Original subtitles

(GRUNTS)

OK. I can't get it in closer.

How's that?

REPORTER: A murder investigation being launched

into the death of another Russian on British soil.

(BIG BEN CHIMES)

♪ CHESS: Blood Money

REPORTER: He told his uncle a fortnight before he died,

"If anything happens to me in the next two weeks,

it won't be an accident."

(RAPPING IN RUSSIAN)

BILL BROWDER: London is levitating on a sea of dirty money.

If you deal with somebody

who has a very suspicious track record,

some day it will come back to haunt you.

(POLICE SIREN WAILS)

I read all those seven articles published by BuzzFeed,

and I think everything what they are writing

in all of their seven articles - absolute nonsense.

So, every article, if you take every article,

and analyse it from the beginning to the end,

every article is simply false.

It's an invention. It's a legend.

It's a journalistic legend, nothing else.

Some of the cases are simply stupid.

For example, Gareth Williams.

It's a strange case, but definitely

Russia was not involved in Gareth Williams' strange death.

Why he died, what happened - it's entirely unknown.

You can make a long, long theory of it,

but he was definitely not assassinated by the Russians.

There was never any reason to get rid of him.

Nothing. There's not any fact proving that.

And this goes exactly with every other case.

HEIDI BLAKE: One of the more bizarre deaths on the list of 14

is the spy in the bag.

It's an extraordinary mystery

and has perplexed the public here for years.

British people - it's Agatha Christie - love the whodunit.

Like, it's Colonel Plum, in the lounge, with a candlestick.

HEIDI BLAKE: Gareth Williams worked as a codebreaker at MI6.

He apparently was investigating Russian money-laundering networks

in the months before his death.

And he was found dead in very suspicious circumstances.

Gareth's body had been placed inside a sports bag,

which itself had been placed inside the bathtub of his apartment.

It had been padlocked from the outside

and the key to the padlock was underneath his body, inside the bag.

PETER FAULDING: I was contacted to attend the crime scene itself.

I'm quite small and flexible. I was a similar size to Gareth Williams.

When I first saw the crime scene, I think it was quite overwhelming.

I expected to see a very untidy area and lots of struggle,

but there was no signs of struggle anywhere within the flat.

Everything had been forensically examined.

There was not a mark of Gareth's fingerprints

on the padlock, the bath, the shower screen.

HEIDI BLAKE: It's impossible to live in a flat

and not to leave your fingerprints and your DNA

and forensic traces all over it.

Another suspicious factor is

the heating in the flat had been turned up near enough to maximum,

even though it was mid-August,

which meant that his body was so badly decomposed

by the time it was found

that it was impossible to run any particular toxicology tests

to determine whether he'd been poisoned

or really to determine his actual cause of death.

MI6 hadn't raised the alarm,

despite the fact that Gareth had been missing from work.

RICHARD HOLMES: It was about a week

before someone actually decided to visit his flat.

Theoretically, this is possible to do.

I think it is more probable

that Gareth was on his own at the time of his death.

I was asked to recreate various scenarios.

I spent hundreds of attempts to actually get in the bag.

You can't achieve getting into the bag or the bath

without leaving a trace of fingerprints and DNA.

HEIDI BLAKE: The idea that he had climbed into a sports bag,

zipped the sports bag up,

padlocked it from the outside,

locked the key underneath his own body

and then perished really beggars belief.

I have to say, I thought the investigation did their level best

to really get to the bottom of this.

I don't know if people do connect this case

to Russians or international espionage.

I mean, that is... one or two individuals might do,

BuzzFeed might do, investigative journalists might do.

I'm not decrying any of their investigative work and what they...

the conclusions they draw.

But I don't know if that's a broader opinion.

From my perspective, a police investigation perspective,

and what we looked at,

there was no evidence to suggest

that the Russians are involved in Gareth's death.

Until we have further evidence and more information coming in,

it could be either of those.

I was a police officer in London for nearly 40 years,

and I served as a detective in all ranks

up until Detective Chief Superintendent,

and my last years were with the Major Crime Homicide Command.

