Murder cases don’t come much more bizarre than the one that preoccupied me
during the winter of 2006-07 — the slow, agonising death of the Russian
dissident Alexander Litvinenko.
Little more than a year before Mr Litvinenko’s death, I had been summoned to
give a secret security briefing to President Vladimir Putin on the July 2005
London bombings.
I decided it would be useful for President Putin to see the mock-up of one of
the 7/7 bombs. It was reconstructed exactly like the original bombs, albeit
without explosive. On Wednesday October 5, 2005, I carried it in a rucksack
like the ones the bombers had used. Such was the sensitivity of the meeting
that Tony Blair decided it should be held in the room where we normally met
for the Cobra sessions.
It was one of the few times a foreign leader had been allowed into this cellar
in the bowels of Whitehall; I read that as a sign of the Prime Minister’s
commitment to a close partnership, even friendship, with the Russians.
Eliza Manningham Buller, the head of MI5, and I were first to arrive. I had
brought my rucksack, and sat there, the dummy bomb beside me on the floor.
The Prime Minister swept in with President Putin — I was surprised to see
how short he was — and a team of advisers and translators.
Mr Putin was immaculately dressed and courteous, though he wore a steely
expression that eased only once during the meeting. Mr Blair opened with his
view on the security situation, then Eliza and I had our say, with me
explaining the rucksack and the bomb, before the conversation opened up.
The Russians were impassive — not unfriendly, more ungiving. Mr Putin asked a
series of questions. Thirty or forty minutes into the meeting he began to
speak about the horrific siege by Chechen rebels at a school in Beslan a
year earlier. They had wired up a hall with explosives. When Russian troops
stormed it, the Chechens shot the children randomly; 396 people died, mainly
the children.
As Mr Putin talked, his demeanour changed. He never lost his composure, but
his face showed expression and emotion and his vocabulary became more
colourful as he relived the events.
I thought it had been a good meeting. But in November 2006 I found myself
looking back on it with bewilderment as Russia and Britain headed towards a
Cold War stand-off.
The torturously slow murder of Mr Litvinenko was at the heart of the freeze.
He was a former KGB spy, who spent his career fighting terrorism and crime
but broke cover in 1998, accusing his bosses of ordering him to assassinate
a billionaire Russian businessman. He fled to the UK, where he was granted
political asylum. Here he rubbed shoulders with some of the fiercest critics
of President Putin.
The other key character in this story is Andrei Lugovoi who had been a KGB
bodyguard before becoming a wealthy businessman in Russia. He was firmly in
the Putin camp.
On November 1, 2006 the pair met in the bar at the Millennium Hotel in
Mayfair. The next day Mr Litvinenko felt ill and was rushed to o hospital.
At 6am on November 23, 2006, I was woken by a call on my mobile from one of
our overnight investigators. Mr Litvinenko was dying and a Cobra meeting had
been set for 8am. I headed straight for the Yard and a 6.30am meeting with
Peter Clarke, head of Counter-terrorism Command. We put together a team of
five people who were happy to be available 24/7 throughout the
investigation. By 7.15am they were in my office.
“This guy was unwell,” I began. “He goes to Outpatients at Barnet General
Hospital where he’s made to vomit, but it doesn’t stop. He’s eventually
admitted and transferred to a special unit at University College Hospital.
Doctors suspect leukaemia but the patient claims he’s been poisoned.
“When we took over the inquiry the samples of poison found in Litvinenko had
been sent for specialist testing. The scientists think it’s polonium-210, a
highly dangerous, very unusual radioactive material.”
At Cobra, Peter did the police briefing. There were three main crime scenes
where radioactive traces had been found — the Millennium Hotel, an Itsu
sushi bar, which Mr Litvinenko had also visited that day, and his home in
North London. Traces had also been found in the vehicle that took him to
hospital.
The problem of his body was raised. It would be toxic, too hazardous to hold a
post-mortem examination.
At 1pm, John Reid, the Home Secretary, called another Cobra meeting. We had
pulled our teams out of the scenes of crime; we had no idea if they would be
contaminated and how dangerous that would be. Instead we sent in
radiological experts from the Atomic Weapons Establishment.
That evening Alexander Litvinenko died. Over the following days we had
briefings, Cobra meetings and Whitehall confrontations. I was frustrated
that we couldn’t follow lines of inquiry as we wanted to because we lacked
information on what we were handling.
We didn’t know if it was safe for our scientific teams to go into the affected
locations, so they didn’t at first. We didn’t know if it was safe for our
detectives to speak to Mr Litvinenko’s wife without being contaminated. And
at first I had no advice on what I could tell the hard-working officers who
had sat day and night by his bedside.
I remember being told that all those who’d been anywhere Litvinenko had been
were likely to have serious health consequences in the future. Twenty-four
hours later that judgment was reversed when the health authorities changed
their view.
By December 4, 2006, five weeks after Mr Litvinenko had been poisoned and two
weeks after he’d died, we were still searching a huge number of places in
London.
The Russian connection had become very strong. I wanted to send
counter-terrorism officers to Moscow. Nine of our officers were briefed by
MI5 and MI6 and warned never to let their guard down on Russian soil.
Moscow, meanwhile, was talking of sending police to the UK. Then our officers
finally got to interview Mr Lugovoi — with Russian officials sitting in. He
claimed that he’d been framed and was a scapegoat, that he was a victim
because he, too, was contaminated, that Mr Litvinenko had been a British spy
and had tried to recruit him. He even suggested that the British authorities
were behind the poisoning.
On January 31, 2007 we handed our file to the Crown Prosecution Service. We
had managed to produce strong evidence, despite the complexities. And we’d
put our case together in a very short time.
Four months later, Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions,
announced that Mr Lugovoi should face trial. Our next objective was to get
Lugovoi into the country.
I remember saying to someone from MI6: “There will be an occasion when Lugovoi
wants or needs to come to the UK. The moment he steps on UK soil we’ll nab
him.”
The person I was speaking to had spent years on the Russian desk. He looked
over his glasses and said to me: “I admire your enthusiasm Andy, but you’ve
got no chance of ever speaking with Lugovoi again in the UK.”
