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The Rest Is Classified
174. The Murder of Litvinenko: Did the British State Hide the Truth? (Ep 6)
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For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club@therealisclassified.com. Did the British state try to bury the truth of what happened to Alexander Litvidenko? And how did his wife Marina continue battling for justice? Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey.
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And I'm Gordon Carrera.
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And last time, Gordon, we looked at how the Metropolitan Police had run their investigation into Litvinenko's murder, had found enough to charge Lugovoy and Cavtun after this dramatic trip to Moscow. But there's no sign, of course, that the Russians will ever extradite Lugovoyan Cobden for the murder, nor that either man would ever come to Britain again. We talked about this a little in the last episode. There's also not much of a sign of a strong response, much of a response at all from the British government. And so as we close out in this episode, our Syria is looking at the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. We're going to be asking ourselves, is there any justice for this, this crime? And who really, I think this is an interesting question. Who really is behind the murder? We know that Lugovoy and Cobtun put the poison in that so called nuclear teapot, but where did the order come from? How high up into the Russian system did the verdict rise to go and kill Alexander Litvinenko? So many questions still to answer.
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A
I mean, well, as we, as we said, he's probably, I mean, I, I think Litvinenko is, we could think of him as an agent of sorts for MI6.
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B
Yeah, he was definitely on their payroll.
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A
Yeah, right. Yeah, they were paying him as a consultant, agent, whatever you want to call him. I, I could see why the, the spooks would be reticent to have David inquiry where a lot of this information could, could potentially be made public.
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B
Yeah, I think that's right. They were in shock. I think at first it was a kick in the guts. One British intelligence officer told me we never thought they'd do it. I don't think they, they thought that a British citizen, someone who come to the UK could be murdered in that way, could argue that might be a bit naive. Didn't really understand the history, what the Russians got got up to. And you know, they, as we talked about in the earlier episodes, had potentially been playing a game where they were trying to recruit Logovoi and use Litvinenko. Maybe Litvinenko was doing a bit off his own back, but trying to double him back and recruit this guy as an agent. The problem is that the Russians were playing a different game. They were using Lugovoy to target Litvinenko, but not in the spy sense to target him for recruiting, but to kill him. So you can see the Russians are playing by a different set of rules and a more dangerous set of rules and willing to play that game on the streets of Britain and go after traitors. And I think it was a sign that the rules were changing, but Also potentially that MI6 had maybe, you know, were playing the wrong game and had Been outplayed at it. So I think for that reason, you can see why, can't you? You don't want all. All the details of your relationship with Litvinenko unearthed at all.
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A
But surely, Gordon, the Foreign Office and British politicians would want to get to the bottom of this.
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Oh, David, surely I sense. I sense you're trying to. To. To wind me up. And if so, you don't need to, because the Foreign Office were particularly weak, I'm going to say about this, I'm afraid. Sorry to Foreign office friends, but Mi6 were at least quite hawkish on the Russians. I mean, they were the ones saying, look, the Russians are a problem. The Foreign Office wasn't even hawkish. They see their role as building up relationships, doing diplomacy and getting business deals back on the table. And their priority, really, at this point, and for a long time afterwards, was getting back to a normal footing with Russia and all this kind of spy stuff. All a bit Cold War, isn't it? You know, we don't want to do this, just brush it under the table so we can go back to having nice diplomatic meetings. I'm afraid that was definitely the case.
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A
Well, this is. This is an era where, I think September of 2011, then British Prime Minister David Cameron visits Moscow again. The aim, to boost business ties. The following year, 2012, Putin's in London, sitting kind of awkwardly, I would say, beside David Cameron while they watch a judo match at the Olympics.
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B
I mean, isn't that weird now to think about Putin coming to London and watching a judo match with the Prime Minister? I mean, again, different era, but it still points to a political class as well, who wanted to build relations with Russia.
