Alexander Litvinenko
Below is a draft, un-edited extract from the new version of Conspiracy Files released in England, Wales and Scotland yesterday.
ALEXANDER LITVINENKO
The explosive conclusions of some conspiracies produce flashbulb moments – the white magnesium flare leaving its violent after image burned into global cultural memory. It is commonplace for those alive in the 1960s to talk of remembering where they were when they heard the news of the assassination of JFK. Among my generation, its exact point when you heard the news John Lennon had been shot that delivers total clarity of recall. For my teenage god-daughter’s age-group, it is September 11, 2001.
It was the final dying moments of another conspiracy with a strangely personal connection to me that means I recall 24 November, 2006. I had enjoyed a fantastic night out, drinking Bellinis at the Heights Bar high above London, watching 100,000 lights shine below me, transforming London into fairyland. I got home just before midnight and in autopilot mode switched on BBC News 24 to hear: ‘At 9:23pm Alexander Litvinenko died.’
Suddenly I was a mess of empathy for his wife and son, anger towards his killers and a heightened sense of my own mortality. Although from the moment of his death the world would come to know him mainly by the tabloid title of ‘the radioactive Russian spy’, to me Alexander Litvinenko was a fellow author of conspiracy books. He was also a generous source of information for some of the material in my book Global Gangland that dealt with the Organizatsia and the links between Russian politicians and criminal networks.
Alexander Litvinenko was not your usual conspiracy theorist. Before coming to live in England as a political exile from his Russian homeland, Litvinenko had been a lieutenant-colonel in the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the successor organization to the Soviet KGB. In 1998, after more than 12 years loyal service in the KGB and FSB, Litvinenko took to a platform with four other senior FSB officers. The five men publicly declared they had been ordered to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, a Russian businessman who then held the government post of Secretary of the Security Council and was close to President Boris Yeltsin. They claimed their orders had come from the top of the security service. At the time the head of the FSB was future Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After he made this claim, Litvinenko was dismissed from the FSB. The following year he was arrested on charges of having beaten up citizens and stolen explosives while carrying out anti-terrorist duties. After serving a brutal month in prison, the authorities released Litvinenko on condition he remained in Russia. With the help of old FSB contacts and friends of Boris Berezovsky, Litvinenko was able to flee to Istanbul on forged passports with his wife and young son. He eventually arrived at London’s Heathrow airport where he applied for politcal asylum.
Once safely settled in Britain, Litvinenko began to make further conspiratorial claims about the role of the FSB in Russian politics. Some of his claims – such as those in his book Blowing Up Russia – were backed up by hard evidence. He was able to show that members of the FSB carried out some of the wave of apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people in Moscow and other Russian cities in 1999. The bombing had originally been blamed on Chechen terrorists, but Litvinenko believed the FSB had carried them out to justify a new war in the disputed territory of Chechnya and help bring Putin to power.
Some of Litvinenko’s other claims were harder to prove. He asserted two of the terrorists behind the Moscow theatre siege in 2002 were FSB operatives and leading al-Qaeda terror chiefs such Ayman al-Zawahiri had been trained by and were still linked to the FSB. Some thought him a hero for announcing a FSB dimension to the July bombings in London in 2005. Others though him a madman for maintaining Vladimir Putin had ordered the killing of journalists who tried to expose his alleged paedophilia. However, no one doubted he was an expert on the workings of the FSB and linkage between the security services and elements of the Russian Mafiya. He certainly tried to use his knowledge to save the life of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered just weeks after Litvinenko warned her Putin had ordered her death.
On November 1, 2006 Litvinenko suddenly became ill and was hospitalised. It later emerged that he had been poisoned with the rare and highly toxic radionuclide polonium-210. Litvinenko told police that he had met three ex-KGB agents on the day he fell ill, drinking tea with them at the Millennium Hotel. He had then dined at the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly with Italian contact Mario Scaramella, to whom he made the allegations concerning Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
When it became clear that his death from radiation poisoning was imminent, Litvinenko converted to Islam and allegedly drafted a statement in which he blamed President Putin for the conspiracy to silence him through the ‘beating wings of the angel of death’.
