Litvinenko: Kremlin Conspiracy or Blofeld Set-Up?

The radioactive poisoning of former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko raises many disturbing questions. And, as British Home Secretary John Reid said, the investigation should not make any premature assumptions and should be prepared to go in every possible direction. The Putin government, assuming it has nothing to hide, should cooperate with the British. The Kremlin’s own self-interest requires nothing less than clearly addressing Western suspicions about its possible role in the assassination.

When a vitriolic critic of President Vladimir Putin is poisoned with a nuclear isotope, questions about Moscow’s involvement are inevitable and appropriate. What is not appropriate is the highly simplistic and sometimes even misleading coverage of the affair in some Western media. Consider a December 5 story in The Washington Post, “British Police Take Poisoning Inquiry to Moscow,” by Mary Jordan and Peter Finn. It starts by referring to Litvinenko as “a former Russian spy.” But there is no record that Litvinenko ever served with Russian foreign intelligence, either in the post-KGB foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, or military intelligence, known as the GRU. On the contrary, after junior assignments in FSB counterintelligence, the post-KGB internal security agency, Litvinenko built a name for himself in its organized crime department. According to a remarkably insightful story in The New York Times (“Russian Ex-Spy Lived in a World of Deceptions,” by Alan Cowell, December 3), in that capacity Litvinenko developed a relationship with leading Russian oligarch Boris Berzovsky as early as 1994. During that period of free fall after the collapse of Soviet institutions, Berezovsky openly mixed his senior positions in the Russian government with aggressive privatization of state assets for his own benefit. And Litvinenko’s department in the FSB was frequently viewed not so much as a law enforcement agency, but as a part of organized crime itself.

Worse, The Washington Post misleadingly describes Berezovsky as “a billionaire now living in self-imposed exile in London” who “was a friend of Litvinenko’s.” Anyone who read Paul Klebnikov’s Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia would know that Litvinenko’s “friend” was much more than an anti-Putin business leader. He was a master of Kremlin intrigue, widely reputed in numerous, and now public, accounts of bribing and corrupting everything and everyone around him, including members of Boris Yeltsin’s family. And Berezovsky does not just oppose Putin’s rule—he has said on several occasions that he is actively pursuing regime change in Russia using his base in London and his business and political contacts from Ukraine to Georgia.

In the first days after Litvinenko’s illness became known to the public, the primary source of information about what had happened and Litvinenko’s suspicions of Putin was Alex Goldfarb, who The Washington Post and others describe as “a friend of Litvinenko’s” or a “friend of the family.” Goldfarb certainly was a friend and could probably even be considered a member of the family—in the same way that Tom Hagen was a key member of the Godfather’s family in the famous movie. Goldfarb—officially the director of Berezovsky’s Foundation for Civil Liberties—is one of Berezovsky’s close associates. Interestingly, despite being known as a relentless publicity seeker, Berezovsky has sought to downplay his role and that of his organization in this instance. Based on his past conduct, one would have expected at a minimum that Berezovsky would attempt to use the Litvinenko matter to pursue his stated objective of discrediting and undermining Putin.

At present, there are three main theories of Litvinenko’s killing. One is the Kremlin plot that Goldfarb described when quoting what Litvinenko allegedly dictated on his deathbed. This requires one of two assumptions. The first—that the leader of a major nuclear power is dangerously devoid of basic common sense and any instinct for self-preservation—defies our previous experience with Putin. Killing a fairly insignificant political opponent in a key European capital with a highly traceable material would demonstrate an appalling lack of judgment in an area where most of Putin’s critics see sinister genius rather than Yeltsin-style bumbling.

