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Strange stroll around Hyde Park that went nowhere
БД: Julia Svetlichnaja recalls Litvinenko's eccentric behaviour Sunday December 3, 2006 The Observer We first met beside the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Wearing dark glasses and leather jacket, Alexander Litvinenko appeared unexpectedly behind my back, saying: 'I was watching you from around the corner. You are not a spy, are you?' I suggested coffee in the nearby Caffe Nero, the first of our often chaotic, erratic conversations we would share from last April until his death. I asked various questions about the Chechen people in Moscow during the Eighties and Nineties. Litvinenko, though, leapt from one exotic story to another - secret operations in Afghanistan, a plot against Boris Yeltsin, the assassination of former Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev; all these memories still seemed dear to his heart. In the end I made my excuses and left. 'Try him, but filter what he says; the man rambles too much,' the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had earlier warned me. Litvinenko was the contact who, I had hoped, would introduce me to Akhmed Zakayev, a member of the officially unrecognised Chechen government in exile. Ultimately, however, I almost regretted giving my email to Litvinenko. From our first meeting he started to feed me information with such gusto that in the weeks before his death I had started deleting most of his messages without opening them. The next time we met, in the summer, we ended up walking around Hyde Park for hours. I started to wonder whether meeting Litvinenko was a waste of time. He told me shamelessly of his blackmailing plans aimed at Russian oligarchs. 'They have got enough, why not to share? I will do it officially,' he said. After two hours of traipsing around the park, I suggested we sit down somewhere. 'Professionals never sit and talk, they walk and walk around so nobody can overhear their conversation,' he muttered darkly. So we carried on walking, Litvinenko regaling me with more stories about his war against the Kremlin. 'Every time I publish something on the Chechen press website, I piss them off. One day they will understand who I am!' he said. Some of his emails were confidential documents from the FSB, the successor to the KGB; others were his own writings for the Chechen press. Many of his 'political' texts were too obviously rants to take seriously: one of his wildest claims was that Putin was a paedophile. The photographs he sent were equally contradictory - one showed him with Zakayev and Anna Politkovskaya. Next he sent me a striking picture of himself in front of a large Union flag, holding a Chechen sword and wearing FSB gauntlets - Litvinenko said this proclaimed his pride in his new British citizenship. The next meeting, in May, was arranged to take place at Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill, north London, where we were supposed to be joined by Zakayev, but he did not turn up. Litvinenko proudly told me how well his son was adapting to England and its language while he could barely string a few sentences together. Marina, his wife, served us dinner and tea with traditional Russian sweets. Afterwards, we moved to the garden and eventually to Litvinenko's study, where he showed me his stash of secret files and photographs. It was very late when he drove me to the station. He stopped at the traffic lights and, indicating right, suddenly turned left into a dark alley. We drove round and round the crescent before stopping. 'Demonstration. I was famous for getting rid of the "tail". All you have to do is to indicate and then turn the other way,' he explained. We sat in his car for another hour talking about life in the FSB. I felt sorry for him. People around him seemed either deranged or were using him for their advantage. Despite his whistleblower past, Litvinenko was confident he was safe. Unlike Zakayev, he willingly gave out his mobile phone number and home address. He did not have any security. Although, in October 2004, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into Zakayev and Litvinenko's neighbouring homes in Muswell Hill, he never contemplated moving house. May was the last time I saw him. Later I heard he had been poisoned and I am ashamed to say I thought it might have been another trick to get attention. After that I watched and read the details of his slow death drip into the media as the polonium 210 rotted him from within. Would Litvinenko be pleased with the paradox that since his death he has been taken very seriously?
