The Litvinenko Affair | Londongrad Today - Interview with Luke Harding | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. Matt, today we are wrapping up our series about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. What a journey it has been. It's an incredible story with so many different parts to it. At the heart of it is this tragic murder of a defiant and brave individual and the legacy that has for his family and for his friends. There are then these bizarre experiences

daft parts of it. These two clowns that are meant to carry out the murder various times and fail. And...

what those two guys were like. Yeah, it's almost slapstick if it wasn't so devastating. We talked a lot in the series about their night out, their big night on the town. That radioactive towel was one of the botched attempts. The fact that we'll never go to an itsu sushi ever again without thinking about this. So yeah, it's two very different tones. It is. I've also cancelled my Hey Joes membership after this. Quite right. It just doesn't feel good, does it, anymore? It doesn't.

So there are those elements to it as well. And then there's the grand geopolitical elements of this. Vladimir Putin at the heart of it. This murder being carried out potentially with the personal approval of the current leader of Russia. As we said at the beginning of this series, power, corruption, money, poison, spies. It's got the lot. And it leaves massive questions for us now.

about the uncomfortable relationship between the British state and Russia, the things that the British state is perhaps still willing to overlook.

And it therefore begs the question, will this happen again? I don't know if I can answer that for you, Matt, but I know that today's guest will definitely give it a good shot. Luke Harding is a journalist. He was foreign correspondent for The Guardian and was based in Moscow as their bureau chief. He knows many of the story's key players that we've been talking about, including Marina Litvinenko. And he wrote the book A Very Expensive Poison, the definitive story of the murder of Litvinenko and Russia's war with the West. So if not him, then who?

Putin himself? I got a very promising out of office. Imagine that as a serious closer. I'd love to hear his answer phone message. Do you think it's one of those novelty ones? Yeah, for Wondery Plus listeners, we've got a kind of MTV Cribs around Putin's new gaff. Our conversation with Luke Harding is next.

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Luke Harding, welcome to British Scandal. Hello, great to be with you. So we've been discussing Sasha Litvinenko for four weeks, four episodes now. You've spent years, of course, talking about this story. It resonated then and it continues to resonate now. Why do you think...

This story is so compelling. I mean, it's partly the sheer, crazy, almost surreal, dark drama. The fact that two killers sent, we now know, by Vladimir Putin and his spy agencies can jump on a plane, fly to Gatwick Airport,

run around London, try and poison Sasha Litvinenko, fail, regroup, come back, have another go, and leave this kind of billowing trail of radiation. I mean, it's astonishing. It's a story that were you to pitch it to your literary agent as a novel, I think you'd be told that that's just too ludicrous. And it's a kind of reminder that reality is...

is sometimes more strange and more squalid than in Hollywood. So I think it's an astonishing story. It talks about politics, it talks about international relations, and it talks about, I would argue, the kind of extraordinary vendetta that Vladimir Putin has towards people he regards as being traitors to Russia.

In your opinion, what was the ultimate intention with Sasha's murder? To stop him talking as a punishment? You know, an example being made of what happens if you denounce Putin?

I mean, I think all of those things. What you have to remember is that Putin and the people around him are basically, in Russian, they're called sylovaki, which means you could loosely translate that as the power guys, people with a background in Russia's intelligence services, whether it's the KGB or the GRU military intelligence. And they have a kind of certain...

binary view of the world. I mean, they think that Russia is surrounded by hostile enemies, as in Soviet times, by Western countries led by America and the UK, who wish to destroy and do down Russia and to meddle in its internal affairs. Now, this is

This view is what philosophers call a priori. It's just how they see it. And basically, it's quite a nihilistic view of geopolitics and world affairs and indeed human relations where essentially everything can be negotiated. And if things can't be negotiated, then what?