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A
Well, in the us, we had the reset in this roughly the same time period. I mean, really, in the years after. After the Litvidenko poisoning. So it's not. It's not only your political class, Gordon, it's. It's the Americans who are also, I think, you know, it's. It's now, after Ukraine, it's almost impossible to imagine, but there was this time period where I think you could look at Putin and Russia and the system that he was building, and, you know, smart people came to different conclusions about the direction it was headed. There were indications, like Litvinenko, I think, like the war in Georgia, like a lot of the other murders that we're going to talk about, that there was a very, very dark side to this system and that Putin was playing by different rules. And yet at the same time, you did have this engagement between Russia and the west that was, I think in theory, the sort of argument was that it would draw Russia out of what had been its Cold War stance and bring it closer, at least to the West. And the Litvinenko murder stands as a kind of early indication of the real direction the system was going.
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B
Yeah, you're right. There were policy and political, diplomatic reasons to not want to dig too deep in this and not to have an inquiry. I think there were deeper reasons as well, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, but Russia had built this London grad relationship in which Russian money and therefore Russian influence had flooded into London particularly. And I think it's interesting because it never goes into New York, for instance, or Washington or LA, or other American cities. In the same way, it's London where the Russian money comes, which becomes a playground for their spies. It's also a way in which they can wield influence. London had opened its doors, the Russian money had come in. And that buys you friends, it buys you protection. I remember a year before Litvinenko was killed, so 05, a British intelligence official, a serving one, confided in me that one of the things that depressed him most from what he saw, was the way Russian money had corrupted the professions in London. And by professions he meant things like law, accountancy, banking. And he didn't mean the kind of things we think about now with corruption, someone taking a bribe to break the law. It was subtler. He said it was that the amount of money that Russian oligarchs and businesses could offer to lawyers, accountants, bankers, asset managers, estate agents, members of Britain's professional class meant they were willing to turn a blind eye to the origins of the wealth and not ask too many questions. It was quite an insidious form of corruption eating away at public life. And you have this whole class built up in London of people who provide professional services to wealthy foreigners, and that in turn builds a class of people who are dependent, reliant on Russian money. And it's not corruption in the traditional way, but, you know, that's what's going on in this era, isn't it?
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A
And the mega rich Russians had also figured out how to, I guess, do a kind of reputational laundering through British society. So, you know, by, by a football club, sponsor an art gallery launch, organize charity balls even. We did, you know, those episodes a while back now on Anna Chapman and she's the kind of young, glamorous Russian who were kind of swirled around in London society in this time period. And it is almost all the more insidious because it's not very. Well, I'm sure some of it was illegal, but a lot of it was just. Was not. It was just there was so much Russian money that this whole class of, you know, British service professionals got addicted to it and. And thus had to advance the interests of really corrupt Russians.
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B
Yeah. And it's sometimes it's not even. You don't always need to advance the interests, you just need to not challenge the interests. And when it comes to a decision, are you going to call for an inquiry or not? Maybe you're not going to. And I think you could see it in, you know, there were politicians and there was a lot of Russian money around. Politics and socializing and all of that, you can see, created this kind of atmosphere. You could see it as a deliberate Russian strategy as well. It's around this time they're using energy supplies to create dependencies in European countries, using lucrative contracts to enrich people and put politicians in Moscow's pockets. So there was a lot of. There was a lot of that around Europe, but I think Britain was particularly susceptible to it. And I think the lesson Moscow learned was that Britain wasn't willing to risk its own wealth to stop murders like Litvinenko to kind of call them out and investigate them.
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Well, that all, I think explains. Doesn't justify, but explains why the British state for years did its best to block an inquiry into Litvinenko's death. Right. Because there's hundreds of billions of reasons not to look into this. Yeah, but what was the actual. Obviously, you can't. You can't say the quiet part out loud. So what was the reason given for not actually conducting the inquiry?
