Peskov stated that Moscow ‘strongly rejected’ any suggestion of Russian state involvement. Where was the proof? Litvinenko’s death was a ‘terrible crime’ and not a political murder, he said. He reeled off Moscow’s many grievances against London – unsuccessful extradition requests, ‘Mr Berezovsky, Mr Zakayev…’ One quip had annoyed him. Peskov recalled how he flew first-class with British Airways from New York to London. The stewardess had served him a cup of tea with the words: ‘No polonium this time, Mr Peskov.’
According to Peskov, London was succumbing to the kind of virulent ‘Russophobia’ more usually associated with Eastern European countries like Poland. ‘You want me to encourage my citizens to go to London?’ he asked, adding: ‘It takes two to tango.’ He was adamant the Kremlin was reacting to the aggressive behaviour of others. ‘We weren’t the initiators of this crisis,’ he said. ‘This mirror response [the expulsion of UK diplomats] was actually something we regret, and something we were forced into.’
Peskov’s performance reminded me of the writer and critic Clive James’s observation in his book Cultural Amnesia: truly unprincipled states never blush.
Meanwhile, the FSB sent me a further letter. Its investigation was going well; officers had concluded that I didn’t meet Berezovsky. I was therefore ‘not of interest’ to the agency, it wrote. In August we flew back to the UK for our annual summer holiday and a week on a Cornish beach. Later that month I returned to Moscow without my family, who were staying on.
The post in Moscow was unreliable; sometimes packages arrived, sometimes not. I had hand-carried a video taped by a friend, the poet Heathcote Williams. He had recorded two documentaries he thought might be of interest. One was a BBC Panorama investigation into Litvinenko’s death, How to Poison a Spy, presented by the journalist John Sweeney. The other was My Friend Sasha – a Very Russian Murder by Andrei Nekrasov, the filmmaker who had shot the deathbed footage of Litvinenko.
I dumped the tape under the TV, and forgot about it. Williams had Sellotaped programme notes to the side of the cassette, including the photo of Litvinenko in intensive care. One Sunday evening I slotted the video in to watch. The recording began normally – a slice of BBC Newsnight hosted by Jeremy Paxman. After this, something very strange. The Litvinenko documentaries had been erased. Instead of pictures, there were scratchy black-and-white lines; the sound, just audible, was a high-speed squeak.
It was hard to be sure, but it appeared the FSB had broken in again, taken umbrage at the tape’s contents, and deleted them. I emailed Williams. He’d checked the tape before he sent it; it played fine. The Panorama documentary, I found out later, featured interviews with all the major players. Peskov – who else? – denied Kremlin involvement.
There was also a clip from an interview with Litvinenko. In it, he remarked: ‘There were two ideologies in the Soviet Union, communist and criminal. In 1991, the communist ideology ceased to exist and only the criminal remained. The KGB was renamed, it became the FSB, but nothing really changed. Everything stayed the way it was before. The only difference was that a KGB officer killed for his ideology while an FSB officer kills for money.’
Lugovoi had friends in high places; that was obvious. They were keeping a close eye on his case. I caught up with the man himself four months later. He was on the campaign trail, embarking on an unlikely career as a deputy in Russia’s parliament. Lugovoi was number two on the federal list of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), an outfit set up by the KGB and led by the flamboyant Zhirinovsky. In his new role as a would-be politician, Lugovoi zigzagged across the country, traveling to the Far East, the Urals and European Russia.
It seemed that Lugovoi was going to make the best of his notoriety. His campaign, such as it was, had an anti-British flavour.
I went with Lugovoi to Manturovo, a village 60 miles (100 km) outside the western city of Kursk. It was always good to get out of Moscow; here were crumbling dachas, snow-covered fields and poplar trees. Lugovoi toured a farm, peered into its cowshed and visited an orphanage. That evening he talked to locals in a pink-walled hall decorated with an icon and a bust of Lenin. His audience listened politely.
Lugovoi, it struck me, wasn’t a natural politician. With his modish suit, purple tie with swirls and Italian shoes, he cut an incongruous figure. Since elections in Russia were fake political exercises – vote rigging on behalf of the ruling United Russia party was rampant – this didn’t matter. At a press conference in his hotel, the Nightingale, Lugovoi blamed Britain for Russia’s woes. The British had invaded Crimea, forged the Zinoviev letter in 1924 and carried on behaving like ‘Anglo-Saxon imperialists’.
I scribbled his remarks in my notepad. ‘If you look at Russian–British relations, the Cold War never started and never ended,’ he declared.
Locals seemed bemused by his performance. Did it matter that Lugovoi was accused of murder? ‘It’s difficult to say,’ Viktor Shumakov, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, told me. ‘In Russia many strange things happen all the time.’
A year after Litvinenko’s death, Lugovoi was elected as a deputy to Russia’s Duma. His meteoric rise, most observers in Moscow felt, could have happened only with the Kremlin’s endorsement. Lugovoi, meanwhile, gave numerous audiences to the domestic and foreign press. They took place in Moscow, on the remote and beautiful Kamchatka peninsula, and while he sat on the back of a horse.
My own on-off investigation into Litvinenko’s murder had not met with a breakthrough. But there were clues. I went to see Olga Kryshtanovskaya, an expert on elite politics, and a researcher in sociology at Russia’s academy of sciences. Kryshtanovskaya was an interesting figure, who would go on to became a United Russia MP. She had described how under Putin former KGB officers rose to senior positions – by 2007, 42 per cent of those in top Kremlin jobs had a military or intelligence background. She had good contacts inside Russian intelligence.
I asked her about Litvinenko. She said that FSB officers had privately admitted that his murder must have been one of their operations. They had no regrets about the target – Litvinenko was a traitor and merited the punishment – but expressed surprise at the shoddy way in which his execution was carried out. These things were done much more tidily by the KGB, in particular when Yuri Andropov – the only KGB officer to lead the Soviet Union – was communist party general secretary.
‘My FSB friends told me that this [Litvinenko’s bungled poisoning] would never have happened under Andropov,’ Kryshtanovskaya told me. ‘They told me the KGB was much more efficient at murdering back then.’
Lugovoi and Kovtun may have been third-rate killers, but they continued to enjoy support from where it mattered. In April 2008, I interviewed Lugovoi for the first time. The location was his first-floor office in Moscow’s Radisson Hotel in Kievskaya, the same place where the detectives from Scotland Yard had stayed.
Despite his contempt for the British ‘establishment’, Lugovoi turned out to be an Anglophile. He was a fan of English literature; the works of Arthur Conan Doyle sat in a glass-fronted cabinet case. ‘I’ve read all Conan Doyle. I’m very fond of The Lost World,’ he explained. His son went to the same British school in Moscow as my son, though at a different campus. His daughter spent a year on an English course in Cambridge.