Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Heidi Blake 2019

Cover image © Getty Images

Heidi Blake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All photographs courtesy BuzzFeed News unless otherwise stated

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008300050

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008300074

Version: 2019-11-05

This book is dedicated to Mark Schoofs, always a

guiding light; to my investigative comrades

Tom Warren, Richard Holmes, Jane Bradley,

Jason Leopold, and Alex Campbell, without whom this

story would have stayed buried; and to those brave

members of the independent Russian media who risk

their lives every day in the pursuit of truth.

Contents

1  Title Page

2 Copyright

3  Dedication

4  Contents

5  Foreword

6  Introduction

7  Part One: Two Worlds Collide i ii iii iv

8  Part Two: The Oligarchs in Exile v vi vii

9  Part Three: Occupational Hazards viii ix

10  Part Four: The Price x xi xii

11  Part Five: Impunity xiii xiv xv

12  Part Six: Peregruzka xvi xvii xviii

13  Part Seven: The Fall xix xx xxi

14  Photos

15  Bibliography

16  Acknowledgments

17  About the Author

18  Also by Heidi Blake

19  About the Publisher

Navigation

1  Table of Contents

Foreword

A note on the original BuzzFeed News investigation

In December 2014, I flew to New York to meet Mark Schoofs, the legendary editor who then headed investigations at BuzzFeed News, to discuss setting up a new investigative unit at the company’s office in the United Kingdom. I came carrying a newspaper clipping containing the first clues to a mystery I hoped the new team might solve. It described how a multimillionaire property tycoon had plunged to his death from the fourth-floor window of a London town house a few days earlier—becoming the latest in a group of men, including the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had all died under bizarre circumstances. I was fascinated by what lay behind this expanding web of death at the heart of London—and Mark was equally intrigued.

Soon after I joined BuzzFeed News and set about recruiting the new UK team, I got a call out of the blue summoning me to a mysterious meeting at an apartment in a smart part of London. When I arrived, I found myself face-to-face with the ex-wife of the very tycoon who had died in that fatal fall. Her ex-husband had been murdered, she said, and by coincidence she wanted my new team to investigate. More serendipitously still, she was sitting on a large trove of documents detailing the activities of her ex-husband and his associates in the years before their untimely deaths.

I was soon joined by an extraordinary group of colleagues in the quest to get to the bottom of the story. Tom Warren, Jane Bradley, and Richard Holmes came aboard the new investigations unit in London, and we teamed up with our American colleagues Jason Leopold and Alex Campbell to chase leads across the Atlantic. Over the next two years, under Mark’s inspired oversight, our team connected the property mogul’s fatal fall to a web of fourteen deaths in the UK—and one in the United States—all of which had glaring links to Russia. Astonishingly, not one of those cases had been deemed suspicious by the authorities. But we obtained hundreds of boxes of documents, hours of surveillance footage and audio recordings, a huge cache of digital files from forensically restored mobile phones and computers, and bags of discarded police evidence that blew a hole in the official story.

We fed all our exclusive material into a huge custom-built database, supplementing it with thousands of pages of public records, and ran advanced searches across the entire cache to piece together a sprawling international story of money, betrayal, and murder. Then we tracked down and interviewed more than two hundred people connected to the fifteen dead men, while also gathering information from more than forty current and former intelligence and law enforcement sources on both sides of the Atlantic. And we obtained readouts of multiple secret US intelligence files—including a classified report sent to Congress by America’s top intelligence official detailing Vladimir Putin’s campaign of targeted killing in the West.

Every single reporter was pivotal to the project. Richard personally scanned hundreds of thousands of documents by hand so we could digitize and search them, and he contributed vital law enforcement source-work. Tom set up our gargantuan evidence database and applied his forensic genius to fathoming the dizzyingly complex financial maneuvers at the heart of the story. Jane deployed her unparalleled skills at tracking people down and persuading them to talk against all the odds, and Alex wore out his shoe leather running down leads across America. Jason—the sort of rock ’n’ roll reporter who’ll stop to get a new tattoo in between meetings with spies—blew the story wide open by getting a multiplicity of US intelligence sources to spill details of secret files linking every single one of the deaths in Britain to Russia.

Reporting this story was, at times, a dicey ride. A man in a black car appeared every night for months outside one reporter’s house, another reporter came home to find personal items had been moved around in his bedroom, and it appeared one team member was being followed. We used trackers, panic buttons, intruder alarms, encryption, and countersurveillance techniques to stay safe—and in the final phase of the project, some reporters were moved to discreet locations for their security.

Our initial investigation was published by BuzzFeed News in June 2017. The shock waves it sent are detailed in the pages that follow. Since then, we have carried on investigating and gathering fresh evidence that places the fifteen suspected assassinations we initially uncovered at the center of a much wider campaign of Kremlin-sanctioned killing around the world.

This book is based on that body of work. Details of the events described are taken from our vast repository of documentary and digital evidence, as well as interviews with people who were present, and the dialogue recounted here is based on the best recollections of those who heard it. What follows is a story that more than one government wanted to keep secret—and it would have lain buried forever without the tireless work of my incomparable colleagues at BuzzFeed News.

Heidi Blake

Introduction

Salisbury, England—March 4, 2018

The fog that enveloped the city overnight had cleared by lunchtime, revealing the cloud-tipped spire of Salisbury Cathedral to the smattering of Sunday diners ambling up Castle Street. The afternoon was cold and quiet, and a light rain was fizzling on the medieval rooftops as two figures emerged from a columned restaurant door. The couple—a smart, plump, snowy-haired man with a blonde some decades his junior—would have gone unnoticed among the lunch crowd at Zizzi, where they had been washing down risotto with white wine, had it not been for his outburst midway through their meal. The pair left the restaurant suddenly after he flew into a loud temper, ducking down an alley and hurrying away from the marketplace, but their pace slackened once they emerged and crossed the bridge over the swollen river. Across the Avon lies a small tree-fringed playground where children were feeding ducks in the drizzle, and the man paused to press some bread he’d saved from lunch into their hands before the pair strolled on toward the edge of the green. It was here that they came to a sudden halt. Within minutes, passersby would stop to stare at a bizarre scene.

The man and woman were slumped together on a bench—she unconscious, he making strange hand gestures and apparently transfixed by the sky. As onlookers cautiously approached, the man seemed to freeze. Then the woman began convulsing, her eyes white and mouth foaming.

The Sunday shoppers who rushed to help were unaware of the seismic global significance of what was unfolding before them. This was the latest salvo in a secret war being waged on the West by a hostile foreign superpower, and their peaceful Wiltshire city had become a battleground: the site of the first chemical weapons attack unleashed on European soil since the Second World War. Still more alarming, the good samaritans themselves were being exposed to a lethal poison even as they stood on the green sheltering the stricken pair under umbrellas while they waited for paramedics.

The couple on the bench were Sergei Skripal—a former Russian spy turned double agent for MI6—and his thirty-three-year-old daughter, Yulia. Skripal, then sixty-six, had arrived in the United Kingdom eight years earlier, after being freed from a Russian prison where he was serving time for high treason. The onetime senior military intelligence officer had been convicted of selling secrets to Britain and blowing the cover of some three hundred Russian agents in 2006. He was released four years later, along with three other men convicted of spying for the West, in exchange for the return to Moscow of ten Russian spies caught living under deep cover in suburban America. The agents were traded on the tarmac of the Vienna airport in the biggest East-West spy swap since the Cold War—but no sooner had the Russian returnees stepped safely onto home soil than Vladimir Putin made his intentions toward the men he had released clear.

“Traitors will kick the bucket,” he announced on state television. “Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”

The events unfolding on the green in Salisbury proved the Russian president true to his word. Sergei and Yulia Skripal lay choking on the bench as their airways were shut down by a deadly chemical that had been smeared on the door handle of his suburban home hours before.

By the time they were admitted to the intensive care unit at Salisbury District Hospital, the Skripals were both suffering convulsions as their lungs filled with fluid and their hearts slowed to a near stop. Doctors were initially perplexed, but when police informed them that the man in their care was a Russian turncoat living under British government protection, the symptoms began to make terrible sense. The Skripals were showing all the signs of having been exposed to a nerve agent—a military-grade chemical that attacks the central nervous system and causes the collapse of all vital bodily functions. These poison gases, fluids, and vapors are so indiscriminately deadly that the world had banned their development or stockpiling some two decades before. In the unthinkable event that the pair had been attacked with a chemical weapon on the streets of Salisbury, wouldn’t there be other casualties?

Those fears were compounded with the arrival of a new patient in intensive care. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was a decorated officer of the Wiltshire Police who had been deployed to search Sergei Skripal’s home, and he had been hit with all the same symptoms as the spy and his daughter. Soon after, two more police officers were admitted with itchy eyes and respiratory difficulties. Then came the three children who had taken handfuls of bread from Sergei Skripal to feed the ducks and an off-duty doctor and nurse who had rushed to administer mouth-to-mouth to the Skripals in advance of the paramedics arriving. Before long, twenty-one people had presented with signs of nerve poisoning.

It looked abundantly clear that a deadly chemical had been used to attack the Skripals—indiscriminately endangering the lives of potentially hundreds of British citizens. The medics in Salisbury District Hospital braced themselves for an all-consuming public health crisis while counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard swept in to take over the investigation from the local police and 180 military personnel were deployed alongside specialist investigators in white protective suits to comb the streets for traces of a nerve agent. But without identifying the exact chemical that had been used in the attack, it was impossible to know where it had come from—or how its awful effects could be treated.

To the northeast of Salisbury, encircled by barbed wire and set in seven thousand acres of open land, is a sprawling complex of windowless labs and bunkers that harbors some of Britain’s most closely guarded secrets. The Skripals had been poisoned just a few miles from Porton Down, home to the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, one of the world’s foremost centers for research into chemical and biological weapons. As soon as medics spotted the signs of possible nerve-agent poisoning, samples were taken from the Skripals and rushed to the top-secret laboratory for testing.

It did not take long for the government scientists to identify the poison. This was a pure strain of Novichok—a chemical weapon as deadly as it is conspicuously Russian—and researchers at Porton Down had been studying nerve agents like it for years. The toxin was developed in the 1970s and 1980s under a Soviet program code-named Foliant at the Shikhany military research base, in southwest Russia. The existence of the Novichok stockpile was exposed by two Russian state chemists in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and just as the country was signing on to the Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing the development and retention of chemical and biological weapons—and MI6 had been gathering intelligence about its adaptation for use in targeted assassinations ever since. The discovery that the Skripals had been poleaxed by this distinctly Soviet poison was met with stark astonishment. This wasn’t just a covert attempt to liquidate a traitor and settle a score: it was also a deliberately overt act of aggression. The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal was a message, and the return address was clear. The Kremlin.

The prime minister needed to be briefed. Theresa May called her intelligence chiefs to a meeting, where she heard evidence that Putin had sent state agents to exterminate the Skripals on British soil. MI6 had compelling intelligence that the Russian president had personally overseen a program to repurpose an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including Novichok, for use in targeted assassinations over the past decade. Specialist hit squads had been trained in the use of nerve agents to target individual enemies of the Russian state—and they had been specifically taught to smear the chemicals on door handles, where the highest concentrations of Novichok were identified in samples taken from Sergei Skripal’s home. Russian spies had been showing an interest in the Skripals as far back as 2013, when the country’s military intelligence unit had hacked multiple email accounts owned by Yulia. More alarmingly still, Sergei’s wife and son had both died suddenly in the years since the family relocated to the UK, and there were suspicions that they, too, may have been poisoned.

The British government had no option but to act. On March 12, eight days after the Skripals collapsed, the prime minister announced on the floor of the House of Commons that it was “highly likely” that Vladimir Putin was responsible. “Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent,” she said, demanding an explanation from the Kremlin by midnight the following day. Russian officials hit back immediately, calling the remarks a provocation and describing the prime minister’s statement as a “circus show in the British parliament,” but no explanation was forthcoming. Two days later, May announced the expulsion of twenty-three Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover in London. Russia quickly followed suit, ejecting twenty-three British diplomats from Moscow.

The accusation that Russia had carried out a chemical weapons attack in Britain sparked an unprecedented international reaction, leading to the expulsion of more than 150 Russian diplomats from twenty-eight Western countries. The leaders of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement condemning Russia for “the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War,” describing the attack as “an assault on UK sovereignty” and a breach of international law that “threatens the security of us all.” The fallout plunged relations between Russia and the West to the kind of subzero temperatures not seen since the end of the Cold War. For a Britain increasingly isolated by its decision to leave the European Union, the attack on the Skripals had occasioned a heartening show of international solidarity. And, at least ostensibly, it enabled a prime minister beleaguered by bruising failures in the Brexit negotiations to reposition herself as a redoubtable global stateswoman. But back in Moscow, Putin was looking on with scarcely disguised glee.

