From Russia with Blood

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Tony Blair had been in such a hurry to cement his special relationship with Putin after their preelection night at the opera in St. Petersburg that, unable to contain himself until after the official inauguration, in May, he invited Russia’s president-elect to Downing Street almost as soon as the ballots closed.

“Vladimir Putin is a leader who’s ready to embrace a new relationship with the European Union and the United States,” the British prime minister declared after the meeting, in April of 2000, doing his best to ignore the disorderly band of Chechen War protesters being carted off in police vans outside Downing Street.

Putin received similarly rapturous receptions from other world leaders. Bill Clinton flew to Moscow to greet Russia’s new strongman as one of his final acts as US president, brushing aside concerns over Chechnya to declare Putin “fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia while preserving freedom and pluralism and the rule of law.” And when Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, followed suit the next year, he, too, fell hook, line, and sinker.

“I looked the man in the eye,” he told reporters. “I found him very straightforward and trustworthy—I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Berezovsky was determined to disabuse the Western dupes of their trust in his former protégé. He established the International Foundation for Civil Liberties to campaign against Putin—distributing hundreds of grants to protest groups across Russia and taking out banner ads decrying the regime’s human rights abuses in the international press—and hired Lord Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favorite spin doctor, to help fire out his anti-Kremlin message. Now he just needed ammunition—and that was where Litvinenko came in.

The former FSB detective had been tasked with digging deeper into Putin’s links to the mob and the Moscow apartment bombings with the help of two other regular Down Street visitors. Litvinenko was to work closely with Akhmed Zakayev—none other than the leader of the Chechen rebels accused by Putin of orchestrating the bombings—who had numerous sources on the ground and was determined to prove that his fighters had been framed. Zakayev, whose jagged features and ferocious beard made him look almost as fierce as he really was, had escaped Chechnya to join the growing group of dissidents living on Berezovsky’s tab in England, and he was now fighting a political war remotely from a modest home in Muswell Hill, just a few doors down from Litvinenko. The other collaborator was the brilliant if endearingly clodhopping Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky, who was there to help compile and write up the evidence.

By March of 2002, the investigators had provided Berezovsky with his first round of firepower, and the oligarch held a press conference in central London to present compelling new evidence linking Putin’s security service to the Moscow bombings. Litvinenko and Felshtinsky had laid out their findings in an excoriating book titled Blowing Up Russia, which was serialized across twenty-two pages of the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and it was accompanied by a documentary, the no less ambiguously titled Assassination of Russia, which Berezovsky screened exclusively for the assembled journalists.

A central plank of the case against Putin rested on the explosives used in the apartment blasts. After the first bomb went off, the FSB announced that traces of the highly explosive chemical hexogen had been found—an eyebrow-raising admission, given that the military-grade chemical could only be obtained from government facilities under the security agency’s own control. It hadn’t taken long for the FSB to realize that gaffe and change its story, but then crime scene investigators made another damaging discovery.

Explosives experts had visited the apartments in the city of Ryazan where residents had spotted two men placing fifty-kilogram sacks of powder wired to detonators in the basement, and they announced that these, too, contained hexogen. After local police had caught the two culprits and identified them as FSB officers, the security agency announced that the whole incident was a training exercise and the bags contained nothing but sugar—but the publication of Blowing Up Russia ripped a huge hole in that story.

The book laid out evidence that government-controlled hexogen had indeed been found in the sacks planted at Ryazan as well as in the four other bombs that had been detonated successfully elsewhere. It included testimony from a soldier who had been posted to Ryazan in the autumn of 1999, a few weeks before the bombings, to guard a government arms depot that, oddly, seemed to contain nothing but fifty-kilogram sacks labeled SUGAR. The private had used some of the white powder in his tea and was so repulsed by its acridity that he had a team of specialists test it to make sure it wasn’t poison. The results, he said, revealed that the substance was hexogen.

Berezovsky told the assembled journalists that four separate explosives experts from Britain and France had independently examined the evidence from the Ryazan incident and concluded that the bomb the FSB officers were seen planting was real. Then he introduced a former director of a Russian government explosives facility who confirmed that the security service had purchased a bulk load of hexogen in the period directly before the attacks. “At a minimum Vladimir Putin knew that the FSB was involved in the bombings,” Berezovsky declared.

