The Terminal Spy: After sipping tea in a London hotel, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer and vocal foe of the Kremlin, fell ill and was rushed to the hospital, fatally
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 0767928164
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“A story that is at once real-life thriller and an immensely sinister cautionary tale about the new Russia.” –Star Tribune
On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko sipped tea in London’s Millennium Hotel. Hours later the Russian émigré and former intelligence officer, who was sharply critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin, fell ill and within days was rushed to the hospital. Fatally poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope slipped into his drink, Litvinenko issued a dramatic deathbed statement accusing Putin himself of engineering his murder. Alan S. Cowell, then London Bureau Chief of the New York Times who covered the story from its inception, has written the definitive story of this assassination and of the profound international implications of this first act of nuclear terrorism.
“Absorbing.” –New York Times
“Cowell plays out the Byzantine possibilities behind this killing with heroic clarity.” –Los Angeles Times
“Doggedly reported and dramatically written . . . Cowell tells the story with literary panache but doesn’t let his stylish prose eclipse the substance of a sordid tale. The sections about espionage and the assassination are worthy of Tom Clancy, but the author’s political analysis is equally riveting . . . A well-told true-crime tale mixed with expert political/historical analysis.”
–Kirkus Reviews
improbabilities of what Lugovoi was accused of doing—or the cold cunning of his cover. How many assassins, after all, bring their families along for a vacation and then take in a soccer game immediately after carrying out the hit? Lugovoi and his family checked in at the Millennium Hotel. According to a person familiar with the arrangements, they took two rooms, one on the first and one on the fourth floor, and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, Lugovoi’s business associate, took one on the third. The family
Without the evidence available at a trial, it was impossible for outsiders to evaluate either Lugovoi’s denials or the accusations of the Crown Prosecution Service. If he was a killer, he was certainly no secret assassin. Having gone to jail in the Aeroflot fraud case for allegedly trying to help Berezovsky’s ally Nikolai Glushkov escape, Lugovoi had become embroiled in the battle of the titans between Berezovsky and the Kremlin following Putin’s ascent to the presidency in 2000. He had
years. (The weight of the volumes offered ample testimony to Berezovsky’s determination to make his case.) This time, we met in the boardroom of his offices and spoke across a long, gleaming conference table. In a hallway outside, the walls were covered in artfully printed black-and-white photographs of Russian leaders from Tsar Nicholas and Lenin to Khrushchev and even including an image of Vladimir Putin. I wondered whether Berezovsky still saw himself as a claimant to inclusion in this
a place of refuge and political sanctuary. For others it was a city where money made in Russia could be spent, invested, and protected. So many affluent Russians arrived in London seeking a luxurious bolt-hole that the British capital earned the sobriquets Moscow-on-Thames and Londongrad. In the six years Litvinenko lived there, the city challenged, if not overtook, Wall Street as the global financial capital and drew vast Russian wealth into the discreet offices of private bankers, real estate
faintly hungover from a late drinking session—for a business meeting with Lugovoi. It was the day Andrei Lugovoi, Vyacheslav Sokolenko, and Lugovoi’s family met up in the Millennium Mayfair hotel to prepare to watch the game. A photograph showed the two men with friends and children at a steak house in Piccadilly on the way to the stadium. It was the day Mario Scaramella met Litvinenko in the itsu sushi bar to show him a sheaf of e-mailed memos from Yevgeny Limarev. It was the last day ever that