Death of a Dissident (43 page)

While Boris was reinventing himself in Cap d’Antibes as a leader of émigré opposition, Sasha and Marina slowly adjusted to their new life in London. The IFCL supported them through a resettlement grant, which allowed them to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Kensington. Tolik went to the International School; his school friends’ parents became Marina’s first social acquaintances. She took English classes. Through the school she found some dance students. Sasha spent a lot of time with his lawyers preparing an asylum request. He also spent hours on the phone with Yuri Felshtinsky as he continued to work on their book,
Blowing Up Russia
, about the bombings of September 1999.

In London Sasha also grew close to two older men who had been legends in the KGB at the time of his recruitment. Negative legends, that is. Vladimir Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky personified the two archetypal foes of Kontora. Sasha had first heard of them while studying the “faces of the enemy.”

Bukovsky was a quintessential dissident, perhaps the most famous anti-Soviet activist after Sakharov, a veteran of the anti-Communist
underground of the 1970s who spent years as a political prisoner in the Gulag and was eventually exchanged for the leader of the Chilean Communists, who had been imprisoned by the Pinochet regime.

Gordievsky was a true spy. For years, as the head of the KGB’s London station, he worked as a double agent for the British. Betrayed in 1985 by the CIA mole Aldrich Ames, Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow. He would certainly have been executed, along with other victims of Ames’s treachery, if the Brits had not managed to extract him at the last minute. It took a daring operation straight out of a John le Carré novel, involving disguises and decoys and crossing the Finnish border in the false bottom of a tourist automobile.

That these two brave men, icons of anti-Soviet resistance of the previous generation, accepted him as one of their own was a tremendous boost to Sasha’s morale. He called Bukovsky almost daily to discuss his writing and seek reaction to his interviews. Whenever I called him from New York, Sasha would quote Bukovsky or Gordievsky. They became his gurus. One day he cited Gordievsky as he talked about our adventures in Turkey: “You know, although I was not extracted by the CIA or MI6, the way I ran—it was a real blow to Kontora. Oleg Antonovich said that it made them a laughing stock in the trade, that Berezovsky and Goldfarb snatched me out from under their noses. They must hate me at Lubyanka as much as they did him.”

He sounded happy about it.

On May 14, 2001, George Menzies, Sasha’s solicitor, called to give him the good news: the Home Office had granted him political asylum. He should come to the office to sign some papers. Would he please convey George’s congratulations to Marina and Tolik?

Seymour Menzies Solicitors are located behind an inconspicuous green door on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in Carter Lane, a narrow, crooked side street not far from St. Paul’s Cathedral.

George Menzies, a fair-skinned, athletic, and cheerful Englishman of the sort who once managed the world, opened a bottle of champagne. It was his party, too. For countless days that winter, he had translated into coherent English Sasha’s incredible tales of Khokholkov and
Gusak, Kovalyov and Skuratov, Berezovsky and the Party of War, with the aim of persuading an anonymous immigration inspector that Sasha, Marina, and Tolik had a “well-founded fear of persecution” from Putin, the man whom Tony Blair called his dear friend. For six months, that nameless official reader had become a permanent unspoken presence in the Litvinenko household. He was invested with the key attributes of a deity: he (or she?) was invisible, and possessed the power of life and death over them. And now the immigration god had spoken—the incredible was deemed credible. They could stay.

“Now we need to choose a name for you,” said George Menzies.

As it turned out, the Home Office gives every new asylum seeker an option to pick a new legal name; this is part of the package. To those who are still sought by the powers from whom they had fled, a new name gives an extra bit of protection, especially when traveling abroad with new British documents.

“You choose a name for me, George,” said Sasha. “You, in a way, are responsible for me becoming British, so you have the right to baptize me, so to say.”

“Okay, you will be Edwin. He was the first political refugee.”

Menzies had studied history. He explained that when the Romans left Britain, it was conquered by the Saxons. At around AD 614 Edwin, the Saxon prince of Northumbria, had to flee for his life from a usurper by the name of Ethelfrith. Edwin sought refuge at the court of King Redwald of East Anglia. But his protection was not secure. Ethelfrith, using a combination of threats and bribes, nearly convinced Redwald to give up Edwin.

Everything would have ended badly had not the queen, who had learned about Edwin’s impending extradition, shamed King Redwald for not keeping his word. Should he go ahead and surrender Edwin, he would be punished with guilt and infamy. Redwald changed his mind and decided to put up a fight to protect his guest. He defeated Ethelfrith at a battle on the banks of the River Idel, in Nottinghamshire, at the cost of the life of his beloved son. Thus began the tradition of which Sasha was a beneficiary.

“You will be named Edwin Redwald,” said Menzies. “Pauline, please write it down on the form.”

“Come on, George, he cannot
possibly
be named that,” said Pauline, George’s secretary. “It trips off the tongue.”

“You’re right,” sighed George. “Let’s pick a less assuming surname. How about Carter, to reflect that we are here, at Carter Lane?”

So Sasha officially became Edwin Redwald Carter, a closely kept secret until the day of his death.

