Hello and welcome to the documentary, Anyone, and the 15th episode of our 20/20 season. In 2017, Robert Mulhern produced a documentary with us entitled Ireland and the KGB, that documentary briefly featured Derek Conlon, a Dublin piano player who accidentally drank from the same radioactive cup used to poison ex KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Today, we bring you the first part of a two part documentary which takes an in-depth look at this story produced by Robert Mulheron for Sky News Story, cast and narrated by Diana Magnay.

This is part one of polonium and the piano player. And a quick point of note before listing, the former KGB agents, Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy deny any involvement in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, as does the Russian state. It's November the 1st, 2006, we're in Mayfair, London, the five star Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square, to be exact.

It's coming up to half past four in the afternoon. And three men are sitting, talking in a busy piano bar just off the hotel lobby.

The character, they're Russian, and that's not all they have in common. Each has been trained by the KGB, the notorious spy agency of the former Soviet Union.

But there is a critical difference between these men. Two are working undercover for the Russian state. The third used to, but he doesn't anymore. He's ex KGB.

The two active Russian agents are Andrei Lugovoy, 39, and already a military veteran, and Dmitri Kovtun, 41, and something of a drifter who harbored dreams of making it as a porn star. And these men are on a mission to kill the man they're talking to, this third man, the former KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who fled Russia six years earlier and defected to the U.K. where he was granted asylum.

Alexander Litvinenko believes he's here in the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair to discuss a business deal. But he's been marked out as a traitor. And that makes you enemy number one in the eyes of the Kremlin, minutes before Alexander Litvinenko arrives at the Millennium Hotel, the two Russian agents drop a highly radioactive substance called polonium 210 into his cup of green tea. The stage is now set this afternoon, meeting over a cup of green tea is about to turn into an international event, creating its own history and harking back to an age of espionage, war and deceit.

It all evokes memories of Cold War scandals like the assassination in 1978 of George Markoff murdered with a poison tipped umbrella.

What happens next will change people's lives, change diplomatic affairs, change business affairs. You might even say change the world in some way.

And in the middle of this Russian assassination plot, there is another person, a fourth person who's about to get caught in the crossfire, caught up in a world he knows nothing about, a world few of us will ever know anything about. My name is Gerry Conlon and I am 57 years old. From Dublin in Ireland, Derek Conlon plays the piano, the five star Millennium Hotel.

And he's making his way here right now. And we're going to start this story by looking inside this teapot, which is being made lethally toxic thanks to a drop of polonium, thinks something no bigger than a grain of sand, but powerful enough to kill not just everyone here in the bar, but about 10 percent of the entire population of London.

It only needs tiny amounts, micrograms, millions of grams to have enough that would kill someone if you get it inside them. So the other way, think of it as if you had a gram of the material, then you could kill a million people. In just a few hours, Derek Connellan and Alexander Litvinenko will become unwitting victims of this nuclear attack, something the press will dub an act of war.

What you're talking about is a nuclear attack on British soil not far short of an act of war.

Derek Holland has never told his story. But to tell it, we also need to tell you Alexander Litvinenko story because the stories of both men were destined to collide here in London's five star Millennium Hotel.

They'll be looking for evidence of polonium 210 described as a tiny nuclear bomb. This is how to do that. We need first to relocate four miles to the north of here.

And fast forward to March the 12th, 2020.

Commander Derek Derek Conlon is meeting with Robert Mulhearn on Northhampton Street of Essex Road in Islington. And this morning, I'm standing outside the place where it all began.

Derek is 57 now, and this location, Northhampton Street, is important because this small grey apartment block is where Derek woke up on the day of the poisoning.

I get up, say 10 o'clock, have something to eat, bacon and scrambled eggs and you name put on the plate and it's gone.

It sounds pretty mundane, but it's a routine that you put yourself in as a musician 14 years on from that fateful day, Derek has agreed to tell his story in full. He's going to begin by retracing his footsteps to the hotel that afternoon.

Just turn right. And it's about 200 yards to the bus stop right now.

He's dressed casually in jeans and a jacket. But on the day of the attack, November the 1st, 2006, Derek was dressed to perform.

