The Times, UK
May 13 2005
>From Russia with secrets
by urban fox, times online correspondent
Until recently, Mr Litvinenko was a lieutenant-colonel in the Russian
secret police. He claims to know some of the darkest dealings of his
country’s recent past
There’s something very un-English about murderers who dispatch their
victims too flamboyantly. Louis Untermeyer expressed British
puzzlement when faced with showy foreign killers perfectly in the
lines:
Although the Borgias
Were rather gorgeous
They liked the absurder
Kind of murder.
That’s why people in this country find stories about the KGB so
extraordinary. The sheer swaggering theatricality of the kind of
killings the Soviet secret police were said to favour, beggars the
average English person’s belief. Tell an Englishman that an assassin
might choose to kill someone innocently waiting for a London bus by
jabbing him with an umbrella tip containing a pellet of the rare and
virtually untraceable poison ricin, and the Englishman’s first
reaction will be to laugh in disbelief. Why bother with such
elaborate cloak-and-dagger tactics? If you want to bump someone off,
why not just push him under the bus?
Yet, however much it sticks in English gullets, that is exactly the
way the KGB did behave. Ricin was used in the James Bond-style
murder in London in 1978 of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi
Markov. He was jabbed with a poisoned umbrella tip while waiting for
a bus on London Bridge, and died four days later. The KGB was blamed.
Anyone who thinks the secret police learned to behave better after
the Soviet Union disintegrated – and the Soviet KGB was reformed and
renamed the Russian FSB – will definitely want to gasp and stretch
their eyes at almost everything a more recent arrival in London has
been saying since he got here.
Alexander Litvinenko came to the British capital five years ago. He’s
a fair-haired man of about 40 with quiet ways and watchful eyes. He
has a wife and a son coming up to his teens. They’ve all lived
unobtrusively in a leafy bit of suburban London since leaving Moscow.
But I am not at liberty to reveal precisely which leafy bit of London
Mr Litvinenko lives in. He believes that might endanger his life. His
contact details change often; his mobile number went dead last summer
after someone pushed a pram containing Molotov cocktails at his front
door. Until recently, Mr Litvinenko was a lieutenant-colonel in the
Russian secret police. He claims to know some of the darkest secrets
of his country’s recent past, from the era when the FSB was run by
one Vladimir Putin, who later become the Russian president. And the
spy in hiding fears he will be silenced.
Mr Litvinenko first made headlines in Russia in 1998, when he blew
the whistle on an order he says he received from his FSB superiors to
assassinate the unpopular but powerful tycoon Boris Berezovsky. After
a black comedy of institutional reaction – he was fired, arrested on
unrelated charges of mistreating a detainee, acquitted, rearrested on
similar charges, reacquitted, rearrested a third time, and only
cleared his name in court thanks to a photographic memory which
allowed him to prove exactly where he was at any given time – he was
whisked off to Britain where he won political asylum.
While still at the FSB, Mr Litvinenko says his job was
corruption-busting. But, he says, he kept finding it inside his own
office – generals hand in glove with drug-runners; colonels running
racketeers. All his investigations were fruitless because they
ultimately led to federal ministries. His attempt to spill the beans
to Putin himself – and get the boss to crack down on an organisation
running riot – was not a success. He was fired within weeks.
Luckily for him, Mr Berezovsky quickly fell out with President Putin
and also fled to London, where he too now has political asylum. Mr
Berezovsky spends his time here denouncing the Russian president for
bringing the histrionic methods of murder traditionally favoured by
the KGB into the modern Kremlin. The billionaire finances a coterie
of dissidents whose stories lend weight to his version of events,
including Mr Litvinenko and the Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev.
So Alexander Litvinenko pops up at press conferences, or at parties
for anti-Putin journalists, or, last week, at the Oxford Union with
Mr Zakayev. He looks restrained, speaks quietly and wears neat tweed
jackets. But his every revelation is designed to show that the FSB,
Putin’s almer mater, is behind just as many cloak-and-dagger horrors
as the KGB ever was.
His biggest revelation centred on the conspiracy theory that the FSB
was involved in a string of bombing attacks that levelled apartment
buildings across Russia in the autumn of 1999. The theory has it that
these bombings, which Russian authorities blamed on Chechen
separatists, were used to galvanise public support for the invasion
of Chechnya and win Mr Putin the presidency.
President Putin has dismissed the allegation that the bombings were
organised by the FSB, under his own command, as “delirious nonsense”.
But the FSB was annoyed enough about Mr Litvinenko’s book, “The FSB
Blows Up Russia,” to seize a shipment of 4,400 of them in Moscow at
the end of 2003 in what it called an effort to protect state secrets.
It was hair-raising stuff, at least in principle. But in practice,
outside the overheated rooms where the kind of people gather who have
lived in Russia and come to take KGB horror stories seriously
(including, I have to admit, me), it never really gained a foothold
in the British popular imagination. It was just too exotic for anyone
from the comparatively gentle streets of London. Perhaps partly
because the FSB has omitted to take a poisoned umbrella to Mr
Litvinenko, his revelations have turned out to be a bit of a damp
squib.
FSB were involved. I thought he’d gone quiet for a while but last
week I found him at it again – this time announcing that the FSB had
been behind a bizarre bloodletting in ex-Soviet Armenia in 1999, when
gunmen burst into parliament and shot eight of the most prominent
politicians in the land.
I’m no longer in phone contact with Alexander Litvinenko. But his
emails go on coming thick and fast – musings on the causes of the
Chechen conflict or patriotism, snippets from Chechenpress, or bitter
comparisons between Putin’s Russia and Nazis, all topped with quotes
from Russian literature in neat italics.
Mr Litvinenko must be frustrated to discover that he’s brought his
extraordinary revelations to a land where people can’t bring
themselves to believe in the absurder kind of murder (except if it is
committed between the covers of an Agatha Christie novel).
Like many immigrants, there’s clearly a part of him that can’t let go
of his past at home, even a past and a home as horrifying as he says
Russia is if you’re in the FSB, or come to its attention. But he’s an
intelligent man. Give him another five years to assimilate, and who
knows?
He may yet come to be pleased to have become part of a society that
operates through an endless round of TV dinners, PTA meetings and
uneventful outings to Tescos, and whose definition of freedom is the
freedom to feel safe while snoozing through the news.