Peter Pomerantsev Reviews A Very Expensive Poison' by Luke Harding LRB 31 March 2016

Peter Pomerantsev reviews A Very Expensive Poison by Luke Harding...
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Murder in Mayfair
Peter Pomerantsev
A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russias War
with the West by Luke Harding
Faber, 424 pp, 12.99, March, ISBN 978 1 78335 093 3
As he lay dying Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future. A
professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim, he worked out that he
had been poisoned in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, by another former
KGB detective, Andrei Lugovoi. He had thought they were partners, investigating the
connections between Putins Kremlin, organised crime and money laundering in Europe
but, he now realised, Lugovoi was still taking orders from the people they were
investigating. As Litvinenkos hair came out in clumps, as he found it increasingly hard to
open his mouth to talk, as he became yellow and shrivelled, he cursed himself for letting
his guard down: he had assumed he was safe after receiving asylum and citizenship in the
UK. But solving the crime, Litvinenko understood, was only the beginning. Would the
British government risk undermining its financial interests by investigating his death
properly?
Of course I understand the West wants to get gas and oil from Russia, he told inspectors
from Scotland Yard who interviewed him in hospital, but one shouldnt be involved in
political activity if one doesnt have political beliefs. And beliefs cant be traded for gas and
oil. Because when a businessman is trading hes trading with his money but when a
politician is trading he is trading with the sovereignty of his country and the future of his
children. The transcripts of Litvinenkos interviews were released last year; he was clearly
trying hard to win the police over to his cause. He was good at speeches. In case there is
from the top administrative pressure for political reasons, he said, be firm bring this
case to the end. The men from Scotland Yard were impressed by his faith in them: Last
month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may
die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a
great country.
Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened
Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.
Their tests showed he was terribly contaminated with polonium, a metal four hundred
times more radioactive than uranium and which can only be manufactured in a nuclear
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plant. It had very nearly been the perfect assassination: polonium isnt picked up by Geiger
counters and doctors had followed many false leads ricin? thallium? in trying to
identify the mystery poison. When polonium was first suggested by urine tests it was
dismissed as an anomaly caused by the plastic container.
But now that polonium had been confirmed it was a cinch for investigators, dressed in
radiation-proof suits, to follow the radioactive trail, with equipment capable of detecting
alpha radiation, through Mayfair, Heathrow, and on the plane Lugovoi had flown in on
from Moscow. The Avangard facility in Sarov is the only place that continues to produce
polonium in the amounts used in the assassination. You have to be a state or state
organisation to get hold of polonium in [these] quantities, the British ambassador to
Russia reported, as the UK sought to extradite Lugovoi and his sidekick, Dmitry Kovtun.
Moscow refused, instead making Lugovoi a Duma deputy for the (far-right) Liberal
Democratic Party meaning he was immune from prosecution. Russia and the UK
expelled a few of each others diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating.
Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin.
In London, Litvinenkos widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait
while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations.
In 2010 she was still waiting. When Cameron became prime minister, Luke Harding writes
in his gripping account of the Litvinenko case, his foreign policy objective was quite
simple: to sell stuff to foreigners. Londons new role was to be financial capital of the
world: the strategy for economic growth was to attract other peoples money. Britain still
sought the extradition of Lugovoi and Kovtun, of course. But, Cameron indicated, these
bilateral differences could be negotiated around and shouldnt prevent co-operation in
other areas, especially trade. Cameron was perfectly aware of the nature of Putins regime.
In 2010 WikiLeaks cables showed that a Spanish prosecutor had told US officials that
Russia was a virtual mafia state, with the Kremlin controlling organised crime, which in
turn exercised influence over ministers and senior officials. The Spanish prosecutors had
partly based their investigation on Litvinenkos research; and he had been due to go to
Madrid to testify about the connections between the Kremlin and the Tambov gang, which
specialises in inter alia drugs, arms smuggling and money laundering. (In a 488-page
submission to the Audiencia Nacional last year, the prosecutors presented evidence that a
leader of the Tambov gang, Gennady Petrov, had been a shareholder in the 1990s in Bank
Rossiya, along with several close allies of Putin. After he became president, the bank was
known as Putins wallet.) MI6 paid for some of Litvinenkos work: 2000 a month from
an unidentified bank account appears in his accounts among the family shopping at
Sainsburys.
