It was a warm autumn day when the two Russian visitors arrived in Grosvenor Street, central London. Their names were Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun; the date was 16 October 2006. They had arrived that morning from Moscow carrying something that British customs failed to detect. Not drugs or large sums of cash, but something so otherworldly, it had never been seen before in the UK.

The substance was polonium, a highly radioactive isotope. It is probably the most toxic poison known to man when swallowed or inhaled – more than 100bn times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide. It had come from a Russian nuclear reactor. The job of Lugovoi and Kovtun was to deploy it. They had come to poison Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident, MI6 employee and Kremlin critic. The visiting killers had no personal grudge against their target. They had been sent by Russia’s FSB spy agency, in an operation likely to have been approved by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

Scotland Yard has never established how the assassins transported the polonium. The amounts were very small and easy to disguise. There are several possibilities: a container with the poison administered by a pipette-style dropper. Or an aerosol-like spray. Even a modified fountain pen would do the trick. Within its container, the polonium was safe. Out of it, it was highly dangerous. Ingest it, and you were dead.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, it would become apparent, had no idea what they were carrying. Their behaviour in Britain was idiotic, verging on suicidal. Nobody in Moscow appears to have told them Po-210 had intensely radioactive properties. Or that it left a trace – placing them in specific locations and indicating, via telltale alpha-radiation markings, who sat where. It was possible to identify anything and everything these clueless assassins touched.

That morning – at 11.49 – Lugovoi called Litvinenko from Gatwick airport to confirm their meeting that afternoon at the intelligence firm Erinys in Grosvenor Street. Litvinenko thought this was a routine meeting. Lugovoi had offered himself as Litvinenko’s business partner, giving advice to western firms seeking to invest in Russia.

The killers travelled by train to central London. They checked into the Best Western hotel on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of Soho. The first rule of spycraft is not to draw attention to yourself. But from the moment they stepped on to UK soil, Lugovoi and Kovtun attracted attention. It wasn’t just that they were assassins: they looked like assassins, a couple of stage villains from KGB casting.

When the pair swapped their casual clothes for “business” attire, their appearance prompted hotel staff to chuckle. Kovtun was wearing a silvery metallic polyester-type suit and Lugovoi was kitted out in checks. They had matched their shiny outfits with colourful shirts and ties. They wore chunky jewellery.

According to hotel manager Goran Krgo, the two men resembled stereotypical eastern European gangsters. “The colours didn’t match, the suits were either too big or too small. They just didn’t look like people who are used to wearing suits. They looked like – I think the expression is: like a donkey with a saddle.”

At 3pm, Litvinenko met Lugovoi and Kovtun in Grosvenor Street. Waiting for them was Tim Reilly, the Russian-speaking head of Erinys; he shook their hands and led them into the boardroom.

Alexander Litvinenko, in 2002. Photograph: Alistair Fuller/AP

The meeting began in typically English style, with talk of the sunny weather. Then Lugovoi steered the conversation round to tea. He suggested they all drink some, joking that the English had cups of tea all the time. Reilly declined and told them he had just drunk water from the cooler. Lugovoi was weirdly persistent.

“They kept on saying to me – don’t you want any [tea], won’t you have any?” Reilly recalled.

Heaving with radioactive contamination

Reilly served cups of tea to his three guests. He sat to the right of Litvinenko, who was at the head of the table with his back facing the bay window; immediately across the table from Reilly was Lugovoi. Kovtun sat to Lugovoi’s left. He said nothing. After making tea, Reilly – fortuitously for the would-be assassins – went to the loo.

We don’t know how the polonium was deployed. The forensic evidence suggests that either Lugovoi or Kovtun slipped it into Litvinenko’s tea. For the next 30 minutes, the tea sat in front of him, a little to his left – an invisible nuclear murder weapon primed to go off. Lugovoi and Kovtun must have been barely listening to the conversation: for them, the only question was, would Litvinenko drink?

Litvinenko didn’t drink. One can only imagine what must have been going through Lugovoi’s and Kovtun’s minds when the meeting broke up, his drink untouched.

