(ominous music)
This is the story of Vladimir Putin's
global campaign of targeted assassination.
This is about how the Russian state
goes after enemies, traitors, critics,
journalists, those who seek to expose
Vladimir Putin's links to organized crime.
It's a story about intimidation.
It's a story of statecraft,
and is one of the most disturbing
geopolitical stories of our time.
My name is Heidi Blake
and I'm Global Investigations Editor at BuzzFeed News.
And I wrote "From Russia with Blood:
"The Kremlin's ruthless assassination program
"and Vladimir Putin's secret war on the west".
(dramatic music)
Back in 2014 I flew to New York
to meet with Mark Schoofs who was then
the editor of BuzzFeed's global investigations team.
And I was talking to him about setting up
an investigations team in the United Kingdom.
And I took with me a news clipping
that I hoped contained the clues to a mystery
that may be the new team could set about trying to solve.
And that news clipping was about the death
of a man called Scot Young.
He was a multi-millionaire property tycoon
and he had plunged to his death
days before I flew to New York.
Falling from the fourth floor of a London penthouse,
and had been impaled on the spikes
of a wrought iron fence underneath his window.
So it was a really gruesome death.
Scot Young's body was found in Montagu Square
on Monday evening.
There were reports about his death,
and particularly about his connections
to a number of other men
who had died in suspicious circumstances.
Including the exiled Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky.
And so I was really intrigued by what
kind of lay behind this web of death
at the heart of London.
And shortly after I got a mysterious phone call
out of the blue from somebody who asked me
to come and meet her at an address
in a smart part of London.
I turned up at the address and the door swung open
and I came face-to-face with Michelle Young,
who was the wife of Scot Young,
and who told me her husband had been murdered
and she wanted my new team to investigate.
I knew as soon as I had received that phone call,
I knew that he'd been murdered.
Michelle Young had a trove of documents
which had come out in the course of this divorce battle
between her and Scot Young.
And those documents showed really fascinating new details
about Young's business dealings with Boris Berezovsky,
this exiled Russian oligarch
who was a major enemy of the Kremlin,
and with a number of other
highly politically exposed Russians
who were really living in the UK
in the crosshairs of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
And so we began to look at those documents
and to piece together this jigsaw puzzle
which connected Scot Young not only to Boris Berezovsky,
who himself had been found hanged
in very strange circumstances the year before,
but also to a whole group of people,
a total of 14 men, who had died suspiciously
in Britain after falling afoul of Vladimir Putin.
We got hold of this huge cache of documentary evidence
which showed the connections between this group of men
who had all worked together to try to move
ill-gotten Russian money into the United Kingdom,
and had all met untimely ends.
And we fed all of those documents,
along with huge amounts of other exclusive
material we had obtained, into a custom-built database
that allowed us to search across the whole set
of data that we'd obtained.
And we also then scraped public records
from various court cases and public inquiries and inquests.
We were able to piece together a kind of big digital library
which helped us to unravel this story
of Russian related money and betrayal and murder.
We also got hold of hours worth of surveillance footage
of Scot Young and some of his associates
in the months leading up to his death.
Some leaked audio recordings.
We rebuilt mobile phones and computers
that had been discarded
to piece together a really large digital cache of evidence,
and we got hold of some bags of evidence
which the police had gathered from the scenes
of some of these deaths, and which had been discarded.
And we were able to piece together this picture
of a pattern of 14 suspicious deaths in the United Kingdom.
Officially, Thames Valley Police
are treating the death as unexplained.
There is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding it.
People fell off tall buildings,
they were found hanged, found stabbed to death,
fell under Tube trains,
there's a whole series of bizarre and grizzly deaths
that befell these men.
At the same time, Berezovsky was financing
a group of people to investigate
Vladimir Putin's links to organized crime
and his connections to a series of terror atrocities
that had taken place in Russia.
And those investigators similarly died
in highly suspicious circumstances,
both in Britain and in Russia.
(speaking in foreign language)
I was threatened with the murder
of my six year old son.
The most famous of those cases is the death
of Alexander Litvinenko, who was a defector,
a former Russian spy who came to the UK
and blew the whistle on lots of atrocities
connected to the Kremlin.
That's probably the most famous Russian assassination
in living memory.
He was poisoned with radioactive polonium,
a deadly nuclear substance,
and he died very slowly and painfully
in a London hospital.
But not before solving his own murder from his deathbed
and accusing the Kremlin of his killing.
Friends and relatives gather
to pay their respects to a man noted
for his vigor and challenge to the Putin administration.
Russia, in particular under Vladimir Putin,
has plowed a huge amount of resource
into refining the art and the science
of targeted assassination.
To enable Russian assassins to kill
enemies of the state abroad without leaving a trace,
in undetectable ways.
News that a nerve agent was used
in the attack on Sergei Skripal
and his 33-year-old daughter
is making headlines in Britain.
But also, they have the ability
to conduct very high profile assassinations
that are pretty obviously connected to Russia
if they want to send a message.
And so, you can see with the recent attack
on Sergei Skripal, a Russian defector in Britain.
He was poisoned in Salisbury
with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok.
That's a substance that really only originates
in those quantities in Russia.
It's a very conspicuously Russian poison.
There are a lot more subtle ways
within the armory of the Russian state to kill people.
In this park he and his daughter
were attacked in broad daylight with a lethal chemical.
Widespread speculation that the Russian state was involved.
Instead there was a choice taken to use
this extremely conspicuous technique of killing,
and really that attack was intended to send a message
to traitors that if you cross Vladimir Putin
your life is in danger.
What happened here pitted east against west
with a chemical weapon of choice.
There's a whole array of techniques available,
ranging from those kinds of really sophisticated methods,
just to very crude, organized crime style,
gangland shootings and stabbings.
And because of that real full spectrum
of techniques being used by the Russian state
to neutralize enemies, it's quite difficult
for law enforcement to say with certainty
whether a suspicious death was carried out
by the security services or organized crime
or was a natural death, and that's part of why
these deaths have been so difficult
for the authorities to tackle and investigate.
Western leaders have shown themselves
to be really unwilling to stand up to the Kremlin
in these cases where Putin's enemies
have died suspiciously on western soil.
My team at BuzzFeed News spent about two years
investigating these deaths in Britain
and one death in the USA
before we published our articles
in the summer of 2017.
Exposing this web of death in both countries
and also the failure of the authorities
to investigate properly or to tackle the threat from Russia.
Certainly reporting this story was dicey for us at times,
we had some strange occurrences;
reporters being followed and items being moved around
inside people's homes and things like that.
And that kind of thing is obviously intimidating,
but we have an amazing security team at BuzzFeed News
who worked really hard to keep us safe
throughout the investigation.
We used counter-surveillance methods
and trackers and panic alarms
and things like that to keep us safe.
(dramatic music)
I don't think this story is over.
I think that all the evidence suggests
that Putin's campaign of targeted assassination is,
if anything, escalating.
Just a week after the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury
another enemy of the Kremlin died on British soil,
a man named Nikolai Glushkov who was found strangled
at home with a dog's lead.
That is a case that the British authorities
did immediately treat as a murder.
I think because the attack on the Skripals
had been such a watershed moment.
But there's really no sign that this problem
is abating, if anything this is an escalating problem.