From Russia with Blood

xxi

Royal Courts of Justice, London—January 2016

Marina Litvinenko sat expectantly in the front row of court 73. At her side was her son Anatoly, now a young man of twenty-two with a neat side parting to match his flawless British accent, and behind them were two of her husband’s few surviving friends: Yuli Dubov, looking scholarly in his wire-rimmed spectacles, and Akhmed Zakayev, who arrived in a splendid fur hat. The Litvinenko inquiry had finally reached its verdict, and the public gallery was crammed with spectators eagerly awaiting the judge’s findings.

There was general agreement that the judge would surely have to hold Lugovoy and Kovtun culpable in light of the glaring radioactive trail they’d left all over London. The big question was whether he would go further. The inquiry was supposed to be entirely impartial and free of political and diplomatic pressures, but many of those in the room had long since lost their trust in the British system. Would the judge be so bold as to direct the blame at the Russian state? Or would this be another very British fudge?

Sir Robert Owen arrived and took his seat with a nod at the packed courtroom. The judge had presided over lengthy public hearings and sifted mounds of secret intelligence in private before withdrawing to write his judgment. Owen was a pillar of the establishment—a seasoned snowy-haired justice recently retired from the High Court—and he had based the findings he was about to make on a coolheaded, lawyerly review of the evidence. But he embarked upon the oral summary of his conclusions with discernible trepidation.

“There can be no doubt,” he began, speaking slowly and deliberately, as if laying land mines with every syllable, “that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by Mr. Lugovoy and Mr. Kovtun.” Relief washed across the upturned faces in the front row, and the news began to flash across TV screens up and down the country. The judge hunched his shoulders as if bracing for his next declaration.

“I have concluded that there is a strong probability that when Mr. Lugovoy poisoned Mr. Litvinenko, he did so under the direction of the FSB,” he continued. “I have further concluded that Mr. Kovtun was also acting under FSB direction.”

It was an astonishing moment, and the silence in the courtroom was electric. Owen had laid the blame for Litvinenko’s killing squarely at the door of the Russian state security agency. The judge’s words were now running on every news channel, and editors were already clearing the next day’s front pages. Owen, whose cheeks were visibly flushed, took a long pause before straightening his back and pressing on. His next statement went way beyond what anyone had expected.

“I have further concluded that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, then the head of the FSB,” he said. “And, also,” he went on, his head a little bowed, gazing fixedly ahead, “by President Putin.” Cries of “Yes!” rang out from the public gallery. After years of denials and secrecy orders and diplomatic discretion, this was an unimaginable watershed: a British judge had pointed an accusing finger straight at the Kremlin.

Owen had not limited himself to a narrow judgment on Litvinenko’s cause of death; he considered it his calling to assess what motive lay behind the murder. He had heard evidence from more than sixty witnesses, including Litvinenko’s collaborators in Britain and Russia, officials at MI6, the police officers who had investigated his death, and the scientists who uncovered the polonium trail that led straight back to Moscow. Akhmed Zakayev gave evidence. So did Yuli Dubov, Nikolai Glushkov, and Yuri Felshtinsky. Some—like Boris Berezovsky and Badri Patarkatsishvili—had testified from beyond the grave in the form of statements they had given to the police at the time of the defector’s murder. And Litvinenko’s own work had informed the inquiry. Owen’s 328-page judgment was a high-explosive bomb packed full of the incendiary evidence the defector had spent his last years amassing against the Kremlin—all wrapped up in the decorous language of the British judiciary.

The judge laid out Litvinenko’s theory that the apartment bombings that killed almost three hundred people in Russia had been “the work of the FSB, designed to provide a justification for war in Chechnya and, ultimately, to boost Mr. Putin’s political prospects,” noting that the book the defector had authored on the subject had been “more than a political tract” and was “the product of careful research.” He also set out Litvinenko’s suspicions that the Moscow theater siege was another FSB false-flag operation and that Anna Politkovskaya had been one of several people in Russia to be murdered for investigating the state’s connection to the atrocities. And he noted that Litvinenko had gathered evidence pointing to “widespread collusion between the Tambov group and KGB officials, including both Vladimir Putin and Nikolai Patrushev” during his time inside Russia’s state security agency.