The West’s response to the attempted assassination of the Skripals could not have been more of a gift to the man in the Kremlin. The Russian presidential elections fell on March 18—a fortnight after the attack—and Putin needed to mobilize his electorate. True, he did not have much competition. The opposition figurehead, Alexei Navalny, had been repeatedly attacked and imprisoned during his campaign before ultimately being banned from running, and Putin’s previous leading opponent, Boris Nemtsov, had been gunned down on a bridge outside the Kremlin three years earlier. The election result was a foregone conclusion. But Putin wanted a resounding victory as he closed his grip on another six years in power, and that meant getting a strong turnout at the polls. To achieve his goal, he needed to rouse the Russian people into a state of patriotic fervor and distract them from the dire state of Russia’s sanctions-stricken economy, rampant corruption, crumbling infrastructure, chronically underfunded health service, and failing education system. What better way to do that than to invoke the looming menace of Russia’s enemies in the West, from whom only he could be trusted to defend the motherland?

That had been the principal objective of the state of the nation address Putin delivered three days before the attack on the Skripals, in which he announced that Russia had developed a new arsenal of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating US air defenses. Squaring up to the podium in a sharp-shouldered black suit and deep-red tie, he declared: “I would like to tell those who have been trying to escalate the arms race for the past fifteen years, to gain unilateral advantages over Russia, and to impose restrictions and sanctions…The attempt at curbing Russia has failed.” Behind him, two vast screens lit up with footage of snow-covered rocket launchers blasting gigantic missiles into a glowering sky, followed by animations charting a ballistic trajectory encircling the entire globe.

Putin’s warmongering state of the nation was the first turn in his well-practiced pre-election performance as a global strongman, and the attack on the Skripals made the perfect sequel. After Britain pointed a finger at the Kremlin and the countries in the United States–led NATO alliance followed suit, all the mechanisms of the Russian state went into overdrive to whip up national hysteria about the iniquity of its Western enemies. Even by the prodigious standards of the Russian propaganda machine, rarely had such a dazzling variety of alternative conspiracy theories been spewed out by the state’s multiplicity of troll factories, fake-news farms, and organs of agitprop. Britain had deliberately put the Skripals into a coma and fabricated evidence to frame Russia—or to detract attention from its difficulties in the Brexit negotiations, or to smear Putin ahead of the presidential election or to destroy Russia’s reputation as a “peacemaker” in Syria, or out of sour grapes over having lost the right to host the 2018 World Cup. MI6 had poisoned Skripal out of fears he would flip and start selling British secrets back to Moscow. The pro-Western government of Ukraine was behind the attack. Sweden, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic was responsible. A mafia group had taken out a contract on the Skripals. The Novichok had originated from the lab at Porton Down, or the United States had made its own version of the nerve agent or stolen it while performing chemical weapons inspections in former Soviet states. So the theories wound on and on.

Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, called the poisoning a “grotesque provocation rudely staged by the British and US intelligence agencies”—and Putin himself was scornfully dismissive, describing Britain’s accusations as “delirium and nonsense.” But the president and his propagandists also took care to fan the flames of suspicion.

Three days after the attack on the Skripals, before Britain had publicly accused Russia of the attempted assassination, the Kremlin’s Channel One TV station used the main bulletin of its flagship current affairs show to issue an unambiguous warning. Skripal was “a traitor to his country,” the host said. “I don’t wish death on anyone,” he continued, “but for purely educational purposes, for anyone who dreams of such a career, I have a warning: being a traitor is one of the most dangerous professions in the world.” Anna Chapman, the glamorous linchpin of the network of ten Russian sleeper agents caught spying on the United States in 2010, also publicly accused Skripal of treachery. And, on the cusp of the presidential election, Putin himself used a specially commissioned documentary to issue his own monition. Asked by the handpicked interviewer if he was capable of forgiveness, the president nodded. Then a glacial smile crept across his face.

“But not everything,” he said. The interviewer wanted to know what it was the president could not forgive.

“Betrayal,” Putin spat back.

The Russian people are used to living with this sort of cognitive dissonance. This is how a nation is hypnotized: sowing confusion with conspiracy and contradiction, distorting debate with disinformation, and muddying fact with falsehood so that the collective consciousness is clouded by a perpetual fog of ambiguity in which nothing is true and no one is accountable. Sergei Skripal betrayed the motherland by selling Russian secrets to the West—and Putin is a strongman, so traitors will kick the bucket. The West is smearing Russia with false accusations to threaten its power—and Putin is a strongman, so only he can save the nation. These were the dissonant messages that the people of Russia received—and, by and large, believed.

When election day came, Putin swept to victory with 77 percent of the vote and a turnout of more than two-thirds of the population. Almost as soon as the polls had closed on March 18, his campaign spokesman attributed the success to a single event.

“Turnout is higher than we expected, by about eight to ten percent, for which we must say thanks to Great Britain,” said Andrey Kondrashov.

“Whenever Russia is accused of something indiscriminately and without any evidence, the Russian people unite around the center of power. And the center of power is certainly Putin today.”

The attack on Sergei Skripal was a blatant provocation designed to give Britain—and the West—no choice but to react exactly as they did, and the gambit had paid off handsomely. But it was also part of a far bigger and more sinister picture.

The truth was that Putin had been using deadly force to wipe out his enemies from the first days of his presidency, and the West had long been looking away. Dissenting politicians, journalists, campaigners, defectors, investigators, and critics had been gunned down, poisoned, hit by cars, thrown out of windows, beaten to death, and blown up on Russian soil since his ascent to the Kremlin on the last day of 1999. Turning a blind eye to this brutality was the cost of doing business with an economically renascent nuclear power that had a stranglehold on Europe’s energy supply and a superwealthy class of oligarchs pouring billions into Western economies. Successive leaders had let themselves be lulled into the belief that Putin was a man they could do business with—a man who, with the right coaxing, might finally come in from the cold and integrate the world’s largest country into the warmth of the rules-based liberal world order. That had proved a catastrophic misjudgment.

Putin never really wanted to join the club. He remained what he had always been: a creature of the totalitarian Soviet security state. To his mind the collapse of the USSR, with its mass killings, censorship, political repression, and bellicose isolationism, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and he blamed it on the West. The 1989 revolutions that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Europe, and the accession to the EU and NATO of the former Soviet satellite states—these were outrages to be avenged. So he had risen through the ranks of the KGB and arrived at the Kremlin ready to use all the tactics in his Soviet security-service tool kit to restore Russia to its former glory. While the leaders of the United States and Europe courted him with summits and state visits, handing him the presidency of the G8 and establishing the NATO-Russia Council to foster closer military and political relations, Putin was smiling for the camera, shaking hands, and plotting a silent war on the liberal institutions and alliances upon which the stability of the West depends. The fox was in the chicken coop.

The systematic extermination of enemies, traitors, and opponents was at the core of Putin’s clandestine campaign. Covert killing is a deeply Soviet form of statecraft, a prized lever of power that had rested for more than half a century in the hands of the feared USSR security service from which the new president had emerged. The KGB had led the world in the art and science of untraceable murder, with its poison factories and weapons labs churning out such deadly marvels as plague sprays, cyanide bullets, lipstick pistols, and ricin-tipped umbrellas. Those capabilities had dwindled since the USSR fell—but not on Putin’s watch. While the West welcomed him to the fold, the Russian president was busy reviving the KGB’s targeted killing program. He plowed public money into researching and developing chemical and biological weapons, psychotropic drugs, obscure carcinogens, and other undetectable poisons, and he armed specialist hit squads to hunt down his foes at home and abroad. He restored the fearsome power of the Soviet state security apparatus—enriching and empowering the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, and giving its agents special worldwide powers to kill enemies of the state with impunity. Anyone who betrayed the motherland, anyone who threatened the absolute power of the Russian state, anyone who knew too much—all put themselves squarely in the Kremlin’s crosshairs. And every dead body sent a signal. If you cross Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, there is no safe place for you on earth.

The covert killing campaign was one crucial line of attack in a much wider war of subversion. As soaring oil prices swelled the state’s coffers, Putin shoveled resources not only into the development of cyberweaponry capable of shutting down foreign infrastructures at the touch of a button but also hacking labs that could gather kompromat on his adversaries. He ramped up Russian espionage operations to Cold War levels, inserting Anna Chapman’s illegal sleeper cell into the American suburbs, pouring spies into every major European capital, and developing a network of agents of influence to push the Kremlin’s agenda in the corridors of Western power. He weaponized Russia’s fearsome organized crime complex, enmeshing the country’s powerful mafia groups ever more deeply with his government and security services and extending their tentacles around the world as an unofficial outgrowth of the Russian state. He grew a sprawling international propaganda machine to disseminate disinformation, assembled a troll army of social media warriors running millions of fake accounts to stoke conspiracy theories and sow chaos in the West, and built black-money channels to finance extremism, terror, and despotism abroad. And he doubled down on defense spending, pumping the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars into a sweeping military modernization program to replace crumbling Soviet weaponry with hundreds of spanking-new bombers, submarines, warships, and intercontinental missiles.

As Putin expanded his web, his use of targeted assassination beyond his own borders grew more brazen. By 2006, he was sufficiently emboldened to pass new laws explicitly giving the FSB a license to kill Russia’s enemies on foreign soil. Since then, his regime’s critics, opponents, and traitors have dropped dead in violent or perplexing circumstances in both the United States and Europe. But nowhere has Putin pursued his killing campaign with more vigor—or greater impunity—than in the United Kingdom.

London proved the perfect playground for superrich Russians on the run from Putin’s regime. Its booming banks and skyrocketing property market gave them a safe place to stash the money they had looted during the smash-and-grab post-Communist era, while its opulent hotels, luxury department stores, and star-studded nightclubs made for appealing places to spend it. England was a land where both an ill-gotten fortune and a tarnished reputation could be laundered to look as white as a sheet in a flash. Its world-class lawyers and accountants were on hand to help siphon cash safely out of Moscow and into respectable-looking UK companies via opaque offshore structures. Its estate agents were ready to hand over the keys to the country’s most prestigious addresses without asking too many questions, and its lacquered PR gurus flocked to polish away any lingering reputational taint from the mucky business of getting rich in Russia. An endowment to an Oxbridge college here, a donation to the ruling party there, a stately home, a child enrolled at Eton—it didn’t take much more to make a new arrival from Moscow look presentable in the loftiest circles of British society.

Before long, billions of pounds’ worth of Russian money was pouring into London’s banks and properties each year. The governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron were all anxious to preserve this new lifeline for an economy increasingly dependent on financial services to supplant its dying manufacturing industry. That was why grants of political asylum and investment visas were doled out so liberally to the wealthy new arrivals from Moscow. But it was equally important to cultivate close ties with Putin and smooth the path for British energy investments in Russia. And that was why the establishment discreetly averted its eyes when the Kremlin’s enemies started dropping dead on British soil.

Boris Berezovsky was the linchpin of the community of exiled Russians who fled to Britain after Putin came to power. The brilliant Soviet mathematician had become a billionaire by looting state assets during his time as a high-ranking member of Boris Yeltsin’s government, and he viewed himself as the kingmaker who had plucked Putin out of obscurity. But when his protégé lurched toward autocracy and began quashing all opposition, Berezovsky used the newspapers and TV channels he had amassed to launch blistering attacks. Enraged, Putin had warned publicly that oligarchs who stepped out of line would be crushed and began demolishing Berezovsky’s business empire in Moscow. But to the president’s fury, the oligarch had escaped to the green hills of England with his fortune intact.

Berezovsky found a network of British lawyers and financiers to help spirit his money out of Moscow and stash it out of the reach of the Russian authorities in a byzantine network of offshore vehicles. Then he began using his vast expatriated fortune to finance an international campaign of opposition to Putin’s regime from his new home in the English countryside and to bankroll the activities of a group of dissidents, including the whistle-blowing FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who joined him in Britain. Within a matter of months, the man who had helped bring Putin to power had made himself the number one enemy of the Russian state.

Berezovsky and his turbulent associates thought they had found a safe haven in England. They hoped that their grants of political asylum from the government would be enough to save them from the long arm of the Kremlin. They were wrong. One by one, in the years that followed, the lawyers, fixers, dissidents, and businessmen in Berezovsky’s circle would drop dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, the British authorities would close the cases with no investigation and carry on courting the Kremlin.

There was a single exception. The 2006 murder of Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in a London hotel was an act of provocation the British government could not ignore. The two assassins sent to poison the FSB defector botched their mission so badly that they left a radioactive trail all over the capital. Litvinenko died slowly in the full glare of the world’s media, allowing time for images of his gaunt and hairless frame to be beamed around the globe and for him to solve his own murder by accusing the Kremlin of ordering his killing in a statement issued from his deathbed.

Britain had no option but to respond, and the authorities charged the two assassins with murder in absentia after they fled back to Russia. But even in the face of a blatant act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of the capital, the government’s reaction was muted. The UK expelled a mere four Russian diplomats, and four British embassy staff were sent packing from Moscow in return. When Russia refused to extradite the two killers, foreclosing any hope of a criminal trial, the government stood in the way of efforts by the dead man’s widow, Marina Litvinenko, to secure a public inquiry into her husband’s murder. Theresa May personally intervened to quash the possibility during her tenure as home secretary, citing the need to protect “international relations” with Russia. It was a full decade later, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea had made reparation with the Kremlin impossible, that the government finally relented to demands for the inquiry, which ultimately found that Litvinenko had likely been assassinated on Putin’s orders. But back in 2006, Britain had too much at stake to pick an unwinnable fight with the Kremlin.

