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Russian Spy Game within the UK
Daily Telegraph 21/11/2006
Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United Kingdom and is now a British citizen, lies in an intensive care bed in a London hospital, his chances of survival described as "50-50". He is the victim of an attack with a deadly poison that apparently took place in the course of a meeting in a public place. This fact has taken nearly three weeks to establish beyond doubt by toxicology tests. A number of disturbing questions that arise from this crime remain in dispute. There is, in the minds of his friends and most knowing observers, a link between the catastrophic fate that has left Mr Litvinenko so near to death and his ties to known enemies of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Not only is he an associate of Russian "oligarch" exiles in Britain, and of Chechen activists, but he has recently been involved in investigating the murder of Russian dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya. advertisementAll of this points to an obvious conclusion: that agents of the Russian presidency were responsible for the attack which was intended either to silence a dangerous critic permanently, or to cause him enough suffering to serve as a warning to others. The Russian secret service, in its previous incarnation as the KGB, was known to favour poisoning as a means of eliminating dangerous antagonists but it would be peculiarly worrying if Mr Putin were going to such lengths to put a minor player out of commission. The Kremlin, predictably, denies these charges vehemently, dismissing them as "pure nonsense". However dubious such protestations of innocence may be, the absence of any clear proof combined with categorical denials from Mr Putin's officials put the British government in an awkward diplomatic position. Speculation that enemies of the Putin regime might have perpetrated the crime in an attempt to discredit the Russian presidency seem far-fetched but for official purposes cannot be totally dismissed. But the British government cannot be seen to accept a situation in which a citizen of the United Kingdom is subjected to a murderous attack under conditions that raise grave, and reasonable, suspicions of the involvement of foreign agents. The Foreign and Home Offices must be seen to pursue this case with the greatest rigour and to the highest possible level, and to demand whatever explanations they feel are required from the Russian authorities. Otherwise, there will be a clear suggestion that Britain dare not offend a Russian regime that may hold much of Europe to ransom over energy resources within a decade. Whatever the future holds for British energy supplies, this country must not be a safe haven for international thuggery. • Alexander Litvinenko, 43: Former colonel in KGB, now the FSB, who accused the organisation of trying to assassinate Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. Sought asylum in Britain where he has written about the FSB and worked for Berezovsky. • Andrei Lugovoy: Former KGB agent and bodyguard for Berezovskysaid to have met Litvinenko the morning he was taken ill. • Mario Scaramella: Italian investigator who met Litvinenko at the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly the same afternoon. • Boris Berezovsky, 60: Russian billionaire and oligarch with interests in cars, oil and media. Supporter of Boris Yeltsin. Fled Russia after Putin turned against him and was granted asylum in Britain. • Alex Goldfarb: Works for Berezovsky at the International Foundation for Civil Liberties. Friend of Alexander Litvinenko. • Anna Politkovskaya, 48: Journalist who campaigned for human rights in Chechnya. Murdered outside her apartment building in Moscow in October. • Akhmed Zakaev, 50: Foreign minister for the Chechen government-in-exile, former fighter with the Chechen rebels. Russians failed in an attempt to have him extradited from Britain. Friend of Litvinenko. • Oleg Gordievsky, 68: Former KGB colonel and head of station in London. Double agent for MI6 and in 1985 became the highest ranking officer to defect. Friend of Litvinenko. By Philip Johnston
21/11/2006
The collapse of the Soviet Union nearly 15 years ago did nothing to curb the Russian appetite for espionage. There is still a significant Russian spy presence in Britain, mainly represented by the GRU military intelligence and the SVR, the new name for the overseas operations of the old KGB. The FSB, which some claim was behind the alleged assassination plot, is Russia's internal security apparatus - the equivalent of MI5 in Britain. It is MI5's job through its counter-espionage branch to keep tabs on spies in Britain but it has to do less than formerly because of the current preoccupation with terrorism. One estimate yesterday suggested that there were 30 or more spies based at the Russian embassy. Partly, they carry out ''old-fashioned" spying, finding out what the host government and its agencies are up to. But they are also monitoring the Russian dissident population here. An SVR unit called Line X is involved in technological espionage - trying to acquire scientific secrets. Despite this continuing activity, there is concern that MI5 is not able to devote enough resources to the threat. During the Cold War, counter-espionage was the main focus of the service's work. Even in 1999, it devoted a quarter of its resources to combating the spies. Now it accounts for around six per cent of the budget. Dame Eliza-Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, told a Commons intelligence committee a few years ago: ''There's not less of it [espionage] about, we are doing less work on it, we are being more selective about the priority cases." Daily Telegraph 21/11/2006
Alexander Litvinenko, a fit 43-year-old former lieutenant-colonel of the FSB, Russia's equivalent of MI5, first began to feel ill on the evening of Nov 1. Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former KGB chief, has been accused of being behind the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko Unlike Some English people, when former Russian spies who believe there is a price on their head suffer from unexpected stomach pains, they do not immediately suspect the sushi. They think of when and where they might have been poisoned. Through the encroaching nausea and pain, Mr Litvinenko spoke of his suspicions to his close friend Alex Goldfarb, the man who helped him reach the relative safety of Britain six years ago. The ex-spy, a minor thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin's government for almost a decade, had been to two meetings that day. There were no other events Mr Litvinenko could think of that might have caused his illness. The second meeting, a lunch at the Piccadilly branch of the Japanese restaurant chain Itsu, was with an Italian named Mario Scaramella, who provided the Russian, proud holder of a British passport for only a month, with details of a threat to both their lives. This led back to the murder in Moscow last month of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, responsibility for which Mr Litvinenko had laid firmly and very publicly at the door of the FSB. And that was one of several reasons why the former spy was very much persona non grata with his former masters. Ironically, Mr Litvinenko laughed off the threat that so worried Mr Scaramella, who has since disappeared from the public gaze. But it was the first of his two meetings that is currently of more interest to Scotland Yard. It was held at an unknown central London hotel in the morning of Nov 1 with two Russians who, although not suspects, may yet have important information togive as witnesses. One was well known to Mr Litvinenko. He was a tall and burly former member of the KGB's ninth directorate, the arm of the feared Soviet intelligence service which supplied bodyguards for political figures. His name was Andrei Lugovoy. During his time as a state employee, Mr Lugovoy had worked for Boris Berezovsky, then deputy head of the Russian security council, as part of his personal protection team and accompanied him on at least one perilous trip to negotiate with Chechen rebels. He had also worked on the payroll of Mr Berezovsky, a billionaire who was a key ally of Mr Putin and now an enemy of the Russian leader, as the head of security at ORT, the Russian television channel the oligarch owned. At the hotel meeting, Mr Lugovoy was accompanied by another man, named Vladimir, who Mr Litvinenko did not know. His friend Mr Goldfarb said that through the agony of his illness, Mr Litvinenko could not recall details of the meeting. "Like all of us, he assumed that he would not be the target of any attack because he lived in Britain." But Mr Litvinenko also had his background as an FSB man to fall back on. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector and friend of Mr Litvinenko, said: "He told me he was safe because he would see an assassin coming a mile off. You might say that he was a victim of his own pride." Alexander Valterovich Litvin-enko was born in Voronezh in southern Russia. He left school at 18 and was drafted into the army. He served for 20 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. At 26 he joined the counterintelligence agency of the KGB. From 1991 he worked for the Central Staff of what by then was known as the FSB, specialising in counter-terrorism and organised crime. In a press conference in Moscow in November 1998, he claimed he had been asked to organise the assassination of Boris Berezovsky. He was arrested the following March and imprisoned in the FSB prison at Lefortovo in Moscow. He was acquitted in November 1999 and re-arrested before the charges were again dismissed in 2000. A third criminal case began but Litvinenko slipped out of the country, claimed asylum in Britain and was convicted in his absence. But is Mr Litvinenko really a victim of the Russian intelligence services rather than, perhaps, of some internal feud? Certainly, the FSB's reach into Russian society has spread in the six years since President Putin came to power and democracy in the world's largest country has grown commensurately weaker. Yet if a plot was hatched in Moscow to poison Mr Litvinenko in London, many Russians believe a threshold has been crossed. "It is difficult to know why Litvinenko was targeted but the theory is that this is a statement of intent to those who speak out against the regime," said a Russian commentator with close links to the intelligence services. "Those critics who feared for their lives always had the option to flee abroad. But the message now is: We can get you anywhere." If the theory is right, it certainly seems effective. While many analysts that follow the FSB have grown more circumspect in what they say of late, Mr Litvinenko's poisoning appears to have left them terrified. "Talking about this is an invitation to get myself killed," said one. But there must be a strong note of caution here. Many experts sneered at the idea that Mr Litvinenko was a target of official action. In Moscow, Putin loyalists said that he was too small a fry to have bothered the regime. "I am at a loss to understand who may be interested in eliminating Litvinenko who presents no threat to us at all," Gennady Gudkov, a parliamentary deputy who sits on the State Duma's security committee, told the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy. Certainly, Mr Litvinenko had not done much for his credibility by claiming that the FSB was behind the Sept 11 atrocities or that senior al-Qa'eda officials were agents of Russian intelligence. But occasionally he had scored hits on his old bosses. Firstly, in 1998, shortly after he was sacked from the FSB he held a press conference, flanked by masked officers still employed by the FSB, to reveal a plot to murder Mr Berezovsky. If that was greeted with scepticism, Mr Litvinenko's next claim that the FSB was behind a series of bombs that exploded in Moscow apartment blocks in 1999, blamed on the Chechens, won far greater acceptance. It was a key to the Russian justification for its brutal second war in Chechnya. Another sceptic was Nigel West, the British intelligence expert, who said yesterday he would be most surprised if the FSB had tried to kill Mr Litvinenko because it would fly in the face of 65 years of Soviet or Russian practice. "Neither the FSB nor the KGB has ever killed a defector on foreign soil and their predecessors, even under Stalin, did so only once in the case of Walter Krivitsky in Washington in 1941. "Even then there were doubts as to whether he might have committed suicide. On several occasions, the KGB has tracked down defectors such as Igor Gouzenko in Canada, or Vladimir Petrov in Australia in the 1950s. They found them, but decisions were taken at a high level not to kill them." There are two precedents for the use of poisons by Soviet bloc agents to assassinate dissidents. The first is the case of the Bulgarian Georgi Markhov, killed with a ricin pellet fired from a device in an umbrella. The second concerns three Romanian dissidents working for the American-funded Radio Free Europe in Vienna. Agents of Romania's foreign intelligence service broke into their office and sprinkled plutonium dust in their desks. All three died months later from lung cancer. Thirty years later, this John Le Carré world of espionage is just as dirty as ever. Only the characters, and the poisons, change. See also A common energy policy for Europe? State murder A sadly logical event A suspicious death in Russia Putin good or bad |
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