The man in front of me is wearing a disguise. We are talking on Skype. I’m at my home near London and Dr Grigory Rodchenkov is at an undisclosed location somewhere in America, guarded 24/7 by armed FBI agents. How is he? “My life is good. My mood is very good,” he says. He’s grinning, I think. Since he’s wearing a black scarf over his face and dark glasses, it’s hard to tell.

The cloak-and-dagger atmospherics surrounding our interview might seem a little overblown. Until, that is, you remember, Vladimir Putin’s roving assassins are trying to establish Rodchenkov’s secret location so they can snuff him out, a traitor to the state. Russia’s president has a long list of enemies. But Rodchenkov – the most significant sports whistleblower of the 21st century – is probably at the top.

Rodchenkov was director of Moscow’s anti-doping centre. The super-lab’s name is a misnomer. As Rodchenkov recounts in a gripping memoir, The Rodchenkov Affair, he ran Russia’s doping programme. He developed a novel drugs cocktail to help his country win. It featured three nearly undetectable anabolic steroids. Athletes swished it around the mouth, mixed with Chivas Royal or vermouth.

Russia’s state-sponsored doping operation was a highly sophisticated affair, refined over many years. And a successful one. Moscow cheated its way to medals in successive international competitions. They included the 2012 London Olympics, the “dirtiest in history”, according to Rodchenkov. The fraud reached its apogee at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, hosted by Putin and a moment of patriotic pride.

How much did the Russian president know? According to Rodchenkov, the lot. “He knew about this operation. He was informed on a regular basis, yes,” he says. After each doping episode, Russia’s sports minister Vitaly Mutko – a simple loyalist, in the book – would pop in and brief the president. Typically, Putin would ask if there was anything Mutko needed. “The state’s role is absolutely clear,” Rodchenkov says.

In the cold war, doping was rife across the Soviet bloc. Rodchenkov recalls how as a promising student athlete he first took performance-enhancing drugs in 1981, while sitting on the sofa of his Moscow apartment. His mother, a medic, injected a steroid called retabolil into his right buttock. “The drug felt intoxicating. I could feel energy pouring into my gluteus maximus, the most powerful muscle in a runner’s body,” he writes.

Rodchenkov read chemistry at Moscow State University. In the mid-1980s he got a job at the USSR’s doping- control lab. He thrived there, and rose to run the facility after elbowing out his boss. Rodchenkov admits in his career to covering up hundreds of positive doping results for Russian sportsmen and women, many of them stars. He says he coordinated this programme with Kremlin politicians and top sporting officials.

In politics, Putin was determined as president to project Russia as a great power. In the sporting arena, however, things were going less well. In 2010, he was disappointed by the Russian team’s failure at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where it won just three gold medals. Sport and ideology go hand in hand; as the Sochi Games loomed, Putin gave orders for Russia’s performance to be improved as a matter of urgency, the whistleblower says.

I ask Rodchenkov how we should feel about the London Olympics? At the time they felt magical. We now know, thanks to his revelations, that there was rampant Moscow cheating. Rodchenkov acknowledges the Games were exceptionally dirty and blames in part the “poor analytical performance” of the UK’s anti-doping lab at Harlow, Essex. It failed to spot 126 positive doping cases, he says, including 82 in track and field.

By the time the Sochi Games arrived, Moscow had taken its doping operation to a giddy level. Rodchenkov says Putin sent in the FSB, the secret spy agency he once headed. A group of FSB officers were covertly inserted into Rodchenkov’s doping control team. The spies made a miraculous breakthrough: they discovered how to open tamper-proof bottles used in urine control tests. Positive samples could be replaced with clean ones.

Rodchenkov likens the backroom drama at Sochi to a thriller. “It was Ian Fleming! It was James Bond number two!” he says, with a note of pride. His lab perfected what he calls a “swapping system”. In advance of the Games, Russian Olympians produced clean urine samples. These were carefully stored. The athletes – especially the older ones, who got the most benefit – then swigged Rodchenkov’s potent drugs cocktail.

At the purpose-built Sochi lab where the urine samples from Olympic athletes would be taken after each event, Rodechnkov’s assistant,Yuri Chizhov, drilled a small hole in the wall. This was in room 125. The room connected with room 124, where the FSB had pre-stored clean urine samples in a fridge. Working in the dead of night, the scientists and the spooks exchanged bottles, as the athletes’ samples arrived. “It was a watertight fraud,” Rodchenkov recalls. “There were no security cameras.” Western doping-control inspectors who occasionally dropped by spotted nothing amiss; the mouse-hole looked like an inoperative power socket. “They were extremely naive. They couldn’t understand or estimate the magnitude of our lies and falsification,” he tells me. An FSB officer, Evgeny Blokhin, oversaw the entire operation, disguised as an innocent plumber. Rodchenkov describes Blokhin as a “pure foot soldier” from the provinces who “fulfilled orders”. He regards the Russian athletes who took part in the fraud as witting cheats. They knew that the state perks that went with Olympic status were dependent on keeping their mouth shut. Most of them did.

