From Russia with Blood

xx

Marylebone, London—December 2014

The London square was still and cold when the body fell, dropping silently through the moonlight and landing with a thud. Impaled through the chest on the spikes of a wrought-iron fence, it dangled under the streetlamps as blood spilled onto the pavement. Overhead, a fourth-floor window stood open, the lights inside burning.

The dead man was Scot Young. The onetime superfixer was by then the ninth in Berezovsky’s circle of friends and business associates to die under suspicious circumstances in Britain. But when the police entered his penthouse on the night of December 8, 2014, they didn’t even dust for fingerprints. They declared his death a suicide on the spot and closed the case.

Young had become a shadow of his former self before his fatal fall: ever more terrified in the wake of Berezovsky’s death, hounded day and night by angry creditors, and still fighting tooth and nail to suppress the secrets of his Russian business dealings.

After seven years, sixty-five divorce hearings, and three months in prison for contempt, he had still failed to provide a satisfactory explanation for the sudden disappearance of his fortune, and the High Court had been forced to make its final ruling blind.

“Doing the best I can, I find that he still has £45 million hidden from this court,” the judge had ventured. Young was ordered to give Michelle half of that and several million more to cover her legal costs, telling Young “this debt will exist for all time.”

The money had not materialized, so Michelle continued her investigation into the whereabouts of the missing fortune. But shortly before his death, she received a frantic phone call from her ex-husband.

“I fucked it up in the end completely,” he said. “I put my hands up, and I actually apologize to you. You were a very good wife. You used to run me a bath, make me tea.” He made her an offer: if she stopped digging, he would find £30 million to give her the following day. But Michelle had told him that was nothing like enough “after billions of pounds being hidden,” and their call ended angrily.

“Okay, Michelle,” he said before hanging up. “I’ve tried to be nice. You’re going to end up with sweet fuck-all.”

When she heard the news of her ex-husband’s fatal fall weeks later, Michelle came into her younger daughter’s bedroom shaking all over.

“Your father has jumped off a building,” she said in a daze.

Sasha didn’t believe it. A few days before, her father had called to tell her he was checking himself into a psychiatric unit to stay out of danger. He was not supposed to be released for several more days.

Sasha called her sister, Scarlet, and the two of them set off to check on their dad in the hospital. But Young wasn’t there. Staff brought them tissues while they phoned the police in tears and begged in vain for facts. Then, googling on their mobiles, they found articles reporting their father’s death: he had fallen four stories from his bedroom window and been impaled on the iron spikes below—so deeply that a large section of the fence had to be cut away in order to remove his body. The two young women stumbled out of the hospital and threw up outside.

It wasn’t until around 8:00 p.m. that the police finally showed up at their door—two days after Young’s fall. Their father had killed himself, the officers said, and the death was not being investigated.

But Sasha and Scarlet had “zero belief” that their father had taken his own life. They knew he had been terrified of dying right until the end, and he had a crippling fear of heights. He had, they now realized, called them both sounding calm and cheerful just minutes before his body was found impaled on the spikes.

They phoned Jonathan Brown. The smoked-salmon mogul had been a favorite among their father’s friends ever since they were kids in Miami, and they told him through sobs that their dad was dead. Brown’s reaction was unambiguous. His friend had obviously been “fucking whacked,” he said, “like everyone else.” He had two questions: first, who was responsible? And second, “Am I next?”

Brown got on the first plane to London and the three of them made a pact: if the police weren’t going to investigate this, they would.

First, they went to speak to Young’s fiancée, Noelle Reno. She told them what she had told the police—that she and Young had split up right before he went into the hospital, and he had returned home unexpectedly at around 3:30 p.m. on December 8, just as she was waiting for a locksmith. They had a blazing row, Reno said, and Young refused to leave. In the altercation, one of her two phones had accidentally been dropped in the toilet, so after the locks had been changed she left Young inside the flat and set off to buy a new one. On her way, she said, Young called her on her second phone and said: “I’m going to jump. Stay on the phone and you will hear me.” She hung up, and minutes later he had fallen—at around 5:15 p.m.

