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From The Sunday Times
June 3, 2007
The lies and the spies: I must have justice
Ann McFerran meets Marina Litvinenko

What does Marina Litvinenko think of Andrei Lugovoi’s Moscow press conference last Thursday at which he claimed that her murdered husband worked for MI6 and that the British government was behind his agonising death?

“Ridiculous!” she seethes, her nostrils flaring. “We were expecting Lugovoi to come up with something. But . . . it’s so completely stupid.”

British prosecutors have spent three months preparing a case against Lugovoi as prime suspect in the polonium poisoning of his fellow former KGB agent, Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko, but Russia is refusing his extradition.

The press conference was staged so that Lugovoi could rebutt the accusation. British Moscow-watchers promptly dismissed it as a classic KGB-style misinformation exercise.

Strictly speaking, the Russian secret police have been known as the FSB since soon after the fall of the Soviet Union; but to Marina and many other Russians, the old communist terminology is more appropriate.

It was all so different a year ago when Marina met Lugovoi in London at the 60th birthday party of Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire Russian exile for whom her husband had worked. Lugovoi was among a planeload of guests flown in from Russia.

“He was the sort of person who can’t really concentrate; he was all over the place looking out for famous people. He couldn’t be more different to Sasha. He’s a bodyguard!” she spits.

A former dancer, Marina left everyone and everything she knew in Russia to follow Litvinenko into exile after he had been repeatedly arrested in a feud with former KGB colleagues. Six years to the day from their arrival in Britain, he died last November of what was later revealed to be poisoning by a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210.

Since then a curious celebrity has been thrust upon Marina, 44, because “I fell in love with a man who became famous because of his death.”

Now she has collaborated on a book about the case, Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB (Simon & Schuster), with Litvinenko’s old friend Alex Goldfarb.

She lost not only her husband but also her home in north London and some of her most important mementos when he died. Only hours after his death the police insisted she and their son, Anatoly — whom she calls Tolik — leave the property to avoid further radioactive contamination. It was not until February that she was able to return to gather memorabilia of their years together. “But I felt sick; it wasn’t my house any more.”

Crowded with policemen, their home was full of notices warning about contamination. She wanted to collect some of the pictures Litvinenko had taken of their family from the wall of his study, but they were contaminated because he had used it as a bedroom while ill.

“When he was first poisoned, Sasha was in a lot of pain and vomiting heavily. I had to get up to get Tolik up for school, so Sasha slept in his study.”

In the kitchen, the food had not been cleared away since her enforced flight. Three months on, flies buzzed around the decaying bread and rotten bananas.

For Marina bananas are a reminder of a more innocent time. On their first date she told Sasha she loved bananas but often couldn’t afford them.

She met him at her own 31st birthday party in the summer of 1993, 18 months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When her friend Lena announced she and her husband were bringing a young KGB officer, she said, “That’s a strange birthday present!” But Lena convinced Marina she would like him: “He’s funny and laid-back and he saved us from racketeers.”

Sasha Litvinenko had met many kinds of people in his life besides racketeers, but this was the first time he’d met someone who danced for a living. Marina was equally surprised by the man she met: “He looked 10 years younger than his age, 30, and he certainly wasn’t your typical KGB guy, he didn’t drink or smoke. My friends told me he was a serious person. But I found him light somehow, and radiant, and as emotional as a child.”

He was married with two children, and Marina, although herself a divorcee, was strict about dating married men. To her surprise, Litvinenko turned up a week later, having been kicked out by his wife. Lena told her: “You can only be serious with this guy.”

After their first date he asked her for another, but Marina told him she was going to a concert with a girlfriend. In the interval she felt a tap on the shoulder, and there was Sasha with a big bag of bananas. He had to go away suddenly, he said, and he wanted to make sure she had a good supply.

They first lived together in Marina’s apartment in south central Moscow while her parents were in their dacha. After that, Litvinenko often went away but “he always made sure I had enough bananas till he returned”.

Just four months after they had first met, Marina realised she was pregnant. For her, it was a small miracle. In her first marriage she had been told she would have to have fertility treatment if she wanted children.

“Now I can be sure you won’t leave me,” he told her.

Marina smiles broadly at the memory: “This is usually the reasoning you hear from women.”

She continues: “My husband was my other half and I was his. We were very lucky to find each other. He used to talk about what we would do in the future and how he looked forward to us growing old together.”