When nuclear scientists examined the Erinys table, they found that, in Reilly’s damning words, it was “heaving” with radioactive contamination. It appeared there had been substantial spillage. Reilly wondered whether he, too, had been an intended target. One spot in front of where Litvinenko had been sitting showed exceptionally high alpha-radiation readings of more than 10,000 counts a second. Scientists later identified the scene as one of “primary contamination”. That meant the radiation could only have come from deployed polonium. Other parts of the baize had readings of 2,300 counts a second. One chair – where either Lugovoi or Kovtun had been sitting – registered at 7,000 counts a second.

The Russians would later claim that it was Litvinenko who had poisoned them, during this, their first significant encounter in Mayfair. All subsequent traces, they said, could be explained by this initial radioactive contact. It was a version they would repeat to Russian state media, which transmitted it as true.

This version was easily disproved when Scotland Yard reconstructed Litvinenko’s journey from his home to Green Park using his Oyster card. He had travelled on the 43 bus, getting on at Friern Barnet, then taking the tube into central London from Highgate station. The bus – vehicle registration LR02 BCX – was found and tested for contamination. There wasn’t any.

Lugovoi and Kovtun, by contrast, left a lurid nuclear stain wherever they went, including their hotel rooms, well before their first meeting with Litvinenko. After leaving Erinys, Litvinenko took the pair to his favourite branch of Itsu in Piccadilly Circus, close to the Ritz. They sat downstairs. Polonium was found here, too. The visitors took their leave of Litvinenko.

A ghostly glow on the shisha pipe

Afterwards, Lugovoi claimed that he and Kovtun strolled around Soho for an hour and a half. They dropped in to a bar, Dar Marrakesh in the Trocadero centre, where Lugovoi smoked a £9 shisa pipe on the terrace. Scotland Yard later retrieved the pipe. It was easy to spot: the handle gave off a ghostly alpha-radiation glow.

Back at home in Muswell Hill, Litvinenko felt mildly unwell. He threw up, just once. His vomiting spasm was due to exposure to radiation – just from being near the poison. Litvinenko thought little of this episode. He had unwittingly survived his first encounter with polonium.

At 1am, the would-be killers returned to the Best Western hotel. At some point that day or the next, Lugovoi handled polonium in the privacy of his room, 107. He appears to have transferred it here from one container to another. And to have disposed of it down the bathroom sink. We know this because Lugovoi’s plughole showed massive alpha-radiation readings of 1,500 counts a second. There were lower readings elsewhere in the bathroom, and in the bedroom next door. Kovtun’s room, 306, was also heavily contaminated.

Andrei Lugovoi, left, and Dmitry Kovtun speak to Ekho Moskvy radio in November 2006. Photograph: Reuters

The two Russians had booked into the Best Western for two nights, with Lugovoi paying in advance. But the next day, 17 October, they abruptly checked out and took a taxi to the Parkes hotel in Beaufort Gardens, Knightsbridge. Lugovoi explained the switch by saying he “didn’t like the condition of the rooms”. The real reason, most probably, was to distance himself from the poison, which he had efficiently tipped down the bathroom U-bend.

Front office manager Giuliana Rondini was on duty when the Russians walked in. After chatting, Lugovoi made a request. Was there somewhere fun where he and Kovtun “might meet some girls”? Rondini was used to dealing tactfully with these kinds of inquiries. She recommended a house across the street. “It was well known with girls. It was a brothel,” she said. Failing that, she suggested an Italian restaurant. “It was a place where you could go and have a pizza but also have fun and pick up girls. Pizza with extras, I would say.”

About 11.30pm, Lugovoi rang Litvinenko to say that he was missing out on fun times. He said that he and Kovtun had hired a rickshaw and that they were going on an hour-long joyride through central London – two off-duty assassins enjoying themselves amid the bright lights of Soho. Their rickshaw driver was Polish. He spoke “not bad” Russian. It appears they asked again about girls. The driver recommended a private members’ place in Jermyn Street popular with big-spending Russians.

This was HeyJo, a club founded in 2005 by a former fruit-and-veg stall owner from Essex called Dave West. It featured mirrored walls, frilly pink cubicles, waitresses dressed as naughty nurses, and a bronze phallus. There was a dancefloor and a Russian-themed restaurant, Abracadabra, with silver tables. The bordello theme extended to the bathrooms, where water spouted from penis-shaped taps.