Cameron, however, had decided, as Harding writes, that the large influx of Russians to
Britain was good for business Wealthy Russians buy property in London and the Home
Counties, send their children to British private schools, and go shopping in Harrods (and
Selfridges). Increasingly, Russians come to the UK to settle their legal disputes,
commercial and matrimonial. All this is a boon to headmasters, divorce lawyers, estate
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agents and purveyors of sushi. The actual amount of (official) Russian investment in the
UK is relatively small, but Russian wealth is concentrated in elite industries and helps
send the larger strategic message that Britain is open for business with anyone. The official
figures dont reflect the money moved here anonymously through the extensive network of
former colonies turned offshore tax havens: on its own the City of London is neck and neck
with Wall Street as a financial centre, but if you include the offshore zones its estimated
that a third of all international deposits and investments flow through Britain and its
satellites. Moreover, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, most UK banks dont
enforce know-your-customer rules: the financial capital of the world doesnt ask too many
questions about where the money comes from. Deutsche Bank has calculated that $1.5
billion enters the UK each month without being recorded by official statistics, half of it
from Russia.
In the summer of 2012, Cameron entertained Putin at Downing Street, and they watched
the judo together at the Olympics. Later that year BP merged with the state-owned
Russian giant Rosneft to create the worlds largest oil company, nicknamed Britneft. BP is
responsible for one sixth of dividends in British pension fund schemes. Fearing the British
government was trying to bury the case, Marina Litvinenko pushed for an inquest into her
husbands murder. Robert Owen, a High Court judge, promised an open and fearless
investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for
public interest immunity which meant that the governments classified files on
Litvinenko wouldnt be available to the inquest and that Owens freedom to investigate was
severely restricted. The British government, like the Russian government, is conspiring to
get the inquest closed down in exchange for substantial trade interests which we know Mr
Cameron is pursuing, Litvinenkos counsel, Ben Emmerson, said. In May 2013 Cameron
flew to Sochi for talks with Putin and agreed that British intelligence would resume
co-operation with the FSB for the first time since Litvinenkos death. Chris Grayling, the
justice secretary, refused to pay Marina Litvinenkos legal costs.
Owen wrote to Theresa May, the home secretary, requesting a public inquiry: this would
allow the chairman to consider secret material in closed hearings, balancing the
governments security concerns with the need for open justice. May rejected Owens
request. She offered six reasons for her refusal, including public expense. Marina
Litvinenko filed a claim for judicial review, asking the High Court to re-examine the
governments decision. In February 2014, three High Court judges ruled in her favour.
They described Mays refusal as irrational and legally erroneous and requested that she
reconsider.
In March 2014 Putin annexed Crimea, breaking the Budapest Memorandum, which
Britain, among others, had signed in 1994 guaranteeing Ukraines territorial integrity in
return for its abandoning nuclear weapons. A government adviser was photographed
walking into No. 10 with a piece of paper stating that the UK should not support, for now,
trade sanctions or close Londons financial centre to Russians: Many of the themes that
featured in Litvinenkos murder were here again, Harding writes, played out on a bigger
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and more terrible canvas.

Five days after the Malaysian tourist flight was shot down in eastern Ukraine, the Home
Office announced that it would, after all, allow the inquiry into the Litvinenko murder. It
had seemed that Marina Litvinenko was on her way to winning her campaign against the
government anyway, but its hard not to shake the feeling that the Home Office threw in
the towel because relations with Russia had got so bad that business as usual was now a
PR liability. On 30 July the EU issued a series of sanctions against oligarchs and
businesses close to Putin, including Bank Rossiya. After ten years of government
fog-blowing the Litvinenko investigation would finally be made public, much of it centred
on the area of London that perhaps best displays the paradoxes of Britains 21st-century
role as financial capital of the world: Mayfair, one of Londons wealthiest districts and the
scene of the crime.
