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A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West Paperback – Illustrated, January 24, 2017
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On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium—a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance.
Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story—complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters. He shows how Litvinenko’s murder foreshadowed the killings of other Kremlin critics, from Washington, DC, to Moscow, and how these are tied to Russia’s current misadventures in Ukraine and Syria. In doing so, he becomes a target himself and unearths a chain of corruption and death leading straight to Vladimir Putin. F
rom his investigations of the downing of flight MH17 to the Panama Papers, Harding sheds a terrifying light on Russia’s fracturing relationship with the West.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateJanuary 24, 2017
- Dimensions5.2 x 1.04 x 7.94 inches
- ISBN-101101973994
- ISBN-13978-1101973998
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“Gripping. . . . The case against Mr. Putin, his intelligence agencies and their hitmen was built gradually over the years, by detective work and intelligence. As set out by Mr. Harding in this book, it arouses a demonic fascination. . . .Mr. Harding ranges widely, far beyond the Litvinenko case, in A Very Expensive Poison. . . . Presidents who sup with Vladimir Putin should bring a very long spoon indeed.” —Daniel Johnson, The Wall Street Journal
“Harding is a great journalist. . . . His work is precious. . . . With experience and lucidity, he helps us to understand that we must be vigilant and always ready to guard the most precious asset of all, not a gift but a right: freedom.” —Roberto Saviano, l’Espresso
“Drawing on interviews, original reportage, and a British public inquiry, Harding reiterates the inquiry’s findings: Litvinenko was the victim of a political assassination that was indistinguishable from a gangland hit. . . . Harding suitably conveys the shocking, violent, and tragic story of a man whose murder has gone unpunished.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"Harding’s exposé, shortlisted for the CWA Nonfiction Dagger Award, could not be more chilling or timely. . . . A devastating and disturbing must-read." - Booklist
"A chilling look at the Putin regime's murderous suppression of its critics. . . . In this fast-paced book, Harding, who was expelled from the Kremlin while serving as the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief, covers all the bases while exposing the weakness and accommodationism of the now-departed British leadership. Hard-hitting and timely given Russia's continued sway in international politics as well as its documented influence over an incoming American administration that is also hostile to the press." - Kirkus
"Extraordinarily pacy...one of the best political thrillers I have come across in years." - The Evening Standard
"Harding...tells this ghastly tale with real authority, wit, and panache. . . . The book is as 'definitive' as it claims." - The Times
"Impassioned...Harding paints deft portraits of the tragi-comic duo suspected of carrying out the crime." - The New Statesman
"Gripping." - London Review of Books
"A Very Expensive Poison reads like a John Le Carré spy novel, but shockingly it's all true. Luke Harding has followed the criminality of the Putin regime from Russia to the West and his story leaves us with terrible feelings of dread about what Putin will do next." - Bill Browder, author of Red Notice
"An expert chronicler of a sensational but opaque crime...Enthralling." - A. D. Miller, author of Snowdrops
"Harding lays out every fact connecting it in thrillerish detail to the dark undercurrents of life in today's Russia." - Oliver Bullough, author of The Last Man in Russia
"Horrific, instructive and, at times, hilarious. He is a masterful storyteller and an impeccable researcher." - Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford
About the Author
Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Men from Moscow
Passport control, Gatwick Airport, Sussex
16 October 2006
Two of the Russians arriving that morning stood out. What precisely made them suspicious was hard to identify. But in the mind of Spencer Scott – the detective constable on duty at London’s Gatwick Airport – there was a curious sense of doubt. It was 16 October 2006. Passengers were disembarking from a Transaero flight from Moscow. They were collecting luggage. A stream of new arrivals queued up at passport control, and then proceeded for customs and excise checks.
The first Russian was of medium height, thirty-something, with blond Slavic hair. He was wearing a casual jacket and carrying an expensive-looking leather laptop case. He appeared prosperous. The second, with dark hair, receding slightly, and a yellowish complexion, was clearly his companion. They weren’t behaving oddly as such. And yet there was something – a furtiveness that pricked Detective Constable Scott’s attention.
