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

5 Murder in Mayfair ^{Millennium Hotel, 44 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London, November 2006}

The Millennium Hotel is an unusual spot for a murder. It overlooks busy Grosvenor Square: an enclave of grass and plane trees. It’s practically next door to the heavily guarded US embassy. Rumour has it that the CIA has its station on the fourth floor. A statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt – wearing a large cape and holding a stick – dominates the north corner of the square. In 2011 another statue would appear, that of the late US president Ronald Reagan. An inscription hails Reagan’s contribution to world history in the twentieth century and his ‘determined intervention to end the Cold War’. A friendly tribute from Mikhail Gorbachev reads: ‘With President Reagan, we travelled the world from confrontation to cooperation.’

The quotes would seem mordantly ironic in the light of events that took place just round the corner, and amid Putin’s apparent attempt to turn the clock back to 1982, when the former KGB boss Yuri Andropov – the secret policeman’s secret policeman – was in charge of a doomed empire called the Soviet Union. Next to the inscriptions is a sandy-coloured chunk of masonry. It’s a piece of the Berlin Wall, retrieved from the east side. Reagan, the monument says, defeated communism. This was an enduring triumph for the west, democratic values, and for free societies everywhere …

Grosvenor Street – home to Erinys, and the scene of Lugovoi and Kovtun’s earlier murder attempt – was 500 metres away.

Like most upmarket London hotels, the Millennium Hotel has CCTV. Its multiplex system can run up to forty-eight cameras; on 1 November 2006, forty-one of them were operational. The cameras work on a time-lapse system. They take an image every two seconds; the video is retained for thirty-one days. This footage has a jerky quality, a little like the early days of cinema – images jump; people appear and vanish; life ebbs and flows. And yet it’s an honest record. A time stamp – days, hours, minutes – fixes everyone. The stills offer a miraculous time machine, a journey into verisimilitude.

But even modern CCTV has its limitations. Some parts of the Millennium Hotel weren’t covered by it – as Lugovoi, an expert in surveillance, and a former VIP bodyguard, would have noticed. One camera was fixed above the reception desk. It shows the check-in counter; a bank of three computer screens; uniformed hotel staff. In the left of the picture is a part-view of the foyer. There are two white leather sofas and a chair. Another camera – you wouldn’t notice it, unless you were looking – records the steps leading up to the lavatories. Opposite the ladies’ and gents’ is a business centre and a bank of pay-phones.

The hotel has two ground-floor bars accessed from the foyer. There is a large restaurant and café. And a smaller Pine Bar immediately on the left as you enter through a revolving door from the street. The bar is a cosy wood-panelled affair, furnished at the time in traditional English style with equine pictures on the wall. Three bay windows look out onto the square. In CCTV terms the Pine Bar is a security black hole. It has no cameras, its protean guests invisible.

The evening before Kovtun flew into London, camera 14 recorded this: at 20.04 a man dressed in a black leather jacket and mustard-yellow jumper approaches the front desk. On either side of him are two young women. They have long, groomed blonde hair: his daughters. Another figure wanders up from the sofas. He’s a strikingly tall, chunky-looking bloke wearing a padded black jacket and what resembles a hand-knitted Harry Potter scarf. The scarf is red and blue, the colours of Moscow’s CSKA football club.

The video captures the moment the Lugovois checked in on 31 October – on this, his third frantic trip to London in three weeks, Andrei Lugovoi arrived with his entire family. He came from Moscow with his wife Svetlana, daughter Galina, eight-year-old son Igor, and friend Vyacheslav Sokolenko – the guy with the scarf. At the hotel Lugovoi met his other daughter Tatiana. She had arrived from Moscow a day earlier with her boyfriend Maxim Bejak. The family party was due later the following evening to watch CSKA Moscow play Arsenal in the Champions League at the Emirates Stadium in north London.

Like Lugovoi, Sokolenko was ex-KGB. But Sokolenko wasn’t, detectives would conclude, a murderer.