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B
Well, the Home Office particularly said when it, you know, kept refusing a public inquiry, said the revelations might damage national security, including relations with Russia. I mean, it's pretty explicit about that. And this is the thing. It was only the tenacity of Marina Litvinenko that kept the fight going for year after year after year. And I got to know Marina actually very soon after her husband's death. I did one of the first interviews she did, I mean, you know, just days or weeks after he died, in which she talked about it. And one of the things I remember is she was incredibly calm. Anyone who's seen her or met her will know. Incredibly measured, incredibly precise. And she is quite extraordinary because I always think this is someone who ran an amazing, tenacious, determined campaign for justice for years and was not a trained diplomat or intelligence officer or anything else. I mean, no offense to ballroom dance teachers, but that's what she'd been, you know, she wasn't, you know, trained in this world. She'd not come of it. And yet she, she always knew how to use publicity, how to drive the agenda, how to say something but not go too far, which would alienate politicians in a way which would make them dismiss her. Very measured, very precise and very determined. And she just keeps pushing for judicial reviews when ministers deny an inquiry. And I went to lots of these legal hearings, not many other people turned up, but a few of us journalists did. And you could see that she and her friends just kept going. Even when the money started to run out, she just kept going. I think she was mortgaging a house. She was, you know, and she just kept going, fighting for that inquiry.
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A
And then the geopolitical context, the security context, I guess, starts to change because in early 2014, we have the kind of Russian little green man in Ukraine. The first, I guess, invasion that wasn't quite an invasion. Putin seizes Crimea, proxy forces move into Ukraine to start fighting. The mood finally shifts. We have senior Russians who are getting sanctioned. I think there's a wake up call in Western capitals to what Putin and the Russians are actually up to. This is effectively the end of any hopes, I think, of a reset in the states or anything like that that's done. And finally that allows or really maybe forces the UK government to relent. And in July of 2014, they allow a public inquiry under independent minded judge named Sir Robert Owen.
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B
Yeah, and there were public hearings and I went to lots of them, which are absolutely fascinating. And I have to say Robert Owen was very impressive as a judge presiding over it. He had that kind of quiet, restrained manner of a British judge. But you could also see him getting angry at times about, you know, because Lugovoy and Covetin were playing games with the inquiry and, you know, we're going to cooperate, we're not going to cooperate. He was just absolutely dedicated. He was allowed. Also there were these public hearings which I went to, but they're also secret ones, closed hearings where he got to see some of the intelligence. And his report is eventually released in January 2016. I reread it for, for this and it's a really impressive inquiry report. It's just clear, it's direct, it's powerful, it's concise and it tells the story of what happens and makes clear what they think had happened. And it was interesting when it came out, I actually sat down with not just Marina, but with Anatoly Litvinenko's son to talk about the whole experience at this point, because this was to some extent, maybe not totally, but the end point after 10 years after Alexander Litvinenko had been killed. And Anatoly, I remember talking to him, he'd been so young when his father had died that he'd had little understanding of what his father had been doing. And he said it was only the inquiry that helped him understand what Litvinenko had been involved in, the things he'd done, what had driven him, the fact he'd still been involved in this world of security and intelligence. I remember him saying to me, I try not to think too much about my early childhood. It's easier that way. But then he also said, my father did a hell of a lot to get me to this country to make sure I was safe. I need to respect that and do whatever I can to honour his memory. Finding the truth is the closest we can get to justice for my father. And he was a really, really remarkably level headed, impressive young man. Still is, because I've seen him in the last few years as well. And yeah, it's a testament, I think, to Merida particularly, but also to Anatoly for maintaining that determination, but also being level headed about it in a way.
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A
So what does the inquiry say? What were the major findings?
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Well, clearly that Le Gavoy and Kovatun were the killers and we should say they have always continued to deny it. The judge also says that the plot to kill Litvinenko may have gone back to 2004. He thinks so, all the way back to when Lugovoy first got in touch with Litvinenko, although he says it's hard to be sure. But the key question that everyone really wanted to know, because I think we knew Covetin and Lugovoy had done it, allegedly, but was who gave the order? And it ends the report by making clear that in the judge's view, that Lugovoy and Kovtun were acting as part of an FSB Russian Security Service operation,
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A
which I don't find surprising. I don't know about you, Gordon. No, I think we both believe that this was the Russian state and it was an official operation condoned by the Russian state. But what was the actual evidence presented for that?
