Posted: 04.12.06 15:08. Post subject: Strange stroll around Hyde Park that went nowhere

Julia Svetlichnaja recalls Litvinenko's eccentric behaviour

Sunday December 3, 2006
The Observer

We first met beside the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Wearing dark glasses and leather jacket, Alexander Litvinenko appeared unexpectedly behind my back, saying: 'I was watching you from around the corner. You are not a spy, are you?' I suggested coffee in the nearby Caffe Nero, the first of our often chaotic, erratic conversations we would share from last April until his death.

I asked various questions about the Chechen people in Moscow during the Eighties and Nineties. Litvinenko, though, leapt from one exotic story to another - secret operations in Afghanistan, a plot against Boris Yeltsin, the assassination of former Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev; all these memories still seemed dear to his heart. In the end I made my excuses and left.

'Try him, but filter what he says; the man rambles too much,' the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had earlier warned me. Litvinenko was the contact who, I had hoped, would introduce me to Akhmed Zakayev, a member of the officially unrecognised Chechen government in exile.

Ultimately, however, I almost regretted giving my email to Litvinenko. From our first meeting he started to feed me information with such gusto that in the weeks before his death I had started deleting most of his messages without opening them.

The next time we met, in the summer, we ended up walking around Hyde Park for hours. I started to wonder whether meeting Litvinenko was a waste of time. He told me shamelessly of his blackmailing plans aimed at Russian oligarchs. 'They have got enough, why not to share? I will do it officially,' he said. After two hours of traipsing around the park, I suggested we sit down somewhere. 'Professionals never sit and talk, they walk and walk around so nobody can overhear their conversation,' he muttered darkly.

So we carried on walking, Litvinenko regaling me with more stories about his war against the Kremlin. 'Every time I publish something on the Chechen press website, I piss them off. One day they will understand who I am!' he said.

Some of his emails were confidential documents from the FSB, the successor to the KGB; others were his own writings for the Chechen press. Many of his 'political' texts were too obviously rants to take seriously: one of his wildest claims was that Putin was a paedophile.

The photographs he sent were equally contradictory - one showed him with Zakayev and Anna Politkovskaya. Next he sent me a striking picture of himself in front of a large Union flag, holding a Chechen sword and wearing FSB gauntlets - Litvinenko said this proclaimed his pride in his new British citizenship.

The next meeting, in May, was arranged to take place at Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill, north London, where we were supposed to be joined by Zakayev, but he did not turn up.

Litvinenko proudly told me how well his son was adapting to England and its language while he could barely string a few sentences together. Marina, his wife, served us dinner and tea with traditional Russian sweets. Afterwards, we moved to the garden and eventually to Litvinenko's study, where he showed me his stash of secret files and photographs. It was very late when he drove me to the station. He stopped at the traffic lights and, indicating right, suddenly turned left into a dark alley. We drove round and round the crescent before stopping.

'Demonstration. I was famous for getting rid of the "tail". All you have to do is to indicate and then turn the other way,' he explained.

We sat in his car for another hour talking about life in the FSB. I felt sorry for him. People around him seemed either deranged or were using him for their advantage.

Despite his whistleblower past, Litvinenko was confident he was safe. Unlike Zakayev, he willingly gave out his mobile phone number and home address. He did not have any security. Although, in October 2004, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into Zakayev and Litvinenko's neighbouring homes in Muswell Hill, he never contemplated moving house.

May was the last time I saw him. Later I heard he had been poisoned and I am ashamed to say I thought it might have been another trick to get attention. After that I watched and read the details of his slow death drip into the media as the polonium 210 rotted him from within.

Would Litvinenko be pleased with the paradox that since his death he has been taken very seriously?