From Russia with Blood

viii

Miami, Florida—2004

The cruise ships were steaming out to sea along the narrow turquoise cut between Fisher Island and the Miami mainland as Jonathan Brown settled at his usual waterfront table. The tanned, barrel-chested mogul looked every bit the Miami native as he drained his martini in the honeyed evening sunlight—but his penchant for tight white jeans and crocodile-skin boots hid a less glitzy backstory. Brown was a sheep farmer’s son from Cumbria, in the rainy north of England, who had set himself up in the smoked-salmon business and proved to everyone who doubted him just how rich you could get selling fish. He had moved to Miami to expand his salmon empire and multiply his millions in Florida property investments, and though he liked to bellow “I’m a fish man!” at strangers as he blew thousands of dollars at the bar, he had put all the clear blue water he could between himself and his drab Cumbrian past.

Brown was at his favorite South Beach steakhouse, Smith & Wollensky, to greet a new arrival in Miami: a London tycoon who had just sailed in to look for a new waterfront mansion. The smoked-salmon mogul had been asked to entertain the visitor by a mutual friend in the Florida property trade, and he watched with interest as the yacht-bronzed newcomer strolled across the terrace toward his table, grinning at the diners who glanced up curiously as he passed.

Young still had the sort of style and swagger that turned heads, even if his hair was thinning a little these days while his waistline did the opposite. He had been spending more time in Miami as life in Britain got increasingly complicated, and he had recently alighted upon the idea of moving his family out here for good. That would put his daughters at a safe distance from his risky Russian business, and it would buy himself a bit of breathing room from his increasingly strained relationship with Michelle. He was here to hunt for properties, and he was glad for a companion.

The pair hit it off instantly. When Brown suggested they write down their favorite moment in film history as an icebreaker, they swapped cards to discover they had both picked the exact same scene from True Romance. It was the part when Dennis Hopper is about to get whacked by the mob, and he uses his last words to hurl florid insults at his Sicilian assassins.

“Even in death, we’re gonna fuck ’em!” Brown shouted happily, and Young laughingly agreed. The banter continued over a repast of dry-aged sirloin sluiced back with bottles of velvety red wine, and by the end of the night they were noisily hatching plans for future escapades.

“Come to London next week!” Young insisted. “I’ll show you how to live!”

Brown had recently finished selling a big swath of his fish business, and his marriage was going stale. He was at a loose end—and he’d just bought himself a brand-new private jet that he was itching to take for a spin. Thank fuck, he thought as he gladly accepted Young’s offer. I’ve finally found someone I can play with.

London and Miami—2004–5

Young had two Rolls-Royce Phantoms waiting on the tarmac when Brown landed at London’s Biggin Hill airport the following week. He put his friend up in lavish style at the five-star Halkin hotel, in Belgravia, and they hit the town—partying until dawn at Boujis, the favorite nightspot of Princes William and Harry, where Young blew £50,000 night after night on cocaine and magnums of Dom Pérignon that he’d shake up and spray all over the crowd.

They had such a riotous time that Brown began flying to London to stay at the Halkin regularly, and Young spent ever more time in Miami. He bought himself four Porsches to keep on the peninsula and enlisted Brown’s help in hunting for his waterfront property, setting a budget of £45 million. Before long, he had bought a dazzling white villa in Coconut Grove and moved his family into their new home.

Michelle was tough to please these days, but she was thrilled with her new mansion overlooking the mangrove-fringed waters of Biscayne Bay. Young confided in his new friend that his marriage was falling apart, and the move to Miami was a way to get his girls settled into a wonderful new life before he left their mother for good. Brown wanted to help, so he pulled strings to get Scarlet and Sasha into the same exclusive local school as his own daughters. But after a few months hanging around with Young, his own marriage was hanging by a thread.

Brown had been seeing a young Russian woman during his stays at the Halkin, and he was just starting to realize that he was falling for her when she told him she was expecting a baby. Now he, too, was living a double life, with a pregnant girlfriend secreted away in a stylish London apartment, at a safe distance from his wife and daughters back in Miami. But for all the upheaval, Brown couldn’t remember feeling more alive. Young’s wayward charisma was intoxicating, and being with him made life feel magical. Brown would never forget the time that December when he was treating his girlfriend to a stay at the Dorchester and Young kicked in the door, burst into the room, and threw armfuls of cash at them as if it were confetti.

“Jonny! Happy Christmas!” Young yelled as Brown lay in bed laughing and the air flowed with fifties.

