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

2 Journalist, Exile, Campaigner, Spy ^{London, 2000–2006}

It was late September 2000 when the figure – sandy hair, sporting appearance, no obvious luggage – slipped out of his Moscow apartment. From here he travelled to Sheremetyevo Airport and boarded an internal flight. Was anyone tailing him? The plane flew south and landed two hours or so later in Sochi on the Black Sea. This was southern Russia: warm, subtropical, hedonistic.

Since Soviet times, Sochi has been a holiday destination, both for the Politburo and for the ordinary citizen. There is a pebbly beach; a botanical garden; pleasant cafés and hotels along a sinuous promenade. The sanatoria have beguiling names – Rainbow, Golden Sheaf, Zhemchuzhina (Pearl) – but are typically squat, communist-era rectangles. In the afternoons guests plough up and down azure pools; by evening prostitutes sit in the lobby.

This traveller had no time to linger. After arriving in Sochi he was on the move again. A steamer shuttled between the ports of the Black Sea, once part of a single empire, and now divided between Ukraine, Russia and Georgia. The boat was heading to the Georgian town of Batumi. He got on last and handed his internal Russian passport to a customs officer. Plus a bribe of $10. In return, the officer agreed to glance away from a list of persons forbidden from leaving the Russian Federation.

The boat set off – Sochi, with its twisting green headland and brown-roofed hillside villas, diminishing in the distance. For Russians, Georgia is still the near abroad; only an internal passport is needed for entry. The figure disembarked at the port of Batumi and travelled directly to Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The first part of Litvinenko’s plan to escape had worked. But, as he knew, it was only a matter of time before the FSB noticed his disappearance, and – vengefully – came after him.

A week earlier, while in Moscow, Litvinenko had discussed his escape with his friend Yuri Felshtinsky. Felshtinsky, a successful historian and author, emigrated from the USSR in 1978 and settled in the US. He returned to Russia in 1998 to write Berezovsky’s biography, at Berezovsky’s request. The book never happened. The oligarch was an elusive subject. Felshtinsky may have failed to extract Berezovsky’s life story from him but he did become a member of his informal team. They disagreed about Putin, however, who Berezovsky insisted was ‘my friend’. (Felshtinsky predicted that future president Putin would toss Berezovsky in jail.)

During a state trip with Berezovsky to Baku, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko had shared a plane and a room. They got on. According to Felshtinsky, Litvinenko was a good storyteller who would talk for hours. As a KGB and FSB officer, Litvinenko had been and was still forbidden from fraternising with foreigners; this was his first sustained encounter with anyone with experience of the west. By 2000 it was clear that Felshtinsky’s forebodings about Putin were correct, and that Litvinenko’s troubles were just beginning. Felshtinsky agreed to help his friend escape, with Berezovsky’s considerable financial assistance.

Their plan went smoothly. Felshtinsky flew from Boston to Tbilisi and found Litvinenko alive and well. Litvinenko relayed a message to his wife instructing her to buy a new mobile phone. He called her on this number and told her to take a package holiday to somewhere in Western Europe. Two days later she flew out of Moscow with their son Anatoly. Their destination was Spain’s Costa del Sol.

In Tbilisi, Litvinenko had no clear idea what to do next. He grew nervy and restless: instead of staying in his hotel room out of sight he wandered round the town, with its churches and old quarter. At one point the local militia almost arrested him, a suspicious Russian with no clear purpose in the city. Litvinenko’s best option, he and Felshtinksy agreed, was to seek political asylum in the United States. But when Felshtinsky called in at the US embassy, desk officers showed no interest in his case.

To go further Litvinenko would need a full travel document: the FSB had stolen his international passport. Luckily, he had allies in high places. Berezovsky’s business partner Patarkatsishvili was Georgian, extremely rich, and friends with Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia’s then president. Patarkatsishvili arranged a Georgian passport for Litvinenko. The passport was genuine but the details inside it were false. Litvinenko got a new name: Mr Chernishev.

In Moscow, meanwhile, the FSB realised that its troublesome former agent had escaped. One of Litvinenko’s ex-colleagues, Andrei Ponkin, called up Felshtinsky, saying he was ‘concerned’ for Litvinenko’s well-being. Had he seen him? Felshtinsky claimed to be in Boston. Ponkin kept calling. Berezovsky suggested they go to Turkey and sent his private jet. The two men left Tbilisi – Litvinenko going through passport control as Mr Chernishev – and flew to Antalya on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

By now Litvinenko had realised that his exit from Russia was irreversible. Returning home would mean instant arrest. ‘I analysed everything. It was clear my fate was decided in Russia,’ he said. He rang Marina in Spain and laid out their options in stark terms. They could all go back to Moscow. But from prison Litvinenko would be unable to protect her and Anatoly. Marina believed that after a stint in jail her husband would eventually get out. Litvinenko demurred, telling her: ‘I will never leave prison. They will kill me.’

Marina agreed and flew to Turkey with Anatoly on Berezovsky’s plane. The Litvinenkos were reunited in Antalya but their problem remained: where could they go next? They knew no foreign languages, and practically nothing of the western world. Marina felt lonely and disorientated. Litvinenko was nervous that the FSB was closing in. His friends began to worry that he might do something outlandish.

Berezovsky called Alex Goldfarb, his long-time aide, in New York. It was 4 a.m. there. Goldfarb was a microbiologist by training and US citizen who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in the seventies. He had worked as an academic, as a journalist, and for the philanthropist George Soros, administering a programme to award grants to hard-up Russian scientists. Goldfarb resembled a New York professor – round metal glasses, beard, corduroy jacket, slightly dishevelled appearance. He had a shining intelligence, easy manner, and superlative English. I would later get to know him well.

