As Alexander Litvinenko lay dying under tight police protection at London’s University College hospital, he pointed an accusing finger at the man he believed responsible for ordering his assassination: Russian President Vladimir Putin. The dying man had good cause for suspecting Putin. Abundant evidence, including a radioactive trail of polonium-210, the substance used to poison him, leads right back to Putin’s operatives in Moscow. In addition, the Kremlin’s heavy-handed tactics to thwart the efforts of British police detectives sent to Russia to investigate the poisoning do little for the credibility of Putin’s protestations of innocence and his pledges to do everything possible to help solve the crime.
Litvinenko had become ill on November 1, after a meeting at London’s Mayfair Millennium Hotel with three Russian “businessmen”: Andrei Lugovoi, Dmitry Kovtun, and Vyacheslav Sokolenko. Lugovoi acknowledges that he is a former agent of the FSB, the renamed KGB. Litvinenko was sure that he had been poisoned later that evening, when he was seized with violent vomiting. After three weeks of agonizing deterioration, in which the fit 43-year-old Litvinenko lost his hair and shrunk to a shell of his former self, he died on November 23.
Even as his life was ebbing away, Alexander and his wife, Marina, had been hoping for a recovery. “I did not lose hope,” she told the Sunday Times of London. “He was a very handsome man, but each day for him was like 10 years, he became older in how he looked.” Mrs. Litvinenko added: “Even until the last day, and the day before when he became unconscious, I thought that he would be OK. We were both completely sure he would recover. We had been talking about bone-marrow transplants and looking to the future.”
The poison, initially thought to be thallium, turned out to be polonium-210, which Dr. Andrea Sella, lecturer in chemistry at University College London, told reporters was “one of the rarest substances on the planet” and few could obtain it. “This is not some random killing,” Dr. Sella said. “This is not a tool chosen by a group of amateurs. These people had some serious resources behind them.”
Polonium-210 leaves a radioactive trail and, as many news stories have noted, that trail has turned up wherever Lugovoi and Kovtun went in London, Germany, and Russia: a hotel restaurant, airplanes, an apartment, a soccer stadium. One of the more important polonium traces is on a passport photo of Kovtun, which he left at the Hamburg City Hall in Germany, where he had applied for a residency permit two days before meeting with Litvinenko.
When British police detectives from Scotland Yard went to Russia to interview a number of witnesses and suspects, including the three men who had met with Litvinenko, they were told that two of the main objects of interest, Lugovoi and Kovtun, were in hospital quarantine for radiation poisoning. The detectives were also informed by Russia’s chief prosecutor Yuri Chaika that, in the words of a Reuters report, they would be “virtually relegated to the role of observers,” as Russian police carried out the interviews. Chaika, a Putin flunky, further made it clear that no suspects would be extradited to England. He has kept the British detectives on a very short leash.
Spokesmen for Putin have denounced suspicions of Putin’s involvement as “absurd” and part of a frame-up and conspiracy to discredit Putin and Russia at home and abroad. As to be expected, the Russian press, reflecting Putin’s control, points the accusing finger at Putin’s enemies, most frequently citing Boris Berezovsky, a former Putin ally now in exile in London, as the likely culprit. Not surprisingly, many journalists in the West have picked up and parroted this theme as well.
However, in addition to considerable evidence tying Putin to the murder through his secret-service minions, it is clear that he — not Berezovsky — qualifies as the top candidate possessing the classical criteria for a crime suspect: motive, opportunity, and means.
What Litvinenko Knew
Litvinenko, an ex-agent of the Soviet KGB (and its successor, the Russian FSB), was a fierce critic of Putin even before fleeing to Britain with his family in 2000. He had first come to the attention of the Western media in 1998 while still a lieutenant colonel in the FSB, creating a stir with his public revelation that he had been ordered to assassinate Berezovsky, one of Russia’s richest new oligarchs. It was an order he refused to carry out. The head of the FSB at the time: Vladimir Putin.