It's a conspiracy. And people who defect to the other side, like Livin Yinka, who go and work for British intelligence or American intelligence, are, in Putin's unflinching view, they are traitors. And traitors deserve...

the ultimate punishment, which again, as in Soviet times, was death. What we've seen over the last two decades is Putin's security services wiping out a whole long list of people whom he regards as being traitors. And he sees himself as synonymous with Russian power, traitors to him, traitors to Russia. So we've seen critics, we've seen journalists,

And we've also seen these astonishing operations abroad where killers are sent to foreign shores, to places like Britain, to rub out hated enemies. This story is devastating and absurd. Two other important characters are, of course, Lugovoy and Kovtun. I'm wondering what happened with them. Could you talk us through the steps beyond their immediate involvement?

Yeah, well, I mean, they were both fascinating, strange individuals. I mean, I met them in Moscow when I was there trying to investigate, among other things, the whole Litvinenko story and to kind of tease out the role of the Russian state in the FSB. And

And they, I mean, they were very different. I mean, they fell out, actually. I mean, Lugovoy was astonishing when I saw him in his office in the kind of Kiev hotel in Moscow. He behaved like an English gentleman. He was wearing an immaculate suit. He had a sort of pink striped shirt, these dandyish cuffs.

He was telling me what an Anglophile he was, that his daughter had studied at a language school in Cambridge. He showed off this glass-fronted cabinet with the collected works of Sherlock Holmes there. And he was a sort of dandy, a curious figure. And it was only when I started asking him what had happened at the Millennium Hotel on the 1st of November 2006 that I realized the man in front of me was...

undoubtedly, I would say, a murderer. We can say that because that was the finding of the public inquiry, identified him as a murderer. And that actually, for all of his superficial charm and for his sort of sleekness, he was a monster. He was a monster in human form. And he told me the same kind of banal story about how

It was all at Livy-Nenko's insistence that he met with him on the 1st of November, that he had nothing to do with the killing, that it had been the work of Brasovsky or MI6, etc. And clearly he was following a script. And what he'd done rather cleverly was to parlay his notoriety into a career, into wealth back in Russia. He'd become a sort of

a sort of celebrity assassin and you know formerly he said he had nothing to do with the murder but this was done with a kind of wink um and he enjoyed the full protection of the russian state you know he became an mp for a far-right party um he was a kind of kremlin talking head he was the successful assassin and koften by contrast was the flop he was the failure um who

had always admired Le Gavoy, they went back together, they had childhoods together, had gone to Germany as a soldier, had defected, had tried to become a successful businessman and instead it ended up

washing dishes in an Italian restaurant in Hamburg, and I discovered, was a failed porn star. Again, I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. Matt has a penchant for this part of the story. Well, you called him a flop. I wasn't sure if that was a reference to his porn career. I mean, you know, he used to, in the pre-internet days, I mean, you guys are probably too young for this, but he would go to the Raper Barn in Hamburg, where the Beatles played this sort of sleazy entertainment show

district full of sex shops and cinemas and he would watch porn and he fantasized about doing a threesome with his wife and another guy and maybe selling this to magazines. He talked about how you needed stamina and so on. But basically he wasn't going anywhere and then pretty much out of the blue he gets caught from Lugavoy and the title of my book A Very Expensive Poison

comes from a conversation he had with a fellow waiter to whom he confided the details of this plot, that he was going to fly from Hamburg to London and they were going to poison a traitor who had it coming. And by the way, he asked his colleague, did he know a waiter in London or a cook who could put this poison in the target's food or drink, this very expensive poison? And this plot was so ridiculous that the German police who investigated

in the aftermath of the poisoning in 2006, discounted it. Subsequently, the British police combed through the phone records and found that he had indeed phoned his colleague. The colleague didn't like Cofton very much and had not really responded. And that essentially this assassination in Broglio was bungling. They were pretty hopeless killers. And also we found out they were hopeless murderers.

would be lovers. They turned up in their hotel in London wearing kind of chunky outsized jewelry and loud shirts. They careened around Soho in a rickshaw peddled by a Polish guy, asked him if he could take them to meet some girls.

He took them to a strip club. They sat rather forlornly on a bonquette. They didn't dance. We know this because, you know, the scientists swept the dance floor for polonium, didn't find any, although they did find it in the strip club loo and the urinal. And having not scored in basically what was a brothel, they went disconsolately back to the hotel.