In the case of Gareth Williams,

the property was secured by us for over a week

whilst forensic examination was conducted

and fingerprinting and infrared light

and a whole load of other tests.

The absence of fingerprints is remarked on as being suspicious.

Well, in one way, yes, it could be that if someone has...

if there's evidence of it being cleaned up or cleared up,

but there wasn't any real evidence of that.

I'm more inclined to believe it was a death by misadventure

and that he was on his own when the event occurred,

and he placed himself in the bag

and he died whilst in the bag.

I know the expert reported that he couldn't do it

and the videos were shown at the coroner's inquest

of him attempting it, and it wasn't possible.

But subsequently, another expert demonstrated it could be done.

By going in and inserting the toggles in a particular way,

you could do it.

I understand that BuzzFeed introduces Gareth's death

as yet another example,

drawing a correlation and link

over a series of deaths that occurred in the United Kingdom,

but I have no evidence of that.

I wouldn't make any claim to such a suggestion at all.

He was an employee of the government intelligence service,

who engaged in many activities,

but to then place his death

at the door of a foreign state's

extrajudicial killing

is a big leap.

I don't think there's anything wrong

with the investigation that was done.

What is unsavoury and unsatisfactory is,

despite that extensive inquiry,

not every death can be explained

satisfactorily or easily

because there's a gap in our knowledge

of what actually took place.

And within that gap

allows people to speculate quite widely on what happened.

DIRECTOR: So what do you make of BuzzFeed's theory

that 14 people, including Scot,

might have been murdered on British soil by Russians?

A theory is not factual evidence.

Yes, there's a couple of Russians

that have been found dead on British soil.

But BuzzFeed cannot prove that this was Russians that murdered Scot.

And I believe, if any other inquiry was opened up,

it would open up the whole case.

So, as a family,

we can't rest in peace because we don't know the truth.

We've been left in limbo.

My daughters didn't want me to do this interview with you,

and I'm actually honoured,

and I believe you will do your very best to tell the truth.

(HEART MONITOR FLATLINES)

I don't know why Michelle feels that.

I know that she has adopted different viewpoints

at different times about what might have happened,

but I just know that what we have in the documents is highly compelling,

and he's at the centre of a web of individuals who were all connected.

That's really the thrust of our story.

You know, over the years, the amount of people

who've been in touch with me has been completely amazing. You know?

I've had private investigator firms,

letters from lawyers - yeah? -

and people chasing assets, yeah?

Not one person, not one person

has actually found anything of any significance.

Supposedly, Berezovsky was murdered,

Scot was murdered...

I don't think that was the case at all.

I think it's just been a set of circumstances which just fits.

The door was locked and there was no signs of forced entry

and it was locked from the inside.

Do I believe that he was thrown out a window?

I don't think so. I mean, no.

Do I believe that he intended to commit suicide?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe he just slipped on the ledge.

I don't know is the answer.

So you had no sense that anyone in the Kremlin

or Vladimir Putin was enraged

because of Scot's relationship with Boris Berezovsky?

(SUPPRESSED LAUGH)

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever.

You've got sensationalist articles being written about this

for years and years and years.

It keeps on getting dragged up again and again and again.

But do I believe that he was, let's put it bluntly,

bumped off by, you know, Russian mobsters?

No, with a with a capital N. No.

How do you respond to any critic who says

you guys are grasping at straws,

you're stringing things together - that aren't connected? - Yeah, yeah.

So... And I think, look...

I think that's a reasonable question.

People might look and say, "This story is insane,

you've just done like... you're just joining the dots,

like, it doesn't make any sense."

This is so serious the US intelligence community

was drawing up a report about these people

and assessing the likelihood

of Kremlin involvement in their deaths.

Do you believe that the Russian state has sanctioned

or been able to assassinate people on British soil?

Well, there is no need to believe, if you know for sure.

REPORTER: These are the London offices

of ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele,

who compiled the Donald Trump dossier,

which contains unverified allegations

that Russian security officials

have compromising material on the President Elect.

The dossier that Christopher Steele produced

became sort of political fodder in the United States.

When you read the Steele report,

it by no means was what we would call "finished intelligence".

It was a variety of sources with a variety of levels of access

and a variety of levels of trust by Mr Steele.

REPORTER: Federal prosecutors have laid out a clear picture

of flimsy and potentially biased sourcing in the dossier.

Steele has defended his work,

claiming it was raw intelligence that needed further vetting,

but that his sources were solid.

To a professional, to someone

who's worked on Russian intelligence issues,

the information in the dossier, in the reports,

it was certainly consistent with the kind of activities

that Russian intelligence gets involved in.

You know, if you wanted a crude answer from me

about those 14 deaths, my guess would be probably

two-thirds of them were linked to Russia

and half of those were linked to the Russian Government.

One of the problems that we all have in assessing these suspicious deaths

is that you're dealing with an environment

which is totally unlike our own society.

The Kremlin doesn't have as

all-encompassing control over these things as people might imagine.

In Russia, you have an overlapping morass

between the Kremlin, the intelligence services,

business oligarchs and organised crime.

And so, when you look at any one of these,

it's really quite difficult to assess the true motivation

that might have been behind one of these suspicious deaths.

Clearly, there are cases which are very clear-cut,

like Litvinenko, where you're looking at something

very unusual, a very unusual methodology and so on.

In a case like Berezovsky, there are any number of explanations

as to what it might be.

There's not an obvious state motivation.

You know, you're at this kind of interface

between oligarchs, the Kremlin and the intelligence services,

all in a kind of overlapping indistinct structure.

When we first published,

it was honestly gutting that it barely made a ripple.

And it was only when Skripal happened...

..everything changed overnight.

REPORTER: Tonight, Sergei and Yulia Skripal

are in a critical condition in hospital here in Salisbury.

HEIDI BLAKE: In the case of Sergei and Yulia Skripal,

the former Russian spy and his daughter,

who were poisoned on the streets of Salisbury,

the Russian state has targeted a defector and his daughter,

and they've used the Soviet nerve agent Novichok

to target those two people, thereby indiscriminately exposing

hundreds of members of the British public

to an internationally outlawed weapon of war,

a weapon of mass destruction.

TOM WARREN: And then not only that,

the poison was picked up by two poor unsuspecting people

who went bin-diving for stuff,

and one of them died.

And then, only when that happened,

that entire insane, like, sequence of tragic events,

did people look at our stories and go, "Oh, my God, they're right."

And it was so bizarre. Nobody listened...

..Skripal happened, and we saw the results of our reporting

just being copied out everywhere by other news services.

REPORTER: Journalist Heidi Blake believes the Russian state

could potentially be behind many more deaths in the UK.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Yvette Cooper.

The Foreign Secretary rightly said

that no attempt on innocent life on our soil

should go uninvestigated or unpunished.

But what about the 14 cases where UK authorities,

in many of these cases, have concluded that these were suicides,

despite the fact that there has now been

considerable reported evidence, including in the BuzzFeed report,

of further evidence that casts serious doubt

on those conclusions?

There are serious questions about whether the police investigations

were thorough enough. MPs: Hear, hear.

I must say that the Right Honourable Lady is perfectly right.

There are a number of deeply troubling cases,

Mr Perepilichny, for instance,

and, to the best of our knowledge, there is no further evidence

that points in the direction of criminality.

But I think what she says is very important,

and we will certainly follow it up and I will certainly have

that discussion with the Home Secretary.

TOM WARREN: It was looked at because

the police were ordered to do a review

into a lot of the deaths we reported on.

They were just like, "Yeah, there's nothing going on."

But it was fascinating because, after that,

it then came up in the Russia report.

You know, there was a big report into Russia,

and there was a section within it

on suspicious deaths that were linked to Russia.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Mr Dominic Grieve.