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B
Well, some of it probably came from the closed and classified evidence, because you could imagine, couldn't you, that there's probably intelligence from sources in Moscow or Intercept or something else you know about the FSB which suggests that was the case. And of course that can't be revealed Publicly, which is one of the challenges. But, you know, I'd be surprised if over the years, British and American intelligence allies hadn't collected something, something in which people are discussing it and saying, who gave the order? But that is going to be in the closed report. But I think that's one of the reasons why he's so confident about, about it. But also, I mean, let's be honest, it is implausible, isn't it, that this was a private hit. I mean, you know, that, you know, someone who's aggrieved that Litvinenko, for instance, had written a report that he didn't like on due diligence and had decided to kill him. Doesn't make sense, does it?
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I think if Litvinenko had been shot, it could be more plausible that it's some kind of private vendetta. Now, maybe it's not the most likely scenario, but then maybe it feels more like a, you know, Russian organized crime, an aggrieved business partner. But the murder weapon, I think the murder weapon is so crucial to understanding who's ultimately responsible, because as you said in your science explainer, polonium, you don't like, scrape it off of, you know, the bottom of a pond. You, you, you get it from a state level nuclear program. So, yeah, how, like, how do you explain it as anything other than a state orchestrated hit, given the weapon?
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Because I think even, even if you were to imagine someone in the FSB hearing Putin going, this guy's really annoying, you know, who will rid me of this turbulent priest, the famous line, you know, and someone thinks I'm going to go do it. Even then you wouldn't be able to get hold of polonium. I mean, that's going to require a nuclear program, a nuclear reactor, and kind of authorization to get it to move it, even within the state. That's not something that's easy. And the only country that's producing polonium from its nuclear reactors is Russia. You know, Russia, Yeah, yeah. It's not like the Brits are making tons of tons of it. I mean, tiny amounts of it are sold and there's weird uses in anti static guns and things like that, but it's impossible to get hold of it and produce the amounts used in this case without professional state level help. I mean, not least because it's just so dangerous. So I think that is a very clear piece of evidence that it's the Russian state and not either two lone killers or even a kind of rogue operation done off the back by the fsb.
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What happens to Kaftun and Lugovoy afterwards, because we left. I think we left them, but they were. There was some frustration that they had been given a radioactive poison.
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Yeah.
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Without knowing exactly what they had. But they're back in Russia. They seem to, you know, play ball with Russian efforts to stymie the investigation. And where do they end up when this is all said and done?
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Well, and. And that's another bit of evidence, I think, that it's a state activity, because, let's say, allegedly they were the killers. They deny it. But if. If it had been a rogue operation or an entirely personal operation, then you wouldn't expect Lugovoy to become an MP and to be awarded a state honour. In March 2015. I mean, he joins Zhirinowsky's Liberal Democratic Party, which is an extremist party, despite the name, bit different from our Liberal Democrats, but it's quite closely linked to the security services and becomes quite a prominent figure, which also, at various points, gives him immunity from prosecution. So he's becoming significant in politics. It is interesting, though, because. And it's not clear what he gets his decorations for other than in 2015, by that point, relations with the west have soured. So Putin is thinking, I'll stick two fingers up at the west and give. Give le Governor. I mean, that's the only way I think you can explain it. Kovtun, weirdly, doesn't prosper so much. I mean, he kind of disappears.
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Well, I guess this leads us to the biggest question, or one of the biggest questions, which is, did Putin himself give the order? Because, and I always find this fascinating with other Russian assassinations, but there's always this question of is the guy at the top? Response was, did he actually order it? Did he put something down on paper? Did he tell someone that he wanted Litvinenko killed? So I think this question of where did the inquiry come down on the question of Putin's culpability?
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B
Well, the inquiry concludes that Sir Robert Owen says, taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me, I find that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, who was the head of the FSB, and also by President Putin. He concludes he cannot prove it definitively, but he clearly believes it was Putin. I mean, hard to prove definitively, because you'd imagine it's a verbal order rather than a piece of paper to someone. You'd imagine Putin says to the head to Patrushev, get rid of him. And Patrichev puts it in motion. As people said at the inquiry, no one's going to kill Litvinenko in London with radioactive polonium without getting some cover, probably from the top dog. You know, it's a risky thing to do, isn't it? Don't you think?
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A
I think if you're Patrichev or an underling inside the fsb, you're probably not operating with a blanket approval to conduct these kind of operations. The degree to which Putin had any of the details, who knows?
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B
Yeah.
