were leaving a radioactive trail. Priest’s conclusion roughly tracked with Oleg Gordievsky’s second scenario—that Lugovoi had been used as bait by other, unseen hands who actually dropped the polonium-210 into Litvinenko’s tea.
It seems safe to say that the assassination was not a seat-of-the-pants, rogue operation. After all, polonium-210 was not easy to procure, and it was pricey—one needed some $2 million to $3 million in cash, the commercial cost of the probable dose that experts say killed Litvinenko.
Organized crime experts considered whether Litvinenko was killed by professional Russian criminals, hired by someone whom Litvinenko had angered. But they rapidly dismissed this possibility because even the most hardened thugs would not risk Putin’s wrath by murdering such a high-level target on their own. They would have participated in such a killing only if they understood that it was acceptable to the senior ranks of Russian government.
Many thought the ruthless, calculated, and convoluted method of Litvinenko’s assassination clearly implicated Russia’s spy agencies.
“That’s Russian,” said a pin-striped British private eye who formerly served as a Soviet specialist for MI6, the country’s overseas espionage agency. During his spying days, he and his colleagues would marvel at the elegance of Soviet missions, finding that “an overcomplicated intelligence operation is their signature. You either admire its complexity, or decide it’s all out of proportion to what you want.”
Would the Kremlin dare to carry out, or bless, such an audacious scheme—murder by nuclear isotope, in a major Western capital, against a British citizen? An indignant Kremlin said no. Yet the notion of Russian state responsibility could not be easily put to rest. There was the law that Putin had approved just four months before Litvinenko’s death, granting the president authority to sanction the assassination of an enemy outside the nation’s borders. And there was the matter of Russia’s unrivaled access to polonium-210. Ninety-seven percent of the world’s commercial supply came from a single state-controlled nuclear reactor 450 miles southeast of Moscow, in a shipbuilding town called Avangard. The reactor complex was well secured, but it could not be ruled out as the source of the radiation that killed Litvinenko.
Britain sent investigators to Moscow and asked to interview Lugovoi, Kovtun, and other Russians. In response, the Kremlin said it was conducting its own investigation and asked to question one hundred people in London, including exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky and other Russian dissidents. It was a transparent effort to turn the tables on Britain. Critics said Putin seemed to regard the murder as a public relations problem rather than a matter of criminal justice, and they appeared to be right. If, as Moscow suggested, London exiles were truly culpable, why did Russia not aggressively cooperate with Scotland Yard? It was an opportunity to prove once and for all that the West was providing safe haven to unsavory characters who did not deserve anyone’s protection. But Putin’s statements and actions made it appear he had little real interest in absolving Russia of outside suspicion.
Britain was in a predicament. The evidence plainly implicated both Lugovoi and Kovtun. But would the British request the pair’s extradition from Russia, triggering a judicial process that could lead to courtroom accusations against senior Kremlin officials? Putin himself, the sovereign president of a much-valued country, might become entangled in the drama. Were the British prepared for this to balloon into an international incident? I had my doubts. The British conducted much business with Russia—BP, the United Kingdom’s biggest company, was heavily invested there—and had a less-than-vigorous history of taking diplomatic risks. It was more of a go-along, get-along country.
Yet I was proved wrong. Six months after Litvinenko’s death, the United Kingdom said it would charge Lugovoi with murder, and it officially requested his extradition. Putin refused, saying that the Russian constitution prevented sending citizens abroad for trial. He said that the Britons should present their evidence to Moscow prosecutors and allow the Russian judicial system to decide the case. Britain regarded his offer as an effort to thwart justice, which seemed a correct assumption to me.
The case went nowhere. Rather, it turned into a diplomatic fracas: Britain expelled four Russian diplomats, and Moscow responded by ordering the closure of two British cultural offices in Russia, and expelling British diplomats.
Meanwhile, Lugovoi was treated as a Russian hero. In December 2007, he won election to the Russian parliament, and he was often cheered as he traveled around the country.
The foreigner who gained the closest access to Lugovoi was Mark Franchetti, the British journalist who seemed always to end up at the center of the news. After a series of interviews with Lugovoi, Franchetti aligned himself with Oleg Gordievsky and Nick Priest’s relatively benign view of the accused multi-millionaire’s culpability.
“Lugovoi has often asked me if I think he killed Litvinenko,” Franchetti wrote. “I confronted him with the theory, which I support, that he did murder but is not a cold-blooded killer. I told him I think he was recruited by Russia’s secret service but was tricked and used without his full knowledge. He did not flinch. He again voiced his innocence, and agreed he was framed, but by MI5,” meaning the domestic British intelligence service.
Franchetti wrote: “‘C’mon, Andrei, we both know that if you did take part in Litvinenko’s murder, you are hardly going to tell me, are you?’ I often said to him. Every time he smiled a wide, spontaneous grin. For me, that has always been revealing.”
As Franchetti suggested, Lugovoi seemed genuinely not to believe he had put polonium-210 into that tea. Was he delusionary? Did he spike the tea thinking it was another substance? Did he put nothing into the tea himself, but actively or unknowingly provide cover for the person who did lace it? Was the triggerman actually Kovtun?
Lugovoi now embraced the Litvinenko-as-nuclear-terrorist theory, accusing the defector of contaminating himself, Lugovoi, and Kovtun by accidentally spilling polonium-210 he intended to sell on the black market. I could not accept that Lugovoi actually believed that; now a political celebrity, he was playing to his constituents. Who knew how far he could rise by casting himself as the brave survivor of a traitor’s treachery? The sky seemed the limit.
Franchetti believed that Russia would never hand over Lugovoi to the British, and that felt right. Short of someone making a deathbed confession, there seemed to be almost no chance that the world would ever know for sure who was responsible for Litvinenko’s murder.
Litvinenko had put himself in peril by turning his back on the Russian intelligence services and defecting from his native land. He had exhibited undeniable bravery before and after his exile by speaking his mind, sometimes recklessly so. He had died an agonizing death after twenty-three days of atomic war within his body. But I had difficulty viewing him as heroic or especially admirable, as a number of articles and documentaries rushed to describe him after his death. Litvinenko pursued his goals—first the reform of the FSB spy agency, then the downfall of Vladimir Putin—with much energy, but did not exhibit towering morality or intellect. In the end, he was a determined but ordinary man consumed by events far larger than him.
One thing was certain, though. Those who had scoffed at Litvinenko’s paranoia had been proven wrong—the devilish forces he said he was battling turned out to be all too real.
EPILOGUE
Exit Mr. Putin
As Vladimir Putin’s presidency was winding down, he sent two miniature submarines on a daring 2.5-mile dive under the Arctic ice. When they reached the seafloor, the three-person crew in one of the submersibles ejected a titanium capsule containing a Russian flag. This symbolic planting of the flag in August 2007 laid claim to the underwater region of the North Pole as Russian territory—a bold challenge to four other nations, the United States, Denmark, Norway, and Canada, that also asserted undersea rights there. But the unprecedented feat was no mere explorer’s vanity. According to the United States Geological Survey, some 25 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas underlies the Arctic. The Russian president was sending dual messages: Don’t underestimate Russian