The allegations that the Russian president had colluded in the slaughter of almost three hundred of his own people ricocheted through the British and international media. Back in Moscow, prosecutors accused Berezovsky of “financing terrorist activity” in the wake of his press conference. The book was banned and added to Russia’s official list of extremist materials, and the FSB used all its powers to stop the public from learning of its incendiary contents. Theaters that attempted to show the film were shut down and their proprietors beaten up, while trucks carrying consignments of the books into Russia were pulled over by the FSB and had their cargo confiscated. But through it all, the leaders of the West remained silent.

In the corridors of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, there was glum acknowledgment that Putin was almost certainly behind the explosions, but there was no appetite for a fight. Six months before Berezovsky’s press conference, the world had been rocked by an atrocity that dwarfed the Moscow bombings—the worst terror attack on Western soil in living memory—and no one had capitalized on the fallout more effectively than Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president had been the first world leader to telephone George W. Bush to offer his condolences after the planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

“Russia knows directly what terrorism means,” he declared in a televised address after the call, likening the Al Qaeda attack to the apartment bombings in Moscow, which he blamed on Chechen Islamists. “Because of this we, more than anyone, understand the feelings of the American people.”

Two days later, in a move that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, NATO and Russia issued a joint statement vowing to fight the scourge of terrorism. And when President Bush declared his “war on terror,” Putin immediately pledged his full backing, supporting the invasion of Afghanistan by allowing the United States to ship supplies through Russia and, equally unthinkable, to use the military bases of the former Soviet Union in central Asia. At a time when the West was uniting against a terrible common foe in the form of Al Qaeda, Russia’s cooperation was warmly welcomed. Putin had positioned himself at the forefront of a global fight against Islamist terror—and it played perfectly into his narrative.

In the wake of 9/11, the Russian president announced that Islamist rebels in Chechnya were being trained and funded by Al Qaeda, repeatedly likening Zakayev and other prominent separatists to Osama bin Laden. The Kremlin had long characterized its bloody suppression of Chechen separatism as a conflict with jihadist terrorists, and portraying the largely Muslim region as the first battlefield in a new global war was the perfect way to justify the brutality as reports of rape, mass slaughter, looting, and torture continued to flood out of Grozny. And the West bought it.

When Putin visited Bush at Camp David in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US president praised him for building a Russia “at peace within its borders, with its neighbors, a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive.” And when Tony Blair received the Russian president at Chequers in December of 2001, he drew his own comparisons between 9/11 and the Moscow apartment bombings as the two leaders announced an intelligence-sharing deal to combat terrorism.

Putin’s pivotal role in the US-led counterterrorism coalition paid many dividends—not least of which were the establishment of the NATO-Russia Council, Russia’s full membership in the G8, and Western support for the country’s long-sought accession to the World Trade Organization. But among the greatest rewards of Russia’s centrality in the war on terror was the incentive it gave the global community to swallow the story that Chechen Islamists, and not Putin’s own state security agency, were to blame for the Moscow bombings.

On the one-year anniversary of the New York attacks, six months after Berezovsky’s press conference unveiling Litvinenko’s findings, Putin called President Bush to renew his condolences. Then he took to the airwaves to speak directly to the Russian people.

“Recently we commemorated those who were killed in a string of blasts in apartment buildings in Moscow three years ago, and today we are also remembering those who died in Washington and New York,” he said. “In Russia, they say that time cures. But we cannot forget.”

The truth, as far as Alexander Litvinenko was concerned, was just the opposite. In the wake of 9/11, his evidence linking the Russian government to the mass slaughter of its own people was simply too inconvenient. And so it was that the world forgot.

London, Tbilisi, and Moscow—2002

Whether or not the West was listening, Berezovsky and his band of investigators were far from finished. After the launch of Litvinenko’s findings, the group gathered in secret at Down Street to plot the next phase of their campaign—and they were joined by some valuable new allies.

