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Was Litvinenko telling the truth, and if so, was that his sole motivation for grabbing the limelight? Later, two of the officers in the episode claimed the stunt was bought and paid for by Berezovsky, which probably only heightened the rage of the man who had become the FSB's chief--Vladimir Putin. To Putin, a former KGB officer, what Litvinenko had done "was a major act of treason," says former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, now an exile in the U.S. after having written about Russia's tilt toward authoritarianism. In his book The Lubyanka Gang, Litvinenko, for his part, said he had gone to Putin before the press conference with proof showing which top FSB officers and high state officials were corrupt. Putin, he wrote, promised to take action--but had Litvinenko tailed instead and hired some of those accused of corruption to work for him. FSB officers arrested Litvinenko on corruption charges in 1999, and he was jailed for eight months. At trial, he was acquitted, then rearrested and jailed for an additional seven months on the same charges (which were quashed), then arrested again. He was eventually released on the condition that he did not leave Moscow.
Litvinenko broke that promise. With Putin having succeeded Yeltsin as President, Litvinenko and his family fled to London in October 2000--shortly after Berezovsky, who was later charged in Russia with fraud, had left for Britain. Litvinenko went to work for the billionaire and lived in a house owned by him. Both agitated against Putin, Berezovsky by financing human-rights and opposition groups and Litvinenko by producing two books furiously critical of the new President. Litvinenko, it is fair to say, didn't like Putin. Last summer he claimed in a letter posted on the Internet that the President was a habitual pedophile. Litvinenko also contended that Putin had been on the take from Mafia groups for years and that to advance his presidential ambitions, he had directed FSB officers to blow up apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999, killing more than 300 people--then pinning the outrage on Chechen rebels. (Putin has vehemently denied any involvement; Russian courts found a group of Chechens guilty of the crimes.) Litvinenko helped make a French film about the apartment bombings and was contributing to a documentary being made in London when he was murdered. This fall Litvinenko had been on the trail of the murderer of Anna Politkovskaya, a persistent critic of Putin's war in Chechnya and human-rights abuses in Russia. Politkovskaya was killed in the doorway of her Moscow apartment in October. Litvinenko was sure the order had come from the Kremlin.