Washington Post December 13, 2006 Two Old Friends at Center of Poison Mystery By Peter Finn and Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service
MOSCOW, Dec. 12 -- At a closed hospital run by the Federal Medical-Biological Agency, two Russian men, friends since they were 12-year-olds, lie removed from the world and at the center of an international poisoning drama.
Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy, who visited with former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko the day he fell ill, have declared their innocence, as the investigation narrows to this city and to at least one of the men, Kovtun.
Each discovery of a trace of polonium-210, the radioactive isotope that killed Litvinenko, acts like a carelessly left fingerprint. British and German investigators say a trail of positive readings matches the movements of Kovtun from Moscow to Hamburg on Oct. 28 and then on to London, where he met with Litvinenko at the bar of the Millennium Hotel on Nov. 1.
Kovtun and Lugovoy both have ties to the Russian security services that Litvinenko said were out to kill him on President Vladimir Putin's orders. Yet they also have long-standing bonds with Putin's exiled enemies, who are seen in Moscow as likely suspects. How Kovtun, 41, came into possession of or contact with polonium-210 remains unanswered. He gave two interviews to Russian reporters in late November and has remained silent since. There are unconfirmed reports that he is seriously ill from radiation exposure.
Asked on Echo Moskvy radio on Nov. 24 what he thought had happened to Litvinenko, Kovtun said, "Of course I am thinking about it. But I dealt with justice so I would be very careful with any comments. I don't want to go into detail and tell fortunes from coffee grounds."
German police are investigating Kovtun as a suspect in illegal handling of a radioactive substance. Russian prosecutors call him a victim and have opened an attempted murder case on grounds that he was poisoned.
>From age 12, Kovtun and Lugovoy lived in the same
apartment block in Moscow, their fathers both employed
in the Soviet Defense Ministry. They went on to the
same elite academy, the Supreme Soviet Military
Command School, which turned out military and KGB
officers.
Lugovoy joined the KGB in 1987 and was assigned to the Ninth Department, or Kremlin guard, which provided security for high-ranking Communist officials. Kovtun went on to serve in what was then Czechoslovakia and later in East Germany, apparently as a military man. Whether he had an intelligence role there remains unknown.
At some point, Kovtun married a German, Marina Wall, now 31. He moved to the port city of Hamburg. Authorities there said he has held an unrestricted visa to live and work in Germany since the mid-1990s.
Police said they were investigating tips that Kovtun may have worked in Hamburg as a waiter.
Kovtun and Wall divorced but kept in touch. He rented an apartment one floor below his ex-wife's residence in a working-class part of Hamburg, neighbors said, but did not live there.
Police have established that Kovtun visited Wall in October on his way to London. He visited a local immigration office on Oct. 30 to update his visa.
In many places he went, he left traces of radiation: on one of the documents he submitted at the visa office; on a couch where he slept in his ex-wife's apartment; and in the BMW that brought him from the airport.
Wall remained hospitalized Tuesday, with her two young children from a separate relationship, as doctors tried to determine whether they had been exposed to polonium.
Hamburg law enforcement authorities sent an official request to the Russian government Tuesday for cooperation, but said officials in Moscow have not been forthcoming. German inspectors have not been given access to the Aeroflot plane in which Kovtun traveled from Moscow to Hamburg.
"The tunnel is still rather dark," Hamburg police spokesman Ralf Meyer said. "We cannot yet say with certainty whether he had polonium inside his body, whether he carried it with him on his body, or what he did here."
Across the street from Kovtun's apartment stands a district office of the German Greens party. "Nuclear Power? No Thanks," shouts a poster in the window.
It came as a shock for the neighbors to learn that the Russian emigre had potentially exposed them. "That something like this could be found in a residential neighborhood is just stunning," said Phyliss Demirel, a Greens official and city council member in Hamburg's Altona district. "People have children here. They live and work here. Every place this guy went, there are more and more consequences."
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lugovoy, 41, continued to serve with a federal protection unit. A year later, he was director of security at ORT, the television channel controlled by Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire who fled Russia in 2000 after clashing with Putin.
In June 2001, Lugovoy was charged with attempting to arrange the escape from custody of Nikolai Glushkov, first vice general director of Aeroflot, the Russian airline in which Berezovsky was a major shareholder. Glushkov and several other Aeroflot executives were charged with misappropriation of funds. Berezovsky has said that Glushkov was cleaning up black accounts in the airline that were used by the domestic security agency, the FSB.
Lugovoy was found guilty.
After getting out of prison, he went into business. In an interview with Echo Moskvy, he said he is an owner of a factory producing honey wine south of Moscow. Lugovoy also has an interest in a security firm in Moscow, according to news reports here.
Lugovoy said he had known Litvinenko for 10 years but had no personal or business relationship with him before Litvinenko fled Moscow after alleging that intelligence services had a role in the bombing of Russian apartment buildings.
Although Kovtun maintained his German residency papers, he moved back to Moscow. Lugovoy and Kovtun "began to work together," Vyacheslav Sokolenko, another former KGB man who now runs a security agency, said in an interview. He also served in the Ninth Department after graduating from the same military college as the two others.
Investigators are now scrutinizing contacts among these three men and Litvinenko in London.
Kovtun told Echo Moskvy that he was first introduced to Litvinenko by Lugovoy in London on Oct. 16. Litvinenko had "serious contacts with serious British companies which wanted to get into the Russian market but had experienced difficulties with this," he told the radio station.
The Nov. 1 meeting at the Millennium Hotel in central London's chic Mayfair neighborhood was unplanned, Kovtun said. Litvinenko simply phoned to say he wanted to come over to the hotel.
"We didn't talk much" there, Lugovoy told Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. "He only said that our business meeting was set for tomorrow at 10."
"Then my 8-year-old son ran in and I introduced him to Alexander. We stood and talked a little more. Then we went to the lobby and my wife with the daughters and Vyacheslav Sokolenko came in after their tour. We said hello and then went to our rooms. I didn't notice anything unusual in Alexander's behavior. We discussed Hamburg weather and Dmitry's dog." Kovtun has an Irish wolfhound.
Sokolenko, also at the hotel, said he had come to the city for a soccer match. "I learned there was a meeting with Litvinenko much later, on November 17," he said. "Maybe I saw him, but I had no idea the man was Litvinenko."
The following morning, Lugovoy said, Litvinenko called and said "he was feeling awful, stomach problems, and that he couldn't go to the meeting."
Whitlock reported from Hamburg. Special correspondent Shannon Smiley in Hamburg contributed to this report.
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