Litvinenko told Scotland Yard later: ‘During all our initial meetings he always, insistently, importunately, asked every day whether I was working for MI5 and MI6. He was the only person who asked me so often about it. I told him, Mario, what difference does it make for you? I said, you know, if I say yes you’ll think I’m an idiot because such things like this are not spoken about. And if I say no, you won’t believe me.’
Litvinenko denied he was working for British intelligence, telling Scaramella: ‘I have played spies in my life up to here. And the main thing is, I write books, why would they need me? Think yourself.’
Litvinenko’s consultancy work for Her Majesty’s Government threw up two important questions. Neither has been properly answered.
One, did the Kremlin discover that Litvinenko worked for MI6?
Two, did MI6 consider Litvinenko to be at risk from Moscow’s assassins? If not, why?
In addition to his work for MI6, Litvinenko began in 2005 to provide regular information to Spain’s intelligence services. In fact it was British intelligence that introduced Litvinenko to its Spanish counterpart. The Spanish security service assigned Litvinenko a Russianspeaking handler named ‘Jorge’. The £2,000-a-month retainer paid by MI6 also covered Litvinenko’s work with Spanish spooks and Spanish prosecutors. With increasing frequency, Litvinenko began flying to Madrid and Barcelona. Marina said her husband would return from his trips to Spain with presents – a Real Madrid T-shirt, porcelain souvenirs. As an undercover spy he flew business class, on one occasion even managing to get the autograph of David Beckham, a fellow passenger, for his son Anatoly. But his reason for being in Spain was far from frivolous.
The Spanish authorities were at the time grappling with a serious and chronic problem. From the mid-1990s onwards, vory v zakone – in Russian, thieves in law – began to enter Spain. Vor v zakone was the highest rank in Russian organised crime. Spain provided a useful haven for Russian mafia bosses, as a base for operations, and a territory safer than Russia itself. Their influence grew. Their activities in Russia included contract killings, kidnappings, drug-running, prostitution and arms-smuggling. Profits in Russia, including from illegal casinos, were laundered in Spain and invested in real estate.
In 2004, Spanish prosecutors created a formal strategy to ‘behead’ the Russian mafia.
The biggest group active in Spain was the Tambov gang, the same St Petersburg outfit that Litvinenko investigated in the 1990s as an FSB officer. It also included Alexander Malyshev, once the Tambov’s competitor, and now its Spain-based criminal partner. The authorities began extensive investigations. They discovered the mafia had no known jobs or sources of income but were living in lavish mansions. The cash clearly came from money-laundering. The challenge was to prove this.
According to the Spanish daily El Pais, Litvinenko provided information on top mafia figures. They were Vitaly Izguilov, Zakhar Kalashov and Tariel Oniani. In the early 1990s, Litvinenko’s FSB department had investigated Oniani, a Georgian-born Russian citizen, in connection with a string of kidnappings. One of its victims was the chairman of the Bank of Russia. The case against Oniani was dropped after Litvinenko got a call from above ordering him not to touch him. Kalashov was a hit man. He, too, enjoyed protection from official Russian structures.
Spanish security officials launched two major operations against the Russian mafia, codenamed Avispa (2005–7) and Troika (2008–9). The first phase of Avispa in 2005 saw the arrest of twenty-eight people, twenty-two of them alleged thieves in law. Litvinenko provided the Spanish with details of locations, roles and activities of gang members. The Spanish hailed the operation as the biggest ever undertaken against a global mafia network.
In reality, the results were somewhat mixed. The biggest targets – Kalashov and Oniani – both managed to escape the country on the eve of the raids following a tip-off, most probably from the Russian security services or a corrupt Spanish official. Kalashov was arrested in Dubai in 2006 and extradited to Spain. His fortune, according to court documents, was €200 million.
A secret diplomatic cable, leaked in 2010, and sent from the US embassy in Madrid, suggests that Litvinenko was key to these Spanish operations. His main contribution was to untangle the intimate links between the Russian mafia, senior political figures and the FSB. They were, in effect, a single criminal entity.
In January 2010, Jose Grinda Gonzalez, a special prosecutor for corruption and organised crime, met with US officials in Madrid. In a ‘detailed, frank’ briefing to a new US–Spain counter-terrorism group, Grinda said that the mafia exercised tremendous sway over the global economy. He said that Russia, Belarus and Chechnya had become ‘virtual “mafia states”’ and predicted that Ukraine – under its new Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych – was ‘going to be one’.
The special prosecutor said it was an ‘unanswered question’ whether Putin was personally implicated in the Russian mafia and whether he controls its actions.
The leaked cable reads: ‘Grinda cited a “thesis” by Alexander Litvinenko … that the Russian intelligence and security services – Grinda cites the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and military intelligence (GRU) – control organised crime in Russia. Grinda stated that he believes this thesis to be accurate.’
There was evidence that certain Russian political parties operate ‘hand in hand’ with the mafia, the prosecutor said. This evidence came from the intelligence services, witnesses and phone taps. He said that the KGB and its successors created the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), which is home ‘to many serious criminals’. He also claimed there were ties between politicians, organised crime and arms trafficking.
According to Grinda, organised criminals in Russia ‘complement state structures’, with Moscow employing the mafia to do whatever the ‘government of Russia cannot acceptably do as a government’. He said that Russian military intelligence, for example, used Kalashov to sell arms to the Kurds, with the aim of destabilising Turkey.
Grinda added: ‘The FSB is absorbing the Russian mafia but they can also eliminate them in two ways: by killing organised crime leaders who do not do what the security services want them to do, or by putting them behind bars to eliminate them as a competitor for influence. The crime lords can also be put in jail for their own protection.’
The evidence collected by Spanish investigators would lead to the arrest in 2008 of Gennady Petrov, the Tambov gang’s alleged boss; his number two, Alexander Malyshev; and Izguilov. Leaks to the Spanish press talked of the ‘hair-raising’ contents of wire-tapped conversations. In them, senior mafia figures boasted of their connections with Russian government ministers to ‘assure partners that their illicit deals would proceed as planned’.
It wasn’t until 2015 that the names of some of these ministers were revealed. Grinda, together with a colleague Juan Carrau, presented a 488-page complaint to Spain’s Central Court. The petition brought together ten years of investigative work against the Russian mafia.
According to the news agency Bloomberg, which got hold of the petition, Petrov had his own top-level government network in Moscow. It features many of Putin’s allies. They include Viktor Zubkov, Russia’s prime minister between 2007 and 2008 and the chairman of Gazprom, the natural gas extractor and one of the world’s largest companies. Zubkov’s son-in-law Anatoly Serdyukov, Russia’s former defence minister, also features.