Life After Death

Marina Litvinenko has fought with great determination for eight long years to bring the killers of her husband, Alexander, to justice and this interview in The Times leaves no one in any doubt as to whom she holds responsible for the is terrible crime.

Who else but a powerful government has the ability and resources to access and administer such a deadly radioactive substance?

The finger points directly at the Russian Government and little happens there that is not directly sanctioned by the President, Vladimir Putin.  

Marina Litvinenko: ‘I don’t have hate for Putin, I have disgust’

Marina Litvinenko outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London Dominic Lipinski/PA Archive

Jane Wheatley - The Times

The widow of the poisoned Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko has won her eight-year battle for a public inquiry. Finally she can discover the truth

I meet Marina Litvinenko for tea at Whiteleys in west London two days after home secretary Theresa May announced that a public inquiry will be held into the death of her husband, the Russian dissident Alexander (Sasha) Litvinenko, after he was poisoned with radioactive polonium in 2006.

Litvinenko died an excruciating death in a hospital three weeks after drinking a cup of tea laced with polonium during a meeting at a London hotel with two former KGB colleagues. It is believed that he was working for MI6 at the time and was killed on the orders of the Kremlin.

May’s decision represents a personal victory for Marina Litvinenko who fought tirelessly for the probe into her husband’s murder after a coroner said he could not hold a “fair and fearless” investigation as part of an inquest. It will send out a message to his killers, she insists, that “no matter how strong and powerful you are, truth will win out in the end”.

“I’ve waited so long. Now everyone can plan,” she tells me. “Even if we discover something I didn’t know, I’m not worried because I know Sasha has done nothing wrong, nothing to make us ashamed of him.” The investigation, a U-turn by the British government, will examine whether the Russian state was behind the death of Litvinenko, a former KGB officer and a noted critic of Vladimir Putin who became a British citizen.

Her office told her last Friday that they would be receiving an official letter on Monday to say that there would be a public inquiry, but she wasn’t allowed to say anything so had a difficult weekend. She woke up Monday morning having slept quite well, but feeling really exhausted. “We’ve been waiting every day. It’s been a long time since the High Court hearing in February and almost a year since the Home Office declined a public inquiry last July. When the Ukrainian crisis began we thought maybe this would be the time for us because there would be no need to keep a good relationship with Russia any more, but it didn’t happen.”

Did she feel she should nudge them? “Well, no, we couldn’t do that. I did say to my solicitor, ‘Maybe we need to do something,’ in other words to take advantage of the situation. But the solicitor said the only way we could do that is through the court. And then suddenly it happened this last weekend, out of the blue.”

Did she think it was do with the backlash against Russia after the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine? “No, definitely not. All the journalists wanted me to say that but I don’t think it was. I’m sure the decision was made before the air crash and they wanted to make the announcement on the last day of Parliament.

“Maybe because it happened in the middle of all the drama of the crisis in Ukraine and then the aircrash, it made it feel very complicated. It made me have mixed feelings. I want my case to be kept clear. It’s a matter of justice and truth. But now with all this drama everyone is trying to make connections with the political situation and that made me feel more emotional and more stressed. I have always been hopeful that the decision to allow a public inquiry would come, because she [the home secretary] had exhausted all her opportunities to refute us, but still it is a huge relief.”

This is the second time we’ve met. Marina is wearing a black summer dress with white spots, her skin beautiful despite the troubled sleep. When I go in for two kisses she says: “Three! It is the Russian way.” Her son, Anatoly, joins us. He’s self-possessed and still has his Russian accent, but is very articulate. He’s currently doing a holiday job in west London, while in his first year of studying politics at UCL.

Anatoly tells me the Malaysian Airlines crash has reminded him of his own experiences when his father was killed: “A personal tragedy gets caught up in a larger political landscape and I feel very upset about that.” Marina adds: “It’s very difficult. I have very difficult feelings about being Russian at the moment, how people can do so many wrong things.”

The family have been based here for nearly 15 years. Alexander, then known as Lieutenant-Colonel Litvinenko of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) — the successor to the KGB — first moved to London in October 2000 from his homeland in fear for his life and sought asylum in Britain.

Almost exactly six years after arriving in London, he lay gravely ill in an isolation bed in University College Hospital, poisoned by the deadly radioactive isotope polonium-210, a substance so rare and difficult to detect that it was only identified just hours before his death by analysts at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, Berkshire.

A grain of sugar contaminated by polonium is enough to kill a man but is only active once ingested. Police investigators wanted to interview two ex-KGB officers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, supposedly friends of Litvinenko, who are believed to have administered the poison while drinking tea with him at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, London. Traces were found on crockery and in the hotel rooms of the two men, who returned to Russia shortly after the tea date. The Litvinenko affair plunged Anglo-Russian relations to a low after the Crown Prosecution Service unsuccessfully sought the extradition of Lugovoy and Kovtun, naming them chief suspects in the case.

