From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 6/3/2007 1:26 AM
Marina Litvinenko

It is six months since Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210 in a Mayfair bar. As the row over bringing his killer to justice continues, his widow talks freely and frankly about the KGB man she loved and lost
 
Viv Groskop
Sunday June 3, 2007

The Observer

One of the worst things is living with the physical legacy: the threat of cancer in the future. And dealing with other people's reactions. For three days before Alexander Litvinenko was admitted to University College Hospital, London last November, Marina nursed her husband at home, assuming he had food poisoning. She cleaned up his vomit, not knowing it was radioactive. Although she is in good health, she has tested positive for above-average levels of radiation. 'Every morning when I wake up I check myself over. I think to myself: is everything OK? Is anything wrong with me?'
 
She has moments of feeling like a pariah. 'It's like it used to be with Aids. No one knows whether to touch you or not, whether they could catch something. It's awful to be surrounded by so much support and kindness from people and then suddenly they'll say: "Hang on, is it safe for me to be standing here next to you?"' Friends have had to ask if they should clean furniture after she has sat on it. She sympathises with their concern - she wonders about these things herself. How much does anyone really know about radiation, what is safe and what isn't?

Marina's husband, former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, died on 23 November after ingesting polonium-210 on 1 November. He had not eaten for 22 days. Litvinenko was a fighter: the dose he received was estimated to be double that of those at the epicentre of Chernobyl, who all died within two weeks. He was buried in a sealed casket: due to radiation levels it will not be safe to cremate his body for 28 years.
 
Six months after his death I meet his widow in a hotel in Paris just off the Champs Elysees. Although Marina, 44, is now living with her son Anatoly, 12, in a safe house in an undisclosed location in the Home Counties, she is on her way back from Cannes. A documentary, Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case, directed by the Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov, has just premiered at the film festival, implicating the Kremlin in the deaths of Litvinenko and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
 
The Cannes screening is the latest product of the thriving Litvinenko industry, with Hollywood studios already caught up in the race to make the first feature film. The book Marina has co-authored with Alex Goldfarb, The Death of a Dissident, has been bought up by Columbia Pictures for a reported $1.5m. Three further Litvinenko books have been optioned by other studios with Daniel Craig, Johnny Depp and John Malkovich variously tipped for the title role.
 
The Death of a Dissident claims that Litvinenko is the 'world's first victim of a nuclear terrorist attack' and expands on the anti-Putin theory: that Litvinenko was targeted by the FSB (the new KGB) with the president's blessing. It backs up the Crown Prosecution Service's attempt to extradite ex-KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoi, one of three Russian men Litvinenko met in the Millennium Hotel, Mayfair, on the day poison was slipped into a pot of tea in the Pine Bar. Lugovoi himself now claims Litvinenko was a British agent and had tried to recruit him to work for MI6. (Last Thursday he even claimed that MI6 sanctioned Litvinenko's death). This new book alleges that Scotland Yard has 'computer-aided simulations of radioactivity spread' which prove Lugovoi was shedding traces of polonium-210 before Litvinenko was contaminated on 1 November. It contends that Lugovoi left a trail of polonium in London on a previous visit in mid-October - 'in hotel rooms, offices, restaurants and on the British Airways plane that took him back to Moscow'. The only people who left a trail were Litvinenko and his alleged killer.
 
One theory is that a first bungled attempt on Litvinenko's life was made in October - either that or it was a dress rehearsal. What this theory does not explain, however, is why on earth Lugovoi would have travelled to London on the second visit accompanied by his wife and three children - who have all tested positive for radiation traces. Understandably the subject of radiation obsesses Marina. Fortunately her son Anatoly had little physical contact with his father while he was sick at home and has been given the all-clear. She is in good health at the moment; there are no immediate risks but she says the long term is an unknown.
 
Doctors say she has only a slightly increased risk of developing cancer (she has been told the average risk is 25 per cent and following the exposure hers is now 26 per cent). But she is not convinced. 'No one really knows because there are no statistics on radiation. I could have an 80 per cent chance now. It is the most terrifying situation you can imagine because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.'
 
She is also consumed with anxiety about the other unwitting victims of November's polonium-210 trail at the hotel and other locations across London. According to the Health Protection Agency, after testing over 1,000 people - including hotel workers and tourists - traces of polonium-210 have been found in 140. Seventeen have been warned they face 'very small' long-term health risks. 'Everyone knows that one man died. But there are so many others who were affected too. I have thought a lot about this in the last few months. I am healthy and at the moment I feel fine. But what about people who are more vulnerable who could have been exposed to it? And when you think about how easily it spread... It's terrifying.'
 
