From Russia with Blood

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Muswell Hill and Mayfair, London—Summer 2006

Life had settled into a comfortably knowable rhythm inside the unassuming yellow-brick town house on Osier Crescent, the sleepy Muswell Hill side street where the Litvinenko family lived opposite the Zakayevs. The neighbors knew them as Edwin, Maria, and Anthony Carter—even if Litvinenko’s thick accent and habit of feeding Russian kolbasa sausages to the neighbor’s cat gave the lie to those quaint English aliases. He was a figure of some fascination to the locals, who joked privately at first that perhaps he was a KGB spy—until he dropped signed copies of Blowing Up Russia through their doors at Christmas and they stopped laughing.

The family had been there approaching six years. Litvinenko still spoke very broken English, but Marina had studied hard to become fluent, and she’d taken up teaching ballroom dancing to supplement the family’s income. Anatoly was well settled, too, sounding more like a native Londoner as he aced his first year at the prestigious City of London School for boys on the banks of the Thames, where Berezovsky was paying for him to study. He was twelve, old enough to beat his father at chess, and he still spoke to his dad in Russian. But his memories of sledding and seeing the Moskva River freeze over in the fierce winters of his early childhood were gradually melting away, along with the last traces of his accent. The defector’s son seemed to become a little less Anatoly Litvinenko and a little more Anthony Carter every day.

Litvinenko was proud to live in England, enthusing often about the rights and freedoms the family enjoyed in their new home. Soon after they arrived, he had taken Anatoly to visit Speakers’ Corner and stopped to pose for a photo with two London bobbies. This was a place where you could speak up for what you believed, he told his son, and the law would protect you. He kept the front driveway obsessively well swept, strung a British flag from the balcony, and worked out vigorously every day in the makeshift gym he’d rigged up in the garage. On the weekends he went for ten-mile runs and swam with Anatoly in the local pool. Sometimes, when he felt homesick, he’d watch old Russian movies on VHS while Marina cooked comfortingly familiar recipes—spicy soup and stuffed pancakes. But most nights it was work that kept him busy.

The house on Osier Crescent was lined with the investigative case files that Litvinenko had spent years assembling in his personal crusade against Vladimir Putin. Row after row of immaculately indexed folders contained all the evidence documenting the Russian president’s links to the Tambov gang in St. Petersburg, the FSB’s plot to assassinate Berezovsky and Trepashkin, and the government’s links to the terrorist atrocities it blamed on Chechen rebels. Litvinenko spent many evenings rereading and adding to his records, often leaping up and racing across the road to speak to Akhmed Zakayev when he happened upon a new discovery.

The defector and the rebel leader had grown to be best friends, and their two families formed a tightly knit little community on Osier Crescent—eating together, sharing holiday celebrations, and minding each other’s kids. Litvinenko had a habit of disappearing for hours into the Zakayevs’ house, infuriating Marina by coming home so full of Chechen delicacies that he had no room for his dinner.

The two men were still actively investigating the FSB’s role in the Moscow bombings and theater siege as part of Zakayev’s Chechen war crimes commission, helped by the dauntless Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was a regular guest at Osier Crescent when she came to visit her sister in London. And now the trio was gathering string on a third terrorist outrage.

Two years earlier in Beslan, a town in Russia’s wild North Caucasus, armed Islamist militants had occupied a school and taken more than one thousand people hostage—most of them children. The captives were crammed into the gymnasium, where explosives were strung from basketball hoops over their heads as the terrorists demanded Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya. After a three-day standoff, Russian troops stormed in, pounding the building so heavily with tanks, rockets, and grenade launchers that the roof of the gym collapsed, crushing many of the hostages. More than three hundred people were killed in the operation—186 of them children.

The use of such deadly force carried clear echoes of the Moscow theater siege, and the Muswell Hill investigators were suspicious as soon as the news broke. Then they heard that Politkovskaya was recovering in the hospital after drinking a poisoned cup of tea on the plane as she traveled to Beslan to report on the attack. Convinced the government was hiding something, Litvinenko started digging.

