Diplomatic crisis after Russian spy’s death

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Diplomatic crisis after Russian spy’s death

UK Asks Kremlin To Help With Litvinenko Probe; Polonium 210 Found In Him Available Only At N-Installations


Rashmee Roshan Lall | TNN



London: In a gathering diplomatic crisis between Europe and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Britain has officially asked the Kremlin for help in investigating the mysterious and extraordinary death here by radioactive poisoning of former KGB dissident-turned-British citizen Alexander Litvinenko.
Litvinenko’s death on Thursday in a London hospital, allegedly by a massive dose of the highly radioactive and toxic material Polonium 210, has set off a full counter-terrorism police investigation across the British capital with traces of the element found at across several locations in the city, sparking public health fears.
Britain’s heavyweight Cobra committee, the Downing Street crisis team, has already met several times in emergency session over growing fears that Litvinenko’s murder could mean an assassination squad is targeting Russian dissidents in London.
Polonium 210, a by-product of uranium, is very difficult to obtain other than from a nuclear installation, scientists said and security experts warned of serious security implications, if radioactive material is found to have been smuggled into Britain.
It is believed that Litvinenko somehow ingested a small amount of the pure alpha-emitter Polonium 210 on or around November 1. Although harmless to the outer skin, the heavy metal, in quantities no larger than a pinch of salt, destroys internal organs by causing severe radiation poisoning. In a sequence worthy of a James Bond film or John le Carre novel, Polonium 210 is being described as the perfect, if unique and unprecedented killer poison because unlike the better known radioactive elemits that emit gamma rays, it would be impossible to detect using a Geiger counter.
Until he died from heart failure, doctors had failed to pinpoint the cause of symptoms that reduced the fanatically-fit pentathelete 43-year-old Litvinenko to a “ghost” with a crippled immune system and a useless liver.
A post-mortem will not be carried out until it is deemed safe for London hospital staff.
Eminent British nuclear scientist Peter Zimmerman has gone on record to say that because Polonium 210 is extremely rare in nature, can only be produced in nuclear reactors using the bombardment of neutrons and has never before been used by intelligence agencies such as the KGB or anyone else as a murder weapon.
Even as Russia moves towards joining the WTO, agreeing a major new partnership and cooperation agreement with the European Union and Russian companies bidding to buy up leading British and European ones, British officials admitted the diplomatic ramifications would be immense if Russian agents are implicated in Litvinenko’s death. Officials agreed the gathering storm could lead to the frostiest relations with Moscow since the Cold War.
Britain’s intelligence agencies have claimed that Litvinenko’s death — the first by Polonium 210 anywhere in the world — bears all the hallmarks of a “state-sponsored” murder. But political analysts, Russia experts and President Putin himself have the rising hysteria over alleged Kremlin involvement.
In a sign of the potential damage to relations between London and Moscow, the British foreign office said on Saturday that it had asked the Russian government to provide “any information” that would help Scotland Yard’s investigations. British officials said the Cobra meetings underlined the seriousness with which the UK government viewed the assassination with radioactive material.
But critics of the screaming British allegations against the secretive and authoritarian regime of Putin said suspicious should be directed instead at Britain’s large, vocal and venomous anti-Kremlin community of Russians. They said Russia could not afford the international PR disaster of appearing as a state that could sanction the murder of a “former irritant”.
The raging speculation and finger-pointing took its toll on Putin late on Friday, as he prepared for a crucial EU summit in Helsinki. The Russian president said Litvinenko’s death was a tragedy, but he saw no “definitive proof” it was a “violent death”.

Radiation risk: Patrons of sushi bar urged to contact authorities


London: Authorities in Britain were attempting to calm public concern on Saturday after radioactive material was found in central London during investigations into the death of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko. Members of the public who visited the Itsu sushi bar on Piccadilly and the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square on that day are now being asked to contact Britain’s National Health Service. Those suspected of being at risk will be asked to fill in a questionnaire and submit all the urine they produce over 24 hours for testing. AFP

 

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[Cheetah786]

Just who fatally poisoned former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko three weeks ago in London remains unknown, though his death Thursday after a horrible illness strongly suggests the long arm of a reborn SMERSH.

Litvinenko had no doubts: He he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of giving the order to kill him. "Those bastards have got me," he said on his deathbed.

SMERSH, a Russian acronym for "Death to Spies," was created by the Soviets in the 1940s to liquidate enemy agents and defectors.

It reported directly to Stalin. SMERSH and the NKVD/KGB's "Special Tasks" unit assassinated Ukrainian and Baltic nationalist leaders.

The favoured weapons of Soviet "wet affairs" units were undetectable poisons developed by Moscow's top secret "Lab X" that made victims appear to have died from natural causes. Lab X was founded in 1937 and continues, as "Laboratory 12," to this day. The CIA had its own version.

