Intelligence

Death by Poison, Direct from Moscow

Following the Litvinenko Trail: Death by Poison, Direct from Moscow - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Why are Russian President Vladimir Putin's opponents dying? Former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko is only the most recent victim of assassination. Indications hint at a battle for power in Moscow -- between the government and the secret service.

For four long days in November, Andrei Nekrasov stayed at the bedside of dying Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, watching helplessly as his friend Sacha's condition steadily and implacably deteriorated. All the while, Nekrasov had to face the massive army of media present at the University College Hospital in London.

On last Thursday, though, after Litvinenko's death, Nekrasov was rushing through jam-packed Terminal 1 at London's Heathrow Airport. Two British Airways Boeing 767s stood outside on the tarmac. London police had ordered them taken out of service after traces of the same radioactive metal that killed Litvinenko, polonium 210, had been detected in the two aircraft. The airline set up a hotline in an effort to contact more than 30,000 people throughout Europe who been passengers on either of the two aircraft since Oct. 25 and may have been exposed to radiation.

Although fear of this ominous threat had already spread far beyond London, film director Nekrasov, on his way to an appointment in Milan, was unafraid. Given the magnitude of the dramatic events he had witnessed, the thought that he himself could have been exposed to radiation at Litvinenko's deathbed seemed to him ridiculous. Officials in London had offered to test him for possible exposure, but Nekrasov turned them down. He was in Ukraine after the Chernobyl accident where he was "of course exposed," he says, matter-of-factly. "What I could have gotten from Alexander is minimal."

Nekrasov first met Litvinenko in 2002 when he was filming a documentary called "Disbelief." The two men spent entire nights talking and eventually became friends. They also attended a memorial service for murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Westminster Abbey together. As they were leaving the church after the service, Litvinenko said: "It's quite clear that they are working down a list of targets. The state has become a serial killer." But unlike his dead friend, who, until his last breath, had accused the Russian president directly of having ordered the murder, Nekrasov finds it difficult to believe that Vladimir Putin was directly responsible for ordering the poisoning. Instead, said Nekrasov, Putin is unable to control certain elements among his allies, "people who sit in their dachas and saunas, bragging that they can find and destroy anyone -- anywhere in the world -- who displeases them."

The list

In other words, Litvinenko wasn't the only one. Politkovskaya may also have been on this suspected list. Journalist Jan Travinsky, shot to death in the Siberian city of Irkutsk in 2004, is another possibility. And what about the former Chechen head of security Movladi Baisarov, who, after being arrested, was shot in Moscow in broad daylight on Nov. 18? And Andrey Kozlov, the deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, who fell victim to assassins on Sept. 13? Was a powerful clique behind all those murders?

The ongoing series of murders -- a series which may have found its most recent victim on Monday with the murder of Alexander Samoilenko, the general director of the gas company Itera-Samara -- has many suspecting that doing away with political opponents may once again be a favored strategy inside the Kremlin. Former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was famous for it -- and now, it seems as though the baton has been passed, with dissidents in President Vladimir Putin's Russia once again having to fear for their lives. Even former political leaders may not be safe -- doctors have been unable to diagnose a mysterious illness which befell ex-premier Yegor Gaidar in Ireland last week. Poisoning is a leading candidate.

The series of gruesome attacks in recent years goes on and on -- and the majority of them have never been solved. As a pro-Western presidential candidate in 2004, Viktor Yushchenko barely survived a poison attack during his campaign against the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych. In July 2003, journalist and human rights activist Yuri Shchekochikin died of something his doctors defined as an "allergic reaction." Many in Russia think they know who is responsible for these and other, similar murders -- and their fingers generally point to Moscow. Putin, for his part, insists that such accusations are completely unfounded. At the European Union summit meeting in Helsinki in late November, the Russian president pointed out drolly that other countries also have their share of unsolved murders. Still, his apparent lack of interest in the Politkovskaya murder -- and the conspiracy theories flourishing as a result -- is doing him no favors in the global court of public opinion. That and the fact that at least 13 Russian journalists have lost their lives under peculiar circumstances since 2000. An official investigation, it seems, might not be such a bad idea.

The Litvinenko affair is only the most recent evoking uncomfortable memories of the Cold War -- casting a sinister light on post-Soviet Russia. It has also raised eyebrows among Russia's allies abroad.

"Very, very serious matter"

"It is obviously a very, very serious matter indeed," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in Copenhagen while en route to the NATO summit in Riga, Latvia. "We are determined to find out what happened and who is responsible," he added before assuring that "no diplomatic or political barrier" would stand in the way of the investigation.

Peter Hain, Blair's Northern Ireland secretary, was even more direct. "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," Hain said, in what many have interpreted as an insinuation of Kremlin involvement.

Putin himself has seemed oddly indifferent to the international outcry and accusations against his person and government, almost as if he is not taking them seriously. He shows no sign of concern for his country's reputation, let alone compassion for the murder victims. Indeed, his pokerfaced demeanor in recent days has been much more reminiscent of a cold-hearted, former KGB colonel then a head of state.

His only reaction to the murder of journalist Politkovskaya was to critique her work as being "extremely insignificant." On the Litvinenko case, Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the Russian foreign intelligence service, commented that the man was "not the kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations (with Great Britain)."

When pressed for a personal reaction by journalists at the EU-Russia summit, Putin called the death a "tragedy" and expressed his sparsely worded condolences for the family. But, in the same breath, he also questioned the authenticity of Litvinenko's deathbed letter and warned the British authorities not to

"fuel groundless political scandals." Instead of appointing a high-profile commission to investigate the ongoing series of murders, Putin merely promised to "support the British, if possible."

What is going on here? When Putin came to power at the very end of 1999, Europe saw him and Russia as a partner and ally. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, his country made giant steps toward the West through various treaties and agreements, and by becoming Europe's single most important energy supplier. Not only that, but the Russian economy finally regained its strength and the government seemed to have at least the rudiments of a free and open democracy. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder even famously called him a "flawless democrat." Nowadays, it looks more than ever that the West was merely being naïve.

Memories of gulags

Still, the West needs Russia. The vast country is more than just an energy superpower, the world's second-largest petroleum producer and the country with far and away the planet's largest natural gas reserves. It has since become a political heavyweight. If any power can prevent Iran from going nuclear and convince Syria to help bring peace to the Middle East, that power is Russia. Moscow's help is likewise indispensable when it comes to controlling the highly dangerous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and his weapons arsenal.

The ailing United States now needs Russia more than it could ever have wanted. "Whatever the final outcome of the cases, the deaths of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya have chilled Russia's already frosty civil society, and revived memories most Russians would prefer to forget," wrote US news magazine Time in late November.

The memories Time refers to are those of gulags, and of the days when fear was a part of everyday life. They are memories of the Soviet days when dissidents -- aside from a handful of heroes like Andrey Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, who risked their lives to oppose the state -- only dared express their views in the absolute privacy of their kitchens and only to those they truly trusted.

Anyone who visits Moscow today sees a gleaming, cosmopolitan city that seems to differ from Paris, London or New York in only one respect: the higher hotel and restaurant prices. Every major global corporation has an office in the Russian capital, and leading fashion houses Gucci, Hermès and Dior sell more at the city's "Millionaires' Trade Show" than in any other city on earth. Lavish wealth is as much in evidence as the rise of a new middle class which, at least in the capital, can afford its growing devotion to all things Western, from McDonald's to Microsoft.

