He said, "Marina, you can't imagine how keen my nose is. I'm like a bloodhound - I sense danger, my hair stands on end, and I take care of everything immediately." Recently he had been talking about a feeling of danger, but nothing concrete. He was very earnestly concerned about the law that was passed in Russia concerning the possibility of special operations being carried out abroad. He believed they would do such a thing.
Former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and his wife Marina.
Photo: Archive photo
| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
Alexander Litvinenko's Widow Speaks about Her Husband's Death
// An Exclusive Interview with Marina Litvinenko
Alexander Litvinenko, who died recently in London after ingesting polonium, never knew the reason for his fatal illness. If he had died one day earlier, no one would have even known the cause of his death. In an interview with Kommersant special correspondent Natalia Gevorkian, the former FSB officer's wife, Marina Litvinenko, talks in detail about what happened to her husband, the time he spent in the hospital, and Alexander Litvinenko's own suspicions about poisoning.
"This is so weird. They've just dunked me in the toilet."
How many years have you lived in England?
We moved here exactly six years ago, on November 1! It's just like a horror movie, a mysterious coincidence… On November 1 Sasha and I decided to have a family dinner in honor of the anniversary of our move to England. Sasha came home and didn't even stop by to see Ahmed [Zakaev], the way he usually does. He went upstairs, checked some information on the internet, and then we had dinner together.
And when did he start to feel sick?
I'm getting to that. And I'm really only going to tell you, because you can't tell English journalists that kind of thing. Too many details… He got sick that night, the night of November 1. He went to bed fairly early, around 11 o'clock, and said that he had important meetings the next morning. I picked up the house a little bit before I went into the bedroom. There was something wrong with him. He said, "I'm going to throw up." What's the matter, I asked him, we just ate the same thing together, so how come you're sick to your stomach and I'm not? He threw up once, really violently, but I wasn't worried – something in the food doesn't sit well, it happens…then when he threw up for the third time, it started to scare us. I said, "Sasha, let's rinse your stomach out with some milk of magnesia." He drank it and started to retch again. And again… He said, "Marina, I'm going to sleep in the other room, since you have to get up at 6 tomorrow morning." He went into the other room.
At around 2 o'clock in the morning, I fell asleep and slept until 6. When I woke up, I saw that he wasn't asleep and that he looked absolutely exhausted. He said that the vomit had been abnormal somehow, that it was grey. We called a Russian doctor that we saw occasionally. I told him that my husband was ill with something strange, maybe a stomach infection. The doctor couldn't make a house call – he was just finishing an operation – but he advised us to buy some medicine that would revive the normal flora in the stomach. I ran to the pharmacy, bought some medicine, and made Sasha take it. For a little while he looked a bit better, but he didn't stop throwing up. It was so strange. And he kept trying to make jokes about it. He would come back from the bathroom and say, "Marina, something's wrong, this is so weird. They've just dunked me in the toilet." Can you imagine?
So you obviously put off your morning meetings?
It continued all through the following day - the vomiting, the stomach spasms. Then the next night he told me that he felt like he couldn't breathe and that his heart was giving out. He was lying under a thin blanket and he had the window open, so that it was cold in the room. That's when I noticed something strange. I kept taking his temperature, because if it were some kind of infection, his temperature should rise. But it was falling – 35.7, 35.8. Then it was 33.6. He suffered through the entire day, and at two o'clock in the morning he said, "Marina, I can't take it anymore. Call an ambulance." That was already the second night. I called an ambulance. Two young women came, looked at him, and said that he needed to drink more water. I said he was drinking, but all the water was coming back up. They checked his temperature and blood pressure, ran a glucose test, and said that they could take him to the hospital but that they would just do the same thing there, so there was no point.