The cold, mercenary reality was that Anglo-Russian business was booming. The UK had become the biggest investor in Russia’s energy sector by the time Litvinenko was poisoned, and the British oil giant BP signed on to a historic joint venture with the then state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom just a week after the two countries played tit for tat with their diplomatic expulsions over the murder. Russian energy firms were investing big in the UK, too, and initial public offerings by Moscow firms were by then worth tens of billions of pounds each year to the London Stock Exchange. All that was a critical prop to the British economy, and it suited Putin just fine. Inward investment in Russia, and the global expansion of homegrown business, meant more rubles to pour into his campaign of foreign subversion, cyberweaponization, and military revampment. And as much as Putin was a creature of his Soviet training, he was also a kleptocrat. He wanted to make Russia great again, and he intended to enrich himself and his inner circle in the process. The more money that flowed into Moscow, the more he could siphon off into the secret network of offshore accounts, trusts, and properties that would ultimately make him, by some estimates, the world’s richest man.

But still, the diplomatic pain caused by the row over Litvinenko’s murder impeded Anglo-Russian relations at a time when Britain wanted nothing more than to stay in step with the rest of the West and keep the Kremlin close. In the years that followed, when Russian émigrés and their British fixers died with ever greater frequency, the authorities were all the more steadfast in their determination to look the other way. And the more the British government showed itself willing to shut its eyes, the more emboldened Russia became.

The reasons for Britain’s inaction were more than just financial. Russia’s murderous organized crime and state security complex began encroaching on the West just as the September 11, 2001, attacks drew all the firepower of Anglo-American intelligence and security machinery into the war on terror. Security-service officials at MI5 and counterterrorism detectives at Scotland Yard tasked with tracking organized crime groups and monitoring the subversive activities of foreign states were yanked off the job and redeployed in the fight against jihadist extremism while foreign intelligence chiefs at MI6 downsized the Russia desk and poured the lion’s share of their resources into the Middle East. When Berezovsky and his fellow exiles arrived in Britain, they brought with them extensive organized crime connections and came tailed by teams of Russian spies, turning London into a crucible of Russian secret service and mafia activity just as Britain’s security and intelligence establishment had taken its eye off the ball.

The few officials who did remain dedicated to monitoring Russian threats in Britain faced a Sisyphean challenge. Russia’s criminal networks are so deeply entangled with its state security apparatus, and Berezovsky and his associates were themselves so extensively connected to organized crime, that when threats were detected it was often impossible to tell whether they emanated from the government, the mafia, or both. The FSB would frequently enlist organized crime hoodlums to carry out crude hits on its behalf, while powerful mafia groups could enlist moonlighting state assassins to conduct more refined killings if required. And when the state was involved in a murder, the sophistication of its methods was often way beyond the ken of Scotland Yard, let alone the rural police forces that often picked up the job when rich Russians dropped dead in the home counties. FSB assassins were expert at disguising murders as accidents or suicides—even using drugs and psychological tactics to drive their targets into taking their own lives—and the state’s weapons labs had developed an arsenal of undetectable poisons designed to make a murder look like a natural death. Even if Britain’s spy agencies had strong intelligence pointing to an assassination, it was often impossible to share classified material with a court or a coroner without blowing the cover of sources and revealing highly sensitive methods. In such instances, it was easier to pronounce a death unsuspicious than to stoke diplomatic tension and public alarm over an accusation of political assassination that would be unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny.

As Russia’s activities in the wider world grew more blatantly hostile, the British authorities had a new consideration to add to the calculus. Fear. The government’s security advisers began cautioning that the Kremlin could inflict massive harm on Britain by unleashing cyberattacks, destabilizing the economy, or mobilizing elements of Britain’s large Russian population to cause disruption. Deep police funding cuts following the financial crisis of 2008 had weakened the UK’s law enforcement capabilities, and a decade of focus on jihadist terror had withered the institutional expertise on Russia within the security and intelligence services, leaving the nation exposed and vulnerable. Defense chiefs warned that Putin’s modernized military far outstripped the diminished capabilities of the austerity-ravaged British armed forces, and there were concerns that Russia could be creeping toward a full-scale conflict with the West as its actions became more overtly hostile. Suddenly, the specter of general war with Russia was being discussed in the corridors of Whitehall. If it came, the mandarins agreed, it could happen very rapidly—and Britain would be unprepared. This was no longer just about business. There were genuine existential threats to consider when the government calculated its response to Russian operations on its soil.

Putin had been flexing his muscles more boldly since the murder of Litvinenko. He set his weapons modernization plans in motion within weeks of the killing, quickly followed by a wave of crippling cyberattacks on Estonia, and embarked upon his first foreign military adventure with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Cyberattacks on Germany, France, and the United States were to come, accompanied by Russia’s increasingly overt financing and support for far-right and separatist groups across Europe. But as the aggressions grew more audacious, the British government found itself stuck between its more hawkish American ally and European partners who remained heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas and who had no appetite for a fight. The invasion of eastern Ukraine was the tipping point.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March of 2014 marked the end of any serious hope that Putin could be coaxed into the liberal fold. Russia was suspended from the G8, the NATO countries ceased all political and military cooperation with Moscow, and the United States and European Union imposed scorching sanctions that, coupled with the slump in global oil prices, threatened to cripple the Russian economy. Undeterred, Putin pressed on with his latest adventure, sending tanks and heavy weapons over the border into the turbulent Donetsk and Luhansk regions and sparking a full-blown armed conflict with the Ukrainian government. Further waves of sanctions followed. Then pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and fifteen crew members on board—and only then did the British government finally relent and announce a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

Even after that, the UK authorities continued to suppress evidence of the full scale of Russia’s killing campaign on British soil. It would take an indiscriminate chemical weapons attack on the streets of Britain to force the government to confront the menace it had long ignored.

By the time Sergei and Yulia Skripal collapsed in Salisbury, the West had finally woken up to the severity of the Russian threat. The attack came hot on the heels of a series of jaw-dropping moves by the Kremlin: brazen meddling in the US election in favor of Donald Trump; interference in democracies across Europe with state-sponsored hacking, internet trolling, and financing for extremist groups; an attempted coup in Montenegro; increasingly malignant cyberattacks on Western governments; and a military intervention in support of the Syrian regime as it unleashed wave after wave of chemical weapons attacks on its own people. Russia’s activities amounted to an all-out asymmetric war of subversion, using the full spectrum of state powers to disrupt and destabilize its Western enemies.

At the same time, Britain’s intelligence agencies were facing scrutiny from their US counterparts over their failure to get to grips with the escalating spate of Russian assassinations in the UK. US intelligence officials had been watching the pattern of deaths from across the Atlantic with mounting alarm, concerned that it could spread to American shores. They had for years been sharing intelligence with MI6 connecting the deaths of the men in Berezovsky’s circle and others to Russia and had looked on with consternation as every case was shut down by the authorities without investigation. Fears that Britain’s quiet complicity could be emboldening Putin to ramp up his killing campaign had intensified in 2015, following the strange death in Washington, DC, of Mikhail Lesin, a onetime Kremlin henchman who was preparing to start talking to the US Department of Justice. Relations between senior Russia officials at MI6 and their CIA counterparts were becoming increasingly strained.

Then in 2017, the summer before Skripal’s collapse, a team of investigative journalists at BuzzFeed News published a series of stories laying bare the pattern of Russian assassinations on British soil––and exposing the government’s attempts to suppress the evidence.

When Russia struck again, the prime minister no longer had any option but to take a stand. But the tough rhetoric and waves of diplomatic expulsions that followed the nerve-agent attack on the Skripals did not perturb a gleeful Putin as he careered toward reelection. Just hours after Theresa May accused Russia of a state-sponsored assassination attempt on British soil, the body of another Kremlin enemy was discovered. Nikolai Glushkov was a close friend and business associate of Berezovsky’s and an avowed foe of Putin. He was found at his home on the London outskirts, strangled with a dog leash. Counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard quickly took command of the investigation, but the killer had not left a trace.

Meanwhile, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were making a miraculous recovery. That was thanks to the expertise of the scientists at Porton Down and the state-of-the-art treatments they had developed for nerve-agent poisoning. Detective Sergeant Bailey, the off-duty doctor and nurse, and the children from the green were all discharged from the hospital, and when they were well enough, the Skripals were moved to a secure location to complete their recovery. A multimillion-pound military cleanup operation was under way in nine Salisbury locations that had been contaminated with the nerve agent, and it seemed for a while that the British authorities might have contained the crisis without any lives being lost. Then, four months after the initial attack, news broke that two more people in Salisbury had been hospitalized with symptoms of Novichok poisoning.

Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were a couple in their midforties who had fallen on hard times. On a balmy summer day at the end of June, Rowley had found what he thought would make an elegant gift for his girlfriend while out rifling through local trash cans and dumpsters: a gold Nina Ricci perfume box containing a small bottle with a long nozzle attached to the lid. He took it home and gave it to Sturgess, who sprayed it on both wrists.

The bottle did not contain perfume. It was the vessel that had been used by Russia’s assassins to transport their Novichok to Salisbury, and Sturgess had doused herself with ten times the amount of nerve agent used on the Skripals. She died in the hospital just over a week later. Some of the Novichok had splashed onto Rowley’s hands, but he narrowly pulled through and woke from his coma two days after his girlfriend had died. There were no pallbearers at Sturgess’s funeral. The government’s public-health watchdog had put special measures in place to protect the mourners from contamination.

Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command had deployed its finest officers to hunt the state agents who had deployed the Novichok, but for six months there was no sign that their inquiry had turned up any leads. Then, on September 5, the country’s premier police force announced two men were being charged with the attempted assassination of the Skripals. They were identified as two serving members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who had entered Britain under false names. Police released photos of both men along with CCTV stills of the grinning assassins arriving at Gatwick Airport, traveling to a shabby hotel in East London, and carrying out a reconnaissance mission to Salisbury before returning to the city on March 4 to deploy the nerve agent.

A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the fruits of the British investigation as a “big fake.” Then Putin announced that Scotland Yard’s two suspects had been found living innocently in Russia, declaring that they were “civilians” and would be coming forward shortly to tell their story. The two men appeared in an interview aired by the Russian propaganda network RT the following day, claiming they were tourists who had visited Salisbury simply to admire its cathedral.

Later that month, the investigative website Bellingcat identified one of the suspects as a GRU veteran named Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga, who had served in Chechnya and Ukraine and had been personally decorated with the nation’s highest honor by Vladimir Putin. Soon after, the site identified the second man as a GRU doctor named Alexander Mishkin.

The Kremlin dismissed the reports just as Britain’s intelligence agencies confirmed them. In a speech the following month, Putin denounced Skripal as a “traitor” and a “scumbag” before angrily denying GRU involvement in the events in Salisbury.

In the corridors of Whitehall and the riverside headquarters of the security and intelligence services, officials were asking themselves how it had come to this. The propensity of Russia’s enemies for dying strange and sudden deaths in Britain had long been regarded with a degree of indifference. If you were a Russian robber baron who got rich on the spoils of the fallen Soviet state or a dirty financier who helped launder an ill-gotten fortune in the West, and if you met a sticky end—well, then, maybe you got what you paid for. Even after the West began to wake up to the menace of the man in the Kremlin, the deaths were seen as individual cases unworthy of much consideration by officials playing catch-up from years of inattention and struggling to get to grips with bigger issues like Russia’s new nuclear capabilities and its troop movements in Ukraine. But now that hundreds of British citizens had been exposed to a nerve agent, and there was no sign of remorse from the Kremlin, it was hard to deny that Putin’s killing campaign had been allowed to spin out of control. How could he be stopped?

Vladimir Putin’s covert war was, finally, in the spotlight. But for all their flustered protestations, Britain’s leaders could not claim with any sincerity to be surprised. They knew they had turned away as Russia’s assassins stalked the streets. They knew they had stood by as Putin’s enemies and their British fixers died.

This is the story of the men who lived and died in the Kremlin’s crosshairs on British soil—and the secrets, buried with them, that successive governments never wanted to be told.

Part One

Two Worlds Collide

i

London—1992

The flamboyant young lawyer always made it his business to get a seat up front on the Concorde flight from New York to London. The first three rows of the supersonic jet were reserved for the most significant people on the plane, and he liked to number among them. He’d sat next to Jackie Onassis on one occasion, and another time his neighbor was Eric Clapton, so he always watched the other passengers boarding with a frisson of anticipation, eager to spot which notable might be joining him next.

The young couple who settled across the aisle in seats 1B and 1C captivated him instantly. It was a crisp autumn day, and the man, who didn’t look much older than thirty, was sporting an Armani couture coat with a magisterial brown fur collar. He was tall, tanned, and athletic, with designer stubble and a cloud of dark curls framing an appealingly open face. His slight female companion had pointed features, with waves of blonde hair tumbling over the shoulders of a soft leather jacket, and a newborn baby asleep in her arms. The lawyer thought them fabulous—and clearly very much in love. They must come from very important families, he hypothesized, since British Airways had seen fit to discriminate in their favor by placing them in row 1.

Not until the jet was soaring over the Atlantic did the tall man lean across the aisle and proffer his hand to the lawyer. “Scot Young,” he said with an unexpected Scottish lilt. “Should I know you?”