Goldfarb also possessed a cool head, invaluable in this moment of crisis. A couple of days after Berezovsky’s summons, he arrived in Antalya. He rented a hire car and the four of them – Goldfarb, Litvinenko, his wife and son – drove to the Turkish capital Ankara, Goldfarb’s wife Svetlana travelling by plane. Felshtinsky had returned to the States.

While in New York, Goldfarb had called a staffer at the US security council who dealt with Russia. He had told his contact he planned to bring a Russian defector to the US’s Turkish embassy. The staffer was appalled and told him: ‘Don’t do this. You’re not a pro. It’s dangerous! Don’t even think about it.’

Undeterred, the party turned up at the US mission in Ankara. The embassy had been pre-warned. A consular official checked their documents, took their cell phones and escorted them to a secure sound-proof glass room guarded by marines – the ‘bubble’. Inside the bubble were two representatives of the CIA and a video-link with a Russian-speaker patched in from the United States.

The US agents interviewed Litvinenko on his own for three hours. He told them his story: his feud with Putin, the trumped-up charges, jail. The officials were non-committal. It was uncertain if the US would grant Litvinenko asylum. In the meantime he would have to wait. It was dark when Goldfarb collected Litvinenko and took him back to their hotel. The US embassy refused to provide security. At this point relations between Putin and the outgoing Clinton administration were warm. The White House viewed the Russian leader as fresh and dynamic – as an ally and a democrat. The Litvinenko case may have seemed like an ill-timed throwback to the Cold War.

By now, Litvinenko was convinced that the FSB was on his trail. Its next move, he thought, would be to kidnap him and to render him back to Moscow. That night, the Litvinenkos plus Goldfarb made a covert exit from their hotel, whizzing out of the underground car park. They drove in blackness to Istanbul. For security reasons they switched off their cell phones. The next afternoon Goldfarb found a message from the US embassy. He called back. There was an answer from Washington, which said sorry, we can’t help you, good luck.

The situation was now desperate. Patarkatsishvili offered to send his yacht; he suggested the Litvinenkos could hole up on it for a couple of months, bobbing in the blue waters off Istanbul, while he arranged more fake passports. Berezovsky felt Litvinenko should go to ground in Turkey. Goldfarb explored flying to Barbados via the US – impossible, it turned out, without an American transit visa. But what about France? Or Britain? He looked on the internet. No transit visa was needed to go via London. Goldfarb booked tickets to Tbilisi via London’s Heathrow Airport.

The next day, 1 November 2000, the four of them flew to the UK. Goldfarb knew London well but for the Litvinenko family it was terra incognito. They arrived at the transit section of Heathrow terminal three. Litvinenko and Goldfarb saw a uniformed policeman and approached him. The policemen stationed at the airport were used to all sorts of requests, including quite strange ones. The world in its many tongues and Technicolor guises flowed past. This sentence, though, stuck out.

Litvinenko said in English: ‘I am KGB officer. I am asking for political asylum.’

Britain would become the Litvinenkos’ new home. And – it appeared – a haven from enemies in Russia. Officials from the UK Home Office’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate interviewed Litvinenko in a custody suite. The interview went on for eight hours. Marina called her shocked mother in Moscow. Little Anatoly roamed round the terminal building, munching on a packet of M&Ms; he recalls being bored and feeling sick.

Goldfarb had arranged for a London solicitor, George Menzies, to come to the airport. Alexander, Marina and Anatoly were temporarily allowed to enter the UK while Litvinenko’s asylum application was considered. The authorities took a dim view of Goldfarb’s actions – people-smuggling. He asked if he might fly home to New York. They refused and deported him back to Turkey.

Over the next weeks, the family stayed in temporary accommodation paid for by Berezovsky. Litvinenko’s escape had cost the oligarch around $130,000 – small change for a man whose expenditure averaged around £1 million a month. (His bills included lovers, yachts – two of them – the upkeep of his luxury properties including a chateau in the south of France, bodyguards, jewellery …)

Berezovsky himself went into self-exile soon afterwards. He left Moscow for his villa in Cap d’Antibes and then moved to London. His new office was in Mayfair, at 7 Down Street, a modern complex opposite a church and a vintner’s. Down Street would become the hub for Berezovsky’s last ambitious and tragically doomed project: to bring down the Putin regime.

During this early period of exile, Litvinenko was worried about his safety. Might the British send him back to Russia? Could the Kremlin dispatch its agents to the UK? Menzies suggested the family adopt new English names. The solicitor’s office was in Carter Street, in south-east London. Carter sounded inconspicuous, middle-class, respectable.

Alexander’s new official name gave no hint of his previous career in the KGB – Edwin Redwald Carter. Marina became Maria Anne Carter. Anatoly got the name Anthony. Anatoly was enrolled at an English-language international school in Baker Street; the family moved into a temporary flat in Lexham Gardens in South Kensington; Anatoly would later study at the private City of London boys’ school. They began studying English, Alexander with the least success.

Days after arriving in London, Litvinenko got in touch with fellow émigré Vladimir Bukovsky. Bukovsky was a celebrated former political prisoner who had spent twelve years in a variety of Soviet labour camps, jails and psychiatric facilities. He revealed the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union – a practice that went on from the 1960s to the early 1980s, which saw thousands of dissidents tossed into mental hospitals for ‘anti-Soviet’ thinking.

