Strongman, The

corruption and links to organised crime in the organisation itself and began to rebel. In March 1998 he confided to the oligarch Boris Berezovsky that he and four other agents from his unit had been ordered to kill him. (Berezovsky at the time was the ultimate wheeler-dealer in the Kremlin, who had engineered Boris Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 and would soon help to organise his succession.) When Vladimir Putin was appointed director of the FSB in July that year, Berezovsky immediately took Litvinenko to see him and report on corruption in the organisation. According to the oligarch, Putin did not respond, so on 13 November Berezovsky went public, with an open letter to Putin in the newspaper Kommersant . Four days later Litvinenko and his four colleagues from the URPO unit held a press conference at which they made public their claim that they had been ordered to kill Berezovsky. 8 Litvinenko was immediately dismissed from the FSB, apparently on the personal orders of Putin, who told the journalist Yelena Tregubova later: ‘Soon after becoming director of the FSB I fired Litvinenko and liquidated the unit in which he worked.’ His objection was not that FSB agents were carrying out extra-judicial killings but that Litvinenko and his colleagues dared to go public about it. ‘FSB officers should not stage press conferences. This is not their job. And they should not make internal scandals public.’ 9
    During 1999 Litvinenko was twice arrested and imprisoned for months, but eventually acquitted. In November 2000 he fled to London and applied for political asylum, which he was granted. In London he worked for the now exiled Boris Berezovsky, campaigning against the Putin regime, and in October 2006 became a British citizen. His activities in London would have infuriated the Russian government in many ways. First, he was on the payroll of Berezovsky, one of Russia’s most wanted men, whom the British government refused to extradite. (He was also alleged to receive a retainer from the British secret intelligence service, MI6.) Second, he was totally convinced of the complicity of the FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings which had triggered the second Chechen war, and published preliminary findings in a Russian newspaper and in a film. As noted earlier, several journalists and politicians who investigated these allegations died in mysterious circumstances.
    In exile in London, Litvinenko did everything he could to provoke the Kremlin. His allegations seemed to grow ever more fantastic and obsessive, perhaps delusional: he accused the FSB not only of being behind Chechen terrorist attacks such as the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school crisis, but even of responsibility for terrorist attacks worldwide, including the 2005 London bombings. Even close friends regarded him as a fantasist, consumed by his hatred for Putin and the FSB. He claimed, with no proof, that the KGB had trained al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and that Putin was a paedophile. He developed close links to the Chechen separatist government in exile and lived next door to its foreign minister, Akhmed Zakayev. After Anna Politkovskaya’s death, Litvinenko gave a presentation to journalists at London’s Frontline Club where he condemned Putin for personally ordering her murder.
    A couple of weeks later, on 1 November 2006, Litvinenko met two visitors from Russia – both former intelligence officers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun – and had tea with them. He fell ill and died after an excruciating illness on 23 November. Investigators established that he had been poisoned with a rare radioactive substance, Polonium-210. A police investigation eventually concluded that the poison had been brought to Britain, possibly by Kovtun via Germany, where traces of the element were detected, and administered by Lugovoi, who had put it in Litvinenko’s tea during their meeting. The agonising slow death of Litvinenko topped the news throughout November. Few had heard of the Russian, but as journalists and investigators pieced together the story of his poisoning, the British public was both scandalised by what seemed to be the enactment of a John le Carré-style plot, and terrified by the discovery of Polonium-210 traces around their capital city and on aeroplanes that had flown from Moscow. The events brought to mind the KGB’s ‘umbrella-tip’ poisoning of a Bulgarian exile in London in 1978, at the height of the Cold War. The Daily Mail