Strongman (25 page)

During 1999 Litvinenko was twice arrested and imprisoned for months, but eventually acquitted. In November 2000 he fled to London and applied for political asylum, which he was granted. In
London he worked for the now exiled Boris Berezovsky, campaigning against the Putin regime, and in October 2006 became a British citizen. His activities in London would have infuriated the Russian
government in many ways. First, he was on the payroll of Berezovsky, one of Russia’s most wanted men, whom the British government refused to extradite. (He was also alleged to receive a
retainer from the British secret intelligence service, MI6.) Second, he was totally convinced of the complicity of the FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings which had triggered the second Chechen war,
and published preliminary findings in a Russian newspaper and in a film. As noted earlier, several journalists and politicians who investigated these allegations died in mysterious
circumstances.

In exile in London, Litvinenko did everything he could to provoke the Kremlin. His allegations seemed to grow ever more fantastic and obsessive, perhaps delusional: he accused the FSB not only
of being behind Chechen terrorist attacks such as the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school crisis, but even of responsibility for terrorist attacks worldwide, including the 2005 London
bombings. Even close friends regarded him as a fantasist, consumed by his hatred for Putin and the FSB. He claimed, with no proof, that the KGB had trained al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, and that Putin was a paedophile. He developed close links to the Chechen separatist government in exile and lived next door to its foreign minister, Akhmed Zakayev. After Anna
Politkovskaya’s death, Litvinenko gave a presentation to journalists at London’s Frontline Club where he condemned Putin for personally ordering her murder.

A couple of weeks later, on 1 November 2006, Litvinenko met two visitors from Russia – both former intelligence officers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun – and had tea with them. He
fell ill and died after an excruciating illness on 23 November. Investigators established that he had been poisoned with a rare radioactive substance, Polonium-210. A police investigation
eventually concluded that the poison had been brought to Britain, possibly by Kovtun via Germany, where traces of the element were detected, and administered by Lugovoi, who had put it in
Litvinenko’s tea during their meeting. The agonising slow death of Litvinenko topped the news throughout November. Few had heard of the Russian, but as journalists and investigators pieced
together the story of his poisoning, the British public was both scandalised by what seemed to be the enactment of a John le Carré-style plot, and terrified by the discovery of Polonium-210
traces around their capital city and on aeroplanes that had flown from Moscow. The events brought to mind the KGB’s ‘umbrella-tip’ poisoning of a Bulgarian exile in London in
1978, at the height of the Cold War. The
Daily Mail
wrote that the ‘tentacles of the KGB reach as far and formidably as ever’. It was suddenly remembered that in July 2006 the
Duma had passed legislation allowing the security forces to hunt down and eliminate extremists worldwide. The definition of ‘extremism’ was explicitly widened to include anyone who
libelled the Russian authorities – which Litvinenko certainly did, in spades.

Gruesome though the situation was, it was also expertly exploited by Berezovsky and his spin doctors, a PR company run by Margaret Thatcher’s former image-maker, Lord Bell. They released a
shocking photograph of Litvinenko on his deathbed, hairless and emaciated. Just before he died Litvinenko signed a statement composed for him by his friend Alex Goldfarb, who also worked for
Berezovsky, in which he accused Vladimir Putin of personally ordering his murder. ‘As I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death,’ he wrote, in somewhat
over-elegant English, and continued: ‘You may succeed in silencing one man, but a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your
life.’ Berezovsky could scarcely have found a more powerful weapon in his battle against the Kremlin than the death of his protégé.

Putin was in Helsinki, at an EU–Russia summit, the day after Litvinenko’s death, when his posthumous accusation was read out. Putin, of course, had no option but to answer questions
about it at a news conference. Just as he had done with Politkovskaya, he seemed to play down Litvinenko’s importance, saying merely, ‘the death of a human being is always a
tragedy’. Regarding the personal accusation against him, he dismissed it as a political provocation, probably written by other people. But privately – I was told by his press secretary
Dmitry Peskov, who had to tell him about the deathbed note – Putin was livid. ‘He can’t believe that people are accusing him personally of ordering this murder,’ he said.
‘As a person, he is very upset by that.’ When I asked why Putin didn’t show that anger in public, since it might convince people of his innocence better than his normal
stonewalling, Peskov replied: ‘He doesn’t like showing his feelings in public.’