The evidence that had been heard in open court amounted to a “strong circumstantial case” that the Russian state was behind Litvinenko’s assassination, Owen found—but it had been the totality of the material before him, including a “considerable quantity” of secret intelligence, that sealed his final verdict. And he didn’t view Litvinenko’s murder in isolation: he noted that “leading opponents of President Putin, including those living outside Russia, were at risk of assassination.” Owen’s extraordinary judgment was published on the inquiry’s website, along with transcripts from the public hearings and thousands of pages of evidence.

After the verdict, Marina Litvinenko stood on the steps of the High Court, her chin aloft. “I am of course very pleased that the words my husband spoke on his deathbed when he accused Mr. Putin have been proved true in an English court with the highest standards of independence and fairness,” she told the TV cameras. The home secretary had already written to her “promising action,” she said, adding that it would be “unthinkable that the prime minister would do nothing.” And then she walked down the steps; her ten-year struggle to wrest the truth about her husband’s death from the government’s grip finally at an end.

But when Theresa May addressed the House of Commons soon after, she quickly played down the prospect of any real retaliation against Russia. The home secretary denounced the assassination as “a blatant and unacceptable breach of international law” but explained that it wasn’t in Britain’s interests to alienate Putin when the West needed his help resolving the crisis in Syria and tackling the threat from ISIS. Over at the World Economic Forum in Davos, David Cameron echoed that sentiment when asked what action he planned to take against Russia in light of Owen’s findings.

“Do we at some level have to go on having some sort of relationship with them because we need a solution to the Syria crisis—yes we do,” the prime minister said. “But we do it with clear eyes and a very cold heart.”

Russia’s reaction to the inquiry’s verdict was one of unalloyed contempt. “There was one goal from the beginning: slander Russia and slander its officials,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman said, warning that the outcome had “darkened the general atmosphere of our bilateral relations.” Lugovoy was typically vituperative, describing the inquiry as a “pathetic attempt by London to use a ‘skeleton in the cupboard’ to support their political ambitions,” and Putin’s spokesman derided the judge’s findings as an example of “subtle British humor.”

In the end, the British government made the token gesture of ordering a freeze on any UK assets belonging to Lugovoy and Kovtun—not that it was at all clear either man had any. As far as Britain was concerned, that was the end of that. The thousands of pages of evidence gathered by the Litvinenko inquiry were moved to the National Archives, the police files were shut away, and the teams of detectives and government scientists who built the case upon which the explosive verdict rested went back to their workaday lives. But the sore was still running in Russia.

Russia—February 2016

The Mayak nuclear facility is a place so secretive that for many decades it was not even on the map. Buried in the forests of Russia’s Ural Mountains and surrounded by a 250-kilometer exclusion zone, it is home to the country’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets. This was the birthplace of the Soviet atomic bomb project and the site of a series of devastating nuclear disasters that were covered up for decades until the fall of the USSR. It is one of the world’s most contaminated places, known by some as “the graveyard of the earth.” And at the start of 2016, it had just acquired a new claim to notoriety.

The reactor at Mayak had been outed in evidence presented at Owen’s inquiry as the likely source of the polonium used to murder Alexander Litvinenko. That deduction had been based in part on measurements taken by a respected government scientist named Dr. Matthew Puncher, one of the team of public health officials brought in after the defector’s death to analyze the radioactive contamination in his system. Puncher’s job had been to determine the precise amount of polonium administered to Litvinenko, and his discovery had incendiary implications. The dead man had ingested twenty-six times the dose that would have been needed to kill him, and there was only one place on the planet where the rare nuclear isotope originated in those quantities: the state-controlled reactor at Mayak.

Back in 2006, Puncher had been an unassuming nuclear scientist in his midthirties with bushy hair and a bashful smile, unaware that his calculations would help put Vladimir Putin squarely in the frame for the most shocking assassination in memory. Now, almost ten years later—and just a month after Owen’s inquiry finally reached its damning verdict—he was heading back to Russia to complete a highly sensitive project studying contamination levels in a notorious radioactive danger zone: none other than the Kremlin’s polonium-producing nuclear site deep in the Ural Mountains.

