174. The Murder of Litvinenko: Did the British State Hide the Truth? (Ep 6)

18:01David:Well, clearly that Lugovoy and Kovtun 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 Kovtun 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.

18:42Gordon:Which I don't find surprising. I don't know about you, Gordon.

18:45David:No.

18:46Gordon: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?

18:57David: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 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 it.

19:33David:But also, I mean, let's be honest, it is implausible, isn't it, that this was a private hit? But I mean, 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. It doesn't make sense, does it?

19:51Gordon: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 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 get it from a state level nuclear program. So how do you explain it as anything other than a state orchestrated hit given the weapon?

20:40David:Because I think 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. It's not like the Brits are making tons of it.

21:20David: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.

21:51Gordon:What happens to Kovtun and Lukavoy afterwards? Because we left, I think we left them, but there was some frustration that they had been given a radioactive poison without knowing exactly what they had. But they're back in Russia. They seem to play ball with Russian efforts to stymie the investigation. And where do they end up when this is all said and done?

22:14David:Well, 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 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 Zirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, which is an extremist party, despite the name, a 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 i mean you know and it's not clear what what he gets his decorations for other than in 2015 by that point relations with the west of soured so putin is thinking i'll stick two fingers up at the west you know and give give lugovoy an honor i mean that's the only way I think you can explain it.

23:16David:Kovtun, weirdly, doesn't prosper so much. I mean, he kind of disappears.

23:20Gordon:Well, I guess this leads us to the biggest question, one of the biggest questions, which is, did Putin himself give the order? Because I always find this fascinating with other Russian assassinations, but there's always this question of, is the guy at the top responsible? but did he actually order it? Did he put something down on paper? Did he tell someone that he wanted Litvinenko killed? So I think there's this question of, where did the inquiry come down on the question of Putin's culpability?

23:50David: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, you know, rather than a piece of paper to someone, you know, you'd imagine Putin says to the head, to Patrashev, get rid of him. And Patrashev puts it in motion.

24:27David: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. It's a risky thing to do, isn't it? Don't you think?

24:42Gordon:I think if you're Patrushev 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? but let's say if you're Patriciova, 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 take care of this guy he won't be a problem for you anymore.

25:30Gordon:And Putin says, maybe he doesn't even say anything. He doesn't say no. He just doesn't say no. It could be very vague. But David, what is the British government's response to confirmation from this inquiry? I'm going to guess, I'm going to go, is nothing the right answer? Or are there more expulsions of low-level diplomats?

25:54David:I'm going to say pretty much nothing. I mean, I think there was some vague noises and maybe some vague noises. Someone grunted at a Russian diplomat afterward. 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've already started sanctioning people. It's post-2014. 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.

26:36David: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. What would you have done? I think I would have, at the very least, I'd have written a very angry letter.

27:01Gordon:A very, and you will know how angry we are with you by the time you're done reading this letter.

27:07David: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.

27:17Gordon:But then they just do the same thing back. You lose your insight.

27:22David:But you've got to do something. You've got to impose some costs. You could sanction Putin, some of the people around Putin. You could clamp down on some of the dirty money in London. Shock horror.

27:32Gordon:Yeah, you could do that. That would have been something you could have done.

27:36David:You could pass some legislation to make it easier. I just think that it was pretty feeble. It was pretty feeble.

27:42Gordon:You know what they should have done? poison the SVR resident in London.

27:48David:Give him diarrhea in the runs. Well, maybe more.

27:51Gordon:Maybe more. Well, you could do that, right? I mean, are you not allowed to do that? That could be legally challenging.

27:56David:I don't think we do that kind of thing, David.

27:59Gordon: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 it's not like the SVR resident in London means anything to Putin, but 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 Russian intelligence services, they are barbarians without limits or morals. This is the way he described the Russian security services to be. And it's so different from the sort of political and intelligence culture in Britain or in the US.

28:42David:just so it's so different 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 berazofsky himself Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have eczema, so I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about ebglis? Ebglis, lubricizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

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30:42Gordon: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 yeah what is the russian fascination with using poison as a murder weapon of its intelligence services. Because there's a long history of this, isn't there? The Litvinenko case is unfortunately not alone in Russian spy services using poisons to kill their opponents.

31:11David:And I think that is one of the other pieces of the puzzle which points to Russian state responsibility, is that 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 defects, reveals he's an assassin with a gun that fires cyanide pellets.