The lawyer was pleased at the opportunity this question afforded. He’d been enjoying a lot of publicity lately for his work on behalf of superrich and famous clients.

“You might,” he said cheerily, shaking Young’s hand. “I’ve been on the television recently. I’m a lawyer.”

Young’s smile broadened. His fiancée, Michelle, was busy breast-feeding their baby daughter, Scarlet, and he was bored. The family had been holidaying at the ultraluxe Sandy Lane resort, in Barbados, and had flown back via New York to do a bit of shopping en route. Young let it be known, with a confidential air, that he had paid for the entire trip—flights, five-star hotels, designer acquisitions, and all—in cash. That was a revelation that piqued the lawyer’s interest. Perhaps it explained their presence at the front of the plane, he thought. But Concorde tickets cost about eight thousand pounds each for a round trip. What sort of people paid for them in cash?

The two men passed the rest of the flight chatting pleasantly, and when they had landed at Heathrow and the bridge was being attached, Young asked for the lawyer’s card.

“I’ve got a little tax issue I’d like to talk to you about,” he explained as they stood and stretched their legs.

A fortnight later, Young strode into the lawyer’s central London office and closed the door.

“I’ve been robbing banks all over Europe,” he said matter-of-factly. “And every time I try to spend my money in the UK, the tax man wants to know where it came from.”

This struck the lawyer as an unusual predicament. Most of the criminal clients he had so far acquired—a group he referred to affectionately as “my crims”—tended to confine their activities to the UK. Young, it appeared, was a man of more international ambitions; an altogether more interesting class of crook. He assured his new client that he could help straighten things out. But first he would need to know more.

Young was a man who seemed to have been born in a hurry. Ever since he could remember, he’d wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the tumbledown tenement block where he grew up in the gritty Scottish port city of Dundee. He had dropped out of school early and started dealing drugs in the pubs and clubs of his home city before making his way to Edinburgh to ply his trade on a grander scale in the smoky cellar bars of the Scottish capital. What Young lacked in formal education he made up for in charm, eloquence, and cunning. He could talk almost anyone into anything, and his great gift was the art of making a deal. It was this talent that would eventually set him on the path to becoming a self-styled “superfixer” for some of the world’s richest and most politically exposed men. But first he needed to make it big on his own.

From his earliest days in Dundee, Young had an irrepressible habit of making dangerous associations. His first mentor was a gun-toting casino king named Alex Brown, who wasn’t afraid to settle a pub brawl with a shotgun and whose venues had a strange tendency to burn down in unexplained fires. Brown would eventually be found dead, floating facedown next to his luxury yacht in a Spanish marina, but that was long after Young had made enough money to leave Scotland for the brighter lights and bigger deals that London had to offer. And when he got to the capital, the young hustler set about forming an altogether more treacherous alliance.

Patsy Adams was one of three brothers who ran Britain’s most feared organized crime gang, and he was famed as one of the most violent figures in London’s underworld. The Adams family, or the A-Team, as they liked to be known, had amassed a fortune worth hundreds of millions of pounds through their profuse crimes. Patsy was the family’s enforcer: high-speed motorcycle shootings were his hallmark, and Scotland Yard had linked him to as many as twenty-five gangland hits. Young wangled an introduction to the gang boss when he got to London and worked hard to win his trust. He soon started working for the family—and that was when the cash really started flowing.

The A-Team distinguished themselves from Britain’s lesser crime gangs not only by their propensity for extreme violence but also by their international outlook. Scotland Yard had tracked the family’s connections with both the Colombian drug cartels and the powerful Russian mafia groups shipping their heroin and cocaine into St. Petersburg. The brothers were suspected of doing a brisk business trafficking those narcotics into Europe, on top of their healthy trade in racketeering, extortion, bribery, sex trafficking, money laundering, smuggling, fraud, gun running, theft—and armed robbery.

Young didn’t mention his association with Patsy Adams to the lawyer. But he did explain that he had teamed up with a crew of armed robbers who had made millions hitting banks across Europe. Most of the loot was stashed in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein or in suitcases filled with more cash than they knew what to do with. But every time Young tried to splash out in the UK, he got questions from Inland Revenue that he didn’t know how to answer.

The problem had become more pressing since he had fallen in love. He had met Michelle when she was a successful fashion buyer in her early twenties and told her on their first date that he knew she would be the mother of his children. Now that had come true, and she’d agreed to become his wife, too. His fiancée certainly had a taste for the finer things in life, but she had no inkling that he was anything other than a legitimate businessman. He needed to find a way to spend his money in the UK freely so he could lavish her with the kind of luxury they both felt she deserved without arousing suspicion.

It struck the lawyer that there was a touching kind of naive candor about his new client. He wanted to be accepted into the wider community. It was nice, he thought, to see a young couple so much in love and moving up in the world.

He told Young he knew just the man to help get him on the straight and narrow. They needed to talk to a tax barrister.

When the lawyer ushered Young into the senior barrister’s chambers, they were met at the door by an eager clerk.

“This is going to cost you £3,500 an hour” was his greeting. That seemed like an eye-watering sum, but Young was desperate. He nodded, and they were shown through.

The barrister perched behind his desk and listened attentively as Young explained the whole story. When he finished, the barrister nodded, twiddled his thumbs, and asked some supplementary questions while the clock ticked. Then he leaned back in his chair and dispensed his prized advice.

“You should tell the tax man where you got the money,” he said. Young goggled at him. Confessing his crimes to the authorities was not a piece of advice he felt like paying for. But the barrister elaborated. It just so happened, he said, that the schedules of taxable earnings in the Income and Corporation Taxes Act of 1988 did not make any mention of money stolen in bank heists. Technically speaking, that meant Young was not liable to pay a penny on the proceeds of the robberies. Better still, the law protected people from incriminating themselves when making tax declarations—meaning Inland Revenue couldn’t turn him in to the police.

“They don’t want to stop money coming to London,” the younger lawyer chimed in sagely. If Young simply declared that all the cash was stolen, and if he agreed to pay tax on the interest he had earned and any future profits he made by investing it, the authorities would be happy.

To Young’s astonishment, that advice proved correct. He became a regular visitor at the lawyer’s grand Georgian house on the edge of Epping Forest, spinning up the drive in his Porsche each morning for another painstaking day sorting through his tangled finances and getting ready to come clean. After three months, the process was complete. As predicted, Inland Revenue accepted the declaration, and Young suddenly had millions of pounds sitting in his UK bank accounts.

On his final visit, Young pulled up in his Porsche and rang the bell carrying a large polished wooden box. Once inside, he sat on the sofa sipping a cup of tea and passing the time of day while the lawyer eyed the mystery object keenly. Only when he was getting ready to leave did Young hand the gift over.

“I wanted to thank you for what you’ve done for me,” he said with what the lawyer felt was a look of touching sincerity. “Why don’t you open it?”

The lawyer lifted the lid, and his mouth fell open. Inside was a solid-gold Rolex Daytona, brand new and sparkling, with a brown leather strap. Young took the watch from the box and fastened it to the lawyer’s wrist—where it remains to this day. Then he said goodbye and set off into the world a new man.

Oxfordshire, England—1996

From the window of the study overlooking the expansive grounds of Woodperry House, a Porsche could be seen gliding up the long gravel drive. The sleek vehicle purred to a stop outside the golden stone frontage of the eighteenth-century Palladian mansion—named after the Old English “wudu-pyrige,” meaning “the pear-tree near the wood”—and a tall, expensively dressed stranger climbed out. Hearing a knock, the Iranian academic arose from the paper he was finishing inside and made his way to the door, where he was greeted with a wide grin and an outstretched hand.

“Scot Young,” said the man outside. “I was on the way to Heathrow, and my wife said we’ve got to buy that house,” he continued, gesturing at a slender blonde woman waiting in the passenger seat. “If you want to sell it, I’d like to bid.”

Woodperry’s owner, the eminent Oxford University law lecturer Kaveh Moussavi, had not been planning on selling. But there was something strangely compelling about the man on the doorstep, and he found himself agreeing to a meeting in London a few days later to talk terms.

When Moussavi arrived in the plush bar of the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair, Young presented him with a flute of Champagne already poured from a bottle on ice by the table and raised his own for a toast.

“What are we celebrating?” Moussavi asked.

“I’m going to make you a deal you’ll be very happy with,” said Young with a flash of his engaging grin. “I’m going to buy your house in cash.” He pulled out a briefcase from under the table, and Moussavi’s eyes widened as he opened the lid. Inside, stacked to the brim, were rolls of fifty-pound notes.

Four years had passed since Young had reached his entente with the tax authorities, but he had not lost his taste for the thrill of a dangerous deal. He had continued his involvement with the Adams brothers, but he had recently set his sights on even loftier treasures. He and Michelle were now married with two small daughters, Scarlet and Sasha, so he had a whole family to think of. He’d been busy making new associations, and he wasn’t just dealing with the odd million stashed in this Swiss account or that suitcase anymore. The stakes were much higher.

Young said he’d pay £10 million—double what Woodperry would be worth on the open market—if Moussavi was prepared to accept cash. Then they’d declare a sale price of £2 million on paper, keeping the remainder off the books and tax free. Moussavi didn’t like that idea, but he’d come around to the notion of off-loading Woodperry, and he told Young he’d happily accept market value if the money came by bank transfer.

It didn’t take the Oxford academic long to spot that something was amiss once the deal got under way. The first clue came at the Dorchester, when Young pulled £45,000 out of his briefcase to jump-start the sale but asked Moussavi to make out a receipt for £50,000. So he’s obviously accountable to someone, Moussavi thought, and he’s taking a little bit off the top. That alone raised enough questions in his mind for him to task an elite real estate agency with checking out Young’s background. The agent called him back sounding perplexed.

“I’ve looked and looked, and there seems to be nothing there,” he said. “I’ve no idea where his money comes from.”

When Moussavi asked Young directly about his wealth, the Scotsman said he had made his first money in property and invested millions in a chip-and-PIN internet technology company with help from a brilliant Soviet mathematician. Not long after, Young turned up at Woodperry with a beetle-browed stranger who wanted to look around the grounds. The small, suited newcomer spoke in a heavy Russian accent with a hurried air. Was he the Moscow-based benefactor who had helped Young make his big technology investment? Was this the person whose money was really going into the purchase of Woodperry House?

Young was splashing cash in all directions as he prepared to take ownership of the Oxfordshire mansion. Just as claimed, he pumped £2.6 million into an internet chip-and-PIN firm, taking a 50 percent stake alongside the Finnish billionaire and Conservative Party benefactor Poju Zabludowicz, and soon after that began lining up a £2 million investment in another internet venture with the retail tycoon Sir Philip Green. He had, he liked to boast, joined the billionaire’s club. But still, when the property agent chased Young for details of which bank he would be using to pay the asking price for Woodperry, it seemed he was stalling—as if he was having trouble finding a way to marshal the cash. Spooked, Moussavi phoned him and got tough.

“You’ve got twenty-four hours to pay, and then you’re going to forfeit the asset and I’m going to sue you.”

Young was unfazed. “I’m going to deposit cash into the account tomorrow,” he said.

“Do you really mean cash?” Moussavi asked, still somewhat disbelieving.

“Kaveh, I mean cash. Are you sure you don’t want to accept it?” Moussavi said he was sure. He wanted the money aboveboard, by bank transfer, not under the table. Lo and behold, the next day the millions arrived in Moussavi’s account by transfer from Coutts—the queen’s bank.

The Youngs were blissfully happy in their new two-hundred-acre mansion. They enrolled their two daughters at the ultraexclusive Dragon School, in Oxford, alongside the children of a glittering array of celebrities, and Michelle loved being the lady of the manor, overseeing a grand redecoration and marshaling armies of domestic staff to keep the house shipshape. She woke up every morning, looked out the bedroom window at the rolling grounds, and felt amazed that she was mistress of all she saw. When the snow fell in January, she bundled the girls into down-filled jumpsuits, and the family ran outside to tumble around on the marshmallow lawn.

But in the quiet rural community surrounding their stately home, the Youngs were causing a stir. When they hired an upscale local architecture outfit to redevelop Woodperry, the firm’s owner rang Moussavi, an old acquaintance, in a state of consternation.

“Mr. Moussavi, there’s something that smells very bad about these people,” he said. “I’ve seen their furniture! This is clearly new money. Where did they get it from?”

Meanwhile, Michelle was ruffling feathers at the school gates by boasting of her extravagant lifestyle—the exotic holidays and diamonds and twice-weekly dinners at Raymond Blanc’s double-Michelin-starred restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Young wasn’t making things any better by tearing around the country lanes at top speed in his Porsche, often leaving the engine running noisily outside the quiet local pubs. Those who did welcome the wealthy new family into the community on first appearances quickly began to smell a rat on closer inspection. Young’s claim to have been educated at Stowe—one of Britain’s most exclusive boarding schools—was belied by his habit of passing the port the wrong way at dinner.

Moussavi was becoming increasingly suspicious when one day, around a year after the sale of Woodperry went through, he received a knock on the door of his new nearby home from a plainclothes detective. The man was from Special Branch, the national security wing of Scotland Yard, and he wanted to talk about Young. The Yard had suspicions, he said, that the buyer of Woodperry was involved in the laundering of Russian money. Might Moussavi know anything about that?

