Litvinenko had been a classic whistle-blower. In 1998 he had appeared in a televised press conference with four of his secret police colleagues. They declared they had received illegal assignments from the FSB, including an order to kill Boris Berezovsky. The press conference itself had been organized by Berezovsky, whom Litvinenko had met following an unrelated assassination attempt in 1994, which Litvinenko had investigated. Both men valued being acquainted, and each seemed to place exaggerated hope in the other. Berezovsky believed knowing an honest man in the FSB conferred protection; Litvinenko trusted the influential billionaire to help him change what was wrong with the system. Litvinenko had been in the uniformed services since the age of eighteen. He was one of the youngest lieutenant colonels the Russian secret police had ever had; he was wholly devoted to the system that raised him, but he belonged to that rare breed of people who are incapable of accepting the system’s—any system’s—imperfections, and who are entirely deaf to the arguments of those who accept things as they are.
Vladimir Putin had been appointed head of the FSB in August 1998, amid allegations of corruption leveled against the previous leadership. “When he was appointed, I asked Sasha who he was,” Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, told me years later. “He said some people are saying he was never a street officer. That meant they looked down on him—he hadn’t come up through the ranks.” But Berezovsky arranged for a meeting between his protege the head of the secret police and his friend the whistle-blower. This was the period when Putin believed his work environment to be so hostile that he held his meetings with Berezovsky in the disused elevator shaft in the FSB headquarters building. Berezovsky wanted the two men to see each other as allies. Litvinenko came bearing charts that he said showed improper connections among FSB departments and the routes that illegal instructions as well as money traveled. He also told Putin about the order to kill Berezovsky, which both the whistle-blower and the oligarch were convinced Putin did not know about. Putin, Litvinenko later told his wife and Berezovsky, was uninterested; the meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He came home dejected and worried about the future—and, as is the way of men like these, resolved to act.
His next step was to hold the press conference on illegal FSB activity. In addition to the order to kill Berezovsky, he claimed to have received instructions to kidnap and beat up prominent businessmen. Putin responded with a televised statement impugning Litvinenko’s character, claiming he was delinquent on alimony payments to his first wife (his second wife insisted she had personally made the payments every month and had the stubs to show for it).
Three months later, Litvinenko was arrested on charges of having used excessive force with a suspect three years earlier. The case fell apart, and in November 1999 a military court acquitted him. He was not allowed to leave the courtroom, however: FSB officers entered and re-arrested him on other charges. That case was dismissed without a trial, but a third case was launched immediately. A military judge let him out on his own recognizance, however, pending a new trial; but when Litvinenko learned that the hearings would be held in a small city about a hundred kilometers from Moscow, where few journalists or outside observers were likely to venture, he decided to flee Russia.
In September 2000, he told Marina he would be going to a southern Russian city to visit his elderly parents. He called her almost a month later and directed her to go on vacation. “I said, ‘It’s not a good time,’” Marina told me. “Tolya, our son, had started his music lessons, why would we go on vacation? He said, ‘But you always wanted to go on vacation. You should go now.’ And I realized—sometimes he just had this voice that I realized I had to turn my mind off and just do it.” She booked a two-week trip to Spain and went there with their six-year-old son. At the end of the two weeks, Litvinenko directed her to get herself to the airport in Malaga at midnight. She arrived, terrified and confused, and was met by an acquaintance who transported her and Tolya to Turkey in a private jet that probably belonged to Berezovsky. Alexander was waiting for her in Antalya, a Turkish resort.
“It was like the movies,” she said. “We couldn’t believe it.” Except no one had scripted their escape. Berezovsky’s employee who had accompanied Marina from Malaga had had to leave. After two days of celebrating their reunion at a resort hotel in Antalya, Alexander and Marina began to realize they were fugitives with no place to go. Berezovsky had promised to support them finanically, but he had little idea of how to help them logistically, so he called his friend Alex Goldfarb in New York and asked him to fly to Turkey to sort things out. Goldfarb agreed, though his involvement in Litvinenko’s escape would cost him his job with George Soros. Goldfarb took Litvinenko to the American embassy in Ankara, where the whistle-blower was interviewed and politely turned down: he had been a secret police agent but not a spy, and the United States had no interest in his information. By going to the embassy, however, Litvinenko had exposed himself to Russian agents who, he knew, kept the embassy under surveillance. Terrified, he needed a solution more urgently than ever.
Goldfarb finally concocted an ingenious plan: the four of them bought tickets with a changeover in London, where the Litvinenkos would surrender to the authorities right in the airport. They did—and wound up in London, their rent and Tolya’s school tuition paid by Berezovsky.
After some months at loose ends, Litvinenko began to write. Together with Russian-American historian Yuri Felshtinsky, whom Litvinenko had met when Felshtinsky briefly worked on Berezovsky’s media team in Moscow, he wrote a book about the 1999 apartment building explosions. Litvinenko used his professional experience to analyze the evidence that had already been reviewed on Russian television, pointing out numerous inconsistencies in the FSB’s official version of the foiled explosion in Ryazan. He and Felshtinsky also reviewed evidence uncovered by reporters for
Gradually, other evidence began to emerge. An opposition parliamentary deputy, Yuli Rybakov—one of the two men who refused to stand up when the Soviet-Russian anthem was played—gave Litvinenko the transcript of the September 13 Duma session. The speaker had interrupted the session by saying, “We have just received news that a residential building in Volgodonsk was blown up last night.” In fact, the building in Volgodonsk would not be blown up for three more days: it seems the FSB plant in the speaker’s office—whom Litvinenko was later able to identify—had given the speaker the wrong note at the wrong time, but had known of the planned Volgodonsk explosion in advance.
Another whistle-blower, Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB agent who had taken part in Litvinenko’s infamous press conference in 1998, joined the investigation. He was able to trace the connections between the FSB and the apartment buildings in Moscow, identifying a businessman whose name was used to rent space in both buildings, the FSB agent who set up the businessman, and even two of the men who had been hired to organize the actual explosions. Most shockingly, Trepashkin had uncovered evidence that the composite portrait of a suspect had been exchanged for a different one. Two men had been arrested, and Trepashkin, who was a lawyer by training, was planning to represent two survivors at the court hearings, using the forum to present his evidence. But just a week before the hearings, Trepashkin was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm; he would spend five years in prison. The court hearings were declared closed to the public; the two suspects received life sentences, but no story ever emerged of who they were and why they had committed their crimes.
ON THE EVENING of October 23, 2002, a couple of friends stopped by for a drink: I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old and was spending most of my evenings at home. The friends, one of whom was a television producer, suggested we turn on the television to watch a recently launched talk show that I had not yet seen. The show had barely begun when a breaking-news announcement interrupted it. A hostage crisis was under way in a Moscow theater. By this time I was editing a small independent political-analysis website, polit.ru. In the next three days I would get a total of about three hours of sleep: my reporters would take turns keeping vigil at the theater and I would be posting their news to our site.
It was a little after nine in the evening when the siege of the theater began. The musical presented that night included a scene in which a real World War II–era airplane appeared onstage. It was then that masked men with machine guns came onstage and around the perimeter of the hall; for a few moments many in the audience thought it was all part of the show. There were about eight hundred people in the hall that night; with the exception of a few dozen young children and foreign citizens the hostage-takers soon released—and some of the actors, many of them also children, who managed to climb out a dressing room window—they would spend the next fifty-eight hours in the hall, growing exhausted, dehydrated, terrified, and ultimately desperate. Though they were ordered to