In 1976, the USSR expelled Bukovsky. He settled in Cambridge, living alone in a suburban house on the city’s outskirts. When I visited him there in 2012 it had an overgrown garden, antediluvian yellow-and-brown wallpaper and fittings, and a sink littered with unwashed tea cups and cigarette butts.

Bukovsky became Litvinenko’s mentor and guru. According to Bukovsky, Litvinenko had a curious mind. He had missed out on university education and despite serving in the FSB knew practically nothing of the KGB. Bukovsky passed him documents that he had smuggled out of Moscow in 1991. They had come from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The files detailed the USSR’s long history of involvement in sponsoring international terrorism. The KGB supported liberation movements in Central and South America, Palestine and the Middle East. It supplied terrorist groups with explosives, weapons and cover documents. They blew up innocent people.

Litvinenko was appalled by what he read. He called Bukovsky, a night-owl, at four in the morning. The calls continued – sometimes as many as twenty or thirty a day. ‘He [Litvinenko] was totally shocked and said: “Listen, it looks like the KGB was always a terrorist organisation,”’ Bukovsky recalled. ‘I started laughing because I had known that since the age of sixteen. I said: “Well, Sasha, who do you think killed thirty or forty million of our citizens? It’s them.”’ Bukovsky was referring to Stalin’s 1930s purges, administered by the NKVD secret police.

The more Litvinenko read, the more he discovered the system was evil, Bukovsky said. When the communist regime collapsed, the regime continued in milder form. ‘More or less the same bureaucrats were sitting in the same cabinet, in the same offices, and old habits die hard, as you know,’ Bukovsky said. As an operative, Litvinenko found that many criminal threads led back to his own FSB building, and to neighbouring offices. The KGB, he discovered, had patronised organised crime too.

Marina Litvinenko said her husband’s tutorials with Bukovsky transformed him. ‘He was reborn. He became a dissident,’ she said.

Litvinenko began work as Berezovsky’s security adviser. According to Bukovsky, the billionaire’s carelessness amazed them both. Litvinenko found Russian intelligence had compromised Berezovsky’s inner circle and put moles inside his office. Berezovsky refused to fire them. ‘He was an incredibly naïve person,’ Bukovsky said. ‘When we first explained that Putin is going to kill him if he has a chance, he didn’t believe us.’ Berezovsky muttered that Putin had attended his wife’s birthday party, ‘so it couldn’t be true’.

In addition to working for Berezovsky, Litvinenko also embarked on a career as a journalist and writer. There was an obvious subject for him to explore. Prior to his escape, he had become interested in the infamous bombing of some Russian apartment blocks, which had occurred the previous year. In September 1999, nearly 300 people were killed when four multi-storey apartment blocks were destroyed in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk. Putin, then prime minister, blamed the explosions on Chechen terrorists. He used the bombings – and the prevailing national mood of fear and anger – to persuade Yeltsin to launch a military attack on Chechnya and its rebel leadership: the second Chechen war.

Something about the bombings was strange, though. In Ryazan, locals spotted three people – two men and a woman – unloading sacks from the back of a white Zhiguli car with Moscow licence plates. They put them in the basement of a suburban apartment block. A resident, Alexei Kartofelnikov, rang the police. Officers found three sacks containing the explosive hexogen and a homemade detonating device. The block was evacuated, the bomb made safe, and a major hunt launched for the suspects. They turned out to be agents of the FSB.

Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s director, later claimed that the sacks merely contained sugar, and that they had been left in the basement as a ‘training exercise’. The Duma’s communist opposition queried this. Now, Litvinenko, together with his friend Yuri Felshtinsky in the US, launched his own investigation. The pair concluded the FSB was responsible for the bombings. And that Putin covertly sanctioned the operation – involving the mass slaughter of men, women and children – to provide a casus belli for his pre-planned attack on Chechnya.

Their findings became a controversial book, Blowing Up Russia. It argued that the apartment bombings were the foundational act in Putin’s rise to power, a plot akin to the 1933 burning of the German Reichstag. The war in Chechnya boosted Putin’s public profile and catapulted him into the Kremlin. The Soviet Union’s collapse had put Russia’s spy agencies on the back foot. With Putin’s ascent to the presidency the KGB achieved its ultimate goal: ‘absolute power’. The FSB, Litvinenko argued, is a thoroughly criminalised entity and part of a government– mafia state.

Sometimes the agency makes use of organised criminals; sometimes it eliminates or jails them. Litvinenko gives a gruesome account of the FSB’s special operations in the 1990s – contract killings, shootings, ambushes, abductions, with victims burned alive and their eyes gouged out. The ‘agencies of coercion’ are involved in all sorts of crimes. They include bribe-taking, money-laundering and protection rackets. Their agents are untouchable. They have official ID.

Litvinenko’s knowledge of criminal structures was formidable. In the introduction, Felshtinsky warns the reader that Blowing Up Russia isn’t ‘superficial journalism’ but ‘something between an analytical memoir and a historical monograph’. Dense as it sometimes is, it’s a compelling piece of research. And an empirical one, flowing directly from Litvinenko’s personal knowledge of investigations.

Much of what Litvinenko wrote turned out to be correct. He was the first person to predict what would happen if Putin came to power. According to Felshtinsky, Litvinenko warned in early 2000 that people would be killed and arrested, and Putin’s opponents purged: ‘I can feel this. He will kill all of us as well. Trust me. I know what I’m saying.’ The book was published in 2001. The Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta ran extracts, and a documentary film – Assassination of Russia – followed in 2002.