The academic said he didn’t—though he spilled the beans about Young’s proposal to buy Woodperry off the books in cash—but he privately resolved to find out more. He began making his own inquiries into how Young had really come into his fortune. When he put that question to a mutual acquaintance—a local wheeler-dealer who had become friendly with the new arrivals—his question met with a look of surprise.

“Don’t you know?” the man asked with amusement. “Scot is Boris Berezovsky’s bagman.”

Suddenly the picture got a lot clearer. Moussavi knew all about Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch who had made a vast fortune buying up state assets at rock-bottom prices under the country’s increasingly drunken president, Boris Yeltsin, and had siphoned much of it offshore to buy himself lavish properties and yachts all over Europe. So that’s where all the money came from, Moussavi thought. Young was, in his estimation, just a greedy barrow boy who knew how to bullshit his way in the world, but getting involved with the Russian robber barons was a dangerous business. From then on, Moussavi had a strange premonition about the new man in his mansion. It’s mathematically probable, he thought, that Scot Young will end up dead.

ii

Moscow and St. Petersburg—1994

The Moscow sky was choked with snow as a small, stout tycoon climbed out of his limousine, his black eyes glittering with restless energy. Boris Berezovsky hastened toward the grand prerevolutionary mansion that served as his command center, followed by a phalanx of bodyguards. The godfather of the oligarchs was rarely unhurried, and today was no exception. Berezovsky was expanding his empire.

The building, a restored nineteenth-century merchant’s residence, was set in an exclusive enclave of central Moscow close to the Bolshoy Ustinsky Bridge, over the frozen Moskva River, from which the Kremlin’s domes could be seen blooming brightly against the iron sky. Berezovsky had shut off the road leading to his headquarters by blocking it at both ends, turning it into a private club for Moscow’s emerging business and political elite. Inside, it was smoky and sumptuous, with stuccoed ceilings, grand chandeliers, and ornate Italian furniture arrayed around a bar stocked with the finest wines rubles could buy.

The renowned Soviet mathematician, engineer, and chess obsessive had transformed his fortunes since the fall of the USSR, and now, in his midforties, he could call himself rich for the first time. As soon as the Iron Curtain came down, he seized the moment to start importing German cars and the enterprise exploded as Russia opened up for business. Berezovsky soon became the biggest distributor for the state-owned car manufacturer, Avtovaz, profiting massively by acquiring its Ladas in bulk on consignment and paying for them later, once the money had been devalued by rampant hyperinflation sparked by the sudden removal of Soviet price controls. His company, Logovaz, had made hundreds of millions that way, and it had become the official Russian dealer for Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Chevrolet, and several other prestigious Western marques. Logovaz was among the first big success stories of the new capitalist Russia. But Berezovsky always wanted more.

As he strode through the grand entrance of the Logovaz Club on this biting January morning, the businessman’s prized possession—his hulking mobile telephone—began trilling insistently. The caller was Logovaz’s general director, Yuli Dubov. He was overseeing the company’s latest grand expansion, and he had hit upon a major problem.

The city government of St. Petersburg was refusing to issue the papers confirming that Logovaz owned the site of the new flagship service center it was building for Mercedes in Russia’s second city. Opening without the right documentation would make the center a sitting duck for extortion by the city’s notoriously corrupt officials and marauding criminal gangs, and the date when the German car giant was expecting it to be up and running was fast approaching.

“Our people can’t do anything,” Dubov said, sounding desperate. “And this could really damage our relationship with Stuttgart.”

Berezovsky knew exactly what needed to be done. “You’ll have to go and see Putin,” he said.

Dubov was mystified. “Who the hell is Putin?”

As the limousine swept through the snow-cloaked St. Petersburg streets, past the golden domes of the Kazan Cathedral and the gleaming columns of the Winter Palace, Dubov reflected on what little he knew about the man he was getting ready to meet for lunch. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Berezovsky had explained, was the city’s deputy mayor—an unfailingly loyal but ever more powerful lieutenant to the aging Anatoly Sobchak—and these days he was the one who ran the show.

“He’s a really good person,” Berezovsky had told him. “And he’s really in charge of what’s going on in the city.” Dubov had entertained many politicians in Moscow as Logovaz built its business, and he was in little doubt about how the meeting with Putin would go. He would have to spend hours plying the deputy mayor with delicious food, fabulous wine, and plenty of vodka before they turned to the problem at hand and what it would cost to solve it.

As he strode into the restaurant, brushing the snow from his coat sleeves, Dubov saw two men in gray suits seated in the lounge. They rose as he entered. The smaller man, who introduced himself as Vladimir Vladimirovich, was slight and mousy with a cautious manner to match his sober tie. If you put him next to the wall, Dubov thought, you wouldn’t see the difference. The other man, who was introduced as Putin’s secretary, Igor Sechin, stood to attention at his side with an attaché case in one hand and a large mobile telephone in the other. Dubov thought them an oddly austere pair.

The two men declined a drink and stayed standing. With ten minutes to go until the table was ready, Dubov ventured a few comments about the weather in St. Petersburg, which, he felt it fair to say, was dirty. When those efforts at conversation met with stony silence, and no other topics appeared to be forthcoming, he decided to be done with it and plunge ahead with his request.

Logovaz had already paid for the plot of land where its new Mercedes center would be situated, and the building works were almost complete, he explained. But the city government was withholding the documentation granting the company the formal rights to the site. Could the deputy mayor do anything to help?

“Give me one minute,” said Putin, taking the telephone from Sechin, extending the antenna, and walking smartly to the window.

When he returned, he handed the phone back to Sechin and turned to Dubov. “The documents will be finalized and given to you as soon as you come to the office,” he said, reaching for his coat. “Goodbye.”

“What about lunch?” asked Dubov, taken aback.

“I thought I was coming here for lunch,” said Putin. “But it turned out I came here to resolve some of your business problems. Since I have done that, there is no need to spend time eating and talking.” With that, he and Sechin spun on their heels and stalked out, leaving Dubov staring after them in blank astonishment.

“This is a very strange guy you introduced me to,” he told Berezovsky back at the Logovaz Club in Moscow. What sort of politician declines a free lunch in exchange for a favor?

Berezovsky smiled. “Yes,” he said. “He is very special.”

A few years earlier, when he first began importing cars into St. Petersburg, Berezovsky had approached Putin, then a young functionary in Sobchak’s administration, and offered him a small inducement to help smooth over a few administrative matters. To his astonishment, Putin declined. He was, to Berezovsky’s knowledge, the first Russian official who didn’t take bribes. The experience had made a huge impression, and since then he had made a point of swinging by Putin’s office for a chat whenever he was in St. Petersburg. It was a useful alliance for Berezovsky when he needed to pull strings in Russia’s second city. And the reach of Putin’s influence didn’t seem to stop at city hall.

The punctilious young deputy mayor appeared to hold significant sway over the powerful organized crime groups that terrorized St. Petersburg. The Russian mafia had mushroomed into the vacuum created by the implosion of the Soviet security state, and the car industry was a particularly gangster-infested line of business, with hoodlums using brute force to steal whole consignments of new cars and seize control of lucrative dealerships. That made opening a shiny new Mercedes service center in the heart of St. Petersburg a perilous game. But Putin had sufficient status with the city’s most powerful mafia group—the Tambovskaya Bratva, known as the Tambov gang—to guarantee the security of Berezovsky’s operations as well as help smooth over bureaucratic glitches with the city government.

Berezovsky was sure Putin was special. How else could he have risen up through the corrupt ranks of St. Petersburg officialdom and acquired such standing with the mob without tarnishing his seemingly spotless morals? Why else would he be so helpful without wanting anything in return?

But the fact was that Putin did want something very much indeed, and Berezovsky was uniquely well placed to give it him. It just wasn’t a free lunch or a car or a bundle of money. It was the keys to the Kremlin.

Boris Yeltsin had seen off the Communists and come to power in 1991 promising to propel the Russian people out of the darkness of their totalitarian past into the dawn of a free and prosperous future. His strategy, under the tutelage of the World Bank and other bastions of Western capitalism, was to submit the country’s creaking socialist economy to a radical regimen of capitalist shock therapy involving the sudden withdrawal of price controls and the mass privatization of state assets. That, coupled with a decision to plug the state’s budget deficit by printing reams of rubles, prompted a prolonged period of hyperinflation that wiped out savings and plunged ordinary Russians into abject poverty. But for a fortunate few, the shock to the Soviet system shook loose a windfall of unimaginable riches.

Berezovsky had won favor with the first freely elected president of Russia by bankrolling the publication of his memoir. Notes of a President was a dismal commercial flop when it hit the market, in 1993, but Berezovsky made sure the author was handsomely paid, pleasing the vainglorious Yeltsin sufficiently to gain admittance to his private circle. From there, Berezovsky made a beeline for the president’s influential daughter, Tatiana, lavishing her with gifts and largesse until the pair became fast friends. So it was that he became a central member of what came to be known as the Kremlin Family, the intimate group who counseled Yeltsin as he dismantled the Soviet state apparatus and carved up its assets. The businessman could hardly have profited more abundantly from his coveted place in the president’s court.

Berezovsky had made a fortune out of hyperinflation at Logovaz, and now he planned to use it to buy up as many state assets as he could lay his hands on. The Soviet ban on private business had given rise to some forty-five thousand state-owned enterprises, including the country’s vast oil, gas, and mineral concerns, and they were all coming up for grabs at rock-bottom prices in Yeltsin’s fire sale. Berezovsky had the money and the Kremlin connections required to clean up in the auctions, but there was one more thing he needed to do. There was no way to prosper in the smash-and-grab chaos of post-Soviet Russia without getting into bed with the mob.

Gangsterism in Russia had exploded—left unchecked by the collapse of the Soviet security state, which had the multiplier effect of driving thousands of disbanded KGB officers into a life of organized crime. As the rest of the country emerged blinking from the suffocation of the Soviet system, its mafia groups were way ahead of the game. They boasted many of Russia’s brightest and best businessmen (the Soviets having allowed enterprising citizens no other path to prosperity), decades of commercial experience running the country’s de facto private sector—the black market—and deep political connections from years of supplying luxury goods to the Communist elite. So they swooped as soon as the auctions began, buying up swaths of Russia’s energy, mineral, telecom, and transport sectors. And capitalism opened up another major revenue stream: anyone who dared to do private business in Russia without paying the mob for krysha—protection, or, literally, “roof”—was intimidated, run out of town, or murdered. Not for nothing did Yeltsin call his country “the biggest mafia state in the world” in 1994, warning of “the superpower of crime that is devouring the state from top to bottom.” The mob had taken over—and if Berezovsky intended to survive in the hurly-burly new world of Russian business, he needed to find his way into the fold.

That was where Badri Patarkatsishvili came into the picture. The mustachioed Georgian businessman was a well-connected figure in the post-Soviet underworld, with powerful allies in the Moscow mafia and deep ties to criminal elements within the state security apparatus. He held a senior position with the state car maker in the Georgian capital until Berezovsky recognized the value of his criminal pedigree and poached him to become deputy director of Logovaz in Moscow. Patarkatsishvili’s most prized connection was with the Georgian mafia boss and champion wrestler Otari Kvantrishvili, among the most powerful organized crime kingpins operating out of Moscow in the 1990s. Kvantrishvili had become something of a figurehead for the mob in the early days of mass privatization, befriending key politicians and settling disputes between rival criminal factions vying for the most sought-after assets coming up for sale. Patarkatsishvili arrived in the capital at the end of 1993, just in time to get intimately connected in the Moscow underworld before Kvantrishvili was shot dead by a sniper while walking through a parking lot.

With Patarkatsishvili on board, Berezovsky had the unholy trinity of key connections required to get rich and stay alive in post-Soviet Russia: the mafia, the Kremlin, and the security service. He had also, it turned out, met his soul mate. Boris and Badri, as the soon-to-be inseparable pair were always known, made instant sense as a partnership. Berezovsky was a man of extreme tastes and tempers—irresistibly magnetic, fantastically persuasive, and hopelessly impractical. Patarkatsishvili was the polar opposite, with his twirling white mustache and fondness for fur hats. His avuncular outward appearance concealed a ruthless inner steel, and he always got the job done. It was like two halves of a whole had come together: Berezovsky brought the ideas; Patarkatsishvili put them into practice. An extraordinary business partnership had been born.

Boris and Badri went on to acquire an astonishing array of state assets at a fraction of their true value in Yeltsin’s privatization auctions, making them multibillionaires almost instantaneously. They began by parlaying Logovaz’s lucrative dealership contract with Avtovaz into a controlling stake in the state-owned car manufacturer before acquiring major interests in the national airline, Aeroflot, several big banks, and much of the country’s aluminum industry. The jewel in the crown came when they teamed up to help another budding oligarch, Roman Abramovich, buy the country’s largest oil company, Sibneft, for $100 million—a drop in the bucket of the billions it was really worth.

Having thus enriched themselves, Boris and Badri saw another opportunity to expand their power—by buying up the mass-media companies that were flourishing in the sudden absence of state censorship. Their media interests—including the national newspaper Kommersant and Russia’s leading television station, Channel One—gave them a portal into 98 percent of Russian households and proved an invaluable political bargaining chip.

