From Russia with Blood

xix

Titness Park, Ascot, England—March 23, 2013

The mansion was strangely silent when Boris Berezovsky’s only remaining bodyguard let himself in. It was the early afternoon of a bitingly cold day in March, and Avi Navama had been out running errands for several hours. The former Mossad agent had guarded Berezovsky for six years, long enough to start thinking of him as a second father, and he would once have refused to leave his charge unattended for even a moment. But now that the rest of the guards had been disbanded and the servants were gone, he had to be all things to his master—cook, babysitter, errand boy—as well as single-handedly trying to keep the man safe.

Berezovsky was nowhere to be seen inside the château-style mansion where he had been living for months on his ex-wife’s charity, and Navama noticed that calls and texts were backing up on his mobile phone. Bounding up the stairs, the bodyguard found the bathroom door locked. There was no answer when he knocked. When no amount of hammering raised a response, he kicked down the door.

The oligarch was splayed on his back on the bathroom floor, his face a deep shade of purple. A length of his favorite black cashmere scarf was tied tight around his neck, torn from another length dangling from the metal shower rail overhead. Navama knelt and pressed his ear to his master’s lips, but they were silent. The Kremlin’s archnemesis was dead.

Berezovsky had seemed like a man on his way to the gallows in his last miserable months, and when officers arrived from the Thames Valley Police, both his bodyguard and his eldest daughter, Elizaveta, told them he had talked about ending his life. The bathroom door had been locked, and there was no sign of a struggle. A brief panic arose when a radiation detector sounded an alarm and hazardous materials specialists swooped in to check for traces of radioactivity, but none could be found. The police announced quickly that Berezovsky’s death was not suspicious and closed the case.

The news that Russia’s most defiant oligarch had finally fallen on his own sword drove a split through his friends. Some who had witnessed Berezovsky’s descent into depression believed he was capable of suicide, but most were convinced that he had finally fallen victim to the Russian assassins who had been hunting him for years.

“Boris was fucking whacked,” said Jonathan Brown. Lord Bell, the oligarch’s PR guru, told everyone there was no doubt about who was responsible for his death.

“If you upset Putin, you disappear.”

When the Scotland Yard protection officer heard of Berezovsky’s death, he felt crushed. He thought back over everything that had gone into guarding the unruly oligarch—the panicked phone calls when new threats emerged; the heated COBRA meetings; the whispered warnings on lamplit street corners in Mayfair.

After all of that, he thought, it comes to this. He went to Down Street to offer his condolences to the oligarch’s staff, but the fixtures were already being ripped out of the office on the second floor.

The downfall of Russia’s public enemy number one was a prime propaganda opportunity for Putin. He capitalized on it by claiming publicly that the oligarch had recently written two letters throwing himself on the Kremlin’s mercy.

“He wrote that he had made many mistakes and asked to be forgiven and allowed to return to his homeland,” Putin said, adding that the letters were “fairly personal” and that he would not publish them because God would not approve of such a display. The Russian press was told that Abramovich, having received an apology himself, had delivered one of the missives to Putin personally.

The reaction to Berezovsky’s death in the largely Kremlin-controlled Russian media was vitriolic. Channel One, the broadcaster Boris and Badri had once controlled, labeled him an “evil genius,” while another Moscow daily branded him a “master of chaos,” and a popular tabloid described him as a “giant spider who managed to entangle so many top officials in his web.” The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, for which Anna Politkovskaya had once worked, gave Berezovsky the most balanced send-off, noting in an editorial that the oligarch had “viewed Russia as a chessboard, but one on which only he would be allowed to move the pieces.”

Berezovsky’s family was convinced he had been murdered. They were about to fly to Israel for a family holiday, and his beloved mother had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer—they couldn’t believe he would have abandoned her when she had only a few months left to live.

It had been Elizaveta who first told the police that her father had expressed a wish to die, and that was true, but it by no means ruled out foul play in her mind. Berezovsky’s sudden mental collapse had seemed to her too swift and powerful to be believed. He had confided to her one day, pale and shaking, that he felt as if “some chemical reaction inside” was causing him to feel such deep despair. She wondered whether her father had been poisoned with some mysterious mind-altering substance in his last months, and she set about investigating his death on her own.

When officers from the Thames Valley Police arrived at the oligarch’s inquest to make the case for suicide the following year, Elizaveta was ready to square up to them. The coroner heard first from the Home Office pathologist who conducted the official postmortem and concluded that Berezovsky’s injuries were consistent with hanging. But Elizaveta had enlisted an eminent German asphyxiation expert named Dr. Bernd Brinkmann to examine photographs of her father’s body—and his testimony blew a hole in the police case.

Brinkmann announced there was “no way” that Berezovsky’s injuries were consistent with hanging, positing instead that the oligarch had been attacked from behind and throttled before being strung up from the shower rail. The marks on the oligarch’s neck were “completely different to the strangulation mark in hanging”—circular instead of V-shaped—and Brinkmann noted that his face was deeply discolored, whereas victims of hanging are usually pale. There was also a fresh wound on the back of Berezovsky’s head and a fractured rib as well as the presence of an unidentified fingerprint on the shower rail.

The police position was that Berezovsky had sustained his additional injuries when the scarf snapped and his body fell, and they told the coroner they were “content” that Berezovsky had taken his own life. But Elizaveta offered the inquest a very different perspective.

“I can think of many people interested in my father’s death,” she said. Asked if she knew who these people were, she replied: “I think we all know.”

The Kremlin had been trying for years to silence Berezovsky, and his daughter believed it had finally succeeded. “He was saying that Putin was a danger to the whole world,” she told the coroner, “and you can see that now.”

