This is the story of Vladimir Putin's 3

global campaign of targeted assassination. 4

This is about how the Russian state 5

goes after enemies, traitors, critics, 6

journalists, those who seek to expose 7

Vladimir Putin's links to organized crime. 8

It's a story about intimidation. 9

It's a story of statecraft, 10

and is one of the most disturbing 11

geopolitical stories of our time. 12

My name is Heidi Blake 13

and I'm Global Investigations Editor at BuzzFeed News. 14

And I wrote "From Russia with Blood: 15

"The Kremlin's ruthless assassination program 16

"and Vladimir Putin's secret war on the west". 17

(dramatic music) 18

Back in 2014 I flew to New York 19

to meet with Mark Schoofs who was then 20

the editor of BuzzFeed's global investigations team. 21

And I was talking to him about setting up 22

an investigations team in the United Kingdom. 23

And I took with me a news clipping 24

that I hoped contained the clues to a mystery 25

that may be the new team could set about trying to solve. 26

And that news clipping was about the death 27

of a man called Scot Young. 28

He was a multi-millionaire property tycoon 29

and he had plunged to his death 30

days before I flew to New York. 31

Falling from the fourth floor of a London penthouse, 32

and had been impaled on the spikes 33

of a wrought iron fence underneath his window. 34

So it was a really gruesome death. 35

Scot Young's body was found in Montagu Square 36

on Monday evening. 37

There were reports about his death, 38

and particularly about his connections 39

to a number of other men 40

who had died in suspicious circumstances. 41

Including the exiled Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. 42

And so I was really intrigued by what 43

kind of lay behind this web of death 44

at the heart of London. 45

And shortly after I got a mysterious phone call 46

out of the blue from somebody who asked me 47

to come and meet her at an address 48

in a smart part of London. 49

I turned up at the address and the door swung open 50

and I came face-to-face with Michelle Young, 51

who was the wife of Scot Young, 52

and who told me her husband had been murdered 53

and she wanted my new team to investigate. 54

I knew as soon as I had received that phone call, 55

I knew that he'd been murdered. 56

Michelle Young had a trove of documents 57

which had come out in the course of this divorce battle 58

between her and Scot Young. 59

And those documents showed really fascinating new details 60

about Young's business dealings with Boris Berezovsky, 61

this exiled Russian oligarch 62

who was a major enemy of the Kremlin, 63

and with a number of other 64

highly politically exposed Russians 65

who were really living in the UK 66

in the crosshairs of Vladimir Putin's Russia. 67

And so we began to look at those documents 68

and to piece together this jigsaw puzzle 69

which connected Scot Young not only to Boris Berezovsky, 70

who himself had been found hanged 71

in very strange circumstances the year before, 72

but also to a whole group of people, 73

a total of 14 men, who had died suspiciously 74

in Britain after falling afoul of Vladimir Putin. 75

We got hold of this huge cache of documentary evidence 76

which showed the connections between this group of men 77

who had all worked together to try to move 78

ill-gotten Russian money into the United Kingdom, 79

and had all met untimely ends. 80

And we fed all of those documents, 81

along with huge amounts of other exclusive 82

material we had obtained, into a custom-built database 83

that allowed us to search across the whole set 84

of data that we'd obtained. 85

And we also then scraped public records 86

from various court cases and public inquiries and inquests. 87

We were able to piece together a kind of big digital library 88

which helped us to unravel this story 89

of Russian related money and betrayal and murder. 90

We also got hold of hours worth of surveillance footage 91

of Scot Young and some of his associates 92

in the months leading up to his death. 93

Some leaked audio recordings. 94

We rebuilt mobile phones and computers 95

that had been discarded 96

to piece together a really large digital cache of evidence, 97

and we got hold of some bags of evidence 98

which the police had gathered from the scenes 99

of some of these deaths, and which had been discarded. 100

And we were able to piece together this picture 101

of a pattern of 14 suspicious deaths in the United Kingdom. 102

Officially, Thames Valley Police 103

are treating the death as unexplained. 104

There is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding it. 105

People fell off tall buildings, 106

they were found hanged, found stabbed to death, 107

fell under Tube trains, 108

there's a whole series of bizarre and grizzly deaths 109

that befell these men. 110

At the same time, Berezovsky was financing 111

a group of people to investigate 112

