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Chapter One

Asylum

New York. October 25, 2000

My cell phone rang before dawn.

"Salut," a voice said. "Where are you?" It was Boris Berezovsky, who until a few months earlier had been one of Russia's richest and most powerful oligarchs. Now he was an expatriate.

He was calling from his house in Cap d'Antibes in the south of France. He had fallen out with Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin--whom Boris himself had groomed for the job--and announced that he would not return to Russia from a vacation in France.

Putin was busily purging Berezovsky's people, who were ubiquitous, from Russia's power structure. Boris was mindful of wiretapping, so he could not begin the conversation until I assured him I was not in Russia.

"Do you remember Sasha Litvinenko?" Boris asked. I did. A member of the organized crime division of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the KGB's successor agency, Lt. Col. Alexander (Sasha) Litvinenko was one of Boris's men.

Two years earlier, he had become a national celebrity after calling a press conference where, flanked by four masked officers who supported his allegations, he claimed that some rogue generals in the FSB had plotted to assassinate Berezovsky.

This happened shortly after Boris Yeltsin replaced the previous FSB director, a seasoned three-star general,with Putin, who was then a low-level ex-spy and a dark horse from the Kremlin administration. Going against Kontora (the Company) on prime-time TV did not sit well with the folks at Lubyanka HQ.

Shortly afterward, Litvinenko was arrested on a charge concocted by Internal Affairs that he had beaten up a suspect some years earlier. He spent several months in Lefortovo, the infamous investigative prison of the old KGB.

I had asked Boris to introduce me to Sasha at the time, because I was running a public health project under George Soros to contain an epidemic of TB in Russian prisons. I wanted to quiz Sasha about the medical services in Lefortovo.

I had gained access to the regular prisons of the Justice Ministry, but Lefortovo, an FSB domain, was off-limits. Any occasion to meet a former inmate was a chance to begin to assess the state of that secret place.

"Yes, I remember Litvinenko," I said. "Well, he's in Turkey," said Boris. "You call at 5 a.m. to tell me that?" "He's fled." Sasha was hiding in a hotel on the Mediterranean coast with his wife and son, preparing to hand himself over to the Americans. Could I be of help, Boris inquired, as "an old dissident, and an American to boot? We believe you're the only one who can help him." "Why is that?" "Because you have the right connections."

A few hours after Boris's call, and after I had spoken by phone with Sasha himself, I walked into the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with an old friend, a Russian specialist who worked on President Clinton's National Security Council.

A relaxed policeman briefly glanced at my ID. It was still almost a year before September 11. The U.S. presidential elections were just two weeks away and nobody in Washington cared all that much about Russia. I made it into the building in a few short seconds.

"I can give you ten minutes," my friend said. "So what's the urgent matter you can't discuss over the phone?" I told him about Litvinenko and that I was planning to go to Turkey and bring him over to our embassy.

"As an official of the U.S. government, I have to tell you that we are not in the business of luring Russian agents into defections," he replied. "As your friend, I'll tell you: don't get involved. Such matters are for professionals, which you are not. There'll be unforeseen circumstances, trust me. It can become dangerous. Once you get into this, you will not be in control. One thing will lead to another, and there's no telling where you'll end up. So my advice to you: Go home and forget the whole thing."

"And what will happen to Litvinenko?" I asked, remembering Sasha's anxious voice on the phone. "That's not your problem," he replied. "He's a big boy and he knew what he was doing." "What would happen if he walked into our embassy on his own?"

"First of all, they won't let him in. They have serious security issues there. Ankara isn't Copenhagen. By the way, what kind of documents does he have?" "I don't know." "Second, even if he does get in, he'll be talking to consular officials whose job"--he smiled--"is to keep people out of America."

"But he's not an ordinary applicant for a tourist visa." "Well, if he can prove that, then maybe"--he hesitated, picking the right word--"other people will talk to him. In theory, they could put in a word for him, but that would depend . . . " "On what he can offer them?" "You got it." "I have no idea what he could offer them." "There, you see, I told you: you're no professional." My friend smiled at me as I got up to leave.

I had already decided not to take his advice. I had once been a dissident, a Jewish biologist in Moscow who agitated against the Soviet regime. I had gotten out in 1975. My father, also a scientist, was a well-known refusenik who could not get permission to leave for another decade after me. Helping people escape the clutches of Moscow was in my blood. I was soon on a plane to Turkey.

Excerpted from by Alexander Goldfarb with Marina Litvinenko.  Copyright � 2007 by Alexander Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko.  Reprinted by permission from Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.