Lugovoi and Kovtun spent two hours at HeyJo, leaving at 3am. Detectives later found traces of radiation in cubicle nine – on the backrest and cushions. There were low levels on a bench, a table in the restaurant and on a door in the gents’. No polonium was found on the phallus. The floor was clean. Apparently, the men from Moscow didn’t dance.

They didn’t score either. The following morning, as they checked out for their flight back to Moscow, Rondini asked Lugovoi how they got on. His reply was uncharacteristically honest: “We were not lucky that night,” he told her.

Tea, from a silver pot



Lugovoi’s conversations with his FSB bosses following his first unsuccessful attempt to poison Litvinenko can only be imagined. In short, he had failed. The upshot was that, within days, Lugovoi returned to the UK, this time alone, bringing with him another container of radioactive poison. He flew on 25 October from Moscow to London, on British Airways flight 875.

He sat in business class, seat 6K. He arrived shortly after midnight at the Sheraton Park Lane, a hotel overlooking Piccadilly, with a frontage of black classical pillars. Inside, the hotel was rather worn. Lugovoi stayed in room 848, on the eighth floor.

Lugovoi met Litvinenko in the ground-floor Palm Court, an afternoon tearoom furnished in high art-deco style, with Chinese screen paintings, vases and lamps. Litvinenko produced two Orange SIM cards so that he and Lugovoi had a secure way of communicating. As ever, Litvinenko drank tea, from a silver teapot. Lugovoi ordered three glasses of red wine and a Cuban cigar.

Metropolitan Police’s 3D graphic showing polonium contamination on the green baize tablecloth in Grosvenor Square Photograph: Guardian graphics/Litvinenko Inquiry

For unknown reasons, Lugovoi failed to deploy the latest vial of polonium. One possible explanation is that the Palm Court bar had video cameras, which Lugovoi would have seen. Or perhaps he suspected he was being watched. Did the British have him under surveillance? (The answer was no.) It’s possible he had got fresh orders from Moscow. Either way, Lugovoi decided to abort the operation.

This left him with a problem: what to do with the poison? Lugovoi’s solution was simple. In his hotel room, he tipped the polonium down the bathroom sink again, this time mopping it up with a couple of towels. He left the towels for the cleaner. And he appeared to have dumped the container in the white pedal bin next to the lavatory.

When scientists later tested Lugovoi’s hotel room they walked into a scene from an atomic horror story. The door to Lugovoi’s room was highly contaminated. It showed a reading of more than 30,000 counts a second. Inside, there was further contamination. The situation in the bathroom was even worse. The inside of the pedal bin registered what scientists called “full-scale deflection”, a monster reading of 30,000-plus. There was radiation everywhere: on the wall under the sink, the floor and bath, plus another massive result from the bathroom door.

The two scientists wearing protective gear gazed at their instruments incredulously. They asked to be withdrawn from the room. The team was stood down on safety grounds.

The most radioactive towel in history

Amazingly, two months later, detectives located the towels that Lugovoi had chucked away. They had ended up stuck in a laundry chute in the hotel’s basement. A 3ft by 3ft metal service tube ran the full height of the building. At its bottom was a mountain of unwashed sheets and towels.

Lugovoi’s bath towel was found in a green laundry bag on a shelf. His hand towel was discovered at the base of the chute.

The levels of radiation were so alarming that the towels were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the UK government nuclear facility. The contamination was unprecedented. The bath towel gave a reading of 6,000 counts a second, or 130,000 becquerels per sq cm.

The most extreme object, however, was Lugovoi’s white hand towel. The initial reading came in as full-scale deflection, greater than 10,000 counts a second. Re-tested at Aldermaston, it yielded an astonishing result: in excess of 17m becquerels per sq cm.

To put this in context, the equivalent of 10m–30m becquerels absorbed into an adult male’s blood would be likely to be fatal within one month. The towel was the single most radioactive object recovered by Scotland Yard during its decade-long inquiry into Litvinenko’s murder. Probably the most radioactive towel in history.

• Extracted from A Very Expensive Poison by Luke Harding (Guardian Faber £12.99). Buy a copy now for £7.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.