Camera 14 records the Lugovoi party at the front counter. Tatiana shared room 101 with her sister Galina; Lugovoi, Svetlana and Igor were in 311. Sokolenko and Kovtun – who was to check in the following morning – occupied room 382. It was found to be riddled with polonium; the biggest readings came from objects Kovtun touched – phone, heat-control panel, sink. CCTV records Kovtun arriving at the Millennium at 08.32 on 1 November – a diminutive figure carrying a black bag over one shoulder. He’s wearing a black zip-up top and drainpipe jeans with turn-ups; before flying out from Hamburg Kovtun had bought trousers from the Massimo Dutti store.

Kovtun makes calls on his mobile. (The number is never discovered.) Around 10 a.m. the Russians leave the hotel and walk north to Marble Arch. Lugovoi buys a ticket for his family, plus Sokolenko, on a Big Bus sightseeing tour of London.

The events of the next few hours were to become infamous – with Litvinenko the fated victim, the Russian state an avenging god, the media a sort of over-excited Greek chorus. What actually took place was another piece of improvisation that might easily have misfired. Lugovoi and Kovtun had decided to lure Litvinenko to a further meeting. But the evidence suggests they still hadn’t figured out how exactly they were going to kill him.

At 11.33 a.m. Kovtun borrowed Lugovoi’s mobile phone and called up the Albanian cook – the man who might help with putting ‘the very expensive poison’ in Litvinenko’s food or drink.

The cook – identified as C2 – was in an Albanian coffee shop in Stratford, east London. He was tied up with helping a customer. The conversation, such as it was, went like this:

The cook spoke languages other than Albanian: Italian, English and German. Kovtun, by contrast, was never much of a linguist. ‘His English wasn’t as good as my English,’ the Albanian said. ‘He could only speak Russian.’ At Il Porto they couldn’t have become friends, the cook explained, because Kovtun never really learned German properly, which is why he got the job of clearing tables.

The cook plot had clearly fallen through. Another approach was required.

At 11.41 a.m. – eight minutes after the unsuccessful conversation with C2 – Lugovoi called Litvinenko up on his mobile. He suggested a meeting. Why didn’t Litvinenko join him later that day at the Millennium Hotel? Litvinenko said yes; the plot was back on.

Scotland Yard would later precisely fix Litvinenko’s movements on the afternoon of 1 November: a bus from his home in Muswell Hill, the tube to Oxford Circus, a 3 p.m. lunch with his Italian associate Mario Scaramella in the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly. In between he fielded several calls from Lugovoi, who was becoming increasingly importunate. Lugovoi called Litvinenko again at 3.40 p.m. He told Litvinenko to ‘hurry up’. He had, he said, to leave imminently to watch the football.

Lugovoi would tell British detectives that he arrived at the Millennium Hotel at 4 p.m. The CCTV shows that he was lying: half an hour earlier, at 3.32 p.m., Lugovoi appears at the front desk and asks for directions to the gents’. Another camera, camera 4, records him walking up the stairs from the foyer. The image is striking. Lugovoi seems preoccupied. He’s unusually pale, grim, grey-visaged. His left hand is concealed in a jacket pocket. Two minutes later he emerges. The camera offers an unflattering close-up of his retreating bald spot.

And then at 3.45 p.m. Kovtun repeats the same procedure, asking for directions, vanishing into the gents’ toilets, reappearing three minutes later. He’s a slight figure. What were the pair doing there? Washing their hands having set the polonium trap? Or preparing the crime, a heinous one, in the sanctuary of one of the cubicles?

Radiation tests were to show massive alpha radiation contamination in the second cubicle on the left – 2,600 counts per second on the door, 200 on the flush handle. Further sources of polonium were found on and below the gents’ hand-dryer, at over 5,000 counts per second. There was full-scale deflection in two sinks.

