky’s nerve centre was the LogoVAZ Club, a hunting lodge in the centre of Moscow. In 1994, Berezovsky left this office, climbed into the back of his Mercedes, and sped off. A car bomb exploded, killing his driver and severely injuring his bodyguard. Berezovsky survived and spent two weeks in Switzerland recuperating. The FSB used this attempted assassination as an excuse to dispatch Litvinenko to investigate Berezovsky and keep an eye on his affairs.

This was the beginning of a relationship that would define Litvinenko’s life. In March 1995, a gunman shot dead Vladimir Listyev, Russia’s most popular TV anchor, in the stairwell of his Moscow apartment. Listyev was the head of ORT, Russia’s first channel. Suspicion fell on Berezovsky, who had just taken over ORT together with a Georgian billionaire, Badri Patarkatsishvili. Berezovsky denied involvement; we don’t know who was responsible but it would certainly have been unlike him to use those methods. He flew back to Moscow from London.

When Moscow police came to arrest Berezovsky, Litvinenko went to the scene. He realised that in custody Berezovsky’s life was at risk: it was not unknown for the authorities to cause ‘accidents’ to happen behind closed doors. What happened next, Berezovsky told Scotland Yard, was ‘very unusual’: ‘He [Litvinenko] took his gun and said [to the police] if you try and catch him now I’ll kill you.’ Litvinenko called the head of the FSB, who agreed to give an order to protect Berezovsky. The police retreated and left.

At the time, Berezovsky scarcely knew Litvinenko, the good Samaritan. Afterwards, he said, they became ‘very close’. Marina Litvinenko said: ‘Boris said many times Sasha [Alexander] saved his life, and he was very grateful.’ Litvinenko was still working for the FSB but from then on became an informal part of Berezovsky’s entourage.

Meanwhile, Litvinenko was growing disenchanted with the leadership of his own organisation. The FSB was riddled with corruption, he learned. In 1997, he was posted to the FSB’s directorate for the investigation and prevention of organised crime, a covert unit known by the initials URPO. ‘It was the most secret department. It was FSB within FSB,’ Litvinenko said. His boss was Major General Evgeny Khokholkov. Unbeknown to General Khokholkov, Litvinenko had investigated him before. And been horrified at what he found.

Back in 1993, Litvinenko had investigated a group of bent FSB officers. He discovered that the officers – all members of the Uzbek KGB, transferred to Moscow – were taking bribes from an oil trader. The officers reported to Khokholkov. Khokholkov was also receiving protection money from Central Asian drug lords. Heroin was travelling from northern Afghanistan to Europe via Russia, with Khokholkov allegedly taking a cut.

The URPO special operations unit had its own secret office, away from the FSB’s headquarters in the Lubyanka building in central Moscow. URPO had been set up to perform ‘special tasks’ – including, if necessary, extra-judicial murder. Litvinenko, to his growing dismay, soon found himself expected to carry out unlawful activities as part of his new assignment. He received orders to detain and beat up a former FSB officer turned whistleblower called Mikhail Trepashkin. He was also instructed to kidnap a rich Moscow-based Chechen businessman, Umar Jabrailov. If necessary, Litvinenko was told to shoot Jabrailov’s police bodyguards. Litvinenko refused to obey.

But it was another order from a senior colleague that would provoke a political scandal and Litvinenko’s dismissal from the FSB. Yeltsin had appointed Berezovsky deputy head of the security council. Berezovsky helped to negotiate a peace deal with the Chechen rebels. Hardliners viewed this agreement as treachery – and Berezovsky as its perfidious architect.

One day, Litvinenko’s superior Alexander Kamishnikov came up to him. According to Litvinenko, he began by saying: ‘Look, we must be a true successor to the KGB, we must have continuity and you must defend the Motherland, you must discharge your duties properly. We have fallen on hard times, difficult times, and we must be firm and strong.’

Litvinenko was uncertain what to make of this speech. Kamishnikov, however, then continued: ‘Litvinenko, you know Berezvosky well, you must kill him.’

Litvinenko later told UK Home Office officials: ‘I could hardly believe what he had said and asked him if he was serious. He moved closer and repeated: “You must kill Berezovsky. Russia has fallen on hard times and there are people who are very rich who have robbed our Motherland; they have corrupted authorities and they are buying everyone in authority.”’ Kamishnikov said that a legal route would, of course, be preferable but in order to save the country it was necessary for Berezovsky ‘to be destroyed’.