Soviet-style press censorship no longer exists. Russian television viewers can watch any channel they want, including CNN, BBC and Deutsche Welle. Fifteen years after the Soviet Union faded into history, Russia is transformed. The country has become vastly wealthier, repays its debts early and, thanks to its oil and natural gas bonanza, now has huge foreign currency reserves (currently estimated at more than $272 billion). And it is undoubtedly far more cosmopolitan than the Soviet Union ever was.

Despite all that, fear is making a comeback. It is the fear of a gradual "de-democratization" of Russia and of a president who seems to be tending toward authoritarianism.

As in the days of Czar Nikolai II, policy is once again being made "at court," says Dimitry Trenin of the Moscow Carnegie Center. "The president as a modern czar is the only functioning institution." Indeed, the country's constitutional court confirmed this only a few months ago when it issued an Orwellian decision. Because the Russian president, the court argued, is the "direct representative of the entire people," whereas the people are "the sole source of power," Putin is entitled to any powers he desires -- even if they are not mentioned in the constitution.

The country's political institutions have been consolidated. Military and intelligence veterans make up about 60 percent of Russia's highest-ranking leadership. Governors were forced to resign their seats on the Federation Council, and the upper house of parliament was practically stripped of its power. The Kremlin rendered most parties irrelevant when it enacted a new party law it had drafted itself. Putin's party, United Russia, which holds a two-thirds majority in Russia's parliament now ruthlessly adjusts parliamentary rules to suit its needs.

Bleak months

Two restrictive and highly controversial new laws are likely to be enacted this year. Now that foreign-backed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were criticizing Russia's gradual slide into autocracy have been put on tighter leashes, the government hopes to impose strict registration (essentially government monitoring) requirements on domestic NGOs. The second questionable draft legislation calls for introducing "control over political extremism," with the Kremlin serving as the final arbiter on what exactly falls under that category.

For activists and Kremlin critics, the last few months have been among the bleakest since the beginning of the Putin era, even without factoring in violent crime. The authorities had human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov arrested and imprisoned for three days. His crime? He had organized a demonstration for the victims of the tragedy in Beslan, where terrorists took more than 1,000 people hostage and Putin's special forces caused a bloodbath during their "liberation" effort.

Government whimsicality has also plagued Lidiya Yussupova, whose organization documents attacks by Russian soldiers on the civilian population in Chechnya. Journalists who complain about the state -- who go public with official treatment ranging from court summons to repression and anonymous threats -- are especially likely to find themselves under "observation." At the same time, the Kremlin has tightened its reins on the free press. While Russian TV viewers can watch violence, sex and soap operas to their hearts' content, the Kremlin controls most news and information programming. According to the journalists' union, 90 percent of the news on stations broadcast throughout Russia is devoted exclusively to the state -- and to Putin himself.

The government has paid less attention to the written press until recently. But in the last few months, the Kremlin, using state-controlled Gazprom and its media holding company as a front, has purchased the influential Isvestiya. Gazprom's acquisition of the country's highest-circulation daily newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, is already a done deal and will take effect in early 2007.

Back in the USSR

But along with the Kremlin's increased control over media and the state, fears of a new, non-transparent and undemocratic Russia are rising as the list of sinister murders -- affecting business leaders, reporters and government critics alike -- grows longer. "There may no longer be shortages of groceries and long lines at every street corner, but Russia today is still a place where human rights and freedom are in short supply," Lyudmila Alexeyeva, something of a grande dame among regime critics, told Time. She helped create the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976 -- a group which played an important role in softening the Soviet Union and bringing down the communist party's leaders. "People who question the policies of our government are increasingly targeted. People who work for human rights are increasingly under attack. So, are we in Russia? Are we back in the U.S.S.R.?"

Poison victim Litvinenko was without question one of the regime's toughest, but also possibly one of its most nonconformist critics. Who was this former spy? Some former colleagues have derided him as a braggart and a show-off. But could he also have recognized the shadowy nature of Soviet power politics early on and become a champion of truth?

Litvinenko spent most of his working life in the armed forces and the intelligence services. Drafted into the Soviet army at 18, it took him only eight years to be admitted to the KGB, in 1988, where he worked in the Soviet intelligence agency's counterterrorism unit. In the KGB's successor organization, the FSB, Litvinenko was assigned to Department 7, which dealt with organized crime. Public accusations against the Kremlin got him chucked out of the FSB in 1998. At a spectacular press conference, Litvinenko claimed that he had been ordered to murder oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He was arrested and later released, at which point he left the country and moved to exile in London.

In 2002 Litvinenko published a book titled "The FSB is Blowing Up Russia," a political thriller in which he blamed Putin's intelligence service for the bombings of apartment complexes in Moscow and other cities -- a series of explosions which ultimately killed 246 people and injured 2,000.

More accusations leveled at his former employer soon followed. In an interview with Australian television station SBS, Litvinenko claimed that at least two of the Chechens who stormed a theater in Moscow in 2002 worked for the FSB. He told the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita that the FSB had trained al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Dagestan, the republic bordering Chechnya, in 1998. And in April of this year, he claimed that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi had been involved in the 1981 attempted assassination of former Pope John Paul II. "His conspiracy theories were everything" he had left after fleeing from Moscow, says political scientist James Heartfield, who interviewed the former spy for several hours in May of this year.

The fantastic story surrounding his own murder seems to fit right in to the shady list of intrigue. Indeed, was there not proof all over London, it would stretch the imagination. The radioactive trail left behind by the victim and his presumed murderers has enabled Scotland Yard investigators to easily retrace their steps. Their dilettantism with handling the radioactive poisoning even prompted one member of the British government's crisis management team to ridicule the perpetrators as a far cry from being James Bond-like killers. Scotland Yard currently assumes that a group of five suspects, including former and current FSB agents, arrived from Moscow on British Airways flight 873 on Oct. 25.

Radioactive traces of death

The British authorities have also painstakingly reconstructed Litvinenko's fateful last walk through Mayfair, one of London's most expensive neighborhoods, on Nov. 1. He visited the Itsu Sushi Bar on Piccadilly Circus, the Ritz diagonally across the street, the exclusive Millennium Hotel on Grosvenor Square, the office of Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky on Down Street, and, finally, a security firm on Grosvenor Street called Erinys. Traces of the radioactive material that led to the former spy's death were found in all of these places.

Litvinenko told the Scotland Yard investigators where he had been on his last walk through the city and gave them the names of the people he had met. The list reads like a cast of characters in a cheap spy novel. First there is the Italian named Mario Scaramella, to whom Litvinenko said he gave a four-page document at the Itsu sushi restaurant. The document supposedly contained information about the murderers of journalist Politkovskaya. According to Litvinenko, it also contained a hit list put together by an obscure organization of alleged FSB officers and KGB veterans. The names Scaramella and Litvinenko were supposedly on that list.

On his deathbed, Litvinenko said that he suspected Scaramella might have given him the deadly poison. Indeed, even after suspicion seemed to veer away from Scaramella last week after the Italian voluntarily submitted to Scotland Yard questioning, he is once again seen as a key to the investigation. Despite having claimed to only have drunk water at the Japanese restaurant while Litvinenko ate miso soup and drank tea, he has tested positive for polonium 210. He is said not to be in danger, but it remains unclear how or where he came into contact with the poison.

