The Lebedev File

A free-to-read extract from my book, Killer In The Kremlin, out July 21st, about BorisJohnson, Baron Siberia Evgeny Lebedev and his KGB father who gave the keys of the Kremlin to Vladimir Putin

From Killer In The Kremlin, to be published July 21st by Transworld.

In the nineties, behind the Kremlin’s curtains, the secret policemen had never given up on taking back power. They had, after all, secured Soviet power in 1917 by killing the far more numerous liberal democratic opposition to the Tsar’s autocracy. They stayed in power until 1990, failed to overthrow the lurch towards a more open Russia with the 1991 coup but as Yeltsin & Co destroyed democracy’s good name they bided their time, gathered their forces and plotted. Vladimir Putin, the once and future spy, was their man.

His appointment to the Kremlin’s property administration department was an important stepping stone. The word is that that department provided a pathway to the thing that mattered most to Boris Yeltsin’s family: the alchemy of turning political power into money. Tenders for work on the Kremlin were put out to private contractors. The story goes that they would overcharge, big time, and the kick-backs wound up with the Yeltsin family and their facilitators.

But the bad news for the Yeltsin family was that the Russian government still had a system of checks and balances, of scrutiny, of law officers who did their job, more or less. In 1998, Prosecutor-General Yuri Skuratov, Russia’s top law enforcement officer, started investigating the Mabatex Group, based in Switzerland but headed by the world’s richest ethnic Albanian, Behgjet Pacolli. The investigation accused Mabatex of bribing the Yeltin family. The company won a $1.5 billion contract for doing up the Kremlin and other presidential properties and in return it transferred $1 million into a Budapest bank account for Yeltsin’s use. Pacolli later confirmed that he had guaranteed five credit cards for Yeltsin's wife, Naina, and two daughters, Tatyana and Yelena. Worse for the family, the Swiss Attorney General, Carla del Ponte, was also on the case.

Skuratov was dangerous. But his nemesis was at hand. In 1998 Putin emerged from the shadows with the very first serious job of his life, when Yeltsin made him head of the FSB, keeper of the Kremlin’s secrets and king of kompromat. In the spring of 1999 Russian prime-time TV viewers were treated to a grainy black and white video of a fat middle aged man with a Bobby Charlton comb-over in bed with two prostitutes half his age. It was sad moment of sexual indignity for Mr Combover and his women but this video is also a key event in modern Russian history. They call this kompromat, Russian short form for “compromising material” and this is a classic of that dark art.

A very young-looking Vladimir Putin wearing a cheap black leather jacket came on the telly to identify Mr Combover as Skuratov, Russia’s Prosecutor-General, the very same officer investigating corruption in the Kremlin’s property administration department. Putin told Russian television: “The man in the infamous video has been identified as the Prosecutor-General Skuratov… My opinion regarding this case is well known. It corresponds to the opinion of the president and the prime minister – Yuri Ilyich [Skuratov] has to resign.”

Skuratov denied it was him but the damage had been done. There is a story behind the story of the kompromat against Skuratov. There was a second party who lived in fear of – or was deeply troubled by - Skuratov’s investigations in the late nineteen nineties and his name was Alexander Lebedev, a former colonel in the KGB and the father of Evgeny, the Russian oligarch and owner of The Independent and Evening Standard, whom British prime minister Boris Johnson made Baron Siberia. When Johnson celebrated his election victory in December 2019, he did so at Alexander Lebedev’s mansion near Regents Park. The old KGB officer had his own cause to party: it was his 60th birthday.

Alexander Lebedev joined the KGB in the early 1980s and worked first in Switzerland before moving to London. He had diplomatic cover but in reality he was a spy, working out of the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens from 1988 to 1992. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Lebedev Senior then became a banker, a co-owner of the National Reserve Bank and, for a time, a multi-billionaire, one of the richest men in Russia. Lebedev stayed close to Gorbachev and, with him, co-owned Novaya Gazeta, a ferociously brave newspaper whose gifted staff kept on getting murdered.

But Russia is a murky place and the idea that Alexander Lebedev is a true liberal democrat because of his co-ownership of Novaya Gazeta is a nice fairy story. In 2021, Jacopo Iacoboni and Gianluca Paolucci, two Italian reporters working for La Stampa, published their book, Oligarchi, claiming that Lebedev senior may never have cut his ties with the Russian secret state. The authors quoted a secret report by the Italian External Intelligence and Security Agency to its parliamentary oversight committee, Copasir, suggesting that Lebedev's resignation from the KGB and/or its successor agencies might have been fictitious as he "continued to participate in annual KGB meetings". Moreover, "he would have started his business activity while still in the service of the KGB and using the funds he had acquired as an agent."  The Italian report is based on top-secret intelligence that is not in the public domain, and therefore the full facts are not known.

In simple spy terms, the KGB/FSB is like Hotel California in the song by The Eagles: “You can check out any time you like/ But you can never leave.”

