Goldfarb telephoned from Istanbul. If the Americans didn’t act quickly, he told Felshtinsky, he would hold a press conference and say that an American’s life was being put in danger, meaning his own. Felshtinsky should pass that message on to his CIA contacts. Felshtinsky advised against such an approach.
“It’s my life, not yours,” Goldfarb replied. “The FSB is already here. It’s our lives, and I ask you to do this on my behalf.”
So Felshtinsky called his contact at the CIA.
“We can’t be subject to blackmail and pressure,” the CIA contact replied. “You’re on your own.”
Goldfarb, left to his wilier instincts, improvised. He bought Turkey-to-Moscow tickets for everyone—with a transit stop in London. At Heathrow Airport, Goldfarb introduced Litvinenko to an immigration officer and requested asylum on behalf of him and his family.
Within hours, the Litvinenkos were under the protection of the British government. As for Goldfarb, the United Kingdom declared him persona non grata and sent him on his way.
Berezovsky put up Litvinenko and his family in an apartment in London’s upscale Kensington district and arranged a ?5,000 monthly allowance, a handsome sum, considering that their housing expenses were already covered.
Litvinenko and Felshtinsky saw much of each other, laboring over
But the transition to life in London was hard for Litvinenko. Unlike Berezovsky, now in self-exile there, he did not speak English and was not very diligent about learning it. That left him isolated, glued to satellite television shows beamed in from Moscow, and unable to wander much beyond the Russian-speaking community.
He sought a meeting with Oleg Gordievsky, the ex–KGB station chief who was the hub and glue of all the U.K.-based spies and former spies. Gordievsky had become a cause celebre in 1985 when he defected and was spirited out of the Soviet Union by British spies in the trunk of a car. He had traveled to the United States a dozen times, visited Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the White House, and by his own count had written some ten thousand intelligence reports for the West.
Newly arrived Russian exiles regularly made pilgrimages to Gordievsky’s home in Godalming, a village outside London. But the old spy at first refused to see Litvinenko. This new defector from the FSB was not the type of exile he was inclined to meet. This fellow was a mere operative for Boris Berezovsky, and not a genuine dissident.
Berezovsky, on the other hand, was always an interesting guest, especially with all the billionaire’s supplication. Gordievsky recalled their first meeting, at which Berezovsky presented himself as “quite a positive figure” who spent his money on good causes.
“He came here in a limousine, and sat at this table, and told me the story of his life. It was like he felt he had to explain himself to me,” Gordievsky recalled. The two shared a mutual contempt for Vladimir Putin. Gordievsky dismissed the Russian president as one of the “blanket lifters” who spied on Russians abroad when he was a KGB officer based in Dresden, Germany, during the 1980s. Not a professional he could respect.
Litvinenko was finally able to see Gordievsky after another exile vouched for the newcomer. The two quickly hit it off, and Litvinenko visited regularly for lunch, sometimes bringing his wife and son. “Like Berezovsky, he carried two mobile phones,” Gordievsky recalled. “He was always on them.”
Once, Litvinenko brought along Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Russian journalist with whom he had been exchanging stories of Putin’s war in the restive region of Chechnya, and her glamorous elder sister, Elena Kudimova, a London-based derivatives trader. They dined at the village hotel, called Inn on the Lake, with a view of the surrounding forest.
I took the train down to Godalming, where Gordievsky met me in a blue blazer, with a peach shirt and a violet silk hanky sprouting from his jacket pocket. There was no visible security at his home, but I knew this man—the West’s biggest Cold War catch ever—was well protected by surveillance. Gordievsky was cordial, inclined toward coarse humor punctuated with hearty laughs. At dinner with his English girlfriend along, he whispered conspiratorially, alerting me that she shouldn’t hear.
“Russians want to hear rough language. They think it brings life to the conversation,” he said, giving both sides of his face a light slap for emphasis. This is why Russian men can speak impolitely to their wives, he said.
Like Nikolai Khokhlov, Gordievsky fled Russia without his family. There was much explaining to do when he and his wife, Leila, reunited a few years later. She flew into London with their two daughters—eleven-year-old Mariya and ten-year-old Anna—but reconciliation proved elusive. After a few days, the wife and daughters returned to Moscow, and divorce followed. By the time I met Gordievsky, no one in the family was speaking to him.
I asked why his wife had bothered to make the trip. “She wanted the money,” he replied. He was clearly bitter. “There was ?200,000 to her, plus ?170,000 of private education for the two girls. Plus she receives ?1,250 a month as compensation for being an ‘abandoned wife.’ She brainwashed the girls that I am a traitor.”
CHAPTER 7
The Crusading American
IN MOSCOW, I STARTED ASKING AROUND ABOUT AN AMERICAN named Paul Klebnikov. The
I was surprised to discover that Klebnikov seemed a kindred spirit of Vladimir Putin. That set him apart from his more skeptical—in some cases, downright hostile—journalistic colleagues. But then Klebnikov wasn’t an orthodox reporter. He was an unabashed crusader on a shared mission with the Russian president. Both saw themselves duty bound to assist in the restoration of a great Russia—prosperous, powerful, and respected by the world. Both attacked anyone who appeared to be impeding that goal. Neither seemed to pause to consider that his vision of historic Russia might have been more romantic than real.
Klebnikov’s leanings were more understandable when one considered his origins. Unlike Putin, who was most strongly influenced by his sentimental loyalty to Russia’s security services, Klebnikov was driven by blood. A descendant of czarist-era aristocrats, he quoted Pushkin with regularity and spoke fluent Russian with what some acquaintances presumed was the accent of a nineteenth-century nobleman. (
He acquired his enthusiasm for things Russian at an early age. His family’s Manhattan apartment was festooned with memorabilia of the old country. Descendants of Russia’s displaced nobility were regular visitors, and the young Klebnikov was taught to respect his family’s place in history. Stories were told around the dinner table about men such as Ivan Pouschine, a Klebnikov ancestor who was imprisoned for involvement in an 1825 uprising known as the Decembrist revolt, and great-grandfather Arcadi Nebolsin, a Russian admiral slain by mutineers during the Bolshevik revolution. An entire generation of the family had fled Russia during the 1917 uprising.
At the same time, Klebnikov became comfortable around the well-to-do. He was a guest at the homes of schoolmates from St. Bernard’s, on the Upper East Side, and Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, both exclusive schools. Later, he studied at two highly selective universities, UC Berkeley, in California, and the London School of Economics. His wife-to-be, Helen, or “Musa,” as she was known, was the daughter of John Train, a wealthy New York investment adviser and bestselling author of books including
