From Russia with Blood

xii

London—November 2006

In the hospital, Litvinenko initially seemed to rally. Doctors put him on a drip, and he regained a little strength. But the medics were mystified by his condition. At first they assumed he was suffering from severe food poisoning, but then they observed that his white blood cell count was falling fast. That meant his immune system was collapsing, but no one had the first idea why.

The patient himself continued to insist that he had been poisoned, but there was no sign of any recognizable toxin in his system to support that seemingly far-fetched claim. Marina told the staff that there was good reason to believe her husband: he was a former FSB officer, after all, and he knew “dangerous people.” But the medics waved away her concerns, and days went by without any improvement.

When Marina visited on November 13, she was shocked by a sudden decline in her husband’s condition. Litvinenko looked jaundiced, gaunt, and exhausted. She stroked his head to soothe him, and a clump of his hair came away on her glove. Then she saw that it was all over his sheets and pillow, too.

“What’s this?” she shouted. “What happened to my husband?”

It had been nearly a fortnight since Litvinenko fell ill, and the doctors were no closer to a diagnosis. But then a hematologist who was brought in to review his case made a striking observation. Litvinenko’s symptoms were similar to those of cancer patients after intense bouts of chemotherapy. The blood doctor soon refined his diagnosis: it looked like he was suffering from radiation sickness.

Staff brought in a Geiger counter to scan the patient’s body for gamma rays—the most common kind of radiation—but they found none. Doctors were, once again, stumped. The next clue arrived that afternoon in the form of a new batch of test results from the medical lab. Traces of a toxin that looked like the heavy metal thallium had been detected in Litvinenko’s system. The levels were too faint to explain the severity of his condition, and further tests were needed, but the results finally shifted the diagnostic calculus. This was now officially being treated as a case of suspected poisoning.

Litvinenko was transferred to a specialist unit at University College Hospital, in Bloomsbury, where he was put on an emergency course of Prussian blue—an antidote to thallium. A squad of armed police officers was stationed outside his bedroom door, on the hospital’s sixteenth floor. And just before midnight, a wiry figure appeared at his bedside.

The suited stranger addressed Litvinenko by his English name, Edwin. He was pale and rawboned, with silvering hair slicked aside from a deeply creased forehead, and he introduced himself as Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt from Scotland Yard.

“Edwin, we’re here investigating an allegation that somebody has poisoned you,” he said impassively. “Can I ask you to tell us what you think has happened to you and why?”

Litvinenko had lain powerless to fight back as his condition deteriorated for more than two weeks, but his mind had been hard at work on the case. He told Hyatt that he had been poisoned by Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun.

The defector had not said as much to anyone else—not even to Marina. If Lugovoy and Kovtun had no idea that he’d given them up, he reasoned, there was a good chance they’d return to London, where they could be arrested. But he was ready to tell Hyatt everything. “It’s very important for my case,” he said.

The whole story came tumbling out in broken English. He explained how he’d blown the whistle on the plot to kill Berezovsky and fled to Britain, where he’d carried on investigating the FSB’s role in the Moscow apartment bombings and other atrocities bearing the fingerprints of the Russian state.

“I live here,” he said. “I spoke. I fight.” He explained that his friend Anna Politkovskaya had been killed the month before, and he had stood up at the Frontline Club and told journalists it was Putin who killed her.

“I lost a lot of my friends,” he said. “My wife cry. My son don’t understand this.”

He talked for hours into the night, telling the detectives they would find all the evidence backing up his claims in the files he kept at home, on Osier Crescent.

The next day, Hyatt returned with a Russian interpreter. Now Litvinenko could communicate more fluently, and he was unequivocal about who had ordered his poisoning.

“The order about such a killing of a citizen of another country on its territory, especially if it is something to do with Great Britain, could have been given by only one person,” he said.

Hyatt regarded him levelly. “Would you like to tell us who that person is, sir?”

“That person is the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.”

Litvinenko told the detectives he wasn’t naive. “You won’t be able to prosecute him,” he acknowledged, “because he is the president of a huge country crammed with nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons.” But he begged them not to let the matter lie. “I understand that this case is going to be perceived by everyone as political,” he said. “But this case is not political—this case is criminal.”

