A former FSB colleague of theirs had proposed that Trepashkin, still in Russia, go to London and be the point man in a surveillance operation targeting Litvinenko. In Trepashkin’s telling, the former colleague defined the purpose of the mission as sorting out “all matters linked to Litvinenko and Berezovsky once and for all.”
Apparently, the agency expected that Trepashkin’s loyalty to FSB tradition and his Russian patriotism would overcome whatever misgivings he might have at violating an important friendship. But Trepashkin quickly concluded that the agency was trying to draw him into a scheme to murder Litvinenko, and friendship prevailed.
Trepashkin told an interviewer how he responded to the ex-colleague: “‘Are you out of your mind?’ I said to him. ‘Are you trying to recruit me to help carry out an assassination? Forget it.’”
Episodes such as the surveillance plot did nothing to calm the paranoia and sense of drama that seemed to overwhelm Litvinenko at times. A Russian-born doctoral student named Julia Svetlichnaja, writing in a British newspaper, provided a vivid account of grandiose-to-eccentric behavior on his part. She had spent time with Litvinenko while doing research on Chechnya, and her article depicted him as a somewhat pathetic figure. Acting the superspy, he made abrupt turns in his car to lose a “tail” and insisted on standing and walking while being interviewed, supposedly to foil any attempts by unseen persons to record him. He posed in front of a British flag, belligerently brandishing a Chechen sword, and said of the Kremlin, “Every time I publish something on the ChechenPress website, I piss them off. One day they will understand who I am!” She said Litvinenko described plans to blackmail one or more Russian oligarchs with evidence he had of their corruption. He even invited Svetlichnaja to partner with him on the project, she said.
Felshtinsky, his writing partner, doubted that the latter invitation was genuine. Litvinenko, he said, would have been suspicious of a Russian woman he did not know claiming she was in London conducting research on Chechens. “He was probably thinking she worked for the KGB; all of it was his checking if she worked for the Russians or not,” Felshtinsky said. That rang true. Always, it seemed, Litvinenko was on the lookout for another plot.
By 2005, Litvinenko began to feel as if he were living on the dole. He had been in England for almost five years, but was still entirely dependent on Berezovsky’s goodwill and monthly stipends. He had exhausted all the evidence that he and Felshtinsky had gathered to portray the FSB and Putin as complicit in the apartment house bombings. Their investigations had resulted in a book and a film, and Litvinenko had written a second anti-FSB screed called Lubyanka Criminal Group. Now what would he do? He knew he was no businessman, but he excelled at intelligence work. That, he told Marina, “I can really do well.” Everyone was for sale in Russia and “everything has its price,” he said confidently.
Litvinenko was familiar with the detective agencies that had blossomed in London’s Mayfair district, especially their hunger for the kind of information he could provide. Their clientele included Western businessmen exploring joint ventures in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, who were anxious to know more about their potential partners before taking the plunge. The detective agencies were happy to supply the needed intelligence in exchange for handsome fees.
And so Litvinenko, drawing on his sources inside and outside of Russia, began selling information to the Mayfair operatives. His initial experiences were not encouraging. The agencies were relative tight-wads when it came to paying their investigators. Sometimes they refused to pay anything for the information that he submitted, scoffing, “We ourselves could have discovered this.” Litvinenko was awkward in the art of wheeling and dealing, and accepted these financial slights.
But over time, he developed good relationships with a few select companies, especially one called Titon International Security Services. Titon was a boutique operation known for in-the-trenches investigations that larger rivals were reluctant to undertake—just the type that were Litvinenko’s forte. One of his notable successes at Titon was a probing report on Viktor Ivanov, a longtime Putin intimate and former KGB officer. After Putin appointed Ivanov chairman of Aeroflot, Litvinenko profiled Ivanov for a British firm thinking of doing business with the state airline.
At the same time Litvinenko was feeling his way as a private investigator, his relationship with Berezovsky was becoming strained. Given their long history together, this seemed a surprising development. The billionaire Russian had been his mentor and a willing provider for the Litvinenko family. Back in 2000, it was Berezovsky who had made possible Litvinenko’s cloak-and-dagger flight from Russia and had overcome Marina’s doubts about uprooting herself and her son from their native country. Berezovsky’s pledge to take care of them financially had persuaded Marina to go along with the plan to flee, she told me. In London, the exiled oligarch had installed them in an apartment in the desirable Kensington district, paid for their son’s schooling, and provided Litvinenko with a generous salary of £5,000 a month. (Litvinenko chronically griped that he had no cash. A skeptical colleague who knew his habits when it came to managing money once remarked to him, “Sasha, if I deposited my entire salary in the bank, I also would have no money in my pocket.”)
But Berezovsky didn’t regard himself as a philanthropist. He was a businessman who always demanded something in return for his investments. And Litvinenko, despite his obvious gifts as an investigator, seemed unable to come up with new projects that were worthwhile, nothing like Blowing Up Russia, which Berezovsky had been willing to support because he thought it could wound the reviled Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky began to avoid meetings with him, no longer willing to listen to Litvinenko’s highly emotional and long-winded presentations. As Berezovsky put it, his fellow exile “demanded considerable attention,” while the oligarch had more pressing matters to attend to. On top of that, Litvinenko seemed obsessed with matters he regarded as absolutely vital but others thought were inconsequential at best. He seemed consumed by his conspiracy theories. At least that was how Berezovsky saw it.
Yuri Felshtinsky knew firsthand what it meant to be sought-after by Litvinenko. Phone calls came at all hours, and the voice at the other end usually was filled with urgency. But Litvinenko seldom had anything pressing to say. More often, it was “something that could wait two months, [much] less until the next day,” Felshtinsky told me. “I’d say, ‘You’re waking everyone up. Next time, please wait before you call.’ He’d say, ‘I don’t care. What’s the problem? So I woke them up.’”
In Litvinenko’s mind, his behavior was perfectly reasonable—for an oper, that is. This is FSB jargon for a special kind of intelligence agent, the operations man who tracks criminals in anticipation that they will commit illegal acts. Litvinenko had been trained as an oper, a word he used so often that Berezovsky soon picked it up. Now Litvinenko’s prey was the FSB; he was in constant battle with its shadowy operatives, always attempting “to provoke, to see how they react to him,” Felshtinsky said.
He sometimes struggled to decipher Litvinenko’s assertions. “When he is saying he has a tape that Putin is a pedophile, there are several possibilities of what that means,” Felshtinsky offered as an example. “There is the possibility he has a tape; another possibility is that he knows someone who has the tape; a third is that he is trying to provoke a reaction, such as that Putin may think he has a tape, or that someone who has the tape will understand he wants the tape, or that someone might make such a tape.”