Claims that the FSB was behind the apartment bombings gained traction. Litvinenko was invited to give video evidence from London to a parliamentary commission which launched its own investigation. Its deputy chairman was a Duma member, Sergei Yushenkov. He recruited a prominent Soviet dissident, Sergei Kovalyov, as chairman. The commission included journalists, lawyers and Tatiana Morozova, the daughter of a woman killed in the explosions. It asked the FSB and prosecutor general for documents, especially in relation to Ryazan.

The FSB’s apparent reply was characteristic. In August 2002, Vladimir Golovlyov, a Duma deputy who had helped to distribute the film, was shot dead. Then, in April 2003, Yushenkov was assassinated outside his Moscow home. Two months later, Yuri Shchekochikhin, a member of the Novaya Gazeta team and a senior Russian MP, was mysteriously poisoned and died in agony.

Felshtinsky had given Shchekochikhin a manuscript copy of Blowing Up Russia for publication. As well as working for the newspaper that serialised the book, Shchekochikhin was also a member of Kovalyov’s commission and had separately investigated FSB corruption. His symptoms – blistering on the skin, dramatic organ failure, coma – suggest he was the victim of a deadly toxin, most probably dioxin. The authorities refused to give Shchekochikhin’s family his medical records. These were classified as a state secret.

The commission’s legal counsel, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested. Trepashkin was Litvinenko’s close friend and had taken part in the 1998 press conference; sacked from the FSB, he became a lawyer. The charges against him were absurd. Road police placed a handgun in his car and then accused him of illegally possessing a firearm. He was further charged with espionage.

An initial print-run of Litvinenko’s book was successfully smuggled into Russia. In 2003, the FSB seized a second shipment and impounded 5,000 copies, on the grounds that it revealed state secrets. This was the first time a book had been banned in Russia since Solzhenitsyn. Nonetheless, it prevailed: in 2002 a poll suggested that 40 per cent of Russians doubted the official version of events. The Kremlin remains twitchy about Blowing Up Russia. In 2015 it was placed on a federal list of so-called ‘extremist’ literature.

In 2001, the Home Office granted Litvinenko indefinite permission to remain in the UK. This made his position more secure, at least on paper. In fact, there were continuous threats emanating from Moscow. Bukovsky recalls how Litvinenko and Anatoly, then eight, visited him in Cambridge:

‘It was springtime. We were walking in Cambridge, beautiful sight, the birds are singing and suddenly there was a call on his phone, so he answered it and became rather gloomy. By his replies, I understood that it’s some kind of threat. I asked him after the phone call was over: what was it?

‘Litvinenko said: “Some former colleagues from Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB. They said to me: ‘Do you feel yourself safe, secure in Britain? Come on! Remember Trotsky.’”’

Trotsky’s ice-pick murder in Mexico in 1940 was probably the most spectacular extra-territorial assassination of the communist era. Stalin had personally ordered it; the NKVD carried it out. Asked if Litvinenko understood the threat, Bukovsky replied: ‘Oh, definitely.’

The person who called Litvinenko in Cambridge was Ponkin, his old associate, now apparently back informing for the FSB. Ponkin told him that Russia’s prosecutor general was making up a case against him. According to Litvinenko, the prosecutor’s message was unambiguous.

Litvinenko said Ponkin told him that he should return alone to his own country as soon as possible, and then nothing would happen to him. ‘And if you do not return yourself then you will either be brought back in a body bag, or you will be pushed under a train,’ he reported his saying. Litvinenko interpreted the call as an attempt at negotiation. He told Ponkin: ‘This is a very nice offer but I refuse it.’ Ponkin relayed that Marina ‘wouldn’t be touched’.

The warnings continued via different channels. Russian spies traced Litvinenko’s home address in London – at the behest, Litvinenko believed, of FSB chief Patrushev. FSB agents shadowed him in Britain. In March 2002, a diplomat from the Russian embassy, Viktor Kirov, turned up at the family’s flat. He rang the doorbell, demanded to speak to Litvinenko, and said he wanted to give him ‘a package’. Marina refused to let him in. He came back the next morning.

Litvinenko went to his local police station and complained. He told them Kirov was the deputy rezident, that is, the number two in the UK bureau of the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence service. Litvinenko’s solicitor George Menzies wrote to the Home Office asking it to ‘take whatever steps are in your power’ to stop the embassy from harassing the family. The Home Office said there was nothing it could do.

That autumn, Trepashkin emailed from Moscow with gloomy news. He had met Colonel Viktor Shebalin, another former FSB colleague, and a man with vast contacts among serving officers. Trepashkin wrote that Litvinenko’s publication of Blowing Up Russia had sealed his fate:

‘In the course of the conversation, he [Shebalin] said that “you have been sentenced to extrajudicial elimination”, i.e. after the publication of this book, you will definitely be killed. Saying this, he asked me to stress that he would not be involved in this killing. He repeated several times about his non-involvement in the murder. Who specifically was going to eliminate you, Shebalin did not name, but he hinted that such people do exist (so you better write your will in advance).’