A second meeting on that fateful Nov. 1 is likewise surrounded by questions. Litvinenko met Russian nationals Andrei Lugovoi, Vyacheslav Sokolenko and Dimitry Kowtun in the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel. Kowtun had flown in from Hamburg. Lugovoi, a former colleague of Litvinenko from his days as an agent, has since reported his version of the meeting. According to Lugovoi, Litvinenko had approached the men to arrange for their services in Great Britain. The real reason for the flight to London, Lugovoi claims, was an upcoming Champions League football match between ZSKA Moscow and FC Arsenal. That, says Lugovoi, was where he and his companions, along with his wife and their three children, went after meeting with Litvinenko.

Belying this version of the trip, however, is the fact that traces of polonium 210 were found in one of the hotel rooms and on light switches in that room. A Scotland Yard investigator told the Daily Telegraph that the contamination was so great that the poison must have been in the room, and could not come from the poisoning victim. Indeed, the visitors were apparently so nonchalant in handling the material that they dropped some of it on the carpet.

The third interesting find was in the office of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The billionaire, normally a high-profile and very public critic of his archenemy Putin, withdrew to his office after the traces of the radioactive element were found on the premises. "I have no comment," he wheezed into his mobile phone, and promptly issued a statement expressing his "full confidence in the British police." According to his PR consultant Lord Bell, a man who once worked for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Berezovsky, who has been convinced for years that his life is in danger, confronts his fate "defiantly and courageously." But others who know Berezovsky have a different take on the matter. "Berezovsky is afraid that he could be next," says one man.

Just how much of the radioactive poison was given to Litvinenko remains unclear. But the substance is strong enough that administering a lethal dose would not have been difficult. A single drop added to any food or beverage would have been plenty. And even former KGB agent Litvinenko would have been unable to taste that it was there.

Once polonium has entered the bloodstream, its so-called alpha radiation wreaks havoc on the tissue, especially in places where cell division takes place more frequently, such as the intestines, hair and, most of all, bone marrow, which produces a constant supply of blood and immune cells.

Litvinenko's symptoms -- nausea, diarrhea and hair loss -- were typical of radiation sickness. In the end his immune system simply broke down. Also typical of radiation sickness was the initial attack of weakness followed by a period of deceptive stability, in which most of the cells in Litvinenko's body that were especially susceptible to radiation were already dead or doomed. This period of apparent recovery is known as the "walking ghost" phase of radiation-related illness.

Favored weapon of Moscow

When Litvinenko's immune system broke down on Nov. 17, he was transferred to the University College Hospital, where he died on Nov. 23. Only a few hours before his death, doctors, who had initially believed that their patient had thallium poisoning, discovered significant amounts of radioactive polonium 210 in his urine.

Litvinenko's death brings back memories of an entire series of poison attacks -- all of which are suspected of being connected with the Russian intelligence service. Perhaps the world's most dramatic poison attack was that two years ago in Ukraine when Viktor Yushchenko was running for president. As part of his campaign, he had, with Western backing, announced that he planned to reduce the country's dependence on Moscow. At the time, Putin openly supported Yushchenko's rival and current Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.

Yushchenko became severely ill after a dinner with two high-ranking members of the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU, the successor to the Ukrainian arm of the KGB. Tests performed at Vienna's Rudolfinerhaus Hospital showed that he had been poisoned with dioxin. The 50-year-old politician's face has been disfigured by lesions ever since.

Many members of the SBU maintain close contacts with their counterparts in Moscow. The obvious suspicion that Russian intelligence was involved in the poisoning incident was never proven -- and yet it wasn't difficult to find a motive for the Russians. Russia's goal of reemerging as a major world power depended to a large degree on close political, economic and military ties to Ukraine.

Another victim was Roman Zepov, who was killed two years ago in St. Petersburg where he ran a security firm. Zepov, a graduate of a military school run by the interior ministry, was head of security in the early 1990s for Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin even invited him to the Kremlin for his inauguration as president in May 2000. Zepov had already launched his security firm by then. Zepov believed he was well protected against attacks. In an interview shortly before his death, he boasted: "There has not been a single death or injury among my clients or my employees."

A dangerous 'allergic reaction'

But his murderers apparently spared no expense. Significant levels of radioactivity were found in his body after his death. The doctors who treated Zepov conjectured that the poison could have been a drug used to treat leukemia.

Politicians in Russia have also fallen victim to deadly attacks. Dimitry Fotyanov, 31, was considered a superstar within the pro-Kremlin party United Russia in the Primorsky Krai region near Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. A successful businessman, he was seen as a prime candidate for mayor of the city of Dalnegorsk. But at the height of the election campaign in mid-October, Fotyanov was killed by shots from an automatic pistol. Boris Gryslov, the president of the local parliament, called it a "political murder."

Three years earlier, in July 2003, civil rights activist and investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikin died an agonizing death. His skin peeled away from his flesh and his lungs and brain became swollen. Shchekochikin, like Anna Politkovskaya, worked for the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gaseta, and like Politkovskaya, he was especially interested in Chechnya and corruption.

Shchekochikin was also a member of the Russian parliament and of its anti-corruption committee. When he died, he had been planning to write an expose on furniture smuggling, the arms trade and money laundering. Two deputies of then General State Prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov, as well as officials in the interior ministry, the domestic intelligence agency FSB and the customs authority were allegedly involved in the scandal.

Shchekochikin and other members of parliament wanted to call on Putin to investigate the matter. After meeting with FBI representatives in Moscow in June, Shchekochikin also planned to trace the money launderers' tracks to the United States. But he never made it that far.

In early July, Shchekochikin suddenly and unexpectedly died of an allergic reaction. According to the official diagnosis, he died of Lyell's syndrome. But the Novaya Gaseta documented a number of irregularities surrounding the case. Some of the doctors were suddenly reassigned, and a third blood sample, the last taken before his death, was lost in the interior ministry. Friends and relatives are convinced that Shchekochikin was murdered. The reason, they say, that the case was never solved is clear: because the trail leads too high up in the administration.

Former prosecutor Ustinov, now the justice minister, is closely related by marriage to Igor Sechin, the deputy Kremlin chief of staff, a Putin confidante and behind-the-scenes powerbroker at the Kremlin. In November 2003, Ustinov's son Dimitry married Sechin's daughter Inga.

Nothing short of an execution

Most recently, of course, is the murder of 48-year-old Moscow journalist Anna Politkovskaya -- nothing short of an execution and a clear message to government critics everywhere. Politkovskaya was completely defenseless when she emerged from Ramstore, a shop on Moscow's Franze Quay, at 4:05 p.m. on Oct. 7, carrying five shopping bags of weekend groceries: food, vegetables, a few kitchen and bath items.

Politkovskaya parked her silver Lada, went into the lobby of her building and walked to the elevator. When the elevator door opened, the murderer fired three shots at close range. Two of the bullets hit the journalist near her heart and the third shattered her shoulder. But the killer wasn't finished. Just to make sure, he fired a fourth bullet into the dead woman's head.

The Russian interior ministry does not publish statistics on its success rate in solving contract killings. But ministry official Leonid Kondratyuk did reveal that between 500 and 800 contract killings are committed each year in Russia. The unofficial figure, according to Kondratyuk, could even be two or three times as high.

Despite the fact that Putin has installed countless intelligence agents in key positions in the interior ministry and police force, the security situation has not improved. A total of 3,655 murders and attempted murders committed between January and October 2006 remain unsolved. While Russia's economy grows by an impressive 7 percent, crime is up 13 percent. Half a dozen bankers have been murdered in the last few weeks alone.

