They had found in this approach a way of ridiculing Western allegations while at the same time denying the victim or their loved ones any sympathy.
‘As the Chekists have become entrenched in power,’ Politkovskaya wrote in 2004, ‘we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that.’
The many cases of political murder in Russia, including hers, had demonstrated a technique of political management. It was important for the authorities to allow certain investigations to go on, or at least appear to do so. These often ended up pointing the finger at the Russian mafia or hired assassins, but left unsolved the question of who was ultimately responsible. This approach was now deployed in the Litvinenko case, perhaps based on a Russian calculation that British politicians had no more interest in following it to its final conclusions than the Kremlin did.
British detectives were allowed, late in 2006, to visit Russia and question, albeit under restricted circumstances, Lugovoi and Kovtun. But when this process pointed clearly in the direction of Lugovoi’s guilt, Scotland Yard charging him (in absentia) with murder in May 2007, the Kremlin shifted its ground.
Lugovoi was found a seat in the Duma, giving him immunity from prosecution or extradition, and the battle of wills between London and Moscow moved to the issue of possible trial in a third country, something that was never likely to happen but testified to Moscow’s ostensible willingness to find a solution. Lugovoi took a lie-detector test also, which he passed.
In London, meanwhile, the murder posed its own problems. Although the Scotland Yard investigation had pointed clearly to a criminal conspiracy using a very rare substance obtained in a Russian state facility, Downing Street did not want to endorse in any way Litvinenko’s dying accusation that it had all been done on Putin’s orders. As long as there were plausible alternative theories – from rogue elements in the FSB to organized crime – why paint yourself into a diplomatic corner that could easily derail the entire national relationship with Russia?
People in Vauxhall Cross of course had their own view. Several officers in the P5s or Russia sections had known Litvinenko well and they were both shocked and angered by his demise. ‘He was a completely irrepressible character’, one MI6 man noted of Litvinenko, ‘always talking, always fizzing with ideas and theories.’
Although he had not been an MI6 agent when he arrived in the UK in 2000, Alexander Litvinenko was by 2003 meeting officers of the agency regularly. They had limited insights into the FSB and its thinking and found him an excellent sounding board, so much so that from 2004 they were paying him £2,000 a month as a ‘consultant’. In return, Litvinenko came in for meetings, provided background on leading FSB personalities, and was lent out to friendly services.
During 2006, he travelled on a few occasions to Spain, where prosecutors were preparing two trials of Russian mafia figures. Litvinenko knew much about the connections between organized crime and the FSB, and the emergence of this work informed one of the main explanations about the motive for the poisoning and its timing, for one of these trials got under way as he lay dying in hospital.
Litvinenko’s work with MI6 and the Spanish authorities provided an explanation or even justification for some as to why he had been murdered. But if the Kremlin was responsible, Litvinenko had probably long sealed his fate by being an ally of Boris Berezovsky.
Having made a fortune after the Soviet collapse by dealing in cars, oil, and a variety of other enterprises, Berezovsky personified pretty much everything the FSB bosses hated. He had benefited enormously from the USSR’s collapse, become a close ally of Yeltsin, was intimately involved with negotiating what the siloviki regarded as the humiliating end to the First Chechen War, and was Jewish to boot. When Putin campaigned in 2000 on his ‘Dictatorship of Law’ slogan, Berezovsky was exactly the type of target he had in mind.
Nearly three years before he arrived in Britain, Litvinenko, then a serving lieutenant colonel, went to Berezovsky with the extraordinary revelation that he had been ordered by his FSB boss to kill the tycoon. There followed a period of conflict with the authorities, a press conference by Litvinenko and other FSB dissenters, and finally time in jail before the intelligence officer fled the country.
Once in London, Litvinenko was initially very much Berezovsky’s creature, taking money from him and co-authoring a book, Blowing Up Russia, that accused the FSB of carrying out the 1999 apartment bombings as false-flag operations that would create a pretext for a second Chechen War. Later their relationship became more distant. From a Russian perspective, it was London’s willingness to give asylum to the tycoon and former FSB officer that did much to sour the post-9/11 spirit of cooperation. The Kremlin regarded the British playing host to people making such incendiary and hostile claims as a basic breach of good faith.
The relevance to the wider story of the Litvinenko affair is that it began to undermine those in Whitehall who felt the imperfections of Russian democracy should be overlooked in the interests of trade and close cooperation (for example through the United Nations Security Council) on a whole range of world problems. Litvinenko’s murder and Russia’s refusal to extradite the suspects were just too egregious to be ignored.
Of course all of this was meant to send a message within Russia. In consolidating his power Putin was dealing with an issue that had long bugged the siloviki, the removal in 1996 of the ultimate sanction for treachery. Shortly before the poisoning of Litvinenko, Russia’s parliament, the Duma, had passed a new law allowing for the elimination of terrorists outside Russia’s borders. This was intended principally as a means of providing legal cover for operations to kill Chechen militants who had gone into exile, however some also regarded it as providing a more general rubric for dispatching ‘traitors’ abroad. Whether dealing with rebels in the north Caucasus, corrupt businessmen, or those tempted to spy for the West, what Putin and the siloviki realized was that fear was very useful to them. The days of Article 64 and the firing squad might be gone, but there were other ways to stimulate that emotion. If someone felt they might be eliminated then they were far more likely to be obedient.
At MI6, where John Scarlett had become chief in 2004, Litvinenko’s murder derailed the twin-track policy he had long favoured – of maintaining liaison relationships with the Russians while at the same time upping the espionage effort against them. Cooperation with the SVR had to be suspended as these events subtly strengthened the hand of those in his service and elsewhere who saw profound moral hazard in cosying up to Putin and his dubious friends.
And what of the importance of Litvinenko’s tragedy to Sergei Skripal? The murder was instructive in many ways: in showing the willingness of elements within Russia to murder in the UK; in the use of a rare poison that was traced back to a state institution; and in establishing how the Kremlin would respond to the grave accusation of sponsoring assassination overseas. As we will see, the Litvinenko affair also – rightly or wrongly – defined the response of many in the British state to what happened in Salisbury in March 2018.
None of this was apparent of course in November 2006, as Litvinenko lay dying in University College Hospital. For at that time, following his sentence, Skripal was adjusting to the grim reality of his thirteen-year sentence, and to a life transported away from those he loved so deeply.
11
IK 5
The train to Pot’ma leaves from Moscow’s Kazan Station and rattles 500 kilometres to the east, into the isolation of Mordovia. These days an express can do the journey in under eight hours. But the condemned travel at a more leisurely speed.