THE STRANGE PART
Why use polonium-210? As it can only be produced in minute quantities inside nuclear reactors it is an expensive and difficult substance to obtain. It is also a ridiculously ostentatious way to murder someone. Polonium-210 leaves a radioactive trail detectives can easily follow across continents via contaminated vehicles such as passenger jets. It seems whoever planned the murder of Litvinenko was happy for him to suffer the type of strange, lingering death guaranteed to attract global media attention and leave a radioactive trail pointing back towards Russia.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Alexander Litvinenko and many of those close to him believed that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered his death, using the vast resources available to FSB and it network of agents to ensure the silence of one his most virulent critics. Was Putin trying to make an example out of Litvinenko, his extravagant and cruel death a marker to deter others from speaking out against him?
BORIS BEREZOVSKY
Given the amount of spectacular bad press Litvinenko’s death and claims of Putin’s hand in it brought the Russian president, the Kremlin has claimed that Litvinenko was killed by those trying to undermine Putin through an ingenious smear campaign. FSB agents suggested that it was one of Litvinenko’s closest friends and Putin’s most powerful political enemies – Boris Berezovsky – who arranged the murder.
RENEGADE VITYAZ ELEMENTS
Vityaz – Russian for ‘knight’ – is a special unit of the Russian army created to fight terrorism and rebel insurgents. Litvinenko had often criticised its activities fighting a ‘dirty war’ in the Chechnya. ChechnyaVityaz members even used photos of him in marksmanship training. Fiercely loyal to Putin, some believe that renegade Vityaz co-operated with FSB agents in a plan to wipe out Litvinenko without their bosses having any knowledge of it, thereby giving them plausible deniability over events.
THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
ALEXANDER LITVINENKO
One offensive idea articulated by some Russian pro-Putin conspiracy theorists is that Alexander Litvinenko conspired with dissident FSB agents and exiled anti-Putin political activists to stage his own death. He used polonium-210 knowing it would help garner massive press attention and give him a global platform to denounce Putin.
THE ORGANIZATSIA
Litvinenko was an expert on the links between the Russian Mafiya, high-placed politicians and the security service. During his time in as a FSB agent and exiled conspiracy theorist, he had earned the hatred of the Solntsevo crime syndicate, the most powerful group within Russian organized crime. It is believed by some the Organizatsia had him silenced to protect their powerful friends in Putin’s regime.
AL-QAEDA
Claims made by Litvinenko that al-Qaeda was working with and often for the FSB was embarassing for both organizations. In retaliation for suggesting it was the puppet of secret Russian masters, al-Qaeda may have murdered him knowing the harm it would do to the reputation of the FSB and therefore making sure no-one could believe they were secretly in league.
MOST CONVINCING EVIDENCE
A conspiracy as defined the dictionary way of ‘secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act’ was clearly needed to orchestrate such an operatic death for Alexander Litvinenko. In addition, the aftermath unfolded almost as exactly predicted by conspiriologists in two ways. First, the FSB launched a major campaign to discredit Litvinenko, even suggesting a PR firm had been involved in drafting his final statement. Second, Boris Berezovsky exploited his friend’s death for politcal potential – using it as a justification when he announced plans to stage a ‘second Russian revolution’.
MOST MYSTERIOUS FACT
Andrei Lugovoi, a millionaire security consultant and former FSB agent dined with Litvinenko on the day he was poisoned. He has vehemently denied allegations made by Boris Berezovsky that he was involved in the poisoning. Lugovoi had previously been the head of security for ORT – a TV network owned at the time by Berezovsky – and the KGB bodyguard of former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. In November 2006, Gaidar was poisoned in Ireland while on a book promotion tour. Gaidar has claimed ‘adversaries of the Russian authorities’ carried out the poisoning. He has not elaborated on who these adversaries might be.
SCEPTICALLY SPEAKING
It is impossible to deny that there was a conspiracy to kill Alexander Litvinenko. It is also clearly a conspiracy instigated by someone whose wealth, power or professional contacts made securing polonium-210 easy and who had no regard for ruining relations between Britain and Russia. However, knowing a conspiracy exists does not mean that any researcher into it or the authorities charged with trying to seek justice for its victims have any concrete idea of who was behind it. It is easy to spot the pawns in a game of chess, but not always the hidden hand moving them. I personally think I know who ordered Litveneko’s death, but there is no way the lawyers will let me tell you who I want to see fed radioactive sushi to bring about a sense of eye-for-an-eye justice.
ALEXANDER LITVINENKO
The explosive conclusions of some conspiracies produce flashbulb moments – the white magnesium flare leaving its violent after image burned into global cultural memory. It is commonplace for those alive in the 1960s to talk of remembering where they were when they heard the news of the assassination of JFK. Among my generation, its exact point when you heard the news John Lennon had been shot that delivers total clarity of recall. For my teenage god-daughter’s age-group, it is September 11, 2001.
It was the final dying moments of another conspiracy with a strangely personal connection to me that means I recall 24 November, 2006. I had enjoyed a fantastic night out, drinking Bellinis at the Heights Bar high above London, watching 100,000 lights shine below me, transforming London into fairyland. I got home just before midnight and in autopilot mode switched on BBC News 24 to hear: ‘At 9:23pm Alexander Litvinenko died.’
Suddenly I was a mess of empathy for his wife and son, anger towards his killers and a heightened sense of my own mortality. Although from the moment of his death the world would come to know him mainly by the tabloid title of ‘the radioactive Russian spy’, to me Alexander Litvinenko was a fellow author of conspiracy books. He was also a generous source of information for some of the material in my book Global Gangland that dealt with the Organizatsia and the links between Russian politicians and criminal networks.
Alexander Litvinenko was not your usual conspiracy theorist. Before coming to live in England as a political exile from his Russian homeland, Litvinenko had been a lieutenant-colonel in the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the successor organization to the Soviet KGB. In 1998, after more than 12 years loyal service in the KGB and FSB, Litvinenko took to a platform with four other senior FSB officers. The five men publicly declared they had been ordered to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, a Russian businessman who then held the government post of Secretary of the Security Council and was close to President Boris Yeltsin. They claimed their orders had come from the top of the security service. At the time the head of the FSB was future Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After he made this claim, Litvinenko was dismissed from the FSB. The following year he was arrested on charges of having beaten up citizens and stolen explosives while carrying out anti-terrorist duties. After serving a brutal month in prison, the authorities released Litvinenko on condition he remained in Russia. With the help of old FSB contacts and friends of Boris Berezovsky, Litvinenko was able to flee to Istanbul on forged passports with his wife and young son. He eventually arrived at London’s Heathrow airport where he applied for politcal asylum.
Once safely settled in Britain, Litvinenko began to make further conspiratorial claims about the role of the FSB in Russian politics. Some of his claims – such as those in his book Blowing Up Russia – were backed up by hard evidence. He was able to show that members of the FSB carried out some of the wave of apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people in Moscow and other Russian cities in 1999. The bombing had originally been blamed on Chechen terrorists, but Litvinenko believed the FSB had carried them out to justify a new war in the disputed territory of Chechnya and help bring Putin to power.
Some of Litvinenko’s other claims were harder to prove. He asserted two of the terrorists behind the Moscow theatre siege in 2002 were FSB operatives and leading al-Qaeda terror chiefs such Ayman al-Zawahiri had been trained by and were still linked to the FSB. Some thought him a hero for announcing a FSB dimension to the July bombings in London in 2005. Others though him a madman for maintaining Vladimir Putin had ordered the killing of journalists who tried to expose his alleged paedophilia. However, no one doubted he was an expert on the workings of the FSB and linkage between the security services and elements of the Russian Mafiya. He certainly tried to use his knowledge to save the life of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered just weeks after Litvinenko warned her Putin had ordered her death.
On November 1, 2006 Litvinenko suddenly became ill and was hospitalised. It later emerged that he had been poisoned with the rare and highly toxic radionuclide polonium-210. Litvinenko told police that he had met three ex-KGB agents on the day he fell ill, drinking tea with them at the Millennium Hotel. He had then dined at the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly with Italian contact Mario Scaramella, to whom he made the allegations concerning Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
When it became clear that his death from radiation poisoning was imminent, Litvinenko converted to Islam and allegedly drafted a statement in which he blamed President Putin for the conspiracy to silence him through the ‘beating wings of the angel of death’.
THE STRANGE PART
Why use polonium-210? As it can only be produced in minute quantities inside nuclear reactors it is an expensive and difficult substance to obtain. It is also a ridiculously ostentatious way to murder someone. Polonium-210 leaves a radioactive trail detectives can easily follow across continents via contaminated vehicles such as passenger jets. It seems whoever planned the murder of Litvinenko was happy for him to suffer the type of strange, lingering death guaranteed to attract global media attention and leave a radioactive trail pointing back towards Russia.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Alexander Litvinenko and many of those close to him believed that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered his death, using the vast resources available to FSB and it network of agents to ensure the silence of one his most virulent critics. Was Putin trying to make an example out of Litvinenko, his extravagant and cruel death a marker to deter others from speaking out against him?
BORIS BEREZOVSKY
Given the amount of spectacular bad press Litvinenko’s death and claims of Putin’s hand in it brought the Russian president, the Kremlin has claimed that Litvinenko was killed by those trying to undermine Putin through an ingenious smear campaign. FSB agents suggested that it was one of Litvinenko’s closest friends and Putin’s most powerful political enemies – Boris Berezovsky – who arranged the murder.
RENEGADE VITYAZ ELEMENTS
Vityaz – Russian for ‘knight’ – is a special unit of the Russian army created to fight terrorism and rebel insurgents. Litvinenko had often criticised its activities fighting a ‘dirty war’ in the Chechnya. ChechnyaVityaz members even used photos of him in marksmanship training. Fiercely loyal to Putin, some believe that renegade Vityaz co-operated with FSB agents in a plan to wipe out Litvinenko without their bosses having any knowledge of it, thereby giving them plausible deniability over events.
THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
ALEXANDER LITVINENKO
One offensive idea articulated by some Russian pro-Putin conspiracy theorists is that Alexander Litvinenko conspired with dissident FSB agents and exiled anti-Putin political activists to stage his own death. He used polonium-210 knowing it would help garner massive press attention and give him a global platform to denounce Putin.
THE ORGANIZATSIA
Litvinenko was an expert on the links between the Russian Mafiya, high-placed politicians and the security service. During his time in as a FSB agent and exiled conspiracy theorist, he had earned the hatred of the Solntsevo crime syndicate, the most powerful group within Russian organized crime. It is believed by some the Organizatsia had him silenced to protect their powerful friends in Putin’s regime.
AL-QAEDA
Claims made by Litvinenko that al-Qaeda was working with and often for the FSB was embarassing for both organizations. In retaliation for suggesting it was the puppet of secret Russian masters, al-Qaeda may have murdered him knowing the harm it would do to the reputation of the FSB and therefore making sure no-one could believe they were secretly in league.
MOST CONVINCING EVIDENCE
A conspiracy as defined the dictionary way of ‘secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act’ was clearly needed to orchestrate such an operatic death for Alexander Litvinenko. In addition, the aftermath unfolded almost as exactly predicted by conspiriologists in two ways. First, the FSB launched a major campaign to discredit Litvinenko, even suggesting a PR firm had been involved in drafting his final statement. Second, Boris Berezovsky exploited his friend’s death for politcal potential – using it as a justification when he announced plans to stage a ‘second Russian revolution’.
MOST MYSTERIOUS FACT
Andrei Lugovoi, a millionaire security consultant and former FSB agent dined with Litvinenko on the day he was poisoned. He has vehemently denied allegations made by Boris Berezovsky that he was involved in the poisoning. Lugovoi had previously been the head of security for ORT – a TV network owned at the time by Berezovsky – and the KGB bodyguard of former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. In November 2006, Gaidar was poisoned in Ireland while on a book promotion tour. Gaidar has claimed ‘adversaries of the Russian authorities’ carried out the poisoning. He has not elaborated on who these adversaries might be.
SCEPTICALLY SPEAKING
It is impossible to deny that there was a conspiracy to kill Alexander Litvinenko. It is also clearly a conspiracy instigated by someone whose wealth, power or professional contacts made securing polonium-210 easy and who had no regard for ruining relations between Britain and Russia. However, knowing a conspiracy exists does not mean that any researcher into it or the authorities charged with trying to seek justice for its victims have any concrete idea of who was behind it. It is easy to spot the pawns in a game of chess, but not always the hidden hand moving them. I personally think I know who ordered Litveneko’s death, but there is no way the lawyers will let me tell you who I want to see fed radioactive sushi to bring about a sense of eye-for-an-eye justice.
Labels: Alexander Litvinenko, Conspiracy Files, Organizatsia
posted by David at 12:33 PM
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