‘Remember Trotsky!’

Neil Barnett recalls his encounters with the poisoned spy who has had the bearing of a marked man for years. The Russian intelligence services, Litvinenko told him, are purely political organisations, whose only purpose is to shore up Putin’s power

The hotel off a main square in a central European capital was a seedy, low-budget place. When I asked the receptionist for Alexander Litvinenko in room 38, she looked at me blankly, then after some rooting around said, ‘We only have a Mr Jones in room 38.’ It was Litvinenko, of course, employing one of his endless ruses designed to throw off his former FSB (Federal Security Service) comrades who had hounded him since his defection (or ‘granting of asylum’) to the UK in 2000.

Sitting on his bed dressed in a shiny tracksuit and trainers, Litvinenko was a pale, watchful figure, a Putin-like grey man who could vanish into the crowd without difficulty. But at the same time he showed flashes of boyish charm distinctly unlike the Russian leader. He wanted to discuss the Russian state’s abuse of Interpol international criminal arrest warrants to blackmail businessmen and intimidate opponents living outside Russia. It was 2002 and Litvinenko’s patron, the dissident oligarch Boris Berezovsky, also living in London, faced extradition to Russia. The story was interesting, but hard to shift in the British press: too much ‘inside baseball’, too obscure.

But Litvinenko himself was a fascinating figure. I wanted to know what had driven him to confront his old masters so directly, and how he managed the fear that must bring. He described how he had discovered evidence of FSB involvement in the 1999 ‘apartment bombings’ in Moscow and Volgodonsk that had been a prime casus belli for the new Chechen war. Litvinenko — a lieutenant-colonel at the time he decamped — described how local militia in the city of Ryazan caught some men planting what seemed to be explosives in the basement of an apartment block in the early hours of the morning.