After obtaining asylum in England, Litvinenko became an even bigger thorn in Putin’s side. His powerful 2002 book, Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within, with Yuri Felshtinsky, presents convincing evidence which supports the charges of investigative journalists and Russian analysts that the infamous series of apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999 were provocations by Putin’s FSB, not the work of Chechen terrorists. The September 1999 bombings killed over 300 people and wounded hundreds of others. Putin, who was named prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin just three weeks before the bombings began, expertly played up the incidents to stir public outrage in favor of retaliation against Chechnya.
Yeltsin resigned under mysterious circumstances on December 31, 1999, naming Putin to succeed him as acting president. Putin then surprised other presidential candidates and gave himself an advantage by holding the presidential election in March 2000, rather than in the fall, as previously scheduled. Playing up his popular hardline-against-terrorism image, Putin easily rode to victory. The bombings in Russia that were blamed on the Chechens couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for Putin — or at a worse time for the Chechens, because they already had most of the concessions they were likely to get from the Russians and any violence would mean a loss of these concessions.
As Russia’s FSB chief, then as prime minister, and finally as president, Vladimir Putin has been the driving force behind Russia’s brutal terror occupation of Chechnya. Under his reign, Russian bombers have pounded Chechnya’s cities and villages into rubble, while Russian ground forces have systematically engaged in massacres of civilians, as well as widespread torture, rape, and looting. At the same time, Putin has invoked the threat of Chechen terrorism in Russia to justify more and more police-state controls in Russia and greater centralization of power in his hands.
Putin’s brutal foreign and domestic policies have earned him many critics, both at home and abroad. Many of his harshest critics inside Russia have already been silenced — by murder, prison, or intimidation. Litvinenko was, arguably, one of his most potent critics outside of Russia. As a former KGB/FSB insider, Litvinenko had specific knowledge about Putin’s FSB operations and brought a level of credibility to many of the most serious charges against Putin. Besides the ordered assassination of Berezovsky and 1999 terror bombings, those charges include:
• The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s bravest and most famous investigative reporter. Best known for her repeated dangerous travels inside Chechnya and her unflinching reporting on Russian atrocities there, she was also the author of three books — The Dirty War, A Small Corner of Hell, and Putin’s Russia — all of which severely indict Putin and his regime. Litvinenko was close to Politkovskaya, and in a presentation to international journalists at London’s Frontline Club, an independent media group, he outlined the evidence for his charge that Putin was directly responsible for her assassination. (You can watch that presentation in streaming video at www.frontlineclub.com.) Politkovskaya survived a poisoning attempt in 2004, but in October 2006, just three weeks before the Litvinenko poisoning, she was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building.
• The Ryazan Incident. On the night of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment complex in the Russian city of Ryazan reported suspicious activities to local police. Responding, the police found a large quantity of hexogene explosive, timed to detonate at 5:30 the next morning. They evacuated the building and captured some of the bombers, who turned out to be (surprise!) FSB agents. Caught red-handed, the FSB then claimed that this had been merely an “exercise” and the substance was not really hexogene, but sugar. Litvinenko, in his book and in interviews, showed that the planned Ryazan bombing was to be the culminating incident justifying the invasion of Chechnya.
• The 2004 Beslan Massacre. On September 1, 2004, terrorists took 1,200 children, parents, and teachers hostage at an elementary school in Beslan, a town in the Russian republic of North Ossetia. The Russian military attacked the school with flamethrowers, grenades, and machine guns. The death toll of 365 included 186 children, not to mention the hundreds wounded. In addition to outrage over the carnage caused by the Russian military attack on the school, there ensued demands for information about the “terrorists.” Why had they been recently released from an FSB prison and allowed into the Beslan area? Litvinenko explained why, showing that the only explanation that fit the evidence was that the Beslan Massacre was an FSB provocation.
• The FSB/al-Qaeda Connection. In a 2005 interview with the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Litvinenko revealed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the reputed Number Two chief in al-Qaeda and the man second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, was trained by the Russian FSB. According to Litvinenko, “Ayman al-Zawahiri trained at a Federal Security Service (FSB) base in Dagestan in 1998,” before being “transferred to Afghanistan, where he became Osama bin Laden’s deputy.” And, charged Litvinenko, al-Zawahiri was not the only al-Qaeda operative trained by the FSB.
