Alexander Litvinenko (a.k.a. Alexander Volkov, a.k.a Chris Reid, a.k.a Edwin Redwald Carter) was born in Voronezh, Russia in 1962.  He spent most, if not all ,of his career in the intelligence game. At the age of 24 he was assigned to the KGB’s military counterintelligence unit, where he worked to recruit Chechens as spies for the KGB. In 1996, his operation involved intercepting contraband moving from Georgia to Chechnya, an activity which brought him in contact with the smuggling rings that were truckloads of arms to the Chechen rebels. When the KGB became the FSB, he moved to its newly-created Department for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations, which kept track of the connections between businessmen and Russian organized crime. Under Yeltsen, he was put in charge of protecting top businessmen which brought him in contact with Berezovsky. At one point, gun in one hand and FSB card in the other, he prevented Moscow police from arresting Berezovsky as part of a murder investigation. In 1998, he exposed the plan of a rival faction in the FSB to assassinate Berezovsky. Litvinenko was fired from the FSB and, without a trial, imprisoned. When he was released in 2000, it was on condition that he surrender his passport and remain in Russia. He escaped to the Republic of Georgia in October 2000 and crossed into Chechnya. According to Russian officials who investigated his 2000 trip, his mission in Chechnya was to"to eliminate evidence of Boris Berezovsky's involvement in funding illegal armed groups there." He then crossed into Turkey, using a false passport in the name of "Chris Reid," From Turkey, with the help of Berezovsky and Alex Goldfarb, he arranged to get to England by boarding a flight from Istanbul to Moscow on November 1, 2000 with a stop-over at Heathrow, where he disembarked. In London, he was financed by Berezovsky’s foundation and worked ceaselessly to discredit Putin. He co-authored Blowing Up Russia which alleged that Putin’s FSB, not Chechen rebels, had blown up six Russian apartment houses in 1999, and killed some 300 residents of those buildings. Putin’s motive for blowing up Russians, according to Litvinenko, was to create a pretext for his planned re-invasion of Chechnya. His book Gang From Lubyanka claimed that Putin was deeply involved in Russian organized crime. Litvinenko also alleged that that Putin’s FSB had trained Osama Bin laden’s partner, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 1998 in the Caucasus, and that the 2002 seizure of a Moscow theater by Chechen women was organized by "FSB agents among the Chechens."
Litvinenko’s close connection with the Chechen rebels– he converted to Islam on his death bed– led to establish contacts with the Chechen rebels who Russia alleged were the 1999 bombings and who taken refuge in the Pankisi Gorge no-man’s land on the Georgian border. After obtaining a contact number from a former associate in the FSB, Litvinenko traveled to Georgia under the alias “Edwin Redwald Carter,” where he sought a meeting in the Pankisi gorge. He also used his contacts with the Chechen rebels, some of which may have dated back to his KGB counterintelligence work, to facilitate ransoming a kidnapped British banker. Because of his connection, he was retained by a British security group, Titan International Ltd, which was a subsidiary of Erinys International Ltd. He told Goldfarb that the company, “was run by ex-Secret Service officers.” His job there may have also included introducing Russian visitors to his British principals. According to Vyacheslav Zharko, a Russian official, Litvinenko introduced him to in 2003 was Pablo Miller, who then recruited him as a British spy.