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A
But let's say if you're Patricia, put yourself in his shoes, you're the head of the fsb, you don't want the boss to be surprised by this. And for it to affect relations with the UK in particular or the EU or the west more broadly. And for that to be a surprise to Putin. Yeah, you would want to get his approval. And maybe it's kind of vague. Maybe you just say, there's a thing we're going to do and we're going to get, we're going to take care of this guy. He won't be a problem for you anymore. And Putin says, you know, maybe he doesn't even say anything. He gives the nod, say no.
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B
He gives it.
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A
Or he just doesn't say no. You know, it could be very vague,
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B
but, David, what is the British government's response to confirmation from this inquiry?
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A
I'm going to guess, I'm going to go, is nothing the right answer or there more. Are there more expulsions of low level diplomats?
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I'm going to say pretty much nothing. I mean, I think there was some vague noises and maybe some vague. Someone crazy.
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A
Someone grunted at a Russian diplomat afterward.
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B
It's a shocker, David. I mean, Marina had talked about sanctions, expulsion, more action. There's almost nothing. I mean, I guess by that point we already started sanctioning people. It's post 2014, but. But given two opportunities, two different British governments, I should say, of different political parties failed to take any action that might deter the Russian state from thinking it could murder on the streets of Britain with impunity. I think that is the crucial thing, that both in the immediate aftermath and in this inquiry, there's a feeble, feeble response from the British government, which I think encourages Moscow to think, we can do this, we can do this.
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A
What would you have done?
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B
I think I would have. At the very least, I'd have written a very angry letter.
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C
A very.
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A
And you will know how angry we are with you by the time you're done reading this letter.
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B
I would have expelled. I mean, because we'll maybe come back to this. But there were plenty of more people to expel. There were still SVR, FSB, GRU people in London in 2016.
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A
But did they just do the same thing back? You just. You lose your. Your insight.
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B
But you got to do something. You've got to impose some cost. You could sanctions, Putin, some of the people around Putin. You could clamp down on some of the dirty money in London. Shock horror.
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A
Yeah, you could do that. That would have been. That would have been something you could have done.
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B
You could pass some legislation to make it easy. I just think that it was pretty feeble. It was pretty feeble.
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A
You know what they should have done? What? Poison the SVR resident in London.
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B
Give him diarrhea in the runs. Well, maybe more.
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A
Maybe more. Well, you could do that, right? I mean, that's. Are you not allowed to do that? That could be legally challenging.
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B
I don't think we do that kind of thing, David.
- [27:59]
A
See, but that's the kind of thing that would have registered with the Russians. Yeah, you do it to one of our citizens, we're going to do it to you. And, you know, it's not like the SVR resident in London means anything to Putin, but, you know, you put. You put one of ours in a body bag, and we put one of yours in a body bag. The reason I ask is because I think it actually is a hard policy problem, because the Russians are just, as one of my former colleagues likes to say, the. The Russian intelligence services, they are barbarians without limits or morals. This is. This is the way he described the Russian security services to be. And it's so different from the way we play sort of political and intelligence culture in. In Britain or in the U.S. it's just so. It's so different. So.
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B
So if you start playing by their rules, you get sucked into a pretty nasty fight, don't you? Yeah. Well, let's take a break there, because when we come back, we will look at not just the issue of state responsibility, but one of the things we've talked about in this series is the number of other mysterious deaths of Russians that took place in London, including Boris Berezovsky himself.
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A
Gordon, there's. There's a question that hangs over this entire series which we haven't talked about all that much, which I think is like, why poison?
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B
Yeah.
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A
What is the Russian fascination with using poison as a murder weapon of its. You know, of its intelligence services? Because there is a. There's a long history of this, isn't there. The Litvinenko case is unfortunately not. Not alone in Russian and spy services using poisons to kill their opponents.
