In what was told to be an information process, Konstantin Kudryavtsev also talked about others involved in the poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk and how he was sent to clean things up.
But the agent was not talking to an official from Russia’s National Security Council, as he thought. He was talking to Navalny himself, who almost died after being poisoned in August.
Navalny has long been a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side, exposing corruption in high places and militating against the ruling United Russia party.
The Bellingcat-CNN investigation found that the FSB toxin team, consisting of about six to 10 agents, followed Navalny for more than three years. After identifying the majority of the team, CNN and Bellingcat tried to contact them and their superiors.
A man, Oleg Tayakin, slammed the door shut when questioned by CNN. Others did not answer.
At the same time, Navalny was making calls. For a start, he told the agents who he was, and those he contacted immediately ended the call. For the last call to Kudryavtsev, his team decided on another approach: a sting operation.
How Navalny did it
Navalny, who is still recovering in a secret location in Germany, posed as a senior official at Russia’s National Security Council tasked with conducting an analysis of the poisoning operation. His phone number was disguised as that of the FSB headquarters, according to the Navalny team, and a call recording later provided by CNN and Bellingcat.
After Kudryavtsev confirmed his identity, Navalny said he had been tasked with obtaining “a brief understanding from the team members: what went wrong, why was there a complete failure in Tomsk with Navalny?”
Kudryavtsev’s answers in the 45-minute call provide the first direct evidence of the unit’s involvement in Navalny poisoning.
Sometimes he is clearly worried about speaking on an insecure line, but Navalny, sometimes speaking suddenly and urgently, convinces him that senior officials are calling for an immediate report and says that “all this will be discussed at the Council of Ministers.” Security at the highest level. ”
Why the underwear was targeted
The most dramatic Kudryavtsev provided a detailed description of how the nerve agent was applied to a pair of Navalny panties.
Navalny asked, “What item of clothing was the focus on? What is the riskiest piece of clothing?”
Kudryavtsev answered simply: “Panties.”
Navalny went on to ask exactly where Novichok was applied – the interior or exterior seams.
“The inside, the legs,” Kudryavtsev replied.
Toxicologists consulted by CNN say that if applied in granular form to clothing, Novichok would be absorbed through the skin when the victim begins to sweat.
The Bellingcat and CNN investigation used thousands of telephone records, plus flight manifestos and other documents obtained by Bellingcat to track the team of toxin experts. It was established that the night Novichok somehow entered Navalny’s hotel room, there was a ping from a mobile phone belonging to one of the toxin teams, Alexei Alexandrov, just a few hundred meters from the hotel.
Kudryavtsev acknowledged that he knew Alexandrov and praised his work.
Unexpected result
CNN cannot confirm that Kudryavtsev was also in Tomsk when the poison was applied. But the call revealed that he had an intimate knowledge of what had been done and that he was involved in the clean-up operation to make sure there were no traces of Novichok left after Navalny left the hospital.
Navalny suddenly fell ill on a flight to Moscow, and the pilot headed to Omsk, where he received emergency treatment from paramedics.
If the plane had flown to Moscow, Navalny would have died almost certainly, according to toxicology experts consulted by CNN.
“The flight takes about three hours, this is a long flight,” Kudryavtsev said. “If you didn’t land the plane, the effect would have been different and the result would have been different. So I think the plane played a decisive role.”
“[We] I didn’t expect all this to happen. I’m sure everything went wrong, “Kudryavtsev added – suggesting the FSB’s intention was to kill Navalny, as many toxicologists familiar with Novichok have said.
When asked if the wrong dose of poison could have been administered, Kudryavtsev challenged: “As I understand it, I added [a] a little extra. “
Cleaning work
Kudryavtsev’s history suggests that he is a specialist in chemical and biological weapons. He graduated from the Moscow branch of the Russian Academy of Chemical Defense. Bellingcat established that he later worked at the 42nd center of the Ministry of Defense – his research center in the field of biosafety.
The Bellingcat-CNN investigation, which also involved the German magazine Der Spiegel and the Russian online publication The Insider, has already established in flight manifestos that Kudryavtsev flew to Omsk on August 25, five days after the poisoning.
“When we arrived, they gave it to us, they brought the local boys from Omsk [them] with the police, “Kudryavtsev said on appeal. He added that they had applied solutions so that no marks remained on his clothes.
– So there will be no surprises with the clothes? Navalny asked.
“That’s why I went there several times,” Kudryavtsev replied.
Later, Kudryavtsev says, “I was told to work exactly with my panties on the inside.”
Navalny asked, “Who said that? Makshakov?”
“Yes,” said Kudryavtsev.
Stanislav Makshakov is a scientist identified in the investigation as the official in charge of the toxin team, which is based at the FSB Forensic Unit on the outskirts of Moscow. He previously worked as a colonel at the Shikhany Institute, a Soviet and later Russian chemical weapons research institute.
The survey, published last week, set out details of the toxins team’s communications and travels, which showed it had overshadowed Navalny in more than 30 trips outside Moscow since 2017. The data also revealed high-level contacts between unit of toxins and laboratories in Russia, specializing in research nerve agents.
Putin and other Russian officials rejected the Bellingcat-CNN investigation as part of a campaign orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies. On Friday, Putin said it was a kind of “information war” – describing the investigation as “a dump in which everything is thrown away, thrown away, thrown in the hope that it will impress citizens, instill mistrust of the political leadership.” ”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged a surveillance operation at Navalny because of “as he put it – the growing” ears “of foreign special services.
What the agents and Navalny saw
Navalny told CNN on Monday that he did not believe the new revelations would lead to an investigation in Russia. “It has become so obvious that Putin was personally behind this,” he said.
He added that he was amazed to talk to Kudryavtsev. “I was amazed, of course, and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. At the same time, because of my luck and the way he routinely says expressions like “the job was done well.” Clearly, he is not considered a member of an assassination team, but just a regular employee. “
In an almost surreal moment, Navalny congratulated Kudryavtsev on his survival.
He continued: “You have made so many trips with Navalny – to Kirov in 2017 – how do you assess his personality?”
“Very careful, scared of all – on the one hand,” replied Kudryavtsev. “But on the other hand, it goes everywhere and so on. It changes rooms sometimes, very carefully.”
He was then asked if Navalny could recognize a team of toxins.
“This would be unlikely, we are very strict about it, changing clothes and everything,” he said, adding that the team performed different flights when pursuing Navalny in Russia.
Kudryavtsev was a disappointment, however. “No one filmed, no one saw, this is always ruled out.”
He was almost certainly right about that. Navalny told CNN that he did not recognize Kudryavtsev or other members of the team when they were shown the photos earlier this month. But this investigation showed that the FSB team for toxins at the Institute of Forensics left a lot of other evidence of their movements, communications and activities.
Among this evidence, Kudryavtsev’s cell phone number – through which he mistakenly allowed Bellingcat and CNN to complete the image of Navalny’s poisoning by the Russian state.
CNN contacted Kudryavtsev and the Kremlin for comments.
CNN’s Anna Chernova, Mary Ilyushina and Darya Tarasova contributed to this story.