‘I though they were of interest and basically as they came through immigration controls I stopped them and questioned them,’ he recalled. Scott hadn’t been told to look out for them; he was acting on a hunch. He asked them their names. One man spoke English and identified himself as Andrei Lugovoi. His friend, he said, was Dmitry Kovtun. Kovtun said nothing. It appeared he spoke only Russian. Scott took a grainy low-res photo of them. Lugovoi was on the right. In it they look like dark ghostly smudges. It was 11.34 a.m.
Lugovoi and Kovtun’s story seemed convincing enough: they had flown into London for a business meeting. Lugovoi said he owned a company called Global Project. Moreover, his friend was a member of the finance department at a respectable Moscow bank. Their travel agent had booked them in for two nights at the Best Western Hotel in Shaftesbury Avenue. The hotel wasn’t cheap: £300 a night. Lugovoi handed over his reservation. It was genuine.
Still, there was something unsettling about their answers, Scott felt: ‘They were very evasive as to why they were coming to the UK.’ Normally, those subjected to a random stop would open up – about families, holiday plans, the lousy English weather. The two Russians, by contrast, were elusive. ‘As I asked them questions, they weren’t coming out with the answers that I wanted to hear or expected to hear. They were giving me very, very short answers,’ Scott said. Their replies offered ‘no information’.
Scott looked on the internet but couldn’t find Global Project. The Russians told him that their business meeting was with ‘Continental Petroleum Limited’, a company based at 58 Grosvenor Street in London. Scott rang the firm’s landline. A man answered, confirmed they were registered with the UK’s financial authority. OK, then. The constable checked the police database. Nothing. Britain’s intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, hadn’t flagged Lugovoi and Kovtun either. Apparently, they weren’t of interest.
A copper’s nose was one thing; hard facts another. With no evidence to go on, Scott took soundings from his sergeant, who advised him to let both men ‘go forward’. Britain’s judicial and police system rests on a presumption of innocence – unlike in Russia, Lugovoi and Kovtun’s homeland, where judges take informal guidance from above. After twenty minutes the Russians were told they were free to leave. They collected their luggage and headed for central London. Scott put their photo in a file. It was stamped: ‘For intelligence purposes only.’
It was little more than a month later that Scotland Yard – faced with a situation of unprecedented international horror – realised Scott’s instinct had been preternaturally correct. The two weren’t businessmen. They were killers. Their cover story was just that. It had been painstakingly constructed over a period of months, possibly years. And it worked.
That morning, Lugovoi and Kovtun were bringing something into Britain that customs had failed to detect. Not drugs, or large sums of cash. Something so rare and strange and otherworldly, it had never been seen before in this form in Europe or America.
It was, as Kovtun put it, talking in confidence to a friend in Hamburg, ‘a very expensive poison’. A toxin which had started its surreptitious journey to London from a secret nuclear complex in south-west Siberia. An invisible hi-tech murder weapon.
Lugovoi and Kovtun were to use it to kill a man named Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko was a Russian émigré who had fled to Britain six years previously. He’d become a persistent pain for the Russian government. He was a remorseless critic of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s secret policeman turned president. By 2006, Litvinenko was increasingly anomalous: back in Russia many sources of opposition has been squashed.
There was a particular reason why Putin might want Litvinenko dead. Before escaping in 2000, Litvinenko had worked for the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, and the main successor agency to the KGB. Putin himself had been, briefly, his boss. But Litvinenko now had another employer: Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6.
Her Majesty’s Government had given Litvinenko a fake British passport, an encrypted phone and a salary of £2,000 a month, paid anonymously into his HSBC account and appearing on his bank statement incongruously next to his groceries from Waitrose. He had an MI6 case officer, codenamed ‘Martin’.
Litvinenko wasn’t exactly James Bond. But he was passing to British intelligence sensitive information about the links between Russian mafia gangs active in Europe and powerful people at the very top of Russian power – including Putin. According to Litvinenko, Russian ministers and their mobster friends were, in effect, part of the same sprawling crime syndicate. A mafia state. It was his contention that a criminal code had replaced the defunct ideology of communism.
