A Very Expensive Poison (10 page)

Afterwards, the three Russians took a taxi to Chinatown and went for dinner. Nothing happened to Litvinenko’s tea. Lugovoi paid the bill on his card and they went on to a pub.

Recollecting their conversation, Litvinenko said: ‘They found a place in a corner, ordered some beer and started to order for me. But I said, no, guys, I can’t stay in such dirty places like that.’ Litvinenko told the police he didn’t like the noise or ‘the prostitutes’. He took the 134 bus home.

About 11.30 p.m. Lugovoi rang Litvinenko to say that he was missing out on fun times. He said that he and Kovtun had hired a rickshaw and that they were going on an hour-long joyride through central London – two off-duty assassins enjoying themselves amid the bright lights of Soho. They trundled past red double-decker buses, crowded bars, West End theatreland. Their rickshaw driver was Polish. He spoke ‘not bad’ Russian. It
appears they asked again about girls. The driver recommended a private members’ place in Jermyn Street popular with big-spending Russians.

This was Hey Jo’s, an erotic club founded in 2005 by a former fruit-and-veg stall owner from Essex called Dave West. It featured mirrored walls, frilly pink cubicles, waitresses dressed as naughty nurses, and a bronze phallus. There was a dance-floor and a Russian-themed restaurant, Abracadabra, with silver tables. The bordello theme extended to the bathrooms, where water spouted from penis-shaped gold taps.

Lugovoi and Kovtun spent two hours at Hey Jo’s, leaving at 3 a.m. Detectives were able to piece together where they’d been. They found traces of radiation in cubicle nine – on the backrest and cushions. There were low levels on a bench, a table in the restaurant, and on a door in the gents’. No polonium was found on the phallus, also tested. The floor was clean. Apparently the men from the KGB didn’t dance.

Even in these promising surroundings, their side-mission to pick up women was unfruitful. The next morning, checking out of the Parkes Hotel for the flight back to Moscow, Rondini asked Lugovoi how they had got on.

His reply was uncharacteristically honest. ‘We were not lucky that night,’ he told her.

Lugovoi’s conversations back in Moscow following his first unsuccessful attempt to poison Litvinenko can only be imagined. In short, he had failed. ‘Probably the chief yelled at them and said they weren’t good enough. It
meant they had to go back and get another vial [of polonium],’ Goldfarb suggested.

The upshot was that within days Lugovoi returned to the UK, this time alone, taking with him another container of radioactive poison. He flew on 25 October from Moscow to London, on British Airways flight 875. He sat in business class, seat 6K. He arrived shortly after midnight at the Sheraton Park Lane, a grandly positioned hotel overlooking Piccadilly, with a frontage of black classical pillars. Inside, the hotel was rather worn. Lugovoi stayed in room 848, on the eighth floor.

After six years in Britain, Litvinenko was careful about security. He was
akkuratny
– a Russian word meaning neat, careful, punctual, exact, thorough. As a former FSB officer he practised good operational security. He didn’t discuss sensitive matters on the telephone. He told Quirke that he was concerned about London, describing it as such an open city and a place where people from Russia can come and do anything they want.

Despite these precautions and the litany of death threats in the past, Litvinenko trusted Lugovoi, who had now returned for a second time to kill him. Why?

For one thing, there was a sense of shared history. Both were ex-KGB. Both, seemingly, had spent time in Russian jails on false charges, victims of state injustice. In 2001, Lugovoi served eighteen months behind bars after apparently trying to free Berezovsky’s friend Nikolai Glushkov from jail. Glushkov was later released and fled to the UK in 2005. The Russian authorities had accused him and Berezovsky of embezzling funds from Aeroflot.

Glushkov was never convinced that Lugovoi actually went to prison. It’s an open question when precisely he began cooperating with the FSB. Some believe it was as early as 2001 at the time of his dubious ‘jailing’, and that the spy agency gave him a long-term mission to penetrate enemy circles in London. Others think that Lugovoi was forced to turn assassin after the Kremlin got hold of Litvinenko’s Ivanov report in the autumn of 2006.

Certainly other compatriots trusted Lugovoi. The morning after his return to London, Lugovoi set off in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to an estate near Leatherhead, Surrey. His driver, Bruno Bonnetti, remembers him sitting on the back seat, talking in Russian on his mobile. They pulled up outside a palatial home; an iron security gate swung open. A tall man with a white moustache wearing a jogging suit, and in his early fifties, appeared. The man embraced Lugovoi. This was Badri Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian billionaire and associate of Berezovsky who had assisted in Litvinenko’s escape. Nearby, another chauffeur was washing the oligarch’s Maybach car.

