He blamed Putin's agents with his dying breath, but who really killed Russia's dissident spy? David Leppard and Richard Woods in London and Mark Franchetti in Moscow investigate
In a private room of a London hospital, the spy who knew too much was slowly dying. The once fine features of Alexander Litvinenko were pale and drawn. Barely a month earlier he had been a fit man who often ran five miles a day; now, unable even to eat, he was being kept alive by the intravenous drip in his arm.
His hair had fallen out. He had lost two stone. He was unrecognisable as a former lieutenant colonel of the FSB, the Russian secret service, who had fled to London after making an enemy of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
Now his immune system was shot to pieces, his white blood cells destroyed. His vital organs, including his liver and kidneys, were beginning to fail. He was showing all the signs of being poisoned by a radioactive substance.
Next to the bed his wife Marina, an attractive blonde of 44, sat trying to hold back her tears. Visitors had to wear plastic gloves and other paraphernalia to prevent infection.
Inside the racked body of Litvinenko bitterness burnt alongside the poison. He had not yet given up his fight. In an interview with The Sunday Times before this newspaper broke the story last weekend, he claimed he was the victim of a plot by his enemies in Russia.
"There is a special unit within the FSB on poisoning and developing poisons," he said, his voice faltering. "I know they are using poisons in Chechnya. The service are putting special emphasis on this."
He paused, reached for a plastic bowl on his lap and vomited. When he had recovered he continued: "Everything that is happening is fitting very neatly a particular logical chain. First, the Russian parliament passes a law in the middle of this year which allows the government, allows the president, to pursue and attack 'extremists' all over the world. So now it's legal.
"Then a few days later they enacted another [law] which defines 'extremist'. Anybody who is critical of the government falls under these broad definitions."
Few had been more vitriolic and outrageous in their criticism of Putin and the Kremlin than Litvinenko.
"This unties the hands of the secret service because nobody can now say it's illegal under Russian law."
He vomited again and a nurse came into the room. Litvinenko tried to wave her away, but she told him it was time for his next dose of antibiotics and he quietly complied. Then he continued.
"I know what's happening within the [Russian spy] service. Once a law like this is enacted the services immediately start planning activity, frantic activity, setting up new units that would implement the new initiative. The services consider it as an order actually.
"I know that the Russian intelligence are monitoring me. I know that I am an active case. I know the officer in the Russian [embassy] station here who is in charge of monitoring me. I know he is part of the spy trade." He lay back, exhausted.
Those spies, he implied, had laid a trap and led him into it. On November 1, the sixth anniversary of his escape from Russia, he had gone to two meetings, one with a former FSB agent and another with an Italian investigator who feared for his life - and for Litvinenko's.
Later that night he began to feel unwell. By November 3 he was in hospital, suffering from persistent vomiting and dehydration. By November 15 his condition was critical, and baffled doctors were testing him with geiger counters for radiation poisoning.
In the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale, the fictional British spy has poison slipped into his drink. He staggers to his Aston Martin and, thanks to futuristic Q-style gadgetry, boffins back at base are able to diagnose the lethal substance. The antidote is at hand.
The real world of espionage is much murkier. Last week, as Litvinenko's strength was slipping away, he told a friend: "The bastards got me, but they won't get everyone". He died on Thursday evening. He was 43.
On Friday experts from the Health Protection Agency revealed that high levels of radiation - from a substance known as polonium210 - had been found in his urine. He had, they said, either eaten or inhaled the polonium, or absorbed it through a wound.
The radioactive isotope is rare and vastly more toxic than cyanide. But it is undetectable in the body with a geiger counter. Who could have obtained it? How had it come to enter Litvinenko's body?
Outside the hospital his father had few doubts who was responsible. "He was killed by a little, tiny nuclear bomb," he said. "It was so small that you could not see it. But the people who killed him have big nuclear bombs and missiles, and those people should not be trusted."
Had Putin, tiring of Litvinenko's attacks, ordered his elimination? Did rogue elements in Russian intelligence take matters into their own hands? As Litvinenko's plight made headlines, lurid rumours surfaced to justify these suspicions, including claims that originate from Litvinenko that a videotape exists of Putin caught in a compromising sexual assignation.
The Kremlin dismissed it all as "nonsense", and "so silly and unbelievable" that it was "not worthy of comment".
But the conspiracy theories did not stop. If it wasn't the Kremlin, people whispered, then Litvinenko had been sacrificed by his own allies to discredit Putin.
Others wondered whether he was the victim of a mafia plot. Had he somehow come into contact with smuggled radioactive material? Some even went so far as to speculate that the former spy, consumed by his hatred for Putin, had harmed himself.
Whatever the precise source, this is an espionage drama that centres on power, greed and fear. For the road that led Litvinenko to his death in London begins in the lawless Moscow of the 1990s, when billions of dollars and control of the Kremlin were up for grabs.
It was also a place where friendships often turned into deadly enmities, as Litvinenko and his circle came to discover all too well.
ONE morning in the summer of 1994 Boris Berezovsky, a Russian mathematician turned entrepreneur, was driving to his Moscow office, a fortified historic mansion known as the Logovaz Club. It was the age of the Wild East: Russia had discovered the joys of capitalism, including gambling, girls and guns. The postcommunist regime was flogging off state assets at knockdown prices and Berezovsky had made a fortune buying up Lada car dealerships. He was also making enemies.
As his Mercedes pulled up outside the Logovaz Club a bomb hidden in a car parked nearby exploded. The blast decapitated his chauffeur, according to Alex Goldfarb, a Russian émigré who knows Berezovsky and Litvinenko well. "Boris survived by a miracle," he says.
The AntiTerrorist Centre of the FSB sent a team to investigate and the man in charge was Litvinenko. Though the investigation went nowhere, Litvinenko and Berezovsky formed a friendship and stayed in touch. The antiterrorist investigator became a useful ally within the FSB for Berezovsky, whose influence ran far beyond business. He and other "oligarchs" had masterminded the 1996 campaign that had reelected Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia. As part of Yeltsin's cabinet, Berezovsky had considerable influence on policy, and in particular he had negotiated a treaty giving a large amount of autonomy to the province of Chechnya.
In the dangerous, swirling pools of Moscow politics, where communist old Continued from page 1 guard, gangsters, spies and newly minted oligarchs circled like sharks, Berezovsky needed all the eyes he could get.
In 1998, according to Goldfarb, Litvinenko secretly warned Berezovsky that another attempt to kill him was looming. The driving force behind the threat, said Litvinenko, was General Yevgeny Khokholkov, an opponent of Chechen independence who had declared it was time "that we wasted that Kremlin Jew" - Berezovsky, who had negotiated autonomy.
Khokholkov was not a man to be taken lightly. He had blown up one Chechen rebel leader by getting a missile to home in on his satellite phone as he was talking to a Russian MP. They had promoted him to general. Now he was head of an elite division of the FSB called the Directorate of Operations again Criminal Organisations (DOCO), and was using it for his own ends.
Berezovsky got his retaliation in first by arranging a secret meeting between five disillusioned members of DOCO and the deputy chief of staff at the Kremlin. The agents spilt the beans on the directorate's dubious activities and Yeltsin leapt on their report, according to Goldfarb.
