Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [139]
Extradition and asylum are thus conflicting concepts, not mirror images. An asylum request would not be considered if there is an extradition case pending, and the court, as a rule, would not hear an extradition case against someone who has been granted asylum from the same country.
The extradition request for Zakayev came before he even considered seeking asylum, so there was no conflict. But with Boris, by April 2002, an asylum request had been pending for eighteen months. The British government surely knew that if it was granted, Boris’s asylum would make the Kremlin go berserk. The Russian government’s new request to extradite him, therefore, was something of a relief for the Brits. The home secretary wrote to Boris that his asylum plea had been turned down because of the extradition charges. Boris’s fate was no longer in the hands of the executive branch. Instead, Judge Timothy Workman would decide it.
Zakayev’s and Boris’s extradition hearings—the two intertwined cases that tested the reach of the Kremlin and proved far more difficult than the average political assassination—lasted from April to November 2003. They were so beset with bizarre twists, unexpected developments, and odd coincidences that they eventually convinced me to believe in Sasha’s constant stream of conspiracy theories. They unfolded in parallel with our investigation of the Moscow bombings and growing suspicions about the theater siege. The improbable in one reinforced the unbelievable in the other, until I felt as if my life had turned into a made-for-television espionage thriller.
The most bizarre of all was an incident with a man I’ll call Pavel. At a bail hearing for Boris on April 2, his security guards, a squad of French Foreign Legion veterans, spotted a tall, skinny man with a wrinkled face, perhaps age fifty, in a gray suit. They had also noticed him earlier that day skulking around Boris at the Russian Economic Forum. They kept an eye on him. Then Sasha noticed him talking to a Russian by the name of Nikita, who was part of Boris’s retinue. The man came up to Nikita outside of the courthouse to introduce himself. He was a small businessman from Kazakhstan, living in London. The chat with Nikita did not last long and did not get much beyond the introduction.
Pavel appeared again at Boris’s next court hearing, on May 13. As soon as he could, Sasha converged on him like a tornado.
“Confess!” he blustered. “Who sent you to spy on us?”
Remarkably, Pavel did confess. He was moonlighting for the Russian Embassy, he said, entrapped by the FSB. He wanted to switch sides and work with us. Several days later Sasha brought him to meet me in a Starbucks café on Leicester Square.
Pavel said that he had been recruited by the KGB while working as a Kremlin driver in the Brezhnev era. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he thought his relationship with Kontora was over. He started a business but came into conflict with some gangsters and had to flee for his life to Kazakhstan. From there he somehow got to London in 1999, where he applied for asylum and started a small trading company. His asylum was still pending, but in 2002 he was approached in a London park by two Russian diplomats who called out his old KGB code name.
“They said that I should work for them, otherwise they would report my past to the immigration