Ukraine's nationalist leader Viktor Yushchenko, Chechen independence fighter Khattab, and now Litvinenko, were all victims of untraceable poisons. PLO leader Yasser Arafat may have been a victim of a similar toxin.

A Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, was poisoned in London in 1978 by means of an umbrella that drove a tiny poison bead into his leg. The secret files of Bulgaria's intelligence service -- which often performed "wet affairs" for KGB and remains under suspicion in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II -- are shortly due to be opened. Three senior archivists of these files have "committed suicide," two recently.

The Litvinenko affair is incredibly murky and just as fascinating. To understand it, go back to 1989.

As the Soviet Union began crumbling, I was the first western journalist given access to KGB's top brass, headquarters, and archives. "KGB is a powerful force behind modernization and reform," I reported from Moscow that year, adding that the KGB's best and brightest officers from the elite First Chief Directorate had decided to abandon the communists and seize control of business and government.

A 'Russian Pinochet'

The First Directorate's agents, including up-and-comer Vladimir Putin, were Russia's best educated, most sophisticated, and disciplined citizens. They knew communism had wrecked Russia. KGB chiefs told me in 1989 they wanted a "Russian Pinochet," a strongman who would bring in capitalism and make Russia and Russians work.

Today, two decades later, former KGB officers run the Kremlin, Russia's government, and much of its industry.

As the USSR collapsed, a group of sharp-minded financial opportunists called "oligarchs" grabbed control of itsindustries and resources.

Led by Boris Berezovsky, they formed the core support for Boris Yeltsin' s stumbling regime -- with huge amounts of covert U.S. finance.

KGB -- divided in 1991 into the foreign SVR and internal FSB51 -- viewed Berezovsky and other oligarchs as traitors and foreign agents

Also in 1991, the Chechens, a Muslim Caucasian mountain people who had battled Russian colonial rule for 300 years, demanded independence from Russia, similar to its other former republics. Berezovsky backed their calls.

In 1994, Yelstin provoked a war and sent his army to crush Chechen independence. Savage Russian bombing and shelling killed up to 100,000 Chechens.

In a military miracle, Chechen fighters defeated Russian forces in two years of bitter fighting and drove them out. In 1997, Yeltsin signed a peace treaty granting Chechnya independence.

Vowed revenge

But the "siloviki" -- Russia's security and military apparatus -- wereoutraged and vowed revenge. Yeltsin was discredited as a drunken buffoon. At the end of 1999, he was ousted by a discreet coup that made then little-known prime minister, and former KGB officer,Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.

During 1999, Moscow and a provincial city were racked by a series of apartment building bombings that killed 300 people. Panic swept Russia.

The bombings were blamed on "Chechen Islamic terrorists." But Moscow police caught a team of SVR agents red-handed planting explosives in a residential building. The agents claimed they were running a "security test."

This awkward fact was hushed up. Putin called for total war "to wipe out Chechen terrorism" and "kill them in their outhouses." Outraged Russians rallied behind Putin, giving him a huge electoral mandate in 2000. Putin sent his army to invade and re-conquer Chechnya.

The parallels to the 9/11 attacks on America a year later were uncanny.

Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book about the apartment bombings and claimed his own agency, FSB, was behind them. The book was financed by Berezovsky, who had emerged as Putin's main rival for power. In 1998, Litvinenko publicly claimed the secret police planned to kill Berezovsky.

Litvinenko was jailed, then fled into exile in Britain. Berezovsky, charged with fraud, later followed him to exile in London where he continues plotting to overthrow Putin.

Journalist murdered

Shortly before Litvinenko was poisoned, he was investigating last month's murder in Moscow of crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.She had courageously exposed Russian criminality and rights abuses in Chechnya. Politkovskaya told me she was marked for death by "silovoki" and Russian gangsters.

Litvinenko and Berezovsky accused Putin of authoring Politkovskaya's murder. The Kremlin strongly denied any involvement, or any role in Litvinenko's poisoning.

Both crimes have further damaged Russia's image, and tarnished President Putin's image as a strong but law-abiding leader. Yet one must wonder why the Kremlin would risk igniting such a storm to silence a minor figure whose accusations went largely unheeded.

Perhaps thin-skinned officials in Moscow reverted to old Soviet ways by dispatching the "Smershniki."

The Kremlin blames a feud among Russian exiles. But the blood spots connect right to Moscow. One feels a chilly breeze from the days of the Cold War.