In the grim Stalinist world of the KGB/FSB, revealing any one of these state secrets would be more than sufficient cause for relentless pursuit and execution. Arguably the most damaging disclosure for Putin is Litvinenko’s charge concerning the FSB/al-Qaeda connection. All of the other above-mentioned revelations deal with Russia’s “internal affairs” and Chechnya. And while world leaders and the world press have occasionally expressed outrage over the Kremlin’s ongoing barbarities there, it is by now pretty clear to Putin & Company that they have little to fear from “world opinion” over their Chechen operations. But al-Qaeda? Since 9/11, it has become the new global menace, supposedly even more dangerous than the old “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union, ever was. It certainly wouldn’t do to have it widely known that our “partner” against terror, Putin, and his FSB, are joined at the hip with the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
However, as explosive as Litvinenko’s FSB/al-Qaeda charge is, it never caused Putin to suffer any political blowback because the Western press, in general, never bothered even to report it, let alone investigate it. So, is there possibly another even more compelling reason for Putin to take the risk of killing a British citizen (Litvinenko had just received British citizenship shortly before his death) on British soil? Indeed, it seems there is.
Litvinenko Must Die
The revelation that most likely sealed Alexander Litvinenko’s death warrant was his charge that Italy’s current prime minister, Romano Prodi, was known as the KGB’s top man in Italy. If true, that would also make him one of Russia’s top assets in all of Europe, since Prodi served as president of the European Commission from September 1999 through November 2004, one of the most critical periods of the European Union, which included the launching of the euro currency, expansion of the EU to include former communist countries, and drafting of the proposed EU constitution. And if true, it would make Litvinenko a bomb that could, potentially, topple governments, end high-level careers, send government officials to prison, and destroy a vast intelligence network that has taken more than a generation to put in place.
According to Alexander Litvinenko, when he was planning to flee from Russia in 2000, he consulted his former KGB boss and trusted friend, General Anatoly Trofimov, who advised him not to seek refuge in Italy, since it was loaded with KGB agents. “Don’t go to Italy,” General Trofimov said, “there are many KGB agents among the politicians: Romano Prodi is our man there.” At the time, Signor Prodi was Italy’s prime minister. That was immediately before his stint as EU Commission president, which was followed by his return as Italy’s prime minister in May 2006.
Litvinenko’s charge regarding Prodi was brought into the open on April 3, 2006, when Gerard Batten, a British Member of the European Parliament (MEP), brought the matter before the European Parliament and requested an investigation. Batten noted that Litvinenko was one of his constituents and recounted the Litvinenko-Trofimov conversation. General Trofimov and his wife were both shot dead in their automobile near their Moscow apartment in April 2005.
Not surprisingly, the European Parliament, which is loaded with MEPs who are communists, “former communists,” socialists, Greens, and other assorted leftists, has not put an inquiry into the Prodi-KGB connections at the top of its priority list. It presumably has more important business to consider, such as regulating the orange and sugar content of marmalade, and outlawing homophobia and xenophobia.
However, in Italy, apparently, the Mitrokhin Commission did take the Litvinenko charge seriously. Named for ex-KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, the commission (also referred to as the Guzzanti Commission, after its chairman, Senator Paolo Guzzanti) was launched in 2002 by the Italian Parliament to investigate Soviet penetration of Italian institutions since World War II. This was long overdue, since Italy, which had the largest Communist Party of any country in Western Europe, has included open communists and ex-communists in many of its top government posts. The current Prodi regime is no exception. (See “Prodi’s Retinue.”)
The Mitrokhin/Guzzanti Commission was interested in what Litvinenko had to say about Prodi and had dispatched one of its investigators, Mario Scaramella, to meet with him. Litvinenko and Scaramella met on several occasions and Litvinenko went to Italy in 2004 to provide testimony to the commission. In fact, Scaramella met with Litvinenko in London on November 1, shortly before Litvinenko’s meeting with the Russians. He reportedly had arranged the meeting to bring warning about, and details of, an assassination plot against Litvinenko and Senator Guzzanti. Early press reports on the case stated that Scaramella had been poisoned also, but he was released from University College Hospital apparently unharmed.