According to Marina Litvinenko, the conversation left her husband ‘unhappy and nervous’ for two months. In the best traditions of Soviet conspiracy, the order wasn’t written down. Nonetheless, it was an order – one that Litvinenko viewed as tantamount to illegal terrorist activity.

Litvinenko tried to figure out what to do. It was New Year, and Berezovsky had gone to Switzerland for treatment after tumbling off his snowmobile. In March 1998, he finally tracked Berezovsky down to his dacha and told him about the conversation. Berezovsky refused to believe him. Litvinenko returned with several of his URPO colleagues – Andrei Ponkin, Konstantin Latyshonok and German Shcheglov. They persuaded Berezovsky the murder plot was genuine. Shocked, Berezovsky took the evidence to the deputy chief of Yeltsin’s private office.

Litvinenko’s action triggered turmoil inside Russia’s power structures. The FSB ran its own ‘investigation’, carried out by the same people who had apparently ordered Berezovsky’s liquidation. Privately, Khokholkov and Kamishnikov were furious. They wanted revenge. In April 1998, meanwhile, together with two URPO colleagues, Litvinenko recorded a video statement filmed at Berezovsky’s Moscow office. It was for use in case he was jailed. Or worse, killed. They made a deposition to the military prosecutor.

Litvinenko was a punctilious officer, and over the coming months noted down the threats made against him. There were many. His phone was bugged; he noticed he was being followed. A well-known journalist with links to the security services, Alexander Khinstein, published Litvinenko’s identity. Another article accused him of torture, extortion and muggings.

One day in May when he came into work, Lieutenant Colonel N. V. Yenin bawled him out in front of his colleagues. Yenin threatened to assault him, and said: ‘You bastard, you traitor. You prevented honest Russian people from murdering this filthy Jew … If you don’t shut your trap we’ll sort you out in our own way.’

Days later, Litvinenko was returning with his wife Marina from their dacha to their Moscow flat. A gang of young people attacked and beat him, kicking him in the face. Litvinenko got his gun out, said he was an FSB officer, and fired a warning shot in the air. He tried to arrest the youths. One of them told him: ‘We know where you live. If you force us to go to the police we’ll cut your wife’s and your children’s heads off.’

Khokholkov and his allies were determined to make Litvinenko suffer. In August he was suspended from his department and told to find another internal job. The FSB’s human resources office made it clear that he had ‘betrayed the system’ by ‘washing dirty linen in public’. There were further libels in the newspapers, including a claim that he’d failed to pay child support to his ex-wife Natalia.

Faced with a scandal, Nikolai Kovalyov, the FSB’s director, had tried to get Litvinenko to drop his complaint. This didn’t work. Berezovsky, meanwhile, was pulling all the strings he could at the Kremlin. Prosecutors began an investigation. After a few weeks URPO was dissolved; Khokholkov transferred; Kovalyov fired. It looked like victory for Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

President Yeltsin then appointed an unknown mid-ranking officer to replace Kovalyov as head of the FSB. This was Vladimir Putin.

Berezovsky had many flaws, but the greatest of them was surely his inability to distinguish friend from foe. He had known Putin since late 1991. He regarded him as a protégé. They’d been on holiday in France. ‘He was my friend,’ Berezovsky would tell Scotland Yard. At the time, Berezovsky viewed Putin as someone who would loyally serve his interests.

Berezovsky encouraged the suspended Litvinenko to go and see this new director, to introduce himself and to tell him everything he knew.

In his memoir, The Uzbek File, Litvinenko writes: ‘Putin’s appointment was a shock to everyone. Unlike Kovalyov, who rose through the ranks to a three-star general, Putin was a little-known colonel of the reserves working for the Kremlin administration. Everyone considered him a Berezovsky puppet. The consensus among the operativniks was that the new Director will not last long. He will be rejected by the system.’

Litvinenko continued:

Litvinenko spent that night ‘drawing up a scheme for Putin’. It contained everything he knew about organised crime and corruption, including the principal mob groups with their areas of activity. He drew arrows leading to their connections in government, with the FSB, the interior ministry and the tax service. He listed commercial companies used for money laundering. He included his Uzbek file, setting out the drugs trail from Afghanistan to Europe and America, the branches and contacts in Russia, and the ‘protection ring’ deep within the FSB.