 

[KashifAsrar]

Spy was tailed before he died

Cops Trace Ex-KGB Agent’s Last Steps


London: As he lay dying, an ex-Soviet spy poisoned in London named an alleged Russian agent he feared had been targeting him and who he had previously told police was harassing him, a British newspaper said in a report published on Sunday.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died Thursday night of heart failure after suddenly falling gravely ill from what doctors said was poisoning by a radioactive substance.
Litvinenko alleged that a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service chief previously stationed in London had been assigned by Moscow to watch him, Sunday Times reported. Litvinenko, who spoke to friends and dictated a vitriolic statement about Putin’s government while in the hospital, claimed the Russian agent was not directly involved in his poisoning, but had been sent to monitor his activities, the newspaper said.
London’s Metropolitan police said it could not immediately confirm whether officers would seek to find and interview the alleged Russian agent named by Litvinenko.
Police said anti-terrorist officers investigating the former agent’s death had not found records of earlier harassment complaints during their inquiry. An audio recording of Litvinenko making the allegation was being handed over to officers, the Sunday Times reported. Police said no tape had yet been received.
Russia’s Embassy in London said it could not immediately comment on the claims. Britain’s foreign office could not immediately confirm if a diplomat of the name used by Litvinenko had been based in London.
“Whilst in hospital Alexander named the man he alleged was watching him and said he had been the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) station chief in London until 2003, posing as a diplomat at the Russian embassy,” Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb said. Litvinenko told police he believed he had been poisoned on November 1 while investigating the October slaying of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. AP

Polonium 210 much deadlier than cyanide

Gordon Rayner
Polonium 210 is one of the most toxic substances known to man, with a particle the size of a speck of dust enough to cause the sort of slow, agonising death suffered by Alexander Litvinenko.
Weight for weight, the rare radioactive isotope is 250 billion times more toxic than cyanide, and more than a billion times more radioactive than uranium.
If it gets into the body, it will kill off each internal organ in turn as it reaches them through the blood. The only known use for polonium 210 is in nuclear bomb triggers and as a heat or power source in satellites and moon buggies.
To manufacture it requires a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator which would produce, at most, a few milligrams of the substance, small enough to fit on a pinhead.
Professor Denis Henshaw, of the Bristol-based Human Radiation Effects Group, said: “You are only talking about a particle the size of a speck of dust needed to kill someone.” DAILY MAIL, LONDON




Russia blames tycoon for spy’s death

Exiled Boris Berezovsky May Be Behind Poisoning To Discredit Putin
Kremlin sources said they did not rule out the possibility that Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch living in London, may have been behind the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
The source was angered by accusations in the press — and in the deathbed statement of the former spy — that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, or the FSB, the country’s security service, had been behind the poisoning.
“At the moment we don’t have any evidence and honestly we don’t know who killed Litvinenko, but one thing is for sure, it was not the Russian state,” said the source.
“I don’t believe in coincidences. It seems very strange that Litvinenko’s letter accusing the president of murder should be made public just when Putin is sitting down to an EU summit in Helsinki.
“If you ask the question who had the most to gain from all this, the answer can only be Berezovsky, a man who by his own admission is out on a campaign to discredit Putin and the Kremlin.”
Berezovsky knew Litvinenko well and supported him financially. While the tycoon declined to comment, friends said it was “absurd” to link him with the death.
The source also said that the Kremlin would co-operate fully with Scotland Yard and British authorities investigating Litvinenko’s death: “We’ve got nothing to hide and are more than happy to help our British colleagues with their inquiries.”
As Russia responded to Litvinenko’s death, the Kremlin aide was not the only one pointing a finger at Berezovsky. “British PR men ordered the sacrifice of Litvinenko to make a noise,” wrote Izvestia, the daily newspaper, in a clear hint at Berezovsky.
“This death is in the interest of those who want to spoil relations between Russia and the West,” wrote Komsomolskaya Pravda, the popular daily newspaper, on Saturday morning.
In comments played up by the Russian media, Putin, speaking at an EU summit in Helsinki, said Litvinenko’s death was a tragedy, extended his condolences to the former spy’s family and denied any role. “There is no ground for speculations of this kind,” he said.
The radioactive substance that doctors believe that killed Litvinenko could have come from Russia, but nuclear experts said on Saturday it would be difficult for investigators to pinpoint blame for the death even if the origin of the toxin is determined.
Polonium-210, the substance doctors believe killed Litvinenko, is usually made artificially in a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator, and would likely come from a country with a significant nuclear programme. With several nuclear research facilities, Russia fits the bill . “There are many laboratories in Russia where it could be produced,” said Vladimir Slivyak, a nuclear expert and co-chairman of the Russian environmental group Ekozashchita.
Alexander Pikayev, a senior analyst, said polonium isotope would be “much easier” to acquire than weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium because it is not considered weapons-grade.SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON
& AGENCIES

 

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Spy death: UK minister blames Kremlin

Cabinet Member Peter Hain Condemns ‘Murky Murders’, Attacks On Individual Freedoms