Litvinenko gave the email to Bukovsky, who translated it. It was passed to the Metropolitan Police. According to Goldfarb, Litvinenko was fatalistic about this and other threats. Menzies also sent the email to the Home and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices. In retrospect his letter seems poignant. Menzies wrote:

‘Our client [Litvinenko] does not consider that there is likely to be any substance behind this threat. That is to say, he considers that whilst he stays in the UK it is extremely unlikely the “sentence” as described would be carried out. However, given the nature of the threat, we felt it proper to draw this matter to your attention and to invite you to remind the Russian Embassy in London of the attitude of Her Majesty’s Government to the contemplation, let alone the carrying out, of such actions.’

The Home Office came back to Menzies with a polite brush-off: ‘We have no remit to intervene with the Russian Embassy in such matters.’

Tony Blair’s government, it appeared, was unwilling to make a fuss on Litvinenko’s behalf. And it’s doubtful that an official British complaint would have caused the intelligence officers serving at the Russian embassy in Kensington, west London, to break into a sweat. In any case, with UK officials seemingly unbothered, secret operations against Litvinenko continued.

Next, Ponkin flew to London with a Russian businessman. Litvinenko agreed to meet them at the Piccadilly branch of Wagamama, a Japanese noodle bar. Ponkin had a suggestion: Litvinenko should assassinate Putin! Ponkin said he had a friend in the Federal Protection Service, General Yuri Kalugin, who could provide details of Putin’s movements two weeks in advance. All Litvinenko needed to do was to get hold of some Chechens to do the hit …

The offer was a classic FSB ‘provocation’, and not a very good one. Its apparent goal was to add to the mountain of ‘evidence’ being gathered against Litvinenko in Moscow. This eventually resulted in Litvinenko being convicted in absentia of treason. Ponkin, meanwhile, delivered another message: ‘Don’t discredit our president. Stop writing articles.’ This was, Litvinenko said, one of the many hints that he should cease his critical journalism and shut up.

Litvinenko did the opposite. He wrote a second book, The Gang from the Lubyanka. It is based on extended interviews with Litvinenko, conducted by a Moscow journalist, Akram Murtazaev, and edited by Goldfarb. Litvinenko was one of the first writers to allege links between Putin and his associates and organised crime groups.

His thesis – at the time novel – was that Russia’s police and intelligence agencies had been perverted. They had started to make money from the very activity they were supposed to investigate, disrupt and prevent. There were other damaging allegations. Litvinenko claimed Putin was a KGB informant at university. And that he’d been on an undercover mission to penetrate Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, his long-term goal being to preserve the power of the FSB and Russia’s security agencies.

Litvinenko and Felshtinsky also continued to pursue the apartment bombings. They flew to Georgia to seek out Achemez Gochiyaev, a Chechen accused of planting one of the bombs. Gochiyaev was hiding in the Pankisi Gorge, a hideout used by Islamist rebels. They had been in contact with Gochiyaev via third parties. They failed to meet him and were forced to leave Georgia in a hurry after they received a message from Berezovsky, warning them he had heard they were in danger. Immediately after they left, their driver, who was working for the Georgian security services, was murdered.

There were further ominous warnings. In 2004, the Litvinenkos heard a noise outside their home in London – and the smell of fire. It was just before midnight. Marina rang the police. The blaze turned out to be small. It emerged that two Chechens had firebombed their house, as well as the neighbouring property of Litvinenko’s new friend, the Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev.

Handsome, groomed and with an immaculately trimmed white beard, Zakayev had begun his career as an actor playing Shakespearean roles in Grozny’s theatre. He fought in the first Chechen war and became foreign minister of Chechnya’s breakaway government. In 2000, after a car accident, he sought treatment in Western Europe, moving to Britain two years later.

Zakayev was the main emissary abroad of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria. By this point Ichkeria no longer existed: Russian troops had recaptured Grozny. Like Litvinenko, Zakayev was a noxious figure for the Russian government, which accused him of terrorism. By the end of the decade most of Chechnya’s independent leaders had been wiped out; Zakayev was the last man standing.

As well as Zakayev, Litvinenko became friends with a curious Italian called Mario Scaramella. Scaramella was the secretary to an Italian parliamentary commission that investigated links between Italian politicians and the KGB. Set up in 2002, the Mitrokhin Commission was politically motivated – an attempt by Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government to smear its enemies, in particular the former and future centre-left prime minister Romano Prodi.

Scaramella claimed that Prodi was a KGB operative. To support this controversial thesis he fed fake documents to Litvinenko in London. Litvinenko certified them as genuine. Whether he did this because he believed them or simply because he was paid to do so, we don’t know. Perhaps it was a combination of both factors. In fact, the Mitrokhin archive itself – based on notes made by a KGB defector – was more damning about other Italian officials at the Moscow embassy, who came out of the investigation far worse. (There was no evidence Prodi was ever KGB, but plenty showing Italian diplomats in Moscow falling into honeytraps and scrapes.)

This was a murky business indeed. Litvinenko was apparently trading in compromising material, for which there is always a ready market in Russia, known as kompromat.

Some of Litvinenko’s campaign work struck his friends as a little loopy. He blamed the 7/7 bombings – a series of coordinated bomb attacks in central London, carried out in 2005 by four British Islamist men – on the FSB. He also wrote in an article for the Chechenpress website that Putin was a paedophile. The incident that inspired it was certainly somewhat bizarre: the president, encountering a group of tourists in the Kremlin, pulled up the shirt of a small boy and kissed him on the tummy. Still, as Goldfarb observed: ‘Putin is probably not a paedophile.’ To Litvinenko’s critics the article was further proof of his sheer public wildness.

