From Russia with Blood

xi

London—October–November 2006

On a sunny early autumn day a week after Politkovskaya’s murder, Lugovoy was back in London. This time he wasn’t alone. His companion was Dmitri Kovtun, a childhood friend and classmate from Moscow’s elite military academy who had just returned from a decade trying and failing to make it as a porn star in Germany. The pair had lost touch when Kovtun moved to Hamburg to look for his big break, but after years working as a pot washer, drinking, and drifting aimlessly through the city’s red-light district, he had finally given up and come home. Kovtun was desperate by the time he ran into Lugovoy back in Moscow, and his old friend offered him a chance to transform his life. There was a job to do in London—and if they pulled it off, they would both be made men.

Lugovoy brought Kovtun to meet Litvinenko in mid-October, arriving laden with designer shopping bags and dressed in loud checks. He introduced his companion as one of his oldest friends, selling him as a master at digital surveillance who could help them dig up dirt on targets in Russia. Litvinenko took an immediate dislike to Kovtun. The newcomer was surly and brooding, with sallow skin and shadowed eyes, and he looked shifty in his shiny silver suit. But Lugovoy insisted that Kovtun could be trusted and announced that he was bringing him to a meeting they had planned that afternoon with an important client.

The appointment was with a British company called Erinys International, which wanted the men’s help scoping a big security deal with the Kremlin-owned gas giant Gazprom. The Russians walked over on foot and were met at the door of the firm’s smart Mayfair offices by Tim Reilly, its upper-crust energy director. Reilly shook their hands and ushered them into the boardroom, stifling a smile at their gaudy attire. As soon as they sat down, Lugovoy asked him to serve them some tea. It was an unseasonably warm day, and nobody really felt like a hot drink, but he was oddly insistent, so Reilly obligingly poured out three cups. When they got down to business, Lugovoy did most of the talking—rattling off bold claims about the strings he could pull in Russia’s oil and gas industry—while Kovtun sat in morose silence and Litvinenko eyed him with growing distaste. The three cups of tea went cold without anyone taking a sip.

When the meeting broke up, Litvinenko departed hastily for the bus back to Osier Crescent, where Marina was cooking her spicy chicken soup. He felt strangely uneasy about the way the meeting had gone, he told her over dinner. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he found Lugovoy’s friend from Moscow “very unpleasant.” Later, he began to feel a little unwell. He threw up once and emerged from the bathroom looking worried.

“I feel so weak,” he told Marina. But he turned in for an early night, and by the morning he was himself again.

Lugovoy and Kovtun flew back to Russia. But less than a fortnight later, Litvinenko’s partner was back. He showed up first at Downside Manor to see Patarkatsishvili, and the pair spent a pleasant afternoon shooting the breeze in a gazebo out on the grounds. Then he swung by Down Street to see Berezovsky. The oligarch wanted some advice on providing security for a Russian journalist who had recently fled to Britain. The journalist’s apartment building had been bombed after she published a book chronicling Putin’s crackdown on democratic freedoms in Russia, and she had turned to Berezovsky for protection. While the two men were discussing her security, Glushkov burst into the oligarch’s office brandishing two bottles of wine that he wanted Berezovsky to order in bulk for his private jet. But the old Aeroflot director backed quickly out of the room as soon as he saw who was visiting.

At dusk, Lugovoy left Down Street and made his way over to the Sheraton on Park Lane, where he had arranged to see Litvinenko in the hotel’s grand glass-ceilinged parlor. This was the real purpose of his trip—but when Litvinenko arrived, his plan quickly went off-kilter.

The defector had decided to let Lugovoy in on a major secret, and he was relieved to see his partner waiting for him without Kovtun when he entered the parlor. He sat down at the table, ordered a pot of tea, and produced two disposable SIM cards that he’d bought so the pair could communicate more securely. Then he leaned in and began telling Lugovoy all about his secret work for the Spanish intelligence services.

Litvinenko explained that had been working alongside the spies in Spain for years as they unraveled connections between the Tambov gang and the Kremlin, and now he was preparing to travel to Madrid to meet prosecutors on November 8 as a first step toward testifying openly about the group’s links to Putin. He was excited, and he thought the spies in Madrid might have some work for Lugovoy, too, so he invited his partner to come with him. Lugovoy nodded and maintained his insouciant manner, slugging back three glasses of red wine and dragging on a cigar as Litvinenko spoke. But he was listening intently. It was clear that he was going to have to fly back to Moscow for one more debriefing before he could finish this job.