The next day, on Friday, he started having terrible diarrhea. Just as bad as the vomiting. Sasha said it looked like there was blood in it. By that time I was already really scared. Our Russian doctor came to see him. He came to the house, sat down like so, and looked Sasha over. "How strange," he said. Sasha started complaining about stomach pains. The doctor said that it looked like an infection and that now inflammation could be starting. When he started examining him and pressed gently somewhere where nothing should be hurting, Sasha cried out and said that it was really painful. The doctor ordered us to call an ambulance right away, he said it was inflammation, gastritis, whatever…I called an ambulance. Sasha was so weak that he couldn't walk, couldn't go to the bathroom. And he was incredibly pale. We had thought briefly that maybe it was poisoning, but really no one was seriously worrying about that. It was Sasha who finally started saying to me, "Marina, this is something abnormal. When I was in school at the military academy, we studied poisoning like this that was caused by a chemical weapon. This really reminds me of that." The whole time he was complaining about his heart – he said that he felt like it was about to stop. They took him to the hospital, where all the patients were lying in these little cell-like cubicles. They started an IV. I was thinking, thank god, because he was so dehydrated and he hadn't had anything to eat since the first of the month.
"I patted Sasha's head, and hair came off in my hand"
The doctors didn't suspect anything?
No, but they can't be blamed for that. We told them to check for evidence of poisoning with something unusual. We didn't want to say who Sasha was, but we did say that we had received political asylum and that maybe somebody didn't like that. They listened but didn't do anything about it. I can't blame them, though. I blame myself: why didn't I insist, why didn't I make a fuss, why didn't I make them. In the hospital they said that they would run some tests and send him home. He was in really bad shape. The vomiting had stopped, but he asked me to take some cold water and rub his forehead. It was burning up. Then the doctors came and said that they were going to take a blood test and when it was ready, in two hours, they would decide what to do.
In the end he stayed in the hospital, because I insisted that he couldn't be sent home in the condition he was in. On Sunday he had the same symptoms as before, violent diarrhea with blood in it. On Monday he seemed to be a little bit better, but we couldn't really tell for sure.
They told me that they were going to discharge him the next day. I asked to meet with the doctor to find out what kind of diet he should be on and whether he should continue with the antibiotics that they'd been giving him since Saturday. I spent all of Tuesday in the hospital, but it wasn't until seven o'clock in the evening that a group of doctors approached me. They said, like it was a joke, "we've got good news and bad news for you. Which should we start with?" Like we do in Russia, I said, "start off with the bad news." They said, "we can't release him today." Well, that wasn't too bad. And the good news? "We've figured out what's wrong with him. He has bacteria in his intestine." And they told me what the name of the bacteria was and even wrote it down on a piece of paper.
I went online and looked up information about the bacteria. And I didn't understand any of it. It's this kind of bacteria that starts to actively multiply and release toxins after the native flora are destroyed by antibiotics. But when he got sick, he wasn't taking any antibiotics! The bacteria couldn't have shown up before he came to the hospital. So what happened at home?
Once he ended up in the hospital, he didn't get out of bed again?
No, there was a moment in the hospital when Sasha didn't feel too bad. He took a walk in the hallway and swung his arms a bit for exercise, even though I told him that he shouldn't be exercising. The doctors even let him go to the regular toilet – before that he'd had a bedpan. And then at the end of the week all of a sudden his throat started to hurt, so he asked them to take a look at it. Something about it was abnormal – there wasn't any reddening, but blisters had popped up. He said that it hurt really badly to swallow. By Sunday it was worse. The doctors said that it was also from the antibiotics – that the flora was been killed off and that now there was irritation. They thought they had the problem nailed down again.
In other words, before the end of the first week in the hospital there was that diagnosis of bacteria?
Yes. But when I came to see him on Monday morning, I was shocked. He couldn't open his mouth, his mucus membranes were all inflamed, and his tongue was too swollen to fit in his mouth. He was sitting so unhappily on the bed… That's when all of my English patience ran out. I started to yell that everything had been normal yesterday, and today he couldn't even speak, he couldn't even call a nurse. The doctors came and said that it could be a reaction to the antibiotics, that there were two previous cases when that antibiotic had caused similar problems.
