Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [159]
Both men left behind a trail of polonium on their previous visit to London, on October 16-17: in hotel rooms, offices, restaurants, and on the British Airways plane that took them back to Moscow. It was during that visit that they contaminated the Itsu sushi restaurant on Piccadilly, the one that Sasha and Mario Scaramella also visited on the day of his poisoning. That coincidence was the source of much initial confusion until it was established that on November 1 Sasha and Scaramella sat at a different table than the one occupied by Lugovoy, Kovtun, and Sasha two weeks earlier.
What Lugovoy and Kovtun were doing with polonium in London during the October 16 visit is a mystery. One hypothesis is that there were two attempts to put polonium into Sasha’s meal; the first one, possibly at Itsu, did not work out, so the assassins came back for a second attempt, which succeeded. Another hypothesis is that the October 16 meeting was a dress rehearsal.
For me, there is yet another possibility: that Lugovoy and Kovtun botched the operation on October 16, missed their target, yet contaminated themselves; in short, they screwed up. So for the second attempt, their handlers sent a professional killer, “the third man.” The two hapless agents served only to bring the hit man into contact with the target. This third-man theory has been promoted in the press by the ex-spy Oleg Gordievsky, who quotes his own anonymous sources. There was a “tall man with Asian features” who accompanied Dmitry Kovtun on the flight from Hamburg on October 31. He was captured by airport surveillance cameras and then vanished without a trace. The passport he used to enter Britain was from a European country, but the investigators were unable to trace him to any hotel or to any flight leaving the country.
The police never gave Marina any hint in support of the third-man theory, but they have not disputed it, either. It is consistent with what Sasha told me and others: Lugovoy brought along a man whom Sasha had never seen before and who had “the eyes of a killer.”
Finally, there was yet another man, Vladislav Sokolenko, who was hanging around with Lugovoy and Kovtun on November 1. His role is unclear, although he apparently was not contaminated by polonium.
There is no doubt that many questions will be answered in court—if the perpetrators are brought to trial. If the Crown Prosecution Service concludes that the perpetrators cannot be realistically apprehended, the police may still release the file. Then we would see not only the detailed polonium maps, but also the record of the minute-by-minute movements of Sasha, Lugovoy, and Kovtun through the streets of Central London, which are fully covered by CCTV surveillance cameras.
The story would be incomplete without considering a few alternative murder theories, which have been discounted after the polonium trails told their tales.
First, there was Mario Scaramella, a hapless political consultant who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. His relation to Sasha had to do with a squabble in Italian politics about some old and unproven allegations that the Italian prime minister Romano Prodi had been a KGB spy since the cold war. Back in 2004 Sasha told the Italian parliamentary commission investigating those rumors that once he had overheard his mentor General Trofimov referring to Prodi as “our man.” The conversation with Trofimov, however, took place in 2000, after the Prodi-KGB scandal broke out in Italy in October 1999. So Trofimov could have been only repeating hearsay. In any case, it is unlikely that someone would deploy polonium in 2006 to kill Sasha for an inconsequential statement he made in 2004. Scaramella tested positive for polonium, but only in minute amounts.
Then there was Yulia Svetlichnaya, a Russian graduate student in Britain who briefly made headlines by claiming that Sasha had planned to