Two weeks ago Konstantin Mecheryakov, the 33-year-old co-founder of Spezeztroibank, was killed in front of his house in Moscow. He was shot in his back, neck and head. Russian authorities, as they do so often is such cases, provided their own razor-sharp analysis: The death of the victim, they said, was "tied to his professional activities."

The most prominent of these recent victims, Andrei Kozlov, 41, had just attended a football game and, together with his bodyguard, was emerging from the sauna at the Spartak clubhouse on Oleniy Wal in Moscow. Before Kozlov, the deputy director of Russia's central bank, could reach his armor-plated official car, two shots were fired. Kozlov and his bodyguard were both killed.

Kozlov, a committed liberal who, in 1995, was elected deputy head of the central bank at age 30, wanted to establish international standards in the Russian banking system. He introduced a law that would provide insurance for savings deposits. Many Russian banks are still fraught with underworld activity or used by organized crime to launder money.

Kozlov, who was in charge of the government's bank supervision agency, had declared war on this underworld element in the banking system. In the space of only three years, he withdrew the licenses of 260 banks, thereby quickly increasing the number of his enemies.

Most killers remain anonymous

Investigators say that the Kozlov murder was extremely professional. The killers and their clients were intimately familiar with the high-ranking official's schedule. Critical Moscow business magazine Expert suspects that Kozlov could have angered both conventional criminals and corrupt high-ranking officials within the government security services.

Most killers, and certainly most of those who order the killings, are rarely identified. The work of investigators is hindered by corruption within law enforcement agencies, low pay for their officials and poor technical equipment. Since 1991, many qualified officials in the police force and intelligence services have taken jobs in the better-paying private security industry. Russia's investigators have not recovered from this loss of some of their best people.

In an interview with DER SPIEGEL last week, Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov pointed out: "some contract killings, such as that of politicians Galina Starovoytova, have been solved." Kozlov's murderers have also been found, says Ivanov, but not their backers. "Unfortunately it is often the case that the perpetrators receive their dirty money from middlemen and don't even know who their real clients are," Ivanov conceded.

Only in rare cases can the suspicion be eliminated that professional murders are mainly the work of those who learned to kill professionally -- the successors to the Committee for State Security, or KGB.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 2.9 million people, or 1 percent of the population, were on the immense KGB's payroll. Thousands of agents abroad and hundreds of thousands of domestic informers received their orders from the Lubyanka, the popular name of the KGB headquarters complex, as did special regiments of tanks, ships and aircraft. For years, the KGB's own football club, Dynamo, dominated the Soviet league. The KGB was essentially a state within a state.

Beginning in 1967, party leader Yuri Andropov proved to be especially adept at using the KGB to contain dissidents and spy on the Soviet people with limited bloodshed. Andropov was also the first head of the KGB who managed to make it into the Kremlin, although his tenure there was brief. He died after only two years in office, and was succeeded one year later by his protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Job cutbacks for the KGB

Gorbachev was careful not to force his perestroika on the men at the Lubyanka. In fact, he convinced many of them to support his new direction. The "Kagebechiks," as KGB members were called, were by no means unanimous in their support for the old regime. After all, no other institution in the Soviet realm was quite as well informed about the dismal state of the government, economy and public sentiment as the intelligence service.

At the time, Moskovskiye Novosty registered, with some concern, that "the focus of the power oligarchy began shifting toward the KGB." Thousands of agents ran for office in the regional parliaments or became involved in business. KGB members assumed control over many banks and companies. After the attempted coup in 1991, the agency suffered a brief setback. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's new strongman, dismantled the KGB and ordered job cutbacks.

Many agents began looking for new lines of work. According to a 1997 analysis by German's foreign intelligence agency, the Russian intelligence services had entered into a "mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship" with organized crime. Agents joined the Russian mafia and former KGB soldiers became contract killers at home and abroad.

Others took jobs with the oligarchs who, like Boris Berezovsky, had accumulated vast fortunes in the wild 1990s. One of those agents with Litvinenko, Vladislav Surkov -- a member of military intelligence who took a job with the then Chairman of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- now works in Putin's presidential office.

The Litvinenko case clearly has Moscow concerned, and may even be trying to hinder the investigation. Moscow announced on Tuesday that it will not extradite possible suspects to Britain for trial, the prosecutor general said.

Political artiste par excellence

But does that mean, as Alexander Litvinenko alleged on his deathbed, that Putin was responsible for his death? Both Putin's supporters and his adversaries largely agree that is unlikely to be the case. Prominent author Viktor Yerofeyev, more a critic than a friend of the Kremlin, believes that the string of murders have not done Putin any good. He says that there are some with influence who would like to see Russia distance itself from Europe.

Last week's events directed a brighter spotlight at a man who is all too familiar with, and indeed an unmatched master at playing, the intrigues of Moscow's powerful. Anatoly Chubais, the current head of powerful electric utility Jes AG, was the head of the Kremlin administration under former President Boris Yeltsin. Chubais is a political artiste par excellence. He has kept his head above water throughout the ebb and flow of Russian politics in the last 15 years, even surviving a mine attack one and a half years ago. The presumed attacker, Vladimir Kvachkov, 58, a former special agent and a colonel in the military intelligence agency, is currently on trial in Moscow.

In the early 1990s, Chubais served as privatization minister in the government of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. Gaidar was also hospitalized last week after collapsing during a visit to Dublin. After drinking a cup of tea and eating a bowl of fruit salad, the politician spent half an hour spitting up blood and temporarily lost consciousness.

In a frightening parallel to the Litvinenko case, doctors have been unable to determine the cause of Gaidar's ailment, though he has been released from hospital. In a live, televised interview, Chubais said that Gaidar's illness could "hardly have been triggered by natural causes," adding that it was nothing short of a "miracle" that the "a deadly Politkovskaya-Litvinenko-Gaidar triangle" was not completed -- a feat Chubais claimed "supporters of an unconstitutional and violent power shift in Russia" had attempted to accomplish.

Chubais's and Yerofeyev's intimations are backed by a theory that has been hotly discussed among foreign political scientists for some time: that Putin is not the omnipotent Kremlin leader the West likes to perceive him as. The theory holds that the influence of other powerful groups is greater than has been assumed. Proponents believe that, in the run-up to the 2007 parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential election, elements within the intelligence community are concerned that Putin's overtures to the West could adversely affect their spheres of influence. The solution for these members of the Russian intelligence community, say the theorists, is to destroy the president's image abroad.

In his television interview last week, Chubais may have been deliberately using the adjective "silovoi," a term Russians interpret as a clear allusion to the Russian intelligence services. The men surrounding Putin are known as "Siloviki," or powerful people. Igor Sechin, the publicity-shy deputy head of the presidential administration, is considered their secret leader. Putin and Sechin have known each other for 15 years. Sechin worked as Putin's chief of staff when the president was still deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. When Putin became the Russian president, Sechin followed him to Moscow to become his chief of staff.

The Russian banana republic

The two men share a common past in intelligence. In the Soviet days, Putin worked as a KGB colonel in Dresden while Sechin served as an interpreter in the Mozambiquan civil war. Sechin is adept at painting his enemies in a dim light to promote his own image. In June 2003, he allowed political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky to leak a dossier warning against a power grab by the country's oligarchs. The document identified Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of oil conglomerate Yukos, as the leader of the conspiracy. Khodorkovsky was arrested a few months later and his company dismantled.