And when did the doctors start to doubt their diagnosis?
When the doctors left that day, I patted Sasha's head, and hair came off in my hand. I said, Sasha, what's going on? I looked around and there was hair everywhere – on the pillow, on his shoulders. I ran to the doctors. They told me that the tests had shown a sharp drop in his immune system. I asked, I begged them to explain to me why his hair was falling out. But they didn't understand it either. Do you know what they did? They tested him for AIDS and hepatitis. He started turning yellow. But all of the tests came back normal. That was when the doctors first suggested that his bone marrow might be practically gone, though they couldn't tell for sure. And they said that there was a chance that it could regenerate within ten days.
What kind of condition was he in psychologically?
He understood that everything was going pretty badly, but he didn't want to believe it, until the very last day he wanted… We were all certain that he would get better.
"He said that he hadn't liked the man"
Did you discuss what might have happened to him? He didn't try to analyze the possibilities?
Those two meetings on November 1 that are being talked about so much now, he thought they were kind of strange. Strange because the meeting with Mario [Scaramella, an Italian businessman with whom Alexander Litvinenko met in a sushi bar on November 1] was absolutely inexplicable. Why? Sasha said that Mario had gotten everything he gave him through the internet. So Mario could have sent it all to Sasha by email. Sasha said that Mario was acting oddly, like he was really nervous and confused. The second meeting, with Lugovoi and Kovtun (Russian businessmen Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, whom Litvinenko met in the bar of London's Millennium Mayfair hotel), immediately struck him as suspicious, but for some reason he chased his suspicions away. I don't know why. He kept trying to find explanations… Maybe he thought that he would figure it out by himself later and didn't want to discuss it with me.
At that second meeting, the conversation was about the beginning of some kind of joint venture, some kind of business?
Yes. As I understood it, many Russians open businesses in England, and British people have questions for them – who are they, are they really who they say they are. They needed to check some information.
So the conversation was about some kind of consulting?
Absolutely, yes.
And they wanted to work together on it?
As I understood it, yes. I know Lugovoi. Kovtun appeared on the scene about a month before all this happened. I hadn't heard anything about him before. Sasha did say one thing – that some guy he really didn't like had turned up with Lugovoi. I can't say for sure what we were talking about the time, but that was the phrase Sasha used. He said that he hadn't liked the man because he had said something about how he doesn't give a damn about anything in life except money.
And Lugovoi called you when Sasha got sick?
Lugovoi called once on my mobile after Sasha's death. He left a voicemail saying, "Marina, this is Andrei Lugovoi. Everything that happened strikes me as very strange. I'll do everything I can to figure it out." I met Andrei only once, at a birthday party for Boris Abramovich [Berezovsky]. He's called me maybe twice before, when he couldn't get through to Sasha.
Did your husband think that someone might have poisoned him?
Yes, he suggested it, but he didn't say with what… He said that he always know that the FSB's poisons laboratory was still operational. "That bacteria that got into my system – it was in the [FSB officer's uniform] epaulets," he joked. "How can these English doctors not figure that out?"
But the police still hadn't shown up?
No. That was only later, when they first starting saying it was thallium…
"I found out about [the polonium] only after his death"
How did they diagnose thallium poisoning?
When his hair started falling out… They shaved his head, because it was terrible otherwise. And they took him to the oncology ward. The doctors said that he looked like a patient who had just been through chemotherapy, only with a stronger dose. And they couldn't understand how that was possible. Then they said that when a patient undergoes chemotherapy, hair starts to fall out after twelve days. I started counting – and suddenly I realized that about the same about of time had passed since November 1. They ran toxicity tests on him. I asked whether Sasha shouldn't be taken to a different hospital, one that specialized in something. They said that they would transfer him if they thought it was necessary. Late on Thursday evening, I was sitting with Sasha when all of sudden a nurse whom I hadn't seen before came in and said that the results of the tests were back and that he had tested positive for thallium. We were glad that they had finally found something. She brought the antidote and said that he needed to take it immediately. They didn't have the antidote in pill form, only as a powder. When he took the powder, it was like swallowing needles, because it hadn't fully dissolved in the water. And his mucus membranes were still swollen, so it was painful. But she insisted that he had to drink it. And we understood that it was serious.