"He was excited," says Goldfarb. "This was something he was looking for, a pretext to do a thorough clean-up of the Kontora [the Company, as the FSB was sometimes known]. He ordered a search for a new FSB director."
Goldfarb says that when Berezovsky and others in the Kremlin decided that no one within the FSB could be trusted, they cast their net wider. The man they alighted upon was Putin, a former KGB man who had, it seemed, become a liberal, reformist civil servant, first in St Petersburg and then in the Kremlin.
He had even helped Berezovsky with a business deal. "And what was absolutely surprising for me," Berezovsky later said, "was that he was the first who didn't ask for a bribe."
Installed as the new head of the FSB in July 1998, Putin set about disbanding DOCO and bundled Khokholkov into early retirement. Berezovsky was delighted. It looked like being the start of a profitable friendship, recalled Goldfarb.
"Go see Putin," Berezovsky urged Litvinenko. "See what a great guy we have put in with your help."
But when Litvinenko got to see the new head of the FSB, the quiet, inscrutable Putin did not hit it off with the volatile Litvinenko. He was dismissive of Litvinenko's claims of corruption within the FSB. Instead of rooting out a senior officer accused by Litvinenko of plotting assassinations, Putin promoted him.
In late 1998 Litvinenko and several other officers staged a surreal press conference, during which all but Litvinenko wore ski masks or sunglasses. They accused their bosses of ordering kidnapping, extortion and contract killings.
As Litvinenko became increasingly outspoken, he warned Berezovsky that Putin could not be trusted. He went even further at a meeting last August in a London hotel with Barrie Penrose and John Coates, two investigators and former Sunday Times journalists. Putin's post in the town hall of St Petersburg had been nothing but a "cover", he claimed. "Putin had never left the FSB."
Apart from making a few cosmetic changes at the outset, Litvinenko claimed, Putin had slipped effortlessly back into the old secret intelligence mould.
At first Berezovsky refused to believe that Putin posed a threat. Instead he became one of the prime movers propelling Putin towards the presidency, calculating that it would safeguard his business empire and political influence.
On the evening that Yeltsin resigned and Putin was appointed acting president, Berezovsky celebrated by attending the Bolshoi ballet. He told a Sunday Times journalist who was there: "Russia now has the best president in the world".
The love-in was to last a mere few months. Soon after Putin took control of the Kremlin, he summoned the oligarchs and issued a blunt warning. The days when tycoons could dabble in politics were over, he said. He added a veiled threat that if they didn't steer clear the state might begin investigating how they had obtained their enormous riches.
By the summer of 2000, Berezovsky and Putin were openly at each others throats and the FSB man had the stronger grip. Before the year was out, Berezovsky had sold much of his empire to another rising oligarch, Roman Abramovich. The young tycoon, who now owns Chelsea football club, was rather more amenable to Putin. Indeed, Litvinenko later alleged disparagingly that Abramovich was "Putin's accountant".
Berezovsky fled to Britain. Litvinenko, who had already been arrested, imprisoned and released, also decided to quit while he still could. He smuggled his wife and son to Turkey, then flew to Heathrow, where he claimed asylum.
"Mr Litvinenko and his family are in danger," Goldfarb, who was travelling with them, told immigration officials. "It's a question of life and death."
AT THE height of the cold war no one doubted the lethal reach of Soviet secret agents. In 1978 hitmen from behind the Iron Curtain tracked the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov to London, tailed him to a bus stop near Waterloo and jabbed the poison ricin into his leg with a special umbrella. Markov died three days later.
As the cold war thawed, the spectre of assassins and spies prowling London receded, at least in western perception. Putin thought differently.
Igor Malashenko, a former Moscow television executive now living in exile in London, recalls an incident when Putin, then being lined up for the presidency, attended a dinner at the country dacha of a banker.
The meal was interrupted when Malashenko's wife received a telephone call from her daughter, who had just flown back to school in Britain. The car scheduled to meet her at Heathrow had not arrived.
"Our daughter is a strange girl," Mrs Malashenko told the guests. "I would have taken a taxi instead of waiting at the airport so long."
Putin cut in. "Your daughter is right and you are wrong," he said. "You could never be sure it's a real taxi."
Malashenko thought the exchange spoke volumes about Putin's mind-set. And in many ways Putin had reason to besuspicious:the community of Russian exiles growing in London was beginning to wage a guerrilla campaign against him.
When Litvinenko pitched up in London, Berezovsky took him under his wing. When Ahmed Zakayev, another dissident and Chechen separatist, arrived, he too fell into Berezovsky's orbit.
Litvinenko and Zakayev ended up living in the same north London street in houses believed to be owned by Berezovsky. The billionaire, who supported antiPutin factions in various places, was a persistent irritation, enough to make Putin's government in Russia seek his extradition, without success.
At the same time Litvinenko gave full rein to his suspicions and obsession. He published a book called The FSB Blows Up Russia, claiming that state agents had planted bombs in apartment blocks and blamed the attacks on Chechens in order to create a pretext for Russian military action against the province.
Litvinenko's circle became a magnet for dissidents and spooky types, and the alleged plots seemed to grow ever more outlandish. In 2003 he told the Sunday Times about a plan by a renegade FSB officer to assassinate Putin.
He had held a rendezvous with the man - known only as Major P - on a bench outside the Wagamama noodle restaurant in Leicester Square. Major P had outlined a plan to ambush Putin on a foreign trip and get Chechen fighters to "pop up somewhere on Putin's route with sniper rifles".
Major P had apparently wanted Berezovsky to finance the assassination. Litvinenko, however, suspected it was all a "sting" set up by the FSB to entrap him and Berezovsky. So he went to the British police, who arrested the major and another Russian; they were later released on condition that they return to Moscow.
Amid this febrile atmosphere, real violence occasionally bubbled to the surface. In September 2004, two weeks after Litvinenko had been talking to MPs about the FSB, someone threw a petrol bomb at his house. He tried to shrug it off as a minor incident.
"It was just a petrol bottle with oil," he told Penrose and Coates. "My son was asleep, my wife woke up and after 30 minutes went to sleep again.
"Then next week I mended my window, no problem. Not serious. Just petrol bottle with oil. Oil bomb."
Simple vandalism? A warning? Or an attempt on his life? No one took much notice, perhaps because that month a much more prominent figure was the victim of a suspected espionage attack.
In the Ukrainian elections Viktor Yushchenko, no friend of communist factions in his country or in Russia, suddenly suffered a mysterious and disfiguring illness.
Yushchenko, who still went on to become president, was apparently poisoned with dioxins. Suspicions have centred on elements of his own country's security service and the FSB.
There were other incidents, too. A leading Russian journalist and critic of the Kremlin died, apparently of poisoning. And a rebel Chechen leader died apparently after receiving a letter laced with poison.
IN 2006 Litvinenko's campaign against the Russian leader climbed to new heights. The exiled spy was brooding in London, watching Putin exert an ever tighter grip on his country.
In July he wrote an article for a Chechen website accusing Putin of being a paedophile. In October, at an international journalists' club in London, he gave an impassioned speech making other claims.
That month Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who had been highly critical of the Kremlin, was shot dead in the entrance of her apartment block. Litvinenko told the meeting he knew who was responsible.
"Somebody has asked me directly: 'Who is guilty of Anna's death, who has killed her?' he began. "And I can directly answer you. It is Mr Putin, the president of the Russian Federation."
