Johnson's Russia List
2008-#19
28 January 2008
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#52
The Guardian
January 26, 2008
Why a spy was killed
When Alexander Litvinenko fled Moscow for
Britain, he found it hard to find work; London
was awash with former KGB agents. So he turned to
Italy, where he found a ready market for
intelligence, not all of it real. What happened
next was to make him some dangerous enemies
Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy

Alexander Litvinenko began his patriotic career
volunteering for the Red Army straight out of
school in 1979. By the time the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, the KGB had plucked him from
the ranks and set him to work as an operative
detective. He was 29. Litvinenko first served in
counterterrorism in the mid-90s, then began
infiltrating the criminal gangs that flourished
in the chaos of the new Russia.

Litvinenko, according to former colleagues and
commanders, was a workaday spy. His modus
operandi was to stride into a scenario, bang
heads together and wait for the fallout. He
hoovered up everything that came his way, leaving
analysts to sort the truth from the lies. He was,
like many agents in Kontora - or "the company",
as they called the KGB and its successor, the FSB
- secretive, solitary and vain. Litvinenko was
expected to be capable of violence in his job,
but Marina, who had married him in 1994, despite
her fears about the secret services, told us the
Sasha she knew was gentle, straightforward and passionate.

Those who served with Colonel Litvinenko also
recall that he was naive - a flaw in his line of
work. For him, there was only right and wrong.
"He was like a salmon swimming upstream," one
former FSB general told us, citing how
Litvinenko, against his advice, investigated
links between crime clans and what Russians had
come to know as the siloviki - a group of
strongmen within the Kremlin whose core members
came from St Petersburg with a background in the
intelligence services. Their mentor was Vladimir
Putin, a former KGB agent who became head of the
FSB in 1998 and president the following year.

Litvinenko was quickly smacked down for his
intrusion. He was transferred to a highly
secretive FSB unit that carried out hits on
criminals and terrorists. Litvinenko was incensed
when he learned that his first target was to be
Boris Berezovsky, one of the country's oligarchs
who had taken an outspoken stand against the siloviki

In November 1998, Litvinenko staged a press
conference in Moscow, in which he exposed the
Berezovsky plot, fuelling a firestorm in the
Russian parliament. Within days he was under
investigation. Within weeks he found himself in
prison. His allies contrived his release in
December 1999, but by the summer of 2000 they
were urging him to flee or face a lifetime in a political gulag.

Berezovsky had already installed himself in
London and was busy sponsoring every enemy of
Putin who crossed his path. He owed a debt of
gratitude to Litvinenko and, in November 2000, he
arranged for him, Marina and their son, Anatoly,
to escape from Russia, sending Alex Goldfarb, a
Russian émigré and pro-democracy campaigner, to escort the family to London.

Litvinenko assumed he would be feted in the west.
He looked to the experiences of other leading
exiles, including Oleg Gordievsky, the far more
senior former KGB London station chief and an old
friend, who had been embraced by the British
authorities when he defected in 1985.

However, Litvinenko was no Gordievsky, and by the
time he fled, America and Britain were awash with
former KGB agents. He tried to punt his knowledge
to private security companies - about crime
bosses in Moscow, about who was bent in Russian
politics. No one was interested. Instead, he was
kept afloat by Berezovsky, who set him up in a
house in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill,
paid his son's school fees and gave Litvinenko a stipend of £4,000 a month.

In exile, Litvinenko carried on relentlessly
truffling for dirt on Putin, but having to live
on handouts from Berezovsky niggled at his pride.
While his wife, Marina, embraced her new life in
the UK, re-establishing a career as a dance
teacher and learning English, Litvinenko, who
spoke hardly any, hankered after independence. He
needed other sources of income and new outlets
for his investigative skills - he found them in
Italy and they may have led to his murder.

When Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium, a
rare and deadly nuclear isotope, as he sat
sipping tea at a London hotel in November 2006,
the finger of suspicion pointed to the Kremlin.
In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed Putin,
and the trail of radiation from the polonium -
leading across London and all the way to Russia -
quickly convinced detectives from Scotland Yard's
anti-terrorism squad that the culprit was a
former FSB officer, Andrei Lugovoi.