His first observation was that several of the hostage takers had been in FSB custody for other terrorist offenses but had been mysteriously freed before the attack. Had they been flipped in prison? Even if not, they would have been kept under close surveillance after being released—so how had they managed to travel to Beslan armed with bombs and suicide belts without raising any red flags? It would later emerge that Putin had been warned that Islamists were planning a hostage taking at a school in the region several days before it occurred and that he had done nothing to alert the local population or prevent the attack. Litvinenko wrote a damning article for a website Zakayev had set up to chronicle Russian atrocities in Chechnya, asserting that the FSB had at best allowed and at worst provoked the Beslan school siege in another effort to tarnish the separatist movement. And he, Zakayev, and Politkovskaya carried on delving into the FSB’s links to terror.

The defector’s theories had found a receptive audience in the MI6 handler he knew as Martin, and their meetings in the basement café of Waterstones on Piccadilly had become part of the familiar rhythm of his London life. Whenever he had a new lead linking the Kremlin to organized crime or acts of terror, Litvinenko contacted his handler over an encrypted phone line to arrange a rendezvous. In addition to passing on information gleaned from his own investigations, he helped make sense of intelligence the Russia watchers gathered from their own sources. And now, to his delight, he had been tasked with another big assignment—one that finally made all the time he had spent digging into Putin’s St. Petersburg mob connections start to seem worthwhile. The British spies had asked him to help their counterparts in Madrid unravel the Kremlin’s links to a powerful Russian mafia group spreading its tentacles into Spain. The Tambov gang was on the move.

The St. Petersburg mob had extended its operations across Europe under the enterprising leadership of Gennady Petrov, a giant of a man with a face like a slab of concrete who commanded his criminal empire from a mansion in Majorca. Petrov had risen through the ranks of the Tambov gang in the ’90s, while Putin was deputy mayor in St. Petersburg. He had relocated to Spain after becoming the group’s leader, and prosecutors suspected him of laundering the proceeds of drug smuggling, gunrunning, and contract killings through properties in the Costa del Sol. Litvinenko had briefed Martin on Putin’s relationship with the Tambov gang, and his handler had asked him to work with the Spanish authorities as they devised an ambitious strategy to “behead” the Russian mafia. So he was now making regular trips to Madrid, where he fed information to a handler called Jorge, who passed it up the chain to prosecutors building a case against the Tambovs.

Litvinenko had explained to Jorge that the Russian government, its intelligence agencies, and organized crime had merged into a single “mafia state” under Putin, in which the Kremlin used the mob to do its dirty work in exchange for official protection. He described how the president’s relationship with the Tambov gang had developed during his time as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and provided specific information about members of the group who, he suspected, still maintained deep links to Putin’s government. Sure enough, when the Spanish authorities tapped the gang members’ phones, they found the men to be in regular contact with a network of senior Kremlin officials.

Litvinenko’s evidence paved the way for a series of raids two years later in which twenty gangsters were arrested, ultimately leading Spanish prosecutors to indict twelve suspected kingpins—including several current and former Kremlin officials—for colluding with the Tambovs. But all that was yet to come. In the summer of 2006, Jorge was arranging for him to meet directly with prosecutors as a first step toward giving evidence about Putin’s links to the mob in open court.

These services to Britain and its allies were a source of deep pride to Litvinenko—but he was running short of money. The £2,000 monthly stipend he received from MI6 was nowhere near enough to keep his family afloat on its own, and Berezovsky had cut his monthly payments at the start of the year as the freeze on the oligarch’s Swiss funds began to bite. Litvinenko needed to start paying his own way, and, thanks to Martin, he knew where to turn. Two years earlier, when he was first recruited as a British intelligence asset, his handler had provided him with an introduction to a key figure in the shadowy world of London’s private spying industry. Now it was time to cash in.

Dean Attew worked for Titon International, an elite Mayfair-based private intelligence firm of the sort that enjoys direct lines to the River House and does odd jobs for queen and country in return. He was well connected with the Russia watchers, and Martin had introduced him to Litvinenko back in 2004, suggesting that the defector might be a useful source of information for British companies doing due diligence on opportunities in Russia. Attew had also worked in security at high-end casinos around the world, and his years studying potential swindlers around countless card tables had given him a sharp eye for the small tells on a human face. He sensed he could trust Litvinenko. But he had made it clear that the defector would be of no use to British clients unless he learned to speak some English, so when Litvinenko’s money began to dry up, he signed up to take a language course and then called Attew asking for work.