There has been speculation in political and intelligence circles that a particular Italian professor/politician revealed by Mitrokhin, but referred to only by the KGB code name UCHITEL (“the Teacher”), pointed to Prodi, a former professor and longtime insider in Italy’s top business and political echelons. This would help explain why Prodi, during his earlier stint as prime minister, failed to take any action when British intelligence provided his government with information in 1996 about 261 Italians who had been operating for decades as agents for the KGB. When British sources publicly released this information in 1999, Prodi claimed not to have been informed about it earlier. However, his defense minister confirmed that he had given the British information to Prodi.
Subsequently, when the Mitrokhin Commission began delving into the matter, Prodi and his influential media and political backers went into hyperdrive to stop publication of the report. It was due out in March 2006, but still remains unpublished. More recently, on November 20, just three days before Litvinenko’s death, Prodi fired the chiefs of three of Italy’s intelligence agencies, all of whom would have been important to any investigation of the Mitrokhin information. If Prodi is Moscow’s man, as General Trofimov is alleged to have said, then Russia’s intelligence structures would stop at nothing to protect such a valuable, long-term investment.
The Vladimir Bukovsky Trial
The Millennium hotel is an unusual spot for a murder. It overlooks Grosvenor Square, and is practically next door to the heavily guarded US embassy, where, it is rumoured, the CIA has its station on the fourth floor. A statue of Franklin D Roosevelt – wearing a large cape and holding a stick – dominates the north side of the square. In 2011 another statue would appear: that of the late US president Ronald Reagan. An inscription hails Reagan’s contribution to world history and his “determined intervention to end the cold war”. A friendly tribute from Mikhail Gorbachev reads: “With President Reagan, we travelled the world from confrontation to cooperation.”
The quotes would seem mordantly ironic in the light of events that took place just around the corner, and amid Vladimir Putin’s apparent attempt to turn the clock back to 1982, when the former KGB boss Yuri Andropov – the secret policeman’s secret policeman – was in charge of a doomed empire known as the Soviet Union. Next to the inscriptions is a sandy-coloured chunk of masonry. It is a piece of the Berlin Wall, retrieved from the east side. Reagan, the monument says, defeated communism. This was an enduring triumph for the west, democratic values, and for free societies everywhere.
Five hundred metres away is Grosvenor Street. It was here, in mid-October 2006, that two Russian assassins had tried to murder someone, unsuccessfully. The hitmen were Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Their target was Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer in Russia’s FSB spy agency. Litvinenko had fled Moscow in 2000. In exile in Britain he had become Putin’s most ebullient and needling critic. He was a writer and journalist. And – from 2003 onwards – a British agent, employed by MI6 as an expert on Russian organised crime.
Latterly, Litvinenko had been supplying Her Majesty’s spooks and their Spanish counterparts with hair-raising information about the Russian mafia in Spain. The mafia had extensive contacts with senior Russian politicians. The trail apparently led to the president’s office, and dated back to the 1990s when Putin, then aide to St Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, worked closely with gangsters. In a week or so, Litvinenko was to testify before a Spanish prosecutor. Hence, it appeared, the Kremlin’s frantic efforts to kill him.
The men from Moscow were carrying what Kovtun confessed to a friend was “a very expensive poison”. About its properties he knew little. The poison was polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope, tiny, invisible, undetectable. Ingested, it was fatal. The polonium had originated at a nuclear reactor in the Urals and a production line in the Russian town of Sarov. A secret FSB laboratory, the agency’s “research institute”, then converted it into a dinkily portable weapon.
Lugovoi and Kovtun, however, were rubbish assassins. The quality of Moscow’s hired killers had slipped since the glory days of the KGB. Their first attempt, in a Grosvenor Street boardroom, had not worked. They had lured Litvinenko to a business meeting, where – the radiation stain later showed – they had tipped polonium into his cup or glass. But Litvinenko did not touch his drink. As of 1 November 2006, he was stubbornly alive.
Even modern CCTV has its limitations. Some parts of the Millennium were not covered by it – as Lugovoi, an expert in surveillance, and a former Kremlin bodyguard, would have noticed. One camera was fixed above the reception desk. Its footage shows the check-in counter; a bank of three computer screens; uniformed hotel staff. In the left of the picture is a part view of the foyer. There are two white leather sofas and a chair. Another camera – you wouldn’t notice it, unless you were looking – records the steps leading up to the lavatories.
