The KGB's Poison Factory by Boris Volodarsky

Author:Boris Volodarsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473815735
Publisher: Frontline Books

In the Frontline Club near the Paddington Station Sasha, speaking through interpreter, addressed the gathering:

The question was asked here who killed Anna Politkovskaya. I can give an answer. It was Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. After her book Putin’s Russia was published in the West, Politkovskaya started to receive threats from the Kremlin. Only one person in Russia could kill a journalist of her standing, only one person could sanction her death. And this person is Putin.

As if all those insults were not enough, Sasha continued to be very close to Boris Berezovsky, Putin’s ‘Enemy No. 1’.

* * *

The executive phase of the Litvinenko operation started in London days after the death of Politkovskaya. As reconstructed later by the Scotland Yard investigators, it began with a puzzle.

For several weeks members of an FSB special surveillance team who arrived from Moscow under various guises followed Sasha in London. They studied, analysed and cross-checked all his movements and regular places of meeting his contacts, and recorded his telephone calls.

But they probably missed one important event: on 13 October Alexander Litvinenko and his family were granted British citizenship.

On 16 October the commercial Transaero flight from Moscow landed on schedule at London Heathrow. Two Russian passengers in economy class proceeded to the immigration hall to join the crowd waiting in the line of passport control officers. Above and to one side a mirrored wall contained a two-way mirror with a room behind it. The Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector in charge of the airport security, whom his friends called simply Matt, stood in that room looking down. I later met him during a reception at Windsor Castle.

The Russians did not cause any suspicion and soon came out through the ‘Nothing to Declare Green Channel’. They were followed but noticed nothing.

In about an hour they checked into a four-star Best Western Premier Shaftesbury Hotel in Soho. Just around the corner were Piccadilly Circus where Sasha always arranged his meetings and Leicester Square where he met Ponkin. The KGB had long before marked Leicester Square as a recommended meeting place. The files hold many pictures of secret rendezvous here; a very old one showed agent NORMA (Kitty Harris) waiting for agent LYRIC (Donald Maclean) on 10 April 1938. (And the latest one probably featured Michael Mann, Johnny Depp, Alex Goldfarb, Marina Litvinenko and myself gathering at the very same place on 1 June 2009 to watch the premier of Public Enemies and discuss the Litvinenko movie.)

Though the Shaftesbury venue advertises itself as ‘a boutique hotel that embodies a haven where you can be sure of warm traditional hospitality’, only one room was available for the guests wken they arrived there. So they left their luggage in this room and rushed to the meeting at the entrance to the Nike shop on Oxford Street.

Sasha did not expect to see Lugovoy with anybody else, but was not surprised when Lugovoy introduced his partner as Dmitry Kovtun who had recently joined Ninth Wave. According to Lugovoy, they graduated from the same military school and were friends since childhood.

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