The situation was now desperate. Patarkatsishvili offered to send his yacht; he suggested the Litvinenkos could hole up on it for a couple of months, bobbing in the blue waters off Istanbul, while he arranged more fake passports. Berezovsky felt Litvinenko should go to ground in Turkey. Goldfarb explored flying to Barbados via the US – impossible, it turned out, without an American transit visa. But what about France? Or Britain? He looked on the internet. No transit visa was needed to go via London. Goldfarb booked tickets to Tbilisi via London’s Heathrow Airport.
The next day, 1 November 2000, the four of them flew to the UK. Goldfarb knew London well but for the Litvinenko family it was terra incognito. They arrived at the transit section of Heathrow terminal three. Litvinenko and Goldfarb saw a uniformed policeman and approached him. The policemen stationed at the airport were used to all sorts of requests, including quite strange ones. The world in its many tongues and Technicolor guises flowed past. This sentence, though, stuck out.
Litvinenko said in English: ‘I am KGB officer. I am asking for political asylum.’
Britain would become the Litvinenkos’ new home. And – it appeared – a haven from enemies in Russia. Officials from the UK Home Office’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate interviewed Litvinenko in a custody suite. The interview went on for eight hours. Marina called her shocked mother in Moscow. Little Anatoly roamed round the terminal building, munching on a packet of M&Ms; he recalls being bored and feeling sick.
Goldfarb had arranged for a London solicitor, George Menzies, to come to the airport. Alexander, Marina and Anatoly were temporarily allowed to enter the UK while Litvinenko’s asylum application was considered. The authorities took a dim view of Goldfarb’s actions – people-smuggling. He asked if he might fly home to New York. They refused and deported him back to Turkey.
Over the next weeks, the family stayed in temporary accommodation paid for by Berezovsky. Litvinenko’s escape had cost the oligarch around $130,000 – small change for a man whose expenditure averaged around £1 million a month. (His bills included lovers, yachts – two of them – the upkeep of his luxury properties including a chateau in the south of France, bodyguards, jewellery …)
Berezovsky himself went into self-exile soon afterwards. He left Moscow for his villa in Cap d’Antibes and then moved to London. His new office was in Mayfair, at 7 Down Street, a modern complex opposite a church and a vintner’s. Down Street would become the hub for Berezovsky’s last ambitious and tragically doomed project: to bring down the Putin regime.
During this early period of exile, Litvinenko was worried about his safety. Might the British send him back to Russia? Could the Kremlin dispatch its agents to the UK? Menzies suggested the family adopt new English names. The solicitor’s office was in Carter Street, in south-east London. Carter sounded inconspicuous, middle-class, respectable.
Alexander’s new official name gave no hint of his previous career in the KGB – Edwin Redwald Carter. Marina became Maria Anne Carter. Anatoly got the name Anthony. Anatoly was enrolled at an English-language international school in Baker Street; the family moved into a temporary flat in Lexham Gardens in South Kensington; Anatoly would later study at the private City of London boys’ school. They began studying English, Alexander with the least success.
Days after arriving in London, Litvinenko got in touch with fellow émigré Vladimir Bukovsky. Bukovsky was a celebrated former political prisoner who had spent twelve years in a variety of Soviet labour camps, jails and psychiatric facilities. He revealed the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union – a practice that went on from the 1960s to the early 1980s, which saw thousands of dissidents tossed into mental hospitals for ‘anti-Soviet’ thinking.
In 1976, the USSR expelled Bukovsky. He settled in Cambridge, living alone in a suburban house on the city’s outskirts. When I visited him there in 2012 it had an overgrown garden, antediluvian yellow-and-brown wallpaper and fittings, and a sink littered with unwashed tea cups and cigarette butts.
Bukovsky became Litvinenko’s mentor and guru. According to Bukovsky, Litvinenko had a curious mind. He had missed out on university education and despite serving in the FSB knew practically nothing of the KGB. Bukovsky passed him documents that he had smuggled out of Moscow in 1991. They had come from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The files detailed the USSR’s long history of involvement in sponsoring international terrorism. The KGB supported liberation movements in Central and South America, Palestine and the Middle East. It supplied terrorist groups with explosives, weapons and cover documents. They blew up innocent people.
Litvinenko was appalled by what he read. He called Bukovsky, a night-owl, at four in the morning. The calls continued – sometimes as many as twenty or thirty a day. ‘He [Litvinenko] was totally shocked and said: “Listen, it looks like the KGB was always a terrorist organisation,”’ Bukovsky recalled. ‘I started laughing because I had known that since the age of sixteen. I said: “Well, Sasha, who do you think killed thirty or forty million of our citizens? It’s them.”’ Bukovsky was referring to Stalin’s 1930s purges, administered by the NKVD secret police.
The more Litvinenko read, the more he discovered the system was evil, Bukovsky said. When the communist regime collapsed, the regime continued in milder form. ‘More or less the same bureaucrats were sitting in the same cabinet, in the same offices, and old habits die hard, as you know,’ Bukovsky said. As an operative, Litvinenko found that many criminal threads led back to his own FSB building, and to neighbouring offices. The KGB, he discovered, had patronised organised crime too.
Marina Litvinenko said her husband’s tutorials with Bukovsky transformed him. ‘He was reborn. He became a dissident,’ she said.
Litvinenko began work as Berezovsky’s security adviser. According to Bukovsky, the billionaire’s carelessness amazed them both. Litvinenko found Russian intelligence had compromised Berezovsky’s inner circle and put moles inside his office. Berezovsky refused to fire them. ‘He was an incredibly naïve person,’ Bukovsky said. ‘When we first explained that Putin is going to kill him if he has a chance, he didn’t believe us.’ Berezovsky muttered that Putin had attended his wife’s birthday party, ‘so it couldn’t be true’.
In addition to working for Berezovsky, Litvinenko also embarked on a career as a journalist and writer. There was an obvious subject for him to explore. Prior to his escape, he had become interested in the infamous bombing of some Russian apartment blocks, which had occurred the previous year. In September 1999, nearly 300 people were killed when four multi-storey apartment blocks were destroyed in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk. Putin, then prime minister, blamed the explosions on Chechen terrorists. He used the bombings – and the prevailing national mood of fear and anger – to persuade Yeltsin to launch a military attack on Chechnya and its rebel leadership: the second Chechen war.
Something about the bombings was strange, though. In Ryazan, locals spotted three people – two men and a woman – unloading sacks from the back of a white Zhiguli car with Moscow licence plates. They put them in the basement of a suburban apartment block. A resident, Alexei Kartofelnikov, rang the police. Officers found three sacks containing the explosive hexogen and a homemade detonating device. The block was evacuated, the bomb made safe, and a major hunt launched for the suspects. They turned out to be agents of the FSB.