In the room with Berezovsky, Litvinenko, and Felshtinsky was a pale-faced man in a rumpled suit whose permanently parted lips and wide blue eyes gave him a look of perpetual astonishment. Sergei Yushenkov was a leading light of Russia’s postperestroika revolution—having organized the “living chain” of civilians who united to protect their parliament from Soviet troops during the attempted coup of 1991—and he had served energetically as an MP since the earliest days of Russia’s new democracy, campaigning against human rights abuses in Chechnya with particular vigor. The veteran MP shared Berezovsky’s suspicions about Putin’s hand in the Moscow apartment bombings, and so he had joined Liberal Russia—a new opposition party that the oligarch was bankrolling. Three parliamentary motions for an official inquiry into the apartment bombings had been stymied by members of Unity, the party Berezovsky had established to back Putin in the 2000 election, and the oligarch was determined to rectify that mistake by using Liberal Russia to raise hell over the FSB’s role in the blasts.

Yushenkov had already volunteered to use his parliamentary immunity to help distribute Blowing Up Russia and the accompanying documentary in Moscow, and when he arrived at Down Street, he was charged with a further mission. Since attempts to secure an official inquiry into the bombings were leading to a dead end, Yushenkov would go back to Moscow and assemble an independent commission of politicians, lawyers, and journalists to investigate the blasts under its own steam. Litvinenko and Felshtinsky would continue their investigation and supply the commission with evidence, and Yushenkov would air their findings in parliament.

There was another new collaborator to welcome to the group. The discussion had been quietly observed by a woman who was introduced by Litvinenko and Felshtinsky as Tania Morozova—a thirty-one-year-old Russian emigré to the United States whose mother had been killed in one of the Moscow blasts. Felshtinsky had found Morozova living in Wisconsin and persuaded her to come to London for the film screening. Having seen the evidence the investigators had amassed, she was convinced her mother had been murdered by the Russian government, and she signed up to help them expose the crime. As Litvinenko explained to the assembled plotters, Morozova was officially considered a victim of the attack because she had lost a relative in the blast, which gave her the right under Russian law to review the FSB’s case files and to present evidence in court should any of the perpetrators ever come to trial. Her cooperation would give the plotters an inside track on the state’s case.

There was one more newcomer whom Litvinenko wanted to bring into the circle of trust. It was Mikhail Trepashkin—the dogged former FSB officer whose discovery of a corrupt cabal inside the agency had made him a target of the URPO assassination plot alongside Berezovsky. Trepashkin was a phenomenal investigator who had not forgotten that he owed Litvinenko his life, and he had been helping gather local intelligence about the bombings on the ground in Moscow. He had also recently qualified as a lawyer, so it was agreed that he would become an attorney to the independent commission Yushenkov was going to set up. At the same time, Trepashkin would take on Morozova as a client, allowing him to apply for access to the FSB’s files and submit evidence in court on her behalf.

Yushenkov flew back to Russia armed with dozens of copies of Assassination of Russia, which he distributed to reporters who met him off the plane at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. “It demonstrates how the secret services deceived Russian citizens,” he told them. Then he set to work assembling his commission.

In London, Litvinenko and Felshtinsky were on the cusp of a seismic breakthrough. By that time, the FSB had named its prime suspect in the bombings: a man called Achemez Gochiyayev, who had rented space in all the apartment buildings that were blown up, and shortly after Berezovsky’s press conference the investigators were approached by a Chechen intermediary with a message from Russia’s most wanted man. Gochiyayev was innocent, the messenger said, and he wanted to talk to the authors of Blowing Up Russia.

Felshtinsky, who had been handling the communications with the intermediary, met with Litvinenko, Berezovsky, and Zakayev at Down Street to brief them on the approach. The bespectacled historian was frightened. The intermediary had demanded that he travel to the lawless Pankisi Gorge, between Georgia and Chechnya, where Gochiyayev was in hiding under the protection of a band of separatists. What if this was an attempt to kidnap him and demand a ransom from Berezovsky, or an FSB trap, or a murder plot?

Unruffled, the oligarch turned to Zakayev and asked whether the Chechens were likely to murder Felshtinsky.