So first the diagnosis was thallium, and then polonium?
Yes. His thallium level was three times higher than normal. And polonium… Sasha was checked for radiation, but it turned out later that the machine they had used only checked for gamma radiation coming off the skin. He had alpha radiation, which has a short wavelength [though not as short as that of gamma rays], and it was internal. That kind of radiation only showed up on a special and very complicated urine test.
When exactly was the diagnosis of polonium given?
The results were in the laboratory three hours before Sasha died. I found out about them only after his death.
So he never found out what was wrong?
No. And it's possible that no one would have found out… If he had died earlier, it never would have come out what was wrong with him. The diagnosis of polonium poisoning was given only after the special, complicated urine analysis that they finally ran. Up until the very last day, even though he was obviously very sick, both he and I believed that he would survive. He kept asking me if his hair was growing back. It was only later that they explained to me that it had been hopeless.
Was it painful for him?
Very painful. When he was resuscitated for the first time, the first time his heart stopped, he was hooked up to a machine and given special medication. They explained to me that he had been immobilized. It was so that the machine could control everything and so that he couldn't hurt himself. Later I was told that not only the mucus membranes in his mouth, but everywhere in his body were horribly inflamed and covered with blisters.
Did British special services and Scotland Yard question your husband?
Yes, when it was confirmed that toxins had been discovered in his blood. Everything started with the thallium diagnosis. They questioned him, and Sasha gave a deposition. Then they took him to a different hospital. That was on Friday. The police came – it was just like an American action movie. They put him in an ambulance with a flashing blue light, I sat in the police car, and we drove from one hospital to the other as if someone were trying to kill us. And it was so strange, because three weeks earlier no one had taken any notice of anything, and now all of a sudden everybody was trying to save him. It was all fairly uncomfortable. The detectives went to work, and when we talked to them we asked why they hadn't paid any attention to Sasha's suspicions…
How did people around you react to Sasha's illness? Did anyone come to visit him?
Yes, but from Wednesday on he was so weak that he wasn't glad to see anyone. Usually when Ahmed or Boris came to see him, he would immediately try to play the hero. On Tuesday, he gave an interview to the investigators, and they were amazed by his courage: he answered questions for three or four hours, even though it was very difficult for him to speak because, as was starting to come to light, he was burning up inside. The doctors constantly told me that his condition wasn't deteriorating and that they had transferred him to the second hospital only because that hospital was better. Then they moved him to another floor. They said that it was only because there was better equipment there, not because he was getting worse. But his condition changed over the course of those few days, and I couldn't understand at all how the doctors could still not know what was wrong. After all, he was in a better hospital. When I was leaving on Wednesday night, he had asked them for the first time to turn him on his side, and he was lying on a cushion somehow…and then he said the first complete sentence he had spoken that entire day: "oh, Marinochka, I love you so much." I tried to lighten the moment by saying something about how I hadn't heard those words in awhile. All of a sudden I saw how he had started biting his lip. I had never noticed him doing that before. I said, "Sash, what's the matter, you don't want me to go? Your dad will stay here tonight, and I'll come back tomorrow as soon as I've dropped Tolya [the Litvinenko's 10-year-old son] off at school. And he bit his lip again and I…I left. I left.