Patarkatsishvili had hired Lugovoi in the 1990s to be head of security at his ORT TV channel. According to his friend Yuli Dubov, the Georgian later loaned Lugovoi $7 million. Generally speaking, the tycoon thought that ex-FSB officers made bad businessmen. Nonetheless, Patarkatsishvili told police that Lugovoi was a nice bloke, hard-working, a good employee. Lugovoi and Patarkatsishvili talked for some hours, sitting at the bottom of the garden in the gazebo. Lugovoi tried to persuade
Patarkatsishvili to come in as an investor in a new water business. He declined.

‘Badri never liked slaves,’ Dubov said, reflecting on Lugovoi’s charm. ‘Lugovoi was a very good guy, nicelooking and nice-talking. He gave the impression of being absolutely on the level, straightforward, one of us.’

Undoubtedly, Patarkatsishvili thought more favourably of Lugovoi than he did of Litvinenko – someone, in his view, ‘who had crazy ideas about Russian politics’ and who was ‘obsessed by the FSB’, as a result of his unhappy career. The police later impounded Lugovoi’s radioactive Mercedes.

On his return from Surrey, Lugovoi met Litvinenko in his hotel. They sat in the ground-floor Palm Court, an afternoon tea room furnished in high art deco style, with Chinese screen paintings, vases and lamps. Litvinenko produced two Orange SIM cards so that he and Lugovoi had a secure way of communicating. As ever, Litvinenko drank tea, from a silver teapot. Lugovoi ordered three glasses of red wine and a Cuban cigar.

According to Lugovoi, Litvinenko revealed here that he worked for Spanish intelligence. He suggested that Lugovoi accompany him the next month on a joint trip to Spain. In Madrid they’d meet Litvinenko’s Russian-speaking Spanish handler, Jorge. It’s unclear if Litvinenko was acting under MI6’s direction here or simply wanted to present Lugovoi to his Spanish contacts as a useful Moscow-based source.

Litvinenko also had another important appointment. He was due on 8 November to meet Grinda,
the Spanish public prosecutor. It would be their first encounter. All Litvinenko’s previous dealings had been with the Spanish secret service, which fed evidence to his prosecutors.

For Litvinenko, this was a serious escalation in his war with the Kremlin. It meant he was willing to testify in open court about the activities of the Russian mafia – and its friends in government. It’s unclear when Lugovoi learned of the planned meeting. According to Goldfarb, it may have triggered Moscow’s frantic efforts to kill Litvinenko, and to silence him as a witness. ‘That gives you a motive,’ Goldfarb said. Grinda was more circumspect, later saying he didn’t believe it was the cause.

Either way, this was the moment for Lugovoi to poison Litvinenko again. For unknown reasons, Lugovoi failed to deploy the latest vial of polonium he had brought. One possible explanation is that the Palm Court bar had video cameras, which Lugovoi would have seen. Or perhaps he suspected he was being watched. Did the British have him under counter-surveillance? (The answer – no.) It’s possible he had got fresh orders from Moscow. Either way, Lugovoi decided to abort the operation.

This left him with a problem: what to do with the poison?

Lugovoi’s solution was simple. In his hotel room he tipped the polonium away down the bathroom sink again, this time mopping it up with a couple of towels. He left the towels for the cleaner. And he appeared to have dumped the container in the white pedal bin next to the lavatory.

When scientists later tested Lugovoi’s hotel room on the eighth floor they walked into a scene from an atomic horror story. The door to Lugovoi’s room was highly contaminated. It showed full-scale deflection and a reading of more than 30,000 counts per second. Inside, there was further contamination – on the carpet, guest directory, and telephone book in a cupboard.

The situation in the bathroom, white-painted and with a tiled floor, was even worse. The inside of the pedal bin registered another full-scale deflection, with 30,000-plus. There was radiation everywhere: on the wall under the sink, the floor and bath, plus another massive reading from the bathroom door.

The two scientists wearing protective gear gazed at their instruments incredulously. They asked to be withdrawn from the room. The team was stood down on safety grounds.

Amazingly, two months later, detectives located the towels that Lugovoi had chucked away. They had ended up stuck in a laundry chute in the hotel’s basement. A three-foot-by-three-foot metal service tube ran the full height of the building. At its bottom was a mountain of unwashed sheets and towels.

Lugovoi’s bath towel was found in a green laundry bag on a shelf. His hand towel was discovered at the base of the chute.