The hotel has two ground-floor bars accessed from the foyer. There is a large restaurant and cafe. And the smaller Pine Bar immediately on the left as you enter through a revolving door from the street. The bar is a cosy wood-panelled affair. Three bay windows look out onto the square. In CCTV terms, the Pine Bar is a security black hole. It has no cameras; its guests are invisible.
On the evening of 31 October, camera 14 recorded this: at 20:04 a man dressed in a black leather jacket and mustard yellow jumper approaches the front desk. On either side of him are two young women. They have long, groomed blonde hair: his daughters. Another figure wanders up from the sofas. He is a strikingly tall, chunky-looking bloke wearing a padded black jacket and what resembles a hand-knitted Harry Potter scarf. The scarf is red and blue – the colours of Moscow’s CSKA football club.
The video captures the moment the Lugovois checked in – on this, his third frantic trip to London in three weeks, Lugovoi arrived with his entire family. He came from Moscow with his wife Svetlana, daughter Galina, eight-year-old son Igor, and friend Vyacheslav Sokolenko – the guy with the scarf. At the hotel, Lugovoi met his other daughter Tatiana. She had arrived from Moscow a day earlier with her boyfriend Maxim Bejak. The family party was due to watch CSKA Moscow play Arsenal in the Champions League the following evening. Like Lugovoi, Sokolenko was ex-KGB. But Sokolenko was not, British detectives would conclude, a murderer.
CCTV shows Kovtun arriving at the Millennium at 08.32 the next day – a diminutive figure carrying a black bag over one shoulder. The events of the next few hours were to become infamous – with Litvinenko the fated victim, the Russian state an avenging god, the media a sort of overexcited Greek chorus. What actually took place was a piece of improvisation that might easily have misfired. Lugovoi and Kovtun had decided to lure Litvinenko to a further meeting. But the evidence suggests that they had still not figured out how exactly they were going to kill him.
Litvinenko had first met Lugovoi in Russia in the 1990s. Both were members of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky’s entourage. Later, while living in exile in London, Berezovsky became Litvinenko’s mercurial patron. In 2005, Lugovoi recontacted Litvinenko and suggested they work together, advising western firms wanting to invest in Russia. At 11.41am, Lugovoi called Litvinenko on his mobile. He suggested a meeting. Why didn’t Litvinenko join him later that day at the Millennium? Litvinenko said yes; the plot was on.
Scotland Yard would later precisely fix Litvinenko’s movements on the afternoon of 1 November: a bus from his home in Muswell Hill in north London; the tube to Piccadilly Circus; a 3pm lunch with his Italian associate Mario Scaramella in the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly. In between, he fielded several calls from Lugovoi, who was becoming increasingly importunate. Lugovoi called Litvinenko again at 3.40pm. He told Litvinenko to “hurry up”. He had, he said, to leave imminently to watch the football.
Lugovoi would tell British detectives that he arrived at the Millennium at 4pm. The CCTV shows that he was lying: half an hour earlier, at 3.32pm, Lugovoi appears at the front desk and asks for directions to the gents. Another camera, number four, records him walking up the stairs from the foyer. The image is striking. Lugovoi seems preoccupied. He is unusually pale, grim, grey-visaged. His left hand is concealed in a jacket pocket. Two minutes later, he emerges. The camera offers an unflattering close-up of his bald spot.
Then, at 3.45pm, Kovtun repeats the same procedure, asking for directions, vanishing into the men’s toilets, reappearing three minutes later. He is a slight figure. What were the pair doing there? Washing their hands, having set the polonium trap? Or preparing the crime, a heinous one, in the sanctuary of one of the cubicles?
Tests were to show massive alpha radiation contamination in the second cubicle on the left – 2,600 counts per second on the door, 200 on the flush handle. Further sources of polonium were found on and below the gents’ hand-dryer, at over 5,000 counts per second. There was what scientists called “full-scale deflection” – readings so high they were off the scale.