The private spy boss had since offered him several paying projects probing Russia’s business and political elite, but Litvinenko soon realized that if he was going to come up with the sort of fresh intelligence Attew wanted, he needed a partner on the ground in Moscow. That was where Andrey Lugovoy came into the picture.

The two former KGB officers were soon doing brisk business. The division of labor was simple: Litvinenko hustled for jobs in London from Titon and several other Mayfair firms, and Lugovoy did the spadework in Moscow. By that summer, they were gathering dirt on Putin’s agriculture minister for the owners of Stolichnaya vodka as well as scoping a big contract with Gazprom for a London-based security firm and investigating several other powerful Russians who held sway over lucrative deals being sized up by British clients.

Initially they worked at arm’s length, but then it occurred to Litvinenko that clients might be impressed by his man on the ground in Moscow. Lugovoy was a good talker and always seemed to win people over quickly, so perhaps bringing him to meetings would be a good way to get more business. He told Attew there was someone he should meet—“a friend and a source” from Russia—and arranged for them all to get together at Heathrow airport when Lugovoy flew through London in June.

On the day of the meeting, the defector led the private spy boss up the escalators to the raised dining area in terminal 1, where Lugovoy was waiting. Litvinenko couldn’t help but notice that his partner had acquired very expensive tastes since he started showing up in London. He insisted on shopping at Harrods and had taken to sporting silk ties and patterned suits set off with an enormous gold watch.

As the three men shook hands and settled around a table, Attew’s sharp eyes took in every micromovement of the new man’s face. Lugovoy was as fluent as ever, explaining that there was nothing he couldn’t find out about anyone in Russia—whether it meant intercepting calls, bugging buildings, or having targets tailed—but Attew felt a strong dislike forming. There was something scarily cold, he thought, about this cocksure character with his flashy watch and inscrutable gaze. By the time the meeting broke up, he had resolved to have nothing to do with Lugovoy.

The private spy boss wasn’t the only person who thought Lugovoy was bad news. Nikolai Glushkov had finally been released from Lefortovo after serving time for his failed escape attempt, and he fled to Britain, where Boris and Badri put him up in a Berkshire mansion with servants and an eleven-acre pond. The former Aeroflot boss was enjoying a quiet home counties life quaffing fine wines and organizing pirate treasure hunts for the local children. But his face darkened as soon as he learned that Lugovoy was hanging around town. Glushkov insisted that the newcomer had set up the foiled escape to frame him on behalf of the FSB, and he implored Boris and Badri to eject their former security man from their circle. But nobody listened.

“Relax,” Patarkatsishvili told him soothingly. Too much prison time had clearly made poor old Glushkov paranoid. Lugovoy was one of them, he said, and that was final.

Litvinenko agreed, so when Attew contacted him a few weeks later with a new commission, he didn’t hesitate to turn to his regular partner for help. And this time, the job was red-hot.

Attew needed information on none other than Viktor Ivanov—the former KGB officer who, according to Litvinenko’s information, had led Putin into business with the Tambov gang in the ’90s as the mobsters smuggled drugs into the St. Petersburg seaport. Ivanov remained one of Putin’s closest allies, and one of Attew’s clients was on the brink of going into business with him. Litvinenko was tasked with carrying out the due diligence on the deal, and he asked Lugovoy to get him some fresh intelligence on Ivanov’s latest activities to add to the information about his days in St. Petersburg. But when his partner’s report arrived, Litvinenko was dismayed. It covered just a third of a sheet of paper and contained almost nothing that wasn’t already in the public domain.

“I can’t work with this,” said Attew disdainfully when he saw the document. “There’s nothing in here.” Abashed, Litvinenko promised to get him something better. He found another Russian partner to work with and came back with an eight-page report containing the information he had assembled on Putin and Ivanov during his time in the FSB’s organized crime squad, combined with fresh information supplied by other sources. This time, Attew was delighted. This was, he said, “exactly the type of report I would hope to expect,” and its contents were so damaging for Ivanov that Titon’s client immediately pulled the plug on the deal.