The multiplex system records someone else arriving at 15.59 and 41 seconds – a fit-looking individual, wearing a blue denim jacket with a fawn collar. He’s on his cellphone. This is Litvinenko at the blurred edge of the picture; he calls Lugovoi from the hotel lobby to tell him he’s arrived. The CCTV tells us little beyond this. Apart from one important detail. Litvinenko never visits the hotel bathroom. He’s not the source of the polonium: it’s his Russian companions-turned-executioners who bring it with them to London, in this, their second poisoning attempt.

Earlier that week I had flown to Moscow with my wife Phoebe. I was there on a recce – my newspaper, the Guardian, was posting me to Russia as its new Moscow bureau chief. It was a moment of excitement and trepidation. There were logistical issues. Where would our children – Tilly, eight, and Ruskin, six, go to school? And how in this churning metropolis of 12 million people – amid traffic, Soviet tower blocks and eight-lane boulevards – might we find a space to call home?

We flew to Moscow with British Airways, flight 875. Our borrowed flat overlooked Novy Arbat in central Moscow. There were meetings with property agents and tours round a succession of rather dismal, low-ceilinged flats. Visits, too, to the British and American schools. On the second day it snowed: heavy flakes tumbling from a grey sky onto a shuffling procession of vehicles.

My previous postings had been in Delhi and Berlin. We considered ourselves adaptable, good at languages, cosmopolitan. But Moscow looked like a challenge. Our move was scheduled for January and the depths of a Russian winter.

On 30 October we flew back to the UK, on BA 875. The plane was full. Most passengers were Russian football fans on their way to London for the CSKA match. They were a drunken bunch. A few had been swigging from bottles of duty-free. They refused to sit down. Someone smoked in the loo. And then a sozzled Russian travelling with his teenage children punched a steward in the face. The pilot was given priority landing. At Heathrow, armed police boarded the plane and dragged him away. They found a bottle of cognac – two-thirds empty – rolling under his seat. His daughter was crying.

It was a memorable flight, the atmosphere of revelry ending up sour. Memorable for several reasons, it turned out. Lugovoi had flown on the same BA plane during his second October trip to London, days before. Though we didn’t know it, the plane was contaminated with polonium.

We had been sitting just a few rows away from Lugovoi’s radioactive seat, we later discovered. It was a prescient coincidence. The hidden events unfolding in Moscow and London would dominate my professional life in Russia and beyond, for the next four years, and cast a dark shadow over our family life, too.

Meanwhile, the large number of Russians visiting London for the football was the perfect cover for Lugovoi and Kovtun. Amid this influx, with thousands of Russian passport holders coming through Heathrow, who would spot a couple of assassins, carrying with them an invisible weapon?

While serving with the FSB in Russia, Litvinenko perfected his observation skills. It was part of his basic training. How to describe the bad guys: their height, build, hair colour and distinguishing features. What they were wearing. Any jewellery. How old. Smoker or non-smoker. And of course their conversation – from the major stuff such as admissions of guilt down to trivial details. For example, who offered whom a cup of tea?

When detectives later interviewed Litvinenko he gave them a full and – in the circumstances – remarkable account of his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun in the Pine Bar. He made one small error: he said the teapot on their table was silver. In fact it was white and ceramic. Litvinenko confused it with the silver teapots in the Park Lane Sheraton Hotel, where he’d met Lugovoi the previous week, the rather crumbling institution on Piccadilly with the China-themed Palm Court restaurant. He also forgot Kovtun’s first name; after all, he had only met him on one previous occasion.

Otherwise, his recall was perfect.

Litvinenko said that Andrei approached him in the foyer from the left side and said: ‘Let’s go, we are sitting there at the bar.’ He followed Lugovoi into the bar; Lugovoi had already ordered drinks. ‘He sat down in the corner and I sat. There were two tables pulled close together, sort of like a single one.’ Lugovoi sat with his back to the wall; Litvinenko was diagonally across from him on a chair. There were glasses sitting on the table but no bottles. And ‘mugs and a teapot’.

Litvinenko’s account of the conversation is that Lugovoi explained he could only stay for ten or fifteen minutes. ‘Straightaway a waiter came up to us,’ Litvinenko told Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt. It was a waiter with ‘grey hair’, wearing a white shirt and black bow tie. This was Norberto Andrade, the hotel’s veteran head barman.