Litvinenko claimed he and his family had been friends with Politkovskaya for three years - though others say he did not know her well.
"After her book, Putin's Russia, was published she had quite a number of threats which became more frequent, directly from the Kremlin.
"And during one of our last meetings she asked me directly: 'Can they kill me, do you think they can kill me?' And I told her quite frankly: 'Yes they can and I really suggest that you leave the country [Russia]'."
A few days after that meeting, on October 28, Litvinenko received an e-mail from Mario Scaramella, an Italian academic security consultant with whom he had previously exchanged information about suspected Russian agents. Scaramella said that he had important information and wanted to come to London to meet Litvinenko.
They agreed to rendezvous on November 1. It would be the last day that Litvinenko felt well.
What happened next is the subject of dispute and a continuing investigation by Scotland Yard counter-terrorist command.
By some accounts Litvinenko first went to the Millennium hotel in Piccadilly to meet Andrei Lugovoi, a former agent of the KGB (the forerunner of the FSB). Initial reports suggested that Lugovoi and another mysterious Russian named only as Vladimir took tea with Litvinenko. According to a friend: "This Russian man poured the cup of tea and Litvinenko drained it."
Late last week, however, Lugovoi, who now runs a security firm in Moscow, vigorously denied this. He said he had been in London to watch a football match and the two men had met at the hotel where he was staying to discuss a business deal.
"In the last year I flew a dozen times to Britain. Every time I would have several meetings with Litvinenko," he said. "I was in town and had spoken to Litvinenko and we had agreed to meet that day. I don't recall him having a drink and we had no food."
He identified the second Russian present at the meeting as Dmitry Kovtoun, a business associate, whom he had introduced to Litvinenko before.
"There was nothing strange about Litvinenko's behaviour and he did not seem worried. We all left the hotel together and then parted."
Lugovoi said he was happy to cooperate with British police in their inquiry. He also claimed the meeting had taken place later in the day - after Litvinenko had met Scaramella.
At lunchtime in Piccadilly Litvinenko met the Italian, who said he was tired and needed to sit down. They repaired to a nearby Japanese restaurant, Itsu.
"I ordered lunch," Litvinenko said. "But he ate nothing. He appeared to be nervous. He handed me a four-page document which he said he wanted me to read straight away. It contained a list of names of people, including FSB officers, who were purported to be connected with [Politkovskaya's] murder.
"The document was an e-mail but it was not an official document. I couldn't understand why he had to come all the way to London to give it to me. He could have e-mailed it to me."
"I put it in my bag because I thought I'd look at it at home. But he said he wanted me to look at it right now. So I pulled it out of my bag. There were people who had to do with Politkovskaya's murder."
The document apparently named a group called Dignity and Honour, a mercenary organisation made up of former KGB spies. It is suspected of being used by the FSB for "deniable" operations.
"He [Scaramella] asked me: 'Are these dangerous people? Am I in danger?'," said Litvinenko.
"I looked at some names. And I said I cannot tell you right away who these people are. There were some names in the text . . . Something about Berezovsky, something about me. I cannot accuse him of anything but the whole meeting was very strange."
Scaramella has spoken freely about the meeting and is keen to cooperate with any investigation. He believes that Litvinenko had already been poisoned by the time they met.
What is certain is that that night Litvinenko suddenly began to feel very ill.
"At first I thought it was just a bug, but then he started vomiting," his wife Marina told The Sunday Times. "It wasn't normal vomiting." Two days later he was in hospital.
WHO killed him? In Russia the suggestion that Putin ordered the elimination of a man such as Litvinenko is greeted in many quarters with scorn. Litvinenko was small fry, a fantasist, a pest, not a problem, they say. Bumping him off would cause more trouble, an international furore, than putting up with him alive.
One former aide to Putin says: "It's quite simple with Putin. It's all about loyalty. You are either with him or against him. If you are not with him, then you are an enemy. And if you are an enemy, he'll come after you." But even this source does not believe Putin would order the killing of a man like Litvinenko.
Among Muscovites last week the favoured theory was a more convoluted conspiracy: that allies of Litvinenko had sacrificed him to besmirch Putin by making it look like the FSB was responsible.
They pointed to a statement Putin had made after the murder of Politkovskaya. Putin had said: "We have information, and it is reliable, that many people who are hiding from Russian justice have long had the idea of sacrificing someone in order to create a wave of antiRussian sentiment."
Did he really have such information? Or was it just a clever ploy to deflect suspicions onto people such as Berezovsky?
Friends of Litvinenko believe it is ludicrous to suspect Berezovsky of harming the man who once saved him from a possible assassination attempt. "Boris owes his life to Litvinenko and would never do anything to harm him," said Oleg Gordievsky, another KGB defector and family friend.
Friends also dismissed suggestions that Litvinenko could have harmed himself. What would he have to gain, they ask. He loved his wife and son and wanted to continue his fight against Putin.
Curious shapes that appeared on Litvinenko's x-rays turned out to be nothing suspicious; doctors said they were harmless shadows caused by methods used to try to identify what had poisoned him.
Others point out that Litvinenko had made plenty of enemies beyond the Kremlin. In the late 1990s he had accused two of his bosses at the FSB of planning assassinations, and infuriated others with his claims about the FSB blowing up apartment blocks. He had also tangled with mafia gangs.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services, said: "Litvinenko wasn't an ordinary FSB agent. He worked in the department fighting organised crime. It's a special group often accused of links with criminals.
"It's a shadowy world. The people who poisoned him could easily have come from there."
Had a former FSB agent, perhaps linked to Dignity and Honour, taken revenge for a personal grudge? Or is it even murkier still? Had Litvinenko been involved in some nefarious activity that caused him to suffer radiation poisoning?
At first sight the substance that poisoned him might appear to give some clues. Polonium210 occurs naturally in only trace amounts or is produced in nuclear reactors; it might be taken to indicate that the perpetrator was an agent of a state.
Yet it is not impossible for an individual to obtain a supply, since at least one company in America, according to its website, sells the substance in "small orders" to individuals and that "no licence is required".
Whoever poisoned Litvinenko with polonium condemned him to a lingering, painful death. As his final hours approached, his wife, son and his father, Walter, were at his bedside.
"It was a darkened room, and he would open his eyes every now and then," said Andrei Nekrasov, a close friend who visited Litvinenko every day. "It was so heartrending. His son was just in a state of shock. He didn't know what to make of it. The family was just huddled in a corner of the hospital - it was terrible to look at."
The morning after Litvinenko passed away, his father paid tribute to his son, whom he called Sasha.
"He was very courageous when he met his death and I am proud of my son," he said. "He was a very honest and good man.
"Marina and Sasha were the most wonderful couple. They loved each other so much. They were happy here in London, but the long hand of Moscow got them here on this soil."
The key players in a spy mystery
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN
Former member of the FSB, the Russian security service, who took over as president of the Russian Federation in 2000. Has consolidated his power by imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's richest men, and driving out some other "oligarchs", such as Boris Berezovsky.
BORIS BEREZOVSKY
Academic turned businessman who made a fortune in Russia after the fall of communism. Was an ally of Putin until they fell out after Putin became president. Berezovsky fled to Britain, where he has battled extradition, opposed Putin's regime and given help to other exiles such as Alexander Litvinenko.