Litvinenko knew about this mafia’s activities in Spain; he was, in the words of one friend, a walking encyclopedia on organised crime. So much so that MI6 loaned him out to colleagues from Spanish intelligence in Madrid.
All of this made Litvinenko a traitor, and the KGB’s punishment for spies who betrayed their country was understood. From the very beginning of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Moscow had used poisons, bullets, bombs hidden in cakes and other lethal methods to snuff out its ‘enemies’, at home and abroad, from Leon Trotsky to Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident and writer poisoned on Waterloo Bridge in 1978 with an ingenious ricin-tipped umbrella. As Stalin famously observed, ‘No man, no problem.’
There was a spectrum. It went from killings that were demonstrative, to those where the KGB’s fingerprints were nowhere to be found, however hard you looked. Boris Yeltsin had stayed those methods in the post-communist 1990s; the KGB’s poison factory seemingly mothballed; Russia’s democrats briefly in the ascendant. Now, under Putin, such methods were back. The FSB was Russia’s pre-eminent institution. It was all-powerful, beyond the law, and – like its Leninist predecessors – a purveyor of state terror.
In the glory days of the Soviet Union, the KGB dispatched professionals and undercover ‘illegals’ to carry out extra-judicial murders – known in the spy trade as ‘wet jobs’.
Lugovoi and Kovtun’s mission to London was supposed to be exactly such an operation: ruthless, clinical, undetectable – an iron fist concealed in a velvet glove. It was to be done in the best traditions of the Cheka, the counter-revolutionary police force founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s friend. Dzerzhinsky’s statuette with its cold, pinched features sat in Putin’s office.
But, despite a resurgence under Putin, Russia’s spy agencies had suffered the same degradation that had blighted all Russian institutions – the presidency, Russia’s parliament or Duma, medicine, science and technology. Critics said the country, despite its great power pretensions, was slowly dying. Its modern assassins were a shambolic lot.
The idea was that nobody would notice the visiting Russians. Once they had poisoned their victim they would escape back to Moscow, leaving few ripples on the busy surface of London life. Their target, of course, would die horribly. But the Kremlin’s hand would be hidden. The British would mark his death down as a baffling case of gastro-enteritis and those who carried out the murder would return to a life of shadowy anonymity. And, one imagines, reward. The payment for murder, Kovtun hinted, was a Moscow flat.
It didn’t quite work out like that. Russia’s poisoning project, when finally accomplished, would prompt a British public inquiry costing millions of pounds. One that examined the masses of evidence collected by the Metropolitan Police, from hotels, restaurants, car seats – even from a bronze phallus at a nightclub visited by the assassins in Soho. Scotland Yard was able to reconstruct minute by minute the events leading up to the murder. Its investigation – made public more than eight years later – was one of the most extensive in criminal history.
Yet despite this exposure there were soon to be other victims – opponents felled in murky circumstances abroad or, like the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, killed outside the very gates of the Kremlin. Moscow would send tanks across borders, start a war in Europe, and annex a large chunk of neighbouring territory. Its proxies – or possibly Russian servicemen – would blow a civilian plane out of the sky.
The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated edition (January 24, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1101973994
- ISBN-13 : 978-1101973998
- Item Weight : 14 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 1.04 x 7.94 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,444,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #906 in Espionage True Accounts
- #1,750 in Political Intelligence
- #3,346 in Russian History (Books)
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About the author
In 2007 I arrived in Moscow with my wife and young family. I was a career foreign correspondent working for the British newspaper The Guardian. My previous postings were to Delhi and Berlin. I had chronicled George Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reported from the frontline and dodged incoming mortar fire. Surely Russia would be easy? Not quite, it turned out.
Within a few months we found ourselves in a badly written spy novel. Unpromising young men followed me around the icy streets. Secret agents broke into our apartment, on one occasion opening the window next to our six-year-old son's bed. We lived on the tenth floor. The UK embassy explained that these ghostly visitors worked for the FSB. This was the main successor agency to the KGB. Its former boss was Vladimir Putin, Russia's president.