With such conflicting testimony, the coroner, Dr. Peter Bedford, said he could not determine beyond all reasonable doubt how Berezovsky had died, and the inquest recorded an open verdict.

The official police position did not sit easily in all quarters at Scotland Yard. Several officers in the Specialist Protection and counterterrorism units, who had spent years monitoring the threats to Berezovsky, would always suspect that he had, finally, been murdered. They knew Russia was perfectly capable of faking a person’s suicide, having slipped the victim mind-altering drugs beforehand to make it look believable.

Behind the scenes, as had become traditional when Russian exiles died on British soil, the spies in the River House reached out to their US counterparts to ask for intelligence about the oligarch’s demise. The answer from Langley was no surprise. The Americans suspected Berezovsky had been assassinated. They did not have proof that the killing was carried out on direct orders from the Kremlin, but the evidence linking the oligarch’s death to Russia was considered compelling. Berezovsky had made many enemies in his long-distance war with Russia, and he had given them many reasons to wish him dead. But US spies suspected it was a single maneuver that had sealed his fate.

Berezovsky had been living on borrowed time ever since stoking the Orange Revolution, which had toppled the pro-Kremlin regime in Kiev in 2004. And now, with his archnemesis dead, Putin was gearing up to assert his authority in Ukraine once and for all.

Crimea and London—February 2014

The masked men who surrounded the Crimean parliament under cover of darkness in February of 2014 carried Russian army-issue AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. They wore unmarked green flak jackets to obscure their allegiance, but they were acting under the aegis of the Kremlin. In the early hours of the morning, the Russian-backed troops stormed the seat of government in Ukraine’s turbulent separatist region before seizing control of its airport and blockading its military bases. By the time the sun came up, the Russian flag was fluttering from the rooftop of the parliament building, and Crimea had been occupied.

The stage thus set by the masked soldiers he referred to fondly as his “little green men,” Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine’s breakaway region, and within a month, he had announced the annexation of Crimea as a federal subject of Russia. The men in green pressed on to occupy the turbulent Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, armed and backed all the way by the Kremlin. They declared the two regions independent, sparking a full-blown armed conflict with the Ukrainian government in which thousands were killed, while Kiev was hit by waves of crippling cyberattacks emanating straight from Moscow.

The annexation of Crimea marked the end of any serious hope that Putin could be brought in from the cold, and Russia’s expulsion from the institutions and alliances of the liberal world order was swift when it finally came. The NATO countries ceased all political and military cooperation with Moscow, and Russia was thrown out of the G8. President Obama signed a series of executive orders enacting sweeping economic sanctions, and the EU followed suit, crippling the Russian economy further as it reeled from a sudden slump in global oil prices. Major bilateral trade talks were suspended. And the United States went on to revive plans for its missile defense system by the Russian border.

In the first days of the invasion, the British prime minister hoped the trouble might blow over without damage to his dealings with Putin, and a top aide was photographed outside Downing Street holding a document stating that the UK would not back sanctions “or close London’s financial center to Russians.” But Putin’s wholesale annexation of a sovereign European territory was too much.

“It makes it impossible to do business with him,” one cabinet minister reflected privately as the government reckoned with the fallout.

David Cameron had no choice but to come out fighting. He made a statement directed at the Kremlin, and for once, he did not mince his words. “This is an incursion into a sovereign state, and a land grab of part of its territory, with no respect for the law,” he said. Britain followed the rest of the NATO countries by suspending all military cooperation with Moscow and backing the EU sanctions.

Russia’s next move was arguably its most brazen yet. In July, Kremlin-backed forces in Donetsk shot down a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. Satellite footage and other digital evidence showed that the military-grade missile had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash and fired from a field in an area controlled by Kremlin-backed rebels before the launcher was rushed back over the border. Ten Britons were among the dead.

Cameron demanded a phone call with Putin to express his anger about the attack and was further enraged when the Russian president snubbed him by taking three days to respond. That, it turned out, was the last straw.

Two days later, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced that the government would, finally, launch a full public inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

It was a stunning about-face. Until then, the government had stood in the way of every effort by Marina Litvinenko to get to the truth about who had ordered her husband’s killing. An inquest was opened after attempts to extradite the two prime suspects failed, and the presiding judge promised an “open and fearless” investigation—but his path was blocked when the foreign secretary obtained a public-interest immunity order to stop the disclosure of critical classified information. The judge, Sir Robert Owen, asked the home secretary to establish a public inquiry with the power to consider the secret material in closed hearings, but even that was rebuffed. Theresa May acknowledged in her written explanation that “international relations have been a factor.”

The defector’s widow had filed for a judicial review of that decision, pressing on even after ministers rejected her application for legal aid to cover her costs.

“I really want to get the truth,” she tearfully told reporters on the steps of the High Court. Three judges had ruled in her favor that February, describing May’s refusal to hold an inquiry as “irrational” and “legally erroneous.”

Since then, the government had remained silent. But six days after the downing of the MH17 flight, May announced that Marina Litvinenko could finally have her day in court.

Owen was brought in to lead the proceedings, and the hearings got under way. Over the course of the following eighteen months, the inquiry would hear public testimony from a cast of Putin’s most savage critics, while in private the judge pored over a cache of top-secret intelligence documenting the murderous truth about the Russian leader the West had courted for so long.

If the government thought its dilatory move toward justice might serve as a deterrent, it had badly miscalculated. Putin thumbed his nose at the inquiry by personally decorating Andrey Lugovoy with a medal “for services to the motherland” during the hearings. And Russia’s killing campaign was only going to escalate.