A web of intrigue and dirty tricks, with British intelligence at the heart of it
In a private room of a London hospital, the spy who knew too much was slowly dying. The once fine features of Alexander Litvinenko were pale and drawn. Barely a month earlier he had been a fit man who often ran five miles a day; now, unable even to eat, he was being kept alive by the intravenous drip in his arm.
His hair had fallen out. He had lost two stone. He was unrecognisable as a former lieutenant colonel of the FSB, the Russian secret service, who had fled to London after making an enemy of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
Now his immune system was shot to pieces, his white blood cells destroyed. His vital organs, including his liver and kidneys, were beginning to fail. He was showing all the signs of being poisoned by a radioactive substance.
Next to the bed his wife Marina, an attractive blonde of 44, sat trying to hold back her tears. Visitors had to wear plastic gloves and other paraphernalia to prevent infection.
Inside the racked body of Litvinenko bitterness burnt alongside the poison. He had not yet given up his fight. In an interview with The Sunday Times before this newspaper broke the story last weekend, he claimed he was the victim of a plot by his enemies in Russia.
"There is a special unit within the FSB on poisoning and developing poisons," he said, his voice faltering. "I know they are using poisons in Chechnya. The service are putting special emphasis on this."
He paused, reached for a plastic bowl on his lap and vomited. When he had recovered he continued: "Everything that is happening is fitting very neatly a particular logical chain. First, the Russian parliament passes a law in the middle of this year which allows the government, allows the president, to pursue and attack 'extremists' all over the world. So now it's legal.
"Then a few days later they enacted another [law] which defines 'extremist'. Anybody who is critical of the government falls under these broad definitions."
Few had been more vitriolic and outrageous in their criticism of Putin and the Kremlin than Litvinenko.
"This unties the hands of the secret service because nobody can now say it's illegal under Russian law."
He vomited again and a nurse came into the room. Litvinenko tried to wave her away, but she told him it was time for his next dose of antibiotics and he quietly complied. Then he continued.
"I know what's happening within the [Russian spy] service. Once a law like this is enacted the services immediately start planning activity, frantic activity, setting up new units that would implement the new initiative. The services consider it as an order actually.
"I know that the Russian intelligence are monitoring me. I know that I am an active case. I know the officer in the Russian [embassy] station here who is in charge of monitoring me. I know he is part of the spy trade." He lay back, exhausted.
Those spies, he implied, had laid a trap and led him into it. On November 1, the sixth anniversary of his escape from Russia, he had gone to two meetings, one with a former FSB agent and another with an Italian investigator who feared for his life — and for Litvinenko's.
Later that night he began to feel unwell. By November 3 he was in hospital, suffering from persistent vomiting and dehydration. By November 15 his condition was critical, and baffled doctors were testing him with geiger counters for radiation poisoning.
In the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale, the fictional British spy has poison slipped into his drink. He staggers to his Aston Martin and, thanks to futuristic Q-style gadgetry, boffins back at base are able to diagnose the lethal substance. The antidote is at hand.
The real world of espionage is much murkier. Last week, as Litvinenko's strength was slipping away, he told a friend: "The bastards got me, but they won't get everyone". He died on Thursday evening. He was 43.
On Friday experts from the Health Protection Agency revealed that high levels of radiation — from a substance known as polonium210 — had been found in his urine. He had, they said, either eaten or inhaled the polonium, or absorbed it through a wound.
The radioactive isotope is rare and vastly more toxic than cyanide. But it is undetectable in the body with a geiger counter. Who could have obtained it? How had it come to enter Litvinenko's body?
Outside the hospital his father had few doubts who was responsible. "He was killed by a little, tiny nuclear bomb," he said. "It was so small that you could not see it. But the people who killed him have big nuclear bombs and missiles, and those people should not be trusted."
Had Putin, tiring of Litvinenko's attacks, ordered his elimination? Did rogue elements in Russian intelligence take matters into their own hands? As Litvinenko's plight made headlines, lurid rumours surfaced to justify these suspicions, including claims that originate from Litvinenko that a videotape exists of Putin caught in a compromising sexual assignation.
The Kremlin dismissed it all as "nonsense", and "so silly and unbelievable" that it was "not worthy of comment".
But the conspiracy theories did not stop. If it wasn't the Kremlin, people whispered, then Litvinenko had been sacrificed by his own allies to discredit Putin.
Others wondered whether he was the victim of a mafia plot. Had he somehow come into contact with smuggled radioactive material? Some even went so far as to speculate that the former spy, consumed by his hatred for Putin, had harmed himself.