The crime was fixed in the west's collective
imagination as a Putin plot to snuff out a brave
dissident, a whistleblower who had stood up to
the dark forces emanating from the Kremlin. But
this was a theory, implicating the highest levels
of the Russian government, that the British
government did not want to pursue. Simply seeking
to extradite the prime suspect - Lugovoi - has
thrown London into a furious row with Moscow,
resulting in tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats,
restrictions on visas for Russian officials and
attempts by Russia to close down two British
Council offices. Wary of Russia withdrawing its
patronage from Britain altogether - a
considerable blow to the City, where Russian
deposits amount to £50bn - the British government
has been reluctant to take anything other than the narrowest view of the case.

An inquest might delve deeper for evidence, but
there seems little prospect of that at the
moment. Although Scotland Yard says its
investigation was completed last May, with the
director of public prosecutions recommending that
Lugovoi be extradited and charged, the St Pancras
coroner's office, which covers University College
Hospital where Litvinenko died, told us that no
inquest could be held since - in their view - the
police investigation remains open. So large
chunks of evidence about Litvinenko's activities
remain unexplored. Goldfarb told us: "It could
hang like this for years. Marina is very frustrated."

If Scotland Yard have been restricted in their
investigations, the Italian security services
have no such inhibition - and felt able to show
us the results of their inquiries. They were
watching Litvinenko long before he came under
scrutiny in London, and gathered a vast dossier
of material on him, including phone tap
transcripts, affidavits, photographs and emails,
court depositions and police interrogations; it
charts how, driven by money worries, Litvinenko
had been secretly cultivating a new project in Italy.

It began in December 2003 when Litvinenko had a
call from Mario Scaramella, 34, a silver-tongued
opportunist from a wealthy Neapolitan family who
was seeking his help. Scaramella was the last
person to have a meal with Litvinenko, at the
Itsu restaurant in Piccadilly on November 1 2006,
a few hours before the former spy was poisoned.

In 2003, Scaramella was working for a government
body, known as the Mitrokhin Commission, that had
been formed two years earlier by prime minister
Silvio Berlusconi ostensibly to discover if
senior figures in the Italian establishment had
been in the pay of the KGB - in reality a vehicle
for smearing Berlusconi's socialist enemies.

Litvinenko knew this from the start but still
jumped at the chance. The commission was a meal
ticket and would enable him to see more of his
brother, Maxim, who had fled Russia before him
and was living in Senigallia, a small Italian
port on the Adriatic coast. Litvinenko's only
concern was about the value of the information he
had to bring to the table. In the FSB, he'd had
no connection with the foreign wing and no
knowledge of its network of recruits in abroad,
the people who were to be the focus of the commission.

To back him up, he took along a new contact he
had made through the Berezovsky circle, Evgeni
Limarev, also a Russian exile, who lived in
France and was the son of a high-ranking KGB officer.

The Italian files reveal how Scaramella and
Litvinenko worked hand-in-glove for three years
as the prime movers in the commission that would
publicly smear Italy's leftwing statesmen. Any
evidence would do, both fact and fiction. When
that failed to gain traction, Litvinenko began
dredging Italy's underworld, which had links with
the Russian and Ukrainian criminal clans, which
in turn had powerful connections in the Kremlin.
Through them, Litvinenko and Scaramella hoped to
find new evidence of the links between the
Italian left and the KGB. They were making dangerous enemies.

Litvinenko had no compunction in recalling a
piece of gossip he had been told by a former KGB
deputy director as he fled Russia. In 2000,
General Anatoly Trofimov had warned Litvinenko
not to go to Rome since "Prodi is our man in
Italy". He was referring to Romano Prodi, the
former Italian prime minister who went on to
become president of the European Commission.

Now Litvinenko regurgitated the unfounded claim
to Scaramella who persuaded him to write it down.
It may have been no more than KGB tittle-tattle,
but written in Russian by a former KGB colonel,
it became evidence - exactly what Berlusconi
needed at a time when Prodi was gearing up for a return to Italian politics.

By the summer of 2004, Limarev and Litvineko were
flying to Naples or Rome on a monthly basis,
touted around town by Scaramella as his "KGB
colonels". Limarev, who today lives in the French
Alps and continues to work as a security
consultant, told us, "Each day Mario [Scaramella]
would come to the hotel with a procession of
SUVs. When he passed, everyone bowed to him. We
would whirl around parties and official functions, shaking hands."