Still, there were some things Brown found unnerving. Young dealt almost exclusively in massive piles of cash, and there always seemed to be some stranger or other turning up at the Halkin with another bag of money. Where on earth did it all come from?

“Swear to me, Scot: you’re not in fucking drugs, are you?” Brown asked when he could no longer contain his curiosity. Young scoffed at the suggestion, saying he was just taking care of a bit of money for investors he wouldn’t name. But soon after that, he told Brown that there was someone he should meet.

“Boris Berezovsky? I’ve heard of him!” Brown exclaimed.

“Yeah,” said Young. “He’s ex-Russian. I help him.”

The fixer invited his friend along to a discreet club on Berkeley Square where Berezovsky was waiting, flanked by two bodyguards who struck Brown as lethal-looking killers and freaked him out by following him every time he went to the loo. But the oligarch himself was instantly disarming. Brown could hardly believe that this twinkling little man dangling a cigarette between his fingers was the ferocious Kremlin enemy he’d read about.

He soon learned that the oligarch made up in sheer force of personality what he lacked in physical stature. Berezovsky was a scintillating raconteur, given to vivid flights of rhetoric about mother Russia, and Brown hung avidly on his tales of political feuds, gangland battles, and murder plots back home. The smoked-salmon mogul started spending as much time as he could with the oligarch and his fixer.

Being with Berezovsky was a markedly more civilized affair than the sorts of debauches Brown usually enjoyed in Young’s company. The older man was never one to dance on the table or spray the room with Champagne, but he liked wine and music, and Brown came to think of him fondly as the sort of “weird uncle” with whom one could have long talks about the meaning of life. The oligarch had a way of making him feel important—calling him “my love” and, when soliciting his attention on a matter of any delicacy, stepping gently on Brown’s toes and leaning in close in a manner that betokened great trust.

The three men got so close that Young leased them all grand town houses on Eaton Square, in Belgravia—the capital’s most exclusive address—complete with pristine white columns and balconies overlooking private gardens. Young renovated the three properties in high style and handed Berezovsky the keys to number 29, while he took number 27 and Brown had the place in between.

The oligarch kept his family at Wentworth Estate and already had a stunning array of London properties to choose from when he wanted to stay in the capital, but he had other plans for the house on Eaton Square.

“My love,” he said to Brown after they had all gotten settled, treading on his toes with the tip of a polished shoe. “I cannot live in twenty-nine. But can you look after my ladies?” When Brown was shown inside, he found the house full of teenage prostitutes Berezovsky had flown in from the Baltic states.

“Boris!” he said. “They’re younger than my children!” But he promised to watch over the girls while his friend was away.

Brown was increasingly enthralled by Berezovsky. He loved visiting Down Street, allowing himself to pretend he was in a film every time the security guards pulled open the doors to the oligarch’s inner sanctum, with its Chanel-clad secretaries, rotating cast of Russian runaways, and constantly indignant butler. Berezovsky’s almost childlike reliance on Young was another source of fascination. Brown learned just how heavily the oligarch leaned on his fixer when, one day in Miami, he answered his friend’s phone for him.

“My love,” Berezovsky said without waiting to hear whom he was speaking to. “Get on a plane—I need you in London. I have lost the Phantom of Love.”

Mystified, Brown turned to Young. “What the fuck is the Phantom of Love?”

The missing treasure was a £500,000 vintage Rolls-Royce that Young had bought for Berezovsky via an offshore shell company in Gibraltar. The vehicle featured an “audacious rococo interior that is nothing less than magnificently palatial,” according to its auction house listing, with fine upholstery and a ceiling painted with naked cherubs that resembled “the throne room at Versailles.” Berezovsky had given the Phantom to an eighteen-year-old girlfriend as a present, and she had called to say it had “vanished” off the street.

Young was confident he could find it. “I know someone who’ll know someone who’ll know where it is,” he said with a wink. And, to everyone’s astonishment, he did.

Brown was continually awed by his friend’s ability to fix anything, anytime, while juggling huge deals that seemed to yield unbelievable profits. But for all the fun they were having, Brown had never been offered a piece of that action. And then, as they drove to the airport one morning, Young finally let him in on the secrets of Project Moscow.

The city-center development that the fixer had been cooking up with Ruslan Fomichev, Berezovsky’s chief money man, was finally coming to fruition. Young explained that they had bought a swath of land in the Russian capital and were planning to build a “spectacular” complex of shops and offices, which promised “profits running into hundreds of millions.” Brown was being offered a slice of that pie—and he grabbed his chance.