Whereas the City of London and Canary Wharf are full of multinational banks that could
potentially relocate anywhere, Mayfair sells something uniquely British to the world. In
Hanover Square, Harding writes, boys and girls in red uniforms play games at the end of
the school day, among plane trees and an exotic palm from the Canary Islands. Its all
rather English pastoral. The girls sport straw boaters North of the square you find
Grosvenor Street and a row of fashionable 18th-century Georgian townhouses. This was
once the abode of earls, lords, admirals and the odd poet The location radiates prestige,
reliability, trustworthiness. Mayfair is also home to Putins exiled opposition. Hanover
Square is Mikhail Khodorkovskys HQ, where he plans a new Russia for when Putin falls.
Until he died in 2013 Down Street was where Boris Berezovsky plotted, or threatened to
plot, anti-Putin revolutions. Berezovsky had played a significant role in Litvinenkos fate.
In 1998 Litvinenko, then an investigator into organised crime at the FSB, had betrayed
the firm when he went public with an FSB plot to murder Berezovsky, Russias most
influential oligarch at the time and deputy secretary of the Security Council. The
investigation led to the sacking of the FSBs director, Nikolai Kovalyov. President Yeltsin
made Putin, who had Berezovskys backing, the new head of the agency. But when
Litvinenko showed Putin his research into links between the FSB and organised crime
Putin dismissed it: Litvinenko later became convinced this was because he was involved in
the same schemes himself. In 1999 Putin fired Litvinenko, telling a journalist that FSB
officers should not expose internal scandals to the public. Litvinenko was arrested for
beating up a suspect, acquitted and then arrested again in the courtroom, with
investigators openly telling his wife that he was being punished for betraying the agency.
He fled to London, where he was given asylum. Berezovsky now in exile himself made
him his security adviser and paid for his son to go to a private school.
*
Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky et al claim to be part of the same tradition as Alexander Herzen:
political exiles who found shelter in Britain. Its a legitimate claim in one sense, since both
Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky faced politically motivated trials in Russia. But they also
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show up the other side of Londons role: its way of luring big money into the city. Before
they saw the political light or just fell out with Putin both Berezovsky and
Khodorkovsky made their money through rigged privatisations and asset-stripping, profits
that London wealth managers, rent-a-peers and PR men were more than happy to
legitimise. When the oligarchs companies were seized in Russia, London was delighted to
take money from those who had ripped them off in turn. (Rosneft, aka Britneft, for
instance, came into being after Putins ally Igor Sechin seized Khodorkovskys Yukos.)
Mayfair has become attractive, Harding writes, to successive influxes of the international
super-rich. Arabs rich from oil, Greek shipping tycoons, African dictators: all find a home
here, washed in by a global tide of credit crises, coups and recessions. Though home is
overstating it. Many of the houses stand empty: investments, bolt-holes or moneylaundering vehicles. Its not entirely clear what many of the businesses based here do.
Hedge funds? Corporate PR? Wealth management?
On the day of his poisoning, 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko proceeded down Old
Bond Street, with its fashion and diamond boutiques and its sales assistants who speak
Russian, Chinese and Arabic. He entered Berkeley Square at the south-east corner, where
today you find the restaurant Sexy Fish, all lava-coloured couches, fountains streaming
down the windows and a 13-foot Frank Gehry crocodile on the wall. Sexy Fish is the
creation of Richard Caring, most famous for the Ivy, the restaurant in Soho that flaunts its
exclusivity by being as apparently modest and downbeat as possible. That works for the
posh English, but modern Mayfair money has another set of tastes to be pandered to.
Crossing Berkeley Square, passing the Bentley dealership, Litvinenko wound into
Grosvenor Square, long-time home to the vast US Embassy with its M16-toting security,
and stepped through the door of the Millennium Hotel, where in 1815 news first reached
the cabinet of Wellingtons victory at Waterloo.
