It was an inauspicious moment to be a British correspondent in Russia.
When Putin first became president in 2000, relations between Britain and Russia were positive. Putin’s first foreign trip was to London. Russia’s new leader – at this point an enigmatic figure, and the subject of the question ‘Who is Mr Putin?’ – called into Downing Street for talks. The prime minister Tony Blair hailed his guest as a fellow moderniser and defended him in the face of criticism over human-rights abuses and the new war in Chechnya. Putin even met the Queen at Windsor Castle.
The estrangement began in 2003, when a British judge granted Berezovsky political asylum. A court turned down Russia’s extradition request for Zakayev, whom it accused of terrorism. Putin took these decisions as a personal snub.
In the Russian system, judges typically do what the Kremlin expects of them. Putin interpreted the court’s rulings as a betrayal by Blair, who had failed to ensure the correct result. Russia lodged twenty-one applications for the extradition of Russian citizens from the UK. All were unsuccessful. Judges refused them on the understandable grounds that the individuals were unlikely to get a fair trial back in Russia and were, in many cases, being persecuted for their anti-government views.
Relations with the west in general were cooling, too. The Kremlin didn’t perceive the pro-western revolutions in Georgia, in 2003, and in Ukraine, in 2004, as popular movements for democratic reform. They were, it claimed to believe, the product of a US-engineered conspiracy. And a further sign of America’s insidious encroachment in Russia’s post-Soviet neighbourhood. US president George W. Bush – an early enthusiast for Putin – found that Russia’s president was a prickly and unpredictable adversary, opposed to Bush’s Iraq misadventure and much else.
From these alleged slights flowed a series of hostile actions by the Russian government. The British side did some daft things, too. In January 2006, Russian state TV broadcast footage showing an alleged British intelligence officer retrieving information from an artificial ‘rock’ concealed in a Moscow park. The 30-cm rock looked like a small, innocuous light brown boulder – the kind of boulder familiar to fans of The Flintstones. The FSB claimed UK diplomats used the rock to communicate with their Russian ‘agents’. (Jonathan Powell, Blair’s special adviser, later admitted the spy rock was genuine.)
Berezovsky remained a toxic figure for Putin’s administration. Just how toxic I found out for myself in April 2007. Two colleagues interviewed him in London. Berezovsky told them he was plotting nothing less than a revolution. He was, he said, bankrolling people close to the president who were conspiring to mount a palace coup. ‘We need to use force to change this regime,’ he said. Democratic methods were pointless – they wouldn’t work.
Berezovsky acknowledged that such statements were risky: ‘I don’t have any doubts that the Putin regime has become criminal, killing those they calculate as their personal enemy.’ Why? ‘Because they [the regime] identify themselves as Russia. Putin’s understanding is who is against him is against Russia.’
The oligarch’s latest claims were incendiary. He’d said similar things before but in less vehement tones. My bosses at the Guardian asked if I might get a reaction from the Kremlin. I reached Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spin-doctor, and faxed over the key quotes to his office inside the president’s HQ. I had visited Peskov there before, soon after taking up my new Moscow job; he’d told me it was a sadness that the country’s opposition was weak.
The story appeared on the Guardian’s front page the following day, with a photo of Berezovsky and the headline: ‘I am plotting a new Russian revolution’. Peskov’s comments were included: ‘In accordance with our legislation [his remarks] are being treated as a crime.’ My by-line – Luke Harding in Moscow – appeared on the story, placed third, behind that of my two colleagues who’d done the work. At this point I’d never personally met Berezovsky or had any dealings with him.
A more self-assured regime would have dismissed Berezovsky’s claims as self-aggrandising baloney. They were ridiculous. Berezovsky didn’t have a secret army working inside Russian power. The FSB’s purpose, however, was to uncover plots against the state. Here – in lurid black and white – seemingly there was one. Someone inside the spy agency decided to hunt the conspirators. A good place to start, he thought, would be with the Guardian’s Moscow reporter.
I woke up the next morning to find myself inside a sort of sub-John le Carré spy novel. Over the next few weeks a succession of FSB agents followed me round the streets of Moscow. They were easy to spot: unpromising young men wearing cheap leather jackets and brown shoes. Once I met a friend in the deserted basement of a café. Two FSB operatives turned up ten minutes later and, ignoring the many empty tables, sat right next to us. They didn’t order anything; the spy agency doesn’t pay expenses for its officers on duty, I discovered. We laughed, and left.
It became obvious that someone was listening to my phone calls. The Guardian’s bureau was a ground-floor apartment in a block close to Moscow’s Belorusskaya train station. Two low-ceilinged apartments knocked into one. From the tiny kitchen you could see a small area of green where locals walked their dogs. I had a large desk with a landline. Whenever I called London and mentioned the word ‘Litvinenko’ or ‘Berezovsky’ the connection was cut. There was an ominous crackling. The same thing happened if I made jokes about Putin.
Other western correspondents experienced eaves-dropping too; the Brits and Americans were routinely monitored, it seemed. The KGB had perfected these techniques during the Cold War. Female agents listened to targets for hours on end in secret chambers dotted around Moscow. (This was tedious low-level work; it took hours to transcribe conversations.) A caller from the presidential administration, meanwhile, asked for my cellphone number. It looked as if someone had hacked my Gmail account too. Emails tagged with Berezovsky disappeared and then reappeared in my inbox.
None of this was perhaps surprising. Litvinenko’s murder had put a deep chill on UK–Russian relations; I was a British correspondent. The KGB taught its recruits that all western journalists were spies. The belief flowed from mirror thinking: in Soviet times, correspondents abroad, like the talented Yuri Shvets, used journalistic cover to conceal their real jobs as KGB operatives.
What was more unusual in my case were the break-ins by the FSB – a series of intrusions into the apartment where I lived with my family. These were sinister and unwelcome. They became a recurring feature of our Moscow life.
The first took place soon after the Berezovsky story was published. My wife was away. I had been at dinner with friends. I returned with Tilly and Ruskin to our apartment. We’d moved shortly before to a new tenth-floor flat in the suburb of Voikovskaya. From the living room there was a view of a park – birches and a municipal lake in one direction, where we swam in summer; a courtyard in the other.
That someone had broken in was obvious. My son’s single Ikea bed was next to a low window. We kept the window double locked. Now the window was unlocked. It had been left propped open – with a 15-metre drop to the yard below. We peered down. ‘Has there been a burglar?’ my son wondered. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. It seemed unlikely you would survive a fall from such a height. The message appeared to be: take care, or your son might meet with an accident.
At 4 a.m. that night, I was woken by a loud beeping from next door. I turned on the light, and groped towards the sound. An alarm clock with a digital display was ringing in the living room. I hadn’t set the alarm. We’d inherited the clock from our landlord, Vadim, but never used it. It appeared my intruders had decided to play a sinister prank on us. Evidently, this wasn’t a conventional burglary. I checked the kitchen. I’d left several thousand dollars in a drawer to pay next month’s rent. The cash was still there.