I got home, put Tolya to bed, and I was wandering around the house. At ten minutes to midnight, they called from the hospital: I should come over. It was terrifying. I called Ahmed, and we raced to the hospital. Before we got there, Sasha's father told us that his heart had stopped and that they were trying to resuscitate him. When we arrived, his heart had stopped again, and they were trying to resuscitate him a second time. At two o'clock in the morning, they hooked him up to the machine. The ward's chief doctor was attending him. When I left on Thursday, he couldn't say anything anymore. The doctors sent me home to sleep – they told me that all of his vital signs were normal. The only thing that worried them was his blood pressure, so they had given him medicine to keep his blood pressure at the crucial level. They said that if his blood pressure started to fall below that level, they wouldn't be able to do anything for him. I felt then for the first time as though I had been jabbed with a needle: I could lose Sasha. And I was so upset with myself for thinking that… I cried for a bit, but eventually towards the end of the day he started looking better. He had edema after all of the attempts at resuscitation, and there was some redness, but that passed. He wasn't moving, but he was all there, like normal. I went home, and before I could put Tolya to bed – I had just gone into the bathroom – the phone rang. It was the hospital again: come quickly, they said. "Tolya," I said, "are you coming with me?" He told me he wanted to come. He didn't even think about it – he just decided on the spot. When we got to the hospital, they took us into a different room than where he was. I understood immediately what had happened. The doctors told me that they had been doing everything they could, but that nothing was helping, and they told us that we could go in and say goodbye to him. They didn't know what was wrong with Sasha, but they let us say goodbye to him. We were helpless. At that point, we still didn't know anything.
How did you find out that the cause of death was polonium?
We were completely shaken when we returned home from the hospital after he died. Then the police called and said they were coming to see us. I thought that it would be to ask me questions, and I asked if it could be put off until later, as it was very difficult for me. But they said that once I knew the reason that they were coming, I would understand why it was necessary. They arrived at three o'clock in the morning and told us to take all of the things that we needed and leave the house. And I said, "nobody has been thinking about us for three weeks, nobody's been worried, so what's the hurry?" And they said, "you have to understand that we've never encountered this before, that we don't even know what it is, and we don't know what the consequences will be." That's when they told us that it was polonium.
Were you tested?
The next day. And we already have the results, with documents certifying that Tolya, Sasha's father, and other people who were close to him suffered no significant contamination. I am carrying a definite dose of polonium, but for the moment it's not life-threatening. I can't feel anything at all. They told me that my risk of getting sick is maybe one percent higher than normal.
Getting sick with what?
With cancer, for example.
"It was only when the photograph appeared that everyone figured out that something terrible was going on"
What's the story with the cross, with the religious conversion? Was he wearing a cross in the hospital?
I took the cross off from around his neck myself in the hospital, because they needed to take an x-ray and they asked him to take off any of necklaces or rings. He also took off his wedding ring.
So when he went into the hospital, he was a Christian?
Absolutely, absolutely. I didn't want to bring up the topic, because it's fairly controversial and painful… Yes, there was the desire, I mean with regard to conversion, the question was definitely mentioned, but that was all against the backdrop of everything that was going on.
You mean during his illness?
Yes, when he was already sick.
There has been some uncertainty regarding the accusations he leveled at Moscow in the letter he wrote right before he died.
Why? Uncertainty about what?
I think because it's difficult to believe that he managed to write in the condition he was in. Maybe if he had dictated it, but there seem to be no voice recordings…
When he told me that he wanted there to be a letter and a photograph, I was appalled. I definitely didn't want him to be photographed in that state. I said, "Sasha, think about it, you'll get well and then you'll have to see these photographs."
But he wanted to be photographed?
He was certain that both a written document and a photograph were necessary. And now I understand that it was only when the photograph appeared that everyone figured out that something terrible was going on. And that thing with Kovtun, how everyone says that he's in a coma, but no one's seen him. The information that Sasha was in the hospital and that he had been poisoned appeared in the Russian press as well. And on Ekho Mosvky radio Latynina said that she doesn't believe that Litvinenko was making a play for attention.
So who wrote down the text of the letter?
Our lawyer, who has helped us ever since we ended up in England. Sasha asked me to call him.
And when was the photograph taken?
Sasha died on Thursday, and the photograph was taken on Monday or Tuesday.
Maybe all of this tragedy is somehow linked with the business that Sasha started with Lugovoi?