Sasha and Scarlet couldn’t square that account with the calm, cheerful calls they received from their father during the same period. A call to Scarlet at 5:08 p.m. had gone to voice mail, and she still had the recording. “Hi, Scarlet, just wanted to say I love you loads, miss you terribly, and I’m all okay, don’t worry about me. Love you! Bye,” the message said. She would listen to that message what felt like a thousand times, trying to make sense of it.

A minute later—just five minutes before he fell—he called Sasha to tell her he loved her, too, and would ring her again in the morning. It isn’t uncommon for those on the verge of suicide to leave messages for their loved ones that don’t betray their intentions, but Young’s daughters simply couldn’t believe either of those calls had been meant as a final goodbye—so they carried on investigating.

Next, they went with Brown to examine the scene of their father’s fall. The three of them had driven by the flat the night before, while it was still sealed off with police tape, and they were spooked to see a light on in the upstairs window. Now they walked through the door that the police had smashed open and took in the place where Young had spent his last moments.

The flat was immaculate, with pristine white walls and cream carpet. They made their way into the bedroom and went over to the sash window from which Young had fallen. Pulling it up, the two young women found that it only opened around fifty centimeters, about the same as the distance from their dad’s elbow to his fingertips. As soon as they saw the window, they agreed it was hard to imagine how their father could have propelled himself out.

“That window was so small, and he was so tall,” Sasha said. “It would take a few minutes just to maneuver out of it.”

Stranger still, there was a can of Diet Coke, a packet of Marlboro menthols, and a cigarette lighter lined up neatly in a row on the narrow window ledge. Their father would have had to jump clean over them to hurl himself through the tight opening without knocking any of the items over. That scarcely seemed possible.

Leaning out the window, they looked down at the last sight their father’s eyes took in and saw the sharp iron fence looming up below. It was unfathomable to them that he would have flung himself onto those spikes—especially with his almost debilitating fear of heights. And then they spotted something that gave them chills.

On either side of the outside windowsill, there were rows of faint scratch marks in the dirt, about as far apart as the fingers on a hand.

“I guess it’s him fighting for his life,” Sasha said.

They took photographs of the inside of the flat, the narrow window opening, and the marks on the sill. That, already, was more than the police had done. The two young women opened the wardrobe and each put on one of their dad’s big snuggly sweaters, which still had his scent. Then they set off to confront the police.

They met with Detective Sergeant Christopher Page, the senior officer who had determined that Young’s death was not suspicious. The two daughters told Page that their father had called them the Saturday before his death to say he was in danger. Scarlet explained that he knew “unsavory characters,” including “a lot of Russian oligarchs,” and warned them “constantly” that “we had to be careful, he had to be careful, everyone had to be careful.” Several of their father’s friends and associates had died under suspicious circumstances, they pointed out, including Boris Berezovsky and Robbie Curtis.

Page was unmoved. Reno’s account of Young’s last-minute call threatening to jump was enough to preclude any investigation.

“From our point of view it was a clear case,” the detective told them. “He’s threatened to commit suicide.”

“Have we reviewed the CCTV to find out who went into and out of that flat?” Brown asked.

“The answer is I don’t know,” said Page. “I would suspect probably not.”

“If you could just have a look,” Brown implored. “Because the girls, it’s on their heart, and they’re going to live with this for the rest of their lives.”

“We can only go on the information and the evidence that we have,” Page said tartly. “I know that may not satisfy your questions or your theories on the matter.”

“We want the CCTV,” Scarlet insisted. “This is a really big thing for us. And has the apartment been properly inspected? Did you take recent fingerprints? Did you do anything?”

“We wouldn’t have need, given the circumstances,” Page said.

Eventually, the detective did agree to check the CCTV cameras in the area, though the police would later admit that they never watched the footage until they were ordered to do so by the coroner six months later. At the moment Young fell, every single camera in the square happened to be pointing away from the window.