MARIO SCARAMELLA
An Italian security consultant and academic, he met Litvinenko the day he fell ill. Litvinenko had previously given him information, including a tip about Ukrainians trying to smuggle grenades into Italy to kill an Italian senator. Scaramella gave Litvinenko documents about targets for FSB assassination.
ANDREI LUGOVOI
Former FSB agent who now runs a security firm in Moscow. He met Litvinenko in London hours before he fell ill. Lugovoi says he was in London for a football match and had a meeting with Litvinenko and a colleague simply for business purposes.
ALEX GOLDFARB
Russian émigré and director of the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, a group set up by Boris Berezovsky. Goldfarb helped Litvinenko flee from Russia via Turkey to Britain, and has acted as a spokesman for him and his family in recent days.
LORD BELL
Silver tongued, silver haired PR wizard who advises politicians and businessmen, and was closely associated with Lady Thatcher. His firm is retained by Berezovsky and helped with publicity for Litvinenko's story. The timing has been embarrassing for Putin, who last week attended an EU summit in Helsinki.
The last dictated words of Alexander Litvinenko charged the Putin administration with his murder. They may yet provoke an emergency in Anglo-Russian relations. At present the truth about the killing is unknown and perhaps will never be discovered. But should it turn out that agents of Russia's security services organised an assassination in a London restaurant, a dagger will have been plunged into the heart of British diplomacy.
The UK has not covered itself with glory when handling official Russia since the 1990s. Tony Blair has lavished constant praise on President Vladimir Putin. They have been filmed in softly lit venues in London and Moscow. They have exchanged presents. Their wives have been photographed out together. Blair has mentioned him with affectionate warmth. He has not been alone in this. George Bush and Gerhard Schröder have spread as much unction on their diplomatic relations with Russia.
However, in May 2005 Bush spoke up for universal human rights on his trips to Lithuania and Georgia and called for respect for their state sovereignty. Dick Cheney, US vice-president, and Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, have delivered a harsh commentary on the Russian administration. Schröder scandalously continued to eulogise the progress being made by Putin's Russia and was rewarded with a directorship of Gazprom, the state-owned Russian gas giant, on losing the German election.
It is true Blair has remonstrated with Putin about the disrespect for civil rights in Russia. He has also complained about the war in Chechnya. But the mildness of his language has been remarkable. Diplomats who witnessed Blair's sessions with Putin were distinctly underwhelmed by the purely formal tone of British objections.
Blair has even allowed Putin to dress him down in public for failing to accept that Russian military action was an integral theatre in the global "war on terror". Blair, to be fair to him, never overlooked the atrocities in Chechnya. But not once has he shown an understanding that those atrocities are much more than a local affair.
The Chechen danger has been exploited in Moscow as an excuse for countless lurches into authoritarianism. Putin has used it to justify his persecution of the media. Only the bravest criticise fundamental government policy.
The murder of Anna Politkovskaya seven weeks ago remains under investigation. Putin made only the most cursory denunciation of the crime, and the fact that Politkovskaya was a persistent commentator on the brutality of the Russian army in Chechnya has left more than a trace of suspicion that the Federal Security Bureau was involved in her liquidation.
The Foreign Office has plenty of personnel who fully understand the misguided basis of Downing Street's Russian agenda. The so-called war on terror is not helped by the pulverising of Chechnya. The opposite is true. Chechnya, like several other troublespots from Palestine to Kashmir, has provided perfect propaganda for Islamist terrorists. Funds and volunteers have flooded into the country. Chechnya is run by Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin's protégé, who has carried out a campaign of unspeakable barbarity against fellow Chechens.
Blair has persisted with his belief that quiet diplomacy will reap a dividend. There are, of course, British interests in need of protection. As the UK's dependence on energy imports increases, so the reliance on sound economic ties with Russia is bound to grow. Furthermore, BP has bought its way into the potentially lucrative region of the Russian far east and the British government has sought to enable its business to proceed productively. Yet it is doubtful that diplomatic soft soap will make much difference.
Europe is Russia's favourite customer for its oil and gas. The Russian authorities have raised the possibility of constructing new pipelines to China and selling their resources to Beijing. But a future pipeline is not the same as a ready-made conduit that pays for itself hand over fist. And the Chinese are notorious for being slow payers.
As regards BP, its fate is unlikely to be influenced by remonstrations. Putin must be judged not by his platitudes about democracy and the rule of law or even by his presumed personal preferences. The Russian authorities have begun to apply pressure to foreign companies that bought their way into the quasi-liberalised economy in the mid-1990s. The question for the UK is what to do in this situation. Russian rulers have recovered their nerve. They had it in the USSR almost until the end and it is a reason for Putin's high ratings in Russia's opinion polls that he speaks up loud and proud for his country.
Blair could take a leaf out of his book. In 1971 Sir Alec Douglas-Home as foreign secretary decided he had had enough of Soviet intelligence operations in the UK. To Moscow's astonishment he expelled 105 diplomats. Some weeks of unpleasantness ensued but relations were not hampered for long. We now have access to archives on the Soviet political leadership in the post-war years. There is no evidence that the strong line taken by London damaged the national interest.
Last week Blair was pouring out his bottle of emollience again, congratulating President Nursultan Nazarbayev on his contribution to internal progress in Kazakhstan. This is the same Nazarbayev who runs a regime notorious for its abuse of human rights. The crunch has yet to come with Russia. But if police investigations link the killer of Litvinenko to associates of Putin, the prime minister would do well to reconsider the basis of his own diplomacy.
LONDON (AP) - A former KGB agent poisoned in London described in interviews before his death how he was ordered to hire assassins to neutralize potential rivals and whistle-blowers who threatened the Kremlin, excerpts published Saturday showed.
Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-spy turned critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died Thursday of heart failure after suddenly falling gravely ill from what doctors said was poisoning by a radioactive substance.
British pathologists were assessing Saturday when they may finally be able to examine the highly contaminated body and experts said investigators may never pinpoint the exact source of the rare radioactive polonium-210 element found in the spy's urine by toxicologists.
In a dramatic deathbed statement, 43-year-old Litvinenko accused Putin - who he called "barbaric and ruthless" - of ordering his poisoning. Putin has called the death a tragedy and denied involvement.
Litvinenko spoke with James Heartfield and Julia Svetlichnaja from the University of Westminster in three interviews that lasted about six hours in total in April and May. The Daily Telegraph newspaper published a syndicated version of the interviews Saturday.
Litvinenko was recruited into the Soviet KGB and also worked for its successor, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. He was later promoted to a special counter-terrorism and organized-crime unit. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he said his directive was to recruit powerful businessmen who could stimulate an economic boom and hire assassins.
"So, if somebody was the victim of a crime - like his daughter was raped - you would offer to let them take revenge on the perpetrator," Litvinenko was quoted saying.
"This was how we recruited killers."
British detectives investigating his death launched an international hunt for witnesses Saturday and spooled through hours of security video for clues. They were examining closed-circuit television footage and interviewing hotel and restaurant staff, a police spokeswoman said.
In a sign the British government was taking the matter seriously, it convened a crisis committee with security officials for a third straight day. The meetings are attended by top security, health and diplomatic officials on issues such as terrorism. They are intended to bring experts and legislators together to make quick decisions.