By the mid-1990s, the old Soviet mathematician was the undisputed kingpin of a new kleptocracy emerging from the ashes of the Soviet state. But with that kind of power, inexorably, came great peril.

The early evening sun slanted under the overhanging eaves of the Logovaz Club, where Berezovsky’s silver Mercedes 600 limousine was purring in readiness for his departure. The oligarch strode briskly from the rear entrance and into the armored vehicle, giving a nod to the bodyguard holding the door open as he slid into the back seat. It was a mild summer evening in 1994, and the streets were still and quiet. But as the chauffeur cleared Berezovsky’s private drive and pulled onto the public road, the serenity was splintered by a massive explosion that blew the Mercedes skyward, ripping through the bulletproof door and pelting Berezovsky’s face with shards of metal and glass. When the smoke cleared, he saw the headless body in front: his chauffeur had been decapitated. Clambering out of the smoldering wreckage, Berezovsky found the street strewn with the bodies of half a dozen badly wounded pedestrians and the blackened remnants of a blue Opel that had been parked by the curb. The car had been packed with half a kilo of explosives, ready to detonate by remote control as soon as he drove by.

Berezovsky spent several weeks recovering from his burns and facial lacerations at a clinic in Switzerland—a home away from home, since this was where he stashed much of the cash he was siphoning off from the companies he’d bought from the state. When he returned to Moscow, he was called to a meeting with the young state security officer who had been put in charge of investigating the blast. His name was Alexander Litvinenko.

The meticulous young official had visited the site of the explosion, spoken to witnesses, and delved through countless intelligence files tracking the activities of Russia’s organized crime networks, but he had been unable to identify who had ordered the hit on Berezovsky. The only real lead was that Logovaz had recently become embroiled in a loan dispute with a bank controlled by a Moscow mobster named Sergei Timofeev—known across the city as Sylvester, thanks to a passing resemblance to Sylvester Stallone—though Berezovsky was tight-lipped on that subject. Litvinenko was coming up against a brick wall, but there was one thing he could be sure of: the attack on Berezovsky would be considered a shot across the bows of the oligarch’s protectors in the Moscow mafia. If they identified the culprit, retaliation was sure to follow.

Four months after the car bomb outside the Logovaz Club, police found another burned-out vehicle in central Moscow. The smart sedan had been decimated by a bomb attached to the underside of the chassis, and inside was a badly mangled body. It belonged to Sylvester.

Litvinenko never established for sure who was behind the attack on Berezovsky. Nor was Sylvester’s murder ever solved, although rumors swirled in the Moscow underworld that he had faked his own death and skipped the country. But Berezovsky was taken with the conscientious young officer, with his keen blue eyes, boyishly short-cropped sandy hair, and exact manner. The pair exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to stay in touch.

Litvinenko was an anomaly among Russia’s state security officials. He was an idealist, a teetotaler, and a stickler for law and order—all rare qualities in post-Soviet Moscow. He’d cut his teeth in the chaotic final days of the KGB in his early twenties, and after the old state security apparatus was dismantled, in 1991, he’d won his dream job as a major in the organized crime unit of the FSB.

Underneath his orderly exterior Litvinenko was a live wire, prone to fits of great excitement and passion, but his training at the KGB’s academy had taught him to direct that energy with pinpoint precision. He was fanatical about record keeping, maintaining an immaculate notebook that he loved to show off to fellow detectives, and neatly filing every document he gathered as he investigated the messy business of the Russian mob.

Work had always been Litvinenko’s first love, but recently he’d found another grand passion worthy of his high-octane energy. His new fiancée, Marina, was a hypnotically elegant ballroom dancer with smoky blue eyes and high Slavic cheekbones, and he’d pursued her with all his boyish vigor after they met at a friend’s apartment, turning up unannounced with gifts of flowers and bunches of bananas, her favorite fruit. After a dizzying romance, she had just given birth to their son, Anatoly, and now the couple were getting ready to marry. But just as life at home was settling perfectly into place, all his security in the job he loved started suddenly to unravel.

Litvinenko was gathering mountains of explosive dirt on the activities of Russia’s biggest mobsters as he eavesdropped on their phone calls, recruited informants from within their closest circles, and studied their connections with politicians and officials. And as he delved into the activities of one particularly powerful criminal network, he made a series of disturbing discoveries that shook his faith in the new Russia.

Litvinenko had unearthed evidence that the Tambov gang was working in cahoots with state security officials to smuggle heroin into the St. Petersburg seaport and onward to western Europe, operating under the protection of powerful figures within the city administration. As he dug deeper, one name kept coming up: Vladimir Putin.

Putin was a KGB man in his blood and bones. He had dreamed of joining the Committee for State Security since he was a little boy hooked on the Soviet spy series The Shield and the Sword, and he got a place at the KGB academy in his hometown of Leningrad (the Communist name for St. Petersburg) as soon as he could, in 1975. After graduating, his first job was to spy on foreign diplomats in the city before he was posted to Dresden, East Germany, to work undercover as a translator. It wasn’t a particularly glittering start to the career of a lifelong KGB groupie. Dresden was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain: the real cloak-and-dagger adventure was happening over the wall, in the West, where agents could move invisibly among the enemy. Putin had hoped his spell in the East was just a precursor to greater things—but then disaster struck. When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, he was sent packing back to Leningrad, to a dull post grooming new recruits at the state university. From there, he watched with horror as the entire Soviet state disintegrated around him and his beloved KGB was destroyed.

As the ramparts crumbled and Russia lurched toward its capitalist destiny, KGB officers were encouraged by their superiors to forge links with the mafia. The mob understood global market forces better than anyone, and it was clear that the criminal kingpins would rank among the real rulers of the reformed Russia, so the KGB moved to align itself with the new seat of power. The evidence Litvinenko was unearthing* suggested that Putin and a Leningrad KGB colleague called Viktor Ivanov had obeyed that diktat—by going into business with the Tambov gang.

Ivanov was a dashing young officer with an insouciant eye who boasted a more swashbuckling KGB career than Putin did, having served two years in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War. Litvinenko’s information suggested that in the dying days of the KGB, Ivanov had forged close ties with the leader of the Tambov gang—Vladimir Kumarin—and he had brought Putin into the action. The Tambovs were locked in a bloody turf war for control of the St. Petersburg seaport with the rival Malyshev gang, and it seemed Ivanov had sided with Kumarin, marshaling the resources of the KGB to help him drive out the enemy and consolidate the Tambovs’ control of the city. From then on, according to Litvinenko’s evidence, Ivanov became a key lieutenant of Kumarin, assisting him with his operations smuggling heroin into the port as well as bolstering the gang’s other lucrative lines of business: arms smuggling, human trafficking, racketeering, extortion, and contract killings. Putin, meanwhile, appeared to have been enlisted to help whitewash the profits: he was on the advisory board of a sham real estate company called SPAG, which seemed to have been set up by Kumarin to launder Colombian drug money.

When the KGB fell, in 1991, Putin and Ivanov appeared to have taken their Tambov connections with them. Ivanov went to work for its immediate successor, the FSK, and the evidence suggested he had continued to use the state’s resources to help Kumarin flood St. Petersburg with narcotics. Putin, meanwhile, had won himself a place in the mayor’s administration and it looked like he was using his new role in the city government to protect Ivanov and Kumarin from official scrutiny. Litvinenko was sure he had hit on something big, and he intended to keep digging. The young officer had no idea how deadly his discovery would one day prove to be.

Mayor Sobchak had warmed instantly to the sober, diligent new functionary at city hall, who kept his head down and let his boss shine. Putin’s fluency in German was a boon as St. Petersburg opened up to the world along with the rest of the country, and he was soon made the head of the mayor’s committee for external relations in charge of attracting foreign investment.

St. Petersburg was by then in the grip of a crippling food shortage caused by hyperinflation—and Putin soon found that out of every crisis comes opportunity. The local government had been granted federal permits to export oil, timber, and metals to be bartered abroad in exchange for meat, fruit, and sugar for the hungry population, and it was his job to distribute export licenses to local companies. Raw materials worth $100 million were shipped out of the city under his watch—but, oddly enough, the companies to which he awarded the permits all shut down right after the cargo set sail. That left no one to hold accountable when the goods disappeared and no food ever arrived in return.

The export imbroglio caught the attention of Marina Salye, a redoubtable city council deputy who had made it her business to root out corruption in St. Petersburg. When the food failed to arrive, she opened an investigation. Salye suspected that Putin and his cronies had pocketed the goods for themselves while the people of the city starved, and her inquiry led to a city council vote recommending that prosecutors investigate him for embezzlement. But Putin angrily denied any wrongdoing, blaming the failure on the now-defunct companies, and he would never be prosecuted, because Sobchak stood in the way.

The mayor had shot to power on the back of stinging attacks on the authoritarianism of the old Communist regime, but he had quickly come to curse the new democratic mechanisms that replaced the Soviet system. There were four hundred freshly elected representatives in city hall following St. Petersburg’s first free elections, and Sobchak found himself hog-tied as the rookie legislators pulled all the levers of their new powers at once. They went to war over even the most basic decisions and reveled in their new right to challenge Sobchak’s every move in court.

Putin had seen his boss buffeted by the turbulent city council, and now he felt the sting of parliamentary scrutiny himself. Democracy, he learned, just gets in the way. But capitalism was an entirely different story. The market made anything possible. By the time he became deputy mayor, Putin had become a neat fusion of old Russia and new: hybridizing the authoritarian tendencies of his Soviet security training with an appreciation for the market and a kleptocrat’s taste for a criminal scheme. And as his influence in St. Petersburg expanded, his ambitions grew. So when Boris Berezovsky came knocking, Putin saw the path to real power opening up before him.

*Much of the evidence Litvinenko gathered about the Tambovskaya Bratva was later disclosed to the Litvinenko Inquiry and published at litvinenkoinquiry.org. Both Putin and Ivanov have always denied any connection to organized crime.

iii

Davos, Switzerland, 1996

The windows of the opulent Swiss salon gave a warm glow onto the snowy streets of the ski resort where the global elite were gathering for the world’s most exclusive summit. Inside, Boris Berezovsky was in full rhetorical flight, hunched forward as he made his impassioned case to a small but powerful audience. It was January of 1996, and on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, the future of Russia was once again being decided by a cabal of megarich men.

Boris Yeltsin was preparing to stand for reelection at the end of his first term, and he was already careening drunkenly toward a humiliating defeat. The national misery caused by his economic shock therapy program, coupled with his increasingly shambolic public appearances, had made the president a figure of contempt among ordinary Russians, and his approval ratings were bumping along below 10 percent. To Berezovsky’s deepening alarm, the Communists had swept the board in the parliamentary elections the previous month and established a commanding lead in the early presidential polls. Berezovsky knew what would happen if the Reds retook the Kremlin: the oligarchs would be destroyed. The former state assets they had accumulated would be confiscated, their wealth would be clawed back, and spells in Siberian prison would be all they had to look forward to. The full horror hit home when the Communist Party leader arrived at Davos to be greeted by a succession of world leaders and the international media as the future president of Russia. Berezovsky was not about to stand idly by and let Russia backslide. He simply had too much at stake.

The godfather had gathered his fellow oligarchs on the sidelines of the Davos summit to propose a plan to save the motherland. The men around the table must ensure Yeltsin’s reelection at all costs—and when the battle was won, they would make the president pay. Berezovsky’s persuasive powers did not fail him, and the group formed a secret pact to pump tens of millions into a war chest devoted to defeating the Communist threat. Altogether, the “big seven” oligarchs controlled around 50 percent of Russia’s wealth and all its mass-media outlets: they would use the money, as well as their TV stations and newspapers, to wage an all-out information war on Yeltsin’s behalf. Russian electoral rules forbade campaign spending of more than $3 million per candidate—but when had the robber barons ever let a little matter like the law stand in their way?

Back in Moscow, Berezovsky poured the Davos fighting fund into a slick Western-style election campaign, complete with rock concerts, celebrity endorsements, and glossy advertising, and dedicated the airwaves of Channel One and the column inches of Kommersant to coverage vaunting Yeltsin and painting the Communist Party as blood-crazed Stalinists. The plan worked. Yeltsin climbed steadily back from oblivion in the polls, and when the election came around that summer, he won. But the backing of the oligarchs did not come cheap.

In exchange for the money they had put into Yeltsin’s reelection, the big seven acquired controlling stakes in yet more of the prized assets still under state control. As soon as Yeltsin was safely back in the Kremlin, the assets were put up for sale in rigged auctions, a move that cemented the hatred of the Russian people toward the band of kleptocrats now all but ruling the country. In 1997, the year after what became known as the Davos Pact and the windfall that followed, Forbes magazine named Berezovsky the world’s ninth-richest entrepreneur, with a personal fortune of $3 billion. And the rewards he reaped for shoring up Yeltsin’s second term were not purely financial.

The godfather wielded ever more influence after the election. Yeltsin gifted him a prized job as deputy director of the Kremlin’s national security council and made him Russia’s point man in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Berezovsky reveled in his new roles, which afforded him all the limelight he could wish for and plentiful chances for further self-enrichment.