I have long been fascinated by the motivations of those who work for Putin’s shadow state: why do it? Between 2007-2011, the FSB broke repeatedly into my flat when I was the Guardian and Observer’s correspondent in Moscow, a small platoon of ghosts. Rodchenkov knows the FSB. He says its recruits are not “homogenic”. There is rivalry between Moscow spies and a powerful group from Putin’s home city of St Petersburg, he says. “Some people are patriotic,” he adds. “They are still obsessed with Leninist ideas. Others think they are James Bond. And some of them are thieves, fakers and scumbags. They just want to make money.” Blokhin, he says, knew nothing about doping when he got the Sochi assignment, codenamed Operation Resultat. He learned quickly and became a partner in what Rodchenkov calls “our fraud”.

By the time the Games ended, Rodchenkov was exhausted. He had outwitted Wada the World Anti-Doping Agency; Putin gave him the Order of Friendship. In 2015 his problems began, however. Germany’s ARD TV network accused him of presiding over a massive doping programme. And Wada recalled the Sochi samples, prompting Rodchenkov’s lab to dump positive bottles in a landfill site 30km outside Moscow.

Rodchenkov realised his situation was now extremely dangerous. In November 2015, he took the fateful decision to escape Russia. He packed a carry-on containing his computer hard drive: evidence of the Kremlin’s crimes. He flew to LA and stayed with the filmmaker Bryan Fogel, whose documentary on the affair, Icarus, would win an Oscar. A month after reaching the US, Rodchenkov confessed all on camera – the lies, the cover-up, the state’s omnipotent role.

Almost five years later, Rodchenkov says he made the right choice. He says he misses his family terribly – his wife, Veronika, and children Vasily and Marina – who stayed behind in Moscow with their dog. They have been holed up in a dacha outside the capital, trying to dodge coronavirus. “They’re clever people. They understand it’s much better for me not to be in a grave next to Nikita.” Nikita is Nikita Kamaev, Rodchenkov’s deputy. Kamaev was found dead in mysterious circumstances soon after Rodchenkov fled to California. Another colleague and sports executive, Vyacheslav Sinyev, died the same month. Rodchenkov believes both were murdered. “Nikita had been writing a book. I told him to stop it,” he says. The FSB terminated Kamaev with an “invisible inoculation”, he thinks.

Rodchenkov says writing his tell-all book was easy. As a teenager in the Soviet Union, he penned 44 volumes of diaries. He wrote the first chunk of The Rodchenkov Affair immediately after arriving in America. After blowing the whistle on Kremlin doping, Rodchenkov went into hiding, moving locations on multiple occasions. He wrote so much he had to “cook, stew and mix” the manuscript, he says jokingly – using the vocabulary of doping.

He scatters his memoir with quotations from George Orwell, who – he says – understood the deceitful nature of Moscow power. “Cheating, lying and denying are fundamental to political life in Russia,” Rodchenkov observes. He is a fan of Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray as well as Walter Scott and Iris Murdoch. He enjoys the Russian greats too – Lermontov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, plus the poets Joseph Brodsky and Daniil Kharms.

Putin, of course, denies any wrongdoing. He says Russia is the victim of a hypocritical western plot, led by Washington and London. Few outside Russia are convinced. Rodchenkov’s revelations led directly to Russia’s Olympic Committee being suspended from world sport; the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rowed back on this and allowed some Russian athletes to compete in the 2016 Rio and 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.

Moscow is currently appealing a four-year ban from major international sporting events. It’s unclear if its team will take part in next summer’s postponed Toyko Olympics or in the Winter Games in Beijing in 2022. There are few signs that the Kremlin is prepared to acknowledge wrongdoing; instead, Rodchenkov says, Russia last year deleted its entire database of doping test results, giving WADA a faked version with adverse entries stripped out.

At home, Russian state media depicts Rodchenkov as a fraud and a fabulist, who has sold out his motherland for 30 pieces of silver. Rodchenkov sees himself as a late-developing whistleblower. It may have taken a while before his conscience kicked in, but he eventually came out on the side of justice and transparency – enlightening the world about wrongdoing on a galactic scale by a pathologically untruthful regime.

He concludes his book by writing: “I am happy, finally, to be on the side of truth.” This is an admirable sentiment, but Rodchenkov is well aware of the price his moral stance entails. The Kremlin, he says, will kill him if it can: “It’s a fact of life. I was scared for two or three days only.” “I know it will never stop,” he says, “even when Putin dies.”

***Luke Harding is the author of Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, available from the Guardian Bookshop

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