Chapter 3: Work for UK intelligence agencies

¶4.57 Ever since Mr Litvinenko died, there has been speculation that he may have worked

for the UK intelligence agencies. MI6 is the agency most commonly suggested. As we shall see, such speculation was in part the result of public comments made by Mr Lugovoy. I heard evidence on this topic from a number of witnesses.

¶4.58 Before turning to that evidence, I observe that the questions this issue raises with

regard to the matters that I am investigating are more complex than the binary question of whether or not Mr Litvinenko was working for the agencies. In terms of the risks that Mr Litvinenko may have faced, the detail is critical. If Mr Litvinenko did work for the agencies, what type of work did he undertake? What information may he have passed? What (and whose) secrets may he have betrayed? What may have been the consequences? More fundamentally, the question of what Mr Litvinenko was or was not actually doing may be less important than that of what his enemies thought he was doing. For if there was a distinction between the two, Mr Litvinenko was unlikely to have received the benefit of it.

¶4.59 Marina Litvinenko answered questions about this issue in her oral evidence.59 Her evidence can be summarised as follows:

a. She knew that Mr Litvinenko undertook work for one of the agencies – she was unsure whether it was MI5 or MI6. Mr Litvinenko had told her about this work. She was also aware of monthly payments being made into their joint bank account that she understood was payment for Mr Litvinenko's work with the agencies

b. This work had started after Mr Litvinenko's arrival in the UK. She did not believe that Mr Litvinenko had had any involvement with UK agencies while he was still living in Russia

c. She stated that Mr Litvinenko had shared with her some of the information he was supplying to British intelligence, "but not the details". She believed that the information Mr Litvinenko gave to the agencies related to Russian organised crime, including its presence in the UK. But, as I have said, she did not know the details of what Mr Litvinenko had been doing. She had no idea, for example, as to the accuracy or otherwise of an allegation that he had passed the names of Russian sleeper agents in the UK to UK intelligence agencies

d. Mr Litvinenko received a payment of £2,000 per month for this work. The payments had started in about 2004 and were made into the joint bank account that Mr and Mrs Litvinenko shared

e. Her understanding was that Mr Litvinenko had worked for the agencies on a consulting basis, as opposed to being one of their employees or agents (terms that she regarded as synonymous). To her, this was an important distinction. This was the explanation for a statement that she had given to the press in 2007 asserting that Mr Litvinenko, "was never an agent for MI6" – she did not believe that he had been an 'agent', as opposed to a consultant. As she put it, "I knew Sasha did work for MI6, or MI5, but he has never been an agent of MI6." She had earlier explained that she understood the term 'agent' to mean: "work[ing] with the Security Service and doing undercover job, doing something abroad under position of agent of MI6… But more important it's be employed, employed."

¶The Litvinenko Inquiry

¶4.60 The evidence of others who were close to Mr Litvinenko was to a similar effect.

¶4.61 Mr Goldfarb stated that Mr Litvinenko had told him sometime in early 2003 that he

was working for MI6; he added that, "he introduced me to one of them." He said that Mr Litvinenko had told him that he was consulting for MI6 on Russian organised crime in Europe and travelling to various countries in the EU to assist their law enforcement.60

¶4.62 Mr Berezovsky told the Metropolitan Police Service that Mr Litvinenko had worked for

what he described as "the intelligence service" and "the security services" (terms that he appears to have used interchangeably), but added that he did not know any details of his relations with them. He stated that:

"After he stopped working for me I understand he just kept working for the security services. They paid him money to support himself and his family. … he later said that he was disappointed with his working arrangements with the intelligence service."⁶¹⁶¹ Marina Litvinenko 4/105-110; BER002750; HMG000120 Berezovsky 25/10; 25/12 Marina Litvinenko 3/145; Goldfarb 27/112 Reilly 10/80; 10/83-84 Dombey 23/46-48

¶4.63 There were others of Mr Litvinenko's associates who appear to have been unaware,

prior to his death, that he had any possible connection with UK intelligence agencies. Mr Reilly62 and Mr Bukovsky63 fall into this category.

¶4.64 I note that none of the witnesses from whom I heard and who knew Mr Litvinenko

during his life expressed the firm view that he did not have a relationship with UK intelligence agencies.