Whatever the precise source, this is an espionage drama that centres on power, greed and fear. For the road that led Litvinenko to his death in London begins in the lawless Moscow of the 1990s, when billions of dollars and control of the Kremlin were up for grabs.
It was also a place where friendships often turned into deadly enmities, as Litvinenko and his circle came to discover all too well.
One morning in the summer of 1994 Boris Berezovsky, a Russian mathematician turned entrepreneur, was driving to his Moscow office, a fortified historic mansion known as the Logovaz Club. It was the age of the Wild East: Russia had discovered the joys of capitalism, including gambling, girls and guns. The postcommunist regime was flogging off state assets at knockdown prices and Berezovsky had made a fortune buying up Lada car dealerships. He was also making enemies.
As his Mercedes pulled up outside the Logovaz Club a bomb hidden in a car parked nearby exploded. The blast decapitated his chauffeur, according to Alex Goldfarb, a Russian émigré who knows Berezovsky and Litvinenko well. "Boris survived by a miracle," he says.
The AntiTerrorist Centre of the FSB sent a team to investigate and the man in charge was Litvinenko. Though the investigation went nowhere, Litvinenko and Berezovsky formed a friendship and stayed in touch. The antiterrorist investigator became a useful ally within the FSB for Berezovsky, whose influence ran far beyond business. He and other "oligarchs" had masterminded the 1996 campaign that had reelected Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia. As part of Yeltsin's cabinet, Berezovsky had considerable influence on policy, and in particular he had negotiated a treaty giving a large amount of autonomy to the province of Chechnya.
In the dangerous, swirling pools of Moscow politics, where communist old guard, gangsters, spies and newly minted oligarchs circled like sharks, Berezovsky needed all the eyes he could get.
In 1998, according to Goldfarb, Litvinenko secretly warned Berezovsky that another attempt to kill him was looming. The driving force behind the threat, said Litvinenko, was General Yevgeny Khokholkov, an opponent of Chechen independence who had declared it was time "that we wasted that Kremlin Jew" — Berezovsky, who had negotiated autonomy.
Khokholkov was not a man to be taken lightly. He had blown up one Chechen rebel leader by getting a missile to home in on his satellite phone as he was talking to a Russian MP. They had promoted him to general. Now he was head of an elite division of the FSB called the Directorate of Operations again Criminal Organisations (DOCO), and was using it for his own ends.
Berezovsky got his retaliation in first by arranging a secret meeting between five disillusioned members of DOCO and the deputy chief of staff at the Kremlin. The agents spilt the beans on the directorate's dubious activities and Yeltsin leapt on their report, according to Goldfarb.
"He was excited," says Goldfarb. "This was something he was looking for, a pretext to do a thorough clean-up of the Kontora [the Company, as the FSB was sometimes known]. He ordered a search for a new FSB director."
Goldfarb says that when Berezovsky and others in the Kremlin decided that no one within the FSB could be trusted, they cast their net wider. The man they alighted upon was Putin, a former KGB man who had, it seemed, become a liberal, reformist civil servant, first in St Petersburg and then in the Kremlin.
He had even helped Berezovsky with a business deal. "And what was absolutely surprising for me," Berezovsky later said, "was that he was the first who didn't ask for a bribe."
Installed as the new head of the FSB in July 1998, Putin set about disbanding DOCO and bundled Khokholkov into early retirement. Berezovsky was delighted. It looked like being the start of a profitable friendship, recalled Goldfarb.
"Go see Putin," Berezovsky urged Litvinenko. "See what a great guy we have put in with your help."
But when Litvinenko got to see the new head of the FSB, the quiet, inscrutable Putin did not hit it off with the volatile Litvinenko. He was dismissive of Litvinenko's claims of corruption within the FSB. Instead of rooting out a senior officer accused by Litvinenko of plotting assassinations, Putin promoted him.
In late 1998 Litvinenko and several other officers staged a surreal press conference, during which all but Litvinenko wore ski masks or sunglasses. They accused their bosses of ordering kidnapping, extortion and contract killings.
As Litvinenko became increasingly outspoken, he warned Berezovsky that Putin could not be trusted. He went even further at a meeting last August in a London hotel with Barrie Penrose and John Coates, two investigators and former Sunday Times journalists. Putin's post in the town hall of St Petersburg had been nothing but a "cover", he claimed. "Putin had never left the FSB."
Apart from making a few cosmetic changes at the outset, Litvinenko claimed, Putin had slipped effortlessly back into the old secret intelligence mould.
At first Berezovsky refused to believe that Putin posed a threat. Instead he became one of the prime movers propelling Putin towards the presidency, calculating that it would safeguard his business empire and political influence.