The killer was wearing clothes from Harrods: a dark blue and orange cardigan, grey jeans,
and a watch he liked to point out cost $50,000. Litvinenko had been with Lugovoi on the
shopping trip: Why do you need this Harrods? he asked his future killer. When Harding
met Lugovoi in Moscow years later he found he was an Anglophile: he had bound copies of
Conan Doyle on his wall; his son went to a British school in Moscow; his daughter had
spent a year on an English course in Cambridge. He even brought his family with him on
the trip to murder Litvinenko. After he had slipped him some polonium-laced tea in the
Pine Bar, the Owen report suggests, Lugovoi introduced his victim to his son, who had just
returned from a trip to Hamleys. And then the family hurried off to watch the
Arsenal-CSKA Moscow game at the Emirates.
This was Lugovoi and Kovtuns third attempt to poison Litvinenko. On a previous trip they
had aborted the mission, pouring the polonium down the sink of their Park Lane hotel. On
another they enjoyed a night on the tiles, taking a rickshaw ride around Soho. They went
on the pull (not too successfully) at Hey Jo on Jermyn Street, where the owner, Lord Dave
West, a former booze-cruise tycoon who bought his title on eBay, would sit (until his own,
unrelated murder) in a pink suit at the end of the bar chatting up Russian girls on
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Facebook and persuading them to come over to work as hostesses in his Mayfair almostbrothel.
Maybe the assassins needed the relaxation: earlier that day Lugovoi had almost managed
to poison Litvinenko in the offices of Erinys, a business intelligence outfit on Grosvenor
Street. Business intelligence companies are everywhere in Mayfair. Often run by (?former)
spooks, they perform due diligence on businesses from emerging economies potential
partners for Western companies; quite in keeping with Mayfairs split identity, other, more
marginal business intelligence companies can also be hired to write reports whitewashing
corrupt oligarchs and help ease their way into London. Litvinenko worked regularly on due
diligence reports about potential Russian partners. He was a thorough but obsessive and
sometimes downright conspiracy-minded detective: he believed Romano Prodi to be a
Russian asset and that al-Zarqawis time in custody with the FSB in Chechnya pointed to
Russian involvement with the training of al-Qaida operatives. But he had also written
highly professional reports in collaboration with other, more disciplined authors, most
recently a document referred to in the Owen inquiry which showed that Putins ally Viktor
Ivanov, the head of Aeroflot and the Federal Narcotics Service, had been associated with
Colombian drugs cartels in the 1990s. (Ivanov denies everything, though admits that his
deputy had regular dealings with the Tambov gangs Gennady Petrov.) According to its
co-author, Yuri Shvets, the report cost Ivanov up to $15 million in kickbacks when the
Western partner pulled out.
Litvinenko wanted Lugovoi to work with him and Erinys, and had set up a meeting with
the outfits Russian-speaking head, Tim Reilly, in an office with leather chairs and an oak
dining table covered in a green baize cloth. Lugovoi arrived with shopping bags [and]
steered the conversation round to tea. He suggested they all drink some, joking that the
English had cups of tea all the time. Reilly declined and told them hed just drunk water
from the cooler. Lugovoi was weirdly persistent. They kept on saying to me dont you
want any, wont you have any? Reilly recalled. (For a moment the Litvinenko murder
story topples into a dark farce about Englishness: the cult of tea deployed as a murder
strategy by foreign agents against investigators working for Her Majestys Government.)
After making tea, Reilly disappeared off to the loo, Harding continues. The forensic
evidence suggests that either Lugovoi or Kovtun slipped it into Litvinenkos cup of tea or
water For the next thirty minutes, the tea or glass of water sat in front of him, a little to
his left an invisible nuclear murder weapon. The conversation was of Gazprom. Lugovoi
and Kovtun must have been barely listening; for them, the only question was: would
Litvinenko drink?