Besides Prodi, potential targets on their list
included former communist prime minister Massimo
D'Alema; Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, Green party
leader; the then head of intelligence; a couple
of judges; two reporters from La Repubblica; a
dozen politicians and officials connected to
Italian military intelligence; and a clutch of former defence ministers.

Others outside Italy had become interested in
their work, too. The Bush administration and the
Berlusconi government were close allies over Iraq
and the war on terror; the last thing Washington
wanted was the left to regain power in Italy
after the elections of 2006. Litvinenko, Limarev
and Scaramella were introduced to Robert Seldon
Lady, a political officer at the US consulate in
Milan - an undercover CIA agent. When Lady got
into trouble in Italy, it was Litvinenko and the
Mitrokhin Commission who tried to dig him out.

In 2004, the Italian authorities issued an arrest
warrant for Lady, accusing him of "rendering" an
imam to Egypt, where he was tortured as a terror
suspect. Lady went into hiding, and the Mitrokhin
Commission began investigating allegations that
the prosecutor in the Lady case, Armando Spataro,
had secret links to the KGB. In a similar tactic,
two Italian journalists who reported that the
CIA's Rome station chief had been complicit in
creating the story about Saddam Hussein buying
uranium from Niger, were branded FSB dupes by the
Mitrokhin Commission. A consultant on the
commission, Gianni Paolo Pelizzaro, recalls:
"Scaramella and his KGB colonels did a lot of
things using the name of the commission they should not have."

Limarev says it was around then that he backed
away from involvement with the other two.
Meanwhile, Litvinenko's trips to Italy grew more
frequent. "With his consent, Berezovsky had cut
back his stipend and he was preparing to go it
alone," Goldfarb says. "I asked him what he was
up to and [Litvinenko] said, 'I am consulting. I
have business projects.' We had no idea what he
was doing in Italy." Marina, who had always
stayed out of her husband's work, says she did
not even ask him which country he was going to
during his frequent trips abroad.

According to Pelizzaro, Litvinenko "was giving
Scaramella lots of information about Russian and
criminal infiltrations in Italy, but most of it
was very difficult to verify and crosscheck. It
was a little bit out on a limb." In the old days,
Litvinenko had been familiar with criminal clans
in Russsia, now he was making risky approaches to
the Italian mafia. Scaramella believed if they
could get inside this network, they would be able
to leverage much more damaging intelligence about Italian politicians.

They spread their net wider. The Litvinenko
dossier lists a dizzying roll call of names
investigated by the pair, among them Semion
Mogilevich, the darkest figure in Russian
organised crime - a notorious Ukrainian whose
network extended from Kiev to Naples. Mogilevich,
a striking man at barely 5ft 6in and more than 20
stone, has a portfolio that includes private
banks, financing the sale of enriched uranium and
laundering his money through companies listed on
the New York stock exchange. He was already on
the FBI's wanted list but, according to
Litvinenko's sources, had extensive links to Putin's government.

Taking on Mogilevich, who runs a private army of
brutal killers, was a huge risk for a civilian
outfit such as the Mitrokhin Commission, and
Litvinenko soon picked up word that he was
enraging the Ukrainian's siloviki friends in
Moscow. In autumn 2005, he made a tape recording
in London, expressing his concern: "I gave a lot
of information about Mogilevich to Scaramella.
Now I know Russian special services are very
afraid that this commission will uncover
information about its agents in Italy. The
Russian embassy asked for my brother to be
extradited so he could be prosecuted back in
Russia. It is blackmail against me to stop me working with Scaramella."

But Litvinenko would not back off. In October
2005, he claimed to have uncovered an FSB agent
hiding in Naples, a man he believed had been in
deep cover since 1999. This FSB agent was
Ukrainian by birth and, according to Litvinenko,
he had strong links to Mogilevich's mob. His name
was Alexander Talik, he was born in 1970 and,
according to the Italian dossier and to
depositions read out in a subsequent Italian
court hearing, had served with the Red Army
before being recruited by the FSB, where he rose to the rank of captain.

Talik, at the same hearing, would admit to having
served in the FSB until 1977, but denied
everything else. He said Scaramella had tried to
strong-arm him into providing information to the
commission on Mogilevich and Ukrainian criminals
based in Italy. When he refused, the court heard,
Litvinenko and Scaramella resorted to
fabrication: they tried to frame Talik as part of
a criminal conspiracy, hoping this would persuade him to cooperate.