Putin's government has pledged to co-operate with the investigation; the Kremlin had no immediate comment Saturday on the interviews with the academics.
In the interviews, Litvinenko said as a favour to a senior former colleague who was in debt to moneylenders from the Caucasus, he was told to arrest the creditors and execute them.
"Our department worked on the so-called problem principle - the government had a problem and we had simply to deal with it," he said.
He said he was ordered to kill Mikhail Trepashkin, another security officer who had spoken about the FSB's activities. He said he was also told to kidnap a prominent Chechen businessman based in Moscow to trade for Russian intelligence officers taken hostage by Chechens.
By 1997, Litvinenko said his department had become "responsible for illegal punishments or so-called extralegal executions of unsuitable businessmen, politicians and other public figures. In parallel, the department blackmailed the same targets for funds."
In 1998, he publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was living in exile in London. Litvinenko spent nine months in jail from 1999 on charges of abuse of office. He was later acquitted and moved to Britain, which granted him asylum in 2000.
On one occasion, the Daily Telegraph reported, Litvinenko met the researchers in the Itsu sushi bar in London's Piccadilly district, the restaurant he visited Nov. 1, the day he said he was poisoned and where police have found traces of radiation.
Meanwhile, a British government pathologist was assessing the risks of carrying out an autopsy on Litvinenko's contaminated body but no decision had yet been made on when the examination could proceed, police said.
Tests by forensic toxicologists found radioactive polonium-210 in Litvinenko's urine, Britain's Health Protection Agency said. Agency officials said discovery of the element in a poisoning case was "an unprecedented event."
Litvinenko told police he believed he had been poisoned that day while investigating the October slaying of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another critic of Putin's government. Traces of radiation were found at his North London house, the sushi bar and a hotel he visited earlier that day, police said.
Litvinenko was taken to hospital last week after his hair fell out, his throat became swollen and his immune and nervous systems were severely damaged.
Police confirmed Saturday the case was still being treated as an "unexplained death" - not murder.
Polonium-210 could be sourced from Russia, which has several nuclear research facilities and a major space program but Kremlin intelligence agents would be unlikely to use it, as the origin could be traced, said Vladimir Slivyak, a nuclear expert and co-chairman of the Russian environmental group Ekozashchita, or Ecodefence.
He said the material was most likely acquired on the European black market.
Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian exile in Israel, said Litvinenko's death may be linked to investigations into charges laid against ex-shareholders and former owners of the Yukos oil company.
Nevzlin - a former shareholder in Yukos charged by Russian prosecutors with organizing murders, fraud and tax-evasion - said in a statement Saturday he had met Litvinenko, who passed on documents related to criminal charges and tax claims against Yukos shareholders and officials.
In Moscow, the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta made a series of allegations Saturday about the killing, pointing suspicion at London's Russian exile community. It portrayed Litvinenko as a violent and unintelligent pawn who "made his choice and drank his poison...when he betrayed those he worked for."
The newspaper speculated Berezovsky was involved, aiming either to use the death to discredit Putin's government or settle a business dispute. A presenter on Russia's state-run Channel One television channel said there was "a theory Litvinenko poisoned himself."
LONDON - The former Russian spy who died last week from radiation poisoning named a senior Kremlin agent as the man he believed responsible for targeting him.
Alexander Litvinenko, who died after mysteriously absorbing polonium210, a rare and highly toxic radioactive material, said in his last full interview from hospital that he knew he was an "active case" for Russian intelligence.
He named the agent in charge of monitoring him as "Viktor Kirov". A man called Anatoly V Kirov worked at the Russian embassy in London, where he was listed as a diplomat, until late last year.
He is believed to have left the diplomatic service in October 2005 and returned to Russia. But Litvinenko claimed just days before he died that Kirov was an intelligence agent who continued to target him.
Yesterday, antiterrorist squad police requested that The Sunday Times hand over a tape of the interview in which Litvinenko named Kirov. Detectives from Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorist Command SO15 are on standby, if required, to travel to Moscow to interview people involved in the case.
Litvinenko's claim - though he did not accuse Kirov of any direct involvement in his poisoning - will reinforce suspicions that he was killed by an assassin with links to state intelligence. Experts believe that an individual or organisation with access to a sophisticated nuclear facility could have obtained polonium 210.
Cobra, the government's emergency committee, met yesterday to discuss the unprecedented case and was chaired by Tony McNulty, the counter-terrorism minister. Polonium radiation was first found at Litvinenko's home in north London last Thursday.
"High doses" were later found at several sites in London and ministers fear public alarm about contamination. Police have discovered that several rooms at a hotel visited by Litvinenko were contaminated.
Litvinenko's wife Marina has already been tested for polonium contamination. "She is in the clear," said a Whitehall source. At least 100 other people are to be tested, and NHS Direct has been inundated with calls from members of the public who fear they may be contaminated.
The investigation into Litvinenko's death threatens to have serious diplomatic repercussions. Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, said: "What everybody seems to forget is that this guy was a naturalised British citizen and they [Cobra] take a very dim view of British citizens being murdered on British streets by foreign nationals."
The Tory party will be asking for a Commons statement from the government about the affair tomorrow.
A senior Foreign Office source said it had no indication that Moscow was behind the plot: "We don't have any evidence to finger point." However, British officials have formally asked the Russian embassy to provide assistance.
Yesterday an aide to President Vladimir Putin reacted strongly to suggestions of Russian involvement. "We don't know who killed Litvinenko, but one thing is for sure, it was not the Russian state," he said. "We've got nothing to hide."
The aide implied Litvinenko's death was part of a conspiracy by enemies of Putin who had sacrificed one of their own to discredit the Russian president. "If you ask the question who has the most to gain from all this, the answer can only be [Boris] Berezovsky, a man who by his own admission is out on a campaign to discredit Putin and the Kremlin," he said.
The billionaire Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000 and lives in Britain. He knew Litvinenko well and supported him financially. Berezovsky declined to comment yesterday, but friends said it was absurd to accuse him of any involvement in Litvinenko's death.
Last week The Sunday Times obtained a home telephone number for Kirov from a former agent of the FSB, the Russian secret intelligence service. The number was confirmed by a second source. However, the man who answered the telephone denied being Kirov or ever having been in London.
The SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, declined to say whether Kirov is or has been an agent. The Russian foreign ministry denied any role in a plot to kill Litvinenko.
Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, the head of specialist operations at Scotland Yard, has told ministers it is too early to conclude that Litvinenko was murdered. The police have kept an open mind, and still consider it possible Litvinenko poisoned himself by accident or deliberately.
However, an unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, was quoted as saying Litvinenko's death bore the hallmarks of an "organised operation" by an intelligence agency because of the exper-tise needed to obtain and administer polonium 210.
Speaking from his hospital bed eight days before he died, Litvinenko said: "I know that Russian intelligence are monitoring me. I know I am an active case. I know that the officer in the Russian station here who is in charge of monitoring me is Mr Viktor Kirov. Until he left, [he] was consul in the Russian embassy . . . I know that he is part of the spy trade and among other things, was monitoring my movements."
Litvinenko is believed to have previously complained to British police that Kirov had been harassing him at home at night.
During his interview in hospital, Litvinenko said recent changes to the law in Russia had given the state more power to attack critics: "The Russian parliament passes a law in the middle of this year which allows the government, allows the president, to pursue and attack terrorists and extremists all over the world. So it's now legal."