He didnt, but when nuclear scientists examined the Erinys table they found it was
heaving with radioactive contamination. The polonium trail ran through the whole of
Mayfair. It was on a shisha pipe that Lugovoi had smoked and on a door in the gents at
Hey Jo. In Lugovois hotel room on Park Lane there was polonium on the carpet and on a
telephone directory in a cupboard. In the Millennium Hotel polonium was a miasma, a
strange creeping fog. It was found inside the dishwasher, on the floor, the till, the handle
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of a coffee strainer. There were traces on bottles of Martini and Tia Maria behind the bar,
the ice cream scoop, a chopping board and the piano stool. Harding doesnt overcook
the metaphor, but Mayfair and all it represents is portrayed here as something potentially,
maybe inherently toxic. When does a soft power aimed at attracting investment start to
undermine real power?
Altogether the inquiry looked at 720 locations where polonium traces were found, heard
from 62 witnesses and read through 5000 pages of evidence. Appendix 12 not included
in the published report contained the evidence given behind closed doors under the
Official Secrets Act. It presumably included evidence from Litvinenkos handler at MI6,
whom he used to meet in the caf at Waterstones on Piccadilly (since purchased by the
oligarch Alexander Mamut); there were probably intercepts of telephone chatter picked up
by the NSA or GCHQ. What exactly the evidence was we will never know, but it was
enough for Owen to conclude that not only did Lugovoi and Kovtun kill Litvinenko but
there was a strong probability that they did so under the FSBs direction and the
execution was probably approved by Putin.
These were stronger words than anyone expected. Im gobsmacked, said Robert Service,
who had been the inquirys main background witness on Russian history and politics. It
shows the autonomy of the judicial process from politics. Marina Litvinenko felt
vindicated. It is unthinkable that the prime minister would do nothing in the face of the
damning findings, she said. She was wrong. The government had known the secret
evidence all along and it had not stopped them courting Putin. In Davos, where he was
attending the World Economic Forum, Cameron explained that while Litvinenkos murder
was shocking it was necessary to keep working with the Kremlin because we need a
solution to the Syrian crisis. (Its a questionable and probably delusional argument. The
US is unafraid of imposing sanctions on Russia and in any case Britain is hardly an
important power in such global games: Moscow takes only the US and China, and
sometimes Germany, seriously.) Marina Litvinenko proposed targeted sanctions against,
among others, Putin, the head of the FSB, the prosecutor general and the chief investigator
who had blocked Scotland Yards work in Russia, as well as companies involved in
producing the poison. The government refused, but Litvinenkos proposal is part of a larger
movement of policy suggestions and campaigns that struggle with the consequences of
being the financial capital of the world.
*
A week after the final verdict I took part in a kleptocracy tour: a bus ride around some of
Londons most glitzy addresses. We drove past the 60 million pad near the V&A
belonging to Dmytro Firtash (he has also bought a former tube stop next door for 50
million). Firtash, we were told, is the Ukrainian oligarch who was at the centre of a series
of major gas deals between Russia and Ukraine. Moscow allowed him to buy gas at below
market rates and he sold it on high. The profits from this and other deals helped him
finance the government of Viktor Yanukovych, whose kleptocratic rule was only stopped by
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way of a revolution until that, in turn, was countered by the Russian invasion. Firtash
sponsors a Ukrainian Studies department at Cambridge and a British-Ukraine Society that
see the Register of Members Interests paid for the culture minister, John
Whittingdale, to visit Ukraine and Austria and provided the secretariat for the All-Party
Parliamentary Group on Ukraine; Firtash has been rewarded with an honour by the Duke
of Edinburgh.
The tour proceeded past the Russian Embassy off Kensington Park Gardens, Londons
most expensive street, which smelled of magnolia and honeysuckle though spring hadnt
yet arrived in the rest of London. In 2012 the Russian embassy garden hosted the
inaugural event for Conservative Friends of Russia, a group set up to help British-Russian
cultural understanding and business relations. Emails Harding saw from Sergei Nalobin,
the Russian diplomat liaising with the organisation and the son of Litvinenkos former
boss at the FSB, showed that Moscows goals went beyond mere cultural understanding.