¶4.65 The Home Secretary was a core participant in the Inquiry, acting in a representative

capacity for Her Majesty's Government generally, as well as in her own right. Since the factual issue was whether or not Mr Litvinenko worked for, or with, a government agency, it would have been open to the Home Secretary to provide evidence answering the point one way or another. No such evidence was provided in the open session, and it was made clear that the Home Secretary neither confirmed nor denied this allegation. Mr Garnham QC, who appeared on behalf of the Home Secretary, explained the position in his opening statement, in the following terms:

"The very nature of the work of the agencies requires secrecy if it is to be effective, and there is obvious and widely recognised need to preserve that effectiveness. It has been, therefore, the policy of successive governments to neither confirm nor deny (to NCND, in the jargon) assertions, allegations, or speculation in relation to the security and intelligence agencies.

That means that, as a general rule, the government will NCND whether the agencies are carrying out or have carried out an operation or investigation into a particular person or group, have a relationship with a particular person, hold particular information on a person or have shared information about that person with any other agencies, whether within the UK or elsewhere.

In order to be effective, the NCND principle must be applied consistently, including when no activity has taken place and a denial could be made perfectly properly. If the government were prepared to deny a particular activity in one instance, the inference might well be drawn that the absence of a denial in another amounted to

¶Part 4 | Chapters 1 to 6 | Why would anyone wish to kill Alexander Litvinenko?

confirmation of the alleged activity. If the government were forced to depart from the NCND principle in one case, it would create a clear risk of serious harm to essential UK national security interests. It could, furthermore, potentially put lives at risk."⁶⁴⁶⁴ Felshtinsky 23/143 lines 14-17 Garnham 1/172-173 Goldfarb 5/128 Reilly 10/84; 10/107-110 Goldfarb 26/118-121

Later in the opening statement, Mr Garnham quoted a passage from the judgment of Lord Carswell in the Scappaticci case:65

"To state that a person is an agent would be likely to place him in immediate danger from terrorist organisations. To deny that he is an agent may in some cases endanger another person who may be under suspicion from terrorists. Most significant, once the government confirms in the case of one person that he is not an agent, a refusal to comment in the case of another person would then give rise to an immediate suspicion that the latter was in fact an agent, so possibly placing his life in grave danger.

… If the government were to deny in all cases that persons named were agents, the denials would become meaningless and would carry no weight. Moreover, if agents became uneasy about the risk to themselves being increased through the effect of government statements, their willingness to give information and the supply of intelligence vital to the war against terrorism could be gravely reduced. There is in my judgment substantial force in these propositions and they form powerful reasons for maintaining the NCND policy."⁶⁶⁶⁶ INQ017734 (page 12 paragraph 43); Marina Litvinenko 3/90-91 Garnham 1/174-175 Marina Litvinenko 4/33 Reilly 10/85-86 Scaramella 15/172-173

Mr Garnham concluded the statement by emphasising the consequence of the NCND approach that the Home Secretary was taking:

"All that, sir, has an immediate consequence in the circumstances of these open hearings. The failure of the government either to confirm or deny an assertion or a suggestion about events under consideration in this Inquiry tells you precisely nothing about the truth or otherwise of that assertion or suggestion. It means, sir, you must look elsewhere to determine the truth or falsity of such allegations."⁶⁷⁶⁷ Felshtinsky 23/143-144 Garnham 1/178-179 Quirke 11/64-66 INQ018987 (page 2) Scaramella 15/172-178

¶4.66 So much for the question of what relationship Mr Litvinenko may actually

have had with the agencies, and what his family and friends understood to be the position at the time. As I indicated above, for the purposes of this Inquiry it is at least as important, perhaps more important, to assess what Mr Litvinenko's enemies thought he was doing. Did, for example, the FSB believe that Mr Litvinenko was or may have been working with the UK intelligence agencies?

¶4.67 There is some evidence before me to suggest that that is precisely what the FSB believed. The source of that evidence is Mr Lugovoy.

