From Russia with Blood

xiv

Moscow, London, and Eilat—June 2007

The hit man was a fearsome figure in the Russian ganglands—and he was no stranger to the man he was coming to kill. Movladi Atlangeriev was the godfather of Moscow’s Chechen mafia, known as Lord or, more reverently, Lenin throughout the underworld. He started out in the ’70s as a smart young Chechen hoodlum with a taste for fast Western cars and a talent for burglary and rose to riches in the ’80s running a gang of thieves targeting wealthy students across the capital. At the turn of the decade, as communism fell, he persuaded the heads of the city’s most prosperous Chechen crime groups to band together and form a single supersyndicate under his leadership—and that was how he became one of the most powerful gang bosses in Moscow.

The new group was called the Lozanskaya, and it soon asserted its strength in a series of bloody skirmishes with the local mob, leaving the streets strewn with the mutilated bodies of rival gang bosses. Racketeering, extortion, robbery, and contract killings were its stock-in-trade. But Atlangeriev was a suave man with smoky good looks and an enterprising mind to match his wardrobe of well-cut suits, and he blended well with Russia’s emerging business elite. The gang quickly branched out under his command, taking over swaths of the city’s gas stations and car showrooms. That was how it established a lucrative relationship with Berezovsky.

The businessman made good money selling Ladas through dealerships under the gang’s control, and then he paid the Lozanskaya to provide protection as his car businesses grew rapidly in the early ’90s. When Berezovsky was attacked with a car bomb during his battle with the gang boss Sergei “Sylvester” Timofeev, some said it was Atlangeriev’s mob who had struck back on his behalf. And when the oligarch fell out of favor with Putin and fled to Britain, the Chechen crime lord kept in touch.

Atlangeriev called from time to time to talk shop, and he had showed up before in London offering strange propositions to the oligarch and his associates. Several months before Alexander Litvinenko’s death, the crime boss had reached out to Akhmed Zakayev.

“I know him!” Litvinenko exclaimed when his friend mentioned who had come calling. The defector remembered the Chechen gangster well from his time in the FSB’s organized crime division. Part of his job had been recruiting moles to work undercover in the criminal underworld, and the Lozanskaya had grown so powerful by the mid-’90s that the FSB was desperate to get someone on the inside. The ever zealous Litvinenko decided to go straight to the top. Collaborating with the state came with many privileges—not least the ability to operate with impunity—and Atlangeriev proved receptive. Litvinenko had played a key role in his recruitment.

Helping cultivate the godfather of the Chechen mafia as an FSB collaborator had been a major coup, but that was back when he was still a true believer in the Russian security state. Since his defection, he had been following his recruit’s activities from afar with dismay. Litvinenko learned that Atlangeriev had become a key asset in the FSB’s efforts to destroy the separatist movement in Chechnya and prop up the pro-Kremlin regime. His gang had been linked to state-sponsored terror attacks and assassinations in the region, and he had played such an important role that he had reputedly been given several medals and an engraved pistol by the head of the FSB himself, General Nikolai Patrushev.

“He’s 100 percent under FSB control,” Litvinenko told Zakayev.

Meeting Atlangeriev would be fraught with danger, but the two men agreed that the rebel leader should go ahead and secretly record the encounter so that Litvinenko could supply his MI6 handlers with evidence of the FSB at work in London. The defector said he would oversee his friend’s protection during the meeting.

Zakayev told Atlangeriev to meet him at the Westbury hotel, in Mayfair, arriving at the establishment’s discreetly low-lit Polo Bar in advance to prepare the ground. Litvinenko brought in a team of security operatives who swept the room for hazards, slipped recording devices under the table where Zakayev was to sit and wait for the crime boss, and positioned a surveillance team around him. The rebel leader took up his post. He had seen plenty of action in his time, but even he felt like he was in a spy movie, with one member of the surveillance crew at the next table and another posing as an electrician in the corner. Litvinenko had been tight-lipped about where the security team came from, but Zakayev was sure they were from MI6.

The crime boss turned up looking as sharp as ever. He was still arrestingly handsome in his midfifties: swarthy and even featured, with a swimmer’s shoulders under his crisp white shirt. He looks like George Clooney, Zakayev thought. The gangster laid his cards on the table right away. He said he worked for the FSB and came bearing a proposal directly from General Patrushev. If Zakayev dropped his campaign against Putin and came back home, the Russians would give him a senior government job.