The sixth anniversary of Litvinenko’s arrival in Britain fell a few days later, on November 1, 2006. He had promised to be home in time for a celebratory dinner with Marina, but the rest of the day was clear, so when Lugovoy called to say he was back in London, Litvinenko gladly agreed to see him that afternoon.

His phone rang a second time that morning. This time it was Mario Scaramella, a security adviser to a committee that was conducting a public inquiry into Russia-linked corruption in Italy. The defector had met Scaramella several times to supply evidence of an FSB agent he believed was operating under deep cover in Naples, and now the consultant said he’d uncovered something Litvinenko needed to know. The two men arranged to meet at the “old place”—a code for their regular rendezvous point in central London—and Litvinenko threw on a quilted denim jacket before setting out into the crisp autumn weather. He boarded a red London bus and then the tube to Piccadilly Circus, where he made out Scaramella’s pudgy figure waiting by the winged statue of Eros under the square’s illuminated billboards. As he drew closer, he noticed the consultant was looking rough and unshaved.

As soon as the two men came face-to-face, Scaramella announced that they were both in danger. He said he’d explain as soon as they were somewhere quieter, leading Litvinenko down the road to a branch of Itsu, the popular sushi restaurant, where they grabbed some sashimi and found a table.

“I have material,” the consultant said the moment they were settled, producing an envelope from his briefcase and pulling out four grubby sheets of folded paper, which he slipped under the table to Litvinenko. The defector quickly saw what was making Scaramella so jittery.

The bundle contained two emails from a Russian source claiming close links to the Russian intelligence services who had written to the consultant in early October with a tip-off. Scaramella’s name had been placed on an FSB hit list, the source said, adding that his contacts in the agency spoke “more and more about the necessity to use force” to exterminate Russia’s enemies. The list itself had been pasted into the email, and Litvinenko was unsurprised to see his own name alongside Scaramella’s. Berezovsky and Zakayev were on there, too. Most chillingly, so was Politkovskaya: the email had been sent just a few days before she was shot dead.

Litvinenko looked up and met Scaramella’s round-eyed gaze. “Calm down,” he told the Italian, sliding the documents into his bag. He said he’d need more time to study the tip-off before reaching any conclusions about its credibility.

Litvinenko was playing it cool, but his investigative senses were tingling. The emails contained descriptions of a number of officers allegedly involved in the plot to kill those named on the list, including a judo master with a lame right leg said to be running a network of assassins out of St. Petersburg. Perhaps, he thought, they might help to identify Politkovskaya’s killer. He wanted to show the documents to Zakayev and Berezovsky as soon as possible, but first he had to keep his appointment with Lugovoy. So he hastily wrapped up lunch with Scaramella and hurried off toward the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair.

Litvinenko was known for his caution. He used burner phones to communicate with sensitive sources and frequently performed countersurveillance drills to check that he wasn’t being tailed. He knew full well he had a target on his back, and he’d warned his fellow exiles more than once to beware of the long-lost acquaintance who appears suddenly from the past. But he’d been out of the FSB for years, and his standards were slipping.

This was the first time Litvinenko had been to the Millennium Hotel. In the old days, when attending a meeting in an unfamiliar place, he would have been careful to perform reconnaissance. He would have arrived early to scan the area, locate the exits, and watch who came and went. Had he got there half an hour earlier, history might have been different. Litvinenko would have observed an agitated Lugovoy crossing the lobby clutching something inside his jacket and slipping into the men’s room for several minutes. He would have watched his partner emerge from the restroom and head into the Pine Bar—a wood-paneled room with soft leather upholstery and warm side lamps that just happened to be one of the only places in the hotel not covered by CCTV. He’d have spotted that Kovtun was there, too, paying his own furtive trip to the loo before joining Lugovoy in the bar, where the two men ordered gin and Champagne before calling the waiter back for tea. And he would have seen them fussing with the spout of the ceramic teapot that was placed before them on the table.