I'd have to always be in a formal suit, sort of like a dress suit and a nice white dress shirt, crisp and starched. And I never wore the bow tie, obviously, on the bus, because that was kind of pushing it a bit too much. But while Derek was waiting for his bus down at the Millennium Hotel, the two Russian agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, were getting ready for their afternoon meeting with the man. Derrick's life would become forever intertwined with Alexander Litvinenko.

Lugovoy and Kovtun are carrying polonium 210 with them, a poison engineered by a billion pound technology in a nuclear reactor.

Their target is Litvinenko. It wouldn't be secret.

I mean, cyclotron or a reactor you don't have in your garden shed. So you need some kind of national facility.

Professor of physics from Surrey University, Philip Walker explains that this deadly poison would have been very easy to conceal from the point of view of carrying it around.

If you put it in a little vile, a little pot, you could carry around in your pocket. So when the bus arrived to pick Derrick up on Essex Road in 2006, he was on the final leg of a collision course that had actually been years in the making.

It was pedal and down. As I said, I thought, well, here we go. Another day, another day at work. But the journey that led both Derek Connellan and Alexander Litvinenko to the Millennium Hotel that afternoon actually started in the aftermath of a major international crisis.

We're going back to 1962 when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war after the U.S. discovered that the Soviet Union was sending missiles to Cuba.

Castro's government has invasion.

This was the year that Alexander Litvinenko was born in the Soviet Union. On December the fourth and four months later, Derek Connellan was born in Ireland.

Now the Kremlin has turned a deaf ear.

Now, this Cold War threat was a long way from where Derek and his brothers and sisters grew up in Dublin.

Doesn't have know what was the name of the place. Most people know about the popes. The Pope was the autobahn on the main road.

So north to another city about the same size as Dublin. But a world away from Derek's home is the city where Alexander Litvinenko was born. That Hornish in southwestern Russia straddling the Verona's River. Alexander Litvinenko, city of birth, was also home to the prestigious Suvorov Military School, a boarding school for young boys earmarked as future military officers. Many of them had been orphaned by World War Two. And in 1962, the prospect of a devastating nuclear attack was something very real for Alexander's parents, Walter and Nina.

I hate to think what would happen to the world where Fidel Castro got possession of these nuclear warheads.

And because of the Soviet Union's closed way of life, the Litvinenko could never have imagined having neighbors who would become international rock stars.

But back in Dublin, Derek Conlon certainly did.

Bono used to live up the road in Virgin Prunes, and he was a great old time back then. You know, lots of people coming through, lots of people doing a bit of damage to the world, you know, in a good way.

Soon after the crisis in Cuba, Walter and Nina Litvinenko divorced. This resulted in a very unsettling childhood for their young son, Alexander, who is now torn between staying with his father in Nalchik, a Russian city near the border with Chechnya, Moscow, where his mother now lived, or the small town of Morozova, near the Ukrainian border where Alexander's aunt lived.

At the same time, back in Ireland, Derek Condon was having his own childhood problems when I was a kid, I couldn't speak. I didn't want to speak as opposed to say perhaps even more. So I had a stammer and there was a piano in that house back home in Dublin. And I used to, like, touch the notes to me. Each note was a letter and I had some elocution lessons and speech therapy and learning how to breathe.

And over time, my parents found this teacher for me and she taught me everything and I learned how to speak. Obviously not as good as I should be, but enough to get by. The world both Derek and Alexander grew up in in the 1960s and early 70s was a world of great change.

The U.S. had gone to war with Vietnam in an effort to halt the march of communism.

The city of Saigon was renamed the day the victorious communists. Of course, it was a time of new music, new cultural influences and new political ideas.

The American embassy was burned. Some would say the world was coming of age, at least the western world, a communist soldiers around the revolution.

But in 1974, when Derek and Alexander were both around 12 years old, Western pop culture wasn't openly embraced in the Soviet Union, at least not to the extent that Derek embraced it back in Dublin.

I was walking by the Autobahn pub one evening. They had an old piano there and I was a guy playing the piano. And to me it looked like a very old man. But he's playing rock and roll piano music. And I was that, you know. But this is not classical music. It kind of piqued my interest, so to speak, I had to learn how this rock and roll piano music worked at the same time that Derek's musical influences were forming his future career.

Other factors were forming Alexander's future as a KGB agent after nearly a decade of moving between his father, his mother and his aunt.