“I am a Chechen man,” Atlangeriev told the rebel leader. “You can trust me.” Zakayev was thrown. In Chechen tradition, if one man invited another to travel, it was his solemn duty to ensure the guest’s safe passage—but why would the FSB be trying to lure him back if not to kill or capture him? Then Atlangeriev’s phone rang loudly, and the crime boss leaped to his feet.

“Yes, General,” he said, standing ramrod straight and eyeing Zakayev. “He is here in front of me.” Look at him, the rebel leader thought as Atlangeriev carried on the call with fawning deference. He’s so afraid he’s standing to attention even when they can’t see him. What kind of guarantees can he possibly give me if he’s so scared?

“It’s a trap,” Litvinenko told his friend as soon as the meeting was over. “Don’t trust him.” But he was excited: they now had evidence of the FSB offering Zakayev a government job, while in public the Kremlin was still calling him Chechnya’s answer to Osama bin Laden. Zakayev declined the offer to return to Russia, and he and Litvinenko passed their evidence to the British authorities.

Now, a little more than a year later, in June of 2007, Atlangeriev was on his way back to London. And this time, the Russia watchers knew he was coming with orders to kill Berezovsky. The intelligence pointing to his involvement in a live FSB plot to eliminate the oligarch had come through six weeks earlier, and the protection officer had been dispatched to instruct Berezovsky not to meet him under any circumstances. That hadn’t been the only warning: Yuri Felshtinsky had also received a call from a Chechen source to alert him that the crime boss had been enlisted to dispatch Berezovsky, and then a separate source inside the FSB had tipped the oligarch off to the plot.

Atlangeriev’s movements and communications were monitored, and when he bought flights to London via Vienna, the protection officer received an urgent call from MI5.

“He’s arriving at Heathrow,” the voice at the other end of the phone said. “Remove the target.”

The officer raced over to Down Street to tell Berezovsky his assassin was on the way and he needed to get out of the country immediately. As always, the oligarch perked up at the prospect of an adventure and flung open his office door with a flourish.

“Warm up the aircraft!” he bellowed across the lobby to his secretary. “I need to leave today.”

Berezovsky took off for Israel, accompanied by a young officer who had just joined Specialist Protection after a spell as a London beat cop and couldn’t believe that this was his new world. The private jet landed at Ben Gurion Airport, and the party crossed the tarmac to a helicopter waiting to whisk them out to the coastal town of Eilat, where the oligarch’s £200 million superyacht rose like a gleaming shark’s fin from the turquoise waters of the Red Sea.

The rookie officer was shown aboard by an Amazonian hostess who took him to a private cabin, where a dinner suit was laid out on the bed in his exact size. There were deck clothes, too—shorts, sandals, polo shirts, shoes, and a cap—all branded with the yacht’s name, Thunder B. The vessel had an onboard wardrobe department with clothes in every measurement so the oligarch could keep his guests appropriately dressed whatever the weather. The young cop looked around him in disbelief and decided that if he was doing this, he might as well do it properly. He donned the dinner jacket and bow tie and made his way up on deck.

Back in London, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism department had swung into high gear alongside the Specialist Protection unit to prepare a response plan for the assassin’s arrival. The primary target of the hit was Berezovsky, but the intelligence suggested that Akhmed Zakayev was also at risk. Armed police officers were stationed at the rebel leader’s home, on Osier Crescent, and the officers ran drills with the family to plan their escape if the house came under attack. Surveillance teams were positioned in the surrounding streets, backed up by heavy assault units poised to swoop in if Atlangeriev appeared. “You’d only have to sneeze and you’d have an armed response,” the protection officer joked—but as far as he could tell the rebel leader never cracked a smile. It was Marina Litvinenko’s birthday—the first she had celebrated since her husband’s death—and armed officers were sent across the road to her house, too, to stand guard at the barbecue she was throwing for their friends.

Now that the targets were secure, Scotland Yard could afford to play cat and mouse with the assassin. Officers formed a “pursue and attack” plan: surveillance teams would follow Atlangeriev around London for as long as possible in order to gather intelligence about his activities before swooping in and arresting him when it looked like he was ready to strike.