The levels of radiation were so alarming that the towels were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the UK government nuclear facility. The contamination was massive. The bath towel gave a reading
of 6,000 counts per second, or 130,000 becquerels per square centimetre. (The unit of radioactivity is named after Henri Becquerel, the French physicist who shared a Nobel prize with Marie and Pierre Curie.)

The most extreme object, though, was Lugovoi’s white hand towel. The initial reading came in as full-scale deflection, greater than 10,000 counts per second. Retested at Aldermaston, it yielded an astonishing result: in excess of 17 million becquerels per square centimetre. To give an idea of context, the equivalent of 10–30 million becquerels absorbed into an adult male’s blood would be likely to be fatal within one month.

The towel was the single most radioactive object recovered by Scotland Yard during its decade-long inquiry. Probably the most radioactive towel in history.

Dmitry Kovtun had big dreams. Dreams of a better life in the west, of a well-paying job, of a successful career. One day the fantasy took the shape of a vodka factory. Kovtun would be the owner. The factory would be based in Moscow. It would produce vodka with a new and revolutionary type of seal! Another dream was rather more saucy. Kovtun would star in movies. Not just any old movies: specifically, porn movies, with Kovtun playing the role of the stud. Or soft-core magazines. The sex industry would bring him cash, lots of it, maybe fame as well.

Somehow, though, reality never quite matched up to Kovtun’s expectations of it. For him, at least, it was a disappointment. The glamorous career never quite materialised. He didn’t get the breaks. The same could not be said for his silver-tongued friend Andrei Lugovoi. Everything Lugovoi touched turned to gold. But perhaps some of Lugovoi’s good fortune might rub off on him?

Kovtun first met Lugovoi in 1978 or 1979. The boys grew up in the same building where his family and
Lugovoi’s family had been granted flats at the same time. ‘Our fathers were friends and worked together at the army general HQ of the USSR armed forces,’ Kovtun said. ‘We were pupils at different schools – I am one year older than Lugovoi – but we spent a great deal of time together as children, visited each other, exchanged books.’

The two families had a shared military story. Kovtun’s father Vadim was a high-ranking officer. (His mother, who lives in Moscow, is a vet.) Lugovoi’s family had a record stretching back to the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. Lugovoi’s father was a colonel in the Soviet army; his grandfather fought with the Red Army against the Nazis in the battle for Berlin in 1945. A brother worked on Russian nuclear submarines. Lugovoi would make much of this patriotic tradition.

It was inevitable that Kovtun and Lugovoi would don uniforms too. In 1982, Kovtun joined an elite Soviet military command academy in Moscow; Lugovoi followed the next year. ‘We saw each other regularly and associated on friendly terms while studying there,’ Kovtun said. He was trained as an engineer for wheeled and tracked vehicles; a practical course took him to Murmansk
oblast
in Russia’s frozen north; a few old snaps show him there in the sub-arctic.

In 1986, Kovtun graduated as second lieutenant. He was sent to Czechoslovakia and then to Parchim, a town with a large Soviet airfield surrounded by the countryside and forests of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in East Germany. Times were changing, though. Back home, Mikhail Gorbachev was trying to reform a tottering
USSR. Lugovoi had stayed in Moscow and got a job as a Kremlin bodyguard with the KGB’s ninth directorate. As ever, his assignment was starrier than Kovtun’s.

When the Berlin Wall came down Kovtun was stuck in Parchim, seemingly on the wrong side of history as the communist bloc fell apart. In 1990, he began dating a Russian girl from home, Inne Hohne; they’d met at a Moscow hotel while he was back on leave. In 1991, they married in Russia. Inne, together with her young daughter from a previous relationship, moved with Kovtun to East Germany.

Two months later, Kovtun’s unit received bad news. He and his comrades were being transferred back to Russia’s Caucasus. The north Caucasus was the most explosive corner of what was now the new Russian Federation: the scene of wars and skirmishes between Russian troops and a restive Muslim population since the time of the young Tolstoy and the early years of the nineteenth century. (Three years later, in 1994, Boris Yeltsin pulled the trigger on what would become the first Chechen War.)

Inne told her husband she wasn’t going to Chechnya. She wanted to stay in Germany. Kovtun didn’t fancy fighting either. They came up with a plan. He would desert! They would escape together to West Germany and claim political asylum there. They would start a new life.

Escaping the Russian base turned out to be simple. According to Inne: ‘We packed our things one night and crept out of the barracks, through the fence.’ They took a taxi to Hamburg, driving through the dark. They spent the night at a police station. The next morning they were
taken to the aliens’ department. About twenty-five officers from the same Soviet military group also ran away from military camp, though at different times.

Back in Russia, the authorities started criminal proceedings against Kovtun for desertion.

