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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Handler

As for his [Snowden’s] communication with the outside world, yes, I am his main contact

--Anatoly Kucherena, September 23, 2013

Time was rapidly running out for me in Moscow. On November 1st, I still had not been able to make contact with Anatoly Kucherena, and my flight back to New York was in five days. My fixer, Zamir, had been trying to arrange an appointment for three weeks but he had only received one call back from Kucherena’s assistant, Valentina Vladimirovna Kvirvova. She wanted to know how I knew Oliver Stone. He told her of my part in Stone’s movie Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. That was the last he had heard from her. Meanwhile a Moscow based journalist told me that she had waited 18 months to hear back from him giving up. I also learned from a Russian researcher that Kucherena had not given a single interview to any journalist since his television interview with Sophie Shevardnadze on September 23, 2013. And no Russian journalist, or any Moscow-based foreign journalist, had ever obtained an interview with Snowden. At this point, Zamir was becoming increasingly doubtful about getting my access to either Kucherena or Snowden.

But I had another contact in Moscow. When I had been investigating the 2006 Polonium poisoning of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, I had interviewed a number of people in Moscow, including Andrei Lugovoy. A former KGB officer assigned to protecting the Kremlin’s top members in the 1990s, Lugovoy later opened his own security company. In 2005, he became a business associate of Litvinenko’s in gathering information, and made regular trips to London to meet with him. Since he had tea with Litvinenko at the Millennium hotel in London on November 1, 2006, the day Litvinenko was poisoned, he became the main suspect in the British investigation. He could not be extradited, however. After reconstructing the chronology of the crime, I established that Litvinenko had been contaminated with Polonium at a Japanese restaurant some four hours before his tea with Lugovoy. I therefore wrote that Lugovoy could not have poisoned Litvinenko in the Millennium hotel, a finding that he said he greatly appreciated.

Lugovoy was elected to the Duma in 2008, and also hosted a 24 part television series espionage for which he was personally decorated by Putin. He was also now reputed to be in the inner circle of power in Moscow. So I called him.

We arranged to meet in the lobby bar of the National Hotel. A short but well-built man with a bullet-style haircut, Lugovoy showed up promptly at 1 PM. After discussing some of the subsequent developments in the still-lingering Polonium investigation, I asked him if he knew Kucherena.

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