Rosneft, a state-owned company, acquired Yukos's crown jewel, the west Siberian energy company Yuganskneftegaz, in a shady auction. Sechin was Rosneft's chairman. Since then the Kremlin strategist has been looking for ways to secure his power and accumulated wealth beyond the end of Putin's constitutionally limited term in office in March 2008. Sechin's close associates insist that Sechin, who holds a degree in Romance languages, is motivated by the concern that things could fall apart in Moscow, much as they did at Rome's downfall, when Putin leaves office. Sechin is said to consider the two potential successors Putin favors -- Deputy Premier Dimitry Medvedev and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov -- incapable of holding Russia together in the future.

But perhaps the whole thing is far less complicated after all. The head of influential radio station Echo Moskvy -- who has good connections with the Kremlin normally shies away from inciting panic -- sees "Latin American-style death squads" at work in his country, groups he believes "could consist of former intelligence agents and veterans of the Chechnya and Afghanistan wars." If he's right, Russia is on its way to becoming a banana republic, perhaps not unlike El Salvador in the 1970s. Under that theory, Putin has completely lost control over what happens in his country.

ERICH FOLLATH, VERONIKA HACKENBROCH, HANS HOYNG, THOMAS HÜETLIN, UWE KLUSSMANN, CHRISTIAN NEEF, JAN PUHL, MATTHIAS SCHEPP

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

December 7, 2006 at 12:46 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Former Russian PM Gaidar 'poisoned'

Telegraph | News | Former Russian PM Gaidar 'poisoned'

Former Russian PM Gaidar 'poisoned'

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 4:24pm GMT 30/11/2006
Page 1 of 4

# Fourth plane caught up in radiation alert

Doctors treating Yegor Gaidar, the former Russian prime minister who is seriously ill, believe he was poisoned, an aide has said.

“Doctors don’t see a natural reason for the poisoning and they have not been able to detect any natural substance known to them” in Mr Gaidar’s body, spokesman Valery Natarov said. “So obviously we’re talking about poisoning (and) it was not natural poisoning.”

Mr Gaidar, prime minister in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, fell ill on a business trip to Ireland last week. He was unconscious for three hours and vomited blood and bled from his nose.

His condition stabilised and he was returned to Moscow, where he was hospitalised again.

Meanwhile two Russians who met former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko on the day he may have been poisoned have confirmed that they flew on at least one of the British Airways flights that police believe could have been subjected to low level radiocative contamination.

Both Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer who claimed he had been Mr Litvinenko’s business partner for 12 months, and Dmitry Kovtun, another associate initially identified as 'Vladimir’, have visited a Moscow hospital to undergo radiation checks.

The two men, neither of whom are treated as suspects, have been told their results will be available next week. They said they were happy to cooperate with British police.

Mr Kovtun, a consultant for European companies looking to invest in Russia, confirmed he flew back to Moscow aboard a British Airways flight on Nov 3. He arrived in London on Oct 31, the day before his meeting with Mr Litvinenko, from Hamburg.

Authorities have asked passengers aboard British Airways flights between Moscow and Heathrow on October 25, October 28, October 31 and November 3 to come forward.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph last week, Mr Lugovoi said he took the British Airways flight from Moscow on Oct 31 and flew home on Nov 3.

Both men met Mr Litvinenko for afternoon tea at the Millennium Hotel in Grosevnor Square, where radiation has also been found. It was also found at the Itsu restaurant in Piccadilly, which it is believed Mr Litivinenko visited before the hotel. The former spy died last Thursday.

Mr Kovtun and Mr Lugovoi said they had hoped to have been interviewed by Scotland Yard detectives on Tuesday but that contact with British authorities was proving difficult.

Both men have already handed in written statements to the British embassy in Moscow.

“We are now impatiently waiting for British police to arrive,” Mr Kovtun said in Moscow. “For some reason they failed to find us so we had to find them. They have promised to come over but have not told us when.”

Meanwhile, one of the British Airways aircraft remains on the tarmac at Moscow’s Domodedo Airport awaiting examination by experts. Airport officials said they had received no request from the airline to allow the team of experts on board.

A British Airways spokesman in Moscow said staff were waiting for authorization from head office to allow the plane to return to Heathrow. When it does, it fill fly back without passengers.

A Boeing 737 owned by the private Russian carrier Transaero was briefly held in London on suspicion of radioactive contamination. An airline spokesman said the plane had been cleared to return, with its passengers, to Moscow.

“We will conduct checks on all of our eight Boeing 737s that fly the Moscow London route to reassure the public,” said Sergei Buykhal.

The Russian transport authorities have announced additional radiation checks for all foreign airlines flying into the country. Russian aircraft, however, will not be examined.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

November 30, 2006 at 12:07 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Poisoned spy visited Israel with oil dossier

Spy visited Israel to pass on secret dossier - World - Times Online

Daniel McGrory and Tony Halpin
# Litvinenko file on Yukos 'victims'
# Scotland Yard to be handed details

Leonid Nevzlin: providing file

A dossier drawn up by Alexander Litvinenko on the Kremlin’s takeover of the world’s richest energy giant will be given to Scotland Yard today as police investigate the former KGB spy’s secret dealings with some of Russia’s richest men.

It emerged yesterday that Mr Litvinenko travelled to Israel just weeks before he died to hand over evidence to a Russian billionaire of how agents working for President Putin dealt with his enemies running the Yukos oil company.

He passed this information to Leonid Nevzlin, the former second-in-command of Yukos, who fled to Tel Aviv in fear for his life after the Kremlin seized and then sold off the $40 billion (£21 billion) company.

Mr Nevzlin told The Times that it was his “duty” to pass on the file. “Alexander had information on crimes committed with the Russian Government’s direct participation,” he said.

“He only recently gave me and my attorneys documents that shed light on the most significant aspects of the Yukos affair.”

Investigators have told The Times that Mr Litvinenko had apparently uncovered “startling” new material about the Yukos affair and what happened to those opposing the forced break-up of the company.

Several figures linked with Yukos are reported to have disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances while its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and others have been jailed.

Originally it was Mr Litvinenko’s vocal opposition to President Putin’s rule that led to accusations of Russia’s secret service involvement in his death, but police are investigating whether he made enemies through his links with a number of oligarchs.

Detectives involved in what they admit is one of the most complicated inquiries Scotland Yard has faced say that they are working through Mr Litvinenko’s formidable list of friends and foes, which includes some of the world’s wealthiest men.

One figure close to the investigation said: “At present we have a bewildering number of theories and names put to us, and we must establish some firm evidence.”

Friends of the former spy have claimed that on his deathbed Mr Litvinenko named a number of men linked to the Kremlin who he claimed were targeting him.

They reportedly include a diplomat based at the Russian Embassy in London until last year who is now back in Moscow. Mr Litvinenko reportedly complained that the man was harassing him after his home was firebombed a fortnight before he was poisoned.

Police are still piecing together how Mr Litvinenko spent the last 72 hours before he fell ill and searching for any further traces of the radioactive isotope, polonium-210, that is thought to have poisoned him.

A post-mortem examination is expected to be carried out today on the former KGB colonel, who acquired British citizenship last month.

Forensic scientists are hoping that polonium-210 found in the Itsu sushi bar in Piccadilly and the Millennium Hotel, both of which Mr Litvinenko visited on November 1, may yield a fingerprint that could help investigators to track down where it came from.