Marina has waited eight years for the truth about her husband’s death. She’s often to be seen visiting his grave deep in the wooded heart of Highgate Cemetery in north London. A framed photograph of Alexander Litvinenko leans against the headstone. A little weather-worn now after several years in its damp woodland setting, it is nonetheless clear that this fair, pleasant-looking man in the prime of life bears little resemblance to the image that flashed around the globe in November 2006: the hairless skull propped on pillows, a green hospital gown open across a bare chest studded with electrode patches and the heavy-lidded, helpless gaze of a man who knows he is dying.

A good friend of the Litvinenkos secured the burial plot in this coveted spot. “Every time I visit, I say thank you to him,” says Marina, “because you cannot imagine a better place to be, to visit and know Sasha is safe.”

Because of the deadly nature of the poison that killed him, her husband’s body is encased in a secure capsule inside his coffin with an order that it should not be touched or opened for 28 years. The grave is surrounded by a carpet of wood anemone and fading snowdrops; the pink granite headstone bears the name “Sasha” and the line: “To the world you are one person but to one person you are the world.”

The funeral service was a humanist one because, Marina explains, although her husband had been a Russian Orthodox Christian all his life, he converted to Islam on his deathbed. “He asked [his close Muslim friend] Akhmed Zakayev, ‘How do you talk to your God?’ ” recalls Marina, “then he said he wanted to be Akhmed’s brother and convert.” She says that when her father-in-law came to the hospital he brought some Russian icons: “Sasha told him, ‘No Daddy, I’m a Muslim now.’ His father said, ‘That’s OK, at least you’re not a communist.’ ” She laughs. “Later an imam came to the hospital and said some prayers, though Sasha was by then already unconscious. Akhmed told me: ‘I had to do it, Marina, even if you don’t like it,’ but I said it is Sasha’s choice.” Did she mind? “No, I am Buddhist — very accepting!”

Various alternative theories for Sasha’s death have been proposed, including that he had imported polonium himself for some unspecified purpose and accidentally ingested the poison. In 2011 an inquest was opened but did not go ahead because, according to the coroner, it would be impossible to get to the bottom of what had happened without access to secret papers being withheld by the British government. A second coroner insisted that only a statutory inquiry would have the power to examine serious allegations of Russian state involvement in Litvinenko’s death.

Both May and the foreign secretary at the time William Hague claimed release of such sensitive information would jeopardise national security, and an inquest should go ahead without it. But their real concern is more likely to have been about damaging relations between Britain and Russia: the coroner was being “steamrollered by two states acting in collaboration with one another,” said Ben Emmerson QC, acting for Marina.

Then in February this year came a breakthrough: three senior High Court judges stopped short of ordering an inquiry but ruled that the home secretary would have to come up with better reasons for not holding one. After the hearing a relieved Marina appealed to May “as one woman to another”, urging her to consider “how she would feel in my position”. The killing of her husband “was the murder of a British citizen on the street [sic] of London using radioactive poison,” she said. “You would have thought that the government would want to get to the bottom of who was behind it.”

Marina and Alexander grew up in the Soviet Union era, she the only daughter of hardworking parents, an earnest Pioneer (communist girl scout) who became a competitive ballroom dancer, he the only son of divorced parents and raised by his grandparents, who enlisted in the army at 17. When the couple met, both aged 31, he was an officer in the KGB in an unhappy marriage and the father of two children; she was an aerobics instructor.

A few days later they went for a walk in the park. “I was so tired,” Marina tells me, “we sat on a bench and Sasha told me, ‘Take off your shoes,’ and he massaged my feet. I was shocked, it was so intimate.” Within four months she was pregnant: “He was so happy — he said, ‘Now you won’t leave me.’ ”

During their years together in Russia, Marina rarely knew where her husband was or when he would be home; his work was secret and he spoke little about it. If she was worried, she learnt not to show it. All she knew was that he was loyal and honest. “He helped people who had been kidnapped or intimidated,” she says. “He was one of a new, bright, uncorrupted generation of officers. He loved his work with the FSB — it was like his family.”

But in the byzantine world of Russian political plotting and the post-Soviet Union scramble to capitalism, the integrity Marina ascribes to her husband was not only not prized but would lead to his downfall. In 1998 he had been assigned to URPO, the highly secretive Division of Operations against Criminal Organisations and shortly after Vladimir Putin was appointed director of the FSB, Litvinenko went to alert him to corruption inside the agency. When his warnings were ignored, he gave a press conference together with fellow whistleblowers detailing the claims. They included an order he had received to kill the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a hugely influential man and kingmaker to Putin, now evidently out of favour.

For a “oper” from the covert URPO to stick his head above the parapet like this was bold indeed and Putin was furious. “Officers should not stage press conferences,” he told the Kommersantnewspaper. “This is not their job. And they should not make internal scandals public.”