On 1 November 2006 London was full of Russians, there to watch Arsenal play CKSA Moscow in the Champions League. Mingling with the fans was a Russian killer, or killers, with a very different type of goal in mind.
That evening, in the London suburb of Muswell Hill, Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko (born 1962) began vomiting. Within days he was in hospital; on 23 November he was dead, his internal organs destroyed by a radioactive isotope called polonium-210.
Polonium-210 is difficult to obtain in the UK, and in the amount used to poison Litvinenko—he received more than 100 times the lethal dose—must have come from either a commercial transaction abroad or a foreign nuclear reactor. Either way, it was imported into the country. Reconstructing the events of 1 November, police found that Litvinenko lunched with an Italian investigator, Mario Scaramella, at a sushi restaurant near Piccadilly; the Itsu restaurant later tested positive for alpha radiation. So did Scaramella himself. A security consultant and academic—though the university to which he was said to be attached had never heard of him—Scaramella had ostensibly met with Litvinenko to show the latter evidence of mounting death threats against him [Litvinenko]. After the lunch Litvinenko said Scaramella seemed “agitated”.
Equipped with alpha detectors, British government scientists discovered a trail of polonium-210 around London, with 20 sites testing positive, some of which had been visited by Litvinenko after his lunch at the Itsu but others of which had not. The radioactive trail then led them to Heathrow, where two BA planes also showed the presence of polonium-210. To no one’s great surprise, the planes had flown to and from Moscow. A former lieutenant colonel in the Russian FSB (the Foreign Intelligence Service, the successor to the KGB), Litvinenko had enemies galore in his former homeland.
Broadly, there are six possible solutions to the Litvinenko mystery.
First, he was killed on the official orders of Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko had noisily claimed, notably in his 2004 book
Second, while working for the FSB Litvinenko had targeted Russian mafiosi. Like elephants, they have long memories, but with much less sense of forgiveness. They would have enjoyed revenge, even if the dish was served very cold. Also, for all his assumed knight errantry, Litvinenko did work in murky waters as an envoy between Russian businesses, home and abroad, many of which had connections to organized crime. Yet it is unlikely that the Russian Mafia would have bothered with such an elaborate and potentially self-harming method of murder as radioactive poison.
Third, Litvinenko’s murder was staged by Putin’s enemies, knowing that suspicion would fall on the Russian president. Allies of Putin have put forward the name of Boris Berezovsky, the Russian tycoon living in London, as the perpetrator of the plot. However, Berezovsky was Litvinenko’s friend and employer, and would be unlikely to do anything to endanger his political refugee status.
Fourth, the same Putin allies in the Kremlin have also floated the notion that Litvinenko staged his own murder, again with the notion of getting the blame to fall on Putin. The Putinites maintain Litvinenko was sliding towards madness, as evidenced by his ludicrous public claim that Putin was a paedophile. Against this is the problem Litvinenko would have had as an individual in sourcing polonium-210, not to mention the radioactive traces detected in London sites he had not visited.
The fifth solution is that Litvinenko was murdered by the FSB, but without Putin’s direct say-so. Litvinenko was loathed within the FSB for betraying the service and for accusing it of corruption. Additionally, if the FSB was the perpetrator of the Chechen Bombings, it, like Putin, had every reason to silence Litvinenko. Assassinating him would also serve as a warning to others that defection would never be tolerated by the FSB.
The KGB, many of whose officers staffed the FSB in an archetypal case of old wine in a new bottle, had a track record of using radioactive poison to kill defected spies. In 1957 Nikolai Khokhlov, a KGB captain who went over to the West, addressed a conference of anti-Soviet activists in Germany where someone gave him an unsolicited cup of coffee. Although the coffee tasted normal, for some reason Khokhlov drank only half the cup. He later recorded:
I suddenly felt very tired. Things began to whirl about me in the hall, the electric bulbs were swaying, the rays of light were dancing doubled before my eyes. The world about me seemed to have retreated to nowhere, and my body was convulsed in a terrible struggle with some strange forces. Nobody suspected that a chemical agent of delayed action was working in my system like a time bomb. Friday night it broke loose in my system.
Khokhlov’s eyes oozed a sticky white liquid, his hair fell out, and the blood in his veins turned to plasma. Only six weeks of blood transfusions and steroid injections saved him from what was later identified as poisoning by radioactive thallium.
The Russian authorities have laughed off suggestions that the FSB was involved in Litvinenko’s murder, stating that “for us, Litvinenko was nothing”—a claim dealt a severe blow by an article in
This leads to the sixth theory, that the FSB supplied the polonium-210 but subcontracted the actual hit to the Russian Mafia or, more likely, to a private Russian security agency. According to Scaramella, the documents he showed Litvinenko in the Itsu identified one such private outfit, Dignity & Honour, as the specific threat to Litvinenko’s life. Headed by Colonel Valentin Velichko, a former KGB officer, Dignity & Honour is seen by many in Western intelligence as an official extension of the FSB.
In December 2006 investigators from Scotland Yard travelled to Russia to interview a suspect in the Litvinenko case, one Andrei Lugovoi, an ex-KGB officer turned owner of a security and consulting business, who admitted being contaminated with polonium-210. Lugovoi was known to have visited many of the sites in London where traces of the radioactive poison had been detected, as well as travelling on the contaminated BA London- Moscow airliners. He insisted, “I’ve been framed.”
The veracity of Lugovoi’s protestations, like much in the Litvinenko case, is unlikely to be proved one way or the other. In 2007 the British authorities requested his extradition from Russia to answer charges. The Russian constitution, maybe handily for Lugovoi and the Kremlin, bars the extradition of citizens to face trial abroad.
Tony Halpin
Alexander Litvinenko, “Why I Believe Putin Wanted Me Dead”,
Martin Sixsmith,
DOCUMENT:
Alexander Litvinenko—Why I Believe Putin Wanted Me Dead,
In the summer of 1996, I returned to Moscow from Chechnya and was summoned to see my boss, General Vyacheslav Voloch, head of the Anti-Terrorist Directorate of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB).
“They are putting Khokholkov in charge of URPO,” he said. “That man is a monster. We should do