Litvinenko also said he might be suffering from radiation, rather than other, poisoning as originally feared. Doctors were unable to identify the deadly substance until a few hours before his death on Thursday night.
Geiger counters that doctors initially used to test Litvinenko for radiation failed to detect it and polonium 210 was found only when further tests were conducted on his urine. Yesterday the Health Protection Agency (HPA) said only special modelling had revealed the polonium. "In many other countries it would never have been detected, which may be why it was used."
Traces of polonium have been found at Litvinenko's home; at Itsu, the London restaurant where he met Mario Scaramella, an Italian contact; at the Millennium hotel in Piccadilly where he saw a former FSB agent; and at the hospitals where he was treated. Scotland Yard said last night that arrangements were being made for the Piccadilly restaurant to be decontaminated.
Police are studying documents purporting to identify a potential assassin and five "enemies of Russia", including Litvinenko, who should be eliminated. Those named were Scaramella, a security consultant who supplied the documents to Litvinenko on November 1, the day he was poisoned; Bere-zovsky; an Italian senator called Paolo Guzza-nti; and the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.
The documents Scaramella showed Litvinenko came from a KGB defector who is living under the protection of the French security services.
LONDON - Full text of the statement dictated by Alexander Litvinenko before he died and released by his friends on Friday:
I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me; the British police who are pursuing my case with vigor and professionalism and are watching over me and my family. I would like to thank the British government for taking me under their care. I am honored to be a British citizen.
I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.
I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.
But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.
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.
You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value.
You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.
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. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.
THE murder in London of former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko is a crime straight from the darkest days of the Cold War. Who fatally poisoned Litvinenko remains unknown. But he had no doubt: the poison came from Moscow.
You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life,' said Litvinenko on his deathbed.
The favoured weapons of Soviet 'wet affairs' assassination units were undetectable poisons developed by Moscow's top secret 'Lab X' that made victims appear to have died from natural causes.
Ukraine's nationalist leader Viktor Yushchenko, Chechen independence fighter Khattab, and now Litvinenko were all victims of untraceable poisons. PLO leader Yasser Arafat may also have been victim of a similar toxin.
Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov was poisoned in London in 1978. In 2004, exiled Chechen president Salim Yandarbiyev was murdered by Russian agents in Qatar.
Archives of Bulgaria's intelligence service - which often performed 'wet affairs' for KGB are due to be opened shortly. 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 modernisation and reform," I reported from Moscow that year, adding that KGB's brightest officers from the elite First Chief Directorate had decided to abandon the communists and seize control of business and government.
The First Directorate's agents, including up-and-coming Vladimir Putin, were Russia's best-educated and most sophisticated 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 financial opportunists called 'oligarchs' grabbed control of its industries and resources. Led by Boris Berezovsky, they formed the core support for Boris Yeltsin's stumbling regime - with huge amounts of covert US finance.
KGB - divided in 1991 into the foreign SVR and internal FSB - viewed Berezovsky and other oligarchs as traitors and foreign agents. In 1991, the Chechens, who had battled Russian colonial rule for 300 years, demanded independence from Russia like 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 and drove them out. In 1997, Yeltsin signed a peace treaty granting Chechnya independence.
But the 'siloviki' - Russia's security and military apparatus - were outraged and vowed revenge. They discredited Yeltsin as a drunken buffoon.
During 1999, Moscow and a provincial city were hit by a wave 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.
This awkward fact was hushed up. Then Prime Minister Putin called for total war 'to wipe out Chechen terrorism.' Outraged Russians rallied behind him. Yeltsin was ousted by a discreet coup that made then little-known prime minister president.
Putin used the bombings as a pretext to send his army to invade and re-conquer Chechnya. Russians gave him a huge electoral mandate in 2000 amounting to one-man rule. The parallels to the 9/11 attacks on America a year later were uncanny.
Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book claiming his own agency, FSB, had staged the apartment bombings, and allied himself to Berezovsky, who had emerged as Putin's principal 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.
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 it.
Both crimes have further damaged Russia's image, and tarnished President Putin's image as a strong but law-abiding leader. Yet one wonders why the Kremlin would risk igniting such a storm just to silence a minor figure.
Perhaps some thin-skinned 'siloviki' in Moscow reverted to old Soviet ways. The Kremlin blames a feud among Russian exiles. But the finger of suspicion points at Moscow. One feels a chilly breeze from Cold War days.
SCOTLAND YARD is investigating a suspected plot to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain by poisoning him with thallium, the deadly metal.
Aleksander Litvinenko, who defected to Britain six years ago, is fighting for his life in a London hospital. A toxicology test at Guy's hospital last Thursday confirmed the presence of the odourless, tasteless poison.
A medical report obtained by The Sunday Times shows that he has three times the maximum limit in his body, a potentially fatal dose. It is as yet unclear how the poison was administered, but on the day he became ill his family say he had a meal with a mysterious Italian contact.
Friends of Litvinenko, a former lieutenant-colonel in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), are convinced that he is the victim of a murder attempt by former colleagues. They regard it as similar to the plot in which Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident, was killed in 1978 with a poison-tipped umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London.
Scotland Yard detectives have been liaising with consultants at Barnet hospital, north London, who have been treating Litvinenko since the poisoning on November 1, the anniversary of his defection.
A police spokesman confirmed an inquiry had been launched last week: "The Specialist Crime Directorate are investigating a suspicious poisoning."
Supplies of thallium in Britain are highly restricted and cases of poisoning are extremely rare. One gram is enough to kill even the fittest of men and Litvinenko, 43, has all the symptoms of the poison, which can be diagnosed only after at least two weeks.
He has kidney damage, is constantly vomiting and has lost all his hair. He has also suffered severe damage to his bone marrow and an almost total loss of white blood cells which are vital to the immune system.
Doctors say these latter symptoms could suggest the presence of a second unknown agent in a potentially lethal "cocktail".
In an interview last week at his bedside in the cancer ward of Barnet hospital, where he was being treated under a different name, Litvinenko said he believed it was a murder plot to avenge his defection.
"They probably thought I would be dead from heart failure by the third day," he said. "I do feel very bad. I've never felt like this before - like my life is hanging on the ropes."
Litvinenko claimed political asylum in 2000 and was granted British citizenship last month. One of the highest profile defectors from the FSB, he is on the wanted list in Moscow where he has made powerful enemies with his criticism of President Vladimir Putin.
Last month Litvinenko received an unexpected e-mail from a man he knew as Mario, an acquaintance he had made in Italy. The Italian said he wanted to meet him in London because he had some important information about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian investigative journalist who was killed in the lift of her Moscow apartment block.
Litvinenko was a friend of Politkovskaya, one of the Kremlin's most powerful critics, particularly over the war in Chechnya.
"We met at Piccadilly Circus," said Litvinenko. "Mario said he wanted to sit down to talk to me, so I suggested we go to a Japanese restaurant nearby.
"I ordered lunch but he ate nothing. He appeared to be very nervous. He handed me a four-page document which he said he wanted me to read right away. It contained a list of names of people, including FSB officers, who were purported to be connected with the journalist's murder.
"The document was an e-mail but it was not an official document. I couldn't understand why he had to come all the way to London to give it to me. He could have e-mailed it to me."