Never has not finding polonium on the dance floor sounded like such a sad indictment. In the aftermath of Litvinenko's murder, there seemed to be a resistance at the top of the UK government to having a full-scale public inquiry. Why was that, do you think? Yeah, I mean, this is a really awkward theme, but I think it's an important one. And I think we should...

discuss it. I mean, I mean, I have to acknowledge at the outset that for any government, there is always a tussle. There is there's always a kind of argument between what you might call realpolitik, the fact that you have to deal with unsavory states like Russia or Saudi Arabia and what what the Germans call moralpolitik, the politics of morality, the ethical foreign policy. And these things are always in conflict. But but what happened

after the Libyan poisoning is that

The reaction from the then government of Tony Blair and subsequently Gordon Brown was pretty mild. Few Russian diplomats were kicked out, but not much. And then when David Cameron came in in 2010, he decided that he wanted to reset relations with Vladimir Putin and said that the Lviv and Yenka case could be negotiated around it, inverted commas. Now, this was a very, I think, a very short-sighted and daft policy.

the calculation was that this Russian money washing into the city of London was good for the economy, good for jobs, and we won't worry too much about human rights or the rest of it. And it reached its apogee in 2012, if you cast your mind back to the London Olympics, where Cameron and Vladimir Putin sat together watching the judo with these sort of, you know, Cameron had this kind of rictus grimace on his face,

um and the the the sort of reset basically fell apart in 2014 when vladimir putin annexed crimea by stealth using undercover troops fermented a war in the east of ukraine shot down mh-17 in which 10 british citizens were killed over eastern ukraine um and it was i think it was

unethical, ignoble behavior by the British government. Marina Litvinenko, the Cameron government, asked Theresa May, the then Home Secretary, for the inquest

into her husband's death to be converted into a public inquiry so it could consider the Russian state role. And Theresa May refused citing international relations in inverted commas. In other words, that the public inquiry would be embarrassing to Moscow and piss off the Kremlin.

I think that was shameful. Marina Litvinenko appealed against that decision she won. We got a public inquiry. But it was shabby behavior. And certainly Boris Johnson, our current prime minister, is also, I would say, deeply uninterested in looking at the question of Russian interference in British politics and also to some degree Russian murder. Yeah.

When you say that, when you discuss Theresa May's response, it's not even euphemistic, is it? You know, it's out there. It's brazen. Yeah, it's brazen. It was a kind of pragmatic, cynical calculation. And if you look at the Russia report by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, which came out last summer, I mean, Boris Johnson spent eight months trying to hide it down the back of his sock. And eventually it was published against his wishes. And it said that

that since the 1990s, London has become London grad, that it's awash with Russian money, much of it corrupt. And that Russian oligarchs, Russian emissaries, Kremlin-connected individuals, not all of them bad, you have to say, but have hired a whole group of lawyers, of ex-politicians, of British peers of the realm, of hard PR guys, sent their kids to private schools, etc.

and bought houses, luxurious properties in Belgravia and West London and so on. A lot of Brits have grown rich from pandering to this money. It's very depressing. And I think when you think about what's going on in the 21st century, I mean, this is not a story, the live in Yenka story of...

far away corrupt guys, you know, doing bad things. Unfortunately, it's a story about our own corruption, about how, you know, the British state has itself temporized and accommodated, you know, bad actors and allowed them to get away with things, murders, but also money laundering on a huge scale and living in this country. I can't tell you how many oligarchs actually live in the UK. Yeah.

And they like it here. Well, it's always described, London is always described as a safe haven for Russian money, basically. I mean, is it the safest it's ever been? Yeah. I mean, what you do, it's quite smart. You make money in a place of lawlessness. I mean, the post-Soviet Union world where it's all about connections. It's about...

feudal relations. I mean, the court of Vladimir Putin is essentially neo-feudal. He's surrounded by a cadre, a group of ex-KGB officers who on his watch have all become multi-billionaires. I mean, their assets are just astonishing, gobsmackingly wealthy people. And then you take that money out of Russia, often using offshore vehicles set up by British lawyers,

And you park it in real estate, in companies, in investments and so on. And your children's education. Children's education. And this is the paradox is that on the one hand, you know, we, the West, we want to be open. You know, we're open societies. We want to be open to inward investment, especially after Brexit. But at the same time, you know, we don't want to ask too closely from where this money has come.