Putin showed his feelings somewhat a few years later, though, when he spoke about the agent who betrayed 11 Russian spies, including the celebrated Anna Chapman, in the USA in 2010: ‘They
live by their own laws, and these laws are well known to all the special services. Things always end badly for traitors. They usually end up in the gutter, from alcohol or drugs.’ Or
poisoning, he might have added.

With the polonium trail leading inexorably to Moscow, Litvinenko’s death – less than two months since Politkovskaya’s – had a dramatic effect on Western perceptions of
Russia, and in particular on its relations with the UK. The prime minister Tony Blair, anxious to preserve his good relationship with Putin, urged a cautious approach, but some members of his
cabinet strongly objected to the idea of ‘going soft’ on a regime that was flouting human rights. Blair convened an emergency session of COBRA, the government’s crisis response
committee. Ironically, Vladimir Putin himself had once been invited to witness a security briefing in the COBRA room at 10 Downing Street. That was in October 2005, not long after the bombings in
London. Putin had shocked his hosts by declaring, according to an eyewitness, ‘We know well how you pursue terrorists, and we are impressed with your professionalism. But when we identify a
terrorist, he’s dead.’

In January 2007 British investigators concluded that Litvinenko’s murder was a ‘state-sponsored assassination orchestrated by Russian security services’, and in May the Foreign
Office officially asked the Russians to extradite the chief suspect, Andrei Lugovoi. The Russians retorted that their constitution does not allow for the extradition of Russian citizens. The
Russians offered to put Lugovoi on trial in Russia, but claimed that the evidence provided by the British in their extradition request was insufficient for them to base a case on. This was almost
certainly true: the UK authorities were hardly going to hand over all their evidence to the Russians, since much of it was based on their own top-secret intelligence gathering. But without it, the
Russians would neither extradite Lugovoi nor put him on trial. There was deadlock. Lugovoi used the time to have himself elected to the Duma, where he would enjoy immunity from prosecution. He
freely gave interviews, in which he blamed Boris Berezovsky for the murder.

On 28 June 2007 a cabinet reshuffle gave Britain a new foreign secretary, David Miliband. He spent his first weekend with briefing papers that shocked him. ‘What I hadn’t quite
recognised,’ he recalled in an interview, ‘was the rotten state of Anglo-Russian relations, dating back to Iraq and then to the whole Berezovsky business, which the Russians saw as a
political move by us. So there was a deep political problem, even without the terrible events of the murder of Litvinenko.’
¹⁰

A week later the Kremlin turned down Britain’s request for the extradition of Lugovoi. ‘We had to decide how to respond, and we didn’t want the Russians to go wildly over the
top – we didn’t want to break off diplomatic relations.’ Britain expelled four Russian diplomats and froze relations with the FSB, even though that meant cutting off the main
channel for collaboration in the fight against international terrorism. It is not clear whether the British side actually understood this. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, recalls:
‘We had to explain that the FSB, in the Russian Federation, is the lead agency that coordinates anti-terrorist activities and heads the national anti-terrorism committee. So if cooperation
with the FSB was no longer in the plans of our British counterparts, we would have to freeze our cooperation in that area, and this was regrettable.’
¹¹

Russia expelled four British diplomats in retaliation, and sneered at London’s persistent request for extradition. President Putin reminded Britain that ‘30 people are hiding out in
London who are wanted by Russian law enforcement agencies for serious crimes – and London does not even think of extraditing them’. He was sitting, in classic Putin fashion, in a forest
clearing, discussing current affairs with youth activists. He went on: ‘They don’t extradite people hiding on their own territory, and give insulting advice to our country to change our
constitution. They need to change their brains, not our constitution.’

Clearly relations had hit rock bottom. It was time for Miliband to try to calm things. ‘We had to cooperate together on Iran, on terrorism, even on climate change. So I suggested that we
meet with foreign minister Lavrov, and we proposed that we meet him in the UN building in September. It was important to show that we were open for business on the diplomatic front, even though we
were pursuing justice in the Litvinenko case.’