After the meeting the Italian had simply "disappeared", although Litvinenko emphasised that he was not in a position to accuse him of involvement in his poisoning.
That night Litvinenko became violently ill. His wife Marina, 44, said: "At first I thought it was just a bug but then he started vomiting. But it wasn't normal vomiting."
She said her husband is a fit man who often runs three miles a day. He had no previous record of medical problems. He was admitted to Barnet hospital on the third day. Nine days ago, his condition suddenly deteriorated and he lost all his hair. Doctors say Litvinenko has not eaten for 18 days and is receiving what little nourishment he can take via an intravenous drip.
Russian and East European agents have a history of using poisons to attack their enemies. Markov was poisoned with ricin and died three days later.
More recently Victor Yuschenko suffered facial disfigurement after being poisoned with suspected dioxin as he campaigned for the presidency of Ukraine.
Litvinenko, a specialist in fighting organised crime, came to prominence in 1998 after he accused the Russian authorities of trying to kill Boris Berezovsky, a tycoon close to Boris Yeltsin, who was then president.
He claims he was drummed out of the spy agency and subjected to harassment to punish him for speaking out. He was arrested twice on what he says were trumped up charges. Although he was acquitted, he spent months in Moscow prisons.
In 2000 he was arrested for a third time on charges of faking evidence in an investigation. Friends told him he was unlikely to escape lightly under the Putin regime.
Litvinenko decided to flee before he was arrested. Stripped by the authorities of his passport, he ended up in Turkey where he joined Marina and their son Anatoly, who had flown from Moscow on tourist visas. They came to Britain and claimed asylum. He has been a thorn in Moscow's side ever since.
Marina said she was hoping to find a bone marrow donor to save her husband's life.
Doctors have moved him to another hospital offering more specialised treatment and police have taken his family into protective custody.
LONDON, England -- It was one of the most notorious acts of assassination carried out during the Cold War.
Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed by poison dart filled with ricin and fired from an umbrella in London in 1978.
Markov, a communist defector working for the BBC World Service, left his office at Bush House in the UK capital on September 11 and walked across Waterloo Bridge to take the train home to Clapham in south-west London.
As he waited at a bus stop moments into his journey home, he felt a sharp jab in his thigh and saw a man picking up an umbrella.
He developed a high temperature and in four days was dead.
A post mortem, conducted with the help of scientists from the UK government's germ warfare centre at Porton Down, established that he had been killed by a tiny pellet containing a 0.2 milligram dose of the poison ricin.
Markov's assassination was detected only because the pellet carrying the poison had not dissolved as expected.
His assassin has never been captured despite close cooperation between British and Bulgarian authorities, including Interpol.
Markov, a playwright and satirist who had broadcast scathing accounts of Communist high life to Bulgaria, was the subject of two failed assassination attempts before he was killed.
And in the years following his death efforts were made to reveal the chain of command which led to the order for his assassination being given.
KGB suspected in assassination
It is believed that the operation was supported by the technical staff of the Soviet KGB and seems to have involved many senior members of the Bulgarian secret police.
In June 1992 General Vladimir Todorov, the former intelligence chief, was sentenced to 16 months in jail for destroying 10 volumes of material on the case.
A second suspect, General Stoyan Savov, the deputy interior minister, committed suicide rather than face trial for destroying the files.
Another Bulgarian spy, Vasil Kotsev, who was widely believed to have been the operational commander of the Markov assassination plot, died in an unexplained car accident.
Scotland Yard says the case remains open.
Extracted from the seeds of the castor bean plant Ricinus communis, ricin is one of the most feared substances with the potential to be used as a bio-terror agent or weapon of mass destruction.
It is widely available, easy to produce, and a tiny amount is enough to kill an adult.
Gen. William E. Odom, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and author of an important book on the collapse of the Soviet military, believes that the Kremlin war machine has rotted clean through to its core. "Their nukes are rotting in their silos," he was recently quoted as saying. Richard Perle, the coldest of all Cold Warriors, says: "Russia is not an enemy -- and their weapons are rusting away anyway."
Is this really true? And if so, how can we verify it?
The Kremlin has a track record of successful deceptions. The problem of estimating the true military capability of Russia is a thorny one. The key is to be found in Chechnya. As everyone knows, Russia lost the first Chechen war. Now we find nearly 100,000 Russian troops struggling against a few thousand lightly equipped rebels for months on end. This latest war has been described as "a bloody quagmire." But how can this be? The Chechens are entirely surrounded and cut off. They have been bombed continuously for many weeks. One recalls Russia's assault on Berlin in World War II. Tens of thousands of Hitler's elite troops, dug in and, equipped with heavy tanks, did not last so long against the Russian army. How could tiny Chechnya resist the sheer firepower and manpower of the Russian military, let alone the superior training of a Russian officer corps which is famous for providing military advisers to so many of the world's countries?
A month ago it was reported by Itar-Tass that only 2,000 rebels held the city of Grozny against several times that many Russian troops. In addition, the Russian soldiers had tanks and heavy guns. They were supported by missiles and aircraft, a vast intelligence network, satellites and helicopter gunships.
How is it possible that a few thousand rebels can overcome the war machine of the Russian Federation? We even have reliable reports that the Russians have been using fuel-air bombs on the rebels. According to the Russian General Staff, fuel-air bombs are weapons of mass destruction, as powerful as small nuclear weapons.
In last week's Final Phase columns, evidence was presented that former Prime Minister Stepashin sent arms to villages in Dagestan. According to Mufti Akhmed-Khadzhi Kadyrov, a respected Chechen religious leader, these arms were used to trigger the war. When confronted on this issue by a group of North Caucasus religious leaders led by Kadyrov, Prime Minister Putin did not attempt to deny the fact. Evidence has also been presented that the terror bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities were the work of Russia's security services. And now, there is another bit of testimony out of Russia. Former Prime Minister Stepashin, in an interview with the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, admits that the war in Chechnya was planned last March, long before the Dagestan incursion or the Moscow terror bombings.
Before his brief stint as prime minister last summer, Stepashin headed the Interior Ministry. Before that he headed the secret police. Curiously, he is now positioning himself as a leading liberal politician by letting loose with "honest" admissions. But we must be wary of these admissions. Stepashin supports his KGB colleague, Vladimir Putin, for president. "We worked together in St. Petersburg at a difficult time," admits Stepashin. And this leads us to a fascinating inquiry. Why did Stepashin undermine the pretexts for Putin's war in Chechnya? Belonging to that great clandestine brotherhood, Stepashin could not have turned renegade. In fact, he remains a firm supporter of the security establishment, even as he slithers up to the Yabloko Party -- supposedly the only "honest" reform party left in the Russian Duma.
A good deception has many layers. Since the truth itself is multifaceted, deception must also be multifaceted. To successfully pierce a veil of lies it is necessary to know why the lies were told. Unless we know the full truth, which must include the reasons behind the lies, we yet remain in the dark.
Intelligent observers of the Russian scene now believe that the war in Chechnya was arranged to propel Yeltsin's chosen successor into the presidency. This explanation has been supported by a variety of "candid" Russian sources, including Gen. Aleksandr Lebed and Garry Kasparov. While this explanation for the invasion of Chechnya is true on some level, it is almost certain to be a dangerous half-truth.
