Death of a Dissident (4 page)

“Where do you want to go? France, Germany, or England?” I asked.

“I don’t care,” Sasha said, “just as long as we get out of here as soon as possible.”

“I don’t care, either,” said Tolik.

“I want to go to France,” said Marina.

“I think that England would be better,” I said. “At least I’ll be able to explain over there who the heck you are.”

The next morning, an odd group appeared at the registration counter of Turkish Airlines: a bearded American who spoke Russian, with no baggage but with a passport nearly filled up with Russian entry stamps; a beautiful Russian woman with a nervous child and five suitcases; and an athletic man claiming to be a citizen of an insignificant nation, who was wearing sunglasses despite the cloudy weather. The glasses allowed him to professionally scan the airport crowds. I caught the eye of a Turkish policeman observing us. He must have decided that Sasha was my bodyguard.

We checked in for a flight to London, with a change at Heathrow to an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. The registration went smoothly, but the border guard at passport control took an inordinate interest in Sasha’s passport. The rest of us had passed through without incident, and we stood and watched while he turned Sasha’s passport around,
examining it from all sides, and looking at it under ultraviolet light, for a good few minutes. At last he stamped it and waved him on. Made it, I thought.

We had only a few minutes left and we raced through the nearly empty airport to the gate.

“Is that it? That’s it?” Marina asked, glowing.

And then I saw them. Two Turks of a certain type were following us at a distance. It was impossible to miss them: they were the only ones moving at our speed, as if we were all one team.

“See them?” I asked.

Sasha nodded.

“They latched onto us at passport control.”

“Yes, I noticed.”

We ran up to the gate. The flight was closing; we were the last to board. Our escorts sat down at the gate and stared at us. A young woman in a Turkish Airlines uniform took our boarding cards and passports.

“You are all right,” she said to me. Turning to Sasha and Marina, she said, “But you don’t have a British visa.” She looked at them inquiringly.

“We have a direct connection to Moscow,” I said. “Here are the tickets.”

“And where are the London–Moscow boarding passes?”

“We have to change airlines, we’ll get them in London.”

“Strange,” she said. “Why are you going through London when there’s a direct Istanbul–Moscow flight in an hour?”

“We always go through London, to shop duty-free at Heathrow,” I said, pleased with my quick thinking.

“I need to get permission,” she said, and spoke in Turkish into her radio. “My colleague will take their documents to the office for the boss to take a look. Don’t worry, we’ll hold the plane.”

Sasha was as white as a sheet. One of our escorts followed the airline staffer. The other continued watching us, unperturbed. I took Tolik by the hand and went to buy him some candy at the nearest stand. Ten minutes or so went by. Two figures appeared at the end of the hallway: the young woman and our Turk.

“Everything’s in order,” she said, handing Sasha the documents. “Have a good flight!”

We ran into the Jetway. Before takeoff I managed to call a friend in London and asked him to find an asylum lawyer to meet us at Heathrow.

“Did you get what’s happened?” Sasha asked.

“Yes, the Turks escorted us to the plane and made sure we got on.”

“They had my false name in their computer. It means that the Americans tipped them off. No one else knew the name,” he concluded.

For the five days I spent in Turkey I kept expecting fate to materialize in the form of a ferocious Turkish policeman. Instead, fate’s messenger turned out to be a British immigration officer, whose marked politeness did not bode well.

“What you have done,” he said to me, as he looked over Sasha’s false passport, “bears stiff penalties in the United Kingdom. Do you understand that I can arrest you for illegally bringing in asylum seekers?”

I knew that they couldn’t do anything to Sasha, whose new lawyer was waiting for us in arrivals with a copy of a fax sent to the home office; we had communicated with him by phone before presenting ourselves to the border control. As for me, my fate was in the hands of the immigration official. And he apparently did not share my romantic nostalgia for the days of heroic defections from behind the Iron Curtain.

“With due respect, sir,” I said, “there are exceptional circumstances in this case. Mr. Litvinenko and his family were in danger. It was a question of life and death.”

“Russia, as far as I know, has a democratic government,” he parried. “Why didn’t you take him to your own country? Your embassy refused to accept him and you decided to solve your problem at our expense, isn’t that so? Were you paid by Litvinenko for this?”

“No, I did it out of humanitarian concern, knowing the British tradition of giving asylum to fugitives from tyranny.”

“Out of humanitarian concern, I will not arrest you, but I am banning you from entry into the United Kingdom. We are releasing Litvinenko into his solicitor’s custody, and you are taking the first flight back to Turkey.”

He stamped my passport with the border control imprint, then crossed it out with relish and added a notation.

“But I don’t need to go to Turkey,” I protested. “I need to go to New York.”