Michelle was convinced that her ex-husband had faked his own death to get out of paying her divorce settlement, and Brown secretly hoped she was right. He wanted to see for himself, so he headed down to the morgue to inspect the body. If it’s not him, what a fucking amazing cover-up he’s done, he thought, resolving to do his friend one last favor by keeping quiet. But there was no such luck.

Two hundred people attended Young’s funeral. The sisters were approached in the crowd by a man they didn’t know who warned them to “stop asking questions” about how their father died—and things got stranger when Brown stood to give his eulogy and the vicar introduced him as “one of the last surviving members of Project Moscow.” The coffin was accompanied by a display of white roses spelling DADDY. Brown walked alongside Sasha and Scarlet to their father’s grave, and stood by them as his body was lowered into the ground.

Young’s inquest came in July of 2015. The coroner heard first from the psychiatrist who had discharged him from the hospital on the afternoon of his death. She said Young appeared to be in the grip of a “manic episode” when he admitted himself, saying he was “hearing voices and feeling unsafe, as people wanted to kill him,” and telling her he had momentarily contemplated jumping off a balcony, but thoughts of his daughters had stopped him. After four days in the hospital, Young was “stable and well,” denying any thoughts of self-harm. Surmising that the manic episode had been caused by cocaine use, she deemed him well enough to go home, and he left the hospital around 2:30 p.m.

The psychiatrist told the inquest that it would be highly unlikely for Young to have become manic again straight after leaving the hospital unless he had used a lot of drugs. But toxicology tests showed he was clean and sober when he fell. Jaqueline Julyan, a barrister working for Young’s daughters, played the voice mail Young had left for Scarlet and asked the psychiatrist to comment on what it revealed about his state of mind.

“All I can deduce is that the signs of a manic stage are not there,” she replied. “It is normal and matches his state when I discharged him earlier that day.”

Next, Dr. Nathaniel Cary, the Home Office pathologist who conducted the postmortem, testified that in addition to injuries “consistent with impalement,” Young had a “severe head injury,” scratches on his arms, wrist, and thumb, and a cut on the tip of his middle finger. Julyan wanted to know how he had picked up these additional injuries. It was likely that Young “hit something as he fell,” Cary said, adding that “sometimes people hit awnings.” But there weren’t any awnings on the house in Montagu Square, and no one had bothered to check whether it was possible for him to have hit anything else on the way down.

As for the wounds on Young’s arms and hands, the pathologist said these were “typical of falls” because “people can grip to stay in.” Except, of course, that Young was supposed to have thrown himself out the window deliberately. The barrister asked if the pathologist had performed any checks on the windowsill to establish whether there were any marks that could account for the injuries.

“That would be the responsibility of scene-of-crime officers,” he said.

Detective Sergeant Page took the stand. Julyan showed him a picture of the scratches on the windowsill and asked if they had been examined by officers at the scene.

“I didn’t see them,” he said. “It was dark.”

The lawyer asked if he had seen them when he went back in daylight.

“I didn’t go back,” he replied.

The detective acknowledged that the window was so small as to be “difficult to climb through,” and he posited, stretching his arms forward like Superman, that Young had dived out “front first with hands out.” But that wouldn’t explain how he had hit his head. Why, Julyan wanted to know, had officers closed the window before photographing the scene rather than leaving it open to document the narrow gap through which Young was meant to have jumped?

“This was as the weather could change and we didn’t want to lose the forensics,” Page replied. But the officers had not carried out any forensic work.

The barrister asked how it was that Young had landed on the fence—a meter out from the wall.

“I’ve got no idea. These things would have been followed if it had been a suspicious death, but it was not suspicious,” the officer replied.

At the end of the hearing, the coroner said that while she believed the police were “entirely correct” that there were “no suspicious circumstances,” she could not ignore the evidence from Young’s daughters and several of his friends that he had sounded calm on the phone in the minutes before his death—and she noted that the police had not explained either the marks on the windowsill or the trajectory of Young’s body from the window onto the fence.

