Martin Sixsmith - The Litvinenko File: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy

THE LITVINENKO FILE

ALSO BY MARTIN SIXSMITH

Moscow Coup:
The Death of the Soviet System

Spin

I Heard Lenin Laugh

The Life and Death of a
Russian Spy

MARTIN SIXSMITH

St. Martin's Press

New York

THE LITVINENKO FILE . Copyright 2007 by Martin Sixsmith. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37668-0
ISBN-10: 0-312-37668-5

First published in the United Kingdom by Macmillan,
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

First U.S. Edition: May 2007

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PART THREE

33. AN EXPLOSIVE CAMPAIGN

53. THE BUSINESS CONNECTION

The afternoon was tinged with the unreal. Riding the Underground to London's Highgate Cemetery, I caught myself reliving Russian funerals from my past. Andrei Sakharov's emotional leave-taking in 1989, when weeping thousands lined the streets of Moscow; the murdered Russian mafiosnik whose burial party I saw decimated by a graveside bomb severed limbs on the cemetery path, a shin and foot in the branches of a tree, the foot still sheathed in one expensive loafer.

I shook myself. This was December 2006; north London on a drizzly Thursday. What could the funeral of an exiled former KGB man offer that I hadn't seen before? Highgate Cemetery was drenched in dark December rain. The funeral procession straggled through the puddles of a tree-lined avenue, an outsized coffin perched precariously on the shoulders of eleven ill-matched pall-bearers. So here he was. Encased in lead, wrapped in oak, adorned with gleaming brass. More resplendent in death than ever he was in life, here was Sasha Litvinenko, the boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world's most feared security service; the man who alleged murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled from the wrath of the Kremlin, came to London and took the shilling of Moscow's avowed enemy. Now he was a martyr, condemned by foes unknown to an agonizing death in a hospital bed many miles from home; now he would lie in foreign soil, in an airtight casket to preserve his body for a thousand years. A hundred yards away, the grey granite statue of Karl Marx rose above the grave of the father of world revolution.

*

Sasha's coffin was heavy; Boris Berezovsky couldn't hide his relief as the weight was lifted from his back. In the greenery and the fresh air Berezovsky seemed somehow diminished, subdued, not his usual combative self. It came to me that all the times I had met Berezovsky it was always inside, away from the light under the fluorescent strips of his claustrophobic Down Street office or at the shielded corner table of the Al Hamra restaurant with his bodyguards surrounding us, watching all the doors at once.

Now there was something odd. Why was Berezovsky not exploiting the moment? Ever since I had known him, he had seized every opportunity to blacken the hated name of Vladimir Putin. In the late 1990s Berezovsky had been Russia's richest and most powerful man. He had established such a financial and political stranglehold over the weak Boris Yeltsin that he had virtually run the country. But Putin had dethroned him, stripped him of his power and much of his wealth. In a boiling fury Berezovsky had fled to London and appeared to have devoted his life to an obsessive quest for revenge. Sasha Litvinenko was Berezovsky's lieutenant in a bitter propaganda campaign against Putin and his regime. But now, as the world reviled Putin as the hidden hand behind Sasha's murder, Berezovsky was retreating into his shell. I wondered what he had on his mind as he watched the coffin poised over the open grave. Why did the leader and financier of the anti-Kremlin opposition seem so preoccupied?

Sasha's father, Walter Litvinenko, was talking, his face etched with the uncomprehending pain of an old man contemplating the brutal death of a son. As he spoke, his pain turned to anger. My son was killed, he said. Killed by those who had every reason to fear what he knew. To fear the truth he told. They wanted to silence him in the cruellest fashion.

There was nothing suspect about Walter Litvinenko's grief. His was a human personal tragedy. But what of the men he blamed for it? What about Putin, the president who gave his security services the legal right to assassinate political enemies on Russian soil or abroad? What about Sasha's former colleagues in the KGB now renamed the Federal Security Service or FSB? As the mourners filed past, I picked out some unknown faces among the familiar crowd of exiled oligarchs and their acolytes one unknown man in a leather jacket, another smoking a cigarette despite the solemnity of the occasion. Who were they? Sasha's friends from far away? Kremlin envoys sent to gather intelligence on its enemies abroad?

Akhmed Zakayev, a powerful member of the Berezovsky camp with sad southern eyes in a face etched by the grief of his nation, nodded to a man with a beard and Islamic skullcap. The imam intoned a Muslim prayer and Zakayev made the ritual motion of washing his face with both hands. Another odd moment this, in an increasingly puzzling day. I had first met Akhmed Zakayev in 2003, when he was campaigning to avoid extradition from Britain to Russia. As Chechen foreign minister, he had angered the Kremlin by wooing the foreign media with tales of Russian atrocities in his homeland; Putin in return accused him of terrorist crimes. A PR campaign led by Tim Bell and Vanessa Redgrave swayed the British press and just as it had done with Zakayev's protector Berezovsky the High Court rejected the extradition request. Zakayev got the right to stay in Britain, in a London that disaffected Russians have made the headquarters of anti-Putin opposition.

He and Berezovsky persuaded Sasha Litvinenko to settle in London with them. They found him a house next door to Zakayev, gave publicity to his accusations of FSB villainy and offered him protection how ironic that now seemed against the avenging agents of his enemies. In return, Litvinenko told the world that President Putin had plotted to murder Berezovsky; that Putin had conspired with the FSB to blow up Moscow apartment blocks and blame the attacks on Chechen separatists to justify the second invasion of Chechnya. Over time, Sasha's allegations had grown increasingly outrageous, including claims that Putin had regular sexual relations with young boys all, in retrospect, potential motives for a murder.

Litvinenko's former wife, his widow and three orphans stood in silence as the Muslim prayers droned on. His widow, Marina, still living in the suburban London house Berezovsky had bought for them, was unhappy with the Islamic element. She disputed the account of Sasha's alleged deathbed conversion and had wanted a non-denominational service. But families must come second to the demands of the political struggle, and Marina kept quiet. What were her feelings as she walked over to embrace Zakayev after the service? Was she acknowledging that her husband's life and tortured death had been a necessary sacrifice, a martyrdom in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents?