We have gone mad, Your Majesty, and only you can cure our affliction
An open letter to the leader of Opec's biggest oil producer, the one man who can force Britain to cut its carbon emissions
George Monboit
Guardian 27 May 2008
King Abdaullah of Saudi Arabia
Your Majesty,
In common with the leaders of most western nations, our prime minister is urging you to increase your production of oil. I am writing to ask you to ignore him. Like the other leaders he is delusional, and is no longer competent to make his own decisions. You and I know that there are several reasons for the high price of oil. Low prices at the beginning of this decade discouraged oil companies from investing in future capacity. There is a global shortage of skilled labour, steel and equipment. The weak dollar means that the price of oil is higher than it would have been if denominated in another currency. While your government says that financial speculation is an important factor, the Bank of England says it is not, so I don't know what to believe. The major oil producers have also become major consumers; in some cases their exports are falling even as their production has risen, because they are consuming more of their own output.
But what you know and I do not is the extent to which the price of oil might reflect an absolute shortage of global reserves. You and your advisers are perhaps the only people who know the answer to this question. Your published reserves are, of course, a political artefact unconnected to geological reality. The production quotas assigned to its members by Opec, the oil exporters' cartel, reflect the size of their stated reserves, which means that you have an incentive to exaggerate them. How else could we explain the fact that, despite two decades of furious pumping, your kingdom posts the same reserves as it did in 1988?
You say that you are saving your oil for the benefit of future generations. If this is true, it is a rational economic decision: oil in the ground looks like a better investment than money in the bank. But, reluctant as I am to question your Majesty's word, I must remind you that some oil analysts are now wondering whether this prudence is a convenient fiction. Are you restricting supply because you want to conserve stocks and keep the price high, or are you unable to raise production because your fabled spare capacity does not in fact exist?
I do not expect an answer to this question. I know that the true state of your reserves is a secret so closely guarded that oil analysts now resort to using spy satellites to try to estimate the speed of subsidence of the ground above your oil fields, as they have no other means of guessing how fast your reserves are running down.
What I know, and you may not, is that the high price of oil is currently the only factor implementing British government policy. The government claims that it is seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by encouraging people to use less fossil fuel. Now, for the first time in years, its wish has come true: people are driving and flying less. The AA reports that about a fifth of drivers are buying less fuel. A new study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature shows that businesses are encouraging their executives to use video conferences instead of flying. One of the most fuel-intensive industries of all, business-only air travel, has collapsed altogether. In other words, your restrictions on supply - voluntary or otherwise - are helping the government to meet its carbon targets. So how does it respond? By angrily demanding that you remove them so that we can keep driving and flying as much as we did before. Last week, Gordon Brown averred that it's "a scandal that 40% of the oil is controlled by Opec, that their decisions can restrict the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and that at a time when oil is desperately needed, and supply needs to expand, that Opec can withhold supply from the market". In the United States, legislators have gone further: the House of Representatives has voted to bring a lawsuit against Opec's member states, and Democratic senators are trying to block arms sales to your kingdom unless you raise production.
This illustrates one of our leaders' delusions. They claim to wish to restrict the demand for fossil fuels, in order to address both climate change and energy security. At the same time, to quote Britain's Department for Business, they seek to "maximise economic recovery" from their remaining oil, gas and coal reserves. They persist in believing that both policies can be pursued at once, apparently unaware that if fossil fuels are extracted they will be burnt, however much they claim to wish to reduce consumption. The only states that appear to be imposing restrictions on the supply of fuel are the members of Opec, about which Brown so bitterly complains. Your Majesty, we have gone mad, and you alone can cure our affliction, by keeping your taps shut.
Our leaders, though they do not possess the least idea of whether the oil supplies required to support it will be sustained, are also overseeing a rapid expansion of our transport infrastructure. In the UK, we are building or upgrading thousands of miles of roads and doubling the capacity of our airports, in the expectation that there will be no restriction in the supply of fuel. The government's central forecast for the long-term price is just $70 a barrel. Over the past few months, I have been trying to discover how the government derives this optimistic view. In response to a parliamentary question, it reveals that its projection is based on "the assessment made by the International Energy Agency in its 2007 World Energy Outlook".
Well, last week the Wall Street Journal revealed that the IEA "is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast". Its final report won't be released until November, but it has already concluded that "future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought". Its previous estimates of global production were wrong for one simple and shocking reason: it had based them on anticipated demand, rather than anticipated supply. It resolved the question of supply by assuming that it would automatically rise to meet demand, as if it were subject to no inherent restraints.
Our government must have known this, but it has refused to conduct its own analysis of global oil reserves. Uniquely among possible threats to the economy and national security, it has commissioned no research of any kind into this question. So earlier this year, I asked the Department for Business what contingency plans it possesses to meet the eventuality that the IEA's estimates could be wrong, and that global supplies of petroleum might peak in the near future. "The government," it replied, "does not feel the need to hold contingency plans." I am sure I do not need to explain the implications if its forecasts turn out to be wildly wrong. Your Majesty, I recognise that this is not among your usual duties as the ruler of Saudi Arabia. But I respectfully beg you to save us from ourselves.
In the oilfields where John D Rockefeller drilled his way to a fortune, business is booming once more. Rupert Cornwell reports
Independent 27 May 2008
"I feel like I'm taking care of a herd of cows," says Bill Huber as he gently nudges his pick-up truck along muddy, gouged-out tracks to check on his precious charges, scattered through the woods. "Every day there's something to be done. A problem with a drill pipe, a bearing to replace, or something wrong with a pumping jack." Which is not surprising, given that some of the venerable contraptions in question first started to extract oil a century or more ago, and have now been pressed back into service, even though they yield just a few gallons a day. "You get one well going again, it may give you 10 to 15 barrels a day straight off. Then it tapers off. But even if it keeps going at just a third of a barrel a day, it's still pretty good."
Americans may wince at the ever-rising cost of petrol, a daily reminder of the grinding economic crisis that grips the country. But Bill Huber and the other "mom-and pop" producers in this part of the world aren't complaining, not when a 42-gallon barrel now sells for $135 (£68) or so, double what it fetched only a year ago, when every day seems to bring a new record price – and when the first commercially exploited oil field on the planet is enjoying a late-life renaissance. These steep, wooded hills of north-western Pennsylvania are the cradle of the modern, trillion-dollar, global oil industry. Here, on the edge of the stream called Oil Creek, a well drilled by Edwin Drake first coughed up the black stuff on 27 August 1859. A couple of years later, the world's oldest continuously producing well – the McClintock No 1, housed a couple of miles north of Oil City in what looks like an ancient garden shed – went on stream, and a few years after that, the world's first commercial oil pipeline was laid. Here too the first oil boom-and-bust cycle happened. From the fledgling industry, fragmented and unorganised, John D Rockefeller ruthlessly forged the monopoly of Standard Oil and became the richest man of his era.
Then came a long, genteel decline of an ancient family fallen on hard times, long surpassed by brash upstarts in Texas, the Middle East and beyond. The last refinery in the area was pulled down a few years ago. But the past lives on, not only in the rickety wells hooked up by rusty brown pipes, snaking through the mud and dead leaves to storage tanks from which trucks pick up the crude for refining. There are the town names like Oil City and Oleopolis, thoroughfares called Petroleum Street, opulent late 19th century houses built by the world's first oil moguls, even in the title of Oil City's daily paper – you've guessed – The Derrick.
With his slow way of talking, and oil-splatched overalls – not to mention the kennels behind his modest house – Mr Huber, 67, is no Rockefeller. But he has his own small place in the venerable history of Pennsylvania's oil patch. His great-great grandfather, a cooper by trade, came to the area in the mid-19th century and made some of the barrels used by the early local oil industry. Mr Huber's grandfather got into the production business proper at the start of the 20th century, drilling more than 50 wells. Now the third generation oilman has inherited the business, and even expanded it. Over the years he has bought up scores of other wells, mostly during the barren years when Pennsylvania's oil industry seemed doomed. In the late 1980s, the oil price sank to $10 a barrel, before recovering, only to plummet again amid the financial crises in Asia and Russia a decade later. "Many people round here said, 'we're done and that's it'. But me and three others stayed and bought up some of the wells, dirt cheap."
Even so, Mr Huber often needed the income from his kennels to balance his books. But now he has his petroleum herd, 230 low-volume "stripper" wells of which some 45 are in production, yielding "70 or 80 barrels a month, maybe 100 in a good one". Northwest Pennsylvania isn't Kuwait. But 100 barrels a month provides a decent income. Not that Mr Huber is living it up. He's put a new roof on his house in the woods, a few miles north-east of Oil City, and bought a new (or rather new-er) pick-up truck. Soon he may get round to doing up the kitchen. But that's it.
Elsewhere, however, the boom is unmistakeable. The big energy companies are back in Pennsylvania, seeking oil and, more importantly, gas. Already Pennsylvania has more stripper natural gas wells than any other state, and its proven gas reserves are half the US total. In the woods new wells are being drilled. Farmers who own the "OMG" (oil, mineral and gas) rights are leasing land to the companies for $2,500 an acre a year, compared with $25 a decade ago, and get production royalties on top of that. In five years, production of the waxy, paraffin-rich crude from Pennsylvania's Appalachian basin field has shot up 50 per cent to 3.8 million barrels. But experts reckon that two-thirds of the oil that was there when Drake drilled his way into history is still in the ground. Once it wasn't worth bothering with, but no longer. Rock Well Petroleum, a Canadian company, has plans not only to drill scores of new wells, but to dig huge underground caverns to collect the oil and pump it to the surface.
There's just one problem, however: what to do with the brine that comes with the oil, especially from older wells. McClintock No 1, for instance, now delivers 300 barrels of brine for every barrel of oil, says Barbara Zolli, the director of the state oil museum in nearby Titusville, at the site of Drake's first well.
The museum is about to be given a massive facelift, to mark next year's 150th anniversary of Drake's find. A replica has been built at that spot, but the hole in the ground is the original. "This place has relevance for everyone's life. People come here from all over the world to see it, they want to know where the oil industry started," Ms Zolli says. "Even now, you look at that hole and you feel goose-bumps."
And now this Indian summer for the industry. "It's never been as good as this," says Mr Huber, who remembers the bad times when he had to call the buying companies to collect oil even when the tanks weren't full, to get money to pay his bills. "Maybe the present sky-high prices won't last, but from what I can see, what with the Middle East troubles and China's huge demand for oil, they'll never go back down too far. And they keep telling us there's only so much oil left." He has had some offers, but isn't selling. One reason is history, a sense of obligation to his forebears. A fourth generation Huber, Bill Jr, is set to take over the family business, and such father-to-son traditions are hard to break. And then, of course, there's the money. "You may have just 20 wells and get a third of a barrel a day from each of them," Mr Huber notes. "But as my dad used to say, 'It all mounts up.'"
But you can't miss the caution in his voice. Good times are not eternal. Drake might have launched a giant industry, but spent his later years in ill-health and poverty. And as this tiny corner of the petroleum universe proves, booms are invariably followed by busts. The day the Drake well came in, world production doubled. By 1861, oil had hit $20 ($600 in today's dollars) a barrel, before crashing to 10 cents, equivalent to $3 now.
And then there was the story of Pithole, an incredible tale even by the wild standards of the American frontier. Oil first gushed along Pithole Creek in January 1865. By October the settlement was producing a then gigantic 6,000 barrels a day, delivered to barges by a new-fangled, five-mile-long pipeline. From nothing grew a town of 15,000 people, with 54 hotels, oyster houses, and a theatre that put on Shakespeare, most notably a louche version of Macbeth. But in three years Pithole was gone. The forest of wells were pumping oil from the same deposit, which ran dry just as other fields in Pennsylvania came on stream. In 1866, the town's land was valued at $2m. A dozen years later, the local authority bought the lot for $4.37 – a real estate collapse beside which today's sub-prime mortgage crisis pales. The biggest hotel in town, costing $40,000 ($1.2m today) to build, was sold for firewood for $16. Today, not a stone, not a shard, remains; only a grid of mown strips between the trees, denoting where Pithole's streets had briefly stood.
In the modern history of big oil, Pennsylvania merits little more than a similar footnote. But in its day it taught the world. In the 1880s, engineers from Oil City went to Baku in the southern Russian empire to develop the industry there, in the process undercutting their own business. And a Russian connection persists. Out inspecting Mr Huber's wells one recent morning, we ran into John Cubbon. An oil engineer and scion of an established Pennsylvania oil and lumber company, he has crude (or "maybe kerosene") in his blood. He worked with Shell in Russia, married a Russian woman, and was now with BP on another Russian project. Waiting for the Russian government to give him a visa, he had come home to take a look at the mini-boom. Pitholes come and go. But, Cubbon noted, "there's never been an oil field that's been totally abandoned".
RIYADH — Nader al-Mutairi stiffened his shoulders, clenched his fists and said, “Let’s do our mission.” Then the young man stepped into the cool, empty lobby of a dental clinic, intent on getting the phone number of one of the young women working as a receptionist. Asking a woman for her number can cause a young man anxiety anywhere. But in Saudi Arabia, getting caught with an unrelated woman can mean arrest, a possible flogging and dishonor, the worst penalty of all in a society where preserving a family’s reputation depends on faithful adherence to a strict code of separation between the sexes. Above all, Nader feared that his cousin Enad al-Mutairi would find out that he was breaking the rules. Nader is engaged to Enad’s 17-year-old sister, Sarah. “Please don’t talk to Enad about this,” he said. “He will kill me.” The sun was already low in the sky as Nader entered the clinic. Almost instantly, his resolve faded. His shoulders drooped, his hands unclenched and his voice began to quiver. “I am not lucky today; let’s leave,” he said. It was a flash of rebellion, almost instantly quelled. In the West, youth is typically a time to challenge authority. But what stood out in dozens of interviews with young men and women here was how completely they have accepted the religious and cultural demands of the Muslim world’s most conservative society. They may chafe against the rules, even at times try to evade them, but they can be merciless in their condemnation of those who flout them too brazenly. And they are committed to perpetuating the rules with their own children. That suggests that Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam, largely uncontested at home by the next generation and spread abroad by Saudi money in a time of religious revival, will increasingly shape how Muslims around the world will live their faith. Young men like Nader and Enad are taught that they are the guardians of the family’s reputation, expected to shield their female relatives from shame and avoid dishonoring their families by their own behavior. It is a classic example of how the Saudis have melded their faith with their desert tribal traditions. “One of the most important Arab traditions is honor,” Enad said. “If my sister goes in the street and someone assaults her, she won’t be able to protect herself. The nature of men is that men are more rational. Women are not rational. With one or two or three words, a man can get what he wants from a woman. If I call someone and a girl answers, I have to apologize. It’s a huge deal. It is a violation of the house.” Enad is the alpha male, a 20-year-old police officer with an explosive temper and a fondness for teasing. Nader, 22, is soft-spoken, with a gentle smile and an inclination to follow rather than lead. They are more than cousins; they are lifelong friends and confidants. That is often the case in Saudi Arabia, where families are frequently large and insular. Enad and Nader are among several dozen Mutairi cousins who since childhood have spent virtually all their free time together: Boys learning to be boys, and now men, together
They are average young Saudi men, not wealthy, not poor, not from the more liberal south or east, but residents of the nation’s conservative heartland, Riyadh. It is a flat, clean city of five million people that gleams with oil wealth, two glass skyscrapers and roads clogged with oversize S.U.V.’s. It offers young men very little in the way of entertainment, with no movie theaters and few sports facilities. If they are unmarried, they cannot even enter the malls where women shop. Guardians of Propriety
Nader sank deep into a cushioned chair in a hotel cafe, sipping fresh orange juice, fiddling with his cellphone. If there is one accessory that allows a bit of self-expression for Saudi men, it is their cellphones. Nader’s is filled with pictures of pretty women taken from the Internet, tight face shots of singers and actresses. His ring tone is a love song in Arabic (one of the most popular ring tones among his cousins is the theme song to “Titanic”). “I’m very romantic,” Nader said. “I don’t like action movies. I like romance. ‘Titanic’ is No. 1. I like ‘Head Over Heels.’ Romance is love.” Three days later, in a nearby restaurant, Nader and Enad were concentrating on eating with utensils, feeling a bit awkward since they normally eat with their right hands. Suddenly, the young men stopped focusing on their food. A woman had entered the restaurant, alone. She was completely draped in a black abaya, her face covered by a black veil, her hair and ears covered by a black cloth pulled tight. “Look at the batman,” Nader said derisively, snickering. Enad pretended to toss his burning cigarette at the woman, who by now had been seated at a table. The glaring young men unnerved her, as though her parents had caught her doing something wrong. “She is alone, without a man,” Enad said, explaining why they were disgusted, not just with her, but with her male relatives, too, wherever they were. When a man joined her at the table — someone they assumed was her husband — she removed her face veil, which fueled Enad and Nader’s hostility. They continued to make mocking hand gestures and comments until the couple changed tables. Even then, the woman was so flustered she held the cloth self-consciously over her face throughout her meal. “Thank God our women are at home,” Enad said. Nader and Enad pray five times a day, often stopping whatever they are doing to traipse off with their cousins to the nearest mosque. Prayer is mandatory in the kingdom, and the religious police force all shops to shut during prayer times. But it is also casual, as routine for Nader and Enad as taking a coffee break. To Nader and Enad, prayer is essential. In Enad’s view, jihad is, too, not the more moderate approach that emphasizes doing good deeds, but the idea of picking up a weapon and fighting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “Jihad is not a crime; it is a duty,” Enad said in casual conversation. “If someone comes into your house, will you stand there or will you fight them?” Enad said, leaning forward, his short, thick hands resting on his knees. “Arab or Muslim lands are like one house.” Would he go fight? “I would need permission from my parents,” he said. Nader, though, said, “Don’t ask me. I am afraid of the government.” The concept is such a fundamental principle, so embedded in their psyches, that they do not see any conflict between their belief in armed jihad and their work as security agents of the state. As a police officer, Enad helps conduct raids on suspected terrorist hideouts. Nader works in the military as a communications officer. Each earns about 4,000 riyals a month, about $1,200, not nearly enough to become independent from their parents. But that is not a huge concern, because fathers are expected to provide for even their grown children, to ensure that they have a place to live and the means to get married. To many parents, providing money is seen as more central to their duty — their honor — than ensuring that their children get an education. Each young man has the requisite mustache and goatee, and most of the time dresses in a traditional robe. Nader prefers the white thobe, an ankle-length gown; Enad prefers beige. But on weekends, they opt for the wild and crazy guy look, often wearing running pants, tight short-sleeved shirts, bright colors, stripes and plaids together, lots of Velcro and elastic on their shoes. In Western-style clothes, they both seem smaller, and a touch on the pudgy side. Nader says softly, “I don’t exercise.”
Family Life
There are eight other children in the house where Enad lives with his father, his mother and his father’s second wife. The apartment has little furniture, with nothing on the walls. The men and boys gather in a living room off the main hall, sitting on soiled beige wall-to-wall carpeting, watching a television propped up on a crooked cabinet. The women have a similar living room, nearly identical, behind closed doors. The house remains a haven for Enad and his cousins, who often spend their free time sleeping, watching Dr. Phil and Oprah with subtitles on television, drinking cardamom coffee and sweet tea — and smoking. Enad and Nader were always close, but their relationship changed when Nader and Sarah became engaged. Enad’s father agreed to let Nader marry one of his four daughters. Nader picked Sarah, though she is not the oldest, in part, he said, because he actually saw her face when she was a child and recalled that she was pretty. They quickly signed a wedding contract, making them legally married, but by tradition they do not consider themselves so until the wedding party, set for this spring. During the intervening months, they are not allowed to see each other or spend any time together. Nader said he expected to see his new wife for the first time after their wedding ceremony — which would also be segregated by sex — when they are photographed as husband and wife. “If you want to know what your wife looks like, look at her brother,” Nader said in defending the practice of marrying someone he had seen only once, briefly, as a child. That is the traditional Nader, who at times conflicts with the romantic Nader. Soon his cellphone beeped, signaling a text message. Nader blushed, stuck his tongue out and turned slightly away to read the message, which came from “My Love.” He sneaks secret phone calls and messages with Sarah. When she calls, or writes a message, his phone flashes “My Love” over two interlocked red hearts. “I have a connection,” he said, quietly, as he read, explaining how Sarah manages to communicate with him. His connection is Enad, who secretly slipped Sarah a cellphone that Nader had bought for her. These conversations are taboo and could cause a dispute between two families. So their talks were clandestine, like sneaking out for a date after the parents go to bed. Enad keeps the secret, but it adds to an underlying tension between the two, as Nader tries to develop his own identity as a future head of household, as a man. Enad teases Nader, saying, “In a year you will find my sister with a mustache and him in the kitchen.” “Not true,” Nader said, mustering as much defiance as he could. “I am a man.” Another flashpoint: The honeymoon. Nader is planning to take Sarah to Malaysia, and Enad wants to go. He suggests that Nader owes him. “Yes, take me,” Enad says, with a touch of mischief in his voice. Nader cannot seem to tell whether he is kidding. “You know, he can be crazy,” Nader said. “He’s always angry. No, he is not coming. It is not a good idea.” Back in the Village Nader grew up in Riyadh, and his parents, like Enad’s, are first cousins. Enad says his way of thinking was forged in the village of Najkh, 350 miles west of Riyadh, where he lived until he was 14 with his grandfather. It is where he still feels most comfortable. When he can, he has a cousin drive him to his grandfather’s home, a one-story cement box in the desert, four miles from the nearest house. There is a walled-in yard of sand with piles of wood used to heat the house in the cold desert winters. Inside there is no furniture, just a few cushions on the floor and a prayer rug pointing in the direction of Mecca. Enad and his cousins absentmindedly toss trash out the kitchen window, and around the yard, expecting that the “houseboy,” a man named Nasreddin from India, will clean up after them — and he does. Enad is quiet and hides his cigarettes when his grandfather comes through. He would never tell his father or grandfather that he smokes. Enad remains stone-faced when a cousin mentions that another of his cousins, a woman named Al Atti, 22, is interested in him. The topic came up because another cousin, Raed, had asked Al Atti to marry him, and she refused. The conflict and flirtation touched on so many issues — manhood, love, family relations — that it sparked a flurry of whispering, and even Enad was drawn in. Al Atti had let her sisters know that she liked Enad, but made it clear that she could never admit that publicly. So she asked a sister to spread the word from cousin to cousin, and ultimately to Enad. “It’s forbidden to announce your love. It is impossible,” she said. Word finally reached Enad, who tried to stay cool but was clearly interested, and flattered. At that point Enad was himself whispering about Al Atti, trying to figure out a way to communicate with her without actually talking to her himself. He asked a female visitor to arrange a call, and then pass along a message of interest. Enad said it was never his idea to pursue her, but that a man — a real man — could not reject a woman who wanted him. To get his cousin Raed out of the picture, he suggested that Al Atti’s brother take Raed to hear Al Atti’s refusal in person, at her house. “From behind a wall,” Enad said. “Love is dangerous,” Al Atti said as she sat with her sisters in the house. “It can ruin your reputation.”
A Question of Romance
It was a short visit, two days in the village, and then Enad was back to Riyadh for work. In Riyadh he seemed to be both excited and tormented by Al Atti’s interest. That weekend, he and Nader went out to the desert, just outside of Riyadh, where young men go to drive Jeeps in the sand and to relax, free from the oversight of the religious police and neighbors. They sat beside each other on a blanket. Nader began. “I am a romantic person,” he said. “There is no romance.” What Nader meant was that Saudi traditions do not allow for romance between young, unmarried couples. There are many stories of young men and women secretly dating, falling in love, but being unable to tell their parents because they could never explain how they knew each other in the first place. One young couple said that after two years of secret dating they hired a matchmaker to arrange a phony introduction so their parents would think that was how they had met. Now, in the desert, Nader’s candor set Enad off. “He thinks that there is no romance. How is there no romance?” Enad said, his eyes bulging as he grew angry. “When you get married, be romantic with your wife. You want to meet a woman on the street so you can be romantic?” Nader was intimidated, and frightened. “No, no,” he said. “Convince me then that you’re right,” Enad shot back. “I am saying there is no romance,” Nader said, trying to push back. Enad did not relent, berating his cousin. Under his breath, Nader said, “Enad knows everything.” Then he folded. “Fine, there is romance,” he said, and got up and walked away, flushed and embarrassed.
Love on Girls’ Side of the Saudi Divide
Katherine Zoepf
New York Times 13 May 2008
RIYADH— The dance party in Atheer Jassem al-Othman’s living room was in full swing. The guests — about two dozen girls in their late teens — had arrived, and Ms. Othman and her mother were passing around cups of sweet tea and dishes of dates. About half the girls were swaying and gyrating, without the slightest self-consciousness, among overstuffed sofas, heavy draperies, tables larded with figurines and ornately-covered tissue boxes. Their head-to-toe abayas, balled up and tossed onto chairs, looked like black cloth puddles. Suddenly, the music stopped, and an 18-year-old named Alia tottered forward. “Girls? I have something to tell you,” Alia faltered, appearing to sway slightly on her high heels. She paused anxiously, and the next words came out in a rush. “I’ve gotten engaged!” There was a chorus of shrieks at the surprise announcement and Alia burst into tears, as did several of the other girls. Ms. Othman’s mother smiled knowingly and left the room, leaving the girls to their moment of emotion. The group has been friends since they were of middle-school age, and Alia would be the first of them to marry. A cellphone picture of Alia’s fiancé — a 25-year-old military man named Badr — was passed around, and the girls began pestering Alia for the details of her showfa. A showfa — literally, a “viewing” — usually occurs on the day that a Saudi girl is engaged. A girl’s suitor, when he comes to ask her father for her hand in marriage, has the right to see her dressed without her abaya. In some families, he may have a supervised conversation with her. Ideally, many Saudis say, her showfa will be the only time in a girl’s life that she is seen this way by a man outside her family. The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are spirited around the city in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special “family” sections of cafes and restaurants, which are carefully partitioned from the sections used by single male diners. Special women-only gyms, women-only boutiques and travel agencies, even a women-only shopping mall, have been established in Riyadh in recent years to serve women who did not previously have access to such places unless they were chaperoned by a male relative. Playful as they are, girls like Ms. Othman and her friends are well aware of the limits that their conservative society places on their behavior. And, for the most part, they say that they do not seriously question those limits. Most of the girls say their faith, in the strict interpretation of Islam espoused by the Wahhabi religious establishment here, runs very deep. They argue a bit among themselves about the details — whether it is acceptable to have men on your Facebook friend list, or whether a male first cousin should ever be able to see you without your face covered — and they peppered this reporter with questions about what the young Saudi men she had met were thinking about and talking about. But they seem to regard the idea of having a conversation with a man before their showfas and subsequent engagements with very real horror. When they do talk about girls who chat with men online or who somehow find their own fiancés, these stories have something of the quality of urban legends about them: fuzzy in their particulars, told about friends of friends, or “someone in my sister’s class.” Well-brought-up unmarried young women here are so isolated from boys and men that when they talk about them, it sometimes sounds as if they are discussing a different species.
Questions for the Fiancé
Later that evening, over fava bean stew, salad, and meat-filled pastries, Alia revealed that she was to be allowed to speak to her fiancé on the phone. Their first phone conversation was scheduled for the following day, she said, and she was so worried about what to say to Badr that she was compiling a list of questions. “Ask him whether he likes his work,” one of her friends suggested. “Men are supposed to love talking about their work.” “Ask him what kind of cellphone he has, and what kind of car,” suggested another. “That way you’ll be able to find out how he spends his money, whether he’s free with it or whether he’s stingy.” Alia nodded earnestly, dark ringlets bouncing, and took notes. She had been so racked with nerves during her showfa that she had almost dropped the tray of juice her father had asked her to bring in to her fiancé, and she could hardly remember a thing he had said. She was to learn a bit more about him during this next conversation. According to about 30 Saudi girls and women between ages 15 and 25, all interviewed during December, January and February, it is becoming more and more socially acceptable for young engaged women to speak to their fiancés on the phone, though more conservative families still forbid all contact between engaged couples. It is considered embarrassing to admit to much strong feeling for a fiancé before the wedding and, before their engagements, any kind of contact with a man is out of the question. Even so, young women here sometimes resort to clandestine activities to chat with or to meet men, or simply to catch a rare glimpse into the men’s world. Though it is as near to hand as the offices they pass each morning on the way to college, or the majlis, a traditional home reception room, where their fathers and brothers entertain friends, the men’s world is so remote from them that some Saudi girls resort to disguise in order to venture into it. At Prince Sultan University, where Atheer Jassem al-Othman, 18, is a first-year law student, a pair of second-year students recently spent a mid-morning break between classes showing off photographs of themselves dressed as boys. In the pictures, the girls wore thobes, the ankle-length white garments traditionally worn by Saudi men, and had covered their hair with the male headdresses called shmaghs. One of the girls had used an eyeliner pencil to give herself a grayish, stubble-like mist along her jaw line. Displayed on the screens of the two girls’ cellphones, the photographs evoked little exclamations of congratulation as they were passed around. “A lot of girls do it,” said an 18-year-old named Sara al-Tukhaifi who explained that a girl and her friends might cross-dress, sneaking thobes out of a brother’s closet, then challenge each other to enter the Saudi male sphere in various ways, by walking nonchalantly up to the men-only counter in a McDonalds, say, or even by driving. “It’s just a game,” Ms. Tukhaifi said, although detention by the religious police is always a possibility. “I haven’t done it myself, but those two are really good at it. They went into a store and pretended to be looking at another girl — they even got her to turn her face away.” Grinning, Ms. Tukhaifi mimicked the gesture, pressing her face into the corner of her hijab with exaggerated pretend modesty while her classmate Shaden giggled. Saudi newspapers often lament the rise of rebellious behavior among young Saudis. There are reports of a recent spate of ugly confrontations between youths and the religious police, and of a supposed increase in same-sex love affairs among young people frustrated at the strict division between the genders. And certainly, practices like “numbering” — where a group of young men in a car chase another car they believe to contain young women, and try to give the women their phone number via Bluetooth, or by holding a written number up to the window — have become a very visible part of Saudi urban life.
Flirting by Phone
A woman can’t switch her phone’s Bluetooth feature on in a public place without receiving a barrage of the love poems and photos of flowers and small children which many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis have started buying special “electronic belts,” which use Bluetooth technology to discreetly beam the wearer’s cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex. Ms. Tukhaifi and Shaden know of girls in their college who have passionate friendships, possibly even love affairs, with other girls but they say that this, like the cross-dressing, is just a “game” born of frustration, something that will inevitably end when the girls in question become engaged. And they and their friends say that they find the experience of being chased by boys in cars to be frightening, and insist that they do not know any girl who has actually spoken to a boy who contacted her via Bluetooth. “If your family found out you were talking to a man online, that’s not quite as bad as talking to him on the phone,” Ms. Tukhaifi explained. “With the phone, everyone can agree that is forbidden, because Islam forbids a stranger to hear your voice. Online he only sees your writing, so that’s slightly more open to interpretation. “One test is that if you’re ashamed to tell your family something, then you know for sure it’s wrong,” Ms. Tukhaifi continued. “For a while I had Facebook friends who were boys — I didn’t e-mail with them or anything, but they asked me to 'friend' them and so I did. But then I thought about my family and I took them off the list.” Ms. Tukhaifi and Shaden both spoke admiringly of the religious police, whom they see as the guardians of perfectly normal Saudi social values, and Shaden boasted lightly about an older brother who has become multazim, very strict in his faith, and who has been seeing to it that all her family members become more punctilious in their religious observance. “Praise be to God, he became multazim when he was in ninth grade,” Shaden recalled, fondly. “I remember how he started to grow his beard — it was so wispy when it started — and to wear a shorter thobe.” Saudi men often grow their beards long and wear their thobes cut above the ankles as signals of their religious devotion. “I always go to him when I have problems,” said Shaden who, like many of the young Saudi women interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition that her last name be omitted. “And he’s not too strict — he still listens to music sometimes. I asked him once, ‘You do everything right and yet you’re listening to music?’ He said, ‘I know music is haram, and inshallah, with time I will be able to stop listening to music too.’ ” Haram means forbidden, and inshallah means “God willing.” She added, “I told him, ‘I want a husband like you.’ ”
Separated From Cousins
Shaden lives in a large walled compound in a prosperous Riyadh suburb; her father’s brothers live with their families in separate houses within the compound, and the families share a common garden and pool. Shaden and several of her male cousins grew up playing together constantly, tearing around the pool together during the summer, and enjoying shared vacations. Now that, at 17, she is considered an adult Saudi woman and must confine herself to the female sphere, she sometimes misses their company. “Until I was in 9th or 10th grade, we used to put a carpet on the lawn and we would take hot milk and sit there with my boy cousins,” Shaden recalled, at home one February evening, in front of the television. She was serving a few female guests a party dip of her own invention, a concoction of yogurt, mayonnaise and thyme. “But my mom and their mom got uncomfortable with it, and so we stopped,” she said. “Now we sometimes talk on MSN, or on the phone, but they shouldn’t ever see my face.” “My sister and I sometimes ask my mom, ‘Why didn’t you breast-feed our boy cousins, too?’ ” Shaden continued. She was referring to a practice called milk kinship that predates Islam and is still common in the Persian Gulf countries. A woman does not have to veil herself in front of a man she nursed as an infant, and neither do her biological children. The woman’s biological children and the children she has nursed are considered “milk siblings” and are prohibited from marrying. “If my mom had breast-fed my cousins, we could sit with them, and it would all be much easier,” Shaden said. She turned back to the stack of DVDs she had been rifling through, and held up a copy of Pride and Prejudice, the version with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet, a film she says she has seen dozens of times. “It’s a bit like our society, I think,” Shaden said of late Georgian England. “It’s dignified, and a bit strict. Doesn’t it remind you a little bit of Saudi Arabia? It’s my favorite DVD.” Shaden sighed, deeply. “When Darcy comes to Elizabeth and says ‘I love you’ — that’s exactly the kind of love I want.”
His gruesome and very public death shocked the world – and threw London and Moscow into their worst diplomatic crisis since the Cold War. But 18 months on, Mary Dejevsky argues we're still not being told the whole, chilling story
Independent 2 May 2008
Alexander Litvinenko died on 23 November 2006, after a mysterious and painful illness. The cause was identified, less than two hours before his death, by scientists at the British government's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. They found that he had been poisoned, with the radioactive isotope polonium-210. The diagnosis came too late for an antidote to be administered. But the victim, who had been a hale and hearty 44-year-old only four weeks before, had time to authorise a thunderous deathbed statement in which he accused Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, of ordering his murder.
Litvinenko's very public suffering, complete with ghoulish photographs and daily bulletins, was chronicled (with rather too much relish for my taste) by Alex Goldfarb, a former Russian human rights activist and friend of Litvinenko. As it happened, his macabre one-man show outside London's University College Hospital coincided with the release of the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale. Everything contrived to raise the fearsome cold-war stereotypes of Russia that lurk fractionally below the genteel surface of British opinion. Russia was suddenly back in vogue, in the most convincingly negative way. From there, it was but an elegant diplomatic one-step to the authorised British version of the "Litvinenko affair". During his almost six years in London, this former Soviet and Russian intelligence officer had become an increasingly outspoken foe of President Putin. His dramatic deathbed "J'accuse" served posthumously as indictment and proof of Kremlin complicity. The polonium clinched it. Only Russia, it was said, had the capacity to produce polonium-210. The lab, even the date of production, could easily be identified. And if anyone asked why, of all substances available to potential assassins, the choice had fallen on polonium, the answer came back pat: it was in the confident expectation that the cause of death would never be diagnosed. In the unlikely event that the British public still harboured the odd doubt, there were only a few weeks to wait for a fall guy. The presumed assassin hove into view right on cue: Andrei Lugovoi, another former KGB agent and security consultant, had left a radioactive trail all over aircraft, offices and hotels. In late May, 2007 – by which time he was safely back in Russia – the British submitted a formal request for his extradition. That the Russians turned it down flat only completed the familiar picture. Russia was guilty; guilty as hell.
Now, maybe the simple and obvious explanation is the correct one. Maybe Putin, a former KGB man – "once a chekist, always a chekist", as the saying goes (Lenin's Cheka was the forerunner of the KGB) – had personally issued the order to punish Litvinenko as the traitor that, in his eyes, he undoubtedly was. If you think it a stretch to believe that Putin himself commissioned the dirty deed, how about a splinter group of resentful erstwhile KGB colleagues? Nor need the motive stop there. Litvinenko fell ill the day after he was granted British citizenship. Might his killer(s) not have had a supplementary purpose: to use this very public, lingering death to scare Britain's most outspoken Russian exiles into leaving, or at least keeping their anti-Putin thoughts quiet? The explanation is neat, self-contained and entirely plausible. But is it the truth, or anything like the truth? You do not have to be a Le Carré to see espionage and exile as fertile fields for deception. The most straightforward story may turn out to contain hidden depths or be built on shifting sand. And there were early signs – not least in the speed with which the official British version became set in diplomatic aspic – that there might have been more to the affair than met the eye.
The first people to articulate doubts, characteristically, were the myriad conspiracists of the blogosphere – which was useful to peddlers of the official view in that it helped to discredit more substantial doubters. Over the months, however, alternative versions have grown in consistency and authority to the point where they now deserve a serious hearing. Contributions have been made by individuals who patently know what they are talking about – whether it is the science of radiation, the byways of espionage or the incestuous milieu of exiled Russians. Locked out of the mainstream media as irresponsible fantasists, they have turned to the alternative media, or to blogs.
The most recent and, to my mind, most persuasive, piece of revisionism managed, just, to cross the bridge to the mainstream. A long and detailed article by the veteran US investigative journalist, Edward Jay Epstein, it was printed in The New York Sun (19 March 2008) and has been avidly read and critiqued on the internet. So far as I am aware, this article has not been published in Britain, but that has not prevented it being dismissed as inconsequential. It was referred to contemptuously by Litvinenko's widow, Marina, in an article that appeared recently (27 March) under her name in The Times. She tossed it off as a piece printed "in a third-rate New York newspaper" written by a "fringe American journalist". The thrust of her article was a call for a public inquest into her husband's death. But the timing of its publication, soon after the appearance of Epstein's investigative tour de force, suggests that a pre-emptive trashing of his thesis was at least part of the reason why she put pen to paper when she did. I have a great deal of time for Marina Litvinenko. She has suffered her extraordinary, and in many ways tragic, predicament with immense dignity and forbearance. Her romance with Alexander, whom she describes as the love of her life, had lasted 16 years, and was ended brutally. She comes across as utterly honest and sincere. She is all of a piece and she does not adapt either her manner or her story according to the audience.
In one way, however, she may not be the most useful witness. What she actually knew about her husband's work, either in Russia or after they fled to Britain, appears not to be a great deal. As someone who found love relatively late in life, she says, she saw it as her role to make her husband's complicated life easier in whatever way she could. A former dance teacher, petite and elegant, she professes to have taken no part, nor even exercised any curiosity about, what his work in exile entailed. She does say, though, that he was often homesick, adapted poorly to life abroad and spent much time watching Russian television news and videos of old Russian films. She hints, too, that he had a difficult side. As she tells it, he could be dogmatic, tending to see the world in black and white. In Russia, she says – and again, this would fit his character – his work was on the policing side of the intelligence services, and focused on investigating the organised crime that burgeoned in the 1990s. He also served in the border region adjacent to Chechnya – that was where he had grown up – and helped recruit informers from among anti-Russian Chechen fighters. Marina says he was not trained in espionage, nor did he ever work as a secret agent – by which I think she means he was never a cold-war-style spy. She saw him, rather, as a painstaking and dedicated seeker after truth.
She also presents him as a stickler for the law, and cites his adamant refusal to let her drive the family car before she had passed her British driving test, even though she had a Russian licence. He would do nothing, she said, absolutely nothing, that might put the family on the wrong side of the law of the land that had given them refuge. Yet Edward Jay Epstein is not someone whose journalism should be dismissed lightly. He is, to be sure, something of a professional sceptic, but that does not make him wrong. He has in the past exposed stories published in The New York Times as having been essentially dictated by the political establishment. How right he was about the cosy relationship between that venerable newspaper and the Administration was evident from its obsequious coverage of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction – a humungous error that eventually produced an abject apology. No one in the journalistic world would deny that Epstein's investigative pedigree is serious or that he has an ear for "spin" and disinformation. In compiling his article for The New York Sun – and the more exhaustive material that appears on his website – he interviewed dozens of people and delved into the scientific aspects of the case. In what was a considerable coup, he also went to Moscow, where he was allowed to see the extradition papers submitted by the British for their chief suspect, Andrei Lugovoi. These are documents that no one in Britain has seen, not even Litvinenko's widow. Marina, not unreasonably, resents this, and regards Epstein's expedition as a Russian propaganda ploy. She says he was "invited" to Moscow on the understanding that his article would be supportive of the Russian view.
The Russians may well have been kindly disposed towards Epstein as a sceptic of the conventional wisdom. But he tells the story of his Moscow trip rather differently. He says that it took much persistence to get to Russia, and then to gain access to the papers. As for being invited, most foreigners need an invitation from a Russian institution to obtain a visa, so Marina's point may be technically true without implying anything about Epstein's objectivity. What he says struck him above all about the papers was the flimsiness of the British case and the lack of even a post-mortem report. In that respect, Marina may have a point about his pro-Russian sympathies. But it is the theory he eventually gravitates towards to which Marina Litvinenko so takes exception. This is that Alexander poisoned himself while handling radioactive material. Epstein posits that Litvinenko was poisoned by accident – the post mortem, he says, would have determined whether he ingested the polonium-210 or inhaled it. Part of his thesis is that the isotope had been smuggled to London not to murder someone, but as part of an illegal nuclear transaction. Marina's refusal to entertain such a theory is understandable. As she says, "I have to protect my husband's good name." The husband she knew was faithful, honest and law-abiding to a fault. The very notion that he would be involved in illicit, not to mention highly dangerous, dealings seems to her alien in the extreme.
It is partly to quash such speculation that she is pressing, through her solicitor – the respected human rights lawyer, Louise Christian – for a full inquest into her husband's death. If she cannot have justice, she says, she deserves at least the truth. The British authorities do not seem to be exactly rushing to hold an inquest, even though the last agony of Litvinenko, a Russian exile who had just become a British national, must surely qualify as one of the most shocking deaths to have occurred in the capital for years. The delay can be explained by a technicality: if a prosecution is in prospect, then an inquest is not held until afterwards, because all relevant questions might be cleared up by a trial. On her client's behalf, Christian is categorical about what makes an inquest imperative. There was, she says, a "massive breach of security". A lethal radioactive substance was brought into the country "for a terrorist purpose.... Not only Litvinenko was contaminated, but other individuals as well". It is vital, she says, that lessons are learnt – and for that it needs to be established where the polonium was produced, how it came into the country, and how it was subsequently spread around.
It is up to the St Pancras coroner, as this is the jurisdiction that University College Hospital comes under, whether and when an inquest is held. And while coroners officially enjoy substantial independence, there are points where political pressure can be exerted. So the more time that elapses without an inquest being scheduled into one of London's most high-profile deaths, the more the delay looks suspicious. After all, if the case is as cut and dried as the British government has consistently made out, what has anyone possibly to lose? The answer, if the persistent digging of informed sceptics, such as Epstein, has come anywhere near the truth, could be an awful lot. Consider the questions that remain open almost 18 months after Litvinenko's death. There are a great many of them; some overlap, but they are roughly divisible into five clusters. The most obvious relate to the polonium-210 that was identified as the cause of his illness just before he died. Then there is the role of Andrei Lugovoi. The Crown Prosecution Service says it has enough evidence to charge with murder, but the only third party to have seen the papers, Edward Epstein, says the case is extremely thin. Third, there are the mysterious activities of Litvinenko himself. The fourth cluster of questions concerns the part, if any, played by the British secret services, and, last, the role of the exiled Russian oligarch, the enigmatic Boris Berezovsky.
