Some friends thought that his well-publicized attacks on Russia’s most powerful men put Litvinenko at risk of assassination. He usually batted away such suggestions, insisting that he felt well protected in the United Kingdom. At the same time, he trusted no one, according to colleague Yuri Felshtinsky. “He thought everyone was working for the KGB,” Felshtinsky said. “He thought people in Boris’s office were working for the KGB, which perhaps one or more were.”
Litvinenko hammered at the idea of Putin and the Russian intelligence apparatus as the unseen hands behind all sorts of outrages. He declared that the FSB trained Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy chief of al-Qaeda; that Putin was responsible for the Beslan school massacre; that the FSB organized the Nord-Ost hostage-taking (Anna alleged an FSB role as well); and that the FSB killed Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov. He made a link to the 2004 dioxin poisoning of the Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko as he campaigned against a pro-Moscow candidate. Litvinenko told The New York Times that the assault fit the profile of a Russian undercover operation. “The view inside our [intelligence] agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol. It’s not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool,” he told the newspaper.
He got exceedingly personal with Putin. The president’s career in the KGB had been initially derailed because “his bosses learned that [he] was a pedophile,” Litvinenko said. He claimed to have a videotape of Putin cavorting with underage boys, but never made public the purported recording or any other evidence to support what most regarded as a preposterous assertion.
Some who knew him said Litvinenko also exaggerated certain personal relationships. Anna Politkovskaya, for example, was unable to disregard his past as a KGB agent and remained highly suspicious of him, according to her family. Her only interest was whatever information he could provide on the FSB and Chechnya, they said. Litvinenko, on the other hand, regularly said he and Anna were close personal friends. Perhaps he thought his contact with her lent him credibility, allowing him to bask in her reflected glory.
Skeptics abounded when Litvinenko once cast himself as concerned for Vladimir Putin’s safety. He rang the London police to say that two Russian men had approached him with plans to assassinate their president. The allegation received wide attention in the British press and resulted in the men’s brief incarceration, after which they were sent back to Russia. Suddenly, if only briefly, Litvinenko appeared to be the soul of moderateness.
More often, he seemed to be a man of contradictions. Most of his allegations appeared wide of the mark. Yet he had solid sources within Russian security agencies, according to his wife and Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel. They told me that he was able to reach FSB contacts by phone, and through them obtained access to inside information and documents. His judgments were accurate at times simply because he knew from personal experience how the FSB and its companion agencies worked.
His claim that Putin okayed or knew in advance of the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya is highly improbable. But his broader accusation that the Russian intelligence community was involved is far less so. In fact, as Russian prosecutors themselves later alleged, at least one FSB officer did assist in Anna’s murder by telling the killers where she lived.
Some journalists reported his assertions as straightforward news, while others treated him as a crank and possibly unhinged. Even some admirers thought he sounded shrill.
Yet Litvinenko found an ear in British intelligence. The country’s domestic and overseas intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, both debriefed him after his 2000 defection. What he told his interrogators has never been made public, but the questions likely paralleled those asked by American agents when he first sought asylum, in Georgia—for example, the identities of Russian spies in Britain and British double agents anywhere in the world. He cooperated with enthusiasm. After the rough methods of the KGB, the more polished, low-key style of the Britons appealed to him. For a while, he was disgruntled in that his hosts refused to provide him with a salary. But that was to be expected since he hadn’t negotiated his defection in advance, when he might have had some leverage. In addition, he was not a truly high-value catch, not like Oleg Gordievsky, for instance, or even Nikolai Khokhlov, the first officer to defect from Stalin’s assassination unit. By those standards, he failed to qualify for a regular salary; political asylum and the chance to attain British citizenship would have to suffice.
Litvinenko’s best-known broadside against the FSB was Blowing Up Russia, the book he coauthored with Felshtinsky. It argued that the FSB had engineered the four apartment house bombings that terrorized Russia in 1999 and killed some three hundred people, and that the blasts had been part of an elaborate plan to catapult the agency’s boss, Vladimir Putin, into the presidency.
Berezovsky, now in full-throated opposition to Putin, financed the book as a political weapon. He and Litvinenko were united in their desire to upend the Russian regime, with Berezovsky anxious to discredit the president and Litvinenko going after the FSB. Blowing Up Russia had the virtue of attacking both.
The exiled billionaire spent generously to promote his creation. He launched the book with a London party worthy of royalty and flew some four dozen journalists in from Moscow to attend a press conference. Novaya Gazeta, Anna’s newspaper, published excerpts in a special issue. Berezovsky also bankrolled a fifty-two-minute documentary, entitled Assassination of Russia, which was based on the book. The French-produced film had its premiere in London but was also shown to a select audience in Moscow.
Putin’s regime labored to defend itself against the book and other attacks by Litvinenko and his billionaire ally. Boris Labusov, spokesman for the foreign arm of the FSB, scorned the defector’s claim that Russia’s secret services had escalated their activities in North America and Europe. “There is no need to analyze Litvinenko’s fabrications. You can say at once that he is fulfilling another social order by his superiors,” Labusov said, seeming to refer to Berezovsky. Early one morning in 2004, someone lobbed Molotov cocktails at the north London homes of Litvinenko and Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled Chechen leader. Litvinenko blamed Russia, and Labusov responded with scorn. “Discussing our involvement is really a laugh,” he said, suggesting instead that the exiles might have torched their own homes. “History knows a lot of cases when some individuals imitated attempts on their lives, trying to attract the public’s attention to themselves for various purposes.”
But there was no denying that Litvinenko had struck a nerve in Moscow. FSB marksmen used large portraits of their former colleague for target practice—all the better, it seemed, to motivate their accuracy. The Russian embassy left a summons at his London home to appear in Moscow and be tried on charges of beating a suspect and stealing explosives when he was an FSB agent (he had been cleared of similar allegations in 1999). Litvinenko, naturally, had no desire to return to Moscow under the threat of a prison sentence, and ignored the summons. He was convicted in absentia a month later, and a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence was entered against him. Putin’s priorities seemed misdirected—pursuing an empty conviction with the likely intent to vilify a political exile, while exerting little energy to solve the country’s biggest murder cases.
Later in the year, word reached Litvinenko that the FSB apparently had hatched a plot to kill him. The tip came from Mikhail Trepashkin, who said he had been threatened with murder by the boss of Litvinenko’s FSB anti-crime unit and sat with him at the famous whistle-blower press conference in Moscow in 1998. In the end, the FSB turned against both of them, but he and Litvinenko became close friends.