Of course that was unsurprising to many listeners who had assumed for months that the Kremlin was behind the murder, but given the government’s careful avoidance of this type of blame, that MI5’s DG made the case so forcefully, and that Russia had tried another assassination, it set me thinking.
It didn’t take long to find the reporting on the Berezovsky affair of the previous summer. Was this the further attempt that Evans was referring to? I asked an official. Yes. Could I have a briefing on it? We’ll get back to you.
A few weeks later, I was directed to the empty upstairs bar of a restaurant in Mayfair for a mid-morning rendezvous. There I met a ‘Whitehall official’ who briefed me on the intelligence underpinning Jonathan Evans’s public, or at least semi-public, remarks at the Mandarin Oriental. Russian espionage numbers had built back up, close to Cold War levels, despite the flourishing of business and cultural ties during the preceding years; about thirty people accredited as diplomats, half of Russia’s official representation in London, were thought to be spies. Recently though there had been a change, they ‘are now looking to target regime opponents’, and as for the Litvinenko and Berezovsky operations, he argued, ‘our assessment is very clear that this was Russian state activity’. But while the embassy people belonged to the two traditional arms of foreign espionage – the SVR or successor agency to the overseas arm of the KGB, and the GRU – these more aggressive operations had been set up by the FSB.
That the FSB was taking care of business on its SVR and GRU overseas rivals’ turf in the UK would have been entirely unsurprising to someone like Skripal, serving his time in Mordovia. He was all too familiar with the agency power struggles in Moscow. But for the British spooks this was new and deeply unwelcome. Indeed the official said that state-sponsored assassination would mess up the Anglo-Russian relationship ‘big time’.
Litvinenko’s murder had been set up as ‘the perfect crime’, and it was only because he had taken just a few sips of the poisoned tea offered him at London’s Millennium Hotel rather than a full mouthful that he had taken so long to die, giving doctors time to isolate the cause of death as polonium poisoning. If he had perished faster, it would never have been known. In both cases the FSB had opted to use someone known to the victim in order to get close to them. Litvinenko was inherently suspicious, and Berezovsky had hired a formidable Israeli bodyguard team to protect himself. Interestingly, although some reporting suggested the Chechen was planning to use a gun in London, there were people I spoke to whose hypothesis was that, like Lugovoi and Kovtun, Atlangeriev would have used the proximity of a ‘business meeting’ to administer a poison.
Several more days passed and we started to film a story on the attempted murder of Berezovsky, adding lines from the Evans event (which could not be directly attributed to him) and the subsequent briefing. Berezovsky himself gave me the name of Atlangeriev, and of another suspect who had travelled over from Russia at about the same time, as well as many other details of what had happened. The Russian businessman described the urgency of warnings by Scotland Yard and what happened next:
They commanded me to leave the country, I said I don’t have so many opportunities… Russia had a red flag on Interpol to arrest me. I said I’m not able to move anywhere, just to Israel, and I said maybe Scotland? They said no, you move to another country. OK, I said, I’ll try but how urgently? Better today or maximum tomorrow… next day I left the country, I remember it well, it was 16th June.
Berezovsky had met Atlangeriev before, when he had come over, seeking funding for a new political party. The exiled businessman told us the Chechen had asked for a meeting, at which he would carry out the murder, accepting that his arrest and trial were highly likely to lead to a long sentence but that the Russian authorities had promised to compensate his family for it.
Officials confirmed that Atlangeriev was indeed the man deported in June 2007 and we were in business.
The story then was that despite official coyness by UK diplomats or Downing Street in the Berezovsky and Litvinenko cases, MI5 was quite clear that these were acts planned and carried out by the Russian state in the form of the FSB. As for whether Putin had personally ordered these hits, those I spoke to were candid enough to say they didn’t know one way or another.
When, early in July, I rang the Whitehall official who had organized my briefing, to discuss the quotes that we would use (this process was a condition of the meeting), he put heavy pressure on me to tone our story down. The suggested changes would essentially have rendered it meaningless so I conceded a point or two and held firm on the others, despite threats to penalize the BBC as a whole if we put out our report.
What he could see – and lamentably I could not until the day of transmission because I had journalistic tunnel vision – was that it would run on the day that Prime Minister Gordon Brown had his first meeting with President Medvedev at a summit in Japan. Our Newsnight piece made world news but not in the way I had anticipated.
Medvedev’s adviser Sergei Prikhodko briefed the press in Japan that our report showed ‘not everyone in the UK has a constructive approach’, and that its timing was ‘not coincidental’. It had been designed to prevent Brown and his president from turning the page on the conflicts of the past, for example over Litvinenko. Downing Street told reporters that it had not authorized any briefings to the BBC by the intelligence people. Having had a key meeting in a deserted restaurant, Number 10’s denial hardly came as a great surprise to me.
The initial impetus for the story and several of the best quotes had of course come from the MI5 boss’s event at the Mandarin Oriental where there had been close to a hundred people. That had been nearly seven weeks before the Japan summit. It had taken time to get the necessary corroboration, interview Berezovsky and all the rest. While Evans, and the official who subsequently briefed me, had been clear that they did not think the coming of Medvedev would change things for the better, the idea that they thought they could sabotage the summit seemed tenuous at best.
The roasting I got from Whitehall people immediately before and after our transmission indeed rather suggested that our timing was almost as horrifying to them as it was to Mr Prikhodko. Our timetable had, until the actual day of transmission, been entirely coincidental. There were other personal repercussions, including that I was never invited to another Atlantic Partnership power breakfast, and formal briefings from the intelligence services, dwindling during those years in any case, effectively came to an end for me.
The issue of how far Russia was to be trusted, let alone embraced for every pound UK PLC could make, was the subject of intense disagreement within Whitehall. Whatever the ambiguity that British leaders had been using in their pronouncements about the Litvinenko affair, people in the Security Service, and MI6 for that matter, were quite sure that these were FSB assassination plots.
As for Berezovsky, he had alleged a couple of previous murder attempts and all manner of threats from the Russian government. Although he did tone down his anti-Kremlin campaigning he became fatalistic about his life and how it might end. Asked by another journalist about his security detail, the businessman replied with mordant wit, ‘He’s not a bodyguard, he’s a witness.’