Litvinenko was thrilled with this outcome, but he was frustrated that Lugovoy had let him down. So the next time he saw his partner in London, he handed over a copy of the second report as an example of the sort of work they should aspire to. That was how Lugovoy returned to Moscow with all Litvinenko’s incendiary evidence connecting Putin and Ivanov to the Tambov gang tucked safely inside his suitcase.

London and Moscow—October 2006

Something was wrong with Anna Politkovskaya. When Litvinenko met his friend at a Caffè Nero on one of her visits to London, he saw that her face was drawn with worry under her trademark steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Anna, what is it?” he asked, shocked to see the fearless journalist looking so shaken.

“Alexander,” she said. “I’m very afraid.”

Politkovskaya told him she had been receiving threats that she believed came directly from Putin. She had been threatened often enough before, but this time she felt a terrible foreboding. Every morning as she said goodbye to her son and daughter before leaving her flat, it was as if she were seeing them for the last time. And she couldn’t say why, but she felt especially vulnerable in the elevator of her apartment building.

“Anna,” he implored her. “Don’t go back to Russia.” But Politkovskaya’s children were there, as well as her elderly parents. Besides, she was on the verge of publishing a new exposé about the systematic torture of prisoners by pro-Kremlin troops in Chechnya. She said goodbye to Litvinenko and flew home.

On the afternoon of October 7, Politkovskaya pulled up outside her apartment building in her Lada and began unloading her grocery bags. She was in a hurry—her story was scheduled to go out the next day—so she didn’t see the thin man in the baseball cap watching as she hastened inside. Politkovskaya left the first load of bags upstairs and came back down in the elevator to collect the rest. When the doors slid open, the thin man was waiting. He fired two shots into her chest and a third into her shoulder. By the time the fourth bullet entered her skull, she was dead. The gunman dropped his pistol and its silencer next to her slumped body and disappeared.

The assassination of Anna Politkovskaya provoked an international outpouring of grief and anger. The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists declared her the thirteenth reporter to be assassinated since Putin came to power. Hundreds of protesters gathered in Moscow to decry the killing, and candlelight vigils were held in cities around the world. Even Tony Blair and George W. Bush were moved to condemn the murder, calling for a “thorough investigation into this terrible crime” in a joint statement. But Putin was laconic. He said the Russian authorities would get to the bottom of the shooting, but he dismissed Politkovskaya as a “very minor” figure who had “no influence on political life.”

Litvinenko was devastated. He was outraged that his brave friend had been cut down and terrified that he would be next. But his fears were allayed somewhat the following week, when he received the long-awaited news that he and his family had been granted full British citizenship. Attew was working in his office, at the top of a smart town house in Mayfair, when Litvinenko burst in waving his passport.

“I’m British!” he yelled, literally jumping for joy. Now Anatoly would grow up an English gentleman, he joked, and maybe one day his son might even work for MI6.

The family attended their citizenship ceremony at Haringey Civic Centre on October 13. Afterward, Litvinenko took Anatoly to a memorial for Politkovskaya outside Westminster Abbey and spotted Felshtinsky in the crowd.

“I just received my citizenship!” he told the historian. “Now they will not be able to touch me.” Felshtinsky smiled back at him kindly and kept his thoughts to himself.

Litvinenko told Anatoly they now belonged fully to this country where anyone could stand up and speak the truth without fear, and he resolved to use that freedom to stick up for Politkovskaya’s memory. The next week, he and Zakayev attended an event honoring their friend at the Frontline Club, a gathering place for journalists near London’s Paddington railway station. When the speeches were finished, Litvinenko got to his feet.

“My name is Alexander Litvinenko, and I am a former KGB and FSB officer,” he said in faltering English, before the event’s interpreter came to his aid. “I think that because I’m here, I should really speak up and say what I know,” he went on in Russian, standing ramrod straight. “Who is guilty of Anna’s death? I’ll give you a straight answer: it is Mr. Putin, the president of the Russian Federation.”

The declaration caused a small sensation inside the snug little club, with its wooden floors and exposed brick walls. Litvinenko was not a well-known face in London media circles, and the press pack was riveted by this intense blue-eyed man who spoke with palpable feeling about his friend Anna—a woman so brave, and so determined, that she had carried on reporting even under the specter of her own death. “Journalists of the stature of Anna Politkovskaya can only be killed by one person,” he told the room. “That is Putin. No one else.”