The hit man was not coming alone: he was traveling with a young boy, which looked like the same modus operandi Andrey Lugovoy had employed in bringing his family to London as a cover for the hit on Litvinenko. Maybe, the officers hoped, if they stayed on his tail long enough the new assassin might even lead them to a secret polonium warehouse in the heart of the city.

“I need pursuit teams. Gunships. Three surveillance teams—sixty officers on the ground,” the protection officer told Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism commander. “We need chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear teams in full protective gear sent in to swab all his luggage.”

The police chiefs agreed on the strategy—but then they were summoned to the Cabinet Office, where a meeting had been convened to brief ministers and officials from the Home Office, Foreign Office, and Downing Street. By then, Atlangeriev was in the air and time was short, but the officers met with resistance as they laid out their plan. If Scotland Yard got caught tailing an FSB agent around London, there would be a major public fuss, and the diplomatic fallout with Russia would be another headache the government didn’t need. Couldn’t the hit man just be detained at the border? The officers pointed out that Atlangeriev hadn’t yet committed any arrestable offenses in Britain, and the intelligence implicating him in a murder plot couldn’t be revealed without exposing sensitive sources and listening posts in Moscow. It was essential to follow him in order to prove he really was here to kill Berezovsky before they could arrest him.

After some wrangling, the operation was approved—but the officers were instructed not to say a word to the media either before or afterward. If they were successful in apprehending Atlangeriev and journalists called with questions, their statement should be as short and uninformative as possible. “Police have arrested someone. End.” Berezovsky’s threat level was moved from “severe” to “critical”—meaning an attack was considered imminent.

Atlangeriev would arrive in just a few hours. An operations room was hastily set up, where commanding officers could coordinate the activities of surveillance teams on the ground, with hazardous materials units sweeping behind the assassin for radiation traces and armed response teams at the ready.

In a nearby room was a cabal of security-cleared officers tasked with monitoring a live intelligence feed from MI5 and MI6 as well as reading Atlangeriev’s text messages and listening to his phone calls in real time as soon as he landed. That classified information and intercepted material had to be kept out of the central evidence chain, otherwise it would have to be disclosed in court if Atlangeriev ever came to trial, which would reveal sensitive sources and methods. But when the officers in the intel cell picked up anything relevant, they were to bring it into the ops room and read it out to the senior commanding officer to help shape decision making.

Once the ops room and the intel cell were up and running, the surveillance teams were stationed around the airport, and the hazmat crews donned their protective gear. It was time for police chiefs to contact bosses at Heathrow to prepare the ground for the assassin’s arrival.

The plane on which Atlangeriev landed was held on the airstrip for a little longer than usual. The hit man waited with the other passengers, unaware that his bag had been removed from the hold and was being searched and swabbed by officers in hazmat suits outside. When the passengers were allowed to disembark, Atlangeriev and his child accomplice breezed through passport control, collected their luggage from the carousel, and cleared customs with nothing to declare. The pair made their way out of the terminal building and approached the cab stand, where a black taxi was waiting. They climbed in.

London’s iconic black cabs had long been the protection officer’s secret weapon. Unbeknownst to most Londoners, Scotland Yard owned a secret squadron of such cabs for use in special operations, and the security and intelligence services also ran their own fleets of undercover taxis. The cars were so ubiquitous as to be invisible, so there was no more anonymous way to travel around the city. The protection officer had used them to move Tony Blair during an active assassination plot and to transport the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie around London during his decade in hiding following the publication of The Satanic Verses. It was possible to make anyone, no matter how high-profile, disappear inside the passenger compartment of a black cab—and a well-timed taxi ride was often the best way to get up close and personal with a surveillance target.

Atlangeriev directed his taxi driver to the Hilton on Park Lane and settled back in the leather seat, unaware that he had just revealed where he was staying to the officers tracking his every move at Scotland Yard. The driver dropped the hit man and his young accomplice outside the hotel, and the pair made their way through the revolving doors at the base of the glowing blue skyscraper. Then officers from the intel cell came running into the ops room. Atlangeriev had placed a call to Berezovsky.