In 1997 Alexander Lebedev claimed his former business associate, Igor Fyodorov, had stolen $7 million from his bank. Fyodorov counter-claimed, filing a complaint to Prosecutor-General Skuratov, alleging Alexander Lebedev and others were up to criminal no-good. Lebedev and his associates denied this. The prosecutor’s office opened multiple investigations against Lebedev and his NRB bank, accusing the bank of tax avoidance and fraud.

Funny business started. Skuratov realised he was being spied on and his prime suspect was Alexander Lebedev. His bank, NRB, had its own security service, known as SB KONUS (SB means Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or security service). Skuratov told the then independent Russian TV channel NTV in September 1999, “the security service of Lebedev, Konus and others, put me and my family under surveillance… What I can say for sure is that Mr Lebedev used significant resources to counteract the investigation. His acquaintance with work for the special services [KGB/FSB] let him use various methods.” Skuratov went on to claim that personal stuff about his life and family popped up on social media but, “due to a glitch with the internet”, the private eye snooping was traced back to SB Konus.

And then the sex kompromat tape appeared showing a man looking very much like Skuratov with the two women prostitutes. Once again, Skuratov denies it was him.

Alexander Lebedev in his poorly-written book, Hunt The Banker, dedicates a lot of words to denigrating Skuratov and his officers’ investigation into his bank. He suggests that unknown “puppet-masters” may have had a hold over Skuratov, threatening him with exposure of the kompromat tape. Lebedev writes: “‘We wouldn’t want any trouble,’ they doubtless told him, ‘only…’ and so on.”

Strange words. Or, on the other hand, exactly what might you’d expect from someone who had been in the KGB. There is, of course, no suggestion that either of the former KGB officers, Colonel Vladimir Putin and Colonel Alexander Lebedev and their entities, had any involvement in the sex kompromat operation against the prosecutor-general. I wrote an article about all of this for Byline Times which was published in March 2022 and have asked Alexander Lebedev several times to comment on the Skuratov kompromat story and did so, once again, for this book. I have yet to receive a response.

The only other person on the front cover of Alexander Lebedev’s book, Hunt The Banker, is Vladimir Putin. Both former KGB officers are smiling.

The Skuratov scandal rocked Russia and kompromat killed the career of the Prosecutor-General and his investigation into the corruption of outgoing President Boris Yeltsin and family. The payback was large. In the summer of 1999 Yeltsin made Vladimir Putin acting prime minister. Kompromat gave Putin the keys to the Kremlin.

And then the serious killing started…

Boris Johnson’s friendship with Evgeny Lebedev – now Baron Siberia – and his father, Alexander, has nothing to do with political ideology. The bunga-bunga parties the Lebedevs threw at the Palazzo Terranova near Perugia in the centre of Italy were out of this world: amongst the guests were Peter Mandelson, Sarah Sands, the then editor of BBC Today’s programme,  Amol Rajan, at one-time an editor of the Independent, owned by the Lebedevs, and now a rising star at the BBC, Elton John, Shirley Bassey, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Elizabeth Hurley, Rupert Everett, Ralph Fiennes – who plays M in the Bond movies – Boris Johnson and topless model Katie Price, according to James Cusick in a brilliant piece of reporting for Open Democracy in 2016.

Sarah Sands and Amol Rajan are two important cheerleaders for Evgeny Lebedev.  Sands was Evgeny’s editor at the Evening Standard, then got control of BBC Radio Four’s flagship Todayprogramme but has now left. Rajan remains the corporation’s media editor and regularly presents Today. While at the Standard, Sands said Evgeny Lebedev’s “taste is exquisite”. Rajan, when at the Independent, said “he has a terrifyingly good memory and, as someone who works for him, he can be terrifyingly sharp”.

Evgeny Lebedev wrote in the Mail On Sunday: “Various papers produced Stalinist lists of ‘enemies of the people’; influential Russians in the UK who, it is implied, advance the Kremlin’s agenda… I am proud to be a friend of Boris Johnson, who like most of my friends has visited me in Umbria. And I hate to disappoint, but nothing happens there that produces ‘kompromat’.”

We have the word of the son of a KGB Colonel on that.

However, the word on the streets of Perugia is that anything goes at these parties. Evgeny Lebedev is a libertine with a capital L, he likes to play Lord Misrule and he makes no bones about it. In 2012 Evgeny, when he had recently bought The Independent wangled an interview with the Kremlin patsy President, sorry, dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko for the BBC. The Corporation sent along my old colleague Natalia Antelava to keep an eye on him but his subject matter threw both her and the tyrant of Minsk.

"So, what's your opinion on group sex?" Lebedev Junior asked the strong man. He side-stepped the question but Natalia came away thinking that the Lebedev junior was not “terrifingly sharp” but a narcissus and a fool. At his palazzo, there’s a fancy-dress box and guests have to pick what they are going to wear blind which is why one of very famous party-goer ended up a gimp in a gimp suit. A butt-plug with a Vladimir Putin face on it has been spotted. Beautiful men and women are at hand, at beck and call. Katie Price, Jim Cusick reported, hit the champagne a little too heavily and got her tits out for then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. There is, of course, no suggestion that Johnson wore the gimp suit or, indeed, the Vladimir Putin butt-plug and no suggestion whatsoever that he wore both at the same time.