- [29:42]
B
And I think that is one of the other pieces of the puzzle which points to Russian state responsibility is that, you know, they've got a form on this, there's a track record, and the Russian secret police have been using it for decades. Lenin, after the revolution in 1917, first establishes a poison lab in 1921. And you start to see it used by Lenin. So not just Stalin, who does definitely use it in the 30s and 40s, but Lenin starts using it right from the early days of the revolution. And then you even see in the early Cold War, there's this case, Nikolai Koklov in 1954, who defeated effects, reveals he's an assassin with a gun that fires cyanide pellets, but then he gets poisoned with thallium. 1957 in Frankfurt. Stefan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalist, killed with cyanide dust, some kind of cyanide. 1959 in Munich. So there's a deep history in which they like using poisons. I mean, they like killing people, they like, you know, killing exile. Sometimes it's Trotsky with an ice pick, but a lot of times it's poison. And, I mean, I guess there's lots of reasons why poison is useful, isn't it, if you're carrying out what the Russians used to call, I think, wet jobs, you know, killings.
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A
One reason why it's potentially an interesting weapon, I guess we saw that a bit in the case with Litvinenko, is that the time between administering the poison and that the victim seeing the effects mean that the. The poisoners have time to. To flee the scene. Right. You could escape. Right. You can't. It's harder to do that if you're shooting someone. So if you are trying to target someone who's outside of Russia, it can be an effective way to do it. I think. I think there is some value to the Russians in the theatrics of it. There's a theater to the poisoning that draws attention, certainly. I mean, we're doing many episodes on Litvinenko. We would not be doing this many episodes on Litvinenko if he had just been shot dead in London. I don't think. And I also think that fear. Yeah, it does. It creates a sense of fear. It also. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it kind of labels the victim as a mark of, you know, they're sort of marked by the state as someone who needs to be exterminated. In a way that maybe a simple bullet doesn't always accomplish. The FSB took polonium out of a state run nuclear reactor and brought it via intermediaries to London to kill someone. So it's a very direct mark, I think, from the Kremlin onto someone, onto someone they want dead.
- [32:29]
B
It's interesting because it does look like in the second half of the Cold War, the Russian security services, the KGB then get out to some extent of the poisoning and assassination business. They do much less of it. There's that famous story which we did, well, quite a while ago, which was about the poison umbrella, Georgi Markov in London, 1978, which the KGB supplies the rice in, it's thought, for the pellet, but the Bulgarians actually do it because he's a Bulgarian dissident. But the KGB on the whole doesn't seem to do that much in the late Cold War. But they keep the capability, they keep these poison labs. And what's so interesting, I think, is the early 2000s, soon after Putin comes to power, we then see this rise in the number of strange and suspicious incidents and which looked like the use of poison. So in 2002, an Islamist guerrilla leader named Ibn Khattab was killed by a poisoned letter suspected sent by the FSB. In September 2004, there was an apparent attempt to poison Viktor Yushchenko, the anti Moscow candidate, in the presidential elections then in Ukraine. And he ends up disfigured, I mean, by dioxin, you know, his face disfigured, but he's alive. Anna Polotzkovkaya, the journalist we talked about, is poisoned in 2004, two years before she's shot. And I think it gets really interesting because there are some cases in these early 2000s which look like they might have been polonium. So there's a guy called Roman Sepov, who'd worked in St. Petersburg in the 1990s with Putin and probably knew his secrets maybe about links with organized crime, allegedly. And in 2004, he falls ill with symptoms, hair loss, falling white blood cell count, vomiting, reports of radioactivity. In all very similar to Litvinenko and a Chechen gorilla named lekha Islamov, also 2004, in prison, refuses to work for the FSB, summoned for a chat, offered tea and falls ill soon after with hair loss and blisters. Very similar. And this is all in the run up to Litvinenko. So, you know, to me that looks like a renewed campaign to go after enemies with poison. Many of the cases within in the early 2000s within Russia, but then increasingly afterwards. And there are. There is a stat that Putin has overseen more poisonings than any other Russian or Soviet leader.
- [34:51]
A
We also talked throughout this series about the many people who are sort of floating around Litvidenko who are going to end up dead, and Boris Berezovsky, one of them, is going to be one of the major targets.