The Germans accepted Kovtun’s asylum claim and placed him temporarily on a boat in Hamburg. Germany’s second biggest city was a temple of post-war prosperity, with a port, a proud mercantilist tradition and a laidback and cosmopolitan sensibility more British than German. It was in Hamburg that John le Carré – then a British intelligence officer – wrote the novel that made him famous,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
. Kovtun and his wife found themselves living in an asylum seekers’ hostel in Blankenese, an affluent district in the west of the city, with large villas, some of them overlooking the right bank of the Elbe.

The hostel was in Björnsonweg, a quiet suburban street named after Norway’s national bard, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It passes an old municipal waterworks – there’s a sign in art deco letters – and ends in a small forest. According to neighbours there were two hostels here, one home to Africans, the other to asylum seekers from the Middle East and elsewhere. (The street was well-named: as well as being a poet and playwright, Bjørnson was a public intellectual involved in the struggle for freedom of expression and against racism.)

Kovtun had made it to the west but his marriage didn’t survive the transition. According to Inne, Dmitry was a feckless husband. He had, she said, a major drink problem.

Contacted by German police in 2006 out of the blue, a decade and a half after severing all ties with Kovtun, Inne Hohne paints a singularly unflattering picture of her first husband. Their marriage was brief, she said, and something of a disaster. At the beginning of 1992, they split because of what she called his ‘escalating drunkenness’.

She told detectives: ‘He drank a lot, which was eventually the reason for our separation, and in addition he hung about in Hamburg and on the Reeperbahn.’ In addition: ‘Dmitry wanted to be a porn star.’

The Reeperbahn where Kovtun spent his days was the city’s red-light district. The area in St Pauli had grown up to serve the needs of sailors visiting the port. In the pre-internet 1990s it was a street of peep shows, live sex acts and cinema booths, where you could toss a Deutschmark into a slot and view a minute of porn. The unknown Beatles played their first gigs here. Today, the Reeperbahn is more of a cuddly tourist destination than a house of sin. The last live sex theatre has closed; the sex shops are mostly gone; Andrew Lloyd Webber’s tame
Cats
was a fixture in its musical theatre.

Hohne was stupefied by the suggestion that her former husband would be involved in espionage or covert Russian intelligence work. ‘No, I cannot imagine that,’ she told police. He was, she said, temperamentally unsuited to complex projects of any kind. ‘He is not really the type for this, not the sort of person who does big deals or is suited in any way to this.’

Inne would characterise Kovtun as a dandy and one of life’s serial failures. ‘Dmitry is not particularly down
to earth, more a man about town,’ Inna would tell the police. ‘He had all sorts of dreams and plans, none of which he realised, however.’ Kovtun was ‘not a particularly reliable type of person’, she recalled.

In 1994, Kovtun began seeing a Russian-German woman, Marina Wall. She had moved after the Soviet collapse with her family from Siberia to Germany. They married in 1996. Wall had affluent connections; this may have been part of the attraction. Marina’s doctor mother Eleanora works in Hamburg as a psychotherapist in an upmarket clinic. Eleanora and her wealthy partner Hartmut Kohnke own a string of rental properties in the city, divided into small flats and let mainly to students. Kovtun was named as ‘main tenant’ in one of the properties owned by Kohnke’s firm, Garant.

Despite having rich German in-laws, Kovtun failed to become prosperous himself. According to Litvinenko, he complained bitterly about how stingy they were. Kovtun told Litvinenko: ‘I am interested in money and money alone in this life. Nothing else.’ Kovtun said that his tight-fisted in-laws owned a ‘super expensive clinic in the centre of Hamburg and over 200 items of property’. They had bought nothing for him, he moaned, apart from a couple of package tours with his wife Marina. Kovtun told Litvinenko he ‘lived like a pauper’.

This was largely true. Kovtun’s mother-in-law, who retained a soft spot for Dmitry even after he became embroiled in scandal, confirmed: ‘Money and he didn’t go together.’ The shiny position Kovtun had been hoping for didn’t present itself. For a period Kovtun was on the dole,
broke, and relying on German welfare handouts. Sometimes he picked up odd jobs. He worked as a refuse collector. He washed dishes in various Hamburg restaurants.

One of them was Il Porto. Il Porto was an Italian fish restaurant in Grosse Elbstrasse, in the heart of Hamburg’s waterfront tourist area, overlooking the Elbe and the city’s busy port. Opposite were the giant cranes of the German shipbuilder Blohm + Voss; from Il Porto’s pavement tables you could watch ships coming into harbour. Further west along the cobbled Elbstrasse is the Haifisch or Shark Bar, several old merchants’ houses and Hamburg’s 1960s-built commercial fish market. The restaurant occupied the ground floor of a renovated Jugendstil building. It had balconies and a mansard flat in the roof.

