It's the murder mystery still causing political shockwaves in London and Moscow. But was the radioactive Russian spy killed by bungling MI6 agents?

The autopsy was eerie, one of the oddest forensic post-mortem examinations in the annals of crime.



At a London hospital, three British pathologists covered themselves from head to toe in white protective suits before standing around a radioactive corpse that had been sealed in plastic for nearly a week.

The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, a 44-year-old ex-KGB officer who had defected from Russia to the United Kingdom in 2000. Now, six years later, he was dead in the most mysterious of circumstances.

Alexander Litvinenko, a 44-year-old ex-KGB officer who had defected from Russia to the United Kingdom in 2000, died on November 23, 2006, in the most mysterious of circumstances

Just a month earlier he had been admitted to hospital with severe abdominal pains, which were initially diagnosed as caused by thallium, a toxin used in Russian rat poison.

Since thallium was supposedly a favourite poison of the KGB in the Cold War era and Litvinenko was an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was believed Litvinenko might have been the victim of the FSB, the Russian security service that took over from the KGB.

All efforts to save him failed and, on November 23, 2006, he died, leaving behind a deathbed statement he had dictated to a friend, accusing Putin of orchestrating his murder.

Just two hours before his death, there had been another startling twist in the story. New medical tests revealed that the fatal poison was not thallium but polonium-210, one of the world’s most tightly controlled radioactive isotopes and a critical component in the making of early-stage nuclear bombs.

Its unexpected presence should have triggered an inquiry by international nuclear anti-proliferation agencies, anxious to find out which country was holding illicit stocks of this high-security substance.



Instead, the police assumed it had been smuggled into London solely to commit murder. But such a theory was, I believe, inherently unlikely.

Why would anyone use a nuclear weapon to kill an individual, when a knife, bullet or conventional poison would do the trick more quickly, efficiently and certainly? As an assassination weapon, polonium-210 would have to be handled with great caution, since it is extremely unstable and leaks into the air with ease. It would be potentially as deadly to the killer as the victim.

Nonetheless, the commonly held view was that the Russian secret service was behind the poisoning and a culprit was even named in the Press — a former KGB man named Andrei Lugovoi, whom Litvinenko had met at a London hotel a few days before he fell ill.



All efforts to save Alexander Litvinenko failed and, in November 2006, he died, leaving behind a deathbed statement he had dictated to a friend, accusing Putin of orchestrating his murder

The suggestion was that Lugovoi had slipped the polonium into Litvinenko’s tea.

Britain demanded that Russia extradite Lugovoi, so he could be tried for murder. When Russia refused, Britain expelled four Russian diplomats from London in reprisal. There was a stand-off.

What was the truth? That’s what I set out to discover — but only one thing was certain: the most difficult cases to crack are what I call ‘crimes of state’, in which national security interests collide and secrecy, conspiracy and paranoia combine to obfuscate the truth.

The death of Litvinenko in 2006 was a prime example. I spent months investigating his death, sifting the evidence, scrutinising official documents and interviewing witnesses and experts. I even went to Moscow to confront the alleged killer, Lugovoi, to hear his side of the story.

What I found led me to conclude that the accepted version of events is far from being the true story and raised a tantalising question: could the British secret service be to blame?

There is no doubt Andrei Lugovoi had been with Litvinenko in London. Witnesses saw them taking tea in the bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, where Lugovoi was staying with his family. This was less than a day before Litvinenko became ill.

The commonly held view was that the Russian secret service was behind the poisoning and a culprit was even named in the Press - former KGB man Andrei Lugovoi, whom Litvinenko had met at a London hotel a few days before he fell ill

Subsequently, the bar as well as Lugovoi’s bedroom tested positive for polonium-210, leading to an early theory that Litvinenko had been poisoned in the hotel. But then it turned out some four hours earlier Litvinenko had had lunch at a sushi restaurant, which also tested positive for polonium.

Crucially, this suggested that Litvinenko had been contaminated before he took tea with Lugovoi.

