Federalʹnai︠a︡ sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossii. - The terminal spy: a true story of espionage, betrayal, and murder

CONTENTS

For Sue

AUTHORS NOTE

The reporting for this book began when, as head of the New York Times bureau in London, I covered the breaking news of the Litvinenko case in the days before and after his death. Over the subsequent weeks and months, my research expanded to include interviews and conversations with contacts and the key players in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia, and the United States. Throughout the book I have tried to identify by name the people I spoke to. But there were other sources who could not be so easily identified because of the nature of their work. In the case of informants able to speak only in return for anonymity, I have honored their desire for confidentiality.

Alan S. Cowell
Paris, May 2008

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The Victims

LITVINENKO, ALEXANDER: former officer in the KGB and FSB

POLITKOVSKAYA, ANNA: Russian journalist, murdered in Moscow, October 2006

Visitors to London, November 2006

KOVTUN, DMITRI: former Soviet army officer, business associate of Andrei Lugovoi

LUGOVOI, ANDREI: former KGB bodyguard, now owner of a private security company and member of the Duma

SOKOLENKO, VYACHESLAV: former KGB bodyguard, business associate of Andrei Lugovoi

Londongrad

ABRAMOVICH, ROMAN: wealthy Russian tycoon, owner of Londons Chelsea soccer club, former business associate of Boris Berezovsky

BEREZOVSKY, BORIS: wealthy Russian tycoon in self-exile in Britain, bitter opponent of Vladimir Putin, onetime employer of Andrei Lugovoi and Alexander Litvinenko

BUKOVSKY, VLADIMIR: Soviet-era dissident living in Cambridge, England

CLARKE, PETER: head of British counterterrorism police

GORDIEVSKY, OLEG: former KGB double agent and defector to Britain

HYATT, BRENT: British detective investigating the murder of Alexander Litvinenko

ZAKAYEV, AKHMED: exiled Chechen leader in London and neighbor of Alexander Litvinenko

The Kremlin

MEDVEDEV, DMITRI: president of Russia nominated by Vladimir Putin

PUTIN, VLADIMIR: former KGB officer, ex-president, now prime minister, of Russia

YELTSIN, BORIS: former president of Russia

The Family

BELYAVSKAYA, NINA: mother of Alexander Litvinenko

LITVINENKO, MARINA: second wife of Alexander Litvinenko

LITVINENKO, MAXIM: half brother of Alexander Litvinenko, living in Italy

LITVINENKO, NATALIA: first wife of Alexander Litvinenko

LITVINENKO, WALTER: father of Alexander and Maxim Litvinenko

The American Connection

FELSHTINSKY, YURI: Russian-American historian, sometime associate of Boris Berezovsky, living in Boston

GOLDFARB, ALEX: senior aide to Boris Berezovsky, living in New York

SHVETS, YURI: former KGB officer living in Washington, D.C.

The French Connection

LIMAREV, YEVGENY: Russian security consultant living in France

The Italian Connection

GUZZANTI, PAOLO: head of the Mitrokhin Commission investigating KGB activity in Europe

SCARAMELLA, MARIO: Italian researcher, consultant to the Mitrokhin Commission

The FSB Connection

GUSAK, ALEXANDER: former commander of Alexander Litvinenko in URPO unit of FSB

KHOKHOLKOV, YEVGENY: former commanding officer of URPO unit of FSB

PATRUSHEV, NIKOLAI: head of the FSB

PONKIN, ANDREI: former FSB colleague of Alexander Litvinenko in URPO unit

SHEBALIN, VIKTOR: former FSB colleague of Alexander Litvinenko in URPO unit

TREPASHKIN, MIKHAIL: FSB whistle-blower

TROFIMOV, ANATOLY: Moscow regional chief of FSB, murdered in Moscow, April 2005

Business Connections

GLUSHKOV, NIKOLAI: Berezovsky associate jailed in connection with Aeroflot embezzlement case

KHODORKOVSKY, MIKHAIL: former head of Yukos oil company, imprisoned on embezzlement and fraud charges

The KGB Connection

CHEMEZOV, SERGEI: contemporary of Putin in the Dresden station of the KGB, headed the state arms exporter

CHERKESOV, VIKTOR: former KGB officer in Leningrad, head of Russias drug-control agency

IVANOV, SERGEI: former KGB spy, first deputy prime minister of Russia

IVANOV, VIKTOR: former KGB officer and senior aide to Vladimir Putin, chairman of Aeroflot

KHOKHLOV, NIKOLAI: KGB defector, poisoned in Frankfurt, 1957

SUDOPLATOV, PAVEL: former officer of Stalins secret police

The History

CURIE, MARIE AND PIERRE: discoverers of polonium

PROLOGUE

The English autumn was unseasonably warm, and November 1, 2006the day Alexander Litvinenko began to diewas no exception.

A breeze from the northwest rustled leaves turned gold on the trees of Muswell Hilla demure suburb of Edwardian row houses in north London. The temperature was in single digits on the Celsius scale but well above freezing. The red double-deck buses ran in their familiar not-quite-predictable way. Life unfolded with the unhurried complacency of far-flung neighborhoods when those abandoned to humdrum routines pause between the days panicky bookendsthe school run, the supermarket, the dry cleaner, the post office, furtive affairs, perhaps, behind hastily drawn curtains.

The climate, not to mention the tranquillity, must have seemed incongruous to Litvinenko, a onetime secret agent turned whistle-blower, an exile and defector from his native Russia and bitter enemy of its regime. Raised for many years in the northern Caucasus, he had trained for a career in the KGB to spy on his comrades, to interrogate ragged child prisoners from Chechnya, and to chase down the Russian mafia in Moscow. But Litvinenko had turned his back on all that, on everything he had been taught to do, as the Soviet Union dissolved into the new Russia. Brazenly, he defied his masters in Moscow, betraying what he insisted were their innermost secrets.

Now it was payback time, although, as so often in matters of deceit, the victim was the last to know.

On this day in late 2006the last when his life might pass for normal within the somewhat abnormal migr circles he inhabitedLitvinenko bade farewell to his elegantly coiffed wife, Marina, and his gifted twelve-year-old son, Anatoly, of whom he was exceptionally proud. He headed for the city centerthe capital of his own adoptive land. Just weeks earlier, on October 13, Litvinenko and his family had been granted citizenship, and he boasted happily to friends that he was British. He brandished his pristine plum-colored passport, proclaiming with an almost childish delight that it was his protector, the freshly burnished shield of this crusader against evil, this champion of the free (this tilter at windmills, some thought, this swashbuckling DArtagnan).

To mark the familys new status, his son hung their new bannerthe red-on-white cross of St. George, the English emblemfrom the first-floor balcony of the Litvinenkos pale brick town house a mile north of the center of Muswell Hill at 140 Osier Crescent.

The three-story house was one more unassuming home in a new-looking development in the commuter belt on a quiet street that filled with young children when the school day ended and with parked cars when the workday was over. But for Litvinenko it was his castle. Outlawed and outcast by the Kremlin, given refuge in London, he told his wife with tragic navet that they were safe now.

In many ways the journey from his semi-gentrified suburb to MayfairLondons swankiest square mileoffered a metaphor for his own life, caught between dream and reality, between modest circumstance and grand vision.