Asked later if Litvinenko was a bit of a conspiracy theorist, Goldfarb added: ‘Well, at the time I thought so, but with what has happened since, I have become a conspiracy theorist myself, so it’s very hard to judge.’

In July 2006, the Duma rushed through two new laws that seemed to have a direct bearing on Litvinenko. The new legislation allowed Russia’s spy agencies to eliminate ‘extremists’ anywhere abroad, including in the UK. The definition of ‘extremism’ was also expanded. It now included ‘libellous’ statements about Putin’s administration.

Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky – the former KGB colonel turned high-profile MI6 informant – understood perfectly what these changes meant: that state murder in western countries now had official cover. In a letter to The Times, they wrote: ‘Thus, the stage is set for any critic of Putin’s regime here, especially those campaigning against Russian genocide in Chechnya, to have an appointment with a poison-tipped umbrella. According to a statement by the Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov, the blacklist of potential targets is already compiled.’

Russia was about to host the G8 summit in St Petersburg. Western leaders should be prepared ‘to share responsibility for these murders’ or not go, Bukovsky and Gordievsky wrote. Needless to say, there was no boycott.

Litvinenko’s activities in exile were multifarious: campaigner, journalist, security consultant, investigator. In London he gave interviews and attended public meetings. The common thread that linked these personas was Litvinenko’s hatred of Putin, the man who had put him in jail, and of the FSB. He was the Russian president’s most persistent and ebullient critic.

One important activity, however, remained hidden.

The bank entries speak of middle-class normality. Shopping trips to Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, direct debits for Sky Digital, and London’s congestion charge. The account is with HSBC. Its holders are ‘Mr Edwin Redwald Carter & Mrs Maria Anna Carter’. The balance in 2006 fluctuates between £969.02 and £8,076.36. The Carters don’t appear to be especially well-off. Nor are they broke.

In fact, Litvinenko’s bank statements tell us a lot. They give a picture of a typical, health-conscious family (purchases from The Natural Choice), with one child and a car. The Litvinenkos were living at 140 Osier Crescent, a terraced house of yellow brick with a small balcony and a parking spot. The modern estate is in Muswell Hill, in the north London borough of Haringey.

The bank statements root the Litvinenkos in their area. There are debits of £5.40 from Transport for London in East Finchley and Highgate – Litvinenko’s regular off-peak travel-card. Visits too to The Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill. And Japanese food: Yo! Sushi at Gatwick Airport and Itsu, Litvinenko’s favourite restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. The odd small sum of money comes in from time to time – a £75 payment from the David Lloyd centre, where Marina taught a kids’ class in ballroom dancing.

One regular credit entry is unusual, though.

On the 26th of each month, Litvinenko received an anonymous payment. It appears on the statement simply as ‘Transfer’, from an unnamed bank account. The account ends with the digits ‘3698’. The sum in sterling is always the same: ‘2000.00’. The paying organisation appears – one might think – to be rather bashful.

The sum of £2,000 found in among the groceries and trips to Tesco came from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6.

British intelligence didn’t recruit Litvinenko in Moscow. Nor was he ever a spy in Russia: his career in the KGB and FSB involved detective work against criminals, not intelligence. When he arrived in the UK at the end of 2000 seeking political asylum, Litvinenko told Home Office officials truthfully: ‘I didn’t work in intelligence and I didn’t work against England.’ He added: ‘I have as yet had nothing to do with British intelligence.’

According to Marina Litvinenko and Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko began working for MI6 in 2003, some two years after he fled to London. The secret service agency put him on its payroll the next year. In Britain, he was never a full-time agent.

Instead, Litvinenko worked for the agency as an expert adviser. MI6 consulted him on Russian organised crime in Europe, with Litvinenko travelling to various European countries, especially Spain, but also to the Baltic states, Italy and Georgia, assisting their law-enforcement efforts. He spent more time away on ‘business trips’. He continued his journalistic work but kept a lower profile.

In line with its long-standing policy, the British government has neither confirmed nor denied that Litvinenko was an MI6 employee. Its file on Litvinenko hasn’t been made public. We don’t know who hired him. Or if Sir John Scarlett – MI6’s prickly then chief, known by the initial ‘C’ – ever perused Litvinenko’s personnel record.

Scarlett knew about Moscow agents. He had been involved in the operation to recruit Gordievsky, the UK’s most prized defector. Scarlett was fluent in Russian and lived in Moscow in the 1970s. In 1994, Scarlett, by this point Moscow station chief, was expelled from Russia in a political row.

Marina Litvinenko says she knew of her husband’s undercover job. After all, she says, how else might Alexander explain the mysterious £2,000-a-month payments? She didn’t know details. She was uncertain if Litvinenko worked for MI5 or MI6, the numbers a source of confusion.

MI6 gave Litvinenko the tools of the trade. He got a British passport for trips abroad – not in his name, of course, but under an as-yet-unrevealed pseudonym. MI6 also assigned him a handler, codename ‘Martin’, and he was given a dedicated encrypted phone for calling him. Since Litvinenko’s English was spotty, ‘Martin’ was almost certainly a Russian-speaker.

The pair would typically meet in coffee shops in London’s West End, including in the basement of the Waterstone’s bookshop in Piccadilly – an inconspicuous spot for a rendezvous, with a backdrop of novels and historical biographies. ‘Martin’ drank coffee; Litvinenko ate pastries. A Russian oligarch, Alexander Mamut, later bought the Waterstone’s chain and launched a dedicated Russian-language section upstairs.