It then turned out that the two had held a number of meetings in London weeks earlier, including one at a lap-dancing club called Hey Jo. The private booth they sat in was tested and also showed positive, as did the seat Lugovoi had occupied on a British Airways flight back to Moscow.

What was becoming apparent was that both men had been exposed to polonium-210 more than a month before Litvinenko died. But how?

When I met Lugovoi in his office in Moscow, he told me he and Litvinenko had both been intelligence officers in the KGB and FSB in the Nineties. Subsequently, Lugovoi had become a supporter of Putin, while Litvinenko had done everything he could to discredit Putin before defecting to London.

I asked how they came together a decade later. Lugovoi answered in a single word: Berezovsky.

Boris Berezovsky had once been the most powerful oligarch in Russia. He not only controlled whole sectors of the Russian economy and the country’s largest television channel, but he was part of the government apparatus, serving as the deputy secretary of its National Security Council.

Lugovoi and Litvinenko acted as Berezovsky’s protectors in the FSB. With an enigmatic smile, Lugovoi said the two of them had performed ‘extraordinary’ services for him, including one occasion when Litvinenko, with a gun in his hand, had prevented Moscow police from arresting Berezovsky on a murder charge.

The loyal Litvinenko even went as far as to expose an FSB plot to assassinate Berezovsky, an act that ended his career in the secret service and led to him being thrown in jail.

In 2000, Berezovsky fled Russia with his billions, moved to London and became Putin’s arch-foe.



Later that year, he helped Litvinenko escape to England, too, where he supported him and his family financially and sponsored his anti-Putin activities for the next six years.

It was Berezovsky, too, who eventually brought Lugovoi to England, inviting him to his lavish 60th birthday party at Blenheim Palace in January 2006. There, Lugovoi was seated next to Litvinenko.



Boris Berezovsky was once the most powerful oligarch in Russia. He controlled whole sectors of the Russian economy and the country's largest television channel, and he was also part of the government apparatus

That night there was nothing but caviar, good cheer and celebratory toasts, but soon afterward, so Lugovoi told me, Litvinenko had called him with a ‘business proposal’.

They would form a joint venture, backed by Berezovsky, to gather secret business information in Moscow that Litvinenko could sell to London clients.

Since this would involve Lugovoi collaborating with some of Putin’s most determined enemies abroad, I asked him if he had been concerned that this engagement could cause him problems with the authorities in Moscow.

He answered: ‘I had no such worries.’ Did this mean that he had informed Russian authorities about his participation in this shadowy venture? He just shrugged, hinting that this was the case. Since he was by now a member of the Russian parliament, I had to assume that whatever he had done had not harmed his prospects in Putin’s Russia.

As Lugovoi’s project with Litvinenko developed, much of the information he was asked to provide concerned Yukos, the immensely powerful Russian oil company that Putin was then in the process of expropriating from its owners.

Litvinenko (pictured) and Lugovoi formed a joint venture, backed by Berezovsky, to gather secret business information in Moscow that Litvinenko could sell to London clients

According to Lugovoi, he was initially asked to obtain relatively innocuous reports, such as one entitled, Main Characteristics Of Russian Organised Crime In 2003−2005. He duly acquired a copy from former FSB officers, and delivered it to Litvinenko, who paid him.

Litvinenko then gave him a list of other data to acquire, including government files on Russian tax officials. Litvinenko threatened that if he did not get this material, Lugovoi might have a ‘problem’ renewing his British visa. Sure enough, he later found his visa was indeed held up.

When Lugovoi then agreed to get this sensitive data, not only was his visa renewed, but $8,000 (£5,160) was wired to his bank account. This incident made him suspicious that Litvinenko, aside from working for Berezovsky, was also involved with British intelligence.

‘How else could he get my visa withdrawn — and reinstated?’ he asked rhetorically. How indeed.

So what of the crucial meeting at the Millennium Hotel? Lugovoi confirmed to me that the last time he saw Litvinenko was at 5pm on November 1, 2006, at the hotel bar, where they had discussed a planned meeting the following day.