Experts have begun decontaminating the sushi bar, but police were last night still examining guest rooms at the hotel in Grosvenor Square and Mr Litvinenko’s North London home.

His wife, Marina, 44, and 12-year-old son, Anatole, have been examined and neither has been contaminated.

Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch, who employed Mr Litvinenko and who has accused the Kremlin of having a hand in his poisoning, is also reported to have been tested.

More than 300 people have contacted a helpline set up by the Health Protection Agency to be checked for contamination. So far nobody has proved positive.

John Reid, the Home Secretary, said that the Government was doing all it could to warn the public of possible health risks, but added that he had no plans to make a statement to MPs about Mr Litvinenko’s death.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, will raise the matter in the Commons today. He said: “It is essential that other dissidents living in Britain are reassured about their safety and there are also questions about how polonium-210 came to be used in Britain.”

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that the Government should have been “much tougher” on Mr Putin and relations would have to be carefully considered if Mr Litvinenko’s death turned out to be the result of “state terrorism”.

Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, admitted in a BBC TV interview yesterday that relations with the Kremlin were now “very tricky”. He accused Mr Putin of “huge attacks” on liberty and democracy. He told Sunday AM on BBC One that the President’s record had been “clouded” by events including the “extremely murky murder” of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials have asked Yuri Fedotov, the Russian Ambassador, to have the authorities in Moscow make available any information that might assist in the investigation.

The London trail

Energy giant
# Yukos was formed by the Russian Government in April 1993 with the merging of hundreds of state-owned oil industry entities

# It became Russia’s first fully-privatised oil company in 1996

# It employs 100,000 people and is involved in every aspect of the oil industry from drilling to the filling station

# In the past five years it has increased its overseas operations, acquiring significant stakes in Slovakian and Lithuanian oil pipeline operators. It is also involved in a proposed Russia-China pipeline

Source: Yukos

November 27, 2006 at 10:05 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Living in fear: dwindling band of Kremlin critics

Telegraph | News | Living in fear: dwindling band of Kremlin critics

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:28am GMT 27/11/2006

When the Russian newspaper Kommersant revealed that the son of the country's spy chief had landed a plum job with the state-owned oil giant Rosneft, its editor Vladislav Borodulin might have expected congratulations from his new boss. Instead he got the sack.

Russia's dwindling band of Kremlin critics drew two conclusions from the demise of Mr Borodulin. Firstly, with the acquisition of Russia's most prestigious newspaper by a Kremlin-friendly oligarch, the state's control of the print press was, like the television media before it, now virtually complete.

Secondly, the appointment of 25-year-old Andrei Patrushev, whose father Nikolai runs the FSB, the successor to the KGB, was another example of the power struggle within the Russian hierarchy for control of the country's most lucrative resources before presidential elections in 2008.

It is in the context of those polls, analysts in Moscow argue, that the death of former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko must be understood.

A spate of repressive laws, each designed to close off avenues for Kremlin criticism, had led many pundits in Russia to predict that the run-up to the election would be marred by high profile killings and a general rise in lawlessness. Initially dismissed, those pundits are now claiming to have been vindicated.

In the past two months, three prominent figures in the public sphere — including Mr Litvinenko — have been murdered.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, contract killings were very much the norm in Russia. The chaotic lawlessness allowed to flourish under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, meant that business disputes were generally settled in drive-by shootings. Under Mr Putin, Russia has — until now -- been much more stable.

But many critics argue that the way in which he bought short-term stability — primarily by clamping down on democratic institutions and centralising power in the Kremlin -- has created the conditions for potential chaos in the next 18 months.

As government critics have been silenced, the FSB has grown vastly stronger over the past six years.

Senior members of the Putin administration, many of whom share the president's KGB background, also hold dominant and probably highly lucrative positions in the oil and gas sector, much of which is once again under state control. As a result, corruption flourishes.

With Mr Putin constitutionally obliged to step down in 2008, many newly enriched officials have begun to panic, believing that a new man at the Kremlin could sweep them from their posts or — worse — order an investigation into how they acquired their wealth.

Diplomats and analysts say that competing factions within the FSB and the Kremlin are virtually at war as they try to consolidate their wealth and maintain the upper hand in terms of who wields the most authority.

One of the factors contributing to the unease is the uncertainty over Mr Putin's future plans. Although he has stated that he will not change the constitution to stand again, many in powerful positions believe he is the best man to ensure their security.

Various options are being considered, Kremlinologists believe, ranging from Mr Putin re-emerging as a powerful prime minister to his staying on because of an engineered national crisis — possibly a war with Georgia.

In this febrile atmosphere, Kremlin critics say it is not a surprise that assassinations have again become a feature of Russian life. All three of the principal theories surrounding Mr Litvinenko's murder have one thing in common, analysts say.

If the Kremlin is the culprit, the motivation would appear to be to intimidate further those still willing to speak out against the government. Whoever was behind the killing, that seems to be what is happening. Leaders of Russia's tiny opposition have become far more circumspect about what they say in public.

"We are all worried we could be next," said one.

November 27, 2006 at 09:59 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Was he sacrificed to embarrass Putin?

Telegraph | News | Was he sacrificed to embarrass Putin?

By Caroline Davies
Last Updated: 2:48am GMT 27/11/2006

Conspiracy theories have abounded since the death of Alexander Litvinenko as detectives struggle to make headway in this unprecedented case. Some point to President Putin and the Kremlin, others to Litvinenko's dissident allies, some even suggest suicide or, perhaps, an accident. Here are some of the most popular theories.

1. It was Putin

Litvinenko, in his death-bed statement, pointed his finger at President Vladimir Putin, former member of the FSB, the Russian security service. Kremlin officials deny any involvement. Russia's media pour scorn on the theory that Putin ordered Litvinenko's elimination. He was simply too unimportant, a small-time fantasist it was easier to put up with than to bump off, they say.

The idea Putin would order his death – particularly this drawn-out, agonising death guaranteed to attract world-wide attention – and risk an international furore is seen as preposterous. Such a slow and public assassination could only play into the hands of those who wished to compromise Russia in the world arena.

2. Putin's enemies

The most popular theory in Moscow is that Litvinenko was "sacrificed" in order to embarrass Putin. This is the second time Putin has been embarrassed by an opponent's death just before a major international meeting.

The death of outspoken journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot outside her Moscow apartment block, overshadowed Putin's German visit. Litvinenko's public death-bed agonies came just before a major summit meeting between Russia and the EU in Finland.

Putin himself powered this view following Politkovskaya's death, saying in a statement then: "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 anti-Russian sentiment".

3. Putin's enemies outside

Boris Berezovsky has not escaped suspicion in Russia's papers. An academic turned businessman who made a fortune after the fall of communism, he was an ally of Putin until they fell out. He fled to Britain from where he has battled extradition. Opposed to Putin's regime, he has helped other exiles and was giving Litvinenko financial support in Britain.

Litvinenko, when with the FSB, once saved Berezovsky's life by warning him of an assassination attempt and the two became friends. Those close to both men believe it is ludicrous to suspect Berezovsky of harming the man who saved him from a possible assassination attempt.

"Boris owes his life to Litvinenko and would never do anything to harm him," Oleg Gordievsky, friend and KGB defector is reported as saying.