Life began to settle for 12 year old Alexander. In 1974, he moved to Nalchik to live with his grandparents, where he would spend the rest of his childhood. He grew especially close to his grandfather, a Soviet war hero who helped defeat Nazi Germany. And he was then instilling in his grandson a desire to serve and protect the Russian state in the only way he knew through the Russian military. For Derek, though, in 1978, his heroes were the pop stars who could make magic on keyboards, Pinehaven College, I think I was 16 years of age and they have a talent show every year.

So I dressed up in this old green.

I can only describe it as a plastic Gardiner's outfit with a hood. And I had all a crazy makeup on and I had a keyboard and nobody knew who I was, obviously. But when they opened the curtains on the keyboard, I had no idea how what had so many buttons on it. So I was blown away as one of those fond memories of her before I actually left school.

But as Derek began to dream about taking to the stage himself one day, Alexander Litvinenko harbored a different ambition. He finished school in 1980 and applied to go to university. Unfortunately for him, it didn't work out. And so, mindful of his grandfather's military past, Alexander decided instead to go to Russian military college. He took that decision partly because he knew he'd have to do military service at some point anyway. But he was also influenced by what had now become his own desire to serve and defend his own country, Russia.

This was a world that Derek Conolan only ever got to glimpse on TV.

Do you deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba?

And it was always Russia and nuclear weapons and was always that type of thing, you know? And again, this was America was the same with the Americans and their nuclear weapons, but they seem to be good nuclear weapons where the Russians were bad nuclear weapons, anything was going on.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and started opening up the Soviet Union from behind the Iron Curtain.

The British government made the decision to support Mr. Gorbachev in the 1980s. And in supporting him, we were essentially supporting the process of reform itself.

But Alexander Litvinenko was also going through great change. He was now a married father progressing in the military. By 1989, Alexander Litvinenko had come of age as a Russian lieutenant and was recruited into the ranks of its security agency, the KGB. Around the same time Derek had moved to London. That was where he watched the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a moment that would mark the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

We have been pouring non-stop in the areas of joint East German transit and crossing, and one of the strangest traffic jams in West Berlin has ever seen.

For Alexander Litvinenko and his military comrades, this was a time of great uncertainty.

Gorbachev admitted that economically they were falling behind the West. We were not surprised.

They simply gave up, opened the gates and allowed thousands through the old Soviet Union or USSR would eventually break into 15 countries with the likes of Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan, freeing themselves from Russia becoming their own states. Derek Conlon's freedom.

However, that was an altogether different thing. That was an adventure. So I had a phone call from a guy and he said his name is Tom Petty.

And, oh, Tom Petty is calling on the phone. It is amazing, you know. And I said, yeah. And he said, I got some gigs in Germany and East Germany. It's like universities and clubs and stuff, you know, you're interested in doing. I said, yeah, Chris, Tom, Tom is a pretty pretty woman.

OK, Tom. Yeah, sure. I said some of the details.

So when is sex with dates and venues came through? Derek just stuffed his suitcase with loud shirts and a fishtail waistcoat, and then he left.

That was actually just jumping into a battered Suzuki jeep from England and got the ferry across the Holland and 12 straight down to Germany, to Leipzig and Dresden and. Magdeburg and Halam, Chemnitz, Chemnitz says, I think it's pronounced and to see them, it was stuck in the 60s.

Like apartment blocks, it just looked grey and sallerson, driving to miles and miles of forest and open piping, and I haven't seen to be, like I say, stuck at this time of it is this world of drab apartment blocks whizzing by the window of Derek Suzuki Jeep that helped shape the outlook of communist countries and of Alexander Litvinenko now in training with the KGB in Siberia.

By 1991 and the fracture of the Soviet Union, Alexander Litvinenko was firmly embedded in the KGB, which was soon to be renamed the FSB or Federal Security Service. Two of his friends and colleagues in this new Secret Service, Lugovoy and Kovtun, were the two men sent out to kill Alexander on November the 1st, 2006 at the Millennium Hotel in London, which is where Derek is now standing in March 2020, having retraced his journey to the hotel. And what about the 250 to the Millennium Hotel?

The Fontanet? And so you walk over there.

In 2006, Sky News journalist Alex Rossi was based in Moscow. Had Derek been following Alex's reports, he would have seen a very different country to the one he experienced in the 1980s from the window of his Suzuki jeep.

