The drug used on ‘Socrates’ was SP-117 – concentrated alcohol dropped into his champagne glass. After ten minutes, the subject was drunk. At that point he was ready for interrogation. Shvets nicknamed the ‘small, portly’ lab worker who briefed him on the chemical side of the operation Aesculapius, after the Greek god of medicine. He noted that if this drug was number 117, the KGB’s arsenal probably included at least another 116 potions.
Political killings – of domestic opponents or troublesome exiles – were a hallmark of the Soviet Union and Russia from 1917 onwards. Under Yeltsin, these murders dwindled. But from 2000, prominent critics of the Kremlin once again began to meet mysterious deaths. The evidence of official complicity in these crimes was circumstantial. Defectors claim the KGB’s special poisons department was back in business, under a new and deliberately anonymous name, the FSB research institute.
The lab was in the same building as before. Its formal title is Nauchno-Issledovatelsky Institute No. 2 – Scientific-Research Institute No. 2. Or NII-2, for short. Photos of the institute show a squat, gloomy, beige edifice, dating from the Andropov era, built in impregnable isolation, with lights visible through its windows and a few scrawny trees.
According to locals, it’s a quiet spot. There is a guarded perimeter fence. When the building first went up in the 1980s, they assumed it was a hospital for injured Soviet veterans from the war in Afghanistan.
As well as Ismailov and Tsepov, there were others who appear to have been poisoned. The FSB admitted that it was behind a deadly poisoned letter sent in 2002 to Amir Khattab, a militant living in Chechnya. Journalist and Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin died in July 2003. His cause of death was mysterious: his skin peeled off and his internal organs had swollen up. According to Dombey, radioactive thallium probably poisoned him. In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western presidential candidate in Ukraine, narrowly survived an assassination attempt. He was poisoned with dioxin; his face erupted in blisters.
Dombey’s report went to the heart of the row over who had killed Litvinenko and the question of state responsibility. In the days immediately after Litvinenko’s gruesome death, Kremlin regulatory officials told the media that Russia’s nuclear facilities were under tight control.
Sergei Kirienko, the head of Rosatom, the state agency in charge of Russia’s nuclear facilities, said that ‘control over production is very strict’. He added: ‘I don’t believe that someone stole from it.’ Boris Zhuikov, head of the radioisotope laboratory at the Nuclear Studies Institute, echoed this: ‘Everything connected with polonium production and application is controlled by governments … It is regulated and checked by many people.’
Dombey’s view was that such statements were true. Polonium was a state affair: made using reactor and production facilities belonging to the Russian state, supervised by the state. The facilities used to irradiate bismuth – a process involving highly radioactive materials – belonged to the state as well. These facts didn’t diminish the theory that the state was involved. Instead, they confirmed it, and led Dombey to conclude that the Russian state or its agents were responsible.
Litvinenko’s friends agreed. Goldfarb described the plot as an ‘interdepartmental effort’. Rosatom, formerly the atomic ministry, was an ‘extremely powerful’ organisation with its own hierarchy, Goldfarb said, pointing out that the agency’s chief Kirienko is a former prime minister. It was improbable the FSB would call him up and ask for a special delivery of polonium.
Something of this nature would require Kremlin authorisation. Since Rosatom officials stressed that no polonium had been withdrawn from their system there would need to be some sort of cover-up. ‘It would really be a very serious bureaucratic exercise,’ Goldfarb said.
As Yuri Felshtinsky put it: shooting someone in the head was one thing. Anybody could do that. Killing someone with a rare nuclear isotope was another. It would require collaboration between ministries and spy agencies as well as ‘coordination from the very top’.
All Scotland Yard had to do was to get the evidence.
8
An Inspector Calls
Moscow, December 2006
‘What one man can invent another can discover’
In early December, nine Scotland Yard detectives flew to Moscow. The weather when they landed was noticeably colder than in London – a sharpness that pricked the lungs. The sky was a forbidding grey. British embassy staff met them at Domodedovo Airport. The press was there too: TV cameras, lots of them, and noisy reporters. Litvinenko’s murder was front-page news around the world. The men from the Met declined to comment.
They were driven north towards the centre of Moscow, along a forest of silver birch trees bent under snow. The route passes Gorky Leninsky, an official sanatorium used by Lenin, and rows of wooden dachas. Once you are inside the capital’s orbital motorway the landscape grows urban: there are depressing ranks of dull tower blocks and the blue domes of a neo-Byzantine church. Then, in the centre, a giant titanium statue of Yuri Gagarin and the Moskva river, already white and encrusted with plates of ice.
The British embassy is a modern building on Smolenskaya embankment; new diplomatic flats overlook the river. Here the visitors got security passes and a temporary office. Outside is a bronze statue of the great sleuth Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has many fans in Russia. Poems by British and Russian authors are displayed on stone tablets in the embassy wall.
Even before Litvinenko’s killing relations between the UK and Russia were sticky. They were about to get a lot stickier.
Scotland Yard’s mission was diplomatically sensitive. The detectives’ main task was to interview Lugovoi and Kovtun and to collect as much evidence from Moscow as possible. At this point, the two Russians were officially witnesses, not suspects. But the detectives knew Kovtun and Lugovoi were in the frame for murder. This was an unprecedented international inquiry. Seemingly the trail led back to the Russian state itself.
The Kremlin had promised to ‘actively assist’ the UK government in its inquiries. The Russian prosecutor general’s office offered ‘full support’. It even hailed the ‘constructive and dynamically developing cooperation’ between law-enforcement agencies in both countries.
At the same time, senior Russian politicians from Putin downwards had noisily denounced Litvinenko as a nobody and ‘third-rate small fry’ – in short, as someone not worth murdering. Sergey Ivanov, a spokesman for Russia’s foreign-intelligence agency, claimed his service hadn’t assassinated anybody since 1959 and the operation to kill the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. Why start now? The police should turn their attention, Ivanov suggested, to Litvinenko’s entourage in London.
Others suggested that Litvinenko had it coming. During a debate in the Duma a day after his death, deputy Sergei Abeltsev said: ‘The traitor received the punishment he deserved. I am confident that this terrible death will be a serious warning to traitors of all colours, wherever they are located. In Russia, they do not pardon treachery.’
Abeltsev was a member of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic party. Its leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a clever clown licensed by the Kremlin to send out politically useful messages, called Litvinenko a ‘scoundrel’. MI6 killed him, Zhirinovsky said. Gennady Gudkov, a Duma deputy and ex-FSB colonel, accused Berezovsky. Nikolai Kovalyov, the former FSB chief, observed that high-profile defectors to the west like Gordievsky (in Britain) and Oleg Kalugin (in the US) still enjoyed ‘good health’. No one had murdered them.