‘In the course of the conversation, he [Shebalin] said that “you have been sentenced to extrajudicial elimination”, i.e. after the publication of this book, you will definitely be killed. Saying this, he asked me to stress that he would not be involved in this killing. He repeated several times about his non-involvement in the murder. Who specifically was going to eliminate you, Shebalin did not name, but he hinted that such people do exist (so you better write your will in advance).’
Litvinenko gave the email to Bukovsky, who translated it. It was passed to the Metropolitan Police. According to Goldfarb, Litvinenko was fatalistic about this and other threats. Menzies also sent the email to the Home and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices. In retrospect his letter seems poignant. Menzies wrote:
‘Our client [Litvinenko] does not consider that there is likely to be any substance behind this threat. That is to say, he considers that whilst he stays in the UK it is extremely unlikely the “sentence” as described would be carried out. However, given the nature of the threat, we felt it proper to draw this matter to your attention and to invite you to remind the Russian Embassy in London of the attitude of Her Majesty’s Government to the contemplation, let alone the carrying out, of such actions.’
The Home Office came back to Menzies with a polite brush-off: ‘We have no remit to intervene with the Russian Embassy in such matters.’
Tony Blair’s government, it appeared, was unwilling to make a fuss on Litvinenko’s behalf. And it’s doubtful that an official British complaint would have caused the intelligence officers serving at the Russian embassy in Kensington, west London, to break into a sweat. In any case, with UK officials seemingly unbothered, secret operations against Litvinenko continued.
Next, Ponkin flew to London with a Russian businessman. Litvinenko agreed to meet them at the Piccadilly branch of Wagamama, a Japanese noodle bar. Ponkin had a suggestion: Litvinenko should assassinate Putin! Ponkin said he had a friend in the Federal Protection Service, General Yuri Kalugin, who could provide details of Putin’s movements two weeks in advance. All Litvinenko needed to do was to get hold of some Chechens to do the hit …
The offer was a classic FSB ‘provocation’, and not a very good one. Its apparent goal was to add to the mountain of ‘evidence’ being gathered against Litvinenko in Moscow. This eventually resulted in Litvinenko being convicted in absentia of treason. Ponkin, meanwhile, delivered another message: ‘Don’t discredit our president. Stop writing articles.’ This was, Litvinenko said, one of the many hints that he should cease his critical journalism and shut up.
Litvinenko did the opposite. He wrote a second book, The Gang from the Lubyanka. It is based on extended interviews with Litvinenko, conducted by a Moscow journalist, Akram Murtazaev, and edited by Goldfarb. Litvinenko was one of the first writers to allege links between Putin and his associates and organised crime groups.
His thesis – at the time novel – was that Russia’s police and intelligence agencies had been perverted. They had started to make money from the very activity they were supposed to investigate, disrupt and prevent. There were other damaging allegations. Litvinenko claimed Putin was a KGB informant at university. And that he’d been on an undercover mission to penetrate Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, his long-term goal being to preserve the power of the FSB and Russia’s security agencies.
Litvinenko and Felshtinsky also continued to pursue the apartment bombings. They flew to Georgia to seek out Achemez Gochiyaev, a Chechen accused of planting one of the bombs. Gochiyaev was hiding in the Pankisi Gorge, a hideout used by Islamist rebels. They had been in contact with Gochiyaev via third parties. They failed to meet him and were forced to leave Georgia in a hurry after they received a message from Berezovsky, warning them he had heard they were in danger. Immediately after they left, their driver, who was working for the Georgian security services, was murdered.
There were further ominous warnings. In 2004, the Litvinenkos heard a noise outside their home in London – and the smell of fire. It was just before midnight. Marina rang the police. The blaze turned out to be small. It emerged that two Chechens had firebombed their house, as well as the neighbouring property of Litvinenko’s new friend, the Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev.
Handsome, groomed and with an immaculately trimmed white beard, Zakayev had begun his career as an actor playing Shakespearean roles in Grozny’s theatre. He fought in the first Chechen war and became foreign minister of Chechnya’s breakaway government. In 2000, after a car accident, he sought treatment in Western Europe, moving to Britain two years later.
Zakayev was the main emissary abroad of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria. By this point Ichkeria no longer existed: Russian troops had recaptured Grozny. Like Litvinenko, Zakayev was a noxious figure for the Russian government, which accused him of terrorism. By the end of the decade most of Chechnya’s independent leaders had been wiped out; Zakayev was the last man standing.
As well as Zakayev, Litvinenko became friends with a curious Italian called Mario Scaramella. Scaramella was the secretary to an Italian parliamentary commission that investigated links between Italian politicians and the KGB. Set up in 2002, the Mitrokhin Commission was politically motivated – an attempt by Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government to smear its enemies, in particular the former and future centre-left prime minister Romano Prodi.
Scaramella claimed that Prodi was a KGB operative. To support this controversial thesis he fed fake documents to Litvinenko in London. Litvinenko certified them as genuine. Whether he did this because he believed them or simply because he was paid to do so, we don’t know. Perhaps it was a combination of both factors. In fact, the Mitrokhin archive itself – based on notes made by a KGB defector – was more damning about other Italian officials at the Moscow embassy, who came out of the investigation far worse. (There was no evidence Prodi was ever KGB, but plenty showing Italian diplomats in Moscow falling into honeytraps and scrapes.)
This was a murky business indeed. Litvinenko was apparently trading in compromising material, for which there is always a ready market in Russia, known as kompromat.
Some of Litvinenko’s campaign work struck his friends as a little loopy. He blamed the 7/7 bombings – a series of coordinated bomb attacks in central London, carried out in 2005 by four British Islamist men – on the FSB. He also wrote in an article for the Chechenpress website that Putin was a paedophile. The incident that inspired it was certainly somewhat bizarre: the president, encountering a group of tourists in the Kremlin, pulled up the shirt of a small boy and kissed him on the tummy. Still, as Goldfarb observed: ‘Putin is probably not a paedophile.’ To Litvinenko’s critics the article was further proof of his sheer public wildness.
Asked later if Litvinenko was a bit of a conspiracy theorist, Goldfarb added: ‘Well, at the time I thought so, but with what has happened since, I have become a conspiracy theorist myself, so it’s very hard to judge.’
In July 2006, the Duma rushed through two new laws that seemed to have a direct bearing on Litvinenko. The new legislation allowed Russia’s spy agencies to eliminate ‘extremists’ anywhere abroad, including in the UK. The definition of ‘extremism’ was also expanded. It now included ‘libellous’ statements about Putin’s administration.