“I have concluded that there is inconclusive evidence to determine his state of mind and intention when he came out of the window,” she said. The inquest recorded an open verdict.

It was a victory for Sasha and Scarlet, who hadn’t wanted their father’s death to go down as a suicide. Still, they had no real answers about how he had met his end. But while the police shut down the case, dismissed the Russian connection, and rebuffed their concerns, the spies in the River House were secretly asking their American counterparts if the fixer’s risky dealings in Moscow had finally caught up with him.

The spies at Langley replied that yes, they did indeed suspect another assassination had slipped through Scotland Yard’s dragnet. Young’s death was yet another reason why US intelligence officials believed the Kremlin’s killing campaign was accelerating. And their fears that the tide of Russian death might spread to American shores would soon be realized. One of Putin’s top henchmen was on his way to Washington.

Washington, DC—November 2015

Before dawn one November morning in 2015, the mastermind of Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda machine strolled into the lobby of the Dupont Circle hotel, in Washington, DC, and paid $1,200 in cash for a penthouse suite. Mikhail Lesin was the advertising Svengali who had worked with Berezovsky to propel Putin to power in 2000 before leading the new president’s crackdown on independent journalism as media minister—a burly man with a bulbous head who had earned the nickname the Bulldozer as he systematically drove Russia’s newspapers and TV stations under Kremlin control. His crowning achievement was the invention of Russia Today—the propaganda network he had built for Putin to “promote Russia internationally”—and it had grown into a sprawling global giant under his watch.

The spreading influence of RT had become a major source of concern for the US government: its widely shared disinformation about the occupation of eastern Ukraine and the downing of MH17 had prompted the US secretary of state at the time, John Kerry, to denounce the network as a “propaganda bullhorn” for Moscow. But now Lesin was ready to betray his own brainchild. He had joined the cast of Russian runaways hiding out in the West after falling out of favor in Moscow, and he was in Washington for a meeting with the US government.

The media mogul’s glory days had ended in 2009, when Dmitry Medvedev took over the Russian presidency. Over the course of the following three years, Lesin traveled the world, spending lavishly and partying hard on a $40 million yacht named Serenity. He had spent more and more time in the United States, splashing $28 million on luxury California real estate for himself, his daughter—Ekaterina Lesina, an RT bureau chief—and his son, Anton Lessine, a Hollywood producer. Lesin had always been florid and fast-living, but his time away from Russia took the brakes off an already pernicious drinking problem. By 2012, when Putin returned to the Kremlin and invited him back into the corridors of power, he was unraveling.

Lesin returned to Moscow to take over Gazprom-Media and started by subsuming one of Russia’s few remaining major independent outlets into the state-owned conglomerate. But his habit of disappearing on binges for days at a time soured his relationship with the Kremlin, and then his time in the United States started to catch up with him. Senator Roger Wicker had caught wind of Lesin’s California spending spree and wrote to the Department of Justice in 2014 demanding an investigation on suspicion of corruption and money laundering. The case was referred to the DOJ’s criminal division, and that was when Lesin abruptly quit Gazprom-Media and disappeared.

By the summer of 2015, US spies learned that Putin’s propaganda chief was hiding out in Europe, terrified for his life. The word in Moscow was that the Russian president had finally cut him loose once he attracted the scrutiny of the US government, and without the krysha of the Kremlin, his many enemies had started to come after him. Lesin was holed up in the Swiss Alps, the spies heard, and he wanted protection.

Such rare schisms, when they do open up in the tightly controlled orbit of the Kremlin, offer golden opportunities for intelligence gathering—and the DOJ had prime leverage over Lesin in the form of the investigation into his wealth. Officials began communicating with the runaway through a third party, and he indicated that he was prepared to cooperate.