But Yeltsin’s health was failing fast, and his increasingly drink-sodden public appearances were making Russia a laughingstock on the world stage. Berezovsky and his fellow oligarchs knew it was time to find a successor. What they needed was a man they could manipulate—a gray, malleable functionary who would stay loyal and run Russia like a puppet chief executive while they sat above as a controlling board pulling the strings. Berezovsky thought he knew the perfect man for the job—and he had just arrived in Moscow.

Mayor Sobchak had not enjoyed the same luck as Yeltsin did in the 1996 St. Petersburg elections. Without as many rich backers to tilt the ballot in his favor, the mayor had been toppled by a former ally—and that had been just the push Putin needed to leave his hometown behind and set out for the capital. In doing so, he had declined a role in the new mayoral administration, a move that impressed his virtues on Berezovsky still further. Loyalty to one’s patron: that was the quality Yeltsin most fervently desired in his successor. This would make Putin an easy sell.

What the president feared most, after nearly a decade of looting, was prosecution. He knew he and his close circle had become hated figures among the population they had cheated, so he needed to find a candidate who could be trusted to forgo the easy populist points to be gained by going after the old regime.

Putin began spending time with Berezovsky—visiting him at the Logovaz Club, skiing with him in Switzerland, staying at his villa in Spain. He soon secured a junior government job with the oligarch’s help, quickly winning favor through his well-honed appearance of quiet conscientiousness. And then Berezovsky helped smooth his path to a position of real power: in 1997, Putin became the chief of Yeltsin’s presidential staff. He had made it inside the Kremlin.

Moscow—1998

Berezovsky was in the hospital recuperating from a snowmobile accident when his phone began ringing off the hook. The caller was the eager young state security official who had quizzed him about the car bomb four years before. Alexander Litvinenko had since been transferred to a highly secretive department of the FSB—Russia’s newly revamped security agency—and he insisted he needed a private audience with Berezovsky. There was no time to lose: it was urgent.

When the two men met, Litvinenko got straight to the point. He had received orders to kill the oligarch. The new specialist organized crime unit to which Litvinenko had been transferred, the URPO, was so secretive that it was based in an unmarked bunker outside the FSB’s Lubyanka Square headquarters, and orders were given only verbally. Litvinenko had hoped his transfer augured new and exciting cases investigating matters of the utmost sensitivity, but he had quickly come to realize with dismay what the new unit was really all about. The URPO was the FSB’s secret hit squad.

As Yeltsin’s grip on power weakened and the mob tightened its grip, the president had poured more money into the retooled FSB. The new agency was meant to represent a departure from the barbarous old ways of the KGB, but in reality it was staffed by the same men, and there was nothing about the new Russia that they liked. The URPO had been tasked with taking out organized crime kingpins whose activities were considered a threat to the state, but it wasn’t long before its top brass strayed beyond their brief and began using the unit for specialist assignments of a more political nature. That was how Litvinenko and four of his fellow officers had been called into a meeting one morning and ordered to kill Russia’s most influential oligarch.

The bosses at URPO never felt the need to explain their instructions, and Litvinenko had no idea what Berezovsky had done to wind up on the hit list, but there was one thing he did know for certain. Killing a senior Kremlin adviser was an act of madness—not to mention treason. To make matters worse, that order was followed by an equally unthinkable instruction. A well-liked fellow FSB officer named Mikhail Trepashkin had uncovered a network of corrupt officers within the agency, and now the URPO bosses wanted him dead, too. Trepashkin, who had cut his teeth investigating Moscow’s underground trade in stolen art and antiques before being redeployed to probe Chechen mafia groups in Moscow, was a rare comrade after Litvinenko’s own heart: dogged, idealistic, and single-minded in his pursuit of the bad guys. Litvinenko and his team could no more contemplate murdering one of their own than they could countenance committing treason by going after a member of the government. They resolved to blow the whistle on both plots.

At first, Berezovsky refused to believe what he was hearing. He, too, felt sure that his place inside the Kremlin would protect him from the state’s own assassins. But when Litvinenko brought the other officers from his unit to a meeting and they all confirmed the story, Berezovsky was forced to believe the unbelievable. It was time to warn Trepashkin that he, too, was a target. Over the months that followed, the unwilling assassins met secretly with their two targets as they gamed out how to blow the lid off the plot.

Their plan got under way on a cool April night at Berezovsky’s sprawling dacha, in the countryside outside Moscow. Under cover of darkness, Litvinenko and his colleagues gathered to make a comprehensive video record of the orders they had been given. With that evidence safely in the bag, to be released in the event that any of them was arrested or killed after exposing the plot, the whistle-blowers filed a complaint with Russia’s military prosecution service. A top-secret investigation got under way, and while they waited for the results, Berezovsky ran his own interference inside the Kremlin.

The FSB had clearly spun out of control, and it was time for a changing of the guard. In June of 1998, acting on the advice of Berezovsky and other aides, Yeltsin fired the agency’s director and replaced him with a man who could be trusted to do as he was asked. Vladimir Putin’s boyhood dream had come true: he had made it to the top of the Lubyanka HQ.

Berezovsky was thrilled that Putin was in charge. With his protégé at the helm, he would not only be able to foil the assassination plot but also sweep out his enemies from the FSB. He told Litvinenko to visit the new director and tell him everything. Litvinenko was uncomfortable about that instruction: he was still sitting on the evidence he had started to gather a few years earlier charting Putin’s connections with the Tambov gang in St. Petersburg. But the oligarch was having none of it—he had seen the evidence of Putin’s probity for himself, and they could not afford to pass up such a crucial ally—so Litvinenko reluctantly did what he was told.

The director’s office inside the Lubyanka building was as gray and functional as its occupant. Putin put on his best appearance of cordiality as he came out from behind his desk to greet the visitor, but Litvinenko sized up the small man in an instant. He’s doing everything he can to seem open and likable, he thought to himself, but it’s all for show. Still, hewing to Berezovsky’s instructions, Litvinenko sat down and spilled the beans about the goings-on inside the URPO. Putin listened attentively and thanked him for sharing his information. But Litvinenko could not shake the impression that the man behind the desk was eyeing him with cold hatred.

Soon after that meeting, Putin shut down the URPO and redeployed all its officers unceremoniously. Berezovsky claimed it as a vindication, but the truth was the new director hadn’t had much choice, since the order to disband the unit had come directly from the Kremlin. When autumn came and news reached the whistle-blowers that the military prosecution service had thrown out their complaint, Berezovsky did not flinch. Certain they had the backing of the man at the top of the FSB, he declared it was time to go public.

The oligarch used the pages of his newspaper, Kommersant, to publish an open letter to Putin calling on him to root out corruption in the FSB. Then journalists from every paper and TV station in Moscow were called to a press conference to witness the big crescendo. Out walked four men in ski masks and sunglasses alongside a bare-faced Litvinenko to blow the whistle live on television. The broadcast riveted the nation and was beamed around the world, making it a major success in the eyes of Berezovsky. From that day forward, the oligarch never lost his love for the thrill of a dramatic press conference. But watching it up in his Lubyanka office, the new FSB director was seething. The whistle-blowers had betrayed the agency by revealing its secrets and, in the code of honor among spies that Putin cherished, there was no more cardinal sin. Litvinenko and the masked cowards who appeared alongside him must be made to pay, but Putin had to bide his time. He had a distance still to climb before it was safe to let his own mask slip.

Putin had been picked to run the FSB for reasons much bigger than just the plot to kill Berezovsky. The increasingly harried aides to the ill and embattled Yeltsin were looking for a very particular sort of candidate, someone who would protect his boss at all costs, and there was one recent episode in Putin’s history that had convinced them that he was just the man they needed to take care of some unpleasant business.

Back in St. Petersburg the previous year, the old mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, had found himself under investigation for corruption by Russia’s vigorous new prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, and Putin had ridden in to the rescue. In November of 1997, when Sobchak suffered a heart attack while under interrogation, Putin arranged for his former boss to be spirited out of the hospital on a stretcher, past his police guard, and onto a waiting private jet, which whisked him away to Paris. Sobchak was now enjoying a happy exile in la belle France—and those optics were pleasing to the team of advisers worrying about how life after power would look for Yeltsin. Not least because the president and his close circle were having their own spot of bother with Skuratov.

The paunchy prosecutor general was a Communist sympathizer who had publicly declared war on Yeltsin in the aftermath of the 1996 election, vowing to use his role to root out corruption in the Kremlin. He had then mounted an investigation into the president’s administration for taking bribes in exchange for lucrative Kremlin contracts. Yeltsin’s team wanted an FSB chief willing to do whatever it took to get the president out of a corner. So when Putin arrived at the Lubyanka, getting rid of Skuratov was high on his agenda.

It wasn’t just Yeltsin in the frame: Skuratov was going after Berezovsky with equal vigor. On a February morning in 1999, dozens of camouflaged men burst through the doors of the oligarch’s Moscow offices brandishing automatic rifles. They were there on Skuratov’s orders. The problems had arisen after Berezovsky installed a new chief financial officer, Nikolai Glushkov, at Aeroflot three years earlier. Glushkov was a persnickety numbers man who liked to mellow his austere appearance with a jaunty bow tie, and he soon made a dangerous discovery. The state airline had for years been operating as a front for international espionage, Glushkov told Berezovsky. Around three thousand of its staff of fourteen thousand were spies, and proceeds from its ticket sales were being diverted into a vast network of foreign slush funds to bankroll their clandestine operations. Glushkov was not prepared to give the spooks a free ride, so he fired the spies and shut down their slush funds. Then he diverted the money to Swiss companies of which he and Berezovsky were the principal shareholders and wrote to Russia’s spy chiefs telling them to pick up their own tab from now on. Skuratov was now going after Berezovsky and Glushkov on suspicion of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, and the raids on the oligarch’s offices caused a sensation in Moscow. Might the king of the robber barons finally be getting his comeuppance?

Not on Vladimir Putin’s watch.

Days after the raids, the FSB director showed up at a private party for Berezovsky’s wife wielding a huge bunch of roses to make it clear exactly whose side he was on. Then, the following month, the FSB struck against Skuratov. The state-controlled Russian TV channel used its prime-time slot to air grainy footage of a rotund man bearing a striking resemblance to the prosecutor general rolling around in bed with two prostitutes. It was a classic honey-trap operation straight out of the KGB playbook, and in case anyone missed the message, Putin personally held a press conference to tell the world that the man in the video was none other than Skuratov.

The lurid footage forced the prosecutor’s resignation. When the largely Communist parliament rallied to reinstate him, Yeltsin opened a criminal investigation into Skuratov’s use of prostitutes and used it as a pretext to sack him for good.

Yeltsin doubled down on Skuratov’s dismissal by sacking Russia’s prime minister, a potential presidential challenger who had been a staunch ally of the prosecutor general. The threat of prosecution thus averted, the Kremlin Family turned their attention to succession planning. They knew Yeltsin could not go on much longer, so they needed to find a replacement prime minister who had what it took to become president—and sooner rather than later. They did not have to look far. Putin had demonstrated his loyalty, his pliability, and his willingness to play dirty to protect his patrons.

Berezovsky was dispatched to Biarritz, where the FSB director was holidaying with his young family, to make the proposal. On August 9, 1999, the people of Russia woke to the news that not only was Vladimir Putin their new prime minister, he was also Yeltsin’s chosen successor.

Putin had not been in his post for a month when the bombings began. One by one, in early September of 1999, a series of massive explosions in Moscow and two other major Russian cities reduced four apartment buildings to smoldering rubble in the depths of night, blowing residents to shreds as they slept. Firefighters pulled a thousand people free from the ruins with terrible injuries, but almost three hundred were killed. Many of the blackened bodies they found buried in the wreckage were those of children.

The wave of terror attacks, some of the most deadly the world had known until the September 11 attacks in New York, two years later, were quickly blamed on rebels in the breakaway region of Chechnya, spreading fear and alarm throughout the land. And that was exactly what the new prime minister needed to make good the next stage in his ascent.

Putin’s gray-man image had served him well in convincing his various patrons that he was no more than the dour and dutiful stuffed shirt they needed to do their bidding. But what had gotten him this far was the very thing that would hold him back. It was no good just being anointed Yeltsin’s heir by the hated kleptocrats in the Kremlin; he also needed to win over a deeply disillusioned electorate. That meant striking a new and more powerful pose.

The Russian people were in a state of collective identity crisis after the capitalist dream they had been sold gave way to years of poverty and rank inequality. They didn’t miss the drab authoritarianism of the Soviet era, but the orgy of looting and cronyism under Yeltsin had instilled a fundamental distrust of the alternative. All that was left behind was a longing for a lost sense of greatness—a nostalgia for the time when Russia could really call itself a superpower. What they needed in a leader, Putin intuited, was a man of action to satisfy the national yearning for a strong and sure-footed Russia. That was the new posture he needed to pull off, and the apartment bombings provided the perfect opportunity.

In the wake of the attacks, Putin leaped into action, ordering air raids that reduced swaths of the Chechen capital to rubble and triggering the outbreak of a war that killed tens of thousands of civilians. What really stuck in the national consciousness was the television address in which Putin issued a blunt warning to the region’s rebels. “Wherever we find them, we will destroy them,” he vowed. “Even if we find them in the toilet, we will rub them out.” It played perfectly with the people, and Putin’s popularity ratings soared.