Kovtun worked at Il Porto between 1996 and 2001. The restaurant’s gregarious Italian owner Franco Schiavone employed him as assistant waiter. He wasn’t especially competent, but Shiavone liked him and kept him on. Kovtun’s German was poor. His main job was to collect the dirty plates.

Later Schiavone was a man with two stories – one he wanted to tell, and one he didn’t. Of Kovtun, he merely said: ‘I want to forget Dmitry.’ Schiavone was far happier talking about his own life and colourful career. As a young man in the swinging sixties he worked at La Dolce Vita restaurant in Soho, London, as well as in Swansea. He was a waiter in Paris and in Cannes, where a friend would smuggle him into press conferences with Hollywood stars. In 1978 he moved to Hamburg and later
did a stint on a cruise liner. ‘My philosophy is, in life you have to keep moving,’ he told me.

Schiavone’s staff were international. His assistant waiter Kovtun was a Russian; his chef an Albanian. During this period Kovtun became friends with the Italian manager, who in the subsequent inquiry was referred to by the codename D3 in order to keep his anonymity. He would play a crucial role later in his story. D3 had hired Kovtun in 1996 when he turned up at Il Porto asking for a job. They played chess, and sometimes went for a beer after work. They kept in touch sporadically after D3 left Il Porto and moved on. ‘We talked about a lot of things,’ D3 said. Once, Kovtun gave D3 a present. It was a book on Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian political philosopher. A sign of Kovtun’s intellectual interests? Or a fitting choice from a future assassin?

Il Porto was a business success. But in 2001 Hamburg city gave permission for a large and charmless office block to be constructed directly in front of the harbour. It blocked the restaurant’s ‘Elbblick’ – its picturesque view of the Elbe – killing off his custom. Schiavone shut Il Porto. ‘I practically gave it away,’ he said. He opened up another establishment, La Vela, down the road.

Out of a job, Kovtun harboured dreams of running his own business. In 2002, he and Marina Wall came up with the idea of a consultancy firm, advising Russians or Russian companies looking to set up in Germany. According to Wall, however: ‘The business did not materialise.’ By this point Wall and Kovtun were drifting in opposite directions. At the end of the year they separated;
Kovtun stayed in her flat for a while, sleeping in a second bedroom. Wall met a new partner, a Pole, and became pregnant with their first child.

‘Dmitry could not sort himself out here. He did not find any work, he had been a high-ranking officer in Russia and could not prove himself here,’ Wall said. In 2003, after twelve years living in Germany, Kovtun decided to go back to Russia. During his absence the Kremlin had amnestied army deserters. His father had died in 1995; he moved back in with his mother. He was thirty-eight.

After the split, Kovtun remained on good terms with Marina, and with his German ex-mother-in-law, who lived with her partner in Haselau, a village 21 miles (35 km) north-west of Hamburg in Schleswig-Holstein. From time to time he would visit them. ‘Every woman finds Dmitry charming. It is just that he does not fancy working and he is not a family man,’ Wall said. ‘He is more a man about town. That is why we were not suited.’

And then suddenly, in 2005, as if by magic, Kovtun’s luck changed. He was back in touch with Lugovoi, his old friend from military school days. They were going into business together! While Kovtun had been scrubbing pots, Lugovoi had been accruing influence. And money. Lugovoi owned a security firm, Ninth Wave. He was providing bodyguards to VIPs. He had acquired a drinks factory too. Kovtun told Wall he was spending most of his time in Voronezh, doing vodka production with Lugovoi. They went cycling together,
puffing up the slopes of Dombay, a mountain resort in southern Russia.

Was this rekindled friendship with Lugovoi only about business? Or something else?

In July 2006, Kovtun called Wall and said he would be visiting Hamburg. She and Kovtun were getting divorced; Kovtun was due to attend a hearing on 9 August. In the end, he didn’t make it. He told her his new Russian passport wasn’t ready. He would come soon, he said – in the autumn.

The ostensible purpose of Kovtun’s trip to Hamburg at the end of October 2006 was to tidy up his affairs. Every six months he flew to Germany to get a stamp. Wall had made him an appointment at the city council’s aliens’ department in Hamburg’s Platz der Republik. This was a large rectangular neo-classical building, not far from where Il Porto used to be, with an equine statue of the German emperor William I in front of the entrance. Here Kovtun would get a German resident’s permit inserted into his new Russian Federation passport.