You're talking about a massive empire which literally contracted overnight, a country where all its citizens are extremely patriotic and they've been brought up on a diet. But Russia defeated the Nazis. This was a great empire, doing great things. And overnight it just collapsed. You've got widespread alcoholism, poverty, nine years to nine years.

Vladimir Putin comes along, the price of oil goes up. And this is a sober, authoritarian man taking over the helm after the embarrassment, as many Russians saw of Boris Yeltsin spilling off planes drunk and brand Russia not looking particularly good at all.

He was enormously popular. He was seen as a brilliant leader who'd really reversed Russia's fortunes.

Now, what do you think?

I mean, that's a period, I think, where you've perhaps seen how Putin is prepared to engage with things abroad that perhaps he doesn't like.

Russia has a long history of dealing ruthlessly with dissidents abroad from the murder of Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940 to the assassination of Georgy Markov with a poison pellet fired from an umbrella in London in 1978. But it's hard to imagine the agents who carried out those attacks bringing the kind of travelling party that Andrei Lugovoy had brought with him when he flew from Moscow to London on a British Airways flight.

That flight was the night before his meeting with Alexander Litvinenko when his mission was to kill him, the Russian agent had checked into the Millennium Hotel with his wife and children happy, it seems to combine his duty to state with a family holiday. And on the same morning, November the 1st, 2006, his partner and fellow Russian agent, Dmitry Kovtun, landed on a flight from Hamburg. So around the same time that Derek Connellan was getting into his dress suit, Alexander Litvinenko was taking a call from these Russian agents.

Litvinenko knew these men and he trusted them. They were, after all, united by their shared experience in the Russian Secret Service. So he accepted Andrei Lugovoy invitation to this afternoon's meeting. Weeks earlier, the Russians had discovered that Alexander Litvinenko was planning to publicly reveal sensitive information that would compromise Russian President Vladimir Putin. Was this a step too far in the eyes of Russia? Alex Rossi.

Alexander Litvinenko certainly saw the FSB being involved in criminal operations to strengthen the power of states or even in some cases doing things, carrying out his accusation, apartment blocks in Moscow to form a pretext to launch a war in Chechnya. And he claimed to have evidence to that effect.

Lugovoy and Kovtun had already tried to kill Litvinenko. It was mid-October 2006 and they'd met him for a business meeting on nearby Grosvenor Street. Then the plan of attack was the same. Put a drop of nuclear poison, polonium 210 into his water, watch him drink it and leave.

But on that occasion, by some miracle, Litvinenko never touched his cup. He never drank his water. That's why he felt safe when he was meeting Lugovoy and Kovtun, now in the piano bar of the Millennium Hotel. The two agents don't want to get things wrong a second time.

Alex Rossi, Alexander Litvinenko, of course, was teetotal. He didn't become a Muslim after he'd left Russia or fled Russia.

Should I say there was the green tea on the table. Andre Lugovoy was very forthright. He said, you know, kept on urging him to try to have something to take a refreshment.

What must have been like for Russian agents Lugovoy and Kovtun to know that all they needed to happen to kill Litvinenko was for him to take a sip of tea.

As Alexander sips on this nuclear poison, the poker faced Russian agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun, whose bar bill includes expensive Cuban cigars and designer gin, simply continue with the pretense of a business meeting. The scene is like something from a movie script. Alex Rossi. This happened very close to where the U.S. embassy was at the time. You know, we've seen it in films and now we have this stranger than fiction story playing out.

It's now coming up to four thirty pm on the 1st of November. And with the meeting almost done, Andrei Lugovoy, his wife and eight year old son Igor enter the piano bar. The holiday, it seems, can now continue. Tonight, Lugovoy has tickets to watch CSKA Moscow play Arsenal in the Champions League, but considering Litvinenko has just been holding a radioactive cup. The meeting comes to a surprising conclusion. Alex Rossi again.

Lugovoy introduced his eight year old son to live in Yanka, and they shook hands. And Litvinenko, of course, was covered in the stuff.

The two Russian agents then leave Litvinenko, who has an appointment to meet with the Russian dissident and billionaire Boris Berezovsky, follows soon after. And Derek Können, of course, has an appointment to play in the hotel's piano bar, now giving off radiation readings not dissimilar to that of a nuclear accident. So it's about five thirty.