By the time his phone rang on board Thunder B, the oligarch was well prepared. The morning after his hasty escape from Britain, three British security officers had arrived in Eilat and boarded the yacht to brief him. It was a baking hot day, and the officers looked disheveled in sweat-dampened shorts and T-shirts, but they waved away Berezovsky’s largesse and made it clear they were there on serious business. Gathered around a table in the shade on the lower outside deck, they told him they needed his help to buy Scotland Yard some time. If Atlangeriev realized that Berezovsky was completely out of reach, he might just abort the mission and go back to Russia before the authorities had a chance to gather any intelligence. So when the would-be assassin called, they told him to act friendly and say he’d be available to meet in a few days’ time.

Berezovsky wasn’t ordinarily one to follow instructions, but he was relishing his leading role at the center of this live operation against an enemy agent, so he did as he was told when Atlangeriev called. Then he phoned Down Street and told his secretaries to be on high alert for the assassin’s arrival and to tell anyone who called that he was busy. After that, all that remained was to wait. He passed an enjoyable few days on board Thunder B, sunning himself on deck, scuba diving, and zooming around on his Jet Ski while the British authorities tracked his assassin around London.

Scotland Yard’s surveillance operatives found themselves on an unexpected sightseeing tour. They had hoped Atlangeriev might lead them to the heart of FSB activity in the capital, or possibly to a warehouse crammed with radiological weapons, but ever since his call to Berezovsky, the hit man had acted for all the world like a tourist showing a kid around the city. As he and his young companion traipsed through Trafalgar Square and past Buckingham Palace, the hazardous materials officers crept behind them swabbing and scanning for traces of toxins or radiation—but everything came up clean.

The officers judged that when Atlangeriev separated from the boy, that would be the indicator that he was gearing up to strike. They waited, but the sightseeing went on for days, and the protection officer began to get twitchy. Berezovsky was a busy man: he couldn’t stay on his yacht forever. Then finally word came back from the surveillance team that the hit man had set out from the Hilton alone.

“This is the critical moment,” the commanding officer shouted. Atlangeriev had dropped his easy touristic demeanor, and now he was visibly wary of being tailed. He performed textbook countersurveillance moves as he navigated the city—taking circuitous routes, doubling back on himself, and hopping on and off different modes of transportation to throw off anyone trying to follow. Between them, the surveillance teams just about managed to stay on his tail as he visited various addresses—but they couldn’t follow him inside without blowing their cover. Then a readout from the intel cell suggested that the hit man was planning to buy a gun.

“We need to take him off the board,” the commanding officer told the team. Scotland Yard called the officers guarding Berezovsky on Thunder B and told them to prepare him for his big moment. It was time to call his would-be assassin and propose a meeting.

That evening, three plainclothes police officers positioned themselves in the lobby at Down Street. The receptionists on the second floor had been asked to stay late to greet the assassin politely when he turned up, and they waited with trepidation as time ticked by without anyone appearing. After a while, they called downstairs to ask the elderly concierge at the front desk whether anyone had arrived to see Mr. Berezovsky. Yes, the old man said a little shakily, a gentleman had come in a few moments ago, and now there were three others with him in the lobby.

“What are the gentlemen doing now?” the receptionist asked.

“The gentlemen are talking,” the concierge replied. “Three of them are lying down, and one is standing.”

When Atlangeriev entered the lobby, two of the officers had swooped in and pinned him to the floor before he reached the elevator, while the third flashed the concierge his police badge. The hit man was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder and taken into police custody, where he was interrogated for two days, while his child accomplice was taken into the care of social services.

But then the order came down to let him go without charge. It wouldn’t be possible to make charges stick without disclosing intelligence that would give away far too much about British sources in Moscow, the officers were told, and the diplomatic fallout from publicly accusing the Kremlin of ordering another assassination in Britain so soon after Litvinenko’s would have been catastrophic. So Atlangeriev was handed over to immigration officials who designated him a “persona non grata” and put him on a plane back to Russia. That, the officers were assured by their superiors, amounted to a “really strong diplomatic poke in the eye.”

There was a commotion in some quarters at Scotland Yard over the decision to send the assassin home, but others were more sanguine. The protection officer comforted himself with the thought that the FSB might have killed one exile on British soil, but now Scotland Yard had prevented the murder of another. The way he looked at it, that evened the score. He called Berezovsky and told him it was safe to come home.

