Litvinenko’s first foray into this industry with his new partner was with a company called RISC Management, run by a former Scotland Yard detective called Keith Hunter. It offered ‘security investigations and services’. Hunter specialised in Russian clients, one of them Berezovsky. Litvinenko was asked to investigate Russia’s deputy agriculture minister on behalf of a vodka company. Was the minister corrupt?
The money wasn’t huge, but Litvinenko found these corporate assignments interesting; his new colleagues good people. Increasingly, Lugovoi flew to London. The intelligence product he brought with him, as his part of the arrangement, was uninspiring. His work on the vodka assignment appeared to have been culled from the Russian internet.
Still, RISC paid $7,500 to Lugovoi’s Cyprus bank account. Lugovoi was ex-KGB, which meant a lot in Putin’s Russia. Maybe Lugovoi was the key that would prise open the door to Gazprom and other state giants.
In January 2006, Litvinenko, his Chechen friend and neighbour Zakayev, and their wives, were guests at Berezovsky’s sixtieth birthday party. It was a lavish black-tie affair held at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Duke of Marlborough near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Lugovoi flew in from Moscow. They shared a table and posed together for a photo in front of the palace’s entrance of classical columns. Lugovoi, standing on the left of the picture, is an ingenuous presence, his smile as ever disarming. It was the only time that Marina Litvinenko met Lugovoi.
Lugovoi flew back to the UK in March, April (twice) and May (twice) and June. He was a man of means who stayed in the best hotels – in Knightsbridge, Mayfair, Piccadilly. The trips were so frequent they aroused mild suspicion. A British consular official in Moscow noted on his visa application: ‘Speak to applicant and ask why he has used his last visa eight times and why he was in the UK and what he was doing?’
Another embassy official noted Lugovoi’s reply: ‘The applicant says he has travelled to the UK purely for holidays because he has friends there (Alexander Litvinenko) and he likes the UK. He travelled either alone or with his wife.’ Lugovoi’s passport is a galaxy of Russian exit and UK entry stamps – Stansted Airport, 22 January 2006, Gatwick, 5 April 2006.
Meanwhile, Litvinenko’s dealings with Berezovsky were cooling. The dispute was over money. There was no terminal quarrel. Berezovsky continued to pay Anatoly’s private school fees, and said of Litvinenko: ‘We continued good relations.’
Litvinenko’s relationship with Lugovoi, however, continued to grow – what had started as a business alliance apparently developing into friendship. Over the summer, Lugovoi and his wife Svetlana visited Litvinenko at his home in Muswell Hill. On the walls Lugovoi saw photos of Litvinenko with Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel and station chief in London who famously defected to Britain in 1985. All three were prominent Putin enemies.
Litvinenko introduced Lugovoi to his circle of contacts, including Titon’s director Attew. The meeting took place at Heathrow Airport’s terminal one, while Lugovoi was on his way back from Canada to Moscow. Attew disliked him intensely: ‘Seven years of watching people around gaming tables and reading body language left me feeling extremely uncomfortable when I sat with Lugovoi. I didn’t enjoy the experience and was very pleased to be leaving there.’
Attew’s own status was a matter of sensitivity. Lugovoi would later claim that Attew was Litvinenko’s handler and an MI6 agent. And that Attew had tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit him as an asset for British intelligence. MI6 have not, of course, confirmed or denied this but it would not be unlikely that Attew was a former spook and he was certainly well connected in that world.
Soon after the Heathrow meeting, something very odd happened at 25 Grosvenor Street. In the early hours of the morning intruders broke down the black oak front door. They ignored the immediate offices and went to the fourth floor, taking out the entire door-frame to the Titon vestibule. They spent four or five minutes inside. Seemingly they stole nothing.
The next day Attew made a thorough search. No clues. ‘In my business, that’s a reconnaissance,’ he said. ‘That’s a recce.’ At the time Attew didn’t connect it with Litvinenko. Later the break-in made gruesome sense.
The job was done by professional agents. This was the FSB, almost certainly, scoping the ground for a future operation. Litvinenko had always warned Berezovsky that he was most at risk from people who’d featured in his past. In his keenness to make money, and to provide for his family, Litvinenko had forgotten his own rule.
It was a warm autumn day when the two Russian visitors arrived in Grosvenor Street. That morning, 16 October 2006, their undercover mission had almost met with failure when DC Scott, the customs officer, stopped them at Gatwick Airport. But their cover story had held up. Most importantly, the costly poison they had been given back in Russia was intact. This was polonium, a rare and highly radioactive substance. It is probably the most toxic substance known to man when swallowed or inhaled – more than 100 billion times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide.
The next task was to deploy it. They had come to poison Litvinenko.
Scotland Yard would never establish how Lugovoi and Kovtun carried the polonium into Britain. The amounts involved were very small and easy to disguise. There were several possibilities: a container with the poison administered by a pipette-style dropper. Or an aerosol-like spray. Even a modified fountain pen would do the trick. Within its container the polonium was safe. Out of it it was highly dangerous. Ingested, you were dead.
Lugovoi and Kovtun, it would become apparent, had no idea what they were carrying. Their behaviour in Britain was idiotic verging on suicidal. Nobody in Moscow appears to have told them Po-210 had intensely radioactive properties. Or that it left a trace – placing them in specific locations and indicating, via telltale alpha radiation markings, who sat where. It was possible to identify anything and everything they touched: door handles, telephones, wash basins.
These clueless assassins left numerous trails. The most vivid was radiation: subsequently tested by forensic experts, and turned by experts from the Metropolitan Police into colourful three-dimensional graphics. Another was financiaclass="underline" a series of clues whenever Lugovoi paid a bill with his Bank Metropol Mastercard. One other was cellular. Phone records, retrieved by detectives, showed who called whom, for how long, and when.
And of course there were witnesses. They told a remarkable story: of two killers who, in addition to the business of murder, indulged in sight-seeing, shopping, boozing, fine dining – and flirting. During their trips to London they tried to pick up women. Without success. Surely, the KGB was better at seduction in its heyday?
Earlier that morning – at 11.49 – Lugovoi had called Litvinenko from Gatwick Airport. He confirmed they were meeting that afternoon at the intelligence firm Erinys, Titon’s sister company at 25 Grosvenor Street. They would be discussing a potentially lucrative new line of business regarding the energy giant Gazprom. Lugovoi and Kovtun travelled by train to central London. They checked into the Best Western Hotel on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of Soho.
The first rule of spycraft is not to draw attention to yourself. In Lugovoi and Kovtun’s case the reality was comically, even ludicrously, different. From the moment they stepped onto UK soil, Lugovoi and Kovtun attracted attention wherever they went. It wasn’t just that they were assassins: the problem was they looked like assassins, a pair of stage villains from FSB Casting.