The multiplex system shows someone else arriving at 15.59 and 41 seconds – a fit-looking individual, wearing a blue denim jacket with a fawn collar. He is on his mobile phone. This is Litvinenko at the blurred edge of the picture; he calls Lugovoi from the hotel lobby to tell him that he has arrived. The CCTV tells us little beyond this. Apart from one important detail. Litvinenko never visits the hotel bathroom. He is not the source of the polonium; it is his Russian companions-turned-executioners who bring it with them to London, in this, their second poisoning attempt.
***
The Soviet Union had a long tradition of bumping off its enemies. They included Leon Trotsky (ice-pick in the head), Ukrainian nationalists (poisons, exploding cakes) and the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov (ricin pellet fired from an umbrella, on London’s Waterloo Bridge). There was a spectrum. It went from killings that were demonstrative, to those where the KGB’s fingerprints were nowhere to be found, however hard you looked. Such murders were justified by what you might call Leninist ethics: they were necessary to defend the Bolshevik revolution, a noble experiment.
Under Boris Yeltsin these exotic killings mostly stopped. Moscow’s secret poisons lab, set up by Lenin in 1917, was mothballed. After 2000 though, with Putin in the Kremlin, such Soviet-style operations quietly resumed. Critics of Russia’s new president had an uncanny habit of ending up … well, dead. In power, Putin steered the country in an increasingly authoritarian direction, snuffing out most sources of opposition and dissent. The president’s fellow KGB comrades, once subordinate to the Communist party, were now in sole charge.
The murders of journalists and human rights activists could not be explained in terms of protecting socialism. Rather, the state was now synonymous with something else: the personal financial interests of Putin and his friends.
As an FSB officer in the 1990s, Litvinenko had been shocked to discover how thoroughly organised crime had penetrated Russia’s security organs. In his view, criminal ideology had replaced communist ideology. He was the first to describe Putin’s Russia as a mafia state, in which the roles of government, organised crime and the spy agencies had grown indistinguishable.
While serving with the FSB, where his role was akin to that of a detective, Litvinenko had also perfected his observation skills. It was part of his basic training. How to describe the bad guys: their height, build, hair colour and distinguishing features. What they were wearing. Any jewellery. How old. Smoker or non-smoker. And of course their conversation – from the major stuff, such as admissions of guilt, down to trivial details. For example, who offered whom a cup of tea?
When DI Brent Hyatt of Scotland Yard later interviewed Litvinenko, the Russian gave him a full and – in the circumstances, remarkable – account of his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun in the Pine Bar. Litvinenko said that Lugovoi approached him in the foyer from the left side and said: “Let’s go, we are sitting there.” He followed Lugovoi into the bar; Lugovoi had already ordered drinks. Lugovoi sat with his back to the wall; Litvinenko was diagonally across from him on a chair. There were glasses on the table – but no bottles. And “mugs and a teapot”.
As Lugovoi knew, Litvinenko did not drink alcohol. Moreover he was hard-up and reluctant to spend any money of his own in a fancy establishment. The barman, Norberto Andrade, approached Litvinenko from behind, and asked him: “Are you going to have anything?” Lugovoi repeated the question and said: “Would you like anything?”. Litvinenko said he did not want anything.
Litvinenko told Hyatt: “He [Lugovoi] said, ‘OK, well we’re going to leave now anyway, so there is still some tea left here, if you want to you can have some.’ And then the waiter went away, or I think Andrei asked for a clean cup and he brought it. He left and when there was a cup, I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only a little left in the bottom and it made just half a cup. Maybe about 50 grammes.
“I swallowed several times but it was a green tea with no sugar and it was already cold, by the way. I didn’t like it for some reason, well, almost cold tea with no sugar, and I didn’t drink it any more. Maybe in total I swallowed three or four times.” Litvinenko said he didn’t finish the cup.
Hyatt: The pot with the tea in it was already there?
Litvinenko: Yes.
Hyatt: How many mugs were on the table when you came in?
Litvinenko: I think three or four cups.
Hyatt: And did Andrei drink any more from the pot in your presence?
Litvinenko: No.
Hyatt: OK, and what happened next?