31:53David: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 killing exiles. 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

32:24Gordon:think wet jobs you know killings one reason why it's um potentially an interesting weapon i guess we saw that a bit in the the case with litvinenko is that the the time between administering the poison and that the victims seek the effects mean that the poisoners have time to flee the scene, right? You can 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 there is some value to the Russians in the theatrics of it. there's a theater to the poisoning that draws attention, certainly.

33:12Gordon: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 - 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 the... 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 they want dead.

33:58David:It's interesting because it does look like in the second half of the Cold War, the Russian security service of 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 georgie markov in london 1978 which the kgb supplies the ricin 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 and 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 khatab 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.

35:03David:And he ends up disfigured, I mean, by dioxin, his face disfigured, but he's alive. Anna Politskov-Kaya, the journalist we talked about, is poised 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 organised crime, allegedly. And in 2004, he falls ill with symptoms, hair loss, falling white blood cell count, vomiting, reports of radioactivity, all very similar to Litvinenko.

35:42David:And a Chechen guerrilla 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 the early 2000s within Russia, but then increasingly afterwards. And there is a stat that Putin has overseen more poisonings than any other Russian or Soviet leader.

36:20Gordon:We also talked throughout this series about the many people who are sort of floating around Litvinenko who are going to end up dead. And Boris Berezovsky, one of them, is going to be one of the major targets.

36:38David: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 you can sense that this is, you know, kind of get 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 is 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 luguboy and luguboy says give this t-shirt to Berezovsky and on the t-shirt it says Polonium 210 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 Lugavoy supports I mean that's kind of weird isn't it

38:20Gordon:is it a joke I don't know I mean the the fact that they were making merch around the assassination feels like kind of a grim chapeau detail at the end of this story. I mean, all we're doing is producing squirrel t-shirts, Gordon. Polonium 210, good grief.

38:43David:Yeah, and then Berezovsky himself gets into this massive court battle in London with his former protege, Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea Football Club and has 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 is 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.

39:20David:The judge, Mrs. Justice Gloucester, says she didn't trust him. um 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 Berezovsky himself certainly does because he's shocked by it he thought he was going to win he's now running out of money uh 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.

39:59David: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.

40:14Gordon: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 that the evidence was contradictory and had 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

40:44David:barizzovsky i mean that's the thing we know we know putin well we know we think putin had sent assassins to kill him he says allegedly in case mr putin wishes to sue me um or come after me um but um 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 barizzovsky 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.

41:24David:The money's running out, everything's over, he did it. But equally, I think there are definitely other people who think Putin killed him.

41:31Gordon:I wander onto the minefield of sort of ascribing logic and reason to Russian assassinations 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, but quite looks like he took his own life. 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 broken by the verdict of the case. And it's as simple as that.

42:13David:Yeah. And there's other deaths as well. There's a guy called Alexander Peroplichny, who was a healthy 44-year-old who collapses while running near his Surrey home, November 2012. He was a businessman who'd helped Bill 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 Pera Plichny 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.

42:50David: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 Kew Gardens. Do you know Kew Gardens where it's like the kind of world leading plant experts in this beautiful gardens in West London? And, you know, there was this possibility raised. 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.

43:23David: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.

43:54Gordon:That is very much its own series, isn't it? Because in many ways it rhymes, I think, with the Litvinenko story, doesn't it? Very similar themes throughout, but a very different story. what does yeah 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 uh what does marina think marina lindving now 20 20 years on you know does she feel that some measure of justice has been served the inquiry is she still fighting on where where is she in all this these days?

44:38David:I think the inquiry is very important because it was the moment where the finger was pointed. Because you go back to that deathbed statement from her husband, and it was Putin did this. One thing is to say Kovtina 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 write about this. And And I do think part of the problem was that 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.

45:26David:Only then. And then that potentially acts as a deterrent. But I do think the failure to act sufficiently strongly about Litvinenko leads us to Salisbury. There is such a direct line. I mean, I saw Marina Wendassi, I saw her a couple of weeks ago, and we were actually at an event to do with Oleg Gordievsky. 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.

46:02David:And it was only after Salisbury in 2018 that suddenly people take this threat seriously and suddenly there are more cameras around his house. I think 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.

46:26Gordon: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, what it all, for joining us in this adventure. As always, don't hesitate to go sign up. Join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com where you get early access to series like this, access to bonus episodes, a whole bunch of other goodies.

46:54David:And do book those tickets for the live show 4th and 5th of September at the South Bank in London. But otherwise, see you next time. We'll see you next time.