My contact, a former intelligence officer, said he had a clandestine secret
service facility to show me. He instructed my driver to take a circuitous
route through the wintry Moscow backstreets and we eventually emerged into a
nondescript street with low-rise stuccoed buildings on either side. None had
nameplates but one had police guards at the gate.
This, he said, was Laboratory 12. And this was what connected the death of
Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London last November, to his former
comrades in the Russian secret police.
Laboratory 12 or Kamera (the Room) was set up in 1921 by the Soviet secret
service to develop trace-less poisons that would not be evident in an
autopsy. The location of this clandestine poison factory is known to few
people. As we drove, my contact told me he had worked briefly in the
research department and assured me its activities were continuing. Among the
victims he spoke of was Viktor Yushchenko, the anti-Kremlin Ukrainian
president attacked with dioxin to try to stop his election.
Then he mentioned Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was unsuccessfully
poisoned before she was shot, and a Russian MP, Yuri Shchekochikhin, who
died from suspected radiation poisoning.
Both had been investigating alleged Russian secret service involvement in
terrorist bombings of apartment blocks in Moscow and other cities in 1999.
These are widely recognised as the outrage that catapulted Vladimir Putin
from obscure secret police chief to hardline Russian president. From exile,
Litvinenko had directly accused him of ordering the explosions.
My contact also pointed to the case of Roman Tsepov, a former member of the
security services who had acted as bodyguard briefly to Putin before he
became president. Tsepov, who had links to crime groups, at first suffered
violent vomiting and diarrhoea. His white blood cell count began to decline,
his hair fell out and his immune system failed. The skin on his face, lips
and tongue began to blister and his bone marrow was destroyed. Just like
Litvinenko, he died of cardiac arrest caused by massive toxic shock.
Tsepov’s post-mortem showed alpha radiation many times higher than a lethal
dose — as Litvinenko’s did.
My contact said the Tsepov case showed enough similarities to suggest that
polonium, which killed Litvinenko, had been used and that it may have gone
undetected in many other murders. He argued that this linked Litvinenko’s
agonising death to the KGB — or FSB as it is officially known in
postcommunist Russia.
Was he right? The more I probed, the more I was becoming convinced that
Litvinenko had been poisoned by a group of people independent of the Kremlin
but with close connections to the Russian security forces.
The sophisticated planning behind the plot and the evidence of the poison
factory strongly suggested an FSB-style operation. This did not necessarily
mean the FSB had been acting in its own interests or on its own initiative;
the security forces were so fragmented and out of control in the years
following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that individuals and
groups within them were constantly taking on moonlighting jobs on behalf of
paying customers.
Today’s security agencies are not homogeneous; they are composed of people
with widely differing interests, and neither the director of the FSB nor
Putin nor any other Kremlin leader can be sure he controls them all (or even
knows what they are getting up to).
I was shown a letter smuggled out of prison from Mikhail Trepashkin, a former
FSB legal specialist who fell out with the service. He was framed on an arms
charge after becoming an ally of Litvinenko and working as a lawyer for
families of some of those killed in the apartment bombings.
The letter harked back to an unprecedented act of public defiance that
Litvinenko organised nine years ago after he and five other officers in an
FSB hit squad, known as URPO, had been ordered to assassinate Boris
Berezovsky, the immensely powerful Russian billionaire.
Far from killing him, Litvinenko had alerted Berezovsky and, at his behest,
had dragooned the URPO men into denouncing the assassination order at a
press conference. The act of rebellion was quickly crushed and led
ultimately to Litvinenko’s flight to London — and Berezovsky’s.
Litvinenko left a legacy of seething anger not only among the superiors he had
denounced but among the URPO officers who believed he had destroyed their
careers — and almost their lives — by dragging them into his revolt.
In his prison letter Trepashkin says he alerted the exiled Litvinenko that his
life was in danger after meeting one of these officers, Viktor Shebalin, a
name that figures prominently in this story.