As Lugovoi knew, Litvinenko didn’t drink alcohol. Moreover he was hard up and reluctant to spend any money of his own in a fancy establishment. Andrade approached Litvinenko from behind, and asked him: ‘Are you going to have anything?’ Lugovoi repeated the question and said: ‘Would you like anything?’ Litvinenko said he didn’t want anything.

And then: ‘He [Lugovoi] said, “OK, well we’re going to leave now anyway, so there is still some tea left here, if you want to you can have some.” And then the waiter went away, or I think Andrei asked for a clean cup and he brought it. He left and, when there was a cup, I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only a little left in the bottom and it made just half a cup. Maybe about 50 grams.

‘I swallowed several times but it was a green tea with no sugar and it was already cold by the way. I didn’t like it for some reason, well, almost cold tea with no sugar, and I didn’t drink it any more. Maybe in total I swallowed three or four times.’ Litvinenko said he didn’t finish the cup.

And then:

The three men discussed their meeting scheduled for the following day at the private security firm Global Risk. The bar was crowded, with ‘lots of people’, Litvinenko said. He felt a strong antipathy towards Kovtun. It was just their second encounter. There was something strange about him, Litvinenko thought – as if he were in the midst of some personal torment.

There is no evidence to say whether it was Kovtun – the former waiter, good at mixing drinks – or Lugovoi who put radioactive polonium in the teapot. From Litvinenko’s testimony, it’s clear this was a joint criminal enterprise. Lugovoi would subsequently explain that he couldn’t recall what drinks he’d ordered in the Pine Bar. And that Litvinenko had insisted upon their meeting, to which he’d reluctantly assented.

Subsequently, police tracked down Lugovoi’s Pine Bar till receipt. Lugovoi was a man who murdered with a certain breezy style.

The order was:

The tea came to £11.25; the total bill £70.60. Lugovoi paid on his credit card.

Andrade, the man who brought the tea, was from Brentwood in Essex. He’d worked at the Pine Bar since 1981, and was in his late sixties by 2006; his slicked-back grey hair recalled an earlier, more glamorous era. He would retire two years later. Over the years he had served many celebrities. They included the actor Sean Connery, probably the greatest James Bond, and the man who owned the 007 spy franchise, film producer Cubby Broccoli, whose second Bond movie starring Connery was From Russia With Love.

It was a Wednesday. Andrade was working his regular 11 a.m.–7.30 p.m. shift. The bar was extremely busy, he said; there was a property auction going on in the ballroom. Several Russian clients had come to the hotel that week for the football. He was serving drinks, while his ‘very professional’ younger colleague Jacob worked from behind the bar. Lugovoi walked in. He asked for a Havana cigar, and said he would be ‘coming in shortly for drinks’, Andrade said. The barman said he’d add Lugovoi’s cigar to his bill.

Half an hour later, Lugovoi returned, took a seat at table one, strategically positioned in the corner with a clear view of the entrance, and ordered three green teas with fresh lemon and honey. Jacob took a teapot and cups from a stack next to the bar’s Giga coffee machine. Andrade said he delivered the tea to the table but didn’t pour – customers generally preferred to pour themselves, he explained.

Almost immediately, Lugovoi called him back and demanded more honey. Over the next half an hour Norberto said he was shuttling ‘very rapidly back and forth’ between the bar and table one – the Russians were a demanding party and called him back for gin, then ‘a couple of minutes later’ asked for champagne.

At the time, his impression of the men from Moscow was favourable: ‘They were extremely well-behaved and well-dressed gentlemen.’ Andrade said he didn’t notice Litvinenko join Lugovoi at the table. But he did recognise Lugovoi and Kovtun. He said he’d seen them in the bar on a previous occasion.

By this point, Lugovoi and Kovtun must have concluded that their poisoning operation had worked. Litvinenko had drunk the green tea. Not much, admittedly. But, he had drunk. Surely, enough?