The Mayak facility had been forced to accept foreign help to improve safety after a series of nuclear spills caused widespread sickness, mutations, and cancer in the local population, and Puncher had been put in charge of an Anglo-American government project to measure the effects of plutonium exposure on its workers. It was a prestigious assignment—code-named Project 2.4—but as he traveled back to Russia to complete his work in the wake of Owen’s verdict, he was petrified.

Puncher and his colleagues had visited Russia several times as they built software systems to measure radiation at Mayak, and they had noticed something disquieting as they went about their work. They were being followed and, they suspected, bugged by men they feared came from the FSB. But something else had happened to Puncher out there in the Ural Mountains on his penultimate visit, the previous December.

The forty-six-year-old had returned from that research trip forever changed. He had always been a steadily sanguine man, but he had plunged suddenly into a howling depression that nobody who knew him could begin to fathom. He seemed to have lost all interest in his children, and his wife had to beg him just to get dressed and keep clean.

Nevertheless, he remained determined to finish his research, so he summoned the courage to return to Russia in February for what was to be his final trip. To his colleagues, it seemed that the visit went well. But when Puncher came home this time, he was in a state of even more excruciating distress. He told his family and colleagues that he had made a serious mathematical “mistake” on Project 2.4 that was so bad he was worried he might end up in prison.

His coworkers were baffled. The “coding error” Puncher insisted he’d made seemed to them to be no big deal—as far as they could tell he’d just used an alternative route to get to the same outcome, and it didn’t affect the accuracy of his measurements. His colleague George Etherington assured him his fears of prosecution were “groundless” and that “he would look back and wonder why he worried so much.” But Puncher remained inexplicably inconsolable. He was so distressed about this mysterious mistake that his mother felt compelled to ask him if anyone was going to die.

Her son reassured her there was no risk of that happening.

Oxfordshire, England—May 2016

When police entered the red-brick house, they found the scientist’s body sprawled across the kitchen floor. Blood pooled around him from gaping wounds in his neck, arms, and stomach. There was no sign of a struggle—all the furniture was perfectly in place—and a large kitchen knife lay in Dr. Puncher’s lifeless hand. A second, smaller blade was in the sink.

Detective Constable Rachel Carter, the local officer from the Thames Valley Police who inspected the kitchen, noted that the scene was “very unusual.” She had rarely seen so much blood or such devastating stab wounds. But Puncher’s wife told the police her husband’s death made terrible sense. He had become so crippled with anxiety about his work, she said, that he had tried to hang himself with a computer cable the week before. And so, despite Puncher’s role in solving Litvinenko’s murder and the risks attached to his research trips to Russia, detectives decided there was nothing more to investigate. The police concluded that the scientist must have managed to stab and slash himself repeatedly with two separate knives before succumbing to his wounds. And they shut down the case.

DC Carter acknowledged in the evidence she gave at the inquest into Puncher’s death that his injuries had been “so extensive,” and he had lost so much blood, that she struggled to believe he had turned two knives upon himself. “It caused me some unease initially,” she told the coroner. “I didn’t know how he could have inflicted all those injuries on himself without losing consciousness.” But despite her early doubts, the detective said she was ultimately “satisfied” that Puncher had committed suicide. “All the information told us he was very depressed,” she said.

Suicides by multiple stab wounds are exceedingly rare—but the Home Office pathologist, Dr. Nicholas Hunt, testified that though he could not “entirely exclude” murder, it was possible for Puncher to have knifed himself that many times while still remaining conscious. He noted that the scientist had small wounds on his hands, which could have been sustained in defending himself from “a third-party assault with a blade,” but it was also possible that the knife became “wetted with blood” and slipped in his fingers.

Puncher’s wife told the coroner that when her husband returned from Russia, his disposition had “changed completely.” A man who had loved doing homework with his children and cooking, who generally had a positive attitude, suddenly “just lost interest,” she said.

Puncher’s colleagues were equally baffled, and his employers at Public Health England told the coroner there had never been any reason to doubt the quality of his work. The mystery of what had happened in Russia to cause the scientist’s sudden fit of mental anguish was never solved. But the coroner, Nicholas Graham, agreed with the police and ruled that Puncher’s cause of death was suicide.

Behind the scenes, though the police investigation was shut down, US spy agencies provided MI6 with intelligence suggesting that Puncher’s death was yet another Russian hit to add to the spiraling body count. It was possible, they said, that Russia could have driven the scientist to suicide. But their assessment was that he had likely been assassinated.