Vladimir Putin's links to organized crime 113

and his connections to a series of terror atrocities 114

that had taken place in Russia. 115

And those investigators similarly died 116

in highly suspicious circumstances, 117

both in Britain and in Russia. 118

(speaking in foreign language) 119

I was threatened with the murder 120

of my six year old son. 121

The most famous of those cases is the death 122

of Alexander Litvinenko, who was a defector, 123

a former Russian spy who came to the UK 124

and blew the whistle on lots of atrocities 125

connected to the Kremlin. 126

That's probably the most famous Russian assassination 127

in living memory. 128

He was poisoned with radioactive polonium, 129

a deadly nuclear substance, 130

and he died very slowly and painfully 131

in a London hospital. 132

But not before solving his own murder from his deathbed 133

and accusing the Kremlin of his killing. 134

Friends and relatives gather 135

to pay their respects to a man noted 136

for his vigor and challenge to the Putin administration. 137

Russia, in particular under Vladimir Putin, 138

has plowed a huge amount of resource 139

into refining the art and the science 140

of targeted assassination. 141

To enable Russian assassins to kill 142

enemies of the state abroad without leaving a trace, 143

in undetectable ways. 144

News that a nerve agent was used 145

in the attack on Sergei Skripal 146

and his 33-year-old daughter 147

is making headlines in Britain. 148

But also, they have the ability 149

to conduct very high profile assassinations 150

that are pretty obviously connected to Russia 151

if they want to send a message. 152

And so, you can see with the recent attack 153

on Sergei Skripal, a Russian defector in Britain. 154

He was poisoned in Salisbury 155

with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. 156

That's a substance that really only originates 157

in those quantities in Russia. 158

It's a very conspicuously Russian poison. 159

There are a lot more subtle ways 160

within the armory of the Russian state to kill people. 161

In this park he and his daughter 162

were attacked in broad daylight with a lethal chemical. 163

Widespread speculation that the Russian state was involved. 164

Instead there was a choice taken to use 165

this extremely conspicuous technique of killing, 166

and really that attack was intended to send a message 167

to traitors that if you cross Vladimir Putin 168

your life is in danger. 169

What happened here pitted east against west 170

with a chemical weapon of choice. 171

There's a whole array of techniques available, 172

ranging from those kinds of really sophisticated methods, 173

just to very crude, organized crime style, 174

gangland shootings and stabbings. 175

And because of that real full spectrum 176

of techniques being used by the Russian state 177

to neutralize enemies, it's quite difficult 178

for law enforcement to say with certainty 179

whether a suspicious death was carried out 180

by the security services or organized crime 181

or was a natural death, and that's part of why 182

these deaths have been so difficult 183

for the authorities to tackle and investigate. 184

Western leaders have shown themselves 185

to be really unwilling to stand up to the Kremlin 186

in these cases where Putin's enemies 187

have died suspiciously on western soil. 188

My team at BuzzFeed News spent about two years 189

investigating these deaths in Britain 190

and one death in the USA 191

before we published our articles 192

in the summer of 2017. 193

Exposing this web of death in both countries 194

and also the failure of the authorities 195

to investigate properly or to tackle the threat from Russia. 196

Certainly reporting this story was dicey for us at times, 197

we had some strange occurrences; 198

reporters being followed and items being moved around 199

inside people's homes and things like that. 200

And that kind of thing is obviously intimidating, 201

but we have an amazing security team at BuzzFeed News 202

who worked really hard to keep us safe 203

throughout the investigation. 204

We used counter-surveillance methods 205

and trackers and panic alarms 206

and things like that to keep us safe. 207

(dramatic music) 208

I don't think this story is over. 209

I think that all the evidence suggests 210

that Putin's campaign of targeted assassination is, 211

if anything, escalating. 212

Just a week after the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury 213

another enemy of the Kremlin died on British soil, 214

a man named Nikolai Glushkov who was found strangled 215

at home with a dog's lead. 216

That is a case that the British authorities 217

did immediately treat as a murder. 218

I think because the attack on the Skripals 219

had been such a watershed moment. 220

But there's really no sign that this problem 221

is abating, if anything this is an escalating problem.