Later, in fact, it was found that Litvinenko had an astonishing 26.5 micrograms of polonium in his bloodstream. Less than one microgram would have been enough to kill him (estimates suggest that one gram alone could kill 50 million and sicken another 50 million). His exposure to radiation in this dose was approximately 175,000 times greater than that given off in an X-ray.

The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Then, Litvinenko told police, a tall Russian in a dark cardigan materialised at the bar. It was Sokolenko. Sokolenko ‘said something’ to Lugovoi, who replied: ‘Yes, yes, all right’ and ‘Go on, I will speak to you later.’

Lugovoi gazed at his watch. He said he was expecting his wife, Svetlana. Mrs Lugovaya (Russian surnames have different feminine versions) appeared in the foyer and, as if on cue, waved her hand, and mouthed: ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ Lugovoi got up to greet her, and left Litvinenko and Kovtun sitting together at the table.

There was one final, scarcely believable scene. According to Litvinenko, Lugovoi came back to the Pine Bar accompanied by his eight-year-old son Igor. Another guest, Duncan Cunningham, noticed Igor in the hotel, holding a bag from the Hamley’s toy store in London, and looking uninterested, fed up and bored by dull adult company.

Lugovoi introduced his small son to Litvinenko. He said to Igor: ‘This is Uncle Sasha, shake his hand.’

Igor was a good boy. He obediently shook Litvinenko’s hand, the same hand that by now was pulsing with radiation. When police examined Litivnenko’s denim jacket they found massive contamination on the sleeve – Litvinenko had picked up and drunk the tea with his right hand. The party plus Litvinenko exited the bar. The Lugovoi family and Sokolenko went off to the match. Kovtun declined to go, declaring: ‘I’m very tired, I want to sleep.’

Forensic experts would test the entire bar area, the tables, dishwasher and crockery. They examined 100 teapots, as well as cups, spoons, saucers, milk jugs. Litvinenko’s teapot wasn’t difficult to discover – it gave off readings of 100,000 becquerels per centimetre squared, a satanically high number. The highest reading came from the spout. (The teapot was put in the dishwasher afterwards and unknowingly reused for subsequent customers.) The table where they sat registered 20,000 becquerels.

Polonium was a miasma, a strange creeping fog. It was found inside the dishwasher, on the floor, till, the handle of a coffee strainer. There were traces on bottles of Martini and Tia Maria behind the bar, the ice cream scoop, a chopping board. It turned up on chairs – with large alpha radiation readings from where the three Russians sat – and the piano stool. Whoever sent Lugovoi and Kovtun to London must have known of the risks to others. Apparently they didn’t care.

The most crucial piece of evidence was discovered several floors above the Pine Bar. It was found in Kovtun’s room, number 382. When police forensic teams took apart Kovtun’s bathroom sink they found a mangled clump of debris. The debris was stuck in the sediment trap of the sink’s waste pipe. Tests on the clump showed it contained 390,000 becquerels of polonium. The levels were so high that they could only have come from primary contamination – from polonium itself.

After putting the poison in Litvinenko’s teapot, Kovtun went back upstairs to his room. There in the bathroom he poured the rest of the liquid polonium solution down the sink. No one else – other than Lugovoi and Sokolenko – had access to the room. Police concluded that Kovtun had knowingly handled the murder weapon, and afterwards got rid of it. It was an intentional act of disposal.

The science was objective, conclusive and utterly damning. As an inquiry into Litvinenko’s poisoning would later hear, it had the simplicity of undeniable fact. Kovtun would claim innocence. He was never able to explain away this pivotal piece of evidence.

The Russian operation to murder Litvinenko would have had a codename – so far unknown. It could finally be marked down as a success. It was the sixth anniversary of Litvinenko’s arrival in Britain, on 1 November 2000. He didn’t know it yet, but he was dying. The agent used to kill him had been chosen in order to leave no trace of how death was brought about. It was working. From this point on nothing – not even the most gifted medical team, not even a miracle from the heavens – could save him.