“Our intelligence reporting makes it clear that the Kremlin has aggressively stepped up its efforts to eliminate and silence its enemies abroad over the past couple of years,” one US official noted after Puncher’s body was found. “Particularly in Britain.”

After the inquest verdict, the Kremlin made sure no one missed the political significance of the scientist’s demise. The state-controlled Channel One aired a segment calling his death a “very strange suicide” and asking, “What was Matthew Puncher afraid of?”

“Could he have made a mistake in the case of Litvinenko?” the presenter hypothesized. “According to the British authorities, this question is not relevant.”

London—March 2018

Nikolai Glushkov was the last of the exiles to die. The old Aeroflot director had been living a small life since Berezovsky’s demise, growing old in a dingy suburban town house in South West London with a decrepit old dog and a cat called Braveheart. He was sixty-eight years old, and the blood disease that had threatened his health during his incarceration in Lefortovo had reduced him to walking with a cane. But he had one last fight left in him.

Aeroflot had launched a lawsuit against Glushkov in Britain’s High Court, claiming that he and Berezovsky had looted $120 million from the airline while it was under their control, and the impoverished exile had no option but to represent himself. He pored over books about law and accounting as he prepared his defense, and he told everyone that the case would exonerate him and prove what he had claimed all along: that Aeroflot had operated for years as a front for Russian spying all over the world. But he was not blind to the danger he faced.

After Berezovsky died, Glushkov told the Guardian that Putin was working his way through a hit list of enemies in the UK, adding grimly: “I don’t see anyone left on it apart from me.” Nine months later, he collapsed after drinking Champagne with two Russians in the bar of a hotel in Bristol. When he came to, he told paramedics he believed he’d been poisoned. He was determined to make it to trial, where he planned to grill several senior Russian intelligence officials about their involvement with Aeroflot, but he confided in friends that he feared his days were numbered.

The exile was due in court for a preliminary hearing in the Aeroflot case one morning in March 2018, but the defense bench was empty. “I was expecting to see Mr. Glushkov, but I do not see him,” a barrister for the state airline told the judge. A court clerk went out into the corridor to call the defendant’s name, but there was no response.

When Glushkov’s daughter drove to his house to check on him, she found her father dead. He had been strangled with his dog’s leash.

The Russian media painted Glushkov’s death as a gay tryst gone wrong, and one radio station claimed the exile could have died of AIDS. But this time, there was no suggestion from the British authorities that Glushkov’s death might have been merely a salacious accident or a suicide.

The same night his body was found, dozens of counterterrorism officers cordoned off the house and erected police tents across his front garden. Scotland Yard confirmed quickly that the cause of death was compression to the neck—indicating strangulation either by hand or with the dog leash—and announced that the counterterrorism command would lead the investigation “because of the associations Mr. Glushkov is believed to have had.” Later, they released video footage of a black van captured near his home the night he was strangled, asking anyone with information to contact them.

The proactive police response to the discovery of Glushkov’s body contrasted starkly with the stubborn refusal to investigate the deaths of any of his friends in the years before. But in March of 2018, the world had just changed dramatically.

Glushkov was found strangled a week after Russia unleashed a chemical weapons attack on the streets of Salisbury, and the government had, finally, been forced into a combative posture. So this time, it treated the murky death of another Russian exile as exactly what it was: the murder of a Kremlin enemy on British soil.

The Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal on a rainy Sunday in Salisbury was the latest dramatic salvo in a series of increasingly warlike moves by the Kremlin. Putin’s security state had helped propel Donald Trump to the White House through a concerted campaign of meddling in the 2016 US election. Its hacking labs, internet troll factories, and fake news farms had sown disunity, disruption, and disinformation in democracies across Europe, while its financing of extremist fringe groups had stirred up race hate and violence around the world. It had sponsored an attempted coup against the government of Montenegro as the country neared accession to NATO and unleashed ever more malignant cyberattacks on Western governments. And, for all the effort to make Russia part of the solution in Syria, it had backed the regime of Bashar al-Assad with increasingly ferocious military assaults on the Western-backed rebels as the dictator gassed hundreds of his own people with internationally outlawed chemical weapons.