With her gamine crop, wide blue eyes and pale, almost translucent skin, Marina is like a porcelain doll. She moves with a self-conscious grace: she used to compete as a ballroom dancer. She is uncomfortable in the glare of publicity: she finds questioning in English tiring and has developed a lexicon of stock answers. This is the first interview she has given at length in Russian, and she has a lot to say, talking fast and urgently, wringing her hands, crying at regular intervals.
 
Despite her obvious exhaustion and grief, she says she is 'strengthened' by the ongoing British police investigation and the extradition request. Neighbours from Osier Crescent, the street the Litvinenkos lived on in Muswell Hill, have sent her messages of support. Despite this, Haringey Council is engaged in a row about carrying out a £15,000 radiation decontamination at their old address, a £500,000, three-bed townhouse owned by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky - Litvinenko's one-time employer.
 
Berezovsky has supported the Litvinenko family financially since they sought political asylum in the UK in the year 2000, initially setting them up in a Kensington flat. He refuses to foot the Osier Crescent cleaning bill because in his view Vladimir Putin is responsible for making the mess and so he is the one who should pay to have it cleaned up. Marina says: 'I feel awful about it because for our neighbours it has been a terrible experience. All the press crowding the street for a long time and now this uninhabited house standing there... But I have never heard a negative word about it from the neighbours. I have been extremely moved by how kind people have been to us.'
 
Marina Litvinenko comes across as an innocent caught up in events she would rather not have to think about. This seems peculiar for a woman who knowingly married into the KGB in 1994. After all, from the early days of their marriage Litvinenko specialised in investigations into organised crime. He went on active service in Chechnya. Before they were married, while Marina was pregnant with Anatoly, Litvinenko met Berezovsky, now Russia's public enemy number one, then a budding oligarch.
 
You get the impression she is used to looking the other way - and to thinking the best of her husband. Marusya and Sasha, as they called each other, met in June 1993. Their backgrounds were very different. She was a Muscovite who grew up in a dull but stable Soviet family: both her parents worked in the same pneumatic fittings factory for almost 50 years. Alexander was from Voronezh, in south-west Russia, and had a turbulent childhood. His parents split up when he was a few months old and he was shunted between several households, mostly living with his paternal grandparents. 'His grandfather was a pilot in the Second World War and he grew up listening to all his stories. Sasha modelled himself on him: he could be strict, but he was a very upstanding, moral person.' Marina, Alexander would often say later, reminded him of his grandmother: caring, kind, always running around doing things for other people.
 
Ideologically they were also opposed: Marina had been a Pioneer (Communist girl scout) as a child but as a teenager in the 1970s she decided against joining the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Party. She knew it was the end of any serious ambition in life: 'To be in the Komsomol just so that I could have a career... it all seemed so unreal to me. I just stopped believing in all those ideals.' Instead she followed her passion for dance. When she met Alexander she was an aerobics instructor. Alexander, meanwhile, signed up wholesale to the state, following his father and grandfather into the army at the age of 17 and, a year later, the KGB. He used to say that before he met Marina that his greatest loyalty in life was to his commanders: 'Because I belonged to them. Like a child to his parents, whom I had really never had.'
 
They met at Marina's 31st birthday party, introduced by friends. Bringing a KGB man along was something of an amusing novelty. 'He had helped my friends with a difficult situation. They were people from the dance world who were receiving threats and had been asked to pay bribes. Fighting against this sort of thing was Sasha's work - they had officially gone to the Spets Sluzhba [security services] and asked for help. They got to know him as a person and said he was not a typical Spets Sluzhba type at all.' She had never met anyone in the KGB before. 'When I met him I was amazed - it was as if he wasn't from that world at all. He was jolly, witty - quite boyish, really. At first I wasn't interested in getting to know him as a friend or anything else. I was just grateful to him as someone who had helped my friends.'
 
When they met Alexander was already married with two children: 'Things had been going badly in his first marriage. I don't know if he looked at me and thought that I could be his new family... but he must have found something he was looking for.' Marina was pregnant within four months of their first meeting. Although they were only 31 when they met, they both used to joke to each other that they wished they had met when they were younger (Marina also had a previous marriage but no children): 'As time went on it felt as if I had always known him and I couldn't imagine life without him.' She does not sugar-coat the fact that there were times - both in Moscow and, later, in London - when they hardly saw each other because of his work.
 
'I didn't see his work as dangerous - it was more of a strain, really. I could never have a meal ready for him. He often came home late. And sometimes he didn't come home at all. There were times when I was living on my nerves and I would say, How am I supposed to know you're all right? This was in the days before mobile phones. He always used to say that if something bad happened to him then I'd find out quicker. So no news was good news.'
 
In Moscow they never went to the cinema or theatre since it was impossible to plan anything because of Litvinenko's work. In 13 years together they went on holiday twice. 'I didn't really suffer - I just accepted it, although it was upsetting, of course. He understood. But that was just the way it was.' Despite all this, they remained very close: 'We had a lot of trust in each other. As a wife I trusted him completely.' She says she met numerous families Litvinenko helped by investigating the criminal groups who had targeted them, just as he had helped the friends who introduced them as a couple. Because of this, she believed in him.
 