- [35:10]
B
Yeah, that's right. Berezovsky, arch enemy of Putin, does an interview in early 2007 with Luke Harding from the Guardian where he talks about plotting for regime change in Russia. And, and you can sense that this is, you know, kind of get the Putin's back up. June 2007, a Chechen comes to the UK said to be linked to the FSB. He tries to meet Berezovsky, but MI5 and police are following him. So they know about him. And I was told this by a police officer was going to be the single most expensive hit assassination ever ordered in Britain. Don't know the exact price tag, but I was told in the millions to kill Berezovsky. And this Chechen assassin has brought his son over as cover to make it look like he was a tourist on a trip to London. But the police watching him arrest him before he could do anything. Interestingly enough, he's quietly deported back to Russia, no fuss made. Berezovsky then reveals this story a bit later. Soon after he returned, the assassin is outside a restaurant in central Moscow when two armed men force him into a car and he's never seen again. But following through the Berezovsky story, I mean, Berezovsky's Assistant describes in July 2010, two Russians coming over. One gives Berezovsky a T shirt that he'd been given in Moscow by Lugerboy. And Lugeboy says, give this T shirt to Berezovsky. And on the T shirt it says polonium210. CSKA London, Hamburg. To be continued. And the writing on the back says, CSKA Moscow. Nuclear death is knocking your door. And CSKA Moscow is the football club. That look a boy sports. I mean, that's kind of weird, isn't it a joke? I don't know.
- [36:53]
A
I mean, the, the fact that they were making merch around the assassination feels, feels like kind of a. Kind of a grim, a grim chapeau detail at the end of this story. I mean, they, you know, we're, all we're doing is producing squirrel T shirts. Gordon. Polonium 210. Good grief.
- [37:14]
B
Yeah. And then Berezovsky himself gets into this massive court battle in London with his former protege, Roman Abramovich, who, you know, owns Chelsea Football Club and who's been a governor of a Russian province and is close to Putin. Berezovsky says he's owed $5 billion by him. And Berezovsky serves his writ against Abramovich after spotting him out shopping in the London branch of Hermes, which, you know, it's a nice detail. But then Abramovich, for this court case, prepares well. He has the best, most expensive lawyers, including Jonathan Sumption. Later, a justice of the Supreme Court is one of his lawyers. And Berezovsky loses. The judge, Mrs. Justice Gloucester says she didn't trust him, even says, you know, there's not evidence of Putin doing certain things. Some of the journalists covering it find this all a little bit odd, but. But Berezovsky himself certainly does because he's shocked by it. He thought he was going to win. He's now running out of money. And then in March 2013, so not long after that judgment, Berezovsky's bodyguard, who's a former Israeli Special Forces guy, goes off, leaving Berezovsky alone in his Surrey house. The bodyguard comes back. There's no sign of Berezovsky, but his phone is lying out, and there's some missed calls. So the bodyguard goes up to the bathroom. The door's locked from the inside. He kicks it open, and there's Boris Berezovsky lying on the floor with a scarf around his neck, which is bruised, and there's a broken shower rail, and he's dead.
- [38:45]
A
They test, right? They test it for radioactivity and poison, and I think, officially, no obvious signs of foul play. I find this interesting. The coroner recorded it as an open verdict, saying the evidence was contradictory, and it left him unable to conclude whether the Russian had taken his own life or had been killed. What do you think, Gordon? I mean, obviously, it's a very, you know, murky fig. I mean, Putin would have loads of reasons to kill Berezovsky.
- [39:16]
B
I mean, that's the thing. We know. We know Putin well. We know. We think Putin had sent assassins to kill him. He said, allegedly, in case Mr. Putin wishes to sue me or come after me. But, you know, so we know he's an enemy of Putin. So it's interesting, though, because I spoke. I remember talking to some of people who were close to Berezovsky afterwards and talking to one who was completely as anti Putin as you get, and he said to me, look, I think Boris took his own life because he was so broken by losing that court case, he thought he trusted British justice to give him the answers and he didn't get them. You know, the money's running out, everything's over, he did it. But equally, I think there are definitely other people who think, you know, Putin killed him.
- [40:02]
A
You know, I wander into the minefield of sort of ascribing logic and reason to Russian assassinations with, with some trepidation, but why he wouldn't also get the theatrical treatment, I don't know. It feels like you would make a point out of it if you were Putin, as opposed to it being this kind of somewhat quiet thing that quite looks like he took his own life. It just, it feels a little incongruous to me. So I tend to come down on the side of, you know, he took his own life because he was, he's broken, broken by the, the, the verdict of the case, you know, and it's as, it's as simple as that.