“You’re being deported to Turkey! And a new passport won’t help,” he said, guessing my thought. “I’m entering you in the computer as a smuggler of asylum seekers. You’ll have to apply to our embassy for advance clearance in case you want to come here. And I doubt that you will get it.”

Sasha and Marina stared at me in disbelief when I explained what was happening. I had to use all my powers of persuasion to calm them: notwithstanding the official’s apparent fury, I said, they were perfectly safe now. They were on British soil and they had nothing to fear.

The immigration official kept his word. From the British computer, his notation traveled into the American network and apparently will linger there forever. Even though the Brits removed the ban a few months later, I am still stopped occasionally by U.S. Border Control and asked to explain what happened in Heathrow on November 1, 2000. But that night, I could not care less about getting a permanent stain on my electronic reputation; it was well worth the satisfaction of seeing Sasha, Marina, and Tolik being led away by two solemn policemen into the safety of a brightly lit terminal.

When I got back to the States, I spent a long time trying to find out what had occurred during those few hours that the CIA had reversed their decision. None of my contacts wanted to even hear about it. “Be grateful that it all turned out fine and don’t stir up trouble,”
everyone said. Finally, a retired spy, a veteran of the cold war who understood these things, told me what had likely happened.

“In this kind of situation, speed is of the essence,” he said. “As soon as it becomes known that someone is about to cross to the other side, all the formal and informal channels turn on: ‘We know our man is in Turkey, and we know that he is going over to you. If you take him, then we will step on your tail somewhere else, we’ll expel somebody, we’ll do this or that to you, so don’t even think of taking him.’ Then the Americans will start wondering whether this guy is worth the trouble. It’s one thing when a defection occurs quietly and it becomes known much later, or never. A person disappears, and that’s it. It’s another thing when the bargaining begins. When you left for Istanbul, you lost time. In those few hours, the Russians figured out what the Americans were up to and blocked the transfer. That morning, you still had a chance, but by afternoon, Moscow pulled the strings and it was too late.”

“So who do you think were watching us at the hotel, Russians or Americans?”

“Russians, of course. But they wouldn’t have tried to do anything bad there: too complicated and noisy. They would wait it out and eventually get them back from the Turks.”

“And the Turks in the airport?”

“I doubt they were tipped off by Americans. If the Russians spotted you at the embassy, they had enough time to give the Turks his photo. Or maybe his passport was not that good after all. You got really lucky. The Turks apparently decided to let them go so as not to get involved. Next time, move faster.”

For me, there wouldn’t be a next time. For Sasha, on the other hand, not even London would be safe from the long arm of the FSB.

On the road to Istanbul, October 31, 2000

It was before our airport dramas, probably just during the window of time that changed the CIA’s mind about giving him refuge, that I first began to learn Sasha’s secrets. Our long nighttime drive from Ankara to Istanbul was an eye-opener and my introduction to Sasha’s past.

The woman in the backseat, asleep with her son, had been his only ally in all his travails. Everything he told me in the car—about gangsters and oligarchs, terrorists and politicians—he described as happening either Before Marina, or After Marina. The major reference point in his life was not his birth or graduation, not the day he joined the KGB, not even his flight from Russia. It was the summer day in 1993 when they first met. Whatever happened
before
was not really interesting to him. Meeting her was a touch of magic that transformed everything into the extraordinary. Marina stayed out of his affairs, and he avoided telling her many things that were dangerous to know. But she was always his polestar.

Before Marina, Sasha’s personal life had been difficult. Born into a short-lived college marriage, from the age of three Sasha was brought up by his paternal grandfather in Nalchik, a small town in the northern Caucasus, while both his parents formed new families in other parts of the country. His grandfather took him to the zoo,
and the movies on Sundays. “When I was five, my grandfather brought me to the regional history museum in Nalchik, showed me the banner of the Red Army regiment in which he fought the Nazis, and told me that all our family had defended Russia and I would, too,” Sasha told me. He loved his grandfather, and owed him everything, but as he grew older he needed something more. In his last years at school, he became an avid athlete. He focused on the pentathlon to the point of obsession. His trainers, his teammates, and the thrill of competition became his whole life. Even more than his grandfather, they gave him a secure base, a sense of attachment and commitment that he’d lost when his parents left.

When he turned seventeen, his father, discharged from the army, returned to Nalchik with his new wife and children. They moved in, the grandfather’s house grew overcrowded, and Sasha’s whole routine collapsed. He tried to integrate into his father’s family but could not. He loved them, but he felt sidelined. So he found a way to join the army nearly a year before the usual draft age of eighteen. He was right out of high school, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps.

He took to it immediately. “Military service is somewhat like sport,” he told me in the car, “only it’s not a game anymore: you are part of a real team fighting a common enemy—and on the right side, so you think. When they asked me to join the KGB, it seemed perfectly in line, so I accepted enthusiastically, strange as that may seem to you.”