On the evening that Yeltsin resigned and Putin was appointed acting president, Berezovsky celebrated by attending the Bolshoi ballet. He told a Sunday Times journalist who was there: "Russia now has the best president in the world".
The love-in was to last a mere few months. Soon after Putin took control of the Kremlin, he summoned the oligarchs and issued a blunt warning. The days when tycoons could dabble in politics were over, he said. He added a veiled threat that if they didn't steer clear the state might begin investigating how they had obtained their enormous riches.
By the summer of 2000, Berezovsky and Putin were openly at each others throats and the FSB man had the stronger grip. Before the year was out, Berezovsky had sold much of his empire to another rising oligarch, Roman Abramovich. The young tycoon, who now owns Chelsea football club, was rather more amenable to Putin. Indeed, Litvinenko later alleged disparagingly that Abramovich was "Putin's accountant".
Berezovsky fled to Britain. Litvinenko, who had already been arrested, imprisoned and released, also decided to quit while he still could. He smuggled his wife and son to Turkey, then flew to Heathrow, where he claimed asylum.
"Mr Litvinenko and his family are in danger," Goldfarb, who was travelling with them, told immigration officials. "It's a question of life and death."
At the height of the cold war no one doubted the lethal reach of Soviet secret agents. In 1978 hitmen from behind the Iron Curtain tracked the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov to London, tailed him to a bus stop near Waterloo and jabbed the poison ricin into his leg with a special umbrella. Markov died three days later.
As the cold war thawed, the spectre of assassins and spies prowling London receded, at least in western perception. Putin thought differently.
Igor Malashenko, a former Moscow television executive now living in exile in London, recalls an incident when Putin, then being lined up for the presidency, attended a dinner at the country dacha of a banker.
The meal was interrupted when Malashenko's wife received a telephone call from her daughter, who had just flown back to school in Britain. The car scheduled to meet her at Heathrow had not arrived.
"Our daughter is a strange girl," Mrs Malashenko told the guests. "I would have taken a taxi instead of waiting at the airport so long."
Putin cut in. "Your daughter is right and you are wrong," he said. "You could never be sure it's a real taxi."
Malashenko thought the exchange spoke volumes about Putin's mind-set. And in many ways Putin had reason to be suspicious: the community of Russian exiles growing in London was beginning to wage a guerrilla campaign against him.
When Litvinenko pitched up in London, Berezovsky took him under his wing. When Ahmed Zakayev, another dissident and Chechen separatist, arrived, he too fell into Berezovsky's orbit.
Litvinenko and Zakayev ended up living in the same north London street in houses believed to be owned by Berezovsky. The billionaire, who supported antiPutin factions in various places, was a persistent irritation, enough to make Putin's government in Russia seek his extradition, without success.
At the same time Litvinenko gave full rein to his suspicions and obsession. He published a book called The FSB Blows Up Russia, claiming that state agents had planted bombs in apartment blocks and blamed the attacks on Chechens in order to create a pretext for Russian military action against the province.
Litvinenko's circle became a magnet for dissidents and spooky types, and the alleged plots seemed to grow ever more outlandish. In 2003 he told the Sunday Times about a plan by a renegade FSB officer to assassinate Putin.
He had held a rendezvous with the man — known only as Major P — on a bench outside the Wagamama noodle restaurant in Leicester Square. Major P had outlined a plan to ambush Putin on a foreign trip and get Chechen fighters to "pop up somewhere on Putin's route with sniper rifles".
Major P had apparently wanted Berezovsky to finance the assassination. Litvinenko, however, suspected it was all a "sting" set up by the FSB to entrap him and Berezovsky. So he went to the British police, who arrested the major and another Russian; they were later released on condition that they return to Moscow.
Amid this febrile atmosphere, real violence occasionally bubbled to the surface. In September 2004, two weeks after Litvinenko had been talking to MPs about the FSB, someone threw a petrol bomb at his house. He tried to shrug it off as a minor incident.
"It was just a petrol bottle with oil," he told Penrose and Coates. "My son was asleep, my wife woke up and after 30 minutes went to sleep again.
"Then next week I mended my window, no problem. Not serious. Just petrol bottle with oil. Oil bomb."
Simple vandalism? A warning? Or an attempt on his life? No one took much notice, perhaps because that month a much more prominent figure was the victim of a suspected espionage attack.
In the Ukrainian elections Viktor Yushchenko, no friend of communist factions in his country or in Russia, suddenly suffered a mysterious and disfiguring illness.
Yushchenko, who still went on to become president, was apparently poisoned with dioxins. Suspicions have centred on elements of his own country's security service and the FSB.
