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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Heidi Blake 2019
Cover image © Getty Images
Heidi Blake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All photographs courtesy BuzzFeed News unless otherwise stated
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008300050
Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008300074
Version: 2019-11-05
This book is dedicated to Mark Schoofs, always a
guiding light; to my investigative comrades
Tom Warren, Richard Holmes, Jane Bradley,
Jason Leopold, and Alex Campbell, without whom this
story would have stayed buried; and to those brave
members of the independent Russian media who risk
their lives every day in the pursuit of truth.
1 Title Page
2 Copyright
3 Dedication
4 Contents
5 Foreword
6 Introduction
7 Part One: Two Worlds Collide i ii iii iv
8 Part Two: The Oligarchs in Exile v vi vii
9 Part Three: Occupational Hazards viii ix
10 Part Four: The Price x xi xii
11 Part Five: Impunity xiii xiv xv
12 Part Six: Peregruzka xvi xvii xviii
13 Part Seven: The Fall xix xx xxi
14 Photos
15 Bibliography
16 Acknowledgments
17 About the Author
18 Also by Heidi Blake
19 About the Publisher
1 Table of Contents
A note on the original BuzzFeed News investigation
In December 2014, I flew to New York to meet Mark Schoofs, the legendary editor who then headed investigations at BuzzFeed News, to discuss setting up a new investigative unit at the company’s office in the United Kingdom. I came carrying a newspaper clipping containing the first clues to a mystery I hoped the new team might solve. It described how a multimillionaire property tycoon had plunged to his death from the fourth-floor window of a London town house a few days earlier—becoming the latest in a group of men, including the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had all died under bizarre circumstances. I was fascinated by what lay behind this expanding web of death at the heart of London—and Mark was equally intrigued.
Soon after I joined BuzzFeed News and set about recruiting the new UK team, I got a call out of the blue summoning me to a mysterious meeting at an apartment in a smart part of London. When I arrived, I found myself face-to-face with the ex-wife of the very tycoon who had died in that fatal fall. Her ex-husband had been murdered, she said, and by coincidence she wanted my new team to investigate. More serendipitously still, she was sitting on a large trove of documents detailing the activities of her ex-husband and his associates in the years before their untimely deaths.
I was soon joined by an extraordinary group of colleagues in the quest to get to the bottom of the story. Tom Warren, Jane Bradley, and Richard Holmes came aboard the new investigations unit in London, and we teamed up with our American colleagues Jason Leopold and Alex Campbell to chase leads across the Atlantic. Over the next two years, under Mark’s inspired oversight, our team connected the property mogul’s fatal fall to a web of fourteen deaths in the UK—and one in the United States—all of which had glaring links to Russia. Astonishingly, not one of those cases had been deemed suspicious by the authorities. But we obtained hundreds of boxes of documents, hours of surveillance footage and audio recordings, a huge cache of digital files from forensically restored mobile phones and computers, and bags of discarded police evidence that blew a hole in the official story.
We fed all our exclusive material into a huge custom-built database, supplementing it with thousands of pages of public records, and ran advanced searches across the entire cache to piece together a sprawling international story of money, betrayal, and murder. Then we tracked down and interviewed more than two hundred people connected to the fifteen dead men, while also gathering information from more than forty current and former intelligence and law enforcement sources on both sides of the Atlantic. And we obtained readouts of multiple secret US intelligence files—including a classified report sent to Congress by America’s top intelligence official detailing Vladimir Putin’s campaign of targeted killing in the West.
Every single reporter was pivotal to the project. Richard personally scanned hundreds of thousands of documents by hand so we could digitize and search them, and he contributed vital law enforcement source-work. Tom set up our gargantuan evidence database and applied his forensic genius to fathoming the dizzyingly complex financial maneuvers at the heart of the story. Jane deployed her unparalleled skills at tracking people down and persuading them to talk against all the odds, and Alex wore out his shoe leather running down leads across America. Jason—the sort of rock ’n’ roll reporter who’ll stop to get a new tattoo in between meetings with spies—blew the story wide open by getting a multiplicity of US intelligence sources to spill details of secret files linking every single one of the deaths in Britain to Russia.
Reporting this story was, at times, a dicey ride. A man in a black car appeared every night for months outside one reporter’s house, another reporter came home to find personal items had been moved around in his bedroom, and it appeared one team member was being followed. We used trackers, panic buttons, intruder alarms, encryption, and countersurveillance techniques to stay safe—and in the final phase of the project, some reporters were moved to discreet locations for their security.
Our initial investigation was published by BuzzFeed News in June 2017. The shock waves it sent are detailed in the pages that follow. Since then, we have carried on investigating and gathering fresh evidence that places the fifteen suspected assassinations we initially uncovered at the center of a much wider campaign of Kremlin-sanctioned killing around the world.
This book is based on that body of work. Details of the events described are taken from our vast repository of documentary and digital evidence, as well as interviews with people who were present, and the dialogue recounted here is based on the best recollections of those who heard it. What follows is a story that more than one government wanted to keep secret—and it would have lain buried forever without the tireless work of my incomparable colleagues at BuzzFeed News.
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