Coming in on the deal required the smoked-salmon mogul to keep two big secrets. First, Berezovsky was putting $6 million into the project. That had to be kept under wraps because the oligarch was a wanted man in Russia and “Putin wouldn’t like it,” Young explained, so he was fronting for the investment himself. The next issue was that the site they were buying contained two buildings belonging to Russia’s civil defense ministry, which would require planning permission from the city government to be redeveloped, so it was important to have friends in high places. Fomichev’s* father was an FSB general, which came with certain benefits, but you couldn’t be too careful, so Young said he’d bought the backing of the city’s powerful mayor to ensure that the permissions were all waved through. That was the second secret that Brown would have to keep.

“We’ve got the best location in Moscow; we’ve got the mayor paid off—it’s going to be a fantastic deal,” Young promised.

Mayor Yury Luzhkov† was then one of Russia’s leading politicians, a key ally of the Kremlin, and married to one of the country’s richest women, whose personal fortune was estimated at more than $1 billion. He was also, US officials alleged in one diplomatic cable, a corrupt power broker “involved with bribes and deals regarding lucrative construction contracts throughout Moscow.” US analysts studying the center of power in the city identified “a three-tiered structure” with Luzhkov at the top, the FSB at the second level, and ordinary criminals at the bottom. Anyone seeking to do business there had to pay for krysha—protection, or, literally, “roof”—from one of these groups. “If people attempt to forgo protection, they will instantly be shut down,” the cable noted.

Luzhkov was another critical reason why Berezovsky’s name had to be kept out of the picture: the two men were old foes from post-Soviet Russia. The oligarch enjoyed telling everyone that the enmity began when he trounced Luzhkov at pool early in the mayor’s political career. The contest was intended to foster good relations with Moscow’s new ruler—it was the mayor’s favorite game, and Berezovsky claimed he had never played before—but then, the oligarch boasted, he had managed to win all three games in an act of impudence that angered Luzhkov so much that he snapped his cue. Luzhkov’s hatred for Berezovsky was cemented when he ran against Putin in the 2000 election and was viciously attacked by the oligarch’s newspapers and TV channels. The coup de grâce was when Yeltsin’s former head of security broke ranks to allege publicly that Berezovsky had tried to have the mayor of Moscow murdered. It was imperative that Luzhkov should have no inkling that his old adversary was involved in Project Moscow.

That was why Young had come up with a cunning ruse to channel Berezovsky’s $6 million investment into the scheme undetected. The deal was done in the name of Berezovsky’s daughter Ekaterina,†† who “sold” Young a luxury property in London’s upmarket Mayfair without any actual money changing hands. Young committed to pay later from the profits of Project Moscow, and then he took out a mortgage on the property to raise Berezovsky’s capital for the scheme, ensuring that the original source of the funds was obscured.

The fixer was going halves on the project with Fomichev, and his job was to raise a total of $26.5 million by January of 2006 to get the development off the ground. He set up a network of offshore vehicles to channel further investments into the scheme, starting with the $5 million Brown had already promised to pour in. Poju Zabludowicz, the Finnish billionaire and Tory donor who had invited Young and Berezovsky to a dinner with Bill Clinton in London, threw in a few million, as did two more of Young’s friends—a Monaco-based film mogul and a London money lender.

Young was so confident in his krysha that he personally underwrote all the investments, promising to repay the backers every penny if the project failed. But any protection he thought he had came as cold comfort to his London lawyer, who warned that he was placing too much trust in his Russian partner’s connections. “Apart from accidents, Russia is still a dangerous place where people are kidnapped for ransom, are murdered, or simply disappear,” the lawyer noted in a due diligence document. “You are bearing the risk on this because your understandings with RF [Ruslan Fomichev] are worthless if he is not around.”

Young was sure all would be well—as long as no one found out about Berezovsky’s secret investment. “You can’t let them know,” he told Brown whenever the Miami mogul came into contact with the other investors. “Nobody knows Boris is involved, Jon, but you.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Brown said, covering his concern with bravado. “I’m a fish man!”

But the truth was, Berezovsky’s involvement scared him. The oligarch talked all the time about the fact that Putin wanted him dead—and yet he refused to stop poking the bear.