In accordance with their alleged plan, Litvinenko
sent Scaramella a fax in October 2005 warning him
of a Russian security services operation to kill
Litvinenko's brother, Maxim, Scaramella and a
political associate of Berlusconi's. The detail
of the plot was bizarre: a white transit van with
Ukrainian numberplates, apparently en route from
Kiev to Naples, was carrying a consignment of
grenades, hidden inside hollowed-out bibles, to
be used to mount attacks on the three men. The
alleged recipient and hit man was Talik.

Litvinenko and his brother reported the threat to
the local police in Senigallia. Scaramella
reported the plot to the police in Rome. A police
patrol in Abruzzo did indeed discover two white
vans with Ukrainian numberplates and a concealed
shipment of grenades. Six Ukrainians were
arrested and charged with smuggling arms.

At Litvinenko's suggestion, Scaramella also gave
police the name of the FSB officer in Moscow who
they said was managing Talik. Still nothing
happened. Police in fact had their doubts about
Scaramella - the details he provided about the
vans' progress seemed just too precise.

In November, Litvinenko took matters into his own
hands and "revealed" the entire plot to the
Ukrainian media, including Talik's name. The
Italian authorities, by now suspicious of the
Mitrokhin Commission, Scaramella and Litvinenko,
had begun recording their phone calls. One tap
caught Litvinenko crowing to Scaramella, "All the
Ukrainian newspapers have published and all the
Ukrainian citizens know about Talik and the plot.
I also indicated that Talik has been arrested."

In fact, Talik had not been arrested, and
evidence presented at a later court hearing
suggested he was in a mood for revenge. A phone
tap, played to Talik in court, captures his
reaction. "Complete bullshit has been written
about me," he complains. "Litvinenko has blamed
me for organising arms shipments from the
Ukraine." More chillingly, he continues, "I've
asked for the address of this arsehole in London
and I've given a dossier to Vitalich who will
take everything to Moscow." Asked by the person
on the line who Vitalich was, Talik refuses to
explain, insisting only that Vitalich would pass
on this contract on Litvinenko's life to three powerful sponsors, all siloviki

In court, Talik admitted making the call - but
the reference to Litvinenko was merely an idle
threat, he said. He denied accusations that he
had high-ranking contacts both in the Ukrainian
mafia and in the Kremlin and said he had been
enraged by Litvinenko's outing of him as an FSB agent to the Ukrainian media.

The Italian police initially took seriously the
threat caught on the phone tap; but, given that
they now were also convinced Litvinenko and
Scaramella had tried to frame Talik, they alerted
no one. The police also began probing how Talik
had stayed in Italy for six years with no visa.
By February 2006, nine months before Litvinenko
was poisoned, they had assembled a 73-page dossier on him.

Litvinenko and Scaramella continued to work
together, repeating the Prodi allegations, this
time on camera. The slur reached new ears. Gerald
Batten, a British MEP from the UK Independence
party, picked up on it and met Litvinenko on
March 29 at Itsu, the Russian's regular haunt.
Four days later Batten demanded an inquiry into
Prodi at the European Parliament. The story
caused uproar in Italy. The Italian general
election was imminent - Prodi threatened to sue
Litvinenko and Scaramella. Berlusconi, instead of
achieving a strike against the left, was forced
by parliament to wind up the Mitrokhin
Commission. A few days later Prodi was returned to power.

Scaramella was out of a job. Litvinenko, too.
Oblivious to the inquiries going on into the
supposed contract on his life, he was busy
looking elsewhere for a lucrative new collaboration.

In January 2006, Litvinenko had attended Boris
Berezovsky's lavish 60th birthday party at
Blenheim Palace, where he met a ghost from the
past. He was seated on the same table as Andrei
Lugovoi, a former FSB agent whom he had known in
Moscow during the 90s. Lugovoi had gone on to
serve 14 months in prison, for helping a
Berezovsky business partner evade prosecution. He
told Litvinenko that since getting out he had
become a multimillionaire, running a private
security agency that provided bodyguards to rich Muscovites.

Litvinenko should have been wary of Lugovoi from
the start, but the lure of money was too strong.
Otherwise he might have found out that Lugovoi
was a close associate of Alexander Talik; the two
men served together in the same KGB and FSB
divisions. Instead, Litvinenko confided to his
good friend Alex Goldfarb that he had agreed to
become Lugovoi's "man in London".

