The KGB man who spied on the bond markets

It’s not every day a former KGB spy invites you to interview him. But Alexander Lebedev is not your typical KGB spy. He’s made billions in stock-market trading, he throws lavish parties in London attended by the likes of Tom Wolfe and J.K. Rowling, and he might just be the most serious critic of Kremlin policy still standing. Naturally I accept, and go to meet him in the Hyatt hotel in central Moscow. He’s sitting at the back of the bar, dressed more like a rock-band manager than a billionaire spook.

Lebedev joined the KGB in the early 1980s and was sent to London in 1988, operating out of a flat in Kensington High Street. But he was no faceless apparatchik with a poisoned umbrella — his first interest, in fact, was studying international debt markets at the elite Moscow State University of International Relations. ‘Unfortunately, stud­ies of the debt markets by foreign economists were kept in a closed institute,’ he recalls.