He never started any business that could have made somebody want to kill him like that. No matter which way you look at it, polonium can't possibly be an everyday means of poisoning someone. In other words, it's stamped with "made by the state." Even if ties to some kind of business are being considered, it must be business at the level of the federal government. Where else could government-made poison come from?
Why was Sasha the victim, instead of Berezovsky, for example?
That's the real question, isn't it – because for everyone, the primary targets were Boris Berezovsky and Ahmed Zakaev. And Sasha tried to protect them. I'm not a political scientist. I'm just a woman who's not dumb, who can do more than wash the pots and pans and can try to figure something out. It could have been just to show those in Russia what can be done with people, to frighten someone, to control someone. To show that they can do it even in England. But I don't know, it's all just gibberish after awhile.
Was Sasha afraid while he was living here [in London]?
He lived here absolutely without fear, absolutely. He walked a lot…
He didn't believe that anything could happen to him? That "they" would catch up with him?
He believed that he would be able to sense something first. He said, "Marina, you can't imagine how keen my nose is. I'm like a bloodhound – I sense danger, my hair stands on end, and I take care of everything immediately." Recently he had been talking about a feeling of danger, but nothing concrete. He was very earnestly concerned about the law that was passed in Russia concerning the possibility of special operations being carried out abroad. He believed they would do such a thing. He was very worried about Boris and Ahmed. He warned them when he was already in the hospital that they should be careful.
And what did Berezovsky say to that?
At that point, no one believed that he had been poisoned. They thought he was just letting his imagination run away with him again. Boris had no understanding at all of what was going on. It was only when he talked to me and Ahmed, when Ahmed told him that it was serious, that he came to the hospital.
When was that? A week or two after Sasha got sick?
Yes, a week afterwards.
"They thought Sasha would die before anyone could figure out what killed him"
They're saying that you don't want to talk to the Russian investigators if they come to London.
It's not so much that I don't want to. I don't trust them. Because when Sasha was imprisoned in Russia, I had some experience with their investigators, and I just don't trust them. This one investigator, I said to him: why did you put Sasha in jail now, when what you're accusing him of took place two years ago? And he said to me, unofficially: he needs to appear on television less often.
Again, I'm not saying no. I don't trust them, but if Scotland Yard says that it's necessary for their investigation, I'll do it.
Are they in constant contact with you?
Scotland Yard? Yes. There is a protection system in place for the family, a very serious one.
Are you kept abreast of the progress of the investigation?
Yes. They try to make sure that I find everything out firsthand, not from the press. They're attempting to shield us from the public eye, to make sure that Tolya's photograph doesn't appear in the media.
Do you also believe, like Sasha and his father, that what happened was due to "the hand of Moscow"?
You know, it's like that incident with Berezovsky, when they told Sasha that he had to be killed. And then they started saying that it was all nonsense, that there's no such order, who would give such an order, anyway... They didn't even have to say it directly. They could just say to the next person in the chain of command, "It would be good if…" Nothing formalized, just a simple conversation. I'm not talking about the person at the top. Maybe someone just wanted to do something nice for the person at the top. Whoever did this – they're maniacs, and finding them by logical deduction is going to be very difficult for normal people to do. I think that this is all his former system [the FSB]. And it's not the sense of patriotism that they keep bragging about. It's nothing but a horrendous sense of vengeance. In this system of Sasha's, they're all deranged. Once a former colleague of his, after Sasha was released from jail, said to him, "how are you living now? You have no [police] pass and no pistol. How can you live without a pass and a pistol?" They all have that kind of mentality: they don't know how it's possible to live without a police pass and a pistol.
But they why did they wait for six years? And why did they choose such an exotic weapon?
I don't know. I can't understand it at all. Thinking logically, they were counting on no one finding out. They thought Sasha would die before anyone could figure out what killed him. That's almost what happened. If he had died any earlier, the special urine analysis wouldn't have been done, and without that test nothing could have been pinned down.
Interview by Natalia Gevorkian in London
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 21, 2006
|
|
|