“I do not think they would kill him,” the rebel leader replied assuringly—adding, after a moment’s reflection: “They could cut his ears.”

Felshtinsky’s fingers flew to his earlobes. “Boris, will you pay ransom for me if I am taken hostage?” he asked anxiously.

“Of course,” replied Berezovsky. “But here is the deal.” Litvinenko was to go with Felshtinsky to watch his back, and Patarkatsishvili would be in charge of their security at all times on the ground in Georgia. “This is his territory—you do what he orders,” Berezovsky told the two investigators firmly. “Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

When Litvinenko and Felshtinsky touched down in Tbilisi late that night, they were met off the plane by a security team sent by Patarkatsishvili to guard them around the clock. Ever the professional detective, Litvinenko had insisted that they stop at a department store on the way to the airport to buy smart new briefcases in anticipation of the incriminating documents he hoped they would receive. The pair were introduced to a driver sent by Patarkatsishvili to chauffeur them everywhere, and the man conveyed them in a mini motorcade to the five-star Sheraton Metechi Palace, where guards with Kalashnikovs flanked the entrance.

Soon after they arrived, they came face-to-face with a furious Patarkatsishvili, who was livid to discover that Litvinenko had traveled to Georgia with Felshtinsky. It was one thing guaranteeing the security of an academic, but guarding an FSB defector in Russia’s backyard was another task altogether. Berezovsky’s loopy schemes would be the death of them all one of these days: he was sure of it. He told the two visitors he would do all he could to keep them safe in Tbilisi, but if they strayed outside the city they were on their own. Traveling to the Pankisi Gorge, the hideout of at least half of Chechnya’s sizable population of guns for hire, was absolutely out of the question. They would have to get to Gochiyayev another way.

The following day, Patarkatsishvili’s driver took Litvinenko and Felshtinsky to a rendezvous point in Georgia’s grand central square—under the towering Freedom Monument, depicting Saint George slaying a gilded dragon. Felshtinsky tucked a copy of the International Herald Tribune under his arm and waited while Litvinenko and the driver kept watch from a safe distance. They were looking for a man in a green baseball cap.

When the go-between arrived, Felshtinsky promptly informed him that he could not travel to the Pankisi Gorge: Gochiyayev would simply have to come to Tbilisi. That request was flatly refused. Georgia was crawling with FSB agents, and the gorge was the one place that was too dangerous for them to go, which was what made it the only place that was safe for Gochiyayev. They were being watched right now, the man in the cap said, pointing out several cars stationed around the meeting point. To get around the stalemate, it was agreed that the go-between would take a list of questions back to the gorge and bring a videotape of the fugitive’s answers back to Tbilisi the following day.

Felshtinsky and Litvinenko had a night to kill in Tbilisi, so they took their driver and security guards out for a sumptuous dinner while they waited to hear from the messenger. When the call came, the go-between told them he had been tailed most of the way back to the gorge by two cars—but he had managed to give them the slip, and the tape containing Gochiyayev’s answers would be with them the following day.

Litvinenko and Felshtinsky tucked themselves into their crisp white hotel bedsheets full of anticipation. But the following morning, the two investigators were woken by their guards with infuriating news. They needed to get out of Georgia at once—on Patarkatsishvili’s orders.

“I am not leaving,” Felshtinsky informed them indignantly. “I am waiting for some materials. Call Badri, please.”

The guard complied and handed the phone to Felshtinsky. Patarkatsishvili sounded stern. “Come to my place immediately, with your belongings.”

When Litvinenko and Felshtinsky entered the ornate Georgian mansion, the oligarch’s face was grave. “You should leave immediately,” he said. “I have information that your life is in danger.”

He had been tipped off that a contract had been taken out to kill the two investigators, and there was no time to lose.

Felshtinsky was desolate. It was too galling to have to turn back now, just as they were on the brink of hearing Gochiyayev’s story. But then he had a brain wave. Perhaps the driver Patarkatsishvili had assigned to them could be sent to collect the tape from the emissary. He knew what the man looked like, after all, having taken them to the meeting the previous day.