So it was that Lesin found his way to the Dupont Circle hotel under cover of darkness on November 4, 2015, on the eve of his planned meeting with the DOJ. Officials were eagerly expecting him to give up the goods on the inner workings of RT and its relationship with the Kremlin the following day. But before that, their potential informant had twenty-four hours to kill.

Lesin holed up inside the penthouse suite with two bottles of red wine, a six-pack of Guinness, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch, and before long he was staggering drunkenly through the hotel corridors. After he had been shooed back to his room, a security guard checked in on him in the early afternoon and found him falling-down drunk. The guard asked if he needed any help, but Lesin put an arm around his shoulder and slurred “nyet.”

Another guard popped his head around the door just after 8:00 p.m. and saw Lesin passed out on the floor. He was breathing but didn’t wake, and the guard slipped away. The following morning, another member of the staff entered the penthouse to tell its disorderly occupant it was time to check out. The room was scattered with empty liquor bottles, and there was Lesin lying facedown in the midst of the mess. This time, he wasn’t breathing.

The officials at the Justice Department received the disappointing news that their eagerly awaited meeting with the architect of Putin’s global media empire would no longer be going ahead. Lesin was dead. He had been killed by blunt-force injuries to the head—and his neck, torso, arms, and legs had also been battered. The medical examiner further noted that the hyoid bone in the dead man's neck was fractured—an injury commonly associated with strangulation.

The FBI was brought in to help the local police with their investigation, but after an eleven-month inquiry, a federal prosecutor made an announcement that was viewed with disbelief by agents who knew the case. Lesin’s death was nothing more than a sad accident, the prosecutor said. The media czar had bludgeoned himself to death by repeatedly falling down drunk alone in his room “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” The case was closed.

Inside the FBI, agents who glimpsed what lay inside the sealed investigative file on Lesin’s death whispered angrily about a cover-up. The file contained critical evidence ranging from surveillance tapes to witness interviews, the contents of which would thenceforth remain secret, and the authorities had also locked away more than 150 pages of evidence that had been gathered by a grand jury investigating the mogul’s death behind closed doors. Even more explosively, the agents close to the case knew the FBI was sitting on a secret report containing high-level intelligence from Moscow—and it directly contradicted the official finding that Lesin had died by accident.

The report had been authored by Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia desk at MI6, who now ran a private intelligence outfit that often did work for the FBI. Steele would later shoot to international fame as the author of a dossier alleging that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump in the run-up to the US election, and he was all too familiar with the Kremlin’s killing program from his time in the top echelons of British intelligence. He had pumped his network of high-level Russian sources for intel on Lesin’s gruesome demise and handed his final report to the FBI.

Steele’s report said Lesin was bludgeoned to death by moonlighting state security agents working for an oligarch close to Putin whom the media czar had crossed. The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, Steele said, but they had gone too far. That chimed with the whispers that US spies had picked up in Moscow. They had gathered intelligence indicating that Putin’s former propaganda chief had been beaten to death with a baseball bat by enforcers for the same oligarch Steele had named.

US officials feared that the threat of Russian assassination had finally hit home—one senior national security official privately raised concerns that the Kremlin had started “doing here what they do with some regularity in London.”

The East-West relationship hadn’t been so badly fractured since the Cold War. The year before Lesin’s death, hackers in Moscow had penetrated the computer systems of the White House and State Department in Russia’s first cyberattack against the United States. And that September, Russia defied America and its allies by launching a full-blown military intervention in support of the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad as he continued his bloody suppression of the country’s Western-backed rebels.

Still, antagonizing Russia further was a dangerous option. That same year, Iran had finally agreed to a long-term deal to limit its nuclear program and allow international weapons inspectors into the country in return for the easing of sanctions—and Russia had been a key party in the negotiations. Crucial work still needed to be done to bring the deal to fruition, and Moscow’s ongoing cooperation was essential.

In the end, when Langley’s long-held fears were realized and a prominent Kremlin enemy finally perished on American soil, the US authorities took a leaf out of the British playbook. They shut the investigation down.