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БД: Death may have silenced Mr Litvinenko late on Thursday night but his testimony lives on, most dramatically in a series of interviews he gave two academics from the University of Westminster earlier this year. For a total of six hours, most recently in the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, Mr Litvinenko opened his heart to Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield and shared with them the story of his life, from his birth in the Russian provinces to exile in London. Theirs was the last proper interview he gave before his mysterious death and it throws a completely new light on his past and, quite possibly, his fate. The epitaph for Alexander Litvinenko might read "he was caught up in events bigger than he understood". This ordinary boy from Voronezh never shone at school, never went to university and ended up in the KGB only via his national service in the Soviet army. But by the time he ended his life, apparently the victim of radioactive poisoning, he was a disillusioned exile in London, a defector who seemed unable to plan for the future and whose conversation often darted from one subject to another in bewildering fashion. Among his closest friends was an exiled Chechen leader, his neighbour in Finchley, and he admitted that Boris Berezovsky, another exile but in the past a Kremlin kingmaker, had supported him financially. "Is this a crime?" he asked. The one subject that caused him to lose his temper was that of his former employer, and that of Mr Putin, the FSB, Russia's internal security service. Criminals and gangsters, he called them. It was not always thus. The young Litvinenko had been flattered to be recruited into the Soviet-era KGB and had been a loyal officer for years. A promising young officer working in counterintelligence, he was soon promoted and moved into the more prestigious field of counterterrorism and the fight against organised crime. The early 1990s were a turbulent period for the KGB. Communism collapsed and with it everything the KGB held most dear. But the KGB could also move with the times. And it was determined to dominate the new Russian market economy, just as it had the old Soviet Union. Its tactics were ruthless and Litvinenko was expected to show no qualms about achieving its aims. One was to protect and even recruit potential businessmen for the new Russia. And protecting them meant getting rid of their rivals too. Now in his 30s, he was responsible for recruiting murderers. He would play on their psychological weakness to win them over. "So if somebody was the victim of a crime, like his daughter was raped, you would offer to let them take revenge on the perpetrator," he told us at home in his kitchen earlier this year. "This was how we recruited killers." Now, too, he made his first real acquaintance with the Chechens, a tough people from the North Caucasus who were also major players in the new Russian economy. Litvinenko both cooperated with them and was involved in the campaign to cut them down to size when they were perceived as a threat. Increasingly, his department focussed on "solving" problems. For example, as a favour to a senior former colleague in debt to money-lenders from elsewhere in the Caucasus, he was told to arrest the creditors and execute them. Officially, this was justified as part of the struggle against separatists. By the mid-90s a new class of "oligarchs" was seizing control of the country's main assets, especially its oil and gas, and becoming fabulously wealthy in the process. As for Litvinenko, he was more and more involved in settling scores for his masters. "Our department worked on the so-called "problem principle": the government had a problem and we had simply to deal with it," he explained. One target he was ordered to destroy was another security officer who had blown the whistle on some of the FSB's nefarious activities, Mikhail Trepashkin. Another he was told to kidnap to trade for FSB officers taken hostage by Chechens was a prominent Chechen businessman based in Moscow. By 1997 his department, ostensibly in charge of the fight against organised crime, was, in his words, "responsible for illegal punishments or so-called extra-legal executions of "unsuitable" businessmen, politicians and other public figures. In parallel, the department blackmailed the same targets for funds." In our many hours of conversation with Litvinenko he did not strike us as one given to introspection, or even capable of analysing his own motives or actions. But when he was told to kill one of the country's then most powerful - and most controversial - businessmen, Boris Berezovsky, something changed. "When I got the order to kill Boris Berezovsky, I was told that the reason was that he had too much money and too much power," he recalled. We asked Litvinenko why he disobeyed that order. He refused to elaborate. "People ask me what is my relationship with Berezovsky," he said. "Yes, we are friends and he helped me financially, for which I am grateful." Once a patron of Mr Putin, Mr Berezovsky is now an exile in the UK, one the Kremlin would like to extradite to Russia for trial on alleged fraud charges, which he denies. From his new home Mr Berezovsky wages an active political struggle against his former protégé. But Litvinenko told him to temper his rhetoric and warned him of the likely consequences if he failed to do so. "I warned him recently that he cannot talk about changing the political regime in Russia by force but he ignores me," he said. "They will get him. He is not careful enough." But, by defying the FSB leaders, Litvinenko set in motion the events which led to his fleeing to Britain. He was himself arrested for supposedly leaking classified information in 1999, released in court but immediately taken into custody before being freed on parole. It was then that he made his escape, via Turkey, to Britain. Mr Berezovsky, he said, had promised to help him settle him in the West. Here he published a book about the mysterious bombings of Russian blocks of flats that helped provoke the Chechen war of 1999. But once he had revealed the inner workings of the FSB and he himself was no longer part of the system, his usefulness to Mr Putin's critics was over. He lived a curious afterlife among his fellow countrymen abroad. His Finchley home, he told us, was bought for him by Mr Berezovsky but more recently relations between the two had cooled. He was also more and more frustrated that the world was not listening to his story. Bizarrely, he even became an ally of the local Chechen diaspora, one that in Moscow he had viciously persecuted in the 1990s for the FSB. "Wasn't Alexander one of those who was involved in killing the Chechens?' we asked Akhmed Zakayev, the former actor and now Chechen foreign minister-in-exile, when we all met in the bar at the Park Lane Hilton. "Yes, but he is our friend now', Mr Zakhayev replied. Litvinenko beamed. We both felt sorry for him. This former FSB enforcer now seemed completely lost in life. In the end he was just an ordinary Soviet soldier who had risen through the ranks, far beyond his natural abilities, and into a world which took brutal advantage of him but had no role for him once he had served its purpose. The Litvinenkos' home was always very hospitable. His wife, Marina, would serve tea before discreetly leaving the room. Alexander was extremely proud of his young son and how well he was settling in England and good at Judo, like his father. His stories were full of extravagant conspiracies, hardly surprising when he had lived in the middle of so many himself. He was still very interested in the world of Russian espionage and was hoping to earn a living as an intelligence analyst, hinting that he was privy to the secrets behind many big scandals, some of them from as long ago as the Cold War. We talked to Litvinenko to pursue our academic research into Chechens in Moscow. But he always wanted to return to the subject of the conspiracies that fascinated him. Eventually, one of those conspiracies caught up with him. # © 2006 Julia Svetlichnaja & James Heartfield. # Telegraph Media Group Ltd world exclusive licensee. # Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield are researchers at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.
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