Hyatt interviewed Litvinenko at his bedside for a total of nine hours over three days. The defector was suffering from severe diarrhea and had to break off frequently to use the toilet. Nurses interrupted at regular intervals to administer medicine, change his drip, and check his levels. As the final interview drew to a close, Litvinenko seized his chance for a final declaration.

“I feel very upset that this criminal, Putin, sits at the G8 as its chairman at the same table as the British prime minister, Tony Blair,” he said vehemently. “Having sat this murderer next to themselves at the same table, Western leaders have actually untied his hands to kill anyone anywhere.”

Litvinenko’s condition was now dire. His heart rate was irregular, his organs were failing fast, and his digestive tract was so inflamed that he could hardly talk. He was moved into intensive care.

Marina kept a near-constant vigil, sitting with him all day and bringing Anatoly to see his rapidly emaciating father after school. Berezovsky flew back from a trip to South Africa to be at his bedside. Zakayev, too, was there every day.

Doctors were now saying Litvinenko had a fifty-fifty chance of survival, but they were none the wiser as to the cause of his illness. His symptoms weren’t consistent with thallium poisoning, and the levels detected in his system were too low to explain his rapid decline. Radiation sickness didn’t seem to make sense, either, since the Geiger counter had failed to detect any sign of gamma radiation.

At a loss, Litvinenko’s medical team reached out to a poison specialist at another hospital who made an obscure suggestion. What if he hadn’t been poisoned by regular gamma rays but by another form of radiation too rare to be detected by standard hospital tests? It seemed far-fetched, but it was all they had to go on, so the hospital staff took further urine samples from Litvinenko and sent them off to the British government’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, at Aldermaston, for testing.

Litvinenko, meanwhile, sensed he was dying and was determined that the world should know why. He wanted a statement drawn up to be released in the event of his death, directly accusing Putin of his murder. His lawyer got to work and brought Litvinenko a draft.

“This is exactly what I want to say,” the defector rasped. He scrawled his signature in spidery lettering across the bottom of the page.

Next, he needed to capture the public’s attention, and Berezovsky called on his publicity adviser, Lord Bell, for help. The PR man’s advice was clear: a picture would tell this story far more powerfully than words. The defector agreed, and Bell summoned a photographer to the hospital. When she entered the room, Litvinenko pushed aside his hospital gown to reveal the mess of wires and sensors attached to his gaunt chest. The flashbulb flared, and the image was captured: his body jaundiced and shrunken; his fierce blue eyes staring defiantly down the lens.

The picture made the story. The next day, Litvinenko’s agonized face was plastered all over the front pages of every British newspaper, and a growing throng of journalists and TV crews clamored at the hospital gates for news of the poisoned Russian spy.

There was one last matter to take care of. Litvinenko had pledged the last years of his life to championing the cause of the Chechen people, and he wanted to make a final gesture of solidarity. He told Zakayev he wished to die a Muslim. With Marina’s permission, the rebel leader spoke the shahada and brought an imam to his friend’s bedside to perform the rites of conversion.

Litvinenko spent the next day drifting in and out of consciousness. His father, Walter, had flown from Russia to keep watch overnight. When Marina rose to go home to Anatoly, Litvinenko awoke suddenly.

“Marina,” he said, looking at her directly. “I love you so much.”

Later that night, Litvinenko lost consciousness for the last time. Marina spent the following day by his side as he lay in a coma. When night fell, she returned to Osier Crescent to put Anatoly to bed. While at home, she received a call from the hospital telling her to come back immediately. When mother and son arrived on the ward, they were shown into a private room.

The body on the bed was gray, skeletal, and hairless. Litvinenko was dead.

Six hours before, Scotland Yard had received test results from the Atomic Weapons Establishment revealing that the defector’s body was riddled with alpha radiation. He had been poisoned with a rare nuclear isotope originating in only one place: a government nuclear facility in the depths of Russia’s Ural Mountains. Its name was polonium-210.

In the early hours of the following morning, soon after Marina and Anatoly returned to Osier Crescent, huddled together and numb with grief, swarms of police officers converged on their home wearing protective suits, rubber boots, and gas masks. Their lives were in danger, they were told, and they must vacate the house at once. The pair spent a desolate night across the road at the Zakayevs’ home. When they woke, their house was sealed with plastic and surrounded by a police guard. The property was humming with polonium radiation.