But behind the scenes the possibility remains that the Lebedev parties might be a target for intelligence gathering by the Russian secret state. Remember, Alexander Lebedev was a KGB spy in London, helped Vladimir Putin secure the key to the Kremlin by putting Yuri Skuratov under surveillance, fell out with Putin over his Moscow newspaper story about his mistress, Alina Kubaeva, and has now somehow climbed his way back into the Kremlin’s affections. Remember the Italian parliamentary intelligence oversight committee report airing concerns that Alexander Lebedev may not have ended his association with the Russian secret state, that the KGB was like Hotel California, that you can never leave? Alexander Lebedev still has active business interests – that is, money – in Russia and, reportedly, Russian-occupied Crimea. In 2017 he threw a media bash at his hotel complex in Alushta, Crimea “to correct a impression of Crimea put out by a biased Western media”.

The impression of Russian invasion does not need correction.

At the time of writing, mid-May 2022, Alexander Lebedev has not tweeted any comment whatsoever on Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Would the Russian secret state dare to violate the privacy of, say, a British Foreign Secretary while on the lash at a bunga-bunga party in the home of a former KGB colonel?

One former MI6 officer reflected on the strange friendship between the Lebedevs, father and son: “If Boris goes to the Lebedevs’ palazzo in Italy and shags someone, there’s got to be a sporting chance that someone’s filming it… Imagine if Putin was knocking off a woman in a place in Moscow owned by a British businessman, then, in my old job, I would be on to that immediately, I would be all over it like a bad rash.”

Two years on from Katie Price incident, Boris Johnson was back at the Palazzo, intriguingly just after a NATO summit in response to the Skripal poisoning. Both in 2016 and 2018, Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, dumped his Metropolitan Police minders. The detectives that follow him around are there to protect him from terrorist attack but they have another, more discreet function: to protect the British state from being betrayed by one of its servants. If left in London and the Foreign Secretary is under a Russian roof, the Met detectives can no longer do their job properly. Journalists in the know, like Adam Boulton of Sky and Gordon Carera at the BBC, both reported stories that Boris Johnson had lost control over MI6’s because of his dodgy conduct. The Foreign Office put out a murky denial.

The true extent of the relationship between the Lebedevs and Boris Johnson remains opaque. But in 2020 Johnson put Evgeny forward to be a member of the House of Lords. The committee that vets potential members of the House of Lords turned him down on advice from the Special Branch. That advice was later reversed and Evgeny “Group Sex?” Lebedev became Baron Siberia. As I reported for Byline Times the House of Lords Appointments Commission was troubled by this dramatic change and awaited the long-delayed publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report. It caused the Commission yet more unease. The report stated: “The extent to which Russian expatriates are using their access to UK businesses and politicians to exert influence in the UK is ***: it is widely recognised that Russian intelligence and business are completely intertwined. The Government must ***, take the necessary measures to counter the threat and challenge the impunity of Putin-linked elites.”

The asterisks mask security-sensitive details. So we, but not perhaps not the Kremlin, are left in the dark.

Once ennobled, Baron Siberia socked it to his critics in the socked it to his critics in the Mail on Sunday: “To all those who sneer at my Russian background, I say this: Is it not remarkable that the son of a KGB agent and a first-generation immigrant to this country has become such an assimilated and contributing member of British society? What a success for our system. Don’t you think?”

Others say nyet, Baron Siberia, nyet.

Professor Donald Rayfield told me: “Is Evgeny Lebedev a potential security risk? Yes. Especially because of the role of his father who goes back and forth to Russia. Remember it’s very difficult to retire from the KGB. They don’t have a procedure for that.”

Evgeny Lebedev makes a big point out of not having met Putin but Rayfield doesn’t believe this invalidates the question. “You don’t have to meet the man to be in his clutches. Twenty years ago the British authorities would not have given Evgeny Lebedev residency let alone a place in the House of Lords. Evgeny makes much of his ownership of the Independent but it occasionally veers into the territory of Russia Today, suggesting that Putin is not our enemy.”

Is it possible that Johnson might have been a victim of sex kompromat? It is. The former MI6 officer said: “Boris Johnson is compromised. No one believes he went to the palazzo just to sip orange juice.”

For Open Democracy, Jim Cusick reported that, in November 2018, Evgeny Lebedev’s dog, a white Borzoi called Vladimir, died in mysterious circumstances. “Lebedev,” Cusick wrote, “has told associates that he believes the dog was poisoned and that it was a message from Moscow.”

Who killed Evgeny Lebedev’s dog and why is another good question. Is it possible that the secret Russian state wanted to send Evgeny a message? It is.

For Byline Times I contacted the Lebedevs and Number Ten Downing Street but received no reply on the record. For this book, I contacted Lebedevs, father and son, and Downing Street once more. I received no reply.

This is an extract from Killer In The Kremlin, published by Transworld Books on July 21st