“Boris!” Brown yelled when he saw that his friend had published yet another article lambasting the Kremlin. “Don’t wind the government up!” But his words fell on deaf ears. Berezovsky was in a fantasy world, Brown began to realize: he was obsessed with Russia, and he thought he was running the Kremlin out of Down Street. It felt less safe all the time being around the oligarch as his attacks on Putin intensified, and his swarms of bodyguards and armored cars served as a constant reminder of the threat. When Brown rode in the back of Berezovsky’s Maybach, he couldn’t help but remember the car bomb that his friend had only narrowly survived back in Moscow and think, if that happened again now, I wonder if I’d feel it.

As for Young, he seemed so blinded by his boss’s billions that he just couldn’t see the danger. Looking back, Brown would come to wish he’d done more to persuade his friend to distance himself from Berezovsky.

“Me and Scot, we can do the best we can, we make ten million, twenty million, thirty million,” he would say. “We don’t make billions, right? It doesn’t work that way. The billions come when Boris turns up. But it comes with a cancer. And the cancer kills you.”

London and Kiev—2004–5

The latest of Berezovsky’s wheezes was his effort to stir up trouble in Russia’s backyard. In Ukraine, the cassette scandal had sparked mass protests against the pro-Kremlin regime of President Kuchma, and by 2004 the dissent had grown into a full-blown uprising, with hundreds of thousands of orange-clad activists staging sit-ins, strikes, and marches on the streets of Kiev. The unrest was spearheaded by the strikingly handsome opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who had declared a state of revolution soon after the tapes were released. As usual, behind the scenes, Berezovsky was pulling the strings.

In addition to paying for the transcription of the incendiary recordings, the oligarch poured tens of millions of dollars into Yushchenko’s “Orange Revolution,” funneling the money through offshore companies to evade Ukrainian laws banning the foreign financing of politics. By 2004, as Kuchma reached the end of his term, Berezovsky’s funds were pumped into a campaign pitting the opposition leader against the newly anointed pro-Kremlin candidate in the presidential election.

Yushchenko’s presidential manifesto read like an A to Z of everything Putin most loathed: accession to NATO, European integration, and a purge on official corruption, all under the inflammatory slogan “Power to the people.” Since the government controlled the election coverage on most TV channels, the opposition leader built his platform on face-to-face communication with voters, wearing out his shoe leather on the campaign trail and drawing armies of orange-clad supporters to his rallies.

A few weeks before the vote, on September 5, 2004, Yushchenko returned home from a dinner with the head of Ukraine’s security service and greeted his wife with a kiss.

“Your lips taste metallic,” she told him. Before long, his head and face began to swell, his skin broke out in pus-filled inflammations, and a searing pain was spreading through his body. The leader of the Orange Revolution was flown to Vienna for emergency treatment, where tests revealed he had catastrophic quantities of a powerful toxin in his body. Yushchenko had been poisoned with TCDD—the most potent contaminant in the chemical weapon Agent Orange.

The dose should have been enough to kill him, but with expert treatment from Viennese toxicologists, Yushchenko made enough of a recovery to fly back to Kiev. He appeared at a rally to address his supporters, his once-handsome face gray and grotesquely disfigured with lesions and pockmarks above his orange scarf. And then he carried on campaigning.

The election weeks later was rigged. When Yushchenko lost to the pro-Kremlin candidate, the country erupted: as many as a million protesters took to the streets of Kiev, turning Independence Square into a roiling sea of orange banners and bringing the city to a standstill. Berezovsky’s funding helped sustain the demonstrations for nearly two months, with Yushchenko’s campaign busing protesters in from the suburbs when reinforcements were needed.

The demonstrations drew a furious reaction from Moscow: Mayor Luzhkov described the protesters as a “sabbath of witches who have been fattened up with oranges,” while Putin went on to warn that the uprising would turn Ukraine into “a banana republic where the one who shouts loudest is the one who wins.” But when the revolt showed no signs of abating by the end of December, a rerun of the vote was forced—and this time it was the permanently disfigured Yushchenko who swept to victory.

The Orange Revolution was the biggest threat yet to Putin’s authority, scuppering his efforts to install puppet regimes in the former Soviet states and sending a message to the population in and around Russia that corruption and vote rigging did not have to be tolerated. The people had been shown that an authoritarian government could be toppled through peaceful protest alone.

Putin vowed to prevent a similar “color revolution” occurring on his turf. To that end, he oversaw the creation of a youth movement named Nashi—meaning “ours”—which was billed as an “anti-orange” force to “defend Russia” against prodemocracy activists inspired by events in Ukraine. The movement mushroomed to a membership of more than two hundred thousand fanatically loyal teenagers, who marched in red cloaks emblazoned with Putin’s face and adopted his message of “restoring Russian greatness.”