“I warned Alexander Litvinenko about the creation back in 2002 of a group for
his destruction . . . In August 2002 I reported about a meeting I had near
the Kitay-Gorod metro station [in Moscow] with former URPO officer Mr VV
Shebalin, at his request. At that meeting he declared that he was once again
working for the FSB and that ‘a very serious group’ had been created to
‘f*** everybody connected with Berezovsky and Litvinenko’. He told me that
if I agreed to drop my interest in the 1999 apartment bombings and started
cooperating with the group, I would be ‘left in peace’ . . . I replied that
I can’t stomach violence, especially murder.”
Trepashkin says Shebalin threatened him with violence or arrest if he did not
help in the plot to kill Litvinenko by providing intelligence about the
exiled agent and his family.
“He asked me to check out Litvinenko: find out where he works, his pattern of
movements, his regular meeting places. He asked me to get details of the
book he was writing. It was obvious to me that they wanted to send one
person in advance to check out his whereabouts, and then the group would
follow. Getting access to radioactive material would have been no problem
for FSB officers.
“I told Shebalin, ‘Forget about Litvinenko! He’s in London. And enough with
all these dirty settlings of personal accounts!’ That spineless coward
Shebalin . . . had thrown himself at the feet of the sleazy FSB bosses and
offered to work as an agent provocateur and false witness against Litvinenko
and his circle. They took the bastard! He saved his skin. And he got into
the group that was scheming to destroy both Litvinenko and his supporters.”
The Scotland Yard officers who went to Moscow last December to investigate
Litvinenko’s death were refused permission to speak to Trepashkin. The
Russian prosecutor contended that he was a criminal. Nonetheless, the
policemen obtained several letters from him smuggled out of prison, which
were certified authentic by his friends and relatives.
In them, he gives details of how he believ es the FSB had been preparing him
for the still unexplained role that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun played
in Litvinenko’s last days. These men, both former FSB officers, met
Litvinenko on the day he was poisoned and left a trail of polonium around
London. They are now in Moscow, refusing to return to Britain.
“I do not believe that the murder was done on their own initiative,” he wrote.
“As I understood it, the initiative was coming from another group within the
FSB, whose creation had been sanctioned at the very highest level. The group
includes both active and former members of the FSB.”
Trepashkin’s letters alleged that a unit in Russia’s foreign
counter-intelligence agency, the Vneshnya Kontr-Razvedka (VKR), had been
developing poisons to use against targets abroad.
“Already in 1994 certain of the officers of the VKR were sneaking these
poisons out from development sites and were attempting to sell them to
businessmen they knew for the elimination of competitors.
“These poisons do not leave traces in the organism. Most often, autopsy
results list cardiac failure as the cause of death. The poison is usually
applied by aerosol or with a brush to the steering wheel and door handles of
an automobile, in a place where an air-conditioner is working, on telephone
receivers and so forth.”
He added: “It cannot be ruled out that such poisons have been used for the
murder of AV Litvinenko . . . As far back as 2001 I was asked by the FSB to
phone Litvinenko in London and find out if he was writing a book. I learnt
that he was currently working as a postman. A little while later I was told
it was being considered to send him a letter with poison.”
Trepashkin was convinced the FSB was seeking revenge for his whistleblowing
press conference of 1998. “They started to strangle everyone involved with
the 17 November 1998 press conference, to get rid of them like so much
unneeded waste . . . They decided to destroy me slowly, placing me in
conditions that are dangerous for my health and my life. But Alexander,
because he was abroad, they decided to destroy quickly.”
Trepashkin has an axe to grind; but he has also worked within the FSB and seen
it in operation. And his warnings are corroborated.
As far back as 2000 Shebalin had warned in the columns of the international
press: “Litvinenko, you had better come back and give yourself up. You have
no other way out . . . Let me make it clear: we do not forgive traitors!”
Alexander Gusak, another of the reluctant whistleblowers, who had been
Litvinenko’s boss in the URPO execution unit, had denounced him for the
ultimate crime of betraying fellow agents to the enemy, as well as revealing
that current and retired FSB men were volunteering to murder him.
Litvinenko received from Mario Scaramella, an Italian he met on the day he was
poisoned, an e-mailed warning from a former FSB agent that the Dignity and
Honour organisation of ex-FSB and KGB officers was planning to kill both him
and Berezovsky.