The leaders of the United States and Europe had covered their eyes to the Kremlin’s crimes for so long that the man inside had crept right up on them, and now Putin’s actions amounted to an asymmetric war on the West. There had been such bright hopes behind that collective blindness: hopes of coaxing Russia into the warmth of the postwar liberal world order, of sharing in the bounteous riches of its vast oil and gas fields, of reviving recession-stricken Western economies with a steady flow of Russian money. Hopes, too, that Putin might represent a solution to some of the world’s most intractable problems: the scourge of Islamic terror, the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, the crisis in Syria. But now, and not for the first time in history, the West was opening its eyes to the realization that the price of appeasement was too steep.

After hundreds of British citizens were exposed to a deadly nerve agent and the Kremlin responded to Western rebukes with blistering defiance, there was no denying that Russia’s killing campaign had spun out of control. Sanctions hadn’t stemmed the bloodshed, and waves of diplomatic expulsions only seemed to draw more fire. How, short of all-out war, could Putin be stopped?

That was the question ringing out in the corridors of Westminster in the wake of the attack on the Skripals, but no one had offered a convincing solution. And the government was now facing a growing list of queries to which it could find no good response. In the weeks after the attempted assassination in Salisbury, calls for answers about the untimely deaths of other exiles and their associates in Britain were getting louder by the day.

The previous year, investigative journalists working at BuzzFeed News on both sides of the Atlantic had published a series of stories laying bare Russia’s campaign of assassination in the West. The series had mapped a web of fourteen suspected hits in the UK, including the deaths of Boris Berezovsky, his fellow exiles, and their British fixers, as well as the death of Mikhail Lesin in America. It revealed that US intelligence agencies had passed their UK counterparts information linking all the British deaths to Moscow, but in every last case, the authorities responded by shutting down any investigation and locking away the evidence.

In the hawkish atmosphere that gripped Westminster following the attack on the Skripals, a growing chorus of politicians called on the authorities to take action over the spate of suspicious deaths the journalists had uncovered. Bowing to pressure, the home secretary finally announced that the government would reinvestigate all fourteen cases with help from the police and MI5.

The case files locked away inside Scotland Yard and rural police stations across the home counties were decidedly dusty. Some, like the files on the deaths of Berezovsky’s lawyers Stephen Moss and Stephen Curtis, in 2003 and 2004 respectively, had lain unread for more than a decade. In many instances, including the death of Scot Young, little or no evidence had been gathered. No witnesses had been sought; no CCTV had been captured; no forensic work had been carried out at the scene. For the officers drafted in to carry out the review, reviving cases that had been left to go so cold for so long was a nearly impossible task—and it must have seemed like a pointless one. What good could come of raking over secrets and skeletons so long buried when any suspects would be thousands of miles out of reach?

Six months after announcing the review, the government quietly closed down all fourteen reinvestigations without explanation. In a short letter to Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, the home secretary confirmed that Scotland Yard had completed its review and decided there was “no basis” on which to investigate further. No reasons were given.

The letter acknowledged that the government had secretly briefed two senior MPs—the chair of the Home Affairs Committee and the head of Parliament’s security and intelligence watchdog—on its reasons for refusing to comment publicly on the decision to close the fourteen cases. The briefings were given under special rules, meaning they could be conducted in secret and contain classified intelligence. Meanwhile, the home secretary had obtained a secrecy order to ban the results of the review from being disclosed to the inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, which was still snarled up in red tape nearly six years after the event. Three months later, in the absence of any “direct evidence of murder,” the coroner ruled that the financier had died of natural causes.

One thing the British government was, at last, prepared to do publicly was talk tough. After it emerged that the attack on the Skripals had been conducted by two serving members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, Theresa May vowed to use the “full range of tools from across our national security apparatus” to hit back, and she lambasted Russia for its “obfuscation and lies” in connection with the events in Salisbury.

“Their attempts to hide the truth,” the prime minister thundered on the floor of the House of Commons, “simply reinforce their culpability.”

But that kind of talk came easy—now that the British government had hidden the truth about its own quiet complicity in the killing campaign for which it was, at last, prepared to denounce the Kremlin. That would stay safely buried in the secret files it had taken such pains to lock away.