I arrive at the entrance to the Millennium Hotel up these steps and the revolving door dripping wet, shake off the umbrella as you enter the bar. The left hand side is a little row of seats of the kind of bench seats that are sitting. And then to the right is the baby grand piano and the usual suspects on the other people from finishing off business deals. And what have you took off my coat. Check that out and hang it up on the little stand, which is just close by the piano.

Take out the drum machine, plug that in, make sure that's working with the microphone. Check one, two, one, two. Not too noisy. Don't annoy anybody. Go to the bar, say hi to to the staff.

So maybe even even have to ask a cappuccino. Yes. Thank you very much.

As Derek waits for his cappuccino, surrounded by tourists carrying bags from nearby department stores like Harrods and Selfridges, he has absolutely no clue that a nuclear weapon with the potential to decimate the population of London has just been unleashed in the bar.

I just go and grab the newspaper, the Irish Independent, look through the headlines.

And only this radioactive poison was never designed to be released in such a public setting. Ever since 1921, the Soviet Secret Service had been working from an underground laboratory to develop odorless, tasteless poisons for clandestine missions in the West, Polonium 210 represented the latest in what was a long production line, but it wasn't without its design flaws.

Professor of physics from Surrey University, Philip Walker knows that polonium is developed using a nuclear reactor and uranium rods and best handled by scientists in protective gear, not by Russian agents in leather jackets.

The problem comes when you want to administer it, you open the bottle and then very hard to check what you're doing because it's such tiny amounts, you can't see where it's going.

The people with radiation detectors can come around afterwards and tell you where you've put it, but at the time it's easy to slip.

So as well as being one of the most deadly materials known to man, polonium 210 is also extremely difficult to handle. This nuclear poison is easily spilled, and because it's transferable by touch, a piano bar is becoming increasingly contaminated. And some of the highest radiation readings are coming from the teapot and cup that Alexander drank from and that are now being washed in the hotel bar, dishwasher, seemingly clean.

They're now ready to be reused.

This cappuccino that Noby, the head barman, has just put up on the bar for Derek Conlon is purportedly the same cup that Alexander Litvinenko drank the nuclear poison, polonium 210 from a little over an hour ago. Pick up the coffee. I was trying to find the quietest place in the bar on this particular day, he was very busy and so I sat by my piano as a table, a big round table. So I need the coffee on the table.

Is paper quartered over so you could just doesn't take up too much space space in the piano bar.

Is it a premium? The place is packed with tourists and families enjoying tea, cocktails and bar snacks. But everyone in the bar is now part of a murder scene. And Derek is holding a cup that contained a poison from a nuclear facility. Thought nothing of it, just like my coffee, my newspaper.

And after Derek finishes his coffee, he does exactly what he's come here to do.

He sits down at the piano and introduces his first song for 20 minutes. So just keep it nice and instrumental. A song for Guy by Elton John. To get a real sense of this underground Russian world, we need to leave Derek to get on with his set and introduce you to someone who knows that world intimately.

My name is Alexander Weiss.

This is Alexander Vasiliev, another Alexander. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexander Vasiliev settled in London. But before that he worked for the first department of the KGB.

I used to work in the first department of the First Directorate with a very strict discipline for espionage.

Operations in the United States and Canada signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

Not only is Alexander Vasiliev, a respected former KGB officer, he's the same age as Alexander Litvinenko. This means he underwent much the same training as both the poisoned spy and the two Russian agents.

Lugovoy and Kovtun left Soviet military headquarters in Vladivostok. And at this point in the story, we need to be really careful. Alexander Vasiliev does not believe Russia or the FSB played any part in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko just because I believe that Russian spies are going to kill.

Why we need to be careful in saying this is that when the FSB hear this podcast, we do not want them to consider Alexander Vasiliev as a potential next target.

Again, Alexander Vasiliev does not believe Russia or the FSB played any part in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. He is simply helping us tell this story by giving an insight into the minds of Russian agents.

They think a million times about possible consequences of a scandal.

And back in the late 1980s, when Derek Connellan was watching his music videos of Konstantin Chernenko battling Ronald Reagan, Vasiliev was then working with spies who are actually carrying out missions in the United States.

It was a joke heard around the world, the one by President Reagan about bombing the Soviet Union.

And we were soldiers. We didn't wear uniforms, never.

