The life and death of Alexander Litvinenko

As Alexander Litvinenko lay dying in a London hospital in November 2006, neither he nor his doctors understood the nature of his illness. But the former Russian intelligence officer knew that someone had tried to kill him and he had no doubt about who ordered them to do it.

In a statement read on his behalf to media outside the hospital, Litvinenko said he could “distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death” and wanted to say something to the person responsible.

"You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people," he said.

Two days later, on November 23rd, 2006, Litvinenko was dead at the age of 43, poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope he ingested in a cup of green tea. On Thursday, a public inquiry into his death found that Litvinenko was murdered by two Russians who were probably acting with the approval of President Vladimir Putin.

The inquiry's 326-page report, written by Sir Robert Owen, a former high court judge, casts a new light on Litvinenko's extraordinary life and death and why Putin may have wanted him dead. It tells the story of an increasingly outspoken and reckless critic of the Kremlin who came to be regarded as a traitor to his former intelligence colleagues and an enemy of the state.

Born in 1962, Litvinenko spent much of his childhood in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, close to Chechnya, and went to military college after he left school. During his military service, he worked for military intelligence and joined the KGB in 1988 and later served in its successor organisation, the FSB.

Friendship with oligarch

During the 1990s, much of his work involved investigating organised crime but he became increasingly unhappy with the FSB, an unease that reached its climax in 1998 when he was asked to assassinate

Boris Berezovsky

, an oligarch with whom he had a friendly relationship. In July of the same year, Putin was appointed head of the FSB and Litvinenko met him to tell him what he knew about corruption in the intelligence service. It was the only time the two men would ever meet and Litvinenko described their encounter in his book

The Gang from the Lubyanka

.

“He came out from behind the desk . . . to greet me. Apparently, he wanted to show an open, likeable personality. We, operatives, have a special style of behaviour. We do not bow to each other, do without pleasantries – and so everything is clear. Just look into each other’s eyes and it becomes clear, do you trust the person or not. And I immediately had the impression that he is not sincere. He looked not like an FSB director, but a person who played the director.”

Fleeing to Britain

A few months later, Litvinenko went public with his corruption allegations, appearing at a press conference in Moscow with other intelligence officers to call for reform of the FSB. Instead of being embraced as a whistleblower, Litvinenko was arrested in March 1999, charged with assaulting a suspect in an investigation and detained for eight months before being acquitted. When a second attempt to prosecute him on different charges collapsed, the authorities tried for a third time, prompting Litvinenko to flee to Britain with his wife and six-year-old son.

He was granted political asylum in 2001 and became a British citizen in October 2006, a month before his death. Berezovsky, who also became a political exile in London, supported Litvinenko and his family financially, providing accommodation and paying for the boy’s education. But the former spy needed to earn a living and he put his old skills to work, becoming a paid “consultant” for one of Britain’s intelligence services and working on projects for private security firms.

The intelligence services, as is their custom, declined to confirm or deny if Litvinenko worked for them but his wife told the inquiry that they paid a fixed sum into his account each month. He told others that he advised them on Russian organised crime, a service he also provided to the Spanish intelligence services.

If Litvinenko’s covert activities were likely to upset his former masters in Moscow, some of his public activities were more provocative still. In books and journalism, he became an enthusiastic advocate on behalf of Chechen separatists, who had been brutally suppressed by Putin. His criticism of Putin became more strident, reaching a climax in July 2006 when he used a pro-Chechen website to accuse the Russian president of being a paedophile.

Sir Robert Owen said there was "undoubtedly a personal dimension to the antagonism" between Putin and Litvinenko, adding: "I am satisfied that in general terms, members of the Putin administration, including the president himself and the FSB, had motives for taking action against Litvinenko, including killing him, in late 2006."

On November 1st, 2006, Litvinenko met Andrei Lugovoy, a former Russian intelligence officer whom he had known in Moscow, and Dmitry Kovtun a former Russian soldier, in the Pine Bar, next to the Millennium Hotel in London's fashionable Mayfair district. Litvinenko thought they were meeting to discuss doing some work together for a private security company and they discussed plans for about 15 minutes. Lugovoy offered Litvinenko a drink and when the latter declined, told him there was still some tea in the pot on the table, and asked the waiter for a clean cup.

A cup of tea

“He left and when there was a cup I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only little left on the bottom and it made just half a cup. Maybe about 50 grams. I swallowed several times but it was green tea with no sugar and it was already cold by the way. I didn’t like it for some reason, well almost cold tea with no sugar and I didn’t drink it anymore,” Litvinenko told investigators before he died.

A few hours after he drank the tea, Litvinenko complained of feeling sick and spent much of the night vomiting, a condition that worsened so that he was admitted to hospital three days later.

Doctors initially believed he had been poisoned with thallium, used in rat poison, and did not discover the true cause until hours before his death.

Forensic tests later found a massive concentration in the teapot of polonium-210, which is used in Russia’s nuclear industry. Further tests uncovered a trail of polonium following the movements of Lugovoy and Kovtun, so that Owen was able to declare in his report that he was “sure” the two men administered the poison that killed Litvinenko.

Lugovoy and Kovtun returned to Moscow and they deny playing any role in Litvinenko's death. Lugovoy is now a member of Russia's parliament, the Duma, and last March, Putin awarded him a medal "for services to the fatherland".