In 1996, Litvinenko went to Chechnya with the Russian army. When he returned, Marina hardly recognised him. “He was a different man, totally exhausted, with an empty stare. He could hardly walk because his feet were frostbitten.”

This was the beginning of a long and agonising period of disillusion and confusion for her husband, she says.

Two years later, he was losing weight and sleeping badly. “I saw how unhappy he was and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you sleep?’ He told me, ‘I can’t be happy, I have such horrible information. I’ve been ordered to murder Berezovsky’.

“I said, ‘You’re kidding, I can’t believe it’. He said, ‘I can’t do this, Marina’. You see, Sasha never did anything he believed to be wrong. He saw fellow KGB officers who were afraid and had no will, but he could not be like them. He said, ‘If we stay in Russia they will kill me, or I will go to prison’.”

Berezovsky, one of the new business oligarchs, had for several years been a key financial backer of Russia’s post-communist president, Boris Yeltsin, with immense political influence. He earmarked Vladimir Putin, another former KGB agent, as the rising star in the regime; but both Yeltsin and Berezovzky were on their way out, and more sinister forces were re-emerging.

Litvinenko publicly exposed the Berezovsky murder plot but miscalculated the new alignment of forces in the Kremlin. Harried by former KGB colleagues, he fled with Marina to England, via Turkey, a journey that involved dodging shady agents at passport control. Marina says: “It sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie, but actually it was hell.”

In London, the Litvinenkos began afresh. With her new life revolving around her son, Marina found she didn’t miss Russia at all, except for her mother. Litvinenko, however, still needed a daily fix of Russia through the internet, Russian DVDs and books.

He was writing a book, she said, and become involved with a security firm run by former British secret service personnel, specialising in detection and prevention of Russian organised crime. “It was a very different life in London and very liberating for Sasha,” says Marina. “He was free to use his knowledge to help other �migr�s.”

At first they lived in Kensington, but it was expensive. Marina found a family house in Muswell Hill which was duly bought by one of Berezovsky’s companies and rented cheaply to them. Litvinenko converted the basement into a gym and they both took pleasure in gardening; he planted blackcurrant bushes, which reminded him of Russia.

Among the guests at the housewarming was Ahmed Zakayev, the exiled Chechen foreign minister. Zakayev had fled to London in 2002 — pursued by Russian extradition charges of kidnapping, torture and mass murder — and was granted political asylum. Having been on warring sides six years earlier, the two men became firm friends.

When Litvinenko was taken to hospital last November, Marina says, the Zakayevs provided a second home for her son. Then, in the final days, Litvinenko made a deathbed conversion to Islam. She remembers the moment he told her.

“Are you agreed that when I recover I will go with Ahmed to the mosque?” he said.

“Why not?” she replied.

“And if I die I want to be buried next to Ahmed,” he added.

She says now: “I didn’t mind at all. I’m not religious and at that moment it seemed very important to him.”

He died on November 23 at 9.21pm — killed by polonium-210 at “21.21” hours, she points out. His last words to his wife were, “Marina, I love you so much.”

Grieving, Marina and her son returned home. When the police told them to leave immediately for their own safety, they spent the rest of the night at Zakayev’s house.

Everyone who had come into contact with Litvinenko had to be tested. Marina, who had cared for him and cleared up after his vomiting attacks, was the most exposed. She tested positive for ingesting polonium, but not enough to be an immediate health hazard. But she says: “No one has been able to tell me how it will affect me in the long term.”

Marina and Tolik stayed with the Zakayevs before moving to a safe house. “Everything was abnormal,” she says. “People kept asking me how I was feeling. I did interviews with the press and sometimes I’d get very emotional, and sometimes I didn’t.

“Yet, just before Sasha was poisoned we’d been so happy and optimistic. We’d planned to go on holiday to Spain with Tolik and Zakayev’s grandchildren, and Sasha was going to teach them how to swim. But I don’t want my friends to see me crying and upset. I’m the sort of person who keeps things in, but I know that’s not good, either.”

Today life is very busy. With the help of a solicitor, Louise Christian, she has complained to the European Court of Human Rights about Russia’s failure to investigate the murder.

Meanwhile Columbia Pictures is competing with Warner Bros to get the story on the screen.

“My husband was a very ordinary man, but he was also uncompromising and extraordinary,” she said. “And you know, I am a very happy woman because I have had it — I have had love, and some people never have it. I think Sasha would be proud of me.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1870294.ece