But this logic holds only if Litvinenko was nothing more than an extremely harsh Putin critic, someone who accused the pesident of being a pedophile on a Chechen website and blamed him for bombings in Moscow and even in London, but ultimately did little to endanger Putin’s or Russia’s security in a serious way. The alternative assumption is that the Kremlin saw Litvinenko as a real threat, perhaps because of his Chechen links. It is clear that Litvinenko was quite close to at least some Chechen rebels, like exiled separatist spokesman Akhmed Zakayev, whom he saw on November 1, the day he was reportedly poisoned. If Litvinenko had been actively involved with Chechen insurgents, Moscow’s calculations could have been quite different. After all, it is widely believed, and even privately admitted in Moscow government circles, that the Kremlin authorized the killing of former Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiev in 2004. And the Duma recently passed a law authorizing the assassination of suspected terrorists outside Russian borders. So, before dismissing the Kremlin connection, it is essential to establish what exactly Mr. Litvinenko—a recent convert to Islam—was involved in and to examine any involvement he could have had with Islamic extremist organizations that might be interested in polonium-210 for dirty bombs or other uses.

The second theory of Litvinenko’s poisoning comes straight from the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. In the film, the head of SPECTRE, Ernst Blofeld, seeks to provoke a U.S.-Soviet confrontation by creating a false impression that they are seizing each other’s spacecraft. In this instance, Berezovsky would be the mastermind of an effort to set Britain and the West against Putin. He would have both a motive and the capability to use the Litvinenko assassination to frame the Russian leader. And anyone familiar with Berezovsky’s activities in Russia would have to entertain the possibility that he would have the combination of imagination, resources and utter ruthlessness to sacrifice his former protégé to advance his anti-Putin designs.

A new book published in Moscow by Alexander Khinshtein, a pro-Kremlin journalist and Duma member, provides a detailed account (with transcripts of Berezovsky’s phone conversations in July 1996), demonstrating Berezovsky’s key role in creating quite “a performance” to let Yeltsin think that his security chiefs were involved in a conspiracy against the Russian president (Yeltsin. Kreml. Istoriya bolezni, Alexander Khinshtein, 2006). The purpose was to remove from Yeltsin’s entourage those who were an obstacle to Berezovsky’s influence. In 1999, according to the memoirs of former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, Berezovsky again fed false information to Yeltsin and his family to create an impression that they were threatened by Primakov’s anti-corruption investigations. Later, Berezovsky used his control of TV channel ORT to launch a vicious and highly misleading campaign against Primakov on behalf of the new Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, whom he helped come to power. With Putin at first refusing to follow Berezovsky’s guidance and then strongly moving against the oligarch, Berezovsky made it his mission in life to have a regime change in Moscow.

What speaks against this scenario is the terrible personal risk Berezovsky would be taking in the process. He would have to anticipate that while he and his allies could influence Western opinion, they would be in a much weaker position to manipulate a professional investigation by Scotland Yard or by Russian security services determined to demonstrate that Moscow was not to blame. With his obvious connection to Litvinenko and his reputation as an unscrupulous intriguer, Berezovsky would have to know that he himself would become a target of any serious investigation.

Andrey Lugovoi, another former FSB officer now identified as a prime suspect in some news reports, could have been a key player in either the Kremlin or the Berezovsky scenarios. Lugovoi met with Litvinenko on November 1 and was on one of the British Airways flights contaminated by polonium-210. And he has both an obvious FSB connection as well as a less-discussed Berezovsky connection: while still with the FSB in the 1990s, Lugovoi was simultaneously a security officer at the Russian television channel ORT, then controlled by Berezovsky. In 2001-02, he spent time in the infamous Lefortovo prison for helping another Berezovsky associate, Nikolai Glushkov, to escape from detention. His loyalty in this instance is unclear, and Moscow should provide Scotland Yard with direct access to him.

The third and final theory relates to Litvinenko’s personal pursuits rather than his struggle against Putin or his affiliation with Berezovsky. A Russian academic in England recently claimed that Litvinenko was thinking about making money by blackmailing Russian businessmen. Should that be true, a number of individuals and groups could have had a motive to kill him. Suspicions that groups of current and former FSB officers are responsible for killing Litvinenko fit right into this theory.

While the Litvinenko mystery is right out of a spy movie, the stakes in real life—including for the West’s relationship with Russia—are very high. If the evidence does indeed lead to the Kremlin, whitewashing it is not an option. But what is not in the West’s interest is to allow Putin’s political enemies at home and abroad to bring both him and the West into a confrontation based on a set-up, or at least on false information.

