russian opposition politician alexei
navalny survived an assassination
attempt in the summer after being
poisoned with the nerve agent novichok
he as well as most western nations have
blamed the russian security forces
with the help of the ballencat
investigative website who had identified
some of the team which had been trailing
navalny
he called them up he pretended to be a
senior security official investigating
the poisoning operation
and he got a full confession here's an
excerpt from the phone call
okay then tell me what kind of clothes
it was applied on what was the main
focus
what's the riskiest piece of clothing in
theory
world underpants underpants
we spoke to the man who sat next to
alexi navalny during this phone
conversation christo grossef
the lead investigator of bellencat
it was definitely the most incredible
thing anybody can
um can can live through it what added to
the surrealism of the moment is that we
hadn't i hadn't slept the whole night
working on the final
touches to the investigative reports
that we would publish later that day
um so at 4 30 in the morning there was
this phone call
and i think alexander vonnie also had
not stopped that night much so it was
all
kind of in a slow motion and when it
happened i really thought i was dreaming
and this could not be happening in real
time
christo who did you decide to call
well actually the original plan had been
to
only confront the actual suspected
poisoners for navalny to call them up
and to say hello i'm navalny why did you
try to kill me
and to try to get their reaction this we
thought was going to be a
funny moment before we publish the
investigation but
midway through the call uh sequence
nevada says well i'm not getting any
reaction they're all hanging up
so how about i just do a prank and call
one of them but
impersonating a top security officer so
we had about a two-minute prep session
to think up
what name might work and who might be
the office that they call from
he decided on calling on behalf of the
non-existent aide to the chief of the
security council of russian nikolai
patricia who was probably one of the
most senior
security officials probably the most
senior security official in russia
and he was going to call and ask for a
quick uh report on what went wrong in
tomsk the place where navalny was
poisoned
i was completely determined that this
would
yield in a hang up and somebody's just
putting the phone down
it went through the first five minutes
and i thought okay there is a chance
actually this guy might confess
and within about seven or eight minutes
he had made the first confession
navalny stayed in carrier for for 49
minutes and kept
bullying the poor guy to give him more
information and more information
and at the end i i really thought i had
gone through
a dream it's it's probably as unique as
the experience he had of
living through novichok poisoning uh and
i think
once he he does that he's ready for
anything but i could see on his face
that he was withholding the emotion and
and the emotion must have been extremely
powerful of hearing somebody explain to
you
why medics coming to save your life is a
terrible thing to happen
i think it took him a lot of adrenaline
to go through it and at the end he just
essentially collapsed he went back to to
his home to have a rest because he
he had nothing to say and he couldn't
say nothing until we met later in the
day
and we all wondered whether that had
really happened or was it a dream
was it a dream well let's get the
thoughts now of our moscow correspondent
steve rosenberg such
fascinating details in that phone call
steve 49 minutes long
what was your reaction when you listen
to it
well i mean lucy what an incredible
story you you'd be hard-pressed to come
up with a more bizarre
telephone conversation telephone call
would you i mean
alex in the valley picks up the phone
and telephones
um one of the security officials
security agents
alleged to have been part of this
clandestine fsb hit squad
um in order to shadow him and then to
poison him and it was incredible
49 minutes and this man constantine
could drive
clearly uh completely duped completely
taken in believing that
mr nevinly was who he said he was
this uh russian security official and uh
mr nevada able to extract some
fascinating details
of the operation uh to kill him
including the fact the
the detail that the novichok poison this
chemical weapon
seems to have been planted in a pair of
his underpants also interesting
mr kudraf made it clear that the dose of
novichok would have been enough
to kill mr navini if the plane
on which mr the violin had been flying
to moscow hadn't made an emergency
landing so quickly
and if the paramedics on the ground
hadn't accident acted
so quickly fascinating stuff yeah we
heard steve how difficult it was for
alexi navalny to sit there and hear that
kind of detail that it was only the
urgent medical care he received that
saved his life it was really amazing to
get some of that
information but i'm wondering what the
reaction has been not just from the
kremlin
but from others in russia to this
interview
the reaction has been as expected
whenever the russian authorities are
accused of something whether it's
poisonings or whether it's meddling in
newest elections or
sending russian troops into eastern
ukraine the reactions are was denial
and we heard a denial yesterday from the
fsb the russian
internal security service which called
the recording a fake
it said it was a provocation organized
by foreign intelligence services
today the kremlin has commented and said
well the fsb has said everything we have
nothing more to add
but they did add president putin's press
secretary said
that mr levine suffered from delusions
of grandeur and a persecution complex
nothing surprising really in the
kremlin's reaction to this
social media though steve
well it's been all underpants really
lots of um humorous posts
about underpants plays on words uh
many posts suggesting that the fsb uh
cleans mr naval's underpants
because this man mr kudrsov it seems his
role in the operation
was to clean up the evidence and to
organize the cleaning
of of mr nevada's clothes to get rid of
the evidence
and it's fascinating stuff isn't it it's
remarkable on many levels
you know the fact that the victim calls
one of the assassins alleged assassins
the fact that the investigative team the
investigative journalists and the
citizen investigators were able to
identify
the members of this clandestine fsb
hit squad using databases old and new
using passenger logs using mobile phone
records
and they were able to put this jigsaw
together and come up with names
and numbers yeah on that steve they may
deny it but surely this is hugely
embarrassing
for the kremlin and for the fsb
oh absolutely it's embarrassing for mr
kudravsov who was taken in
it's embarrassing for the fsb it's
embarrassing for the kremlin
only last week um vladimir putin at his
big
end-of-year news conference was saying
well yes we
we may have been following mr levine but
uh poison him no if we'd have wanted to
kill him then we would have made sure we
did the job properly i mean the kremlin
has continually denied
that the russian state had anything at
all to do with the the poisoning
of the kremlin's most vocal critic steve
thanks for joining us from moscow