And if people, if nosy people like me, investigative journalists, start asking difficult questions, then oligarchs instruct their lawyers in London to send us threatening letters, which are apocalyptic in tone, and try and kind of close down reporting. And so what's kind of weird is that...

Really, the British government, the National Crime Agency, HMRC should be taking the lead in investigating this. But they've been distinctly reluctant for whatever reason to do so. And it's journalists like me who find ourselves in the vanguard. It's not that I'm an activist. I'm a journalist and an author, but who find ourselves kind of trying to explore these themes of transnational corruption, of the Panama Papers. I was part of the team that did that story five years ago.

where we found a host of colorful characters who are using offshore structures, sometimes legally, sometimes not legally, to hide wealth which now runs into the trillions of dollars.

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You moved to Moscow to head up the Guardian's Bureau in 2006, just weeks after Litvinenko's poisoning. That must have been an incredible period in your life. And was that poisoning at the back of your mind? Or indeed the front of it?

It was at the front of my mind. It shaped my professional life and our personal lives as a family. I flew out to Moscow in the autumn of 2006, just after this happened with... Actually, just before this happened with my wife, Phoebe. Then Lviv and Yenka was poisoned in London. And then about three weeks later, I got a letter from British Airways saying, Dear Mr. Harding, we regret to inform you the plane you recently traveled on to Moscow was...

contaminated with radioactive polonium. And then it said, and this is, it's what the Greeks call bathos. And then it said, if you have any concerns, ring NHS Direct. So I picked up the phone and I dialed NHS Direct. And I was in this kind of phone holding hell where it says, you know, dial 999 if you have chest pains or breathing difficulties, dial 1 for this, dial 2 for that. And I thought,

I thought there's not going to be a polonium 210 option. So I sort of hung up because I was feeling okay. And then, of course, we arrived in Moscow and it became clear that this case had, you know, there was a mood of extreme acrimony between Moscow and London. And that I, as a new correspondent for a British newspaper, was regarded with suspicion. And this is because

What happens in Putin's Russia is mirror thinking. These KGB people, in communist times, journalists posted abroad, Soviet journalists, working for Itartas or whatever, posted to London or Washington, were actually KGB officers. And so the assumption was that any American or British correspondent was working for the CIA or MI6. And so we were treated accordingly, and we had a series of

Well, first of all, I had these kind of unpromising young men in black leather jackets who would follow me around the icy streets of Moscow. And if I was meeting a contact or a BBC journalist would sit at the adjacent table, clearly eavesdropping. And this was kind of more Clouseau than KGB. There was that. But also we had these break-ins at our apartments where these goons would come in and leave a series of demonstrative clues.

sometimes sinister ones. I mean, you know, for example, on one occasion, we came back to discover that my six-year-old son's bedroom window had been bust open. This is when we lived on the 10th floor of an apartment block with a 20-meter drop to the icy courtyard below. And, you know, meanwhile, when I made a phone call back to London and I made a joke about Putin, the line was cut and I would get

you know to show that someone was listening so what do you do well you re-joke you know you retell your joke about Putin and then the line would be cut again and and and so on and that was also you know moderately funny but we had we came back from a holiday in Berlin to discover the KGB FSB had left a sex manual by the side of the bed bookmarked to a page on orgasms which

I guess was kind of amusing. I mean, what were they trying to tell us? That, you know, we were conservative or insufficiently, you know, maybe it was a frequency issue or... Too ambiguous, isn't it? Insufficiently adventurous. I don't know what they were saying, but this was also kind of quite funny. I mean, less funny, on one occasion I was summoned to La Forteva, which is the...