Rashmee Roshan Lall | TNN

London: A mounting diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia has burst into the open on Monday with a senior member of Tony Blair’s cabinet publicly condemning the “murky murders” of President Putin’s regime; the British home secretary making an emergency parliamentary statement on the “suspicious death” of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko and London authorities confirming they would hold an inquest into the Russian’s alleged poisoning by a toxic and rare radioactive metal Polonium 210.
Officials in the British capital, where the 43-year-old former KGB colonel died a painful death by poisoning, said the “expectation” was for an inquest on Thursday. Meanwhile, in the first, public criticism of Putin’s Russia by a leading member of the British government, cabinet minister Peter Hain hinted at possible Kremlin involvement in Litvinenko’s death four days ago.
Hain, who is currently Northern Ireland secretary and is a declared contender for deputy leadership of the governing Labour Party, voiced his criticism of Putin even as his cabinet colleague, home secretary John Reid admitted British police were treating Litvinenko’s death as “suspicious”.
Hain said, in what political commentators described as significantly unbuttoned remarks, that he condemned “murky murders” that had taken place in Putin’s Russia. He also criticised “huge attacks” on individual freedoms and democracy in Russia. He said, in remarks thought likely to embarrass Tony Blair who has long courted Putin as a friend and ally, that “The promise that President Putin brought to Russia when he came to power has been clouded by what has happened since, including some extremely murky murders.”
He added that the attacks on democracy and individual liberty in Russia had overshadowed Putin’s success in “binding a disintegrating nation together” and achieving stability from an economy which had been collapsing into “Mafioso-style chaos”. Hain said, “It’s important he retakes the democratic road in my view”.
The Kremlin has described the increasingly high-pitched allegations coming out of European capitals as ridiculous and Putin himself has said the death was being used for “political provocation”.
Till now, Scotland Yard had described the death as “unexplained”, even though they have submitted a formal request to Moscow for any information that might assist in their investigations. The circumstances surrounding the death of Litvinenko, who passed away last Thursday after apparently being poisoned on or around November 1, have inflamed the habitually-testy relationship between London and Moscow.

Radiation tests on five


London: Five people have been referred to a special clinic for radiological tests following the death of a former Russian spy in London, a spokeswoman for Britain's
Health Protection Agency (HPA) said on Monday. Highly radioactive Polonium 210 was found in the body of Alexander Litvinenko, who died last week, and traces of radiation were found at his home, a restaurant and hotel he had visited.
Health officials have offered tests to members of the public who may have visited the locations. The spokeswoman said that of more than 450 people who called a government hotline for health advice, 18 had been passed on to the HPA for follow-up. “Of those 18, three have been referred as a precaution to a special clinic for radiological assessment,” she said.
Meanwhile, home secretary John Reid said there was no need for public alarm over the discovery of radiation. Reid said the nature of this radiation was such “that it does not travel over long distances – a few centimetres at most.” AGENCIES

UK hunts for ‘Igor the assassin’

Scotland Yard On Trail Of KGB Killer Who ‘Eliminated’ Ex-Russian Spy

Stephen Wright


Aruthless assasin known as Igor is being hunted over the poison murder of a former Russian spy that threatened to spark a fully-blown diplomatic row.
The trained killer — part of a group of ex-KGB spies called ‘Dignity and Honour’ — was named in a document passed to police by Alexander Litvinenko shortly before he died.
The 46-year-old, a former member of Russia’s notorious Spetsnaz special forces, is a key suspect wanted for questioning over the death of the KGB defector, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium 210 — a toxin 250 billion times deadlier than cyanide.
The document was passed to Litvinenko at the sushi restaurant where he is thought to have been slipped a lethal dose of the substance. The papers reveal that ‘Dignity and Honour’ are loyalists waging their own Cold War campaign against critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The document is understood to contain an extraordinary hitlist with 43-yearold Litvinenko a prime target.
The hunt for Igor came on another day of dramatic developments in the case:
Hundreds of people fear they have been contaminated as dangerously high levels of radiation remain at a hotel visited by Litvinenko on the day he fell ill.
Leading Cabinet Minister Peter Hain risked opening a major diplomatic row by accusing president Putin of attacking liberty and democracy.
Police, who expect to launch a formal murder inquiry in the next 48 hours, will shortly fly to Rome and Moscow to quiz three men who met the ex-KGB colonel on the day he died.
Igor is said to be a judo master who walks with a slight limp after an accident. DAILY MAIL, LONDON

Dossier on Yukos takeover passed on

Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who last week died, travelled to Israel weeks before his death to pass along a dossier investigating how the Kremlin took over Russian energy giant Yukos, The Times reported. The dossier, which contains evidence of the Russian government’s dealings with those running Yukos, will be presented to London’s Metropolitan Police. He passed the dossier to Leonid Nevzlin, former second-in-command at Yukos. AFP