The accumulated weight of evidence is overwhelming. Elements among
Litvinenko’s former colleagues in the FSB had not for a moment ceased to
plot against him, and on November 1 last year they got him.
What can be said with equal certainty is that it was an operation long in the
planning. Lugovoi first contacted Litvinenko at the end of 2005, setting up
a business relationship that served as a reason for his and Kovtun’s visits
leading to the final encounter on November 1 in the Pine Bar of the
Millennium hotel.
Indeed, the subterfuge may go back further. Back in 2001 he had been jailed
for allegedly taking part in a botched operation to help Berezovsky’s jailed
business partner escape from Lefortovo prison in Moscow. He was released
soon afterward and became a successful businessman.
If the aim was to infiltrate him as a double agent into the Berezovsky camp,
it means Lugovoi then spent five years or more as a “sleeper”, gaining the
confidence of the enemy before carrying out his long-planned mission.
As well as being long planned, the Litvinenko operation looked to have had the
backing of a powerful organisation with access to such esoteric resources as
polonium. And once again the evidence points to serving or former FSB
officers.
Lugovoi himself has no explanation for his and Kovtun’s polonium contamination
except to suggest it might have come from contact with Litvinenko. In an
interview with the newspaper Izvestiya he claimed that polonium is often
used by police and other agencies to tag counterfeit money and drugs, and
suggested Litvinenko could have been poisoned as a result of his own
criminal activities.
It is an ingenious explanation but unfortunately fails to account for the fact
that Lugovoi and Kovtun were contaminated long before they met Litvinenko on
November 1.
Lugovoi is an intriguing figure. He is independently wealthy yet seems to have
been persuaded, or compelled, to take part in a tremendously difficult
mission in a foreign country. A Russian businessman with a thriving wine and
spirits factory to think about would never voluntarily have established
links with a derided traitor.
Taking part in the Litvinenko operation clearly put Lugovoi’s own health at
risk and his role left him exposed to the public eye. Just why he agreed to
take part is open to speculation, but that he did seems to reflect the
ability of the security services in Russia to command loyalty through
idealism, encouragement or possibly coercion.
I had talked to Lugovoi through intermediaries several times before I flew to
Moscow. He and his assistants had been polite, helpful and informative. In
Moscow, however, he seemed more fraught. When I called him to set up our
meeting he quickly launched into a diatribe against the British press. Then
he turned his wrath against Scotland Yard. “You know, they interrogated my
wife for nine hours without a break. My wife! Nine hours!”
He suggested he still could not give a definitive answer as to whether he
would be able to meet me. My next question, asking if this was really a
decision he could make for himself or if he was waiting for someone else to
make it for him, threw him into a towering rage.
“What are you saying? Are you asking if . . . ? Who decides? You what? Are you
saying the FSB or something . . . that’s an outright provocation.
“You know what? I’m not going to have any meeting. I’m sorry; I’m busy.” And
he hung up the phone.
© Martin Sixsmith 2007
Extracted from The Litvinenko File, by Martin Sixsmith, published by Macmillan
at £16.99. It is available for £15.49 including postage from The Sunday
Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Good for you Sergey! I agree!
I'm surprised by the fact that a Russian would actually show a foreigner the whereabouts of such a secret laboratory without knowing his life would end doing so.
Don't leave Berezovsky out of this one guys! The Mafia can do many more things even the FSB couldn't get away with.
John, Saint Joseph, USA / Michigan
Don't you think its about time someone has questioned the validity of the sources all these "investigators" are using? Seems like all of them are being fed various fantasies by John Le Carre wannabies.
Number One: Vneshnya Kontr-Razvedka is an oxymoron. Ask anyone with a knowledge of a Russian language and at least a breif understanding what Intelligence services do.
Number Two: Yuschenko was NOT poisoned. The rumour has it his face bears the fruits of a botox procedure gone wrong. How is that for a conspiracy theory.
Give it a rest already.
Sergey, London,
absurd!
why Litvinenko just hadn't been stabbed in the neck? It would be much cheeper and easyer.
Who is gainig profit from this horrible story of his death?
Dmitry, Moscow, Russia