The following morning, Litvinenko turned up with this impressive dossier. He brought along two colleagues, but Putin wanted to see him alone. Litvinenko recalled that he was unsure how to greet his new boss – should he address him as ‘Comrade Colonel’ or ‘Comrade Director’? He felt sorry for Putin. ‘We were of the same rank and I imagined myself in his shoes – a mid-level operativnik suddenly put in charge of some 100 senior generals with all their vested interests, connections and dirty secrets.’

In the end, Putin pre-empted Litvinenko, came up from his desk, and shook his hand. ‘He seemed even shorter than on TV,’ Litvinenko noticed.

It was to be their first and last substantial meeting. It was also unsuccessful. And rather surreal.

Litvinenko wrote:

Litvinenko handed Putin a list of FSB officers whom he regarded as ‘clean’, and remarked that there were still ‘honest people in the system’. He added that with Putin’s backing they could fight the corruption that was rife in Russia and the security services. Together they could ‘strike a blow’ against organised crime. Litvinenko told Putin: ‘If we decide to tackle the Russian mafia seriously it will be very dangerous.’

Putin nodded, feigning agreement. He took the list as well as the part of the dossier dealing with drugs. Putin wrote down Litvinenko’s home phone number. He said he’d be in touch. He never called.

It was months later that Litvinenko discovered what happened as soon as he shut the door and left the director’s office. Putin picked up the phone. He ordered the FSB’s internal affairs unit to begin an immediate criminal investigation against Litvinenko, and to bug Litvinenko’s telephone.

Putin’s indifferent attitude at their meeting bewildered Litvinenko: why would he not want to investigate criminal wrongdoing at the top of his own service? Later, Litvinenko said that his contacts inside the FSB gave an explanation. Putin, Litvinenko alleged, had connections with Khokholkov’s team from his time as deputy mayor for economic affairs in the St Petersburg administration of Anatoly Sobchak. Putin had ‘common money’ with Khokholkov and the Uzbeks. At the very least, Litvinenko wrote, Putin was personally involved in ‘a cover-up of organised criminal activities connected with drug traffic in Russia and Europe’.

The meeting with Putin lasted ten minutes. It took place in August 1998. From this moment on, Litvinenko’s already tricky situation got worse. His weapon was confiscated and salary stopped. His friend Berezovsky, however, seemed oblivious to the worsening relations. In November, Berezovsky wrote an open letter to Putin, which began: ‘Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich.’ The Kommersant newspaper owned by Berezovsky published it. Berezovsky’s tone was friendly – he still regarded Putin as an ally, and as an enemy of the communists, widely regarded as Yeltsin’s chief political foe.

Berezovsky said he’d been ‘inspired to write this letter by the pressing issues of national security’. He mentioned his ‘good long-term relations’ with the FSB chief, whom he commended for ‘honesty and professionalism’. Berezovsky then explained how he had learned of the plot to kill him – and how Litvinenko and the four other whistleblowers had written up a report for the presidential administration. The investigation into the plot had gone nowhere, though, Berezovsky complained. He urged Putin to pursue the matter and to secure ‘the constitutional order’.

Four days later, the stakes were elevated further when Litvinenko and his URPO colleagues staged an extraordinary press conference at the Interfax news agency in Moscow. They were to do something no FSB officers had done before: publicly to accuse their superiors of grievous crimes. Litvinenko, the main actor, sat in the middle. He did most of the talking. He made no attempt to hide his identity.

His companions were more bashful. One, Viktor Shebalin, wore a ski-mask; three others, Ponkin, Shcheglov and Latyshonok, put on dark shades. They looked like off-duty bank robbers. Only one other participant was unmasked: Trepashkin, the former FSB officer who had raised his own complaint against the agency. He was one of the men whom Litvinenko had been ordered to beat up.

Litvinenko told the journalists he was holding a press conference to draw the attention of Russia’s leadership and parliament to abuses going on inside the FSB. He said that he and his subordinates had received illegal instructions to kill and kidnap people and to extort money. Instead of protecting the state, senior FSB officials were busy lining their pockets.

Asked if he was scared, Litvinenko said he perfectly understood there would be retribution. ‘I know the habits of this organisation and therefore suspect that we shall all be strangled like blind puppies,’ he replied, adding that ‘as a citizen’ he considered it his duty to act. He said the plot against Berezovsky demonstrated that there was ‘anti-semitism’ in Russia at the very top. It was clear, he said, he was being hounded for his opinion that ‘nationalism is evil’.