When the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

was reformed, we announced immediately

that one of our priorities was to carry out

an inquiry into Russia's covert activities

and whether we had the appropriate responses to it.

The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

decided to carry out an inquiry into Russia.

We wanted to look across the full spectrum of Russia's activities.

Rather than publishing an inquiry with very substantial redactions,

we decided to publish a report

which had as few redactions as possible.

But I'm afraid you'll find, if you read the report,

that significant parts of it are redacted,

and in the circumstances I can't comment further on that.

Clearly, there was some material in the report

that might have been of embarrassment to a government

in the run-up to a general election.

We then got the explanation,

"Well, unfortunately, there was a lot to look at.

There was no possibility of it being published

before the general election was called."

Well, those explanations were,

I described them at the time as "bogus",

and that's what they were.

They were simply not credible.

Now, that suggests a degree of control freakery

by the Johnson Government.

And that may simply be the best explanation on offer

as to why it behaved in this strange fashion.

So I want to ask the Prime Minister about the extremely serious report

by the Intelligence and Security Committee.

It concludes that Russia poses

an immediate and urgent threat to our national security.

The Prime Minister received that report ten months ago.

Given that the threat is described as immediate and urgent,

why on earth did the Prime Minister sit on that report for so long?

Hear, hear! Well, Mr Speaker, actually,

when I was Foreign Secretary

and for the period that I've been in office,

we've been taking the strongest possible action

against Russian wrongdoing.

Were these cases reopened as a result of this report?

DOMINIC GRIEVE: Not as far as I'm aware.

But if you just wait a moment,

I'll just go and get my copy of the report.

You may have read it, but - as it's just to hand -

let's just have a look.

Yeah, here we are.

It's perfectly clearly laid out.

It says that we made inquiry,

we received a reply by the intelligence agencies,

but it's not one which I can share with you.

What that reply is is redacted out.

And that's as far as I can go to answering your question.

So, essentially, that's as far as the British Government will go

to answering that question.

Yes, it's the...

The view that was taken was that it had to...

The answer that was given needed to be redacted

because of national security implications

and it had to be based on that criteria -

made that quite clear.

Part of the reason that the UK did not want

to turn this into an international scandal is because

they didn't want to poke the bear, Russia.

TOM WARREN: You've got trillions in deals

coming into the country from Russia.

Money can buy you impunity,

which, frankly, I find quite terrifying.

BILL BROWDER: London is levitating on a sea of dirty money.

I brought this to the attention of all sorts of regulators,

government officials,

parliamentary committees,

and there have been no consequences.

Why has there been no consequences?

Because there's so many people benefiting from it.

HEIDI BLAKE: There was a point at which

Putin could have been stopped.

But for the last couple of decades,

Western leaders were getting further and further into bed with Putin,

rather than distancing ourselves from Vladimir Putin's Government.

(SHOUTING)

Stop the steal!

The Western world is going through

a period of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy,

for all kinds of different reasons,

and this provides the Russians with an opportunity.

What they do is precisely to take advantage of those flaws,

those cracks in the system, that are already there,

and insert a crowbar and see how much

they can lever it open all the more.

HEIDI BLAKE: Russia's posture

has become more and more menacing, more and more aggressive,

in plain sight of the British authorities.

YULI DUBOV: Putin had to be stopped after Litvinenko's death,

and he had to be stopped when he seized Crimea.

And what happened? Nothing.

REPORTER: Russia has invaded Ukraine.

He felt that he can do whatever he wants.

It is already Europe's worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.

(SCREAMS)

HEIDI BLAKE: Putin wants his enemies to know

that if you anger him,

if you betray the Motherland...

..there is no safe place for you.

Wherever you are, his assassins will hunt you down.

There is no room for the British Government

to ignore what has happened on British soil.

And what we see now is the consequences

of that failure to take a firm line.

YULI DUBOV: The West has an enemy, a very serious enemy,

a very aggressive enemy...

..and an enemy which is not restricted

or contained by anything.

If you don't understand that it's time NOW to fight back,

then when you start to understand this...

..it may be too late.

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