Strongman, The

wrote that the ‘tentacles of the KGB reach as far and formidably as ever’. It was suddenly remembered that in July 2006 the Duma had passed legislation allowing the security forces to hunt down and eliminate extremists worldwide. The definition of ‘extremism’ was explicitly widened to include anyone who libelled the Russian authorities – which Litvinenko certainly did, in spades.
    Gruesome though the situation was, it was also expertly exploited by Berezovsky and his spin doctors, a PR company run by Margaret Thatcher’s former image-maker, Lord Bell. They released a shocking photograph of Litvinenko on his deathbed, hairless and emaciated. Just before he died Litvinenko signed a statement composed for him by his friend Alex Goldfarb, who also worked for Berezovsky, in which he accused Vladimir Putin of personally ordering his murder. ‘As I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death,’ he wrote, in somewhat over-elegant English, and continued: ‘You may succeed in silencing one man, but a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.’ Berezovsky could scarcely have found a more powerful weapon in his battle against the Kremlin than the death of his protégé.
    Putin was in Helsinki, at an EU–Russia summit, the day after Litvinenko’s death, when his posthumous accusation was read out. Putin, of course, had no option but to answer questions about it at a news conference. Just as he had done with Politkovskaya, he seemed to play down Litvinenko’s importance, saying merely, ‘the death of a human being is always a tragedy’. Regarding the personal accusation against him, he dismissed it as a political provocation, probably written by other people. But privately – I was told by his press secretary Dmitry Peskov, who had to tell him about the deathbed note – Putin was livid. ‘He can’t believe that people are accusing him personally of ordering this murder,’ he said. ‘As a person, he is very upset by that.’ When I asked why Putin didn’t show that anger in public, since it might convince people of his innocence better than his normal stonewalling, Peskov replied: ‘He doesn’t like showing his feelings in public.’
    Putin showed his feelings somewhat a few years later, though, when he spoke about the agent who betrayed 11 Russian spies, including the celebrated Anna Chapman, in the USA in 2010: ‘They live by their own laws, and these laws are well known to all the special services. Things always end badly for traitors. They usually end up in the gutter, from alcohol or drugs.’ Or poisoning, he might have added.
    With the polonium trail leading inexorably to Moscow, Litvinenko’s death – less than two months since Politkovskaya’s – had a dramatic effect on Western perceptions of Russia, and in particular on its relations with the UK. The prime minister Tony Blair, anxious to preserve his good relationship with Putin, urged a cautious approach, but some members of his cabinet strongly objected to the idea of ‘going soft’ on a regime that was flouting human rights. Blair convened an emergency session of COBRA, the government’s crisis response committee. Ironically, Vladimir Putin himself had once been invited to witness a security briefing in the COBRA room at 10 Downing Street. That was in October 2005, not long after the bombings in London. Putin had shocked his hosts by declaring, according to an eyewitness, ‘We know well how you pursue terrorists, and we are impressed with your professionalism. But when we identify a terrorist, he’s dead.’
    In January 2007 British investigators concluded that Litvinenko’s murder was a ‘state-sponsored assassination orchestrated by Russian security services’, and in May the Foreign Office officially asked the Russians to extradite the chief suspect, Andrei Lugovoi. The Russians retorted that their constitution does not allow for the extradition of Russian citizens. The Russians offered to put Lugovoi on trial in Russia, but claimed that the evidence provided by the British in their extradition request was insufficient for them to base a case on. This was almost certainly true: the UK authorities were hardly going to hand over all their evidence to the Russians, since much of it was based on their own top-secret intelligence gathering. But without it, the Russians would neither extradite Lugovoi nor put him on trial. There was