I wrote about these experiences in a 2011 memoir, Mafia State (published in the US as Expelled). They fuelled much of my subsequent work as a non-fiction writer. Why had Putin's undercover agents picked on me? I was never entirely sure. My attempts to unravel the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko may have played a part and certainly contributed to the Kremlin's decision to deport me from Russia, in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.
In London, I followed a public inquiry into Litvinenko's teapot assassination. It concluded Putin "probably" approved the operation using radioactive polonium. My book about the case, A Very Expensive Poison, is a dramatic account of one of this century's most lurid crimes. The playwright Lucy Prebble adapted it into an award-winning stage play at the Old Vic theatre in London; it was shortlisted for the 2017 Crime Writers' Association Non-fiction Dagger Prize.
My next book sought to answer a question which haunts us still: what does Vladimir Putin have on the former US president Donald Trump? The dossier by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele says Putin's spies secretly filmed Trump in a Moscow hotel room. The claim always struck me as plausible; the FSB specialises in covert recordings and once left a sex manual by our marital bed. "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia helped Trump Win" was a number one New York Times best-seller.
Like its predecessors, my 2018 book Shadow State is a real-life thriller. The story is incredible but true. Two Russian colonels arrive in Salisbury on a mission to murder a renegade colleague, Sergei Skripal. Shadow State further describes the myriad ways in which the Kremlin is seeking to subvert our democracy and overwhelm our politics, via cyber-hacking, disinformation, and corruption.
My latest book "Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival", is published in November 2022 by Vintage and Guardian Faber. It is the first account of a war that has transformed international relations and which has led to an outpouring of support for Ukraine in the US, UK and beyond. Invasion is a gripping and compelling first draft of history, I hope, of a story that concerns and touches us all.
When Putin's overweening assault began at 4am on February 24, 2022 I was in Kyiv. His goal? To topple president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and to wipe Ukraine from the map. As Putin saw it Ukraine was "historical Russia". I spent the early hours of the invasion sheltering in an underground car park. A mother arrived with her children; the kids' were clutching colouring books. War had arrived. It was Europe's biggest since 1945. Civilians would be its main victims. I spent 2022 on the frontline.
My focus as a writer and correspondent is on the human story. "Invasion" describes the horrors of Bucha and Mariupol; the grinding artillery battle in eastern Ukraine; and the mass graves and torture chambers found in former zones of Russian occupation. I travelled to the north-east Kharkiv region, to areas liberated in autumn by a Ukrainian counter-offensive. In November 2022 I visited bombed villages in Kherson oblast, in the south, days after a Russian pull-out across the Dnipro river.
I have also written books on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the Conservative politician Jonathan Aitken. The director Oliver Stone made The Snowden Files into a biopic, Snowden; Dreamworks adapted my book WikiLeaks - written with David Leigh - into The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
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In an ironic twist, at the book’s end, Harding notes the Cameron government’s “tepid” response by him, the PM, and the present PM, Theresa May, in the aftermath of the Litvinenko murder. Contrast that with the blanket outrage now engulfing the UK, and the democratic West, and one might fairly conclude that opportunities were missed then and may have given way to acceptance that this Putin-esque invasion of the British sovereignty was permissible.
His associations with MI6 and friendships with dissidents such as journalist Anna Politkovskaya, executed in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment building, endangered him further and made him a target of Putin's FSB, evolution of the Soviet KGB, of which Putin was a member. Determined to reveal the depth and gravity of Putin's support of corrupt Russian oligarchies at the exploitation of the Russian people, he gives a fascinating and meticulous account from his deathbed to Scotland Yard detectives, yet still honoring his commitment to MI6. Luke Harding is just as meticulous and principled in his writing of A Very Expensive Poisoning.
Mr. Harding, who worked for The Guardian and lived in Russia for a while, knows of what he writes. He was lucky he was only harassed by the Russians. This book is well-researched and, of course, well-written by this seasoned author. He follows the case of one victim, but includes information about Putin's history--his rise to the top--as well as other information that will be of interest to any reader who wants to know what is really going on inside Russia. Every American should read this book, and that includes skeptics.