Posted by Dimitri Simes at 12/06/2006 02:36:14 PM |

Dead Russian Spy was . . . Muslim???

Just when you think that life can't get any stranger . . . it does.

The dead Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko's wife, Marina, has also tested positive for Polonium-210, the radioactive substance that killed her husband.

However, the amount was "not significant enough to result in any illness in the short term,'' said the Health Protection Agency, which is monitoring cases of suspected radiation.

She is the second person to have tested positive since Litvinenko's death from Polonium poisoning on November 23. On Friday, Mario Scaramella, a self-styled Italian academic who met Litvinenko on November 1, was found to have been exposed to significant radiation. He is now being treated here.

Litvinenko met Mr. Scaramella at a sushi bar here in connection with their campaign against the Russian Government, and the same evening fell fatally sick. The Italian media cast doubts about Mr. Scaramella's academic credentials and his claims that he and Litvinenko were on a Kremlin-sponsored "hit list''.

Mr. Scaramella is being investigated in Italy for his alleged involvement in arms trafficking and for breaching secrecy rules of a parliamentary commission set up by the former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to investigate the activities of KGB in Italy during the Cold War. His claim that he has academic links with many leading universities around the world, including a university in Tamil Nadu, has been questioned.

A close friend of Litvinenko has suggested that he had converted to Islam.

"He was read to from the Koran the day before he died and told his wife that he wanted to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition,'' Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen leader and neighbour of Litvinenko said.

This certainly adds a new twist to a case that has inexplicably made front page news for over a week.

Another article worth reading about this mysterious israeli double agent turned Muslim - Litvinenko And The Apartheid State Of Israel

And, here's another link from Rense.

Posted in assassination | espionage | intrigue | Israel | Russia | secret service Submitted by qrswave on Sun, 2006-12-03 00:06.
qrswave's blog | add new comment

'I can blackmail them. We can make money'

As Scotland Yard officers fly to Washington to help the FBI quiz a former Soviet spy, The Observer reveals Alexander Litvinenko's amazing plot to extort cash from some of Russia's top figures

Mark Townsend, Jamie Doward and Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Sunday December 3, 2006
The Observer

It was perilous, but then Alexander Litvinenko was no stranger to risk. Over the summer months, the former Kremlin spy began finalising an extraordinary business proposition that may prove the most compelling motive yet for murder.

Litvinenko claimed to have made contact with senior sources in the heart of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, who would supply him with a stream of confidential dossiers on any target that the 43-year-old exile requested.

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These documents would, according to Litvinenko, be used to 'blackmail' some of Russia's most shadowy and formidable figures. It was simple: either they would pay or the world would learn their blackest secrets.

As Scotland Yard's inquiries widened to the US and Italy yesterday, it emerged that officers were looking at whether Litvinenko's money-making ploy precipitated his poisoning.

In early May, Litvinenko first approached Julia Svetlichnaja, a 33-year-old Russian-born academic who is examining the roots of the Chechen conflict for a book she is writing. Litvinenko asked if she was interested in becoming involved in his 'blackmail' project.

'He told me he was going to blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin,' she said. 'He mentioned a figure of £10,000 they would pay each time to stop him broadcasting these FSB documents. Litvinenko was short of money and was adamant that he could obtain any files he wanted.'

Litvinenko proved he had sources in the heart of the Russian security services by producing what he said was a 100-page confidential FSB report from 2005 and forwarding it to Svetlichnaja, a politics student at the University of Westminster.

The report alleged links between Russian organised crime gangs and the Duma, the Russian parliament, and named a number of prominent politicians allegedly embroiled in high-level criminal activity.

The report, apparently genuine, was stored on a computer disc and is believed to have been smuggled from Moscow to London. It hailed from the most secret department of the FSB, the Department for the Analysis of Criminal Organisations, where Litvinenko worked as a senior operational officer in the Nineties.

It appears Litvinenko, a vociferous critic of President Vladimir Putin, may have finally acquired the firepower to hurt some of the Kremlin's most powerful interests. Svetlichnaja said: 'He did not seem worried. Quite the opposite; Litvinenko sensed he could finally make some money of his own after years of being supported by his friend [and fellow Russian exile] Boris Berezovsky.'