It's a notorious KGB prison and FSB pre-detention center where Lev Nyenka had himself been kept for some months. And I was interrogated by an FSB officer called Major Kuzmin, who asked me questions about an interview that we had done with Boris Berezovsky while I was in Moscow, which had my byline on it because I'd phoned the Kremlin for a quote. And that was pretty spooky. That was pretty spooky. And I just never got out of the FSB's...

system uh for whatever reason um and in the end after uh having flown back in in 2010 to to um do a story about a a leak of of your State Department cables which portrayed Russia in in dismal terms as a mafia state having having written stories about that I came back to

Moscow airport in February 2011, I handed my passport over to passport control, where a young woman working for the Federal Migration Service, you know, tapped in my details, and did this kind of, you know, this sort of pantomimic recoil. You know, she just tipped back from her seat in horror at something which was written there, handed my passport to another officer who went away, emerged about 10 minutes later, and barked at me in Russian. He said,

Which means for you, Russia is closed. And then we had this kind of faux Socratic dialogue where I said to him, you know, why? And he says, you know, I don't know. Did you do something? And I said, you know, as far as I know, I didn't do anything. And he just sort of shrugged. This was a pretty...

This was not a great conversation. And I was led away to a sort of deportation cell where I spent about 45 minutes. And then my luggage was solemnly wheeled to me and I was deported back to London, the same British midland flight I'd arrived at. And it was a grim moment. My wife, Phoebe, I hadn't seen her or the kids for about a month. And she was really fed up. She hit the vodka. There was a kind of minor international scandal back in London.

It turned out the FSB had blacklisted me without informing the Russian foreign ministry. I had a great last chapter for a book I was thinking about writing, which eventually came out in 2011. It was the first of four books I've written about Russia called Mafia State. For me, the Litvinenko story, my time in Russia, I think intellectually, the start period was the most

important because it coincided with a time in which Russia was moving away from being merely domestically repressive to being internationally aggressive and revisionist with these spectacular exotic cases. I mean, Litvinenko, but also in 2018, Sergei Skripal, invasions in Georgia and Ukraine, deployments in the Middle East and so on. But also it made me understand what was important to perhaps discover

inner resources of bravery that I didn't know I had, but also to realize what was important about our own society, you know, the importance of law, you know, of courts, of justice, of accountability, and also made me see more sharply the flaws of

at home. So it was a definitive, you know, formative period for me. And I guess I'm still exploring all of these things as a journalist and as a writer. I don't know if it's just distance, Luke, but you sound very calm and collected on the matter. I mean, you were described as an enemy of Putin. So they weren't just suspicious of you. They, by the end, had very much made their minds up.

I don't know. I chalked that up as a small symbolic victory against a maligned state. And I would just say, lastly, the real heroes in the situation are not me. It's Russians. It's people like Alexei Navalny. It's people like Sasha Litvinenko who try to tell the truth

stand up to this regime and have paid a really huge price. And Marina Litvinenko, who continues to tell that truth. Yeah, I adore Marina. I mean, we went to go and see the play, the Lucy Preble play, Very Expensive Poison, based on my book. And she had not actually read the script. We did send it to her and I'd introduced her to the cast. And

I sat with her through the first half, just wondering what she would make of it to see herself portrayed on stage. I was in tears. She was in tears. It was just astonishingly moving. And I just salute her courage and the fact that not only did she take on the Kremlin, she also took on an often indifferent British government that really didn't want to

publish the secret material from this case or show what the police had discovered. And what they had discovered was a crime. And on his deathbed, Litvinenko sort of said, and this is a key speech for me, he'd said, you know, everybody will see my case as political. It's all about high politics and Cold War drama. And he said, no, no.

This case is criminal. What you have to understand is that Vladimir Putin, who sits with your prime minister, takes part in G8 conferences, is a murderer. He is a criminal. And I think, actually, I mean, first of all, that's true. But secondly, when you understand that kind of criminal mentality, then you can...

You can better appreciate these dark deeds. Why does the prime minister send assassins around Europe to go and wipe people out? Well, he does it because essentially he behaves, you know, I would argue like a mafia boss and like all good mafia bosses. If you offend the mafia boss, then the penalty is death.