The family was asked not to talk to anyone while officials assessed the risk to the wider public. But when Walter Litvinenko emerged, blinking, from the hospital to a blaze of flashbulbs, the grief-stricken father broke down in tears and let it slip.

“My son was killed by a tiny little nuclear bomb,” he sobbed in front of the cameras.

The British government could wait no longer before confirming that Litvinenko had been killed with radioactive polonium, and its COBRA crisis committee met to plan an emergency response to the defector’s death. It was only a year since Britain’s top intelligence officials had gathered around the table for a private audience with Vladimir Putin. Now the spy chiefs were there to brief the government on intelligence connecting the Russian president to a targeted nuclear attack in the heart of the capital.

Outside the bunker, chaos was breaking loose. Squads of public health officers in protective gear were scouring the streets of London for alpha radiation while camera crews pursued them at every step. “This is an unprecedented event in the UK,” the government’s Health Protection Agency said in a statement. “It is the first time someone in the UK has apparently been deliberately poisoned with a radioactive agent.” The story was running on every news channel, and an emergency government hotline was deluged with calls from thousands of people who feared they might have been exposed to the radiation.

Berezovsky’s advisers had by now released Litvinenko’s final statement. The document the defector signed on his deathbed was sent to every newsroom in the country—and his last words rang out around the world.

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me, the British police who are pursuing my case with vigor and professionalism and are watching over me and my family.

I would like to thank the British government for taking me under their care. I am honored to be a British citizen. I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight. I thank my wife Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.

But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

—Alexander Litvinenko, 21 November 2006

Putin dismissed Litvinenko’s statement as a fake. “It is a pity that tragic events like death have been used for political provocations,” he told journalists at a news conference in Helsinki. Meanwhile, back in Russia, the state propaganda machine sowed doubt and confusion. A loyal Duma deputy named Sergey Abeltsev declared the defector’s death “a serious warning to traitors of all colors, wherever they are located,” while the Kremlin’s media outlets churned out an ever more baffling array of conspiracy theories about how Litvinenko had met his end. The defector poisoned himself. Or Berezovsky murdered him to frame Putin. Or the mafia was responsible. Or MI6 had him assassinated. Or Zakayev was the killer.

But the radioactive evidence was incontrovertible. Lugovoy and Kovtun had left a glaring polonium trail all over London, allowing police to reconstruct their every move in lurid detail. The polonium pathway led from the hotel rooms where they slept to the offices they visited and the bars, restaurants, and strip clubs they patronized after hours. It even traveled with them all the way back to Russia. After the pair were widely named in the media as Scotland Yard’s prime suspects, they visited the British embassy in Moscow to proclaim their innocence, only to leave polonium traces all over the furniture. The chair Lugovoy sat on was so radioactive it had to be burned.

Back in London, the polonium evidence allowed police to piece together an astonishingly vivid picture of the fate that had befallen Litvinenko. The Pine Bar was a nuclear disaster zone. The toilet stall Lugovoy and Kovtun had visited before Litvinenko’s arrival was heavily contaminated, as were the chairs and tables where they had sat. The teapot the assassins tampered with gave off an astronomically high radioactive reading, with the most concentrated levels on the spout. It had been placed in a dishwasher after the poisoning, spreading the nuclear contamination across tableware, glassware, and cutlery that the hotel had unwittingly continued giving to other guests. Scientists examining the room where Kovtun had slept found a mangled clump of hair in the bathroom sink that was clogged with pure polonium. The assassin had poured the dregs of the poison down the drain.

Lugovoy and Kovtun had brought the polonium with them to the Pine Bar, but it was Litvinenko who carried the radioactive trail with him when he left the hotel. After drinking the poisoned tea, the defector had set off for Down Street emitting an invisible radioactive glow. He had trailed polonium into Berezovsky’s offices, leaving traces all over the photocopier he used to scan Scaramella’s documents as well as the back seat of Zakayev’s car as he traveled home.