Others warned him to be careful, including Evgeni
Limarev. Limarev was to play one last significant
role in the Litvinenko affair: he sent a series
of alarmist emails to Scaramella in October 2006,
claiming that a Russian plot was afoot to kill
everyone connected to the Mitrokhin Commission.
He was not referring to the alleged Talik hit,
but to another that had no independent
verification. The messages sent Scaramella
running to Litvinenko in London, who reluctantly
agreed to meet him on November 1 2006. A series
of witness statements Scaramella would later make
to anti-terrorism detectives at Scotland Yard,
which we have seen, give an account of this last meeting.

Scaramella picked up a final email from Limarev
at an internet cafe in Soho just minutes before
he met Litvinenko, as usual in Itsu. But
Litvinenko was dismissive of Limarev's warnings.
Scaramella told British detectives: "Litvinenko
was adamant, 'It's pure shit, Mario. Don't
worry,' he told me. 'As soon as I get home, I'll
make some verifications through my contacts in Moscow.' "

They arranged to speak again the next morning.
But when Scaramella called, Marina answered the
phone. "She said Alexander was very sick,
puking," Scaramella told police. The following
day he rang again, only to be told Litvinenko was
on his way to hospital. Paranoid, Scaramella
scribbled down a note and hid it in his wallet.
"It contained details about my closest relatives
and advice that if something happened to me, it
was necessary to inform the police," he said. As
Scaramella flew back to Naples, he sent
Litvinenko an email. "I made comments about the
timing of his sickness and reminded him about the
names mentioned by Limarev." There was no reply.
But after he read in the newspapers that
Litvinenko was critically ill and had probably
been poisoned, he tried calling one more time, on
November 17. Litvinenko, who had just been
transferred to University College Hospital under
armed guard, answered his mobile phone.
Scaramella told police: "I said: 'It's Mario, how
are you?' He said, 'I'm sick, very sick. Sorry, I
can't speak.' " Six days later, Litvinenko was dead.

Scaramella was a mess. As he tried to deal with a
sickening fear that he was about to be killed,
too, the Italian authorities moved on the
grenades-in-bibles plot. Five days after
Litvinenko's death, the Italian police's
specialist operations division raided Talik's
Naples apartment. He was driven to Rome and
questioned. The transcript reveals that rather
than explore the alleged threat, or Talik's
connections with Lugovoi, the police had a new
agenda - gathering evidence against Scaramella.

Scaramella was arrested on December 24 and
charged with "calumny", or criminal lying,
against Talik. A few months later he was also
charged with weapons smuggling. The trial of the
six Ukrainians who had been arrested with the
grenades, and who had been in custody since
October 2005, collapsed for lack of evidence.

In September 2007, after nine months in police
custody, Scaramella was placed under house arrest
at his family's villa near Gaeta, a seaside town
north of Naples. He denies the charges. His only
link with the outside world is his father,
Amedeo, who agreed to meet us at his lawyer's
office overlooking the Bay of Naples. "While my
son and I were in London assisting your police in
December 2006," Amedeo said, "the police here
broke the doors of all of our houses. When we
returned to Italy, Mario was locked in a solitary
cell, two metres wide, for 45 days. We kept
asking, 'Why are you arresting my son?' Why had
they taken 13 months to arrest Talik, only to
release him straight away? There has been a
deeply political aspect to my son's case."

In Britain, Litvinenko would be portrayed as a
freedom-loving, pro-western martyr, granted
political asylum in 2001, but in Italy he had
become foolishly wrapped up in a rightist plot
and his death was quietly celebrated.

Maxim Litvinenko remains in Senigallia. Even
though he accused Talik of plotting to kill him
back in October 2005, he now claims never to have
heard of the FSB agent. "I know nothing. Who is
Talik? I don't know what you are talking about," he said.

Talik lives freely in a grimy Naples quarter,
where our taxi driver does not want to go. "You walk," he says, speeding off.

Through narrow streets darkened by parachutes of
laundry overhead, we press on to an apartment
with no windows. We knock. Locks are drawn back
and an ashen face peers out. It is Nataliya,
Talik's wife, a child holding on to her leg. Can
we speak to her husband, we ask.

She stares mutely. We need to talk to him about
Litvinenko, we say. A look of incredulity spreads
across her face. "Who told you how to find us?"
she screams, slamming shut the huge iron door. We
can hear her running upstairs, screaming for her
husband. And we back out of the one-way street.