Litvinenko had apparently even started hawking around his plans during the immediate period before his death. Shortly before his death, Litvinenko claimed that some FSB files documented the business practices of British firms.

But the file that most excited him was the so-called 'Yukos dossier', which allegedly includes damaging material about how the Russian oil company once owned by oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky - recently jailed on fraud and tax-dodging charges - came to be taken over by the state. Three months ago, Russian prosecutors launched an investigation into Yukos bosses, accusing them of asset-stripping, charges they deny and say are politically motivated.

Litvinenko's claims that he had such a document were yesterday corroborated by another former Soviet intelligence officer, Yuri Shvets, during questioning by Scotland Yard and the FBI. It is likely that Litvinenko's ownership of the Yukos file may have come to the attention of Russia's security services shortly before he was poisoned. Weeks before he was contaminated with polonium 210, Litvinenko had travelled to Israel to hand over the dossier to Leonid Nevzlin, a Yukos executive whom Russia has been trying to extradite. Nevzlin is currently in self-imposed exile in Israel, but denies any wrongdoing and has given the dossier to the authorities.

The British police investigation has already taken counter-terrorism officers to the US in a line of inquiry that may prove to be connected. The questioning of former KGB spy Shvets by the Metropolitan Police and the FBI in Washington focused on an October meeting between Litvinenko and 'a contact'. Shevts, also an undercover spy in Washington during the Eighties, was the man who actually compiled the Yukos dossier, a business associate said.

The associate said: 'Shevts gave it to Sasha [Litvinenko], who then showed it to a Russian in London, boasting that he wrote it himself.'

Litvinenko's email list of confidantes reveals how Shvets, 53, and Italian security consultant Mario Scaramella frequently exchanged information on Russian politics. Last year, Shvets met Scaramella in Washington to discuss a parliamentary investigation that the Italian was conducting into Soviet spy activities.

Both knew it was an investigation that would make enemies. On 1 November, Scaramella told Litvinenko over lunch in an Itsu sushi restaurant in London, that they, along with Italian senator Paolo Guzzanti, were assassination targets. With Litvinenko now dead and Scaramella 'significantly' poisoned, Italian detectives have contacted Guzzanti to ascertain his safety.

Of interest to Scotland Yard are a number of emails sent by Litvinenko in the weeks before he was poisoned. One, seen by The Observer, was written by him just four days after the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had met Litvinenko shortly before she was shot in the head.

'This is why Putin's secret service killed Anna,' began one message sent to Svetlichnaja. Had the knowledge that Litvinenko's sudden access to humiliating FSB documents meant that, suddenly, he could no longer be ignored? Would it be better if he were silenced?

At the start of last week, Litvinenko's poisoning was being likened to the type of fiction woven by John Le Carre. Now, as the investigation's spread widens, the case has assumed a fantastical aura. Few dare predict its next twist.

So far, the radioactive trail touches some of London's best-known five-star hotels and, unexpectedly, the Ashdown Park hotel in East Sussex, where Scaramella was staying. Increasingly clear, though, is that the trail continues to lead to Moscow. But allegations that the Kremlin sanctioned the poisoning remain unfounded, as do claims that renegade Russian spies with a personal vendetta were to blame.

Elsewhere, forensic teams from the atomic weapons research establishment at Aldermaston are still trying to locate the source of the polonium. Evidence suggests the assassins struggled to contain the polonium with which they were working, leaking radioactive material wherever they went.

Among the theories that remain open is that the poisonings were an accident that happened while Litvinenko tried to assemble a dirty bomb for Chechen rebels. Those who know him believe he was crazy enough to attempt such a thing and, in the past week, some have implicated him in the smuggling of nuclear materials from Russia.

This week should bring the results of the postmortem on Litvinenko. For the first time, detectives will know how much polonium he ingested. Vast quantities would point to a murder; smaller quantities possibly to accidental contamination. From Washington to London to Moscow, detectives, governments and spies are watching and waiting.

Is Putin Being Set Up?

Patrick Buchanan

November 28, 2006 07:30 AM EST


PARIS -- Whoever poisoned Alexander Litvinenko had two goals: a long and lingering death for the KGB defector and pointing a finger of accusation for his killing right in the face of Vladimir Putin.

Which leads me to believe Putin had nothing to do with it.

In an assassination, one must ask: Cui bono? To whose benefit? Who would gain from the poisoning of Litvinenko?

Certainly not Putin. Litvinenko's death puts him, the Kremlin and the KGB, now the FSB, under suspicion of having reverted to the terror tactics of Stalin, who commissioned killers to liquidate enemies like Leon Trotsky, murdered in Mexico in 1940.

What benefit could Putin conceivably realize from the London killing of an enemy of his regime, who had just become a British citizen? Why would the Russian president, at the peak of his popularity, with his regime awash in oil revenue and himself playing a strong hand in world politics, risk a breach with every Western nation by ordering the public murder of a man who was more of a nuisance than a threat to his regime?

Litvinenko, after all, made his sensational charges against the Kremlin -- that the KGB blew up the Moscow apartment buildings, not Chechen terrorists, as a casus belli for a war on Chechnya and that he had refused a KGB order to assassinate oligarch Boris Berezovsky -- in the late 1990s. Of late, Litvinenko has been regarded as a less and less credible figure, with his charges of KGB involvement in 9-11 and complicity in the Danish cartoons mocking Muhammad that ignited the Muslim firestorm.

Yet, listening to some Western pundits on the BBC and Fox News, one would think Putin himself poisoned Litvinenko. Who else, they ask, could have acquired polonium 210, the rare radioactive substance used to kill Litvinenko? Who else had the motive to eliminate the ex-agent who had dedicated his life to exposing the crimes of the Kremlin?

Indeed, no sooner had Litvinenko expired than his collaborator in anti-Putin politics, Alex Goldfarb, was in front of the television cameras reading Litvinenko's deathbed statement charging Putin with murder:

"You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. ... You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed."

Litvinenko's statement is awfully coherent and eloquent for a man writhing in a death agony. But if he did not write it, who did? All of which leads me to conclude Putin is being set up, framed for a crime he did not commit. But then, if Putin did not order the killing, who did?

Who else could have acquired the polonium 210? Who else would kill Litvinenko to make Putin a pariah? These are the questions Scotland Yard, which also seems skeptical that Putin had a hand in this bizarre business, has begun to ask.

As the predictable effect of Litvinenko's death has been to put a cloud of suspicion over Putin and a chill over Russian relations with the West, one must ask: To whose benefit is the discrediting of Putin? Who would seek a renewal of the Cold War?

Certainly, the oligarchs and robber barons like Berezovsky -- many of them now dispossessed of the wealth they amassed in a collapsing Soviet Union, and all of whom have been run out of the country or imprisoned -- have the most powerful of motives. They hate Putin and seek to bring him down. And Goldfarb and Litvinenko both enjoyed the patronage of the billionaire Berezovsky.

Surely, rogue or retired KGB agents, passed over by Putin and bitter at Litvinenko, would have a motive: to send a message, written in polonium 210, that this is what happens to those who betray us and Mother Russia.

Scotland Yard has yet to declare this a murder case and is looking into the possibility of a "martyrdom operation" -- suicide dressed up like murder -- in which Litvinenko may have colluded. The Putin-dominated Russian press is pushing this line, as well as the idea of an oligarchs' plot to discredit Putin and destroy Russia's relations with the West.

Yet Litvinenko was still in his early 40s, with a wife and two children. While his agonizing public death would make him a celebrity even more famous than Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian anti-communist murdered in London in 1979 with a poison-tipped umbrella, Litvinenko would not be around to enjoy his fame.

America has a vital interest in this Scotland Yard investigation. What it discovers may tell us more about the character of the man into whose eyes George Bush claimed to have stared, and seen his soul, or it may tell us who the real enemies of this country are, who are out to restart the Cold War, and perhaps another hot one.


To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
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