Patarkatsishvili shook his head. “Your driver disappeared,” he told them. “He brought you to the hotel yesterday, and that is the last time he was seen. We are looking for him now.”

Felshtinsky froze. If the driver had been captured by the FSB, he might have spilled the beans about the reason for their trip to Tbilisi. There was no longer any doubt that they needed to get out of Georgia immediately. Patarkatsishvili ushered them into a Jeep he had waiting outside, and they sped to the airport in a security convoy, boarding the first available plane.

The next flight out of Georgia happened to go to Frankfurt, and as soon as it landed in Germany, Felshtinsky got straight on the phone to Berezovsky. They had been forced to flee without the tape, he told the oligarch ruefully, but they were on safe ground now and everything was fine.

“It is fine with you,” Berezovsky replied. “But your driver was found dead.”

Despite escaping with their lives, the two investigators could not shake their disappointment that they had come back empty-handed. But, days later, Gochiyayev’s emissaries made contact again. The pair were invited to a meeting in Paris, where, in the grand atrium of a hotel on the Champs-Élysées, Felshtinsky was handed an envelope containing a statement in Gochiyayev’s handwriting. The story of the man accused of orchestrating the Moscow bombings, when they finally read it, was every bit as devastating as the investigators had hoped.

Gochiyayev said he was innocent and had only gone on the run because he feared for his life. He insisted that he had rented rooms in the apartment buildings at the request of a business associate, who had told him he needed the space to store construction materials, and he now suspected that man of working for the FSB. After the second blast, he said he had called the police to warn that there might be explosions in two other buildings where his associate had asked him to rent a room—but his information was ignored, and the associate was never named as a suspect. If that was true, it looked like Gochiyayev had been framed.

Litvinenko and Felshtinsky needed a way to present their new evidence to the public, and Yushenkov’s independent commission provided the perfect forum. The politician had persuaded the venerated MP and human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov to head up the inquiry, lending independence and credibility to its work, while Yushenkov served as its vice chairman. Then he had enlisted five other MPs, along with around a dozen journalists, lawyers, and academics. Yuri Shchekochikhin, the investigative journalist who had serialized Blowing Up Russia in Novaya Gazeta, was a particularly active member, and Trepashkin was hard at work as the commission’s investigative attorney.

Litvinenko and Felshtinsky testified before the commission by video link for two hours in July of 2002, revealing Gochiyayev’s story in front of an audience packed with journalists. The hearing caused a sensation in Moscow. How had these two lone operators managed to hunt down the FSB’s most wanted man when the entire state security apparatus had failed?

Kovalyov was at pains to be impartial—stressing that the commission was nowhere near a ruling on whether either Chechen Islamists or the FSB were responsible for the bombings—but he said Gochiyayev’s statement was “of extreme interest” and must be thoroughly examined. The task of seeking to verify the fugitive’s account was assigned to Trepashkin, who had by then gained access to the FSB’s case files thanks to his status as Morozova’s lawyer.

Soon after the commission hearing, Litvinenko dropped another bombshell. His second book, The Gang from the Lubyanka, meticulously documented Putin’s connections with the Tambov gang in St. Petersburg and the transformation of the FSB into a criminal organization—and it chronicled the latest discoveries in the apartment bombings investigation, including Gochiyayev’s account. Trepashkin helped smuggle the text into Russia, meeting a truck carrying ten thousand copies of the book on a lonely motorway interchange from Riga one wet August afternoon and stashing the cargo in a secluded warehouse. Within days it was selling fast across Moscow. When the Kremlin banned the book and the FSB began confiscating it from retailers, Litvinenko authorized its distribution free of charge. Copies spread like wildfire across the city.

By then, thanks to the riveting public hearings of Yushenkov’s commission, the theory that the FSB had carried out the apartment bombings was gaining serious traction in Moscow, even if the outside world seemed oblivious. Putin was, finally, feeling the heat. And that was when disaster struck the city again.