But Litvinenko wasn’t worried—Lugovoy was a friend. He walked into the lobby at 3:59 p.m. and called his partner to announce his arrival without pausing for breath. Lugovoy came straight out to meet him wearing clothes he’d bought in the Harrods men’s department on a shopping trip with Litvinenko a few months earlier—a tight blue-and-orange cardigan over a pair of smart gray jeans.

“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing toward the Pine Bar. He led the defector over to his table. “There’s already some tea left here,” he said casually, gesturing at the pot. “If you want you can have some.”

Litvinenko poured. The pot was almost empty, and the tea that trickled out was green. He took three or four gulps—but it was cold and unsweetened, with an unusually bitter taste. He pushed the cup aside.

Then, to Litvinenko’s displeasure, Kovtun appeared and sat down at the table. He looked paler than ever in a black zippered sweater, and he seemed depressed, or maybe hungover. Litvinenko wondered if he was a drug addict or an alcoholic. And then, quite suddenly, it began to dawn on him that he hardly knew this man he was meeting here, in this unknown place. Who was Kovtun? Why had Lugovoy brought them here? Out of nowhere came a creeping sense of unease.

The three men talked a bit of business over the din of the crowded bar, but soon Lugovoy was staring at his big gold watch, saying it was time to go. He had brought his entire family with him to London on this trip, and they had tickets to watch CSKA Moscow play Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium that evening, courtesy of Berezovsky. Lugovoy had been insistent on seeing Litvinenko, but suddenly it seemed there was nothing to say. Now his wife was in the foyer, gesturing for him to leave. Lugovoy went over to her and returned with a small boy clutching a bag from Hamleys, the famous London toy store. It was his eight-year-old son, Igor.

“This is Uncle Sasha,” Lugovoy said to Igor. “Shake his hand.” The boy obeyed. And then the family was gone.

Twilight was settling over the city as Litvinenko left the hotel and headed south through Mayfair. The lanterns were on by the time he reached Down Street. Litvinenko had been visiting a little less lately, since Berezovsky cut his stipend, but the office was still a place of comfortable familiarity. He took the elevator up to the second floor and passed the security guards at the door, waving to a departing Glushkov as he padded across the plush cream carpet to the photocopier at the back. He began running off clean copies of the scrappy documents Scaramella had handed him, folding the emails carefully at the top to conceal the identity of the source.

Litvinenko had called Berezovsky on his way over from the Millennium Hotel to say he had documents that might point to Politkovskaya’s killers, and the oligarch was impatient. He, too, was running late for the match at the Emirates Stadium that night.

“Be quick!” he shouted to Litvinenko. The defector handed over a set of copies and then grabbed his phone, which was ringing in his pocket. It was Zakayev, calling from outside in his Mercedes to offer a ride home to Muswell Hill.

In the car, the two men began figuring out how they’d run down the new leads in the emails. Litvinenko couldn’t shake his unease about the meeting with Lugovoy and Kovtun, but he kept his concerns to himself and called home to tell Marina he was on his way.

“Please don’t eat anything!” his wife blurted out when she learned he was with Zakayev. She was busy preparing chicken pancakes to mark the anniversary of their arrival in Britain—the first they’d ever celebrated as citizens. He promised to keep an empty stomach.

Anatoly was back from school when Litvinenko walked through the door. While Marina finished preparing dinner, he spent some time examining Scaramella’s documents before hole-punching the clean copies and placing them carefully in his files. When the family sat down to celebrate, Litvinenko delighted his wife by wolfing down five whole pancakes. She thought her husband seemed happy. Life in England had been good to them.

It was a peaceful evening, and the couple turned in at 11:00 p.m. But ten minutes after the light went out, Litvinenko ran to the toilet and threw up everything he’d eaten. Even when his stomach was completely empty, he couldn’t stop retching.

“Maybe it will pass,” Marina said.

“I don’t think it will,” he told her.

She made him a mixture of manganese and warm water, an old Russian remedy for food poisoning, but it came straight back up. Anxious not to disturb his wife and son, he retired to his study and spent a miserable night being violently sick every twenty minutes.

At dawn, Marina came in to check on him and was alarmed by his pallor. Litvinenko told her he was now throwing up blood and foam. He said he felt like he couldn’t breathe, so she threw open all the windows and let the cold November air stream in.

“I have been poisoned,” he told her.