4. Putin's enemies inside

Of the main factions within the Kremlin, one is a group of nationalistic and hardline elements in the military and security forces dubbed the "siloviki". Some of them are said to believe Putin is dangerous for Russia because the country is collapsing and Russia is losing control of parts of its territory like the Caucasus. Embarrassing Putin could help as they battle for control with Putin's term due to end in 2008, say some.

5. Putin's friends

"Dignity and Honour" are said to be a group of ex-KGB spies waging their own war on dissidents trying to embarrass Putin.

One theory is he was killed by a veteran of Russia's Spetsnaz special forces - dubbed "Igor the Poisoner" by one paper - and named in a hitlist passed to Litvinenko by Italian academic Mario Scaramella on the day he was poisoned, and then to the police. Apart from Litvinenko, the list is said to include Berezovsky, Politkovskaya and Scaramella.

6. Enemies beyond

Litvenenko was known to have plenty of enemies beyond the Kremlin. In the late 1990s, he had accused two of his bosses at the FSB of planning assassinations.

He also wrote a book claim the FSB were behind the blowing-up of several apartment blocks in Moscow, then blaming it on Chechneya. A rogue enemy from his security service past, perhaps? Or was he the victim of a mafia plot from enemies made whilst working for the FSB?

7. Suicide

Perhaps the most desperate theory, but, one still touted in Moscow by those who would depict Litvinenko as a man who so detested Putin he was willing to end his life in this appalling way in a last attempt to discredit him.

8. An accident

There has long been a black-market trade in radioactive materials being stolen from poorly – protected Russian nuclear sites. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates about 40kg of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium were stolen from facilities in the former Soviet Union between 1991 and 2002.

Did Litvinenko somehow come into contact with smuggled radioactive material? According to one expert, pure polonium 210 cannot be contained in ordinary glassware and could not be administered in liquid form as the drink would bubble and the heat would be too intense.

November 27, 2006 at 09:57 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Poisoned spy was the victim of state terror

Poisoned spy was the victim of state terror - Britain - Times Online

Michael Evans, David Charter and Daniel McGrory
# Intelligence services blame foreign agents
# Dissident died from radioactive polonium

Britain's intelligence agencies last night claimed that the poisoning of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko bore the hallmarks of a "state-sponsored" assassination.

A senior Whitehall official told The Times that confirmation that the former Russian spy, who had become a British citizen, had been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 and other evidence so far not released pointed to the murder being carried out by foreign agents.

Last night the Foreign Office said that officials had met with the Russian ambassador in London and had asked the Kremlin to hand over any information that it had which could help the Scotland Yard investigation.

Cobra, the Cabinet's emergency security committee, met yesterday after toxicologists confirmed that the 43-year-old former KGB colonel had a large dose of alpha radiation in his body. The committee chaired by John Reid, the Home Secretary, considered the risk to the public after the discovery of radioactive material in a Central London sushi bar and at the Millennium Hotel, near the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, where Mr Litvinenko held meetings on November 1. Radioactive traces were also found at his family home in Muswell Hill, North London.

The quantity of polonium-210 used could only have been obtained from a nuclear instillation, scientific experts said.

A senior Whitehall official said: "Cobra met because thousands of people have passed through the sushi bar in the past three weeks and there is a potential risk for the public and we have to examine all the implications."

Experts from the Government's Health Protection Agency tried to allay public fears by stressing that it was unlikely that friends, family and medics who were with Mr Litvinenko at University College Hospital had been contanimated.

Security sources said that MI5 and MI6 were engaged in a "joint enterprise" with Scotland Yard in what was "an unprecedented death" in Britain. Anti-terror squad Continuedetectives refused to say where the deadly element was placed, or in what quantities they found it at the Itsu sushi bar in Piccadilly or the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, where the dissident met two Russians on November 1.

Mr Litvinenko's father, Walter, openly accused the Kremlin of murdering his son. They also released a statement that Mr Litvinenko dictated 48 hours before he died, blaming President Putin for his death.

Mr Litvinenko told the Russian President: "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."

Mr Putin interrupted preparations for an EU/Russia summit in Helsinki to deny involvement. He criticised Mr Litvinenko's entourage, the media, the British secret service and even the Italian Mafia. He claimed that the letter accusing him of being "barbaric and ruthless" was a forgery concocted by Mr Litvinenko's wife and father: "If this note was produced before the death of Mr Litvinenko, I wonder why it was not published when he was alive?"

Mr Litvinenko's funeral will be held in London.

November 26, 2006 at 12:46 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Slow-acting killer that was Saddam's favourite instrument of vengeance

Slow-acting killer that was Saddam's favourite instrument of vengeance - Britain - Times Online

On New Year’s Day in 1988, Abdullah Ali, an Iraqi businessman who had been living in London for eight years, joined three compatriots for dinner at a restaurant called Cleopatra in Notting Hill.

The next morning, he was taken ill with flu-like symptoms and was admitted to hospital. There his condition rapidly deteriorated — his hair fell out, he developed excruciating skin and joint pain, and paralysis and respiratory failure began to set in

The next morning, he was taken ill with flu-like symptoms and was admitted to hospital. There his condition rapidly deteriorated — his hair fell out, he developed excruciating skin and joint pain, and paralysis and respiratory failure began to set in.

Fifteen days later he was dead — but not before he had begun to wonder whether something had been added to his vodka. He was right: the Westminster Coroner recorded the cause of his death as bronchiopneumonia due to thallium poisoning.

Abdullah Ali is thought to have been a victim of Saddam Hussein’s secret service, which used thallium sulphate as its poison of choice. Detectives believe he was an undercover agent who became disillusioned and was murdered before he could defect.

Hundreds of Iraqi dissidents met their end in similar fashion. Thallium’s slow action enabled the poisoners to adopt a particularly sinister tactic: dissidents would be released from prison, and even allowed to emigrate, but not before their food or drink had been laced with a fatal dose. Sometimes, it was administered during a “reconciliatory” drink with the prisoner’s former guards.

In his recent book, The Elements of Murder, the chemist John Emsley recounts the case of Majidi Jehad, who was given orange juice at a Baghdad police station while collecting the passport he needed to travel to Britain. He died of thallium poisoning when he arrived at his destination.

Salwa Bahrani, a Shia activist, was killed with yoghurt that had been laced with thallium. In 1992 two army officers, Abdallah Abdellatif and Abdel al-Masdiwi, escaped to Damascus where they fell ill. They were flown to Britain, where they were treated successfully.

France also used the poison to kill a guerrilla leader in Cameroon in 1960, and the United States is suspected of using thallium in one of its many attempts to kill President Castro of Cuba. Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA chemist, conceived a plan to poison the Cuban leader by putting thallium powder in his shoes. This method would have caused his hair to fall out, robbing him of his iconic beard, as it destroys hair follicles.

Thallium was used medically and cosmetically before its lethal effects became known. Though the fatal dose for an adult is 800 milligrams, or less than a quarter of a teaspoonful, 500 milligrams would be prescribed to treat ringworm. Thallium depilatory creams were popular in the 1930s.

Thallium is a metal that is usually administered as a poison in the form of one of its salts, typically thallium sulphate. Its toxicity derives mainly from the fact that charged thallium atoms are almost exactly the same size as potassium ions, which are critical to many bodily functions. It essentially mimics the action of potassium, replacing working ions with inert ones that cripple the nervous system.

Early symptoms are similar to flu and gastroenteritis. This is followed by extreme band-like pain around the body, particularly in the feet and joints. The cause of death is usually heart or respiratory failure, as the nervous system collapses.