But the next morning Litvinenko called to say he was sick and cancelled the meeting, so Lugovoi flew back to Moscow. He insisted he had no knowledge about how Litvinenko, or he himself, had been contaminated with polonium-210. Subsequently, he provided the same answer on a polygraph (lie detector) examination, conducted as part of a Russian TV documentary, and showed no signs of deception.

I next went to see Dmitry Kovtun, another former KGB agent, who had accompanied Lugovoi to London for his last two meetings with Litvinenko.

Like Lugovoi, Kovtun had been contaminated with polonium-210 — his seat on the BA flight back to Moscow had tested positive, as had Lugovoi’s. But Kovtun’s seat on the plane that had brought him to London was clean, strongly suggesting that he, too, must have been contaminated while in Britain.

Both Lugovoi and Kovtun claimed they were merely innocent bystanders who themselves had been contaminated by the same polonium-210 that killed Litvinenko. But how? That was the crucial question.

My next inquiries were with the office of the Russian prosecutor general in Moscow. I asked to see the evidence the British government had provided to support its extradition request for Lugovoi. I was referred to a unit called the National Investigative Committee and given access to the British files.

What immediately caught my attention was that they did not include the kind of documents that are fundamental to any murder case, such as the post-mortem report. There was a statement from a Scotland Yard police inspector that he was ‘familiar with the autopsy results’ and that Litvinenko had died of ‘Acute Radiation Syndrome’. But that was it.

Dmitry Kovtun (L), like Lugovoi (R), had been contaminated with polonium-210 - his seat on the BA flight back to Moscow had tested positive. But Kovtun's seat on the plane that had brought him to London was clean

There was no toxicology report to indicate when Litvinenko had been exposed to the radioactive nuclear component. There were no post-mortem slides of his lungs, digestive tract or body, which could have shown how the radioactive material got into his bloodstream — whether inhaled, swallowed or through an open cut.

Moreover, I learned, the Russians had been making their own inquiries into the case, but they had run into a brick wall when they asked for information from London.

The Russians wanted to know why Litvinenko had been wrongly diagnosed for more than three weeks and therefore not given the correct antidotes. But they said their repeated requests to speak to the doctors and see their notes were denied.

‘We have no trustworthy data on the cause of death of Litvinenko since the British authorities have refused to provide the necessary documents,’ I was told.

Neither did the British police report that accompanied the extradition papers cite any conventional scenes-of-crime evidence, such as eyewitness accounts, video surveillance records and fingerprints, other than the fact that Lugovoi had been with Litvinenko in the hotel bar.

Nor was there evidence that the alleged poisoning had even taken place that day. It could just as well have occurred early in the day, the week or the month at any of several other sites that also tested positive for radiation.

A scientist concluded that the traces of polonium-210 in Lugovoi's bedroom at the Millennium Hotel 'were at such a high level as to establish a link with the original polonium source material'

Instead, the case against Lugovoi was based entirely on a supposed ‘trail’ of polonium-210 radiation that had been detected many weeks after Litvinenko, Lugovoi, Kovtun and others had been in contact with it.

But the Russian investigators found the supposed trail inexplicably erratic in places. When they asked the British for a comprehensive list of all the sites tested, the British refused — leading the Russian investigators to suspect that the British might be truncating the trail to ‘fit their case’ that Lugovoi was the culprit.

The most impressive piece of evidence in the British report involved the high level of polonium-210 in Lugovoi’s bedroom at the Millennium Hotel. The actual level was not divulged, but an unidentified scientist had concluded that the traces ‘were at such a high level as to establish a link with the original polonium source material’.

In other words, Lugovoi had to be the original source.

Was the scientific data reliable? Presumably the scientist based his opinion by comparing the radiation level in Lugovoi’s bedroom with the other contaminated sites around London. But such evidence would work only if all the different sites had been pristine when the measurements were taken.