According to Goldfarb, MI6 spies were nice guys – a procession of well-bred Johns and Tims. Goldfarb, an expert microbiologist, says MI6 contacted him in 2003. The agency wanted to know if Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had biological weapons. He didn’t know. He met the spooks in a Piccadilly branch of Caffè Nero.

What did Litvinenko do for MI6? Litvinenko had spent ten years investigating the Russian mafia and its links with Kremlin officials, including Putin. He knew names, faces, backstories. Goldfarb says Litvinenko asked him to translate the ‘Uzbek File’, which features as a chapter in his book The Gang from the Lubyanka.

The Blair government’s take on Russia was increasingly negative, but framed through the prism of Putin’s rollback of civil society and democracy. This was something new – apparent evidence of how crime lords and politicians conspired to send Afghan drugs to European capitals via St Petersburg. One of those allegedly involved, directly and indirectly, was Putin. Litvinenko writes: ‘As an operative officer I have well-founded suspicions regarding Mr Putin – that he is a member of this gang.’

Like all foreign spy agencies, MI6 has a network of agents in the field. It also relies on electronic intelligence, supplied by the UK government’s monitoring station, GCHQ, in Cheltenham, and passed to government ‘customers’. In addition, the UK is part of Five Eyes, a spying alliance encompassing the US and its National Security Agency (NSA), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s probable that Litvinenko reviewed intercept material gleaned from eavesdropping operations against mafia targets. Marina Litvinenko says her husband identified individuals who featured in surveillance photographs.

In Moscow, former FSB colleagues claimed Litvinenko revealed the names of Russian ‘sleeper agents’ in the UK to MI6 – another act, from the Kremlin’s viewpoint, of treason. This seems fantastical. Litvinenko never worked in Russian intelligence. So it’s unlikely he would have known the identities of undeclared Russian spies, living long-term in Britain, the US and elsewhere.

Litvinenko’s attitude towards spying appears pragmatic rather than romantic. The tradecraft didn’t interest him much. He was also very discreet. Litvinenko was frequently in contact with Scaramella, the Italian, while helping the Mitrokhin Commission in Rome. Scaramella asked Litvinenko repeatedly if he was a British agent.

Litvinenko told Scotland Yard later: ‘During all our initial meetings he always, insistently, importunately, asked every day whether I was working for MI5 and MI6. He was the only person who asked me so often about it. I told him, Mario, what difference does it make for you? I said, you know, if I say yes you’ll think I’m an idiot because such things like this are not spoken about. And if I say no, you won’t believe me.’

Litvinenko denied he was working for British intelligence, telling Scaramella: ‘I have played spies in my life up to here. And the main thing is, I write books, why would they need me? Think yourself.’

Litvinenko’s consultancy work for Her Majesty’s Government threw up two important questions. Neither has been properly answered.

One, did the Kremlin discover that Litvinenko worked for MI6?

Two, did MI6 consider Litvinenko to be at risk from Moscow’s assassins? If not, why?

In addition to his work for MI6, Litvinenko began in 2005 to provide regular information to Spain’s intelligence services. In fact it was British intelligence that introduced Litvinenko to its Spanish counterpart. The Spanish security service assigned Litvinenko a Russianspeaking handler named ‘Jorge’. The £2,000-a-month retainer paid by MI6 also covered Litvinenko’s work with Spanish spooks and Spanish prosecutors. With increasing frequency, Litvinenko began flying to Madrid and Barcelona. Marina said her husband would return from his trips to Spain with presents – a Real Madrid T-shirt, porcelain souvenirs. As an undercover spy he flew business class, on one occasion even managing to get the autograph of David Beckham, a fellow passenger, for his son Anatoly. But his reason for being in Spain was far from frivolous.

The Spanish authorities were at the time grappling with a serious and chronic problem. From the mid-1990s onwards, vory v zakone – in Russian, thieves in law – began to enter Spain. Vor v zakone was the highest rank in Russian organised crime. Spain provided a useful haven for Russian mafia bosses, as a base for operations, and a territory safer than Russia itself. Their influence grew. Their activities in Russia included contract killings, kidnappings, drug-running, prostitution and arms-smuggling. Profits in Russia, including from illegal casinos, were laundered in Spain and invested in real estate.

In 2004, Spanish prosecutors created a formal strategy to ‘behead’ the Russian mafia.

The biggest group active in Spain was the Tambov gang, the same St Petersburg outfit that Litvinenko investigated in the 1990s as an FSB officer. It also included Alexander Malyshev, once the Tambov’s competitor, and now its Spain-based criminal partner. The authorities began extensive investigations. They discovered the mafia had no known jobs or sources of income but were living in lavish mansions. The cash clearly came from money-laundering. The challenge was to prove this.

According to the Spanish daily El Pais, Litvinenko provided information on top mafia figures. They were Vitaly Izguilov, Zakhar Kalashov and Tariel Oniani. In the early 1990s, Litvinenko’s FSB department had investigated Oniani, a Georgian-born Russian citizen, in connection with a string of kidnappings. One of its victims was the chairman of the Bank of Russia. The case against Oniani was dropped after Litvinenko got a call from above ordering him not to touch him. Kalashov was a hit man. He, too, enjoyed protection from official Russian structures.

Spanish security officials launched two major operations against the Russian mafia, codenamed Avispa (2005–7) and Troika (2008–9). The first phase of Avispa in 2005 saw the arrest of twenty-eight people, twenty-two of them alleged thieves in law. Litvinenko provided the Spanish with details of locations, roles and activities of gang members. The Spanish hailed the operation as the biggest ever undertaken against a global mafia network.