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Well, the role of Russia's state involvement has been clarified. This was no kind of chance execution. This was done on orders from the very top. So we understand that Russia runs murder operations. And also, thanks to Bellingcat, the open source investigative outfit run by Elliot Higgins,

We have a better understanding of how these operations work. I mean, Bellingcat at the end of last year did a major investigation into the killers who, or the would-be killers who poisoned Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader in Siberia in the summer of 2020 using Novichok.

the same lethal nerve agent applied to Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Navalny survived. But we now know that there was a sort of hierarchy that

An order came down for the presidential administration. It was given to a secretive research institute which specializes in toxic weapons. And then that a squad of killers essentially shadowed Navalny for about three years using burner phones, using fake identities, crisscrossing around Russia whenever he was in the provinces. And then when an order finally arrived that said,

They tried to kill him by poisoning his underpants. And so there's the kind of bureaucratic hierarchy involved in these operations. Also, as with the Livonenko case, these assassins are not very good sometimes. Their methods are ludicrous. And I remember talking to a guy called Viktor Sivorov, who was a former GRU intelligence officer, that sort of Soviet military intelligence, who defected

in the late 1970s. He lives in the UK near Bristol. And he was saying that what we've seen in Russia is it's like a cancer. We've seen a degradation of science, of scholarship, of politics, of institutions, but also of assassins. He said, in my day, the assassins were very good. You know, there were sophisticated individuals who left no trace, who, you know, operated...

very effectively. And now they just send these idiots, Savorov told me, who are caught on CCTV, who behave as if it's the Cold War, who are unaware of the kind of digital environment and the fact that Russia is extremely corrupt. So you can do what Bellingcat did, which is to kind of buy phone data. So what we're looking at with the Libyan-Yankov story is we're looking at a kind of 20th century plot in a 21st century country.

digital environment where actually, you know, even for a spy agency, it's quite hard to keep the truth under wraps forever. And I think...

if and when the Putin regime falls, that we will discover more about Litvinenko, more about these other cases, and there will be a flood of information. And probably I will reach for my MacBook Air and write a sequel or the fourth part in a trilogy, because these incredible stories, which are true, they're just the dark gift that keeps giving.

Yeah, I've heard you compare it to Le Carre. It's too much. With this series, we're looking at various scandals and trying to ask this big overarching question of what changes are

And Luke, that image of Sasha in his hospital bed is now iconic. And his deathbed statement was just chilling. To remind everyone, he dictated the following. You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You've shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. The howl of protests from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

Has that how reverberated, Luke? Ultimately, did this story change anything? Yeah, I mean, there are two answers to that question. I mean, there's an affirming answer, which is that I think certainly for the UK and subsequently, I think other European Union kind of countries have caught up. The idea that Vladimir Putin...

and indeed still is, a murderer who personally snuffs out people he doesn't like or who he feels have humiliated him in some way. I mean, that is now well understood. I mean, it's well understood at a political level by politicians, by think tanks, by policymakers, and it's understood at a popular level by people who read newspapers. I mean, you only have to look at that image, as you say, of Sasha Litvinenko with his sort of cornflower blue eyes, his hair has fallen out,

staring defiantly at the camera to realize that this was a person, this was a father, this was a husband, this was a son whose crime, if you can call it that, was to tell the truth about a regime that invariably lies about what it does and what it is. So

On that level, yes, it was a success. But on another level, it was a failure insofar as Putin is still there. I mean, basically, he's a dictator. We have to acknowledge that. I'm pretty confident that barring ill health or some unexpected event, that Putin will be there in a decade's time, probably after Boris Johnson has left the stage.

You know, Donald Trump, Biden, there'll all be history, possibly even ghosts, but Putin will still be there. And the same murky regime will continue, I think, for years to come. Is there anything Britain could have done differently in the wake of Litvinenko's murder that could have prevented the Salisbury attack?

