ON THE AFTERNOON OF 1 NOVEM– ber 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, an obscure Russian exile and critic of President Vladimir Putin, met some Russians for tea in the Millennium Hotel in London. Somehow, during that encounter, as Alan Cowell explains in this
engaging work of investigative reporting, Litvinenko "had begun to die."
It was an excruciating death, so painful that Litvinenko actually chewed through his own lips in sheer torment. He resembled a corpse long before he was released from his agonies.
Litvinenko thought he had been poisoned, but the doctors were confused at first, diagnosing poisoning by the toxic element thallium. Then an expert realised that the dying man's strong handshake ruled out thallium, which diminishes muscularity. He alerted the police, who rushed to secure the catheter bag containing the victim's urine.
As Cowell puts it, this was "another of the remarkable breaks in the case that enabled the police to unravel what the poisoners had envisaged as the perfect crime". Without the urine, Litvinenko's decline "would have been terminal and inexplicable, fulfilling the twin criteria of the poisoner's art". Analysis showed that the murder weapon was a rare radioactive material, polonium-210.
The Terminal Spy reveals and indeed revels in the case's Byzantine mysteries. Born in 1962, Litvinenko joined the KGB as a junior officer in 1985. In the 1990s, he interrogated prisoners in the Chechen wars and was later assigned to a special section of the FSB, successor to the KGB, investigating organised crime.
In 1994, Litvinenko got to know the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a member of President Boris Yeltsin's entourage, who had been the target of an assassination attempt; Litvinenko sometimes served as Berezovsky's bodyguard. Three years later, when Litvinenko received an order to assassinate Berezovsky, he refused. Instead, he took his story to Vladimir Putin, then the boss of the secret police, and also held a press conference – an unforgivable act of treason. He was arrested for abusing his office. After his acquittal, he fled to London (where Berezovsky had earlier sought refuge).
In England, Litvinenko wrote a book about the Russian secret police and the rise of Putin. And while he was protected and supported by Berezovsky, he also tried to earn a living, which led to that fateful meeting in the tearoom. One of those he met there was Andrei Lugovoi, who was connected to the KGB, had worked for Berezovsky, had been imprisoned and then re-emerged as a millionaire security entrepreneur – a feat made possible only through many Faustian bargains, official connections and murky favours. Despite leaving a trail of polonium-210 in Germany and Britain before returning to Russia, Moscow refused to extradite him, and Lugovoi has denied committing any crime. Last year, he was elected to the Russian parliament.
Cowell's conclusions are sensible: that the Russians tried several times before they succeeded in killing Litvinenko; that they employed a teapot containing the poison; that the killing was bungled (the poison was meant to be delivered in a higher quantity, to kill more quickly and before it could be traced); that even if Lugovoi was the bait and the bearer, there were other Russian operatives in that tearoom.
The Terminal Spy chronicles not only the crime itself, but also the labyrinth of Russian politics and the security system behind it. Cowell scans history for other examples of the poisoning of traitors and dissidents by the secret police. The list is long. In addition, Cowell cites my account of the young Stalin's visit to London in 1907 to arrange a huge bank robbery; he suggests correctly that Russia's idiosyncratic culture of ideological and moral sanctimony, combined with imperial swagger and sleazy, murderous gangsterism, originated in the conspiratorial underground of Stalin and the early Bolsheviks. This was institutionalised in the Cheka, a precursor to the KGB that in later Soviet times attracted the most ambitious and shrewd bureaucrats, who in the Putin administration have fanned out to guard the state in every direction, from defence to the oil industry.
Although Cowell narrates his gripping story in painstaking detail, and with the common sense and professionalism of a distinguished journalist, he does not avoid stylistic lapses. He sometimes deploys the unnecessary paraphernalia of suspense, like the obligatory references to "le-Carré-esque overtones". There is the surplus information meant to build a scene (Litvinenko's bus the day of the poisoning passed a Burger King, a McDonald's, a Shannon News store) and the occasional sentence intended to chill: "On Dec. 7, 2006, heavy rain fell over north London with a freak ferocity – as if the heavens were punishing the land."
So who ordered the hit? Russia's secret police could never forgive Litvinenko's treason in going public, but his murder surely had higher sanction. Cowell doesn't provide definitive answers, yet what he makes clear is that Litvinenko's murder is worth studying, both as a symbol and a symptom of Russia today.
The full article contains 830 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