The Kremlin was keen to mute criticism of Russias human rights record [and]
desperate to stop top officials from being denied entry to the UK as part of a US-style
Magnitsky list. The Magnitsky bill, which is supported by MPs from both sides of the
Commons but not by the government, would like the equivalent American law, which
was passed in 2012 prevent corrupt Russian officials who abuse human rights from
travelling to or investing in the UK. (Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the bill is named, was a
Russian lawyer who was killed when he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud laundered
through Europe, the US and the Middle East. One of the main whistleblowers, Alexander
Perepilichny, set up his first meeting with Magnitskys colleagues at the Polo Bar in
Mayfair, and died in 2012 while jogging near his mansion in Surrey. The death is still
being investigated after tests conducted last year found traces of gelsemium, a poisonous
plant popular among Russian and Chinese assassins, in Perepilichnys system.)
Conservative Friends of Russia was chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind and its celebrity
speaker when it was relaunched as Westminster Russia Forum was Jack Straw. The two
MPs were later caught on camera by Channel 4s Dispatches offering to use their political
connections on behalf of a fictitious Chinese company for 5000 a day. Rifkind said he
could provide access to every British ambassador in the world. Straw boasted that he had
used charm and menace with the Ukrainian prime minister to change laws on behalf of a
commodity firm that pays him 60,000 a year. Not so much Le Carr as Cash & Carry.
Nalobin has since been expelled from the UK.
The tour bus headed up to Highgate and Londons largest residential house, Witanhurst,
which squats above the city and whose real owner was hidden behind dozens of shell
companies until a report in the New Yorker revealed it as belonging to a Russian senator
who is viewed as so generally insignificant that no one could at first believe he was the real
owner. More than 100,000 properties in the UK are owned by offshore companies, 36,000
of them in London, with the beneficiary owners not disclosed in more than a third of cases;
estimates of the total value of these assets vary from 120 billion to 400 billion. A recent
documentary, From Russia with Cash, showed that a number of Londons elite estate
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agents were happy to take money from and arrange legal assistance for a Russian minister
who told them openly that he had appropriated the money from Russias health budget.
The kleptocracy tour included talks by a range of speakers. There were Russian dissidents
who wanted to uncover the money stolen by Putin allies in the hope of discrediting the
regime; there were activists who saw closing down offshore tax havens as a step towards
enforcing tax justice and stopping the global flow of dirty money; there was an economic
liberal who believed that if globalisation was to work it had to make a distinction between
crony and genuinely competitive businesses; there were campaigners for better
enforcement of beneficiary ownership laws; there were investigative journalists looking to
bust MPs on the take. The tour was co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute, which describes
itself as a centre-right think tank, based in Washington DC. Hudson has recently launched
its Kleptocracy Initiative, to design policies aimed at limiting the ability of hostile foreign
actors to abscond with national assets and use those assets against both their own citizens
and the United States and its allies. Until recently the argument made in both DC and
Whitehall was that economic integration between nations would help guarantee security.
Litvinenko had always known this was naive: when you legitimise corrupt and criminal
regimes, and become dependent on them, you embolden, not tame, their aggressive foreign
policy.
The tour bus took us up Park Lane towards Speakers Corner. Litvinenko loved this bit of
London and would take his son, Anatoly, here. Anatoly was 12 when his father died; he is
now a very English-sounding undergraduate: My dad loved England, he told the inquiry.
He felt extremely safe here. He also told his son that you could trust British justice. You
could stand up on a box and say anything.
Vol. 38 No. 7 31 March 2016 Peter Pomerantsev Murder in Mayfair
pages 3-6 | 4630 words
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Limited 2016
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Peter Pomerantsev Reviews A Very Expensive Poison' by Luke Harding LRB 31 March 2016

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