Moscow—October 2002

As snow fell across Moscow one night in October of 2002, almost a thousand people gathered in the warmth of the city’s Dubrovka Theater to watch a popular musical. The show—an adaptation of an old Soviet story charting an orphaned boy’s Arctic adventure—was enjoying a smash-hit run, and the auditorium was sold out. When the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, the stage was stormed by more than forty camouflage-clad Chechen terrorists. The militants took the entire audience and cast hostage and packed the hall with explosives before releasing their demands on videotape. Russian troops must withdraw immediately from Chechnya—or everyone would die.

The hostage taking sparked a three-day siege, with armed FSB officers surrounding the building. Zakayev appealed for calm from Copenhagen, where he was hosting the World Chechen Congress, urging the militants to spare their captives and “refrain from rash steps.” But after fifty-seven hours trapped inside, the hostages began to realize they couldn’t breathe. A woman on the phone to the Echo Moscow radio station broke the news to the outside world. “They’re gassing us!” she cried. “All the people are sitting in the hall. We really beg not to be gassed!”

A powerful opiate was being pumped into the auditorium from outside, knocking out the hostage takers and all their captives. When the building was silent, the FSB stormed in, shooting the unconscious militants in the head at point-blank range. Firemen and police officers carried the slumped bodies of the theatergoers out into the snowy street in their evening dress. Realizing that scores of the hostages had suffocated, swallowed their tongues, or choked to death on their own vomit, officers began throwing their bodies into buses to hide them from the television cameras. More suffocated as the dead were heaped on top of the living.

The militants had shot two hostages during the three-day siege. The remainder of the dead piling up outside the theater—more than 130 women, men, and children—had suffocated on the gas, which was pumped into the hall by the FSB. The order had come from the top.

“We have not been able to save them all,” Putin acknowledged in a televised address announcing the end of the siege, which he blamed on the scourge of international terrorism. Then Tony Blair called to congratulate him on his handling of the crisis before issuing a public statement supporting the decision to gas the auditorium. “A deadly mixture of religious and political fanaticism is being pursued by those who have no compunction about taking human lives,” the British prime minister said. “I hope people will understand the enormity of the dilemma facing President Putin as he weighed what to do, in both trying to end the siege with minimum loss of life and recognizing the dangers of doing anything that conceded to this latest outrage of terrorism from Chechnya.”

President Bush followed suit with a public statement of support, and the coverage in the international press drew countless comparisons to 9/11. Putin awarded the FSB chief who managed the operation the title of Hero of the Russian Federation and ramped up his anti-Islamist rhetoric, vowing to strike back at “all the places where the terrorists themselves, the organizers of these crimes, and their ideological and financial inspirers are.” Zakayev was accused of plotting the attack, and an Interpol Red Notice was issued for his arrest.

The rebel leader was briefly detained by the Danish authorities before being allowed to return to Britain on bail, and Russia immediately demanded that the UK government extradite him to Moscow to face trial. When Berezovsky pledged to fund Zakayev’s legal fight against being sent back to Moscow, Russian prosecutors followed up with a demand for the UK government to extradite the oligarch, too.

Zakayev was furious that the terrorists had struck so savagely in the name of Chechnya, just as exoneration for the apartment bombings had seemed at last within reach. But then, as he read the coverage of the attack in the Moscow press, it began to strike him that certain key aspects of the story just didn’t add up.

For a start, the men who had carried out the attack were known extremists who were kept under constant surveillance by the FSB—so how had they been allowed to travel to the capital, armed to the eyeballs with assault rifles and TNT, and muster outside a packed theater without being intercepted? Whichever way he looked at it, that just didn’t square. Then, as he read through a list of the forty hostage takers that had been published in the Moscow press, his eye locked on a single name.

Khanpash Terkibaev was a notorious figure in Grozny, a shadowy character who had wormed his way in and out of so many separatist cells, both in Chechnya and its foreign diaspora, that the region’s leaders strongly suspected him of working for the FSB as an agent provocateur. When Zakayev put out feelers on the ground in Grozny, he got word that Terkibaev had resurfaced soon after the siege, attempting to infiltrate another separatist faction by boasting of his role in the hostage taking. The official story was that all the militants had been killed when the FSB stormed the building—but it seemed that Terkibaev was the one who got away. If he really was a state agent and had been allowed to escape to continue his work, then it looked like the FSB had left its fingerprints on yet another terrorist atrocity in Moscow.

