In what he was told was a debriefing, 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 did not speak to an official of the Russian 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 the side for President Vladimir Putin, who has exposed corruption in high places and campaigned against the ruling United Russia party.
The Bellingcat-CNN investigation found that the FSB’s toxin team, of between six and ten agents, tracked Navalny for more than three years. After identifying most of the team, CNN and Bellingcat tried to contact them and their superiors.
A man, Oleg Tayakin, closed the door when questioned by CNN. Others did not respond.
At the same time, Navalny was also making calls. To begin with, he told officers who he was, and those who contacted him immediately ended the call. For the final call to Kudryavtsev, his team decided on a different approach: an acute operation.
As Navalny did
Navalny, who is still recovering in a secret location in Germany, presented himself as a senior official of the Russian National Security Council tasked with conducting an analysis of the poisoning operation. According to Navalny’s team, his phone number was disguised as the FSB headquarters and a call log later provided to CNN and Bellingcat.
After Kudryavtsev confirmed his identity, Navalny said he had been tasked with gaining “a brief understanding of the team members: what went wrong, why was there a complete failure at Navals with Tomsk?”
Kudryavtsev’s responses to the 45-minute call provide the first direct evidence of the unit’s involvement in Navalny poisoning.
Sometimes, of course, he is afraid to speak in an unsafe line, but Navalny, sometimes speaking abruptly and urgently, persuades him that senior officials demand a report immediately and says that “all this will be discussed in the Security Council. the highest level “.
Why was the underwear addressed?
More dramatically, Kudryavtsev provided a detailed account of how the nerve agent was applied to a pair of Navalny socks.
Navalny asked, “What piece of clothing was emphasized? What is the riskiest piece of clothing?”
Kudryavtsev simply replied, “Shorts.”
Navalny kept asking exactly where the Novichok was applied: the inner or outer seams.
“The inside, the crotch,” 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.
Bellingcat and CNN’s investigation used thousands of more obvious flight logs and other documents obtained by Bellingcat to track the team of toxin experts. He stated that, the night the Novichok somehow entered the hotel room in Navalny, there was a ping from a mobile phone of one of the toxin teams, Alexei Alexandrov, a few hundreds of meters from the hotel.
Kudryavtsev acknowledged knowing Alexandrov and praised his work.
Unexpected result
CNN cannot confirm that Kudryavtsev was also in Tomsk when the poison was applied. But the call showed he had an intimate knowledge of what was being done and that he was involved in the clean-up operation to make sure there were no remains of Novichok left after Navalny had left the hospital.
Navalny suddenly fell ill on a flight to Moscow and the pilot was diverted to Omsk, where he received emergency treatment that saved the lives of paramedics.
If the plane had flown to Moscow, Navalny would have died for sure, according to toxicology experts consulted by CNN.
“The flight lasts about three hours, it’s a long flight,” Kudryavtsev said. “If it didn’t land the plane, the effect would have been different and the result would have been different. So I think the plane played the decisive role.”
“[We] I didn’t expect all this to happen. I’m sure everything went wrong, “Kudryavtsev added, suggesting that the FSB’s intention was to kill Navalny, as many toxicologists familiar with Novichok have said.
When pressured about whether a wrong dose of poison could have been administered, Kudryavtsev replied, “As I understand it, we added [a] little more “.
The cleaning job
Kudryavtsev’s background 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 has established that he later worked at the 42nd center of the Ministry of Defense, its biological security research center.
The Bellingcat-CNN investigation, which also involved the German magazine Der Spiegel and the Russian online publication The Insider, had already established through flight manifestos that Kudryavtsev had flown to Omsk on August 25, five days after intoxication.
“When we arrived, they gave it to us, they brought the guys from Omsk [them] with the police, “Kudryavtsev said in the call. He added that they had applied solutions, so there were no remains left on the clothes.
“So there will be no surprises with the clothes?” Navalny asked.
“That’s why we went there several times,” Kudryavtsev replied.
Later, Kudryavtsev says, “I was told to work precisely with the panties inside.”
Navalny asked, “Who said that? Makshakov?”
“Yes,” replied Kudryavtsev.
Stanislav Makshakov is a scientist identified in the investigation as the head of the toxin team, which is based in the FSB’s Criminology Unit on the outskirts of Moscow. He previously worked as a colonel at the Shikhany Institute, a Soviet and later Russian research institute on chemical weapons.
The investigation published last week set out details of the toxins team’s communications and trips, which showed they had overshadowed Navalny on more than 30 trips outside Moscow since 2017. The data also revealed high-profile contacts. level between the unit of toxins and Russian laboratories specializing in research nerve agents.
Putin and other Russian officials have dismissed the Bellingcat-CNN investigation as part of a campaign orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies. On Friday, Putin said he represented a kind of “information war,” which he described as “a landfill where everything is dumped, dumped, dumped in the hope that it will make an impression on citizens, instilling distrust of leadership.” politician”. ”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged a surveillance operation in Navalny because, he said, of the growing “ears” of foreign special services.
What the agents and Navalny saw
Navalny told CNN Monday that he did not believe the new revelations would lead to an investigation in Russia. “It has become so clear that it was Putin personally who was behind this,” he said.
He added that he was surprised talking to Kudryavtsev. “Of course, it surprised me and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Simultaneously because of my luck and the way he routinely says phrases like ‘the job has been done well.’
At an almost surreal moment of the call, Navalny committed to Kudryavtsev who had survived.
He continued: “You have made so many trips with Navalny – to Kirov in 2017 – how do you assess his personality?”
“Very careful, scared of everything, on the one hand,” Kudryavtsev replied. “But on the other hand, he goes everywhere and so on. Sometimes he changes rooms, very carefully.”
He was then asked if Navalny could have recognized any of the toxins.
“That would be unlikely, we’re very strict on that, changing clothes and all,” he said, adding that the team took different flights when it followed Navalny through Russia.
Kudryavtsev seems to be proud of the team’s security measures. “No one filmed, no one saw it, that’s always out of the question.”
He was almost certainly right in that regard. Navalny told CNN that he did not recognize Kudryavtsev or other team members when his photographs were shown earlier this month. But this research has shown that the FSB toxin team at the Institute of Criminology left many other proofs of their movements, communications and activities.
Among those tests was Kudryavtsev’s cell phone number, through which he inadvertently allowed Bellingcat and CNN to complete the image of Navalny’s poisoning by the Russian state.
CNN has contacted Kudryavtsev and the Kremlin to comment.
CNN’s Anna Chernova, Mary Ilyushina and Darya Tarasova contributed to this story.