The Kremlin poured hundreds of millions of rubles into Nashi, and Putin met repeatedly with its leaders. As its membership matured, it would morph into an aggressive arm of the Russian state, launching cyberattacks against critical media outlets, putting new recruits through quasimilitary training, using agents provocateurs to gather kompromat on rival groups, and running campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and sometimes violence against opposition figures. And while Nashi did battle with the opposition in the street, Putin went on to crack down on the forces of change from on high, eventually passing a series of antiprotest laws restricting the right to freedom of assembly and starving NGOs and protest groups of funding by banning them from receiving money from abroad.

If Berezovsky had once been a nuisance to his former protégé, he was now an active menace. Suddenly a stream of whispers about fresh plots to kill the exiled oligarch blew into the River House from British sources and surveillance stations in Moscow. And the threat was getting closer. Across the Thames, inside the neoclassical walls of Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, counterintelligence officers had detected a significant escalation in Russian espionage on British soil. They sent a confidential report to central government in the spring of 2005 identifying thirty-two Russian spies who were operating under diplomatic cover in London. The intelligence officers had been tasked with obtaining secret information about Britain’s military capabilities, its defense industry—and the activities of the men in Berezovsky’s circle.

Putin’s state of the nation address that spring signaled the change in the weather. After years of mouthing platitudes about building a free and democratic Russia and opening up to the West, the president had finally showed his true KGB colors when he branded the collapse of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” and described the independence of the former Soviet states as a “genuine tragedy” that had left “tens of millions of our fellow citizens” outside Russia.

Putin’s bellicose rhetoric, the fresh threats against Berezovsky, and the escalation of Russian espionage in Britain made a noxious mix that caused severe discomfort among the Russia watchers. But any hope of getting central government to confront their concerns evaporated that summer, when disaster struck London.

On the morning of July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers detonated backpacks filled with explosives on the city’s crowded public transportation network, killing more than fifty people and injuring hundreds more. It was Britain’s first Islamist attack—the very nightmare the country’s entire national security apparatus had been cranking up to prevent—and, in the wake of 7/7, Britain wanted to pull its allies in the fight against jihadist terror even closer.

When Putin visited London for an EU-Russia summit that October, Blair came up with the most significant gesture conceivable to restore trust with Moscow. The prime minister invited the Russian president into the sacred chancel of British security: the underground bunker where cabinet ministers receive top-secret intelligence briefings during times of crisis. Inside Cabinet Office Briefing Room A—known across Whitehall as COBRA—Putin was given an audience with the country’s most senior spies for a discussion on counterterrorism intelligence sharing. Few, if any, other world leaders had ever been so honored.

Still, Berezovsky had finally managed to light a real fire under Putin’s feet in Ukraine. And he was meddling in the politics of Georgia and Belarus, too, funding protest groups and forming alliances with opposition candidates. As always, the oligarch’s political moves fused neatly with his business interests. As soon as Yushchenko was in power, Berezovsky deployed Young to scout for new deals in Kiev, with instructions to use his status as the secret funder of the new administration for leverage with key officials. The fixer was soon lining up an investment opportunity for Berezovsky in a major government infrastructure project, and he dived into Georgia, too, booking a private jet to Tbilisi to hunt for new business. Young was also spending more time scoping new opportunities in Russia as Project Moscow came together, sizing up a power-station deal with the Moscow government and another big property development in St. Petersburg. Berezovsky was at the peak of his provocative powers, forging ahead into ever-more explosive territory—and his fixer was right behind him.

* Fomichev said he had never met or had any dealings with Mayor Luzhkov and denied maintaining any links to the Russian security services. “I never had any krysha, never made any deals with anybody, never bribed anyone,” he said, insisting that “Project Moscow was the cleanest deal you can imagine being done in Russia, ever.” He denied Berezovsky’s involvement in the scheme, then said he was “shocked” when he was showed documents evidencing the oligarch’s secret investment. “The first time I am hearing about this is now,” he said. “That was not my intention to involve Berezovsky in Project Moscow.”

† Luzhkov strongly denied any involvement in corruption. His lawyers said in a letter that he had never met Young, had no involvement in Project Moscow, and had not accepted any payment in exchange for protection. Nor, they said, would he have sanctioned any scheme involving Berezovsky.

†† Ekaterina Berezovsky declined to comment, but sources close to her said she had no idea her name had been used to funnel money into the project and would not have expected her father to invest in Russia through any route “because it would have put him and any fellow investors in danger.”