But critical observers of the apartment bombings and their aftermath noticed several things about the official picture that looked all wrong. The first sign was a strange declaration by the speaker of the Russian parliament, who announced soon after the third attack that a bomb had destroyed an apartment block in the city of Volgodonsk, a thousand kilometers south of Moscow. The problem was that there hadn’t been an explosion in Volgodonsk—not yet at least. That fourth bomb went off three days after his announcement, killing another seventeen people. Then, the following week, residents of an apartment building in another city spotted men planting explosives in the basement and raised the alarm, sparking a national manhunt by the local police. The issue this time was that, when the cops caught up with the culprits, they turned out to work for the FSB. The agency’s new director had to claim hurriedly that the bomb had only been a dummy and the agents had been involved in a training exercise to test local vigilance. But in some skeptical quarters, that story just didn’t wash.

Litvinenko had by then been fired from the FSB for revealing agency secrets, but he had gone to work as a private security consultant for Berezovsky, and he was still tapping into his old informant networks. Based on the intelligence he was gathering, he was convinced that the bombings were an FSB plot set in motion by Putin before his departure from the agency as an excuse for bombing Chechnya to get a boost in the polls. If that was true, Russia’s new prime minister was not only a gangster but also a monster who had butchered almost three hundred of his own people to get ahead in the election. But Berezovsky would not hear a word of it. He was far too busy clearing his protégé’s path to power.

Just as he had done for Yeltsin, Berezovsky backed Putin by funding the publication of a flattering book. The biography—first published in the pages of Kommersant—was carefully designed to bolster Putin’s strong-man image, while Channel One aired blistering attacks on his rival candidates. The oligarch also created and bankrolled a new pro-Putin political party, Unity, which won big in the December parliamentary elections. And he enlisted the help of Moscow’s premier adman—a fast-living, florid-faced media guru named Mikhail Lesin—to run a slick advertising campaign painting Putin as the powerful president required to lead Russia into the new century.

With Putin surging ahead in the polls, Berezovsky persuaded the sitting president that the time had come to pick up and clear out. On New Year’s Eve in 1999, Yeltsin announced his resignation, making the prime minister acting president, effective immediately. There was a quid pro quo: Putin’s first decree, signed on December 31, 1999, granted the Yeltsin family immunity from prosecution. Having thus delivered his side of the bargain, Putin could fight the upcoming presidential elections from pole position inside the Kremlin.

Putin hardly had to lift a finger. Beyond a well-televised victory lap around the devastated Chechen capital of Grozny, he barely set foot on the campaign trail. The people of Russia were behind him—and the rulers of the West were cheerleading him, too. Britain’s fashionable new Labour prime minister even jetted over to St. Petersburg to meet the presidential hopeful amid much fanfare a fortnight before polling day. Tony Blair caught stinging criticism from human rights groups for feting Putin amid harrowing reports of looting, rape, mass execution, and torture by Russian troops in Chechnya and for shunning all the other candidates before the election was decided. But as the two vigorous young politicians shared an evening at the opera in St. Petersburg, both had their eyes on a glittering prize.

“He was highly intelligent and with a focused view of what he wants to achieve in Russia,” Blair told the BBC afterward with a classic Cheshire cat grin, praising Putin’s desire to modernize the Russian economy and open the country to foreign investment. Putin did his bit, too, promising to welcome British involvement in the development of Russian oil and gas resources. So when Blair caught awkward questions about human rights violations in Chechnya, he leapt to the defense of his new ally. “The Russians have been subjected to really severe terrorist attacks,” he said, referring to the Moscow apartment bombings Putin had blamed on the region’s rebels.

What the public didn’t know was that the prime minister’s night at the opera with Russia’s future president had been carefully orchestrated by the two countries’ spy agencies. The arrangement had arisen when a senior FSB officer approached the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, in London and asked him to help arrange a high-profile meeting between Blair and Putin to burnish the latter’s presidential credentials ahead of the election. After protracted discussions back at the River House, the spy chief had decided this was an “unusual and unique opening” for the UK and urged Downing Street to accept the invitation. Thus Britain had its hand in smoothing Putin’s ascent.

Blair wasn’t the only world leader who was starry-eyed about Russia’s putative president. Bill Clinton had phoned the British prime minister months before polling day to express his own excitement.

“Putin has enormous potential, I think,” the US president opined.* “I think he’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.” There was a faint note of caution—“He could get squishy on democracy”—but overall, Clinton was hopeful that Putin would come to the table with the right coaxing. “His intentions are generally honorable and straightforward,” the US president said. “He just hasn’t made up his mind yet.”

On the contrary, Putin’s mind was very much made up.

Seven days after his official inauguration, in May of 2000, Russia’s new president enacted a raft of new laws all aimed at what he euphemistically called “strengthening vertical power.” He replaced elected members of the upper house of parliament with Kremlin appointees, sent presidential envoys to supervise the running of Russia’s semiautonomous regions, and granted his administration the power to remove local governors on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing. With the regions thus under tighter control, Putin clamped down on other competing power sources. Next in line was the free media.

Putin’s media minister Mikhail Lesin, the adman who had helped secure his victory, led an assault on the independent TV stations, newspapers, and magazines that had proliferated since the fall of the USSR, using all the levers of state power to pressure their owners into ceding control to the Kremlin. Journalists and proprietors were arrested; advertisers were leaned on; offices were raided; trumped-up charges were brought. Lesin, who would go on to found the sprawling international propaganda network Russia Today (RT), so relentlessly rammed independent media outlets back under Kremlin control that he earned himself the nickname the Bulldozer.

And with the media purge well under way, Putin turned his attention to the oligarchs. Berezovsky and his fellow tycoons were summoned to the Kremlin and told that their special privileges were being revoked. While Putin would stop short of reviewing the rigged privatizations, they would no longer enjoy special access to power. In short: they would be allowed to keep their loot, as long as they kept out of politics.

Berezovsky was agog. He had rubbed shoulders purringly at Putin’s inaugural ball, delighting in telling everyone how he had plucked Russia’s new ruler from obscurity. So confident was he in his status as Kremlin chess master that he had gone to the new president soon after to propose an audacious deal. Putin would rule Russia, while Berezovsky would nominally head up the opposition party, thus carving up power between them, shoring up the position of the oligarchs, and making sure the presidency remained effectively unopposed. But Putin had declined that offer with icy disdain, and that was when Berezovsky first began to realize his mistake.

Putin’s creeping authoritarianism had in fact been well in evidence long before his inauguration for anyone with eyes to see it. As the Chechen war raged on, he had used his three months as acting president to reverse some of the more pacific reforms of the post-Soviet era: signing a decree allowing for the use of nuclear weapons in response to major foreign aggression and ramping up spending on the armed forces. And then there were the warning signs that those who knew too much might have exactly that much to fear.

Anatoly Sobchak had returned from his exile in Paris to become a vocal if chaotic supporter of Putin’s election campaign. The old mayor had struggled to stay on message: he appeared to have forgotten his liberal credentials when he hailed Putin as “the new Stalin,” and he was all too fond of reminiscing about episodes from the old days in St. Petersburg that the presidential contender would rather forget. On February 17, 2000, Putin asked Sobchak to travel to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, for a campaign pit stop. Three days later, the old man was found dead in his hotel room. The official postmortem declared that he had died of a massive heart attack—but that didn’t explain why his two bodyguards had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning. The investigative journalist Arkady Vaksberg later published an account suggesting that Sobchak had been eliminated by a toxin smeared on a lightbulb in his hotel room—a classic KGB technique. Soon after, the journalist’s car was blown up in his Moscow garage. He happened not to be inside—but the message had been sent.

As Putin lurched toward autocracy, Berezovsky decided to show his protégé who was boss, using the pages of Kommersant to publish a searing critique of the president’s plans to centralize power. “In a democratic society, laws exist to protect individual freedom,” he lectured in one of his open letters. When Putin ignored that moral lesson and continued his crackdown, Berezovsky’s aides and advisers counseled the furious oligarch to let matters lie.

“You have to think, Boris! Slow down, calm down, think,” one adviser beseeched him over wine and cigars in the Logovaz Club lounge against the tinkling backdrop of the grand piano. “You have access! Work with the guy. You’re very persuasive, you’re cleverer than he is, you put him in that position in the first place—so work with him.” Badri Patarkatsishvili agreed. Why couldn’t Boris just keep his head down for a moment and let things settle? After all, hadn’t Putin said he’d leave the looted assets untouched as long as the oligarchs toed the line? But Berezovsky had developed a thirst for power that overwhelmed even his love of money, and he was incapable of conciliation.

“You son of a bitch,” he would mutter when Putin’s name arose. “I’m going to fight you.”

For his part, the old Logovaz director Yuli Dubov was left scratching his head about that first encounter with Putin over the lunch that never was in St. Petersburg. In retrospect, he came to believe that the appearance of monkish probity had just been Putin’s way of setting himself apart from the crowd.

“He was playing the long game,” Dubov mused. “It was too early for him to begin to enrich himself, so he waited for his moment.” Berezovsky’s fatal flaw, in Dubov’s mind, was an inflated sense of his own importance. He had believed Putin would be incapable of ruling without him, but it turned out that the new president no longer needed him—and neither did anyone else very much. Suddenly Berezovsky found himself quite friendless in Moscow’s corridors of power. But undeterred, he went on the attack again.

In August of 2000, the new president found himself in the throes of his first public scandal after his botched handling of a nuclear submarine disaster left 118 naval officers to sink to their deaths unaided in the bitter waters of the Arctic Ocean. Berezovsky seized the moment, using Channel One to eviscerate Putin for his role in the tragedy.

Berezovsky was sunning himself at his gleaming white villa overlooking the sapphire waters of the Côte d’Azur when a copy of Le Figaro landed on his doorstep carrying a message direct from the Kremlin. Putin had given an interview to the French newspaper declaring that oligarchs who stepped out of line in the new Russia would receive “a crushing blow on the head.” That warning was rapidly followed by a summons for Berezovsky to appear in Moscow for interrogation by the new prosecutor general, who had reopened the Aeroflot embezzlement case that Putin had helped squash two years before. The godfather of the oligarchs was now a wanted man and an enemy of the Kremlin.

One thing was immediately clear to him: while Putin was in power, he could never return to Russia.

*A transcript of this phone call was released by the Clinton Presidential Library in 2016.

iv

Wentworth Estate, Surrey, England, 2001

Scot Young was easing his Porsche up the gravel drive of his magnificent new mansion in Surrey on a breezy summer evening when Michelle came running through the topiary.

“There’s a strange man inside, and I can’t get him out!” she said. “Shall we call the police?”

Young marched through the grand columned entrance to find a small black-eyed man settled comfortably in an armchair.

“Welcome to my home!” the intruder boomed in a thick Russian accent, throwing his arms wide. “How much do you want for it?”

Later, Young liked to tell his friends that this was the first time he had ever laid eyes on Boris Berezovsky. The story appealed to him both because he was a great raconteur who loved to spin a good yarn and because it happened to be more convenient than the truth. Its punch line was that he hadn’t known the man was one of Russia’s richest tycoons, so he told Berezovsky to “fuck off.” But of course Young knew exactly who Berezovsky was.

Years later, private detectives hired to delve into Young’s association with the oligarch would uncover evidence that he had actually met Berezovsky’s people a few years earlier on a trip to Moscow and had been secretly operating as his point man in the UK ever since, helping him stash the money he was siphoning out of Russia in spectacular British properties and investments. Since Berezovsky fled, the previous year, Young had also been visiting Moscow regularly on his behalf, handing out a business card billing himself as a consultant to Channel One. It didn’t take long for the FSB to develop what the spooks called a “long-term interest” in the British businessman. The FSB surveillance team built up a picture of Young as a high-class fixer providing highly confidential assistance to the oligarch and being pampered in return. He had drunk and dined lavishly on Berezovsky’s ticket at Moscow’s exclusive Café Pushkin, Vogue Café, and Vanille—and he liked to end the night at Private Club Bordo, a brothel frequented by the city’s political and business elite.

The Youngs had sold Woodperry House for £13.5 million earlier that year—more than double what Young had paid for it—and in turn had bought the main manor house on the celebrity-studded Wentworth Estate, in Surrey. After many months luxuriating in his vast Italianate villa on Cap d’Antibes, Berezovsky had tired of soaking up the sun and moved to England to start building his new life in earnest. The oligarch was putting down roots as he settled into a long exile—and he had set his heart on his fixer’s home.

Berezovsky produced a case of exquisite red wine from behind the armchair and pulled out a dusty bottle. The two men spent a raucous night demolishing the offering as the Russian regaled Young with rip-roaring tales of the Wild East, and before long Berezovsky’s offer of £20.5 million had been accepted. Young would always tell friends the true price was £50 million, the lion’s share of which had been hidden offshore, but whatever the cost, Berezovsky had made Wentworth Estate his home.

The godfather moved into his new mansion with his wife and young children, displacing the Youngs to another spectacular property across the estate, and with that a new enclave was established. This lush corner of Surrey, with its follies, lakes, and roaming deer, was to become the seat of some of Russia’s richest men as they waged a long-distance war on the Kremlin.

Part Two

The Oligarchs in Exile

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