Litvinenko: Then he said Vadim [Kovtun] is coming here now … either Vadim or Volodia, I can’t remember. I saw him for the second time in my life.
Hyatt: What happened next?
Litvinenko: Next Volodia [Kovtun] took a place at the table on my side, across from Andrei.
The three men discussed their meeting scheduled for the following day at the private security firm Global Risk. In previous months, Litvinenko had tried to supplement his £2,000-a-month MI6 salary by doing due diligence reports for British firms keen to invest in Russia. The bar was crowded, Litvinenko said. He felt a strong antipathy towards Kovtun. It was only their second encounter. There was something strange about him, Litvinenko thought – as if he were in the midst of some personal torment.
Litvinenko: Volodia [Kovtun] was – seemed to be – very depressed, as if he was very much hungover. He apologised. He said that he hadn’t slept for the whole night, that he had just flown in from Hamburg and he wanted to sleep very much and he couldn’t stand it any more. But I think he is either an alcoholic or a drug addict. He is a very unpleasant type.
Hyatt: Volodia, how did he know to come to the table? Did Andrei contact him and ask him to come and join you, or was there already an arrangement for him to join you?”
Litvinenko: No … he [Kovtun], I think he knew in advance. Even possibly they had been sitting before this and maybe he went up to his room.
Hyatt: Just going back to when you had some tea, you didn’t ask the waiter for a drink. It was mentioned that there was some tea left. How insistent was Andrei that you have a drink, or was he indifferent? Was he saying, “Go on, go on, have some?” Or didn’t he care?
Litvinenko: He said it like that, you know, “If you would like something, order something for yourself, but we’re going to be leaving soon. If, if you want some tea, then there is some left here, you can have some of this…”
I could have ordered a drink myself, but he kind of presented in such a way that it’s not really need to order. I don’t like when people pay for me but in such an expensive hotel, forgive me, I don’t have enough money to pay for that.”
Hyatt: Did you drink any of the tea in the presence of Volodia?
Litvinenko: No, I drank the tea only when Andrei was sitting opposite me. In Volodia’s presence, I wasn’t drinking it …. I didn’t like that tea.
Hyatt: And after you drank from that pot, did Andrei or Volodia drink anything from that pot?
Litvinenko: No, definitely. Later on, when I left the hotel, I was thinking there was something strange. I had been feeling all the time, I knew that they wanted to kill me.
There is no evidence to say whether it was Kovtun – an ex‑waiter, who once worked in a Hamburg restaurant – or Lugovoi who put polonium in the teapot. From Litvinenko’s testimony, it is clear that this was a joint criminal enterprise. Lugovoi would subsequently explain that he could not recall what drinks he had ordered in the Pine Bar. And that Litvinenko had insisted upon their meeting, to which he had reluctantly assented.
Subsequently, police tracked down Lugovoi’s bar bill. The order was: three teas, three Gordon’s gin, three tonics, one champagne cocktail, one Romeo y Julieta cigar No 1, one Gordon’s gin. The tea came to £11.25; the total bill £70.60. Lugovoi was a man who murdered with a certain breezy style.
By this point, Lugovoi and Kovtun must have concluded that their poisoning operation had worked. Litvinenko had drunk the green tea. Not much, admittedly. But, he had drunk. Surely, enough? The meeting lasted 20 minutes. Lugovoi gazed at his watch. He said he was expecting his wife. She appeared in the foyer and, as if on cue, waved her hand, and mouthed: “Let’s go, let’s go.” Lugovoi got up to greet her, and left Litvinenko and Kovtun sitting together at the table.
There was one final, scarcely believable scene. According to Litvinenko, Lugovoi came back to the bar accompanied by his eight-year-old son Igor. Lugovoi introduced him to Litvinenko. He said to Igor: “This is Uncle Sasha, shake his hand.”
Igor was a good boy. He obediently shook Litvinenko’s hand, the same hand that by now was pulsing with radiation. When police examined Litvinenko’s jacket they found massive contamination on the sleeve – Litvinenko had picked up and drunk the tea with his right hand. The party, plus Litvinenko, left the bar. The Lugovoi family and Sokolenko went off to the match. Kovtun declined to go, declaring: “I’m very tired, I want to sleep.”