The trail revealed that the assassins had likely attempted to poison Litvinenko twice before they finally succeeded. The first time was at the meeting in Reilly’s boardroom, where the polonium appeared to have been slipped into Litvinenko’s cup after Lugovoy insisted that they all drink tea. The defector had not taken a sip—but tests showed the whole table had been left “heaving” with radiation. Lugovoy had returned to the Best Western after the meeting and thrown the remainder of the vial down his bathroom sink.

The second occasion was in the Sheraton parlor. Lugovoy brought another vial of polonium to the hotel where Litvinenko had opened up about his work for the Spanish investigators. When the defector left, Lugovoy again returned to his hotel room and chucked the polonium in the trash. This time he spilled some and mopped it up with a couple of towels that a hotel cleaner later picked up and threw down the laundry chute. When Scotland Yard examined the scene, it was so radioactive that two nuclear scientists wearing full protective gear had to withdraw for their own safety, and the entire hotel was sealed off. The towels were sent to Aldermaston and impounded.

By then, more than three thousand people had called the government help line to voice fears that they might have been contaminated, and Health Protection Agency officials were looking for around five hundred members of the public they considered to be at risk. The entire staff of the Pine Bar was found to have been exposed to polonium, and anyone who drank from the contaminated teapot needed to be tracked down for testing. Two policemen tested positive. Reilly, Scaramella, Berezovsky, and Zakayev had also been exposed. And Litvinenko’s family was contaminated, too. The defector himself was the only person to have fallen seriously ill from exposure to the poison—he was, after all, the only one who had ingested it in undiluted form—but the long-term effects of polonium contamination remain unclear.

The pathologists who were brought in to perform Litvinenko’s autopsy wore full protective clothing. It was, they agreed, “one of the most dangerous postmortems ever undertaken in the Western world.” Litvinenko had 26.5 micrograms of polonium in his bloodstream. Less than one microgram would have been fatal. When the body was finally released to the family, it was in a sealed lead-lined casket, and they were told that if they wanted to have him cremated, they would have to wait more than twenty years for the radiation to subside before his remains could be safely removed.

On December 7, Marina and Anatoly stood in the pouring rain on a hill overlooking North London and watched as the casket descended into the ground at Highgate Cemetery. Berezovsky and Zakayev were among the pallbearers who carried Litvinenko’s body to its final resting place, and the rebel leader had brought an imam to say prayers as the coffin was lowered into its muddy grave. Walter Litvinenko stepped forward from the huddled mourners to give his son’s eulogy.

“Sasha was killed for telling the truth by those who are afraid of what he had to say,” he said in a voice so choked that other mourners strained to hear his words. A police guard kept the press pack at bay. The night before the funeral, Scotland Yard had announced publicly that their inquiry was officially a murder investigation.

The Crown Prosecution Service went on to formally charge Lugovoy and Kovtun with Litvinenko’s murder, and Britain demanded that the two suspects be extradited to stand trial in London, but no one was holding out much hope. Moscow initially suggested that the two men could be “exchanged” for Berezovsky and Zakayev, but when that proposal hit a brick wall, Russian prosecutors flatly refused to extradite them.

Britain could simply not afford a total collapse in its relationship with Moscow over the killing. The UK was by then the biggest foreign investor in Russian oil and gas, and BP was scoping a new joint venture with Gazprom after acquiring its stake in Rosneft. Moreover, the West was staring down the barrel of Iran’s advancing nuclear program, and its leaders needed Putin’s help to put pressure on Tehran to step back from the brink. The relationship with Russia was too strategically important to pick an open-ended fight with the Kremlin. The situation was a stalemate. The UK expelled four Russian diplomats, and Moscow sent four British officials packing in return.

Putin’s government built a protective wall around the two wanted men. Lugovoy capitalized on his role in the saga to acquire a macabre kind of celebrity in Russia, holding press conferences, giving countless TV interviews, and parading himself around the talk-show circuit, all the while branding Litvinenko a “traitor” and denying any role in his killing.

“He was sticking his nose in places where a dog would not stick his tail,” Lugovoy sneered in one radio interview. “And so what happened to him was most likely due to his imprudent choice of associates and general reckless way of life.”