¶4.68 In public statements and interviews that post-dated Mr Litvinenko's death, Mr Lugovoy

stated firmly not only that Mr Litvinenko had told him that he was working with MI6, but that Mr Litvinenko had tried to recruit him as an MI6 agent. For example, at the press conference that Mr Lugovoy gave (with Mr Kovtun) in Moscow on 31 May 2007, he stated that, during meetings that he had held in London during 2006, Mr Litvinenko had been involved in an attempt, "to try and recruit me openly as an agent for British Intelligence." Mr Lugovoy went on to describe what it was that, as he understood it,

¶The Litvinenko Inquiry

he was being recruited to do. On Mr Lugovoy's account, the intention was that he would take part in an operation to gather incriminating information about President Putin and his family – he stated that one element of this plan was that a Russian state official would be lured to London and then blackmailed into disclosing incriminating information about Mr Putin. Mr Lugovoy said that he had rejected the approach. Mr Litvinenko, he said, "was enraged that I declined the offer to work for British secret services."⁶⁸⁶⁸ Marina Litvinenko 3/94-95; Felshtinsky 23/145 lines 13-16 INQ001886 (pages 2-3) Attew 13/20 INQ018987 (page 2) INQ013784

¶4.69 Mr Lugovoy returned to this theme in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais

in 2008. On that occasion, he repeated his claim that Mr Litvinenko had been involved in an attempt to recruit him on behalf of British intelligence. He also claimed in this interview that Mr Litvinenko had encouraged him to join him in work that he was conducting with the Spanish secret services against the Russian mafia operating in Spain – a subject to which I shall return below. The particular significance of this interview for present purposes lies in what Mr Lugovoy said he did in response to Mr Litvinenko's attempt to recruit him for British intelligence. As to this, Mr Lugovoy stated that: "when the British agents started to approach me, one of the first things that I did was to inform the FSB so that they wouldn't accuse me of being a traitor or a spy."⁶⁹⁶⁹ Felshtinsky 23/145 INQ017684 Marina Litvinenko 4/38-42 INQ017922 (page 3) Scaramella 15/139-140

¶4.70 If these accounts are true (and I will address the subject of Mr Lugovoy's credibility

below), the FSB received directly from Mr Lugovoy not only information that Mr Litvinenko was working with UK intelligence agencies, but also some idea of the type of work he was conducting.

¶4.71 It may not take much imagination to consider how the FSB would have reacted to

a report that one of its own former officers was working with British intelligence, especially if, as Mr Lugovoy claimed, that former officer was involved in an operation targeting President Putin.

¶4.72 It may be that comments made by Mr Lugovoy and Mr Gusak after Mr Litvinenko's

death provide an indication of the FSB's likely reaction to a report that Mr Litvinenko was working with UK intelligence agencies.

¶4.73 Lugovoy himself, as we shall see, was never an FSB officer. But he came from a

military background and served in the KGB before it was broken up, and thereafter in the Federal Protection Service. He gave his view of Mr Litvinenko's conduct in acting for British intelligence in the El Pais interview that is referred to above, which is printed as a question and answer session:

"A. … [The British] believed that Lugovoy killed Litvinenko because Litvinenko criticised Putin and the FSB.

¶Q. But the FSB believes that Litvinenko was a traitor.

A. And I think so as well. But so what? That doesn't mean that a traitor has to be immediately killed?

Q. Do you think that someone could have killed Litvinenko in the interests of the Russian state?

¶Part 4 | Chapters 1 to 6 | Why would anyone wish to kill Alexander Litvinenko?

A. If you're talking about the interests of the Russian state in the purest sense of the word, I myself would have given that order. I'm not talking about Litvinenko, but about any person who causes serious damage. For example, if I had been president, I would have ordered the assassination of Saakashvili.

¶Q. Saakashvili isn't a Russian citizen, he's president of the Republic of Georgia.

A. Well, there is another person, Oleg Gordievsky (colonel of the KGB), a friend of Litvinenko's, who fled to the UK (in 1985) and was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of the USSR. I think that this punishment should be enacted. If he is caught, he must be brought here and locked up for life. And if someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated. This is my firm belief and the belief of any normal Russian."

¶4.74 In February 2007, before either Mr Lugovoy's press conference or his interview with

El Pais, Mr Gusak, Mr Litvinenko's former friend and superior officer had given an interview to the Ekho Moskvy radio station.70 The interview appears to have been a follow up to an earlier interview that he had given to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The interviewer asked Mr Gusak: "Tell us, please, you have described Litvinenko as a traitor and said that he did indeed inflict serious damage on our country, he revealed his sources of information, and even betrayed several [undercover] agents. Is that so?" Mr Gusak responded: "The thing is, when Aleksandr Valterovich [Litvinenko] defected abroad, he naturally handed over the undercover agents who had been his contacts." Later in the same interview, Mr Gusak was asked, "But you believe that under Soviet laws Litvinenko deserved to be executed, right?" Mr Gusak replied "Well, he did, yes."

¶The Litvinenko Inquiry