That's a great question. And there is an answer, actually, which is, I think, you know, what has happened with all of these egregious deeds, live in the anchor, annexation of Crimea, MH17, is that Putin waits for a response from the international community. And when it doesn't happen, he keeps going. And thus far, that the price that he's been forced to pay has been

He's been rather low. I mean four diplomats kicked out in in in 2007 uh more over skripal but essentially what you have to understand is that this is not the soviet union putin and his friends are As i've said are supremely rich. They're the richest people who've ever Walked the earth I would say and their collective assets Um are somewhere in the region of three four five six hundred billion dollars um, and

For all of its sort of showy patriotism and nationalism and make Russia great again and all the rest of it, actually what really concerns the Russian elite is holding onto this money and bequeathing it to the next generation, to their 30-something generation.

sons. And so there is something that Britain could have done, which is to impose personal sanctions on people around Putin. Now, to some extent, this has happened, but it's generally been done against pretty low or mid-level functionaries. And there are oligarchs

whom I won't name for legal reasons, but I think probably your listeners will perfectly understand who they are, who are well-known in the UK and who have close, often financial relations with Putin, who, by the way, is the richest man in the world. Now, the UK could sanction these individuals, could...

prevent them from traveling to Britain, could close down their bank accounts, could strip their assets, and could extend this to about 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people with Kremlin connections. And we don't do that because...

there's a kind of calculation that they support a lot of people. Like I said earlier, private school headmasters, lawyers, five-star hotels, swanky sushi restaurants, and so on. They help the British economy. And of course, Russian emigres donate very large sums of money to the British Conservative Party. So,

We don't do that. We could do that. And I think until Putin meets a kind of hard wall, we can expect more murders. We can expect more malfeasance, more chaos, more interference in our own democratic elections. And I think, you know, I think...

I think it's time for us to man or woman or person up, actually. Not because we hate Russia. I mean, Russia is a great country full of brilliant people, but because we need to actually target the people at the top of this really nasty and thuggish regime. Luke, this has been a real treat, and your book, A Very Expensive Poison, is a fantastic read. There's just one last thing I want to ask you, and it's very important. It's incredible that you were on the same plane that had conducted

had contained some of that polonium. Have British Airways offered you any traveller points or free flights, 25% off? Have you flown with them again since? I'm not sure I have, actually. Although that may be kind of subconscious rather than conscious. No, apart from that one rather formal letter, nothing at all. I mean, they did kind of deep clean the plane and remove the seats, but

and swap them out for new ones. I mean, it was an extraordinary journey because actually the bit I didn't tell you is that it was full of fans who supported CSK Moscow, a Moscow football team. And CSK were playing Arsenal in the Champions League in London. And some of these supporters got so drunk on the plane. I mean, one of them kind of hit a steward and there were whiskey bottles rolling around the aisles, people smoking in the loos.

that the plane was given priority clearance to land. And then the airport cops stormed on, dragged off a guy, arrested him.

I mean, the whole thing was incredibly messy. At that time, I didn't know the plane was also contaminated with polonium. And it was like a kind of mini introduction to Russia in all of its chaos. But also, you know, for someone like me who writes stories for a living, all of its dark gloriousness and improbability. So the polonium was just another twist in what was already happening.

An astonishing story. What an incredible flyer. It's going to change the announcement in the cabin. We'd like to welcome all frequent flyers, one world customers, football hooligans and international assassins. Welcome to London Heathrow. It's a cool 17 degrees. Wear a cardigan. You've got it. Luke Harding, it's been such a pleasure and I'm sure it's no coincidence the more tenaciously you criticise Putin, the worse your Wi-Fi's got. Thank you so much for being on British Scandal. Thank you.

This is the fourth episode in our series, The Litvinenko Affair. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. Please support them by supporting them you help us offer you this show for free. Another way to support us is to answer a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. If you'd like to know more about The Litvinenko Affair, the text of the public inquiry presented to Parliament in 2016 is available online.

We also especially recommend the books The Litvinenko File by Martin Sixsmith and A Very Expensive Poison by Luke Harding. I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. Our senior producer is Russell Finch. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis. For Wondery...

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