However, others I’ve spoken to do think it is quite possible that he gave up extensive details of his espionage during interrogation. From my perspective it is noteworthy that Russian media accounts, such as the 2014 documentary, seem to contain a blend of things that likely did come from Skripal’s interrogations and others that are simply wrong and maybe reflect the journalists’ or investigators’ erroneous suppositions.
As Skripal’s case concluded, Russian TV was given a short clip of the verdict being read out in the Moscow Military Court. A prosecutor dressed in a black legal robe announced he had been found guilty and the sentence was passed.
Skripal was shown in those reports wearing a tracksuit, caged in the dock, and chatting amiably enough to his lawyer. Whatever the superficial dignity with which he negotiated his trial, everything was about to change. Wearing your own clothes, getting frequent family visits and generous food parcels were features of being on remand in Lefortovo. He was now a convict entering the criminal netherworld, on his way to a harsh regime institution in the Gulag.
10
LITVINENKO
A few months after Skripal’s sentencing, on 1 November 2006, a former FSB officer living in exile in London made his way to a smart hotel in London’s Mayfair, the Millennium, for an afternoon meeting with an old associate, another former KGB man called Andrei Lugovoi, and someone else he’d dragged along, Dmitri Kovtun. The ex-FSB man, Alexander Litvinenko, had become a part of that world where corporate, personal, and espionage interests blend together. He was hoping to use Lugovoi, who, unlike him, could still travel freely to and from Moscow, as a discreet correspondent in the Russian capital, finding out about people and companies that were of interest to London-based commercial clients.
Upstairs, in the hotel’s Pine Bar, Lugovoi and his associate were knocking back the drinks, consuming gin and tonics and a champagne cocktail, and a £15 cigar for good measure. They also ordered a pot of green tea for three, Lugovoi knowing that Litvinenko was not a great boozer. After a while Kovtun, who Litvinenko had only met once before and did not like the look of, complained of being hungover and left the bar, presumably heading up to his room. ‘We’re going to be leaving soon,’ Lugovoi said to Litvinenko, ‘if you want some tea, then there is some here, you can have some of this.’
Observing the social niceties, Litvinenko took a few sips. As things were drawing to a close, Lugovoi’s wife and eight-year-old son appeared. He introduced the boy to the ex-FSB man and the party broke up.
At home in Muswell Hill that evening, Litvinenko and his wife enjoyed a quiet celebration. It was six years to the day since they had escaped Russia and arrived in the UK.
It was not long after going to bed, at about 11.10pm, that Litvinenko began to feel very ill. He went to the bathroom and vomited violently. And that was just the start of it. Every twenty or so minutes, racked by convulsions, he returned to the toilet. He retched and retched until only bile came out and he was frothing at the mouth. The next day passed in agony, despite attempted remedies, and by the early hours of 3 November his wife Marina was calling an ambulance to take him to their local hospital.
Litvinenko’s condition gradually worsened: on 7 November Marina first shared with the doctors the possibility that he’d been poisoned; on the 11th his hair started to fall out in great clumps; and by the 14th doctors treating him were starting to look seriously at the possibility of poisoning. Two weeks after his first admission, Litvinenko was transferred to University College Hospital in central London, and the police were brought in.
Two detectives interviewed Litvinenko, who immediately made clear his suspicion that he had been poisoned. He also let them know, a little coyly, that he had a contact in MI6 who was then called by police. As for the possible motive of the poisoning:
I have no doubt whatsoever that this was done by the Russian Secret Services. Having knowledge of this system I know that the order about such a killing of a citizen of another country on its territory, especially if it is something to do with Great Britain, could have been given by only one person.
Litvinenko then explicitly blamed Putin – and his testimony to the two detectives was promptly classified. It did not become public for eight and a half years. Hours after giving his statement, Litvinenko was moved to intensive care and on 23 November he died. ‘You may succeed in silencing one man,’ his last statement read, ‘but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.’
Hours before his death, having scrapped their diagnosis of poisoning by thallium, scientists at the Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston had finally identified the poison as a rare radioactive isotope, polonium 210. Investigations with Geiger counters had revealed nothing: they are designed to detect more common forms of radiation, gamma emitters, but polonium can only be found by looking for alpha traces.
Once they had cracked the riddle of the poison, detectives retraced Litvinenko’s steps and those of the men he had met on 1 November. An alarming picture emerged.
In the weeks leading up to the Millennium meeting, Lugovoi had twice tried to poison his target. Both times, as he did after the successful attempt, he had flushed polonium down hotel sinks, leaving astronomical radiation readings in those three different places.
In the days before that fateful get-together, Kovtun had flown to Hamburg with another vial of polonium. Aeroplane seats also showed high levels of polonium. German police, following up Kovtun’s part in it, had spoken to a friend of his in Hamburg. This witness alleged the Russian had told him, ‘Litvinenko is a traitor! He has blood on his hands!’ He spoke about giving the ex-spy a rare poison and when asked by his friend why they didn’t just shoot him, Kovtun replied, ‘It’s meant to set an example.’
These investigations, percolating up the police, MI6, and government chain of command, soon set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall. If this was a state-sponsored murder the entire Anglo-Russian relationship could be jeopardized. For their part, the Russian government and commentators replied with a number of alternative narratives – MI6 had killed him, it was a Russian mafia feud, or the culprit was none other than his old patron, the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had also been given asylum in London.
President Putin, asked in February 2007 at a press conference about a number of recent murders, said that it would be for a court to determine responsibility. As for Litvinenko, he ‘was dismissed from the security services’, noted Putin, ‘there was no need to run anywhere, he did not have any secrets. Everything negative that he could say with respect to his service, he already said long ago’.
The implied notion, that a victim didn’t merit murdering, echoed his response to the death in October 2006 of a prominent Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. She had been a vociferous critic of Putin and the Chechen war, and many in Moscow believed she had been assassinated on Kremlin orders. Challenged on this while visiting Germany, Putin replied that Politkovskaya was indeed a government critic, but ‘the degree of her influence over political life in Russia was extremely insignificant’.
The concept that murdering opponents was implausible because it wasn’t worth the effort was made explicit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He responded to a question on the Litvinenko case: ‘Why would the intelligence services spend millions in order to send to kingdom come a former rank-and-file agent, whose absurd allegations against them have long ceased to be taken seriously?’