Lugovoy’s career in the public eye went from strength to strength. He was given a seat in the Duma, making him immune from prosecution in Russia, as well as a role hosting a show called Traitors on Russian TV. Kovtun kept a lower profile, outside of a few appearances at heavily stage-managed press conferences where he morosely protested his innocence, but he was soon doing big business as a consultant in Russia. The onetime pot washer and failed porn star was suddenly a wealthy man.

For the spies in the River House, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko marked the realization of a long-held fear. The first MI6 heard of it was when Litvinenko’s handler received a call from Detective Inspector Hyatt, calling from the defector’s bedside. Litvinenko had proved the most cooperative of witnesses, yet as they tracked back through all his activities in the days before he fell ill, there was one item on his schedule he flatly refused to discuss: a meeting in the basement café of Waterstones on Piccadilly with someone he wouldn’t name.

“Edwin,” Hyatt had said sternly. “It could be absolutely vital that you tell us who that person is.”

Litvinenko wouldn’t budge, but he gave Hyatt the number he used to contact Martin, and the detective placed the call. As soon as Hyatt explained whom he was interviewing, the handler rushed right over to the hospital to debrief his informant, returning to the River House with the nightmarish news that an MI6 asset appeared to have been poisoned on British soil without anyone noticing.

The spy agency cranked into crisis mode, tapping every source and listening post for intelligence about who was behind the plot to kill Litvinenko. The picture that emerged was horribly clear. The FSB had enlisted Lugovoy and Kovtun to infiltrate the community of Russian exiles living in Britain and eliminate the defector in an operation personally overseen by the agency’s director, Nikolai Patrushev. And all the intelligence suggested that the instruction had come from the top: Vladimir Putin himself had ordered the killing.

None of that source material could ever be made public without blowing the cover of highly sensitive informants and listening posts in Russia, but it left no room for doubt inside the River House. And the Russia watchers were collecting intelligence about three more strange events that served to heighten fears about the threat Putin posed to the West.

First, they learned that Igor Ponomarev, Russia’s representative on the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization, had collapsed and died in London after a night at the opera just two days before Litvinenko was poisoned. The diplomat had complained of severe thirst and drunk three liters of water—a known symptom of thallium poisoning—before keeling over, and his body had been rushed back to Russia on a diplomatic plane before any tests could be carried out by British medics. Ponomarev had formed close relationships with US diplomats in the course of his work, and he had arranged to meet privately with Scaramella on the day after his death. That connection, and the proximity to Litvinenko’s poisoning, was too much to ignore, so the Russia watchers sent a formal request to their counterparts at the CIA for information about Ponomarev. When the response came back, the US spies confirmed what MI6 feared: they had intelligence suggesting the diplomat may have been poisoned.

Then came the death of Daniel McGrory. The veteran journalist at the London Times died of a sudden hemorrhage five days before the airing of an NBC documentary in which he was interviewed about his reporting on Litvinenko’s death. Soon after the broadcast, a second contributor was targeted: a US security expert named Paul Joyal, who had also been interviewed by NBC. Joyal was shot and seriously wounded by two gunmen in the driveway of his home, in Maryland, and his attackers were never caught. There was no tangible evidence connecting either McGrory’s death or the attack on Joyal to Russia—no suspects, no forensic evidence, no glaring radioactive trail. And while Joyal declared publicly that he believed he had been targeted by Russian assassins, McGrory’s family insisted the journalist’s fatal hemorrhage had been caused by an enlarged heart, as his inquest found. But the proximity of the two incidents was alarming enough to prompt the spies in the River House to reach out again to the CIA—and again, the US spies confirmed they had intelligence connecting both cases to Russia.

In the aftermath of Litvinenko’s killing, the Russia watchers were left grappling with the knowledge that Putin was prepared to hunt down and murder his adversaries wherever in the world they might seek safe haven. He had passed laws sanctioning the killing of enemies of the state on foreign soil, and he had wasted no time in putting those laws into action. The development of his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons for use in targeted assassinations was gathering pace, and he had shown his willingness to imperil countless members of the public in order to hit his mark. Most chillingly, the threat to Britain’s community of Russian exiles only seemed to be rising.

Putin had learned that he could murder a British citizen on the streets of the capital with impunity—and Litvinenko had been only one name on the FSB’s kill list. Who was next?