It is an attractive tool for murder because it is soluble in water, colourless and virtually tasteless and odourless. A fatal dose can also be given in one go and the body is not good at excreting the toxin by itself. The most effective antidote is potassium ferric ferrocyanide, a chemical better known as the dye Prussian blue.

The toxin has also been used by many murderers, of whom the best known was Graham Young, “the St Albans Poisoner”. In 1962 Young, then 15, used a selection of poisons to kill his stepmother and attempt to kill other members of his family.

He was committed to Broadmoor but released in 1971 and found a job in a photographic studio in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire. Soon afterwards, his foreman, Bob Egle, 59, fell ill and died. Another colleague, Fred Biggs, 60, then died with similar symptoms, and other became unwell.

Young was arrested after asking the company doctor whether he had considered thallium poisoning as a possible cause of the mystery illness. Thallium was found at his flat, along with a diary in which he had noted the doses given to his workmates, together with their effects. He was given four life sentences in 1972.

November 20, 2006 at 01:52 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Kremlin gave order to kill dissident and former spy, claims top defector

Kremlin gave order to kill dissident and former spy, claims top defector - Britain - Times Online

Michael Binyon
# Putin angered by Chechnya criticism'
# 'Assassin used to be victim's friend'
Read how the Times covered the London assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin because of his biting mockery of President Putin, according to a former Soviet spy now living in Britain.

Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent to defect to Britain, said that the attempt to kill Mr Litvinenko had been state-sponsored.

It was carried out by a Russian friend and former colleague who had been recruited secretly in prison by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The Italian who allegedly put poison in Mr Litvinenko’s sushi “had nothing to do with it”.

“Of course it is state-sponsored. He was such an obvious enemy. Only the KGB is able to do this. The poison was very sophisticated. They have done this before — they poisoned Anna Politkovskaya (the campaigning journalist murdered on October 7) on a plane last year. Who else would know where she was sitting and could poison her food? Probably also it was the KGB that shot her.”

Mr Litvinenko, who fled to Britain in 2001, was a target because of the Kremlin fury at his sarcastic attacks on President Putin, Mr Gordievsky said. “There are three people they hate: Boris Berezovsky, Akhmad Zakayev and Sasha (Alexander) Litvinenko, who was writing article after article for the Chechen press, laughing at Putin.”

Mr Gordievsky, a former KGB station head in London, who still refers to the FSB by its former name, insisted that he did not know the identity of the Russian would-be killer.

But he assumed that the man was a former associate of Boris Berezovsky, the former oligarch and Yeltsin confidant, who has been granted political asylum in Britain.

“He used to be in Mr Berezovsky’s entourage and was imprisoned in Moscow. Then suddenly he was released, and soon after that he became a businessman and a millionaire. It is all very suspicious. But the KGB has recruited agents in prisons and camps since the 1930s. That is how they work.”

The man came to London, posing as a businessman and a friend. He met Mr Litvinenko at a hotel and put poison in his tea. That was before Mr Litvinenko had lunch at a Japanese restaurant with the Italian he knew as Mario, who had arranged to meet him because he said he had information about the murder of Ms Politkovskaya, a close friend.

“Why should this Italian do it? I know him. He is a solid, respectable man. And Sasha was already feeling unwell before the lunch. He was poisoned before he met the Italian.”

Mario Scaramella, a consultant for a commission investigating FSB activities in Italy, was last night reported to be in protective custody “terrified for his life”.

Mr Gordievsky is a close friend of the victim, who lived in North London and regularly visited Mr Gordievsky’s house in Godalming, Surrey. Talking exclusively to The Times, he painted a sad picture of the former lieutenant-colonel in the FSB. “He is rather lonely, like me. But he has a tremendous respect for me, as a British agent. He used to report to me, asking for my advice.

“He said Britain was a solid, intelligent and beautiful state, with no corruption as in Russia, and he was very dedicated to it.”

Mr Gordievsky said he could not go into the details of why Mr Litvinenko had agreed to meet his would-be killer. “His wife, Marina is reluctant to speak about it. It is all very hurtful, as he was a former friend. But now all that has been left to the police, and they have told his family not to talk about it.”

According to Mr Gordievsky, Mr Litvinenko began to feel ill that evening. His wife called an ambulance. The crew thought that he had food poisoning and give him pills.

But his condition deteriorated so the next morning they called an ambulance again. “It was only on the tenth day in hospital that the doctors realised it was not food poisoning. When his hair began to fall out they did toxicology tests, and found that his body contained three times the fatal dose of thallium,” he said. Mr Litvinenko lives close to Mr Zakayev, a close friend who suspected poisoning. It was Mr Zakayev who put the details of the case on the internet, Mr Gordievsky said.

Why did it take so long to report the poisoning to the police? “Because British doctors are not familiar with such poisons. He went to the doctor, who gave him antibiotics. His wife and son kept telling the doctor that he had been poisoned, but the doctor said it was just a reaction to the antibiotics. But now he has had very good treatment for the past three days in the hospital.”

John Henry, a clinical toxicologist who examined Mr Litvinenko on Saturday, said that the former spy was quite seriously sick. “There’s no doubt that he’s been poisoned by thallium, and it probably dates back to November 1, when he first started to get ill,” he told the BBC.

Mr Gordievsky said those planning the murder would have to have had permission from the top.

Mr Litvinenko fled to Britain after being imprisoned for a second time. In May 2005 The Times reported how someone pushed a pram containing petrol bombs at the front door of his London home. The attempted assassination left him “shaken but unhurt”.

Mr Gordievsky said he was fourth — now third — on the Kremlin hitlist. The KGB had not been able to reach Boris Berezovsky as he was always surrounded by bodyguards.

Mr Zakayev, the Chechen actor whom Moscow wants to extradite on terrorism charges, had no protection at home, Mr Gordievsky said, but was protected by Mr Berezovsky’s bodyguards when he went out.

What about Mr Gordievsky’s own safety? “What can I do? They can always get me by shooting. But this is a small community in this country. We look after each other. So probably that is my only hope.”

Blacklisted: the men wanted by Moscow

Oleg Gordievsky

Former deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet Embassy in London and a highly successful double agent for MI6. He joined the KGB in 1963 and was posted to Copenhagen, where he became disenchanted — a fact noticed by MI6, which recruited him. He was the KGB’s Resident-designate in London in 1982, but he was suddenly ordered back to Moscow and arrested in 1985. Although suspected and interrogated he was allowed to go home and contacted MI6, which managed to smuggle him out

Boris Berezovsky

Fugitive billionaire living in a Surrey and wanted in Moscow on massive fraud charges. A mathematician who began selling cars under perestroika and after the collapse of communism became Russia’s first billionaire. He became close to President Yeltsin and used his influence to increase his holdings in Aeroflot and several oil properties. Helped to finance Yeltsin’s second election campaign, then backed Putin in 2000 but the latter resented Berezovsky’s interference and opened investigations into his business dealings

Ahmad Zakayev

Former actor who became Minister of Culture in Chechnya — and at the start of the first Chechen war a general in the Chechen army. A political moderate, he negotiated with Russia to end the first war, and then became deputy prime minister. He was wounded in the second Chechen war and was granted political asylum in Britain in 2003. Now lives in London and is acting vice-premier of Chechnya’s underground government. Was accused by Russia of planning the Moscow theatre siege. A court turned down an extradition request, saying he was at risk of torture

Leonid Nevzlin

A right-hