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Assassins: The KGB's Poison Factory 10 Years On
Assassins: The KGB's Poison Factory 10 Years On
Assassins: The KGB's Poison Factory 10 Years On
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Assassins: The KGB's Poison Factory 10 Years On

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A look at the events surrounding the 2006 poisoning of a former Russian security officer in Great Britain.

In November, 1998, Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel of the Russian security service or FSB, along with several former colleagues, publicly stated that their superiors had instigated an assassination attempt on a Russian tycoon and oligarch. Following his subsequent arrest and failed trials, Litvinenko fled to London where, having been granted asylum, he worked as a journalist and writer, as well as acting as a consultant for the British intelligence services.

Eight years later, Litvinenko’s past caught up with him when he was assassinated in London. On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko was suddenly taken ill and hospitalized. He passed away twenty-two days later. Significant amounts of a rare, highly toxic element were subsequently found in his body. Before his death, Litvinenko had said, “You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr. Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life.”

Author Boris Volodarsky, who was consulted by the Metropolitan Police during the investigation and remains in close contact with Litvinenko’s widow, details the events surrounding Litvinenko’s murder. Volodarsky updates the story, referring to the findings of the official British inquiry, on the release of which Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Putin for presiding over “state sponsored murder.”

The author proves that the Litvinenko’s poisoning is just one of many. Some of these assassinations or attempted assassinations are already known; others are revealed by him for the first time.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 19, 2020
ISBN9781526733931
Assassins: The KGB's Poison Factory 10 Years On
Author

Boris Volodarsky

Boris Volodarsky is a former captain of the GRU Spetsnaz, a member of the World Association of International Studies and co-editor of the International Personal Files intelligence magazine. He is the author of Nikolai Khokhlov: Self-Esteem with a Halo and The Orlov File: The Greatest KGB Deception of All Time. He is an advisor to the film director Michael Mann.

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    Book preview

    Assassins - Boris Volodarsky

    Assassins

    Our morality is completely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.

    Lenin

    Nothing in the underworld of the intelligence past can be known with complete assurance or certainty.

    Angus S. C. Mitchell

    Assassins

    The KGB’s Poison Factory Ten Years On

    Boris Volodarsky

    An imprint of

    Pen & Sword Books Ltd

    Yorkshire – Philadelphia

    First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

    Frontline Books

    An imprint of

    Pen & Sword Books Ltd

    Yorkshire – Philadelphia

    Copyright © Boris Volodarsky 2019

    ISBN 978 1 52673 392 4

    eISBN 978 152673 393 1

    Mobi ISBN 978 15267 3394 8

    The right of Boris Volodarsky to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

    A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

    Pen & Sword Books Limited incorporates the imprints of Atlas, Archaeology, Aviation, Discovery, Family History, Fiction, History, Maritime, Military, Military Classics, Politics, Select, Transport, True Crime, Air World, Frontline Publishing, Leo Cooper, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing, The Praetorian Press, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe Transport, Wharncliffe True Crime and White Owl.

    For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

    PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

    47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

    E-mail: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk

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    Or

    PEN AND SWORD BOOKS

    1950 Lawrence Rd, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

    E-mail: Uspen-and-sword@casematepublishers.com

    Website: www.penandswordbooks.com

    For Valentina and Dennis, without whose support this would have been so much harder, if at all possible.

    Contents

    Acknowledgements

    Preface

    Chapter 1 Prologue

    Chapter 2 The Last Farewell

    Chapter 3 Kamera Never Dreams

    Chapter 4 A Murder in Coyoacán

    Chapter 5 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? No, Another Circus

    Chapter 6 Assassin Turned Professor

    Chapter 7 From Russia with a Poison Gun

    Chapter 8 Road to Donbass

    Chapter 9 Of Mice and Moles

    Chapter 10 The Oligarch

    Chapter 11 A Venomous Agent

    Chapter 12 Epilogue: From the one-party terrorist state to the Putin presidency: We’ll wipe them out in the shithouse

    Appendix I: Alexander Perepilichny: An Unexplained Death

    Appendix II: Special Tasks: Assassination Files

    Abbreviations and Acronyms

    Bibliography

    Acknowledgements

    Iam indebted to many people who helped in this project. I thank all of them, but first of all, I thank my wife, Valentina. She was, as always, the first reader and gave daily encouragement as well as valuable ideas and comments. Without her and our son’s understanding and support the task would have been so much more difficult.

    My first British publisher, Frontline Books, an imprint of Pen & Sword, entrusted me with this project ten years ago and were patient and understanding as it progressed resulting in The KGB’s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko, which came out in 2009. Shortly following this and the US edition, other international publishers succumbed to the wiles of Paula Hurst and published the book in several other countries and languages. Martin Mace, a military historian and author, appointed the publisher for Frontline Books in September 2014, was very enthusiastic about bringing out the present work, a sequel to the previous book and, in fact, its second volume. Thank you very much, Martin. I also want to put on record my thanks to Lisa Hooson for her understanding and much-needed help. Thank you, Lisa, and many thanks to Tara Moran, Pen & Sword’s marketing executive. Finally, I must thank Kate Baker for her painstaking and insightful reading and editing of the text. I have benefited a lot from her perceptive comments.

    While working on The Poison Factory, I met the former chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), Sir Richard Dearlove, and his American colleague, James Pavitt, former Deputy Director of Operations (DDO) of the CIA, with both of whom at different times and in different parts of Europe I had a chance to discuss several problems relating to the subject matter of this book and whose opinions were important for the better understanding of many processes behind the scenes.

    On Christmas Eve 2013, my very good old friend Tennent H. ‘Pete’ Bagley, one of the most respected experts on Soviet espionage, sent me his last book, Spymaster, containing ‘some stories from places and times we’ve known’, as Pete wrote in his inscription. After only a few weeks, his daughter called me to say that Pete had passed away. Former deputy chief of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division, Pete, as all his friends knew him, had spent a lot of time and effort reading and correcting my texts and advising on the most important and crucial issues of intelligence history. My gratitude to him is profound, while any errors that remain are exclusively my fault.

    Two people very close to Alexander ‘Sasha’ Litvinenko later taking an active part in the police investigation following his death, and in the inquestcome-public inquiry proceedings – his wife Marina and his associate Alex Goldfarb – devoted considerable time discussing with me various aspects of the Litvinenko case. Despite several disagreements, I am grateful to both of them for their time and effort. I am also very grateful to Professor John Harrison of Oxford Brookes University and Public Health England for sending me his research paper (written together with his colleagues) on the polonium-210 (²¹⁰Po) poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, which became a basic scientific document for the public inquiry on the case.

    Two American journalists and authors, Steve LeVine and Pete Earley, also provided some help before and after The Poison Factory was published. After our rendezvous in London, Steve returned to Washington and wrote his account of meetings with Soviet defectors Nikolai Khokhlov and Oleg Gordievsky – an excellent book that I was happy to use as one of the important and reliable sources for my own narrative that follows. Pete, in his turn, also published two important books (mentioned in the bibliography) and arranged contact with Sergey Tretyakov, another KGB officer who defected to the United States in 2000. Unfortunately, soon after I started communicating with Pete, Tretyakov unexpectedly died aged 54. There’s still a mystery surrounding his strange demise although in a letter to me in February 2018, Pete categorically denied any foul play.

    A prominent Italian politician, journalist and author, Paolo Guzzanti, former president of the Mitrokhin Commission of the Italian Parliament, helped in unlocking many doors to allow a better understanding of the Italian part of the Litvinenko story and the people involved. Paolo remains a good friend to this day. He published his own version of events called Il mio agente Sasha (2009) claiming that Litvinenko was killed because he had worked for the Mitrokhin Commission, which was, without doubt, one of the reasons.

    Several librarians, archivists and filmmakers also rendered considerable assistance during my research. The National Archives in Kew, Richmond, England, became an invaluable source of information for this and other research projects as well as the CIA, FBI and NSA FOIA files, the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv in Koblenz), the Office of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, and the newly opened archives of the Ukrainian Security Service, SBU. Max Fisher of Windfall Films, London, kindly gave me video material covering the Markov case in its modern perspective. I also used the latest German documentary directed by Klaus Dexel Silenced: Georgi Markov and the Umbrella Murder (2012), which led me to Markov’s suspected assassin. All in all, I have used over two dozen documentaries that helped a lot, and myself took part in a few of them, but the most revealing was the film by Andrei Nekrasov called The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes (2016).

    I must make particular mention of two historians, both from the former Soviet Union: Dr Nikita Petrov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of the Scientific and Educational Center of the Society ‘Memorial’, and Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, who have helped find important archival documents and references pertinent to this work. In the course of preparing a chapter on Ukraine, I have also had the good fortune to rely on the advice of Dr Taras Kuzio, a British academic and expert on Ukrainian political and economic affairs at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Toronto. I have benefited too from the very helpful comments of Father Peter Baulk, Archpriest and former Deputy Rector of the Cathedral of the Dormition, Russian Orthodox Church in Chiswick, London, who has contributed to both the first and second volumes.

    Throughout the writing of this book, as with my other works in the past, I have had the good fortune of being able to discuss various matters with my teacher at the London School of Economics Professor Paul Preston – the world’s foremost historian of twentieth-century Spain. I am deeply grateful to him for his friendship and for sharing with me his encyclopaedic knowledge. In June I was happy to learn that Paul had been knighted in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours. I must also thank Christopher Andrew, the former Official Historian of the British Security Service MI5 and convenor of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, and Ángel Viñas, both eminent academics and experts.

    My travails were made especially rewarding thanks to the efforts and unstinting assistance of these men and women. Without them, I could not have done it while, as always, my family have been and remain my greatest inspiration.

    Boris B. Volodarsky,

    London-Vienna, 2019

    Preface

    Regarding the Fourth World War (after the Third, Cold War, was over and the ‘hot peace’ was established), I agree it would have been a rather grave mistake. No, not mine. But, thank God, it hasn’t happened yet and what a consolation to know it is not going to be my fault should it ever occur.

    In my life, I only took part in three major coups worth mentioning here. One was to meet and marry a girl who after four decades is still my wife, and I am more than happy about it. We have raised a fine son while so far enjoying robust good health, for which I am deeply grateful though I not know exactly to whom: fate, fortune, parents or deity.

    As you have probably realised, I’ve just finished reading The Outsider by Frederick Forsyth and thought it was his last one. But no, here the best-selling novelist famous for his realistic spy stories comes again with The Fox – a raceagainst-time thriller, as his marketing people advertise it. And, ironically, it is about a principally new weapon – a human brain. An interesting coincidence. But I am getting ahead of myself.

    The second coup was to become a student of the London School of Economics at the age of 50. Not that it is something extraordinary, but there I met Paul Preston, which was yet another piece of good fortune. My dictionary explains ‘fortune’ as chance or luck and the way it affects your life. One could not dream of a better teacher. Paul – or I should say Sir Paul because Professor Preston was been knighted in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours – is a widely celebrated historian and academic whose books are translated into several world languages and have a significant impact on many people including professional historians and statesmen. I am extremely grateful and proud to be his pupil and even to be mentioned in the acknowledgements to his 2012 masterpiece The Spanish Holocaust, although my contribution to Paul’s great work was very minimal.

    The third coup was to get acquainted with Oleg Gordievsky, a double agent who had worked for British intelligence for over a decade and who was exfiltrated from Russia by MI6 in a brilliant rescue operation in 1985. We had been corresponding for many years, but I only met Oleg in person in 2005, when I visited him in his Surrey home. Interesting people are always great to talk to and Gordievsky, with his life story, seemed very interesting. Soon after, I moved into a small hotel nearby, largely because he needed my help: a young man who we both knew by the name of Sasha Litvinenko had just been poisoned, and the full-scale investigation was still unfolding. SIS, the overseas intelligence organisation and Gordievsky’s minders, were only watching and assessing while MI5, the security service who guarded him in London when he was spying in the Soviet Embassy, was in full control of the Litvinenko investigation carried out by SO15, the Counter Terrorism Command within London’s Metropolitan Police Service. I was on the way to London when Sasha died in terrible torment in University College of London Hospital (UCLH). The world’s media had gone crazy trying to learn any tiny detail that could be reported on the front pages or in the prime-time news, so Oleg was in great demand.

    The hotel was freshly refurbished and positioned on the lake near his house, and although I was quite busy travelling often to London, having been contracted by BBC’s Panorama programme, we met every evening to discuss the situation and exchange the news. One day, Oleg announced that the SO15 detectives would be coming to talk to us and, indeed, in the afternoon two pleasant-looking young officers, who introduced themselves as Michael Hoban and Lisa Harman, quite certainly their operational aliases, arrived at his house.

    As they were mostly interested in the operational methods of the KGB, Oleg spoke first. When he finished, I took his place. We told them that without doubt Sasha’s death was the result of a well-planned joint clandestine operation of Russian intelligence services and this only became known because polonium-210 was, quite by chance, found in Sasha’s body. It was not too different from the operation against Georgi Markov almost 30 years earlier. At the time, I did not know that Francesco Gullino, a Bulgarian agent strongly suspected of murdering Markov, had moved to Austria and was residing in a place not far from where my family lived. After our interview, Michael and Lisa gave me their mobile numbers and I continued to meet them from time to time while the investigation continued.

    During that year, I got to know plenty of very interesting, sometimes quite extraordinary people like Cambridge Professor Christopher Andrew – the world’s leading authority on intelligence history. I also met Boris Berezovsky, an academic and a Russian business tycoon who was by then a political exile and a declared Enemy No. 1 of the Kremlin, duplicating the fate of Trotsky. Berezovsky, a kind and clever man and a shrewd politician, died in the English home of his former wife under extremely suspicious circumstances so that even the inquest coroner recorded an open verdict. Ahmed Zakayev, another political exile in London and Sasha’s friend, who a year later became prime minister of the unrecognised Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, was also one of those who came my way that year, as well as Marina Litvinenko and Paolo Guzzanti.

    Paolo, an Italian journalist and politician, then a senator and former president of the Mitrokhin Commission of the Italian Parliament, became a very good friend for many years. His daughter, Sabina Guzzanti, a tremendously popular Italian actress and satirist, who I also met, became known in the British media as ‘the scourge of Berlusconi’, thanks to her film Viva Zapatero!, which was a protest against the lack of political freedoms in Italy under Berlusconi (the former Italian prime minister and a friend of Putin). Shortly before leaving for London, I met Dmitry Peskov, President Putin’s press secretary and deputy chief of staff, at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. Peskov has served as Putin’s spokesperson since April 2000, and certainly played a very big role in the propaganda campaign covering Russian assassinations that have taken place under the presidentship of his boss.

    I was also very lucky to meet two lords. The first was Nicolas Rea, a British doctor and politician who achieved his medical diplomas at UCLH and was one of the ninety elected hereditary peers to remain in the House of Lords after the House of Lords Act of 1999. When there, he sits on the Labour benches. Another was Hugh Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, a prominent English historian, writer and life peer. He was born in Windsor, studied at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne in Paris, and became world famous for his 1961 book The Spanish Civil War, reissued so many times that half a century after its first publication he signed for me its latest edition. Hugh Thomas, a very generous and nice man and a good friend, died in May 2017. His last work was a short introduction to my book Between Stalin and Franco, which is currently being prepared for publication.

    Gordievsky was not the only Soviet defector that I knew. Forsyth, who visited him while working on Icon (1996), noted in one of his books that quite a few defectors changed sides for genuine ‘conscience’ reasons, but most spies who turn on their own country ‘do so because they share a quite monstrous vanity, a conviction that they are truly important in the scheme of things’.

    Nikolai Khokhlov, a Soviet assassin who defected to the West and later became a professor of psychology at the California State University, was one of the real victims of a sophisticated Russian poisoning plot. He was also one of the first Western scientists who established without doubt that the Soviets had long been working on a super-weapon. Khokhlov, like a number of researchers in secret laboratories before and after him, came to the conclusion that the most dangerous weapon in the world may be not a nuclear or hydrogen bomb, or a clever missile, and not even a computer virus that can cause data loss or system crash. No, murder by malware is child’s play for teenagers like Luke Jennings, ‘The Fox’ in Forsyth’s new book.

    ‘The development of weaponry based on new physics principles: directenergy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, etc., is part of the state arms procurement program for 2011–2020,’ the Russian defence minister reported to President Putin in March 2012. For the layman, uninformed of secret military research, this sounds like science fiction. But it is not fiction.

    Chapter 1

    Prologue

    Classified cables sent to the White House in Washington, DC were leaked to the media. The documents revealed that Russian undercover agents hounded staff working at the British Embassy in Moscow and that Russian espionage activities continued to exist in Britain – surprise, surprise – following the fatal poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006.

    One of the cables stated that, according to the British diplomats, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) had good reasons to refuse many Russian visa requests. HMG officials, it said, see a real ‘intelligence threat’ from Russia and regret a ‘missed opportunity in the late 1990s and early 2000s to assess these intelligence threats’. Michael Davenport MBE, now British ambassador to Kuwait and then the FCO’s head of the Russia, South Caucasus and Central Asia Directorate, reportedly admitted that there was a divide within the government over how to deal with Russia. There still is.

    In spite of their good, solid education and considerable life experience, the diplomats are usually rather naïve. In the Russian capital, behind the glittering facades of the Kremlin, whose magnificent imperial halls are now restored and used for state and diplomatic receptions, there is a heavily guarded three-storey building known as the Senate Palace. Inside, is the dark, wood-panelled, very covert working office of the President of Russia.

    During his rule in the Kremlin, Stalin was known as the Master of the House and the communist regime under his leadership was responsible for millions of victims both inside and outside the country, well exceeding those of Hitler and Pol Pot. It seems as though a kind of a ‘Kill List’ has been on the agenda of every Russian ruler, be it Ivan ‘the Terrible’, Peter ‘the Great’ or Nikita Khrushchev, ‘the Corn Man’. Since Lenin moved to the Kremlin in 1918, the list has been permanently expanding, almost never shrinking. Like a universe. Naïve Western politicians and diplomats believe that with the end of Stalin’s reign it was all over, that 25 or 30 million people, for whose deaths this ‘effective manager’ was responsible, is a big enough figure to stop killing. This is OLDTHINK. Ideas inspired by events or memories of times prior to Putin’s Revolution. In short, PR. The second longest-serving master of the house recently declared that he simply does not need the rest of the world without Russia. In other words, in the language that he well understands – Russland über alles. For those who still remember the original text – uber alles in der Welt. The new Song of the Russians! And, as usual in the West, there is still a divide on how to deal with it.

    When I was writing The KGB’s Poison Factory a decade ago, it was more or less clear – Alexander ‘Sasha’ Litvinenko was murdered in London by a nanonuclear device, a complex compound based on radioactive polonium-210, and the culprit was Russia. The British public inquiry named the Russian president as ‘probably’ responsible for ordering this murder and the assassins sent by the Kremlin as probably those who carried out the killing. However, ‘The odds of getting someone to face trial at the Old Bailey are somewhere between slim and none,’ concluded a senior police source, and that was it.

    In the first volume, which has the subtitle From Lenin to Litvinenko, I wanted to show the Litvinenko operation in every detail, as I had personally investigated it in London, starting with my article in The Wall Street Journal published one day before Sasha died at University College Hospital. In the article, I suggested it was a radioactive substance that was killing him, and, indeed, traces of polonium-210 were subsequently found in Sasha’s body. My reconstruction of the Litvinenko operation – how I understood it as a former Soviet special operations officer and at the same time a British intelligence historian and academic – was based on similar cases of poisonings that happened during more than 70 years of Bolshevik rule. In the book, I demonstrate that the Litvinenko poisoning is just one of many similar murders and that practically all of them have been carried out according to more or less the same pattern. In other words, by the book. Some of the cases that I showed were already known. Others were revealed for the first time.

    Before his death, Litvinenko had said: ‘You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life.’ I am pretty convinced this is going to happen one day. But there’s still a long way to go. And the Kremlin kill list, as the world has seen, exists and expands as before. In this second volume, Assassins, I give a new fresh catalogue of the victims, many of whom were murdered after Litvinenko. Among them are 96 people on board Polish Air Force One¹, including President Lech Kaczyński; then in Chechnya Natalia Estemirova; in England Alexander Perepilichny and Boris Berezovsky; in Moscow Boris Nemtsov; in Kiev Pavel Sheremet, Denis Voronenkov and Maxim Shapoval; and in March 2018, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, Wiltshire. This is only a ‘short list’.

    I remember the story told by a Russian official about Yevgeny Murov and Victor Zolotov, one head of the Federal Protective Service and another of the most secret and powerful Presidential Security Service of Russia – both especially close to Putin. According to the source, Murov and Zolotov ‘decided to make a list of politicians and other influential Moscovites whom they would need to assassinate to give Putin unchecked power. After the two men finished their list, Zolotov announced, There are too many. It’s too many to kill – even for us.² Zolotov, who figures prominently in my Poison Factory book, had headed the Presidential Security Service (SBP) for 13 years from the day when Putin first came to power. Zolotov was already his bodyguard back in St Petersburg where the future Russian president was a bureaucrat at the mayor’s office. Since that time, Zolotov has progressed from colonel to colonel general and recently to General of the Army, member of the Security Council of Russia, and ‘Director’ or commander-in-chief of the Russian National Guard, the elite special forces, which is more than 340,000 personnel-strong and directly subordinated to Putin.

    The name of the high Russian official who told this story about the two highest-ranking Federal Protection Service (FSO) officers and described their meeting in New York to prepare Putin’s visit is Sergei Tretyakov. Tretyakov, a full colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and deputy head of station under the diplomatic cover of First Secretary of the Russian UN Mission in New York, spied for the CIA and FBI. He defected in October 2000. Ten years after changing sides, Tretyakov died at his home aged only 53.

    In the meantime, most of the British and American media have an ongoing problem with the various bodies of the Russian intelligence community, typified, as a master of the genre has put it, by a seeming inability to work out which is which.

    There are five main services. The least known is, ironically, the biggest. This is the National Guard, or Rosgvardiya, which reports directly to Vladimir Putin. The National Guard is separated from the Russian Armed Forces. It was established in 2016 by an executive order signed by the president. Rosgvardiya consolidated all Special Forces of Russia into one Service. This is at the same time Putin’s personal army and Praetorian Guard, and they have even more powers than the Federal Security Service (FSB).

    The FSB is often – even inside Russia – regarded as the direct successor of the old and much-feared Soviet KGB, which is not right. It is true the FSB headquarters occupy several imposing buildings on Lubyanka Square (until 1990 better known as Dzerzhinsky Square) previously belonging to the KGB, but the similarities almost end here.

    The FSB is the principal security agency of the country. With regards to the inheritance of structures, contrary to what is stated in Wikipedia, this service is the main successor of only the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB. It is Russia’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency and like MI5 in the UK, or the FBI in the USA, is part of the country’s secret services machinery. Alongside the FSB, Russian special services also include the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU), the Federal Protection Service (FSO) and the most secretive Presidential Security Service (SBP).

    The FSB is directed to protect Russian economic interests, to conduct counter-terrorism and espionage activities within the territory of the Russian Federation and carry out serious crime investigations. For some time, it also incorporated the Border Service and the major part of the FAPSI or Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information as well as Drugs Control. The Service has regional offices across the country and is headed by a director who reports to the president. The current director (since 2008) is General of the Army Alexander Bortnikov, and the current President of Russia served as the FSB Director for one year from July 1998 to August 1999. What is said here of the inheritance of structures, traditions and personnel is also true with regard to the inheritance of the specific KGB mentality. The majority of FSB officers are the same as, and in most cases even much worse than, the old KGB secret police. Back in the USSR, I dealt several times with KGB staffers of different ranks and positions, and their major flaws were usually despicable careerism, corruption, excessive womanising and drinking. Now, I’ve heard, they are also very greedy for money. And money is king in modern Russia. In England, it is different.

    There is no equivalent of the Secret Intelligence Service, which is widely regarded as a glamorous agency, not only due to Ian Fleming’s James Bond but also because it employs the crème de la crème of British society and very often members of the nobility. Its chiefs are traditionally knighted and become ‘sirs’, and even rank-and-file officers can sometimes be granted titles of peers of the realm, not to mention that automatically they are all members of HM Foreign Service.

    In Russia, the one regarded as the genuinely elite foreign intelligence agency is the GRU. It is also much bigger than the SVR, its ‘civil’ intelligence ‘neighbour’. In reality, SVR officers only look and behave like civil servants, while all intelligence personnel are commissioned officers and have military ranks. The ‘illegals’, however, can be civilians and even foreigners.

    Unlike the FSB, so often mentioned in the reports of Western correspondents, the SVR is the overseas intelligence organisation. The task of SVR officers is foreign information gathering and its presence is truly worldwide. I remember one of the KGB or SVR chiefs saying that there is no place in the world where there is not at least one KGB/SVR officer or agent. Indeed, SVR (and, for that matter, also GRU) stations or rezidenturas (residencies) are in all Russian diplomatic missions operating from the so-called ‘legal positions’. That means they are ‘covered’ by their official status of diplomats, trade representatives, journalists, bankers or airline/ railway/shipping company officers that are seconded to the embassy. In the cities like Vienna, Geneva or New York, Russian intelligence officers under diplomatic and non-diplomatic cover are placed in every possible slot of the UN or other international organisation. Their life is often miserable, but any position abroad is always better and by far more prestigious than in Russia. Today, many of those who have managed to make any decent money at home have moved their families to Europe, which is much more convenient than America, Canada or Australia, because the rest of Europe is nearby. Once there was a case when the family of a serving SVR officer settled in America and, after a while, he also moved there. As a result, a network of Russian spies was apprehended by the FBI.

    Large, diverse and complex Russian communities in Britain, Germany or Israel provide a good natural cover for the agents. SVR and GRU illegals may be of two types – those who operate using a foreign identity, name and biography (known as a ‘legend’) different to their own, or those who use their own name and a biography that is ‘tailored’ for the assignment. That means that an illegal can, for example, get married or marry a foreign subject in order to obtain a new legal name and passport, or acquire a profession useful for the job. An excellent example of this kind of undercover operation is what became known as ‘Illegals Program’, which describes a network of Russian non-official cover agents operating in the USA.

    Since September 2016, the Chief of the SVR, whose official rank is director, has been Sergei Naryshkin, formerly head of the Presidential Administration. The Service is based in Yasenevo, south-west of Moscow. Officers are brought there in the morning by a special bus from the capital and come back home in the evening. The Director resides in Yasenevo.

    The Federal Protection Service (FSO) is similar to the US Secret Service. It is a government agency concerned with close protection, a euphemism for bodyguarding the high and mighty, as well as their residences that officially belong to the state. The Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia also belongs to such VIPs. Traditionally, since the Bolshevik Revolution, all primates of the Russian Orthodox Church and many priests have closely collaborated with Russian secret services. Those rare ones who have not – like Father Pavel Florensky, for example – were arrested, exiled or executed. Although during its long history the Protection Service had many names, among insiders it is still known as devyatka, the good old 9th Department of the KGB. The former head of the Presidential Security Service, General Dmitry Kochnev, now heads the FSO.

    Since Putin became president and brought Victor Zolotov to the Kremlin as his personal bodyguard and the most trusted person of all, the Presidential Security Service (SBP) under him was quickly transformed into a very special agency. It now has roughly two to three thousand personnel and the very best equipment that is available from any supplier. With Zolotov as its CO, the Service can operate anywhere in the world. They even had, perhaps still have, their own intelligence branch, the so-called Psychological Security Department. This brought together the best experts from the SVR, GRU and FSB and could use for its operations any specialists, including officers from the 1st, 2nd and 8th departments of the SVR Directorate S as well as the very shadowy Zaslon (‘Screen’ or ‘Barrier’) unit, which was created within the Service in 1998 to carry out most sensitive operations abroad. Officially, they are not supposed to exist. This was the most dangerous private army. For over a decade they had been known as ‘Men in Black’.

    Of course, nothing of the sort was thinkable when Lenin moved to the Kremlin in 1918. Then, he used talented and ruthless individuals to murder his enemies for him. They were Russian and foreign communists who dreamed about the world revolution. Stalin also used talented individuals alongside sheer fanatics who dreamed and cared about nothing. After Stalin, there were ups and downs but never a stop. When Putin came to power in 2000, the new century began: the time of the assassins.

    ¹ The Polish Defence Minister publicly accused Putin of orchestrating the destruction of Polish Air Force One, see https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimirputin-polish-president-lech-kaczynski-plane-crash-russia-poland-defence-ministerantoni-a8111831.html

    ² See Pete Earley, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007), 298–9.

    Chapter 2

    The Last Farewell

    Oleg, his life companion Maureen and I got out of the cab at the designated place on Swain’s Lane by the entrance to Highgate Cemetery West, which was surrounded by hundreds of television cameras and photographers who were being kept at a distance by the police. We moved forward, crossed the courtyard and were greeted by a solemn and rather small group of mourners gathered under the roof of the retaining wall, anticipating rain. I thought, most people become celebrities because of their extraordinary lives. Sasha Litvinenko became a celebrity because of his extraordinary death.

    The group included: Berezovsky and Zakayev, both of whom I met in person, rather than in the news, for the first time; Alex Goldfarb who, together with Litvinenko, came to see me at the Connaught a year earlier to discuss a business project; Marina Litvinenko (Sasha’s widow); Boris’s gorgeous girlfriend Elena Gorbunova, mother of his two children; Walter and Maxim Litvinenko, Sasha’s father and his younger half-brother, who had just arrived from Italy; and as Andrei Nekrasov, a good-looking film producer, who I immediately liked and who would soon become famous for his documentaries about his friend’s life and death. I did not notice then that Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s, was also there. Like Andrei Illarionov, Putin’s former economic policy adviser, Bukovsky is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, a public policy research organisation and a think tank dedicated, according to its website, to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace. It turned out he was there with Pavel Stroilov, who introduced himself as Bukovsky’s personal aide, and Gerard Batten, then a UKIP member of the European Parliament. They were in the company of Litvinenko’s first wife and her two children. Later I learned that there were also two Norwegians – Maria Fuglevaag Warsinski, a documentary filmmaker from Oslo, and Ivar Amundsen, a Norwegian investment banker and businessman also serving as the Honorary Consul of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in his country and Director of the Chechnya Peace Forum in London.

    Not surprisingly, given the occasion and the ill-assorted group of people gathered on that tragic day at the cemetery, a political discussion broke out and was only interrupted by a signal that the burial was about to start. It was already raining heavily when we entered a muddy road to accompany Sasha Litvinenko to his final destination. But the real storm would begin later.

    When we all gathered around the grave, Walter Litvinenko said in barely audible Russian: ‘Sasha was killed for telling the truth by those who are afraid of what he had to say.’ These words were somehow recorded by The Telegraph correspondent, reproduced in his report from the funeral and would be used by the Russian propaganda machine a decade later.

    Sasha Litvinenko was laid to rest among the Victorian ivy-clad monuments near the poet Christina Rossetti, scientist Michael Faraday and the graves of Mary Anne Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, and at the opposite, eastern side, Karl Marx. After it was all over, we were all given small white security passes and transported to Lauderdale House in Highgate, where an elabroate memorial service had been arranged.

    As soon as the choir finished the first song (There is a green hill far away by Pitts), Boris Berezovsky made the opening address. I remember he was very articulate and an excellent speaker. Boris was aware of his authority and strength, especially in this company and situation. Bukovsky, Zakayev, Amundsen, Goldfarb, and Sasha’s good friend David Kudykov all spoke, but none as well or with as much feeling and emotion as Berezovsky.

    After the ceremony, we were seated in waiting buses and taken to the Italian restaurant Santini on Ebury Street in Belgravia, where dinner was served, and everyone remembered Sasha. Though it was both the wrong place and the wrong time, I used the opportunity to speak to Boris and Marina and got their agreement to be interviewed for the BBC programme. I also managed to discuss some details with Kudykov, who appeared to be very garrulous and who immediately gave me his business card with private numbers. Later, Lord Rea appeared at the party and apologised that he had not been able to attend the funeral. We all ate, drank and talked a lot, and I had a strange feeling that this evening symbolised the beginning rather than the end of something. I could not imagine how right I was.

    In late October 2005, Andrei Lugovoy, a former major in the devyatka, 9th KGB Department (later to become the Federal Protection Service, headed by Murov and Zolotov), made a telephone call to one of Sasha’s mobile phones suggesting a meeting. Lugovoy knew Litvinenko because they had both worked and moonlighted for Berezovsky when the tycoon lived in Moscow.

    Like Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Trotsky), Boris Abramovich Berezovsky (Elenin) had not always been a political exile and critic of the regime. In the 1990s, he was one of the richest and quite certainly the most influential man in the country, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, friend and adviser of Yeltsin’s younger daughter Tatyana and her husband Valentin Yumashev, and a prominent member of the president’s inner circle. Besides, Berezovsky controlled such important assets as LogoVaz, Russia’s leading car dealership; the national airline Aeroflot; and the Siberian oil company Sibneft. He also had a 49 per cent stake in the main television channel ORT (now Channel One). In 1997, three years before he had to leave Russia, Forbes estimated Berezovsky’s wealth at roughly 3 billion US dollars.

    Litvinenko picked up the phone and was happy to hear a familiar voice from Russia. He was well aware that Lugovoy used to serve as head of the ORT security detail and was detained in connection with the alleged escape attempt of Nikolai Glushkov, who headed the management team that Berezovsky had placed at the helm of Aeroflot hoping to privatise it eventually. In February 1996, Glushkov, deputy general manager of the company, discovered that all heads of the Aeroflot offices abroad were either GRU or SVR, two Russian foreign intelligence agencies. Besides, about 30 per cent of the whole staff were somehow connected to secret services. In December 2000, Glushkov was arrested on trumped-up charges of siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars of Aeroflot money through Berezovsky’s company Andava, registered in Lausanne, Switzerland. (When I went to Lausanne, sometime before those events, my friend, the general manager of the prestigious Lausanne Palace hotel, proudly showed me a suite on the first floor that used to be Berezovsky’s permanent residence when he came to the town.)

    In April 2001, Nikolai Glushkov, officially in custody, was hospitalised for a minor treatment. One evening, when he was, as usual, leaving the hospital wearing his gown and slippers to spend the night at home, he was arrested by the FSB and charged with attempted escape from custody. Berezovsky was in France when word came from the Kremlin that the price of Glushkov’s freedom would be 49 per cent of Boris’s ownership of ORT. He duly sold his shares at the price offered by the Kremlin (Roman Abramovich was dispatched as the negotiator), but Glushkov remained under arrest.

    In March 2004, after three years in jail, Glushkov was brought to trial, cleared of charges of fraud (but found guilty of attempted escape from custody) and released from Lefortovo. Lugovoy was convicted of allegedly assisting him to escape and sentenced to a prison term of fourteen months, but was released because they said he had already spent this time in detention awaiting trial. After his release, Lugovoy went to London to see Berezovsky. The formal pretext for the trip was a football match between the Russian Army Central Sports Club (TsSKA) and Chelsea on 20 October. During that visit, Lugovoy also met Litvinenko in London for the first time.

    Back in Moscow, Lugovoy found himself a modest job in the private company Lentus LLP, which still exists, specialising in the production and installation of acrylic coatings for tennis courts. Very soon, however, he moved to the now-bankrupt Moscow commercial

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