Some time later, Sasha received his refugee travel document from the Home Office. George Menzies assured him that it was now safe for him to travel—at least in the Western world.

“Civis Britannicus sum,” he explained. “I am a British subject.” It was what Lord Palmerston, Britain’s prime minister in 1849, uttered in Parliament to justify sending the navy to help out a single citizen, a Gibraltar-born Jewish merchant by the name of Don Pacifico, stranded halfway around the world. Sasha’s new status gave him the protections of a civis Britannicus.

In the meantime, the prosecutor general in Moscow launched an all-out search for Alexander Litvinenko, who had jumped his restraining orders. Once found, he was to be arrested and incarcerated until trial.

In December 2001 his trackers scored a breakthrough. Marina’s sixty-five-year-old mother, Zinaida, was returning home after her first visit to London. At Moscow’s Sheremetievo Airport she was stopped, brought to a room at Customs, and strip-searched. Initially the elderly lady thought that it was a form of harassment, but then it became clear that they were actually looking for something. They found it: a small piece of paper with her daughter’s address in London. Marina had dictated it to her before she took the trip so that she could fill out the UK landing card.

Three months later, two men appeared at the Litvinenkos’ flat. Marina, home alone, answered the doorbell.

“We are from the Russian Embassy to see Mr. Litvinenko,” the visitor said in broken English through the speakerphone.

“Go away, there is no Litvinenko here,” Marina screamed in Russian. “Go, or I’ll call the police!” She was terrified. Their address was supposed to be a secret.

The visitors slipped an envelope under the door and left.

It was a summons for Sasha to appear in court for his third case, the one about stolen explosives, the pursuit that refused to go away. Sergei Barsukov, Sasha’s old Moscow investigator, had signed it. But this time Sasha was not concerned at all. “Civis Britannicus sum” sounded convincing.

By the end of summer
Blowing Up Russia
was completed. While it was being printed by a small émigré press in New York, Felshtinsky contacted the MP-journalist Yuri Schekochihin to arrange for serialization in
Novaya Gazeta
. The excerpts were published on August 27, filling twenty-two pages of the tabloid-size newspaper.

Alas, the book did not provide any definitive proof of the origin of the 1999 blasts. Nevertheless, it contained a great deal of new circumstantial evidence. It detailed various terrorist operations carried out by groups created by and affiliated with the FSB, suggesting a pattern that fit with the apartment bombings.

First, there was the Lazovsky case. In the fall of 1994, just as the first Chechen War was about to start, Sasha was sharing an office at the FSB with another investigator, Evgeny Makeyev. Makeyev was looking into an explosion that took place on November 18, 1994, on a railway bridge over the Yauza River in central Moscow. It would have been a major terrorist attack if the explosion had occurred while a passenger train crossed the bridge. Apparently the bomb malfunctioned, killing the man who was planting it. A few days later there was another blast in Moscow, in a passenger bus. Due to another apparent mishap by the terrorists, there were no passengers nearby; only the bus driver was wounded. At the time the blasts were blamed on unspecified Chechens. The first Chechen War started within days.

Two years later, the case of the ’94 bombings was solved by a Moscow detective named Vladimir Tshai. The man killed on the bridge was Ret. Capt. Andrei Schelenkov, an employee of the oil trading company Lanaco. The owner of Lanaco was Maxim Lazovsky, a longtime FSB agent. The man who planted the bus bomb was apprehended and confessed. He was Lazovsky’s driver, Vladimir Akimov.

Tshai arrested Lazovsky and Ret. Lieutenant Colonel Vorobiev, who also turned out to be an FSB agent.

The evidence was overwhelming. In addition to the two bombs, the group carried out several murders, with apparent FSB backing. Lazovsky and Vorobiev were convicted of terrorism, and their FSB connections became part of the record. They never explained who ordered them to plant those bombs, or why. They had no apparent motives themselves. In his last statement in court, Vorobiev called the case “a mockery of the secret services.” Lazovsky served three and a half years. He was killed shortly after his release, shot by an assassin on his own doorstep. The man who arrested him, Detective Tshai, died in April 1997 at the age of thirty-nine of sudden, inexplicable organ failure. He was a legend—the best detective in Moscow. Rumors flew that he had been poisoned as FSB revenge for the Lazovsky case.

Then there was the case of a Russian officer in Chechnya who in 1996 launched a massacre in the village of Svobodny and was arrested as a war criminal. According to
Blowing Up Russia
, the officer was told by the Agency that he had two options: he could work as the leader of an undercover hit squad, or go to jail. He chose to form a team of twelve people, all of whom are alleged to have perpetrated atrocities in Chechnya. Beginning in 1998, according to the book, they carried out “liquidations” in Ukraine, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Moldova. The members of the group started to disappear in 2000, but before going into hiding, their leader left a video confession, which Sasha obtained.

Such stories—there were many in the book—along with a fresh recap of the Ryazan incident, made
Blowing Up Russia
a minor sensation in Moscow that summer. The book did not prove anything, but it made an outlandish theory seem plausible. Was it possible that the secret service was prepared to blow up houses with sleeping innocent citizens?