- [40:44]
B
Yeah. And there's other deaths as well. There's a guy called Alexander Peraplichni, who was a healthy 44 year old who collapses while running near his Surrey home November 2012. He was a businessman who'd helped Bell Browder, this very interesting American originally who'd spent time in Russia and who'd then gone on a crusade against corruption in Russia. And Pereplichni was working with him and he was warned his life is in danger. He drops dead. Surrey police failed to do the proper tests for weeks. Originally say it's natural causes, but then they make more tests and I remember going to this inquest, I think, down in Surrey, and when they make more tests, they find a trace of a chemical in his stomach which came from a poisonous plant. And it was too late by then to be sure he'd been poisoned. But I went to this inquest and there was a plant specialist from Cuba, Kew Gardens. Do you know Kew Gardens? Where just like the kind of world leading plant experts in this beautiful gardens in West London. And, you know, there was this possibility raised, it was this kind of. It's like something from Agatha Christie, this possibility of a rare plant poison being used against him. But it was hard to be sure. So there were all these deaths and we talked about others during the series. Nikolai Glushkov, who dies in London and it's made to look like suicide. So many. But then I guess 2018, that's the moment Russia does something as extraordinary in many ways as Litvinenko's radioactive poisoning in London, when it uses nerve agent to target former GRU officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. But I think that, as they say, may be another story which we should do another time, because it's worthy in its own right.
- [42:25]
A
That is very much its own series, isn't it? Because that's a. It is. In many ways, it. It rhymes, I think, with the lit Franco story, doesn't it? Very similar themes throughout, but a very. A very different story. What does Maria. You. You know her a bit, Gordon. I mean, as we come to the end of this, you've talked about the, you know, the weak UK response, this string of other murders that are associated with the case connected to Russian poisoning in some way. But where does. I'm curious, where does. What does Marina think? Marina Lindfeng Now, 20, 20 years on, you know, does she feel that some measure of justice has been served with the inquiry? Is she still fighting on? Where is she in all this these days?
- [43:09]
B
I think the inquiry. The inquiry is. Is very important because it was the moment where the finger was pointed, because you go back to that deathbed state statement from her husband and it was, Putin did this. You know, one thing is to say, koftuna lugovoy, that's fine, but it was Putin. And I think finally to have an inquiry say that and say it was Putin, I think that was really important for her. It's interesting, though, because she continues to talk and, you know, write about this, and I do think, you know, part of the problem was that the. The weak response to the murder and then to the inquiry did effectively fail to deter the Russians. And it's only after Salisbury, and we'll talk about this in detail, that the UK actually finally gets its act together and really takes tough action against Russia. Only then and then that potentially acts as a deterrent. But I do think the failure to act sufficiently strongly about Litvinenko, it leads us to Salisbury. There is such a direct line. I mean, I saw Marina when. I see. I saw her a couple of weeks ago, and we were actually at an event to do with Oleg Gordievsky. And it was. And it was interesting because we were talking about Oleg and people were there from Oleg's family, and Oleg at one point had thought he might have been poisoned, actually. Now, whether he was or wasn't, it's not clear, but he was living under relatively little protection, relatively little security. And it was only after Salisbury in 2018 that suddenly people take this threat seriously and suddenly there are more cameras and, you know, around his house. I think, you know, there was a. Yeah, there was a failure there. I think there was a failure, really. And that's one of the important lessons of Litvinenko, I think, is the need to not sidestep, but confront what Russia is willing to do.
- [44:58]
A
As sad as it is to say, we'll be returning to the topic of Russian poisonings at some point in the future when we do talk about Sergei Skripal and Salisbury. Thank you listeners, one and all, for joining us on this in this adventure. As always, don't hesitate to go sign up Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com where you get early access to series like this, access to bonus episodes, a whole bunch of other goodies, and do book
- [45:26]
B
those tickets for the the live show 4th and 5th of September at the south bank in London. But otherwise, see you next time.
- [45:34]
A
We'll see you next time.
- [45:39]
D
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C
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