At Berezovsky’s request, Yushenkov’s commission announced that it would be expanding its inquiry to examine evidence of possible state involvement in the Moscow theater siege. Zakayev had passed all his information about Terkibaev to Litvinenko, who set about making his own inquiries, and when Yushenkov traveled to London in April of 2003, the defector handed over a file of evidence he had assembled on the suspected agent provocateur. What they needed to take the investigation further was someone who knew how to operate in Chechnya’s treacherous rebel strongholds and who had the guts to go after a violent extremist with disturbing state security links. Everyone agreed there was only one woman for that job.

Anna Politkovskaya worked for Novaya Gazeta, which by then was one of the country’s few remaining truly independent publications. The wiry, iron-haired reporter had spent years filing dispatches from the front line in Chechnya and had an unparalleled source network on the ground. During the siege, she’d used the trust she’d built among the separatists to get inside and interview the leader of the hostage takers, entering the theater shouting, “I am Politkovskaya! I am Politkovskaya,” and then stayed on the scene to aid the negotiations by passing messages from the militants to the FSB lines outside. There was no one bolder. When Yushenkov returned to Moscow, he gave her Litvinenko’s Terkibaev file and she got going on the story. Then he went back to work for his commission, which was now examining government links to not one but two terrorist atrocities in the Russian capital.

Days later, as the MP parked his car outside his Moscow apartment building and stepped out into the April sunshine, three shots were fired without a sound. When police arrived, they found the pistol and its silencer on the pavement next to the lifeless body of one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics.

Ten days after the assassination of Sergei Yushenkov, Politkovskaya published her story. She had succeeded in tracking down Terkibaev and persuaded him to give her an interview. The last militant left standing after the Moscow theater siege had blown the lid off everything.

Terkibaev confirmed that he had been in the theater. He said he had led the terrorists into the auditorium and ducked out just before the attack. He told Politkovskaya up front that he was an agent of the FSB. And then he went even further than anyone suspected he would. He was, he said, a consultant to the Kremlin.

No one quite understood what had possessed Terkibaev to take his life into his hands by giving up the goods to Politkovskaya. Eight months after the interview, he was killed in a car crash in Chechnya—but his story was already out there. If what he told Politkovskaya was true, it would suggest the Moscow siege had been whipped up by the FSB to vilify the Chechen rebels and burnish Putin’s strongman image as he vowed to strike back.

That suspicion was impossible for the leaders of the West to stare in the face, even if they wanted to. How could they credit it when they had already praised Putin’s handling of the siege? How could they countenance the idea that the Russian government might have incited the attack when they had already justified the decision to gas 130 Russians as a proportionate response to the bloodthirsty actions of Islamist terrorists?

In June, two months after Yushenkov was shot dead, Putin was welcomed to Britain on a state visit. The Russian president received a twenty-one-gun royal salute before riding down the Mall to Buckingham Palace next to the queen in a gilded horse-drawn carriage. It marked the start of four days of sumptuous state banquets, guards of honor, and royal processions—the first time a Russian head of state had received such a welcome since Czar Nicholas I traveled to London in 1844. The coverage in the now thoroughly tamed Moscow media was rapturous. “The kind of reception President Putin is enjoying in Britain is truly fit for a king,” one tabloid gushed. “Neither Boris Yeltsin nor Mikhail Gorbachev had the honor of being invited by the queen herself.” All the pundits agreed that the spectacle was a major boon to Putin’s hopes of reelection the following year.

There were a few attempts to spoil the party. Amnesty International and other human rights groups strained to be heard over the pomp as they tried again to highlight the reports of rape, torture, and mass killing by Russian forces in Chechnya. But no one who mattered was really listening.

Blair and Putin held private talks at Downing Street and attended an energy conference in London focusing on opportunities for British firms in Russia, including plans for a gas pipeline from Siberia to western Europe. The British prime minister was bright-eyed with brio at the end of the four-day visit. “President Putin’s leadership offers hope to Russia and the whole world,” he enthused afterward.