By then journalists had gotten wind of the dramatic arrest in Mayfair and were inundating Scotland Yard with questions. The press bureau gave out the elliptical response the government had preordained, and when his jet landed, Berezovsky was told to say nothing. The one thing that would increase the threat to his life, he was told, would be to embarrass Russia over its failure to kill him.

“Just lie low and keep your head down,” the protection officer said sternly.

Soon after, Berezovsky stood up in front of a packed press conference in central London and told journalists that Scotland Yard had just foiled a Kremlin plot to assassinate him.

“I think the same people behind this plot were behind the plot against Alexander Litvinenko,” he said. “Not only people in general, but Putin personally.”

Berezovsky held back the details of who had come for him and how the plot had been stopped, but he told his friends he had to go public with the attempt on his life in order to protect himself. Keeping state secrets was a dangerous game, he said: it was safest that the whole world know the truth. And, of course, he had never been one to pass up the chance for a dramatic press conference.

The protection officer was furious. “We’ve been fucked up the arse,” he shouted at the MI5 liaison officer in charge of monitoring threats against Berezovsky. He couldn’t shake the notion that he and his colleagues had unwittingly become pawns in Berezovsky’s big game.

Six months after the press conference, Scotland Yard received a report of the fate that had awaited Atlangeriev upon his return to Moscow. As he walked out of a traditional city-center restaurant on a bitterly cold winter night, the crime lord had been assailed by two men and bundled into the back of a car, which sped off into the darkness. Berezovsky’s failed assassin had been driven out into the woods and shot at point-blank range in the head.

London—October 2007

Berezovsky was hyperactive with glee in the wake of the foiled murder plot, and he was readying himself for a new battle. The oligarch had hit upon the idea of suing his old enemy Roman Abramovich in the British courts, claiming that he had been forced to surrender his interests in Sibneft and Channel One at a massive loss as the Kremlin moved to crush his business empire in 2001. He filed a multibillion-pound claim for damages at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, but the proceedings couldn’t get under way until Abramovich was served with a summons to attend trial, and Berezovsky spent months trying and failing to track down his old foe to deliver the documents. That October, he finally had a stroke of luck.

Abramovich was now the owner of the Premier League football club Chelsea FC, and he’d been spending more time in London since leaving his wife for a twenty-five-year-old supermodel earlier that year. The forty-year-old tycoon was out shopping on Sloane Street when Berezovsky spied him. The oligarch had been doing a spot of shopping himself and was emerging from the Dolce & Gabbana boutique when he caught sight of Abramovich entering the nearby Hermès store flanked by three bodyguards. He sent one of his own guards back to his armored Maybach to retrieve the court papers, which he had been carrying with him for months just in case such a moment arose, and then barreled toward Hermès clutching the documents. His path was blocked at the door of the boutique by Abramovich’s three security men, and a scuffle ensued between the two sets of bodyguards, during which Berezovsky seized his chance to force open the door and barge inside.

“I’ve got a present for you,” he crowed before hurling the court papers at Abramovich and turning on his heel. Berezovsky proceeded to phone all the journalists in his Rolodex to brag about his triumph. “It was like a scene from The Godfather,” he told one reporter.

The CCTV from the shop proved that Abramovich had received the court summons, and so began an epic legal battle between the two billionaires that would rage for more than four years, flushing out eye-popping details about the pillage of Russia in the ’90s and giving Berezovsky a platform from which to fire off a fresh volley of incendiary accusations at the Kremlin.

Berezovsky was manic with excitement after deceiving an FSB assassin and hitting Abramovich with a court summons in such quick succession. But unchastened as he was by the recent attempt on his life, it had put him in mind of a few administrative matters that would need to be resolved in the event of his death. As usual in such moments, he turned to Badri Patarkatsishvili for help.

“I’m not that much afraid,” he told his partner. “But I think there are things we should discuss in case something happens to me.”

Patarkatsishvili invited him to say more, and the oligarch began enumerating the outstanding obligations that would need to be taken care of should Scotland Yard’s finest fail him. The list amounted to a string of favors owed to a dizzying number of girlfriends. This young woman was a student who needed her education paid for; that girl had nowhere to live in Moscow and needed help keeping a roof over her head. After the recital had gone on for half an hour, Patarkatsishvili threw back his head and laughed his belly laugh.

“Boris, do me a favor,” he said. “Let me die before you.”