And we were constantly in some state of a secret war since it was set up in 1954 as the security arm of the ruling Communist Party, the KGB had managed to infiltrate every major Western intelligence operation. It's worth mentioning that when Vasiliev made his way through spy school, so too did the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who started in the spy school at the same time. But we went to different faculties. As a matter of fact, we didn't know each other's real names.

Was it was it was a secret no one had seen this coming, Boris Yeltsin stepping down.

The former KGB spy, Vladimir Putin, his chosen successor, his name in the school was not Putin, but secret, no code name.

If secrecy wouldn't go so well after two decades on, President Putin hasn't changed much, but Russia is transformed.

And it was Vladimir Putin who was in power in Russia when Litvinenko was murdered, a man Alex Rossi believes would have needed to sign off on the release of the nuclear poison.

Now inside, Derek Connellan and Alexander Litvinenko bodies the substance that was used polonium 210.

This is something that can only really be made by a state. You need a nuclear reactor to make the stuff.

And the chemical signature or the signature on this stuff goes back to a place which is controlled by the FSB in Russia.

If you're going to kill somebody with a substance like polonium 210, which is extremely hazardous, extremely dangerous, but also extremely expensive, it's hard to think that at that time in 2006.

But that was the deal. And Putin has pretty much established his vertical of power, usually with them, that he wouldn't have known about that it wouldn't have come across his desk, that it it wouldn't have been in some shape or form signed off by him.

The KGB prided itself on selecting the best and the brightest to become Soviet agents. But recruits like Litvinenko and Vladimir Putin first needed to meet one critical requirement.

You have to be really patriotic and you have to be sure that the information you you provide really helps your country, your government, your people.

The Soviet Union has enemies, adversaries. No one would argue with that. So the Soviet Union is an intelligence service. So they had to spy as well as the Americans to spy on Britain, China, these countries have to spy. There were three major areas in which KGB spies operated its political espionage, scientific, technical espionage and active measures.

Active Measures is a KGB codename that covers, among other things, dangerous missions overseas. These missions have taken many forms sabotage in the stealing of enemy secrets mainly. But they all had the same objective to protect the interests of the Soviet Union.

It is this culture of espionage that led to the release of a military grade nuclear weapon here in the piano bar in London's Millennium Hotel.

So I was working and I had been working at the Grosvenor House where it's just gone 8pm and the contamination is continuing to spread.

Liam got over to me and said, you know, imagine me saying, imagine just me, him and the whole room, obviously.

But it's difficult to imagine two men in civilian clothing casually releasing this nuclear weapon into a teapot in a London hotel bar with the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people. But the skills required to allow those two men to do just that, that came with a huge amount of training.

Well, first of all, foreign languages, special disciplines, techniques of recruiting people, maintaining contact with people and working with agents, with sources, meeting people in the street, the list goes on, drop letterboxes in from the surveillance.

And it is these skills that allowed agents like Lugovoy and Kovtun to operate effectively inside enemy territory, i.e., almost every country outside of Russia told flat out that these guys and gals were essentially throwbacks to the old Cold War, almost to the point where they'd be wearing the floppy hats and big trench coats.

Like Derek, we're probably all familiar with this stereotypical spy image and the movie scene of a spy in a high speed pursuit.

Those all those movies where the Russian was the buddy guy, you know.

But for former KGB officer Alexander Vasiliev, this was an actual exam completed by comrades like Litvinenko and the Russian agents, Lugovoy and Kovtun on the streets of Moscow. You will be followed by 10 to 20 people in three or four cars and people actually changing their appearance, changing their clothes, using wigs, glasses if you are traveling by the tube. They will be in the next coach looking through the window, but very subtly. So when I can see something like this in the movies, the surveillance officer reading a newspaper sitting in front of The Spy, this is rubbish.

They don't do that. Not at least not in Russia.

Definitely not. It's a very it's unprofessional. So the only way to detect them is a natural behavior. If they walk too fast, if they arrive and they talk to walkie talkies into their sleeve, something like that, if there is some commotion than usual, that's it.

Today, this training sounds dated, cartoonish even.

But in 2006, this culture of evasion helped Russian agents move a deadly radioactive weapon through some of Britain's most secure airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, before they tipped the radioactive polonium 210 into Litvinenko teacup in the Millennium Hotel piano bar and is now coming up to 10 p.m. on November the 1st, 2006.