There were other incidents, too. A leading Russian journalist and critic of the Kremlin died, apparently of poisoning. And a rebel Chechen leader died apparently after receiving a letter laced with poison.
In 2006 Litvinenko's campaign against the Russian leader climbed to new heights. The exiled spy was brooding in London, watching Putin exert an ever tighter grip on his country.
In July he wrote an article for a Chechen website accusing Putin of being a paedophile. In October, at an international journalists' club in London, he gave an impassioned speech making other claims.
That month Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who had been highly critical of the Kremlin, was shot dead in the entrance of her apartment block. Litvinenko told the meeting he knew who was responsible.
"Somebody has asked me directly: 'Who is guilty of Anna's death, who has killed her?' he began. "And I can directly answer you. It is Mr Putin, the president of the Russian Federation."
Litvinenko claimed he and his family had been friends with Politkovskaya for three years — though others say he did not know her well.
"After her book, Putin's Russia, was published she had quite a number of threats which became more frequent, directly from the Kremlin.
"And during one of our last meetings she asked me directly: 'Can they kill me, do you think they can kill me?' And I told her quite frankly: 'Yes they can and I really suggest that you leave the country [Russia]'."
A few days after that meeting, on October 28, Litvinenko received an e-mail from Mario Scaramella, an Italian academic security consultant with whom he had previously exchanged information about suspected Russian agents. Scaramella said that he had important information and wanted to come to London to meet Litvinenko.
They agreed to rendezvous on November 1. It would be the last day that Litvinenko felt well.
What happened next is the subject of dispute and a continuing investigation by Scotland Yard counter-terrorist command.
By some accounts Litvinenko first went to the Millennium hotel in Piccadilly to meet Andrei Lugovoi, a former agent of the KGB (the forerunner of the FSB). Initial reports suggested that Lugovoi and another mysterious Russian named only as Vladimir took tea with Litvinenko. According to a friend: "This Russian man poured the cup of tea and Litvinenko drained it."
Late last week, however, Lugovoi, who now runs a security firm in Moscow, vigorously denied this. He said he had been in London to watch a football match and the two men had met at the hotel where he was staying to discuss a business deal.
"In the last year I flew a dozen times to Britain. Every time I would have several meetings with Litvinenko," he said. "I was in town and had spoken to Litvinenko and we had agreed to meet that day. I don't recall him having a drink and we had no food."
He identified the second Russian present at the meeting as Dmitry Kovtoun, a business associate, whom he had introduced to Litvinenko before.
"There was nothing strange about Litvinenko's behaviour and he did not seem worried. We all left the hotel together and then parted."
Lugovoi said he was happy to cooperate with British police in their inquiry. He also claimed the meeting had taken place later in the day — after Litvinenko had met Scaramella.
At lunchtime in Piccadilly Litvinenko met the Italian, who said he was tired and needed to sit down. They repaired to a nearby Japanese restaurant, Itsu.
"I ordered lunch," Litvinenko said. "But he ate nothing. He appeared to be nervous. He handed me a four-page document which he said he wanted me to read straight away. It contained a list of names of people, including FSB officers, who were purported to be connected with [Politkovskaya's] murder.
"The document was an e-mail but it was not an official document. I couldn't understand why he had to come all the way to London to give it to me. He could have e-mailed it to me."
"I put it in my bag because I thought I'd look at it at home. But he said he wanted me to look at it right now. So I pulled it out of my bag. There were people who had to do with Politkovskaya's murder."
The document apparently named a group called Dignity and Honour, a mercenary organisation made up of former KGB spies. It is suspected of being used by the FSB for "deniable" operations.
"He [Scaramella] asked me: 'Are these dangerous people? Am I in danger?'," said Litvinenko.
"I looked at some names. And I said I cannot tell you right away who these people are. There were some names in the text . . . Something about Berezovsky, something about me. I cannot accuse him of anything but the whole meeting was very strange."
Scaramella has spoken freely about the meeting and is keen to cooperate with any investigation. He believes that Litvinenko had already been poisoned by the time they met.
What is certain is that that night Litvinenko suddenly began to feel very ill.
"At first I thought it was just a bug, but then he started vomiting," his wife Marina told The Sunday Times. "It wasn't normal vomiting." Two days later he was in hospital.
Who killed him? In Russia the suggestion that Putin ordered the elimination of a man such as Litvinenko is greeted in many quarters with scorn. Litvinenko was small fry, a fantasist, a pest, not a problem, they say. Bumping him off would cause more trouble, an international furore, than putting up with him alive.
