The Terminal Spy by Alan S. Cowell

Author:Alan S. Cowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767930987
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

9

CROWN PROTECTION?

In the six years and twenty-three days Litvinenko lived in London, he encountered and cultivated a remarkable cast of characters with whom he did business of one kind or another. Among them were former operatives—including one who would later be accused of his murder—ex-spies, émigré dissidents, an academic researcher who denounced him in death as a blackmailer, and an Italian gadfly whose name, Mario Scaramella, would become closely entwined with the story of Litvinenko’s final days.

It was a period that charted a dramatic swing from the optimism of his sanctuary in a new land to self-doubt about his mission in life, his ability to feed his family, and his relationship with the children he left behind in Moscow from his first marriage. Often there was a potent undertow of menace: Litvinenko’s world was rarely free from peril. But it began with a remarkable display of fealty.

After his arrival in London on November 1, 2000, Litvinenko took his young son, Anatoly, to the Tower of London on the banks of the river Thames to show him the British crown, available for public inspection behind thick bulletproof glass (except, of course, for those ceremonial state occasions when it was in use by the monarch).

The crown, encrusted with gems from Britain’s onetime colonies and overseas possessions—most notably the Cullinan diamond from South Africa—was the symbol of an island nation proud of its ability to project its power across oceans and to withstand aggression from beyond its shores. The tower itself, by contrast, had been known in centuries past as a place of dark deeds and treachery of a kind that must have been familiar to Litvinenko from his days in the Russian security services. But, according to his friend Vladimir Bukovsky, Litvinenko took his son there to impress upon him that the family had arrived in a secure new nation worthy of loyalty.

“This is a crown which protects us, guards us, and you should always be faithful to it,” Litvinenko said.

As the years of self-exile unfolded, he encouraged his son to see himself as a British schoolboy in his flannel trousers and school tie and dark uniform blazer. For his own protection, the boy went to classes under an assumed, English name and came to treasure his pseudonym. Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, by her own account, lived a very English, suburban life between home and school and husband. But as with so many aspects of Litvinenko’s life, that was only part of the story. While his family led an English life, he moved in the crepuscular world of Russian conspiracy. And while he nurtured one small nuclear family in London, another felt excluded and forgotten in Moscow.

His estranged father was in Nalchik with part of Litvinenko’s adoptive clan; his mother lived alone in Moscow. His half brother Maxim was in Italy. But the most wrenching part of this familial tangle lay with his son, Alexander, and daughter, Sonya, from his first marriage, who had spent some small time with him after the press conference in 1998, barely getting used to his presence in their lives before he was gone again.

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