As it was, all the sites had been compromised by weeks of usage before they were tested. Therefore the differences in the radiation levels could have resulted from extraneous factors, such as vacuuming, washing or heating conditions.

The Russian investigators were also concerned that the discovered traces could have originated through cross-contamination ‘by outside parties’.

The Russian investigators concluded that there was not ‘a single piece of evidence’ that proved Lugovoi had to be the source.

As for the small quantity of polonium-210 involved, it could have been made in any country with an uninspected nuclear reactor — a list that in 2006 included Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea.

It could also have been stolen from stockpiles in the former Soviet Union or in the U.S., where, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there had been 14 incidents of missing industrial polonium-210 since 2004.

Consequently, we not only don’t know when it arrived in London, we don’t know where it came from. Nor do we know why it was smuggled into Britain.



One theory is that Putin's enemies in London arranged the death of Litvinenko so to cast suspicion on Putin. Even before Litvinenko was dead, websites controlled by Berezovsky had declared Putin the villain

This dearth of hard evidence has given rise to a profusion of theories. The most prevalent one — promoted by Berezovsky and his associates — is that Putin gave the orders to murder Litvinenko, and that Lugovoi carried them out.

A second theory is that Putin’s enemies in London arranged the death of Litvinenko so to cast suspicion on Putin. Even before Litvinenko was dead, websites controlled by Berezovsky and his allies had declared Putin the villain.

To add to the intrigue, in March this year Berezovsky himself was found hanged in the bathroom at the Ascot mansion of his former wife. A full inquest isn’t expected to be heard until next year, and will have to address suggestions that he, too, was murdered.

Other theories hold that Litvinenko was killed because of investigations he was making into organised crime in Spain involving the Mafia and the Kremlin.

My own assessment is that none of these theories holds true. For I believe that Alexander Litvinenko was not murdered at all — but rather that he was contaminated by an accidental leakage of polonium-210.

The highly radioactive material is not simply a lethal toxin, but is often used for more conventional purposes in modern espionage, since it can power miniaturised transmitters planted in an embassy ceiling, a diplomatic vehicle or on an article of clothing to track a person’s movements.

The Litvinenko family, who are now seeking a judicial review on Alexander's death, believe that Britain has struck a pragmatic deal with the Kremlin to hide the truth

Another use for polonium as part of an intelligence-gathering operation would be to provide it as ‘a sample’ — as bait to entrap someone suspected of buying nuclear material. And who would be behind either of these scenarios?

Litvinenko was involved with a number of intelligence services, including British intelligence, Russia’s FSB, America’s CIA (which rejected his offer to defect in 2000), and Italy’s SISMI (which was monitoring his phone conversations).

Did one of these security agencies — perhaps even the British — supply Litvinenko with the material as part of an attempted sting operation, or use it to power a device designed to track him?

All we know for certain is that Litvinenko and a number of his associates — whether wittingly or not — were in contact with a container of polonium-210. My conclusion is that at some stage along the line, it simply leaked with catastrophic consequences.

We will never know for sure where or when or how, because crucial evidence, such as the autopsy report, is locked away in the realms of British national-security secrecy.

The British Government has also gone to considerable lengths to conceal Litvinenko’s relationship with its intelligence services, as have their counterparts in other countries. The official inquest into his death may yet reveal further details, but don’t hold your breath.

Despite the request of the British coroner, Sir Robert Owen, that a full public inquiry should be held with a far broader investigative remit, the Government last month refused.

The Litvinenko family, who continue to blame the Russian government for his death, are now seeking a judicial review, delaying the start of the inquest yet further. They believe that Britain has struck a pragmatic deal with the Kremlin to hide the truth. In the words of one family friend: ‘There’s some sort of collusion behind the scenes with Her Majesty’s government and the Kremlin to obstruct justice.’

Could that be possible?

In cases of such sensitive political crimes, it is rare that conclusive evidence suddenly comes to light.

My belief is that the strange, radioactive death of Alexander Litvinenko is likely to earn its place in the annals of unsolved crime for ever.