Back in Moscow, the clamor for answers over the FSB’s hand in the two terror attacks was noticeably subdued. Yushenkov’s death was widely acknowledged as a political hit, and few people were prepared to pay that high a price for the truth. The work of his commission had already slowed to a near stop when, three months after his assassination, death struck again.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, the Novaya Gazeta journalist who had serialized Blowing Up Russia before becoming a key member of Yushenkov’s inquiry, was stricken by a mysterious illness. Red blotches appeared all over his skin, his hair fell out, and his internal organs began to fail. When he died, sixteen days later, the authorities seized his body and his autopsy was conducted in secret at an FSB hospital. His family was told he died from an allergic reaction, but they were denied access to his medical records, which had been classified.

With two of its key members dead, the commission saw its work investigating the apartment bombings grind to a halt. Only Trepashkin continued his solitary quest for answers.

The FSB’s prime suspect had gone dark, but Trepashkin kept digging through the agency’s case files on Gochiyayev. After the blast on Guryanova Street, in which Morozova’s mother had been killed, local police had produced a sketch of a man suspected of planting the bomb, based on a description provided by the manager of the apartments. But Trepashkin noticed it had rapidly been withdrawn and replaced with an image of an entirely different face. The second sketch was now famous: the man it depicted had quickly been identified as Gochiyayev, whose image had been plastered all over every newspaper and TV station when he was named as the mastermind of the bombings. But strangely, all copies of the original police sketch had vanished from the FSB’s files.

Trepashkin was determined to track down the first drawing, so he began delving through old press clippings in case it had been published anywhere when it was first released. After much trawling, there it was: a picture of a dark-haired bespectacled man in his midthirties printed on the yellowing pages of a newspaper published the day after the first blast. With a jolt, Trepashkin realized that he recognized the face. It was one of his former colleagues from the Lubyanka.

Vladimir Romanovich was an FSB agent who specialized in cracking Chechen cells in Moscow’s criminal underworld, and he had been part of the corrupt network Trepashkin had stumbled upon before being added to the URPO hit list. In front of him, in black and white, was evidence that the man initially suspected of planting the bomb on Guryanova Street had worked for the FSB.

There was no hope of compelling Romanovich to confess his role in the attack, because he, like Terkibaev, had since been killed in a car crash. But Trepashkin tracked down the building manager whose description had been used to create the sketch and asked him which of the two men he had really seen. Not only did the witness confirm that Romanovich was the man he had spotted acting suspiciously before the bombings, he also made another striking revelation. Two days after he provided the description to the local police, he was apprehended by officers from the FSB, who dragged him to an interrogation suite at Lefortovo Prison. There they showed him a photograph of Gochiyayev and compelled him to give a new statement declaring this was the man he had seen.

This was the strongest evidence yet that the FSB’s main suspect had been framed. Trepashkin had an opportunity to present his findings on Morozova’s behalf at the trials of two suspects that Russian prosecutors had charged with plotting the bombings alongside Gochiyayev, which were scheduled to start in October. But he knew how the FSB worked after decades in its service, and he was braced for trouble. As an insurance policy, he handed all his files to a journalist he knew in Moscow with the instruction to publish them if anything should happen to him before the trials.

Sure enough, a week before the hearings began, Trepashkin was arrested. FSB officers swooped in on his car and announced they had found an illegal firearm. Trepashkin insisted it had been planted there, but then he was thrown in jail on a separate charge of “revealing state secrets.” He would remain behind bars for four years.

The journalist published the evidence about Romanovich as requested, but the story barely raised a whimper in the wider Russian press. Mikhail Lesin’s media crackdown had put almost every big newspaper, TV channel, and radio station under Kremlin control. The trials went ahead in secret, and without a jury. The two men the FSB had accused of perpetrating the bombings were sentenced to life in prison.

With so little fuss in the Moscow media, the trials tidied away behind closed doors, and no one to take up the cudgels in the Russian parliament, it was easier than ever for world leaders to continue their backslapping diplomacy with Putin. But Litvinenko’s investigation was beginning to make waves in other quarters. Inside their green and gold headquarters on the banks of the river Thames, the Russia watchers at MI6 were paying attention.