In reality, the results were somewhat mixed. The biggest targets – Kalashov and Oniani – both managed to escape the country on the eve of the raids following a tip-off, most probably from the Russian security services or a corrupt Spanish official. Kalashov was arrested in Dubai in 2006 and extradited to Spain. His fortune, according to court documents, was €200 million.

A secret diplomatic cable, leaked in 2010, and sent from the US embassy in Madrid, suggests that Litvinenko was key to these Spanish operations. His main contribution was to untangle the intimate links between the Russian mafia, senior political figures and the FSB. They were, in effect, a single criminal entity.

In January 2010, Jose Grinda Gonzalez, a special prosecutor for corruption and organised crime, met with US officials in Madrid. In a ‘detailed, frank’ briefing to a new US–Spain counter-terrorism group, Grinda said that the mafia exercised tremendous sway over the global economy. He said that Russia, Belarus and Chechnya had become ‘virtual “mafia states”’ and predicted that Ukraine – under its new Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych – was ‘going to be one’.

The special prosecutor said it was an ‘unanswered question’ whether Putin was personally implicated in the Russian mafia and whether he controls its actions.

The leaked cable reads: ‘Grinda cited a “thesis” by Alexander Litvinenko … that the Russian intelligence and security services – Grinda cites the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and military intelligence (GRU) – control organised crime in Russia. Grinda stated that he believes this thesis to be accurate.’

There was evidence that certain Russian political parties operate ‘hand in hand’ with the mafia, the prosecutor said. This evidence came from the intelligence services, witnesses and phone taps. He said that the KGB and its successors created the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), which is home ‘to many serious criminals’. He also claimed there were ties between politicians, organised crime and arms trafficking.

According to Grinda, organised criminals in Russia ‘complement state structures’, with Moscow employing the mafia to do whatever the ‘government of Russia cannot acceptably do as a government’. He said that Russian military intelligence, for example, used Kalashov to sell arms to the Kurds, with the aim of destabilising Turkey.

Grinda added: ‘The FSB is absorbing the Russian mafia but they can also eliminate them in two ways: by killing organised crime leaders who do not do what the security services want them to do, or by putting them behind bars to eliminate them as a competitor for influence. The crime lords can also be put in jail for their own protection.’

The evidence collected by Spanish investigators would lead to the arrest in 2008 of Gennady Petrov, the Tambov gang’s alleged boss; his number two, Alexander Malyshev; and Izguilov. Leaks to the Spanish press talked of the ‘hair-raising’ contents of wire-tapped conversations. In them, senior mafia figures boasted of their connections with Russian government ministers to ‘assure partners that their illicit deals would proceed as planned’.

It wasn’t until 2015 that the names of some of these ministers were revealed. Grinda, together with a colleague Juan Carrau, presented a 488-page complaint to Spain’s Central Court. The petition brought together ten years of investigative work against the Russian mafia.

According to the news agency Bloomberg, which got hold of the petition, Petrov had his own top-level government network in Moscow. It features many of Putin’s allies. They include Viktor Zubkov, Russia’s prime minister between 2007 and 2008 and the chairman of Gazprom, the natural gas extractor and one of the world’s largest companies. Zubkov’s son-in-law Anatoly Serdyukov, Russia’s former defence minister, also features.

Other officials mentioned as being ‘directly related’ to the alleged gang leader are deputy prime minister Dmitry Kozak and Alexander Bastrykin, who studied law with Putin in Leningrad. Bastrykin is the head of Russia’s investigative committee that opens (and shuts) major criminal cases. It was Petrov who allegedly secured Bastrykin’s appointment. One other name is Leonid Reiman, a former communications minister.

Putin appears three times, including in a 2007 conversation between two Tambov operatives. (They are discussing a house in the Alicante region – and say that Putin owns a neighbouring property in nearby Torrevieja. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, describes this as ‘nonsense’.)

The most intriguing name is that of Nikolai Aulov. Aulov is deputy chief at Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service. His boss is none other than Viktor Ivanov, the politician and former KGB officer who had the ear of Putin and who was the subject of Litvinenko’s 2006 report. The dossier logs seventy-eight phone calls between Aulov and Petrov and describes Aulov as ‘one of the most important persons for Petrov’. In 2008, the petition says, Petrov asked an associate to get Aulov to put pressure on Russia’s new customs chief. The mafia boss wanted to facilitate port shipments for his group.

The court document seeks to charge twenty-seven people, including Vladimir Reznik, a deputy in Putin’s ruling United Russia party and chair of the Duma’s financial markets committee. Petrov was spotted on the island of Mallorca with Reznik. Spanish police raided Reznik’s Mallorca mansion, allegedly a gift from the gangmaster.

It was an extraordinary picture – mobsters and ministers; money-washing and gun-running; the Kremlin not so much a government as a well-entrenched international crime group with truly big ambitions.

The accused Russian politicians deny wrongdoing. Reznik told Bloomberg his relationship with Petrov is ‘purely social’. Meanwhile, Spain’s prosecution of Russian mafia suspects ran into various legal snafus. The suspects would hire Spain’s best lawyers; often they got bail. The strategy to behead them, though, was working.

All of this was thanks to Litvinenko. He made clear to ‘Jorge’ that he was willing to testify in court against Putin and Ivanov, spilling everything he knew about Putin’s alleged links with the Tambov gang.

This would be some court case. And enough reason for powerful people in Moscow to want Litvinenko silenced.