For the sake of clarity, I will deal with these groups of questions one by one.
Polonium The accepted wisdom has been that polonium-210 is produced only in Russia and that the particular laboratory, its jurisdiction and so the identity of the organisation that gave the crucial order, would be easily identified. Since then, no names have been named, even though the "right" answers should surely bolster the British contention that Russia, or the former KGB, was behind the killing. Unofficially, the Avangard plant at Sarov, east of Moscow, is thought the likely source. So why have British officials not named it? One explanation is that the police are holding back such details for fear of jeopardising the accused's chance of a fair trial. Given that a trial now seems such a remote prospect, though, it is hard to see why this information is still not in the public domain. Another explanation might be that the answers do not fit the favoured theory. What is certain is that Russia is not the only producer of polonium-210. Epstein (among others) reports that, while Russia produces it for export to the United States (!), any country with a nuclear reactor not subject to IAEA inspection can produce it – they include China, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea. So the consolation that there is only Russia to worry about is flat wrong. But there is another, and perhaps bigger, problem. Scientists who know anything about polonium-210 find it hard to believe that anyone would choose it as a murder weapon against one individual, even if the purpose was to evade detection. For a start, it is extremely expensive. But it also fits much more comfortably into another scenario: that of nuclear smuggling. It seems far more likely that the polonium tracked in London was part of some sort of deal – a deal that, for whatever reason, went disastrously wrong. Demand for polonium-210 on the illegal international market is as a key element in detonating a nuclear explosion. This is why it commands such a fantastically high price – hundreds of thousands, if not the many millions, of dollars mentioned by some. Money, and even nuclear terrorism, thus emerge as plausible motives to compete with the theory of a Putin-inspired political assassination. Either would entail embarrassment for the British authorities, for it would suggest that illegal nuclear trafficking was going on under their very noses, with all the attendant dangers to the population. It also raises the question of border security. The small matter of how such a lethal substance got into the country pertains, of course, regardless of its intended purpose. So far, however, this crucial question has been successfully muffled by the horror of the presumed crime and the blanket allegation that "the Russians did it".
Lugovoi The second cluster of questions relates to Andrei Lugovoi, charged in Britain with Litvinenko's murder. A former KGB agent with his own security company, he was singled out from the radiation trail left on several planes and at various locations in London. This trail was also used to determine that the poisoning took place at the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair and that the polonium was disguised in a cup of tea. Despite the familiarity of this version, practically every element of it raises doubts. The sequence of meetings and flights that established Lugovoi as the original carrier of the polonium has been convincingly challenged. The British – Epstein and others have suggested – have omitted details of flights and contaminated sites that would contradict the thesis that the polonium originated with Lugovoi. Counter-theories make Litvinenko himself the centre, and source, of the contamination. They track the radiation trail first from London, rather than Russia. They also note that one of the properties reported (by The Independent, 26 January 2007) as contaminated – an office building at 25 Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, does not figure in the official trail. It is an office building believed to be owned by Boris Berezovsky. Some of the most persistent doubts about the fingering of Lugovoi centre on the meeting in the Pine Bar. Lugovoi – of whose account more later – sees this encounter as a set-up designed to frame him. He says that Litvinenko dropped in only briefly and that no tea was ordered or drunk. Lugovoi also notes that no CCTV footage has ever been produced to prove the Pine Bar/contaminated tea story, even though the place bristled with cameras. The closest thing to evidence was a story that appeared out of the blue in the British press a full seven months later, identifying the waiter who supposedly served the tea. This has all the hallmarks of an effort to shore up a version teetering on the brink of collapse. If there was any deliberate poisoning – by tea, or any other substance – the most plausible venue appears to be a room at the same hotel where the two met earlier that same day (1 November). But the two had met on two previous occasions as well: two weeks before at another hotel, and in August at Litvinenko's home. There is nothing, however, to prove conclusively who poisoned whom – nor to disprove the theory that Litvinenko might somehow have been poisoned by mistake. Lugovoi has, of course, strenuously denied that he was the assassin – and, of course, he would, wouldn't he? I would argue, though, that what he had to say when he gave his first Moscow press conference (31 May 2007), and repeated at a later appearance (29 August 2007) held largely for the British media, does not necessarily deserve to be dismissed as fabrication. On both occasions, Lugovoi appears cocky – but this does not prove he is lying. What also impresses is his spontaneity and the consistency of the detail under questioning. His account of approaches from MI6 and meetings with named agents at a New Cavendish Street address – have a ring of truth. It is worth noting, too, that none of the details has been denied by any branch of the British authorities. The have preferred the time-honoured tactic of ridicule. As Lugovoi tells it, a long, calculated effort was made by MI6 to recruit him – an effort he eventually rebuffed. He said they wanted him to pass on intelligence and dish the dirt on Putin. He also says that after Litvinenko died, he "cooperated with the Crown Prosecutor's office and answered every question. I also answered all the questions that the Scotland Yard investigators asked me." There has been no denial of this from either the CPS or the Met. Would a murderer be so cooperative? Lugovoi's central defence, however, is lack of motive. "Just think of it," he says. "They have found a Russian James Bond, who has access to nuclear plants and poisons a friend in cold blood, and, in so doing, poisons himself, his friends, his children and his wife.... Then, as a result, he loses his business and clients. The main question is what for? Where is the motive for my crime?" For the record, Lugovoi's lack of motive is something that also worries Litvinenko's widow. What we have here, then, is a chief suspect with no motive, who may not have been the source of the polonium, and who says he was set up by MI6. If this last point is true, then there may be other reasons why he has been accused – and why the British might not want him in a London witness box. This could explain something else that has long been a mystery to me. I always found it difficult to believe that the British ever seriously expected to obtain Lugovoi's extradition, especially against a Russian constitutional provision that expressly protects Russian nationals against being delivered to a foreign country. I never understood, either, why the British were so furious about Russia's non-compliance that almost the first act of David Miliband as Foreign Secretary was to up the ante by expelling four Russian diplomats. British official fury becomes more much more comprehensible, however, if Lugovoi's real crime in their eyes was not to have killed Litvinenko, but to have fled the clutches of British intelligence – with, perhaps, information valuable enough to buy his safety back home. Fast-tracked into the Russian parliament last December, he now enjoys immunity not only from extradition, but from prosecution in his own country. In sum, there are plenty of reasons not to accept the accusations against Andrei Lugovoi at face value.
Litvinenko The authorised British version is that Alexander Litvinenko was a political refugee who paid the ultimate price for his vocal opposition to Putin. The more that emerges about him, however, the more complicated his life seems to have been. Mystery surrounds precisely how Litvinenko occupied himself when he was not at home watching old videos. He and his family received a house and an income from Boris Berezovsky's charitable foundation, but it is not clear what his paymaster might have asked of him in return. According to the book written jointly by his widow and Alex Goldfarb – the Russian émigré who issued the bulletins on Litvinenko's fatal illness – he helped conduct due diligence investigations into Russian companies on the part of would-be foreign investors. He is also known to have travelled frequently, mainly to Georgia and other countries formerly in the Soviet Union. At the same time, much of the information he had been privy to as an investigator in the commercial division of Russian intelligence in the 1990s would have been out of date, so his usefulness to any investor would have been limited – as it would have been to a foreign intelligence service. It was apparently the low grade of information he had to offer that brought a rejection from his first choice of asylum – the United States. There has been speculation that towards the end he had money worries, precipitated perhaps by a desire to break with Berezovsky. Others say this is disinformation. What is not in dispute is that he had known Andrei Lugovoi in the 1990s and that they shared a connection with Boris Berezovsky. They had not been in touch, however, for almost 10 years, when Litvinenko suddenly approached Lugovoi from London, and suggested meeting up. Lugovoi says they then did some – unidentified – projects together, though he suggests that Litvinenko did little more than sit in on his meetings, in the hope, perhaps, of drumming up some business for himself. No evidence has emerged that either was involved in nuclear smuggling – or, if they were, on whose behalf. One person who definitely was involved in such murky dealings, however, is Mario Scaramella, the Italian businessman and academic, whom Litvinenko met on 1 November at the Itsu restaurant in Piccadilly. It is also worth noting that one of the few instances of nuclear smuggling to have come to light in recent years (of uranium) concerned a Russian man caught in Georgia in 2007 as part of an FBI "sting" operation. Which introduces another dimension. Nuclear smuggling has been much trumpeted as a global peril since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but very few cases have become public, even though Western governments would surely have an interest in demonstrating that the threat was real and being successfully addressed. In fact, I know of no case that has been reported that was not linked to a "sting" operation – staged by Western intelligence agencies to find out the extent of nuclear smuggling going on. A celebrated case uncovered in Germany in 1997 led to Russian accusations that, in their zeal to mount "sting operations", Western intelligence agents were creating an artificial market in illicit nuclear materials. Such "stings", they complained, amounted to "provocations". It is worth bearing this criticism in mind.
MI6 So is it fanciful to suggest that British intelligence might have had a role in the Litvinenko affair? And if so, what might it have been? It has been confidently reported that, at the time of his death, Litvinenko was receiving a retainer from MI6. For obvious reasons, This will never be confirmed, although irregular payments to exiles for particular pieces of information are routinely made. A retainer, though, would suggest more systematic cooperation. Lonely in London, Litvinenko also joined the circle of exiles that gathered around Oleg Gordievsky, the celebrated Russian double agent who defected to Britain back in 1985. Gordievsky has pronounced on the case at several key junctures. Immediately after Litvinenko's death, he mentioned the meeting between Litvinenko and Lugovoi in a room at the Millennium Hotel that preceded their encounter in the hotel's Pine Bar. This is where he suggested that Litvinenko really drank poisoned tea. He also mentioned the presence of a third man, called Vladislav or similar – as another possible assassin. Some of this may be disinformation – after all, "once a chekist, always a chekist" – but some of it may not be. Lugovoi, as another former KGB man, also has credibility problems. But it is not only his account of approaches from MI6 that rings true. He has also described a meeting with Litvinenko at the offices of the Erinys security company in Mayfair (25 Grosvenor Street), which he understood to be part of Berezovsky's empire. He observed that the company seemed to be peppered with former British intelligence agents – which suggests an improbable, but not impossible, crossover between the activities of Berezovsky and those of MI6. It might also require a reassessment of Berezovsky's activities in Britain. It is not at all clear what relations MI6 had with Litvinenko, Lugovoi or Berezovsky, but you do not have to rely on Lugovoi's self-interested testimony to suspect that it was involved with all three. The current head of MI6, John Scarlett, emerges as a linchpin. He is believed to have recruited both Gordievsky and Litvinenko. He, or his people, may also have played a part in trying to recruit Lugovoi. Gordievsky receives a relatively generous government pension. In addition, he was made a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Queen's honours list last year – in a nice touch, it was the same award as that received by the fictional James Bond. He also appears from time to time to be called upon to sing for his supper – as two years ago when he told the BBC that the story of British agents in Moscow being caught using fake rocks as a dead-letterbox was "ridiculous". Marina Litvinenko says she knew of no contacts between her husband and British intelligence. But she did talk to me about the haven that he found in Gordievsky's circle. Perhaps Gordievsky was the link. It seems safe to say that Litvinenko had a relationship with MI6, which could be seen as providing a motive for Russia – or rival Russian exiles – to eliminate him. But it could also be seen as a hint of desperation: perhaps he could find no other line of paying business. Whatever the truth, MI6 probably knows more about what happened to Litvinenko, and why, than might be concluded from its complete non-appearance in the authorised British version of his death.
Berezovsky If the shadowy hand of MI6 can be detected in the Litvinenko affair, then so can that of Boris Berezovsky. The Russian exile, multi-millionaire property magnate, and perpetual thorn in Putin's side, was a constant presence behind the scenes. It was he who sponsored Litvinenko's entry to Britain – out of gratitude, it is said, for Litvinenko's refusal, in the late Nineties, to act on orders to kill him. He appears to have been Litvinenko's main source of employment in Britain, and his charity continues to support his widow. Berezovsky also had links to Lugovoi. Back in Russia, he had employed Lugovoi to organise his security, and Lugovoi's company was, until recently at least, reported to have the contract for protecting Berezovsky's daughter. In the last week of Litvinenko's life, it was also Berezovsky's money that bought the publicity campaign, so expertly fronted by Alex Goldfarb. Thus the view that the British public had of Litvinenko's illness and death was essentially dictated by Berezovsky. Until the very end, neither the hospital, nor the British authorities, nor the Russian embassy contributed anything at all. Berezovsky, through Goldfarb and the PR company, Bell Pottinger, had the field entirely to himself. Some have asked whether so comprehensive a PR effort might not have been intended as a diversion – to disguise, say, a catastrophic accident to Berezovsky's employee and recast it as a Kremlin-ordered assassination. That cannot be excluded. More likely, though, it is possible that Berezovsky genuinely believed Litvinenko to have been targeted by the Kremlin – as a proxy, perhaps, for himself. As well as perhaps feeling guilty, Berezovsky doubtless saw another opportunity to pursue his campaign against Putin. And if, as it appears, his first instinct was to suspect poisoning with thallium, the assumption of Kremlin involvement would have made perfect sense. The discovery that the poison was not thallium, but polonium-210, however – a substance that would be intended for mass, rather than individual, annihilation – suggests that the context was not political vendetta, but illicit nuclear trading. The careless handling of radioactive material then becomes by far the most likely explanation for Litvinenko's death. That the polonium might also have been tracked as part of an attempted security services "sting" would also explain why British officials have stuck so rigidly to their version. Why, after all, would they choose to pick a quarrel with the Kremlin, rather than present Litvinenko as the accidental victim of Russian émigré nuclear trafficking – unless there was something in the latter explanation they needed to hide? And what implications do these five clusters of questions have for Anglo-Russian relations? Aside from her natural desire to clear the cloud of suspicion that is increasingly gathering over her husband's activities, Alexander Litvinenko's widow, Marina, may have another reason to press her call for an inquest now. As Russia prepares to inaugurate a new president, Dmitry Medvedev, she hopes that the Kremlin's line might soften. In fact, any softening so far is to be discerned on the British side. We have not heard any furious public statements about Russia's iniquities for a while. It was announced recently that a new ambassador had been appointed to take over from Sir Anthony Brenton, who had angered the Kremlin by consorting with opposition figures. The slanging match over the British Council has dropped out of the news; discussions on the visa regime are to be unfrozen, and even the one-time attack-dog, David Miliband, has spoken of the need for dialogue with Russia. The decks, it seems, are being cleared for a new start under a new president, even if the old leader, Vladimir Putin, will initially be directing the production from the wings. Unfortunately, a victim of the new rapprochement could be the truth – the real truth – about what happened to Alexander Litvinenko. Sad to say, there may be those in Britain who are even more interested than the new overlord of the Kremlin in seeing this divisive case consigned to oblivion.