The press conference was a sensation, massively reported on Russian TV and in print. Soon afterwards, in December, Putin gave an interview to the journalist Elena Tregubova at his office in the Lubyanka. Putin said he could understand why Berezovsky was alarmed – after all, Berezovsky had survived one assassination attempt. However, Putin took a dim view of Litvinenko’s actions. He told Tregubova: ‘FSB officers should not stage press conferences and should not expose internal scandals to the public.’

In January 1999, Putin fired Litvinenko, personally signing an order kicking him out. Putin also disbanded his unit. ‘Sasha knew it [the press conference] was a very extraordinary event, that the FSB will not take it so easy,’ Marina Litvinenko said. Her husband had told her, in darkly humorous tones, that one of two things would now happen to him.

‘They will kill me or I will be arrested,’ he predicted.

He was right: on 25 March 1999, Litvinenko was arrested. Four men dressed in civilian clothes grabbed him near Moscow’s Rossiya hotel, shouting: ‘FSB, you’re under arrest!’ They bundled him into the back of a van and started beating him with fists on his back.

After being interrogated by a military prosecutor, Litvinenko was hauled off to Lefortovo Prison. This is a drab, yellow three-storey Moscow building lined with spiraling razor wire. I would later visit it myself under unpropitious circumstances.

Lefortovo was the KGB’s most notorious jail. Its former inmates included ‘enemies of the state’ during both the Stalinist and late Soviet periods. One was the writer Yevgenia Ginzburg, who was held there before being transported to Siberia. Another was the Soviet dissenter Vladimir Bukovsky, who would become Litvinenko’s friend and guru. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and dissident, wrote about Lefortovo in The Gulag Archipelago.

The FSB uses Lefortovo for its highest-profile cases. One wing serves as the FSB’s investigative department. There are a series of upstairs suites – small, boxy rooms where FSB officers in olive-green uniforms interview suspects; downstairs a K-shaped prison. On arrival, Litvinenko was stripped, searched and dumped in a solitary cell. He immediately began a hunger strike. The prison governor persuaded him to abandon it. Litvinenko would spend the next eight months in Lefortovo, including thirty-six days in solitary confinement.

Litvinenko was charged with abusing his position and beating up a suspect. According to Marina Litvinenko, the military prosecutor in charge of his case, Vladimir Barsukov, told her that Litvinenko’s real crime was to have gone public with his complaint against the FSB. Now he had to be punished. Barsukov added that if Litvinenko were acquitted, he would simply open another case against him. And, if necessary, ‘another and another’. The goal was to lock Litvinenko away.

Barsukov was telling the truth. Litvinenko denied the charges against him and in November 1999 a judge at the Moscow garrison military court found him not guilty. Court officials removed his handcuffs. Immediately a group of masked FSB officers burst into the room and re-arrested him. It was an ambush. This time Litvinenko was transferred to Butyrka, a Moscow prison controlled and administered by the federal penitentiary service. He spent the next twenty-four hours in solitary, in a tiny shoe-box-like cell, without food, water or sanitation. The cell was so small he could only stand or sit.

Inside Butyrka a group of unknown people summoned Litvinenko twice. They asked what he knew about Putin, urged him to confess, and said frankly: ‘You realise, of course, you can be poisoned here and we cannot really help you?’

Even by the standards of Russian justice, the new charge against him was ridiculous: he was accused of stealing from a vegetable warehouse. Litvinenko complained via his attorneys that the charge was fabricated, and in December he was released on bail. It was clear, though, that the FSB had no intention of giving up. In April 2000, military prosecutors dropped this charge and came up with another more serious one – stealing explosives and ammunition.

By this point, Litvinenko was running out of options. This new case would be heard in Yaroslavl, 170 miles (270 km) outside Moscow, and far away from public scrutiny. The hearing would be closed. A verdict had already been decided, Litvinenko was told – eight years at a labour camp in Nizhny Tagil, a city in the Urals.

The political situation had changed too. The previous week Russia had elected a new president, the country’s second post-communist leader. Yeltsin was gone. A new era was beginning. There had been, in effect, only one candidate to succeed Yeltsin. This was Putin. He had been doing the job on an acting basis for the previous three months, since January.

If he stayed in Russia Litvinenko would go to jail for a very long time. Probably, he would never emerge. That left only one other possibility. Escape.