One former aide to Putin says: "It's quite simple with Putin. It's all about loyalty. You are either with him or against him. If you are not with him, then you are an enemy. And if you are an enemy, he'll come after you." But even this source does not believe Putin would order the killing of a man like Litvinenko.
Among Muscovites last week the favoured theory was a more convoluted conspiracy: that allies of Litvinenko had sacrificed him to besmirch Putin by making it look like the FSB was responsible.
They pointed to a statement Putin had made after the murder of Politkovskaya. Putin had said: "We have information, and it is reliable, that many people who are hiding from Russian justice have long had the idea of sacrificing someone in order to create a wave of antiRussian sentiment."
Did he really have such information? Or was it just a clever ploy to deflect suspicions onto people such as Berezovsky?
Friends of Litvinenko believe it is ludicrous to suspect Berezovsky of harming the man who once saved him from a possible assassination attempt. "Boris owes his life to Litvinenko and would never do anything to harm him," said Oleg Gordievsky, another KGB defector and family friend.
Friends also dismissed suggestions that Litvinenko could have harmed himself. What would he have to gain, they ask. He loved his wife and son and wanted to continue his fight against Putin.
Curious shapes that appeared on Litvinenko's x-rays turned out to be nothing suspicious; doctors said they were harmless shadows caused by methods used to try to identify what had poisoned him.
Others point out that Litvinenko had made plenty of enemies beyond the Kremlin. In the late 1990s he had accused two of his bosses at the FSB of planning assassinations, and infuriated others with his claims about the FSB blowing up apartment blocks. He had also tangled with mafia gangs.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services, said: "Litvinenko wasn't an ordinary FSB agent. He worked in the department fighting organised crime. It's a special group often accused of links with criminals.
"It's a shadowy world. The people who poisoned him could easily have come from there."
Had a former FSB agent, perhaps linked to Dignity and Honour, taken revenge for a personal grudge? Or is it even murkier still? Had Litvinenko been involved in some nefarious activity that caused him to suffer radiation poisoning?
At first sight the substance that poisoned him might appear to give some clues. Polonium210 occurs naturally in only trace amounts or is produced in nuclear reactors; it might be taken to indicate that the perpetrator was an agent of a state.
Yet it is not impossible for an individual to obtain a supply, since at least one company in America, according to its website, sells the substance in "small orders" to individuals and that "no licence is required".
Whoever poisoned Litvinenko with polonium condemned him to a lingering, painful death. As his final hours approached, his wife, son and his father, Walter, were at his bedside.
"It was a darkened room, and he would open his eyes every now and then," said Andrei Nekrasov, a close friend who visited Litvinenko every day. "It was so heartrending. His son was just in a state of shock. He didn't know what to make of it. The family was just huddled in a corner of the hospital — it was terrible to look at."
The morning after Litvinenko passed away, his father paid tribute to his son, whom he called Sasha.
"He was very courageous when he met his death and I am proud of my son," he said. "He was a very honest and good man.
"Marina and Sasha were the most wonderful couple. They loved each other so much. They were happy here in London, but the long hand of Moscow got them here on this soil."
The key players in a spy mystery
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN
Former member of the FSB, the Russian security service, who took over as president of the Russian Federation in 2000. Has consolidated his power by imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's richest men, and driving out some other "oligarchs", such as Boris Berezovsky.
BORIS BEREZOVSKY
Academic turned businessman who made a fortune in Russia after the fall of communism. Was an ally of Putin until they fell out after Putin became president. Berezovsky fled to Britain, where he has battled extradition, opposed Putin's regime and given help to other exiles such as Alexander Litvinenko.
MARIO SCARAMELLA
An Italian security consultant and academic, he met Litvinenko the day he fell ill. Litvinenko had previously given him information, including a tip about Ukrainians trying to smuggle grenades into Italy to kill an Italian senator. Scaramella gave Litvinenko documents about targets for FSB assassination.
ANDREI LUGOVOI
Former FSB agent who now runs a security firm in Moscow. He met Litvinenko in London hours before he fell ill. Lugovoi says he was in London for a football match and had a meeting with Litvinenko and a colleague simply for business purposes.
ALEX GOLDFARB
Russian émigré and director of the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, a group set up by Boris Berezovsky. Goldfarb helped Litvinenko flee from Russia via Turkey to Britain, and has acted as a spokesman for him and his family in recent days.
LORD BELL
Silver tongued, silver haired PR wizard who advises politicians and businessmen, and was closely associated with Lady Thatcher. His firm is retained by Berezovsky and helped with publicity for Litvinenko's story. The timing has been embarrassing for Putin, who last week attended an EU summit in Helsinki.
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