It is gradually becoming clear that Chechnya's military leaders crept into the light of day -- in the first Chechen war -- from the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (GRU). Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, for instance, has been involved with the GRU in the past. According to Mufti Kadyrov and others, Basayev admitted taking money from a Kremlin oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, before the outbreak of the war.
Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, supposedly an independent player, exposed himself as an agent provocateur when he attempted to lure Mufti Kadyrov into an act that would have justified his liquidation by Russian security officials. And Maskhadov's chief of military staff, Mamudi Saidayev, was himself a Soviet military intelligence officer who continues to mingle freely with Russian military commanders. In fact, Saidayev openly brags that Chechen forces are kept in supply by Russian troops, who sell the rebels what they need. According to a story in the Feb. 7 U.S. News and World Report, the 53-year-old Saidayev is "a former officer in Soviet military intelligence" who "moves freely through Russian lines, despite his incongruous pinkish business suit and sunglasses."
Col. Stanislav Lunev, a defector from Russian military intelligence who lives in the United States, recently testified before a congressional committee with a bag over his head to disguise himself. The dread of assassination for any GRU defector comes with the territory. So how does Saidayev mix with his former Soviet colleagues in a pinkish suit and sunglasses without fear of taking a bullet? After all, Saidayev is worse than a defector. He is in open revolt against Moscow, supplying rebel troops and organizing armed resistance.
Since two of the main Chechen military leaders have links to the Russian General Staff, their current independence is doubtful. In the GRU they have a saying: "It's a ruble to get in, but two to get out." GRU defector Viktor Suvorov wrote an autobiography, ''Inside the Aquarium,''
The Soviet General Staff prides itself in its rigorous punishment of traitors. Summary execution of spies and rebels has always been the rule. Discipline has always been harsh. If an enemy of Moscow is a normal human being who understands what he's up against, he would tremble at the thought of mingling with Russian military officers.
All these details merely demonstrate that the real deception in Chechnya, the real game, has less to do with internal Kremlin intrigues than it does with strategic deception in the military sphere. The fighting in Chechnya is a set propaganda piece. Russian soldiers and Chechen civilians have become expendable props in an attempt to convince the West that Russia's large military infrastructure is rotten, useless and non-threatening.
Last year hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were mobilized above the normal draft numbers. We do not know the exact figures. In other words, many more soldiers were put under arms than were needed to fight in Chechnya. Why? What is the purpose behind all this? Russia's military industrial complex has been involved in a huge buildup. Is Europe alarmed? Not in the least. The Russian army is a joke, say the experts.
The chief of the Russian General Staff, who lost the Maikop brigade in the first Chechen War, was promoted for his incompetence. Or was he promoted for accomplishing his real assignment -- the deception of the West about the true state of the Russian military? The loss of a few thousand soldiers is nothing when compared to the benefits of strategic deception. And now Gen. Kvashnin has his own nuclear briefcase, his own nuclear button with which to initiate a nuclear war.
Can we really believe that this man was defeated and humiliated by a handful of Chechen rebels?
The war in Chechnya serves many purposes. Perhaps, as many believe, it served the purpose of assuring Yeltsin's successor. But the ultimate purpose of the Chechen conflict is to mask Russia's war preparations and to hide Russia's resurgent military strength. Given the multi-layered nature of the Kremlin deception, we need to question Western assumptions about the weakness of the Russian military. We also have to remember that the armed forces of other "former" Soviet countries have recently engaged in joint military exercises with the Russian armed forces. There are high-level meetings between the defense ministers of the "former" Soviet republics. This suggests that the former Soviet military system might be playing possum. And one day, it might emerge from its own ashes to confront a sleepy NATO.
We have to remember that former Politburo members and proteges of KGB chief Yuri Andropov are openly in charge of former" Soviet republics. This is obvious in the case of Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and Gaidar Aliyev in Azerbaijan. And now the acting president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, turns out to have a nickname. He is known affectionately as the "little Andropov." The man who initiated Perestroika -- Mikhail Gorbachev -- was also a protege of Yuri Andropov.
Do we have the courage to connect the dots on this? Or will somebody send us scurrying for cover by uttering the word "paranoid" or "conspiracist"?
The strength of the Russian military machine has been masked. If we apply common sense to penetrate this mask we can readily see that the Kremlin has purposely attempted to mislead us.
Now why would they do that?
Think it over.
John Barron, A Senior Editor at Reader's Digest, is the author of ''KGB: The Secret Work Of Soviet Secret Agents''''INSIDE THE AQUARIUM: The Making of a Top Soviet Spy''
. By Viktor Suvorov. 249 pp. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. $17.95.
Viktor Suvorov
At the outset, the author is watching a training film for inductees into the G.R.U., a silent, grainy film that shows him the inside of the G.R.U. crematorium. Attendants clad in protective gray gowns gently glide a coffin between furnace fire doors into an inferno. Next the camera focuses on the handsome, sweating face of an elegantly attired man lashed by steel wires to a stretcher. He is very much alive, and Mr. Suvorov realizes the man is about to be burned alive.
''He strains to the point of breaking his own bones, and tearing his own tendons and muscles. It is a superhuman effort. But the wire does not give. And the stretcher slides smoothly along the rails. The furnace doors move aside again and the fire casts a white light on the soles of the man's dirty patent leather shoes. He tries to bend his knees in an effort to increase the distance between his feet and the roaring fire. But he can't.''
I am not sure that the G.R.U. actually incinerates heretical officers, which is what the film was intended to demonstrate. Neither am I sure that many other stark scenes actually occurred precisely as the author relates. But better than any other, this book bares the spirit and mentality of a formidable clandestine force at work in much of the world.
''Inside the Aquarium''
Mr. Suvorov re-creates his experiences as a tank commander, member of a commando unit (Spetsnaz), a G.R.U. trainee and, finally, operational intelligence officer in Western Europe. In training, he is compelled to dupe an innocent employee of a Soviet missile plant into divulging technical data to him. If he succeeds, the employee will be dealt with just as if an American agent had recruited him. If Mr. Suvorov does not get the data and thereby destroy a fellow citizen, however, he fails the course.
In Vienna, the G.R.U. orders Mr. Suvorov to stealthily deposit a miniature Bible in the mailbox of a brother officer who also happens to be a friend. Uncertain about whether he or his friend is being tested, Mr. Suvorov does not warn him. The officer, instead of immediately reporting the provocation, simply discards the little Bible in a trash bin. For this, he is quickly lured to the G.R.U.'s redoubt, or Residency. Disinfecting the officer's arm with gin, the G.R.U. chief, or Resident, gives him a disabling dosage of ''Bliss'' and under armed guard he is ''evacuated'' to Moscow and jail.
Ultimately, Mr. Suvorov himself has to administer a shot of ''Bliss'' to the Resident's principal deputy, a distinguished and widely admired man who once saved the Resident from execution. No matter. He too must be ''evacuated'' to prison, for he has strayed into the arms of a foreign woman. In the dramatic ending of the book, Mr. Suvorov finds and chooses a way out. Because he does, the G.R.U. is much the poorer and all who desire to understand it are much richer.
Aside from suggesting that not every word should be interpreted literally, I would submit only a minor caution, and I may be mistaken even about it. But I do not think that the G.R.U. is quite the all-conquering appar