How The Kremlin's Assassins Sowed Terror Through The Streets Of London While British Authorities Scrambled To Stop Them
reveals Scotland Yard’s desperate scramble to shield the disorderly oligarch Boris Berezovsky from a string of audacious murder plots in the heart of London.like a fresh bruise across the London sky as the unmarked car rolled up Whitehall toward Big Ben. The Scotland Yard protection officer scanned the road with a well-trained eye, clocking potential hazards as the car passed the spiked iron gates of Downing Street, and swung right on Parliament Square.
Akhmed Zakayev leaves the Bow Street Magistrates Court during his extradition hearing in London on February 14, 2003.The exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the Chechen rebel leader Akhmed Zakayev were judged to be under “severe” threat of assassination, the officials around the table explained, meaning an attack was considered “highly likely,” while a Russian journalist living in Britain and the Cold War defector Oleg Gordievsky had also been identified as Kremlin targets.
The greatest threat, by far, was to Berezovsky. The oligarch had made himself Russia’s public enemy number one through his relentless attacks on the Kremlin and his efforts to foment insurrection in Putin’s backyard, and he had effectively appointed himself theof the entire dissident community in the UK. He had already survived several assassination attempts, and the Russia watchers were getting a steady stream of intelligence about new plots to kill him.
Berezovsky was heavily reliant on Viagra, and, worse, he was taking a penis-enlargement formula that he had specially shipped over from Moscow. Still more alarming was his appetite for teenage girls, which made him a sitting duck for honey traps. The oligarch was constantly being contacted by disturbingly young sex workers from the former USSR and he frequently ferried them over to Britain for sessions on his private plane.
Then there was the challenge of separating the Kremlin-sanctioned threats from those arising from the oligarch’s own risky business dealings. Berezovsky had tangled often enough with organized crime to acquire some nasty private adversaries who had tried to take him out before, but the officer’s remit was limited to protecting him from government assassins.
The others on the Kremlin’s hit list had adapted well enough to their new security regimes. The rebel leader Zakayev accepted an armed guard at his house when the threat level was deemed high, and he never met anyone new without careful vetting and countersurveillance measures. Gordievsky and the Russian journalist were conscientious about their safety. But Berezovsky was impossibly unruly.
The Kremlin immediately hit back, denouncing Berezovsky’s call for revolution as a criminal offense that should void his refugee status in Britain. Scotland Yard said it would investigate those allegations, but the oligarch was unconcerned: the courts had already ruled that he couldn’t be sent back to Russia to stand trial.
Now, in June of 2007, Atlangeriev was on his way to London, and the Russia watchers knew he was coming with orders to kill Berezovsky. The intelligence pointing to his involvement in a live FSB plot to eliminate the oligarch had come through six weeks earlier, and the protection officer had been dispatched to instruct Berezovsky not to meet him under any circumstances.
The rookie officer was shown aboard by an Amazonian hostess who took him to a private cabin, where a dinner suit was laid out on the bed in his exact size. There were deck clothes, too—shorts, sandals, polo shirts, shoes, and a cap—all branded with the yacht’s name,. The vessel had an onboard wardrobe department with clothes in every measurement so the oligarch could keep his guests appropriately dressed whatever the weather.
The police chiefs agreed on the strategy—but then they were summoned to the Cabinet Office, where a meeting had been convened to brief ministers and officials from the Home Office, Foreign Office, and Downing Street. By then, Atlangeriev was in the air and time was short, but the officers met with resistance as they laid out their plan. If Scotland Yard got caught tailing an FSB agent around London, there would be a major public fuss.
Once the ops room and the intel cell were up and running, the surveillance teams were stationed around the airport, and the hazmat crews donned their protective gear. It was time for police chiefs to contact bosses at Heathrow to prepare the ground for the assassin’s arrival. Berezovsky wasn’t ordinarily one to follow instructions, but he was relishing his leading role at the center of this live operation against an enemy agent, so he did as he was told when Atlangeriev called. Then he phoned Down Street and told his secretaries to be on high alert for the assassin’s arrival and to tell anyone who called that he was busy. After that, all that remained was to wait.
“We need to take him off the board,” the commanding officer told the team. Scotland Yard called the officers guarding Berezovsky onand told them to prepare him for his big moment. It was time to call his would-be assassin and propose a meeting. But then the order came down to let him go without charge. It wouldn’t be possible to make charges stick without disclosing intelligence that would give away far too much about British sources in Moscow, the officers were told, and the diplomatic fallout from publicly accusing the Kremlin of ordering another assassination in Britain so soon after Litvinenko’s would have been catastrophic.
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