And Derek is taking requests. So you play the song phrase about Saudi money and he wants to always hear Purple Rain for some strange reason.

Earlier this evening, Alexander Litvinenko had returned to his home in North London. Recently, he'd been granted UK citizenship and his wife, Marina, had planned a special meal. Around the same time, Andrei Lugovoy, having successfully carried out a nuclear attack on his intended target, is now in London's Emirates Football Stadium, watching the final minutes of CSKA Moscow's Champion's League tie with Arsenal. A man on the inside, Alexander Brazilia, he knows the mindset of agents sent out to kill.

But again, Alexander does not believe Russia or the FSB played any part in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko just to kill someone by by the order.

You have to. You need a special guy with a solid enough and specially trained. And I wasn't that good.

Back at his home in North London, Alexander Litvinenko is now beginning to feel unwell. How the tables had turned. Years earlier, he'd been a high ranking FSB counterintelligence officer reporting to the man right at the top to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It had been his job to target those using sinister spy tactics against the state not to fall victim to an attack himself.

But according to former Sky News Moscow correspondent Alex Rossi, Litvinenko had become something of a special project in the eyes of his former employers.

I mean, you have to remember the Russia that was emerging, you know, like into the wild west of the east. This is something that literally had collapsed overnight. So how does a state bring back that power to the center? Alexander Litvinenko certainly saw the FSB being involved in criminal operations to strengthen the power of states or even in some cases doing things, carrying out his accusation, apartment buildings in Moscow to form a pretext to launch a war in Chechnya.

And he claimed to have evidence to that effect.

These political and criminal forces not only shaped Russia's future, but the futures of both Derek Connellan and Alexander Litvinenko.

And by one a.m. on the night of the attack. So November the 2nd, 2006, these radioactive alpha particles given off by the polonium 210 were taking a grip on Alexander Litvinenko body. Philip Walker, professor of physics from Surrey University.

These alpha particles coming out are a bit like going in with a sledgehammer amongst your delicate tissues. I mean, on a kind of blown up atomic scale, but rather small sledgehammer.

But whatever chemistry or biochemistry you've got going on in there is disrupted by these alpha particles coming out of the polonium.

So it's very damaging, albeit over a rather small volume.

At the same time, the polonium 210 was eating away at Alexander Litvinenko body. Derek Conlon was finishing up his set. I've said good night and I just jump off fairly quickly and grab the microphone off, and you're not finished yet, you're not finished yet, you know? I said, Yeah, guys, I'm finished with the night by tomorrow, you know? You know where I am.

And it's now more than eight hours since he drank from Litvinenko. Poisoned cup of green tea.

I get out of there so little after one o'clock in the head, by the way, I came in back up to Oxford Street and then grabbed the bus. And now it's even worse than the bus. That isn't the pilot is drunk and shouting and screaming and the windows are steaming from the rain and the buses are avoiding these guys on his bicycle. So the bicycle taxis where they called took Tookes or something or tactics or whatever they call the hot dogs that are taken out of the machines and some hot dogs to people and smoke from there.

And it's just a it's a strange time of the night in Oxford Street at two o'clock in the morning. You know, I'm sitting there again in my address suit. I think I remember to take off the bow tie. So that's always a dead giveaway. What's the deal on the bus, you know? Sitting on the top deck of the bus, the rhythm of the London night spinning around him or Derek is worried about his getting home, but these radioactive alpha particles are present in his body, too, and they're slowly beginning to poison him.

The journey by, thank goodness, wasn't like an hour and a half ago as it was to get there.

It's more or less could be 25 minutes to get back. And it's a sandwich and a nice cup of tea and a correspondent for the count.

In a matter of weeks, Derek is going to have difficulty seeing properly. And as the geopolitical crisis around this poisoning deepens, this tuxedo wearing piano player will find himself not only a victim of polonium 210, but also a suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Tune in next time and remember, one last thing before we go that we must remind you of. Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun deny any involvement in Alexander Litvinenko murder, as does the Russian state.

You've been listening to the documentary and one and two part one of Polonium and the piano player narrated by Diana Magnay. It was a Sky News story cast production by Robert Mulhearn. The final and second part of this story follows in our next podcast. Until next time. Thanks for listening.