The rookie British foreign minister was in for a shock. Lavrov had practically lived in the UN headquarters for about 17 years, including ten as Russia’s envoy. He is one of the shrewdest
operators I have met, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of two decades of diplomacy. He likes to chain-smoke, sip whisky and deploy his arguments like rapiers. ‘I went in with a football
analogy,’ Miliband recalls. ‘I was talking to him about which football team he supported, but I got very short shrift on that, and then the rest of the 30 to 40-minute meeting was a
very, very tough lesson in diplomacy from someone who felt that they’d been around the block, they knew what the score was and they weren’t going to take any lessons from me. So it was
a pretty robust encounter and a pretty tough way to start a relationship.’

In fact, Lavrov has a different memory of Miliband’s small talk, equally inappropriate. He recalls with a laugh: ‘David started our conversation by asking why our party, United
Russia, was a partner of the Tories, and not the Labour Party. For me, it was unexpected. Inter-party cooperation has nothing to do with me, but he was extremely interested in this.’ As for
fresh ideas on how to get over the Litvinenko crisis, says Lavrov, ‘I heard nothing. I repeated the Russian position, including the prosecutor general’s offer to open a joint
investigation with the British, if they were provided with all the materials at the disposal of British investigators.’

Putin had referred to Britain’s ‘insulting’ demand as a ‘remnant of colonial thinking’, and Lavrov took up the theme. Miliband recalls: ‘He said we needed to
stop looking at ourselves as an imperial power, who could tell other countries to change their constitutions. He was absolutely clear about that.’

Far from healing the rift, it widened even further after Miliband’s meeting with Lavrov. In December the Kremlin announced it was closing two British Council offices in Russia, on the
pretext of unpaid taxes and irregularities in its official status. Many saw it as an own goal, since the British Council’s main tasks include teaching English and organising cultural
exchanges. But Lavrov decided the offices were ‘in violation of an international convention on consular relations’ – while at the same time explicitly saying the action was
further retaliation for Britain’s ‘unilateral actions’ against Russia – specifically the freezing of negotiations on visa facilitation.

David Miliband looks back at his time jousting with Lavrov and sees it is a clash of post-imperial nations. ‘I’ve come to believe that Russia believes that Britain is a declining
power and Britain believes that Russia is a declining power. That is a recipe, not for misapprehension, but it’s a recipe for the sort of toughness and difficulty and, in some ways,
unwillingness to compromise, that seems to go with the territory of British–Russian relations.’

For five years political contacts between the two countries remained virtually frozen. And even after a new prime minister, David Cameron, visited Moscow in September 2011, relations remained in
the doldrums, beached on the sandbar of that atrocious Cold War murder in London in 2006.

Showing initiative

The spate of murders, which would continue over the coming years, destroyed Putin’s attempts to portray his country as a free and modern democracy. Dozens of journalists
were murdered in Vladimir Putin’s two terms as president. Not all the cases were politically motivated, and few of the victims had the stature of Anna Politkovskaya. But hardly any of the
murders have been solved, giving the impression that journalists can be killed with impunity in Russia, especially if they have angered the authorities. The journalist Politkovskaya and the
political exile Litvinenko had both earned themselves enemies in high places. They were extremely hostile to the Putin regime – indeed both wrote in rather similar terms, accusing the FSB of
terrible subversive acts that allegedly sacrificed hundreds of innocent lives in order to shore up the regime.

In his investigation of the Litvinenko affair, Martin Sixsmith concludes that Putin himself did not order the killing, but that he can be implicated in the affair ‘because he created the
atmosphere and conditions in which the killing could take place, in which an enterprising group of current or former FSB men read the signals from the Kremlin and embarked on their own
initiative.’
¹²
I think the same can be said about the Politkovskaya murder. In both cases, it is likely that the assassins did not receive, or even
require, a direct order, nor did they need permission to kill, because they knew that ‘taking out’ an ‘enemy of the state’ had the tacit approval of the authorities. They
may have been acting on their own initiative, for revenge or to ‘please’ their masters. Either way, they knew they would not be punished.