The lowest point in their marriage was when Litvinenko first turned whistle-blower against his KGB bosses, exposing an order to kill Berezovsky. Whether true or not, the accusation sealed his fate: Litvinenko was eventually accused of various charges and imprisoned for seven months in 1999. Marina: 'I made the decision very early on that I would stick by him no matter what. Of course, my mother worried. Why do things always go wrong for you, she would ask. And I would say, Maybe things aren't as bad as they look. Yes, I have a husband in prison and that is not great. But there are women who have husbands at home who make them miserable. At least I have a man who makes me happy. If Sasha has decided that he needs to fight or to speak out against something - I can only support him in that.'
 
Within a year she was to take an even greater leap of faith. On his release Litvinenko faced new charges and secretly left the country in 2000. He phoned Marina and asked her to book a trip to France, Spain, anywhere. 'He had a way of talking that made you realise there was no point in arguing - you just needed to get on and do it.' She took her son on a package holiday to Marbella and waited. She claims she had no idea she would never return to Russia - and at first she refused to go along with the plan. Alexander joked: 'You always wanted to go to England. Well, now's your chance.' Once she understood that if they returned Alexander would face prison again, she relented and they successfully sought political asylum in the UK, with Berezovsky's help.
 
Life in London was in some ways no quieter than in Moscow: Litvinenko continued to investigate figures from his past, exploring conspiracy theories and writing books on the Moscow underworld of the 1990s and on the 1999 apartment bombings which led to the second war in Chechnya. They had very different attitudes to life in the UK. Marina had dreamed of England for years. In Moscow she had a huge video collection of ballroom competitions hosted in Blackpool. She has become a big fan of Strictly Come Dancing. She makes a point of switching the radio to London's LBC when she drives. Alexander preferred to watch Russian films and spent hours listening to 1970s Russian 'chanson' tapes, a dissident music genre inspired by life in prison and the Gulag. Occasionally they would all listen to their son Anatoly's favourites together: Shakira, Nirvana, Queen, Led Zeppelin. She hints that shortly before her husband's death she had hopes for a quieter life: 'Sasha was very into fencing and lately our son started to go to lessons too. They asked Sasha to help out a couple of times at training.' Something like that would have been the ideal profession for him: he was a champion pentathlete at school and still went running every day. But Marina understood his work was an obsession he was never going to give up. 'For him there was never a question of walking away. In the early 1990s when the KGB fell and the security services were reformed, Sasha found himself at the centre of all that. But there weren't any fewer criminals, in fact there was more crime. He used to say to me, Look, Marina, if I don't do this, who will?'
 
She is at her most emotional when talking about her husband's professional identity and notions of betrayal. She has built her whole life around the idea that her husband was fighting for the right side. She always refers to Alexander as an 'oper' [operative] in the Spets Sluzhba. Russians avoid acronyms in speech and she never mentions the KGB or FSB. 'It upsets me so much when he is referred to as a spy. People say: "A spy died - so what? He betrayed his country." But he was never a spy. He did not betray his country or its secrets. He fought for his country.' She feels angry that the case will probably never be resolved: 'The Russians say they can't hand over Lugovoi because extradition is unconstitutional. But where is it written in the constitution that it is acceptable to commit a nuclear terrorist act? And if there is no conclusion and no punishment, then it can happen again.' Her eyes well up.
 
She has cried a lot during the interview. At the end I reach out to comfort her and we shake hands. As I step outside the hotel room, I immediately find myself feeling guilty and ashamed for wondering whether I should go and wash. Marina is right. It is easy to become obsessed about and frightened by radiation. Only in her case the obsession is not paranoia.

Life story

· Born in Moscow, 15 June 1962. Her parents worked at a pneumatic-fittings factory.
 
· Studied oil engineering at the Moscow Oil and Gas Academy. After graduating in 1985, Marina became a professional ballroom dancer. She had initially taken up dance as a hobby at 13. She took part in a number of dance competitions before becoming a fitness instructor, later returning to dance as a teacher in the UK.
 
· Marina first met Alexander at her birthday party in 1993 when both of them were 31, after being introduced by her best friend Lena.
 
· June 1994: Their son Anatoly ('Tolik') was born.
 
· October 1994: Marina, wearing a black tailored suit, married Alexander, who wore white, in a low-key ceremony at a register office.
 
· November 1998: Alexander publicly accused a high-ranking official of plotting to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.
 
· May 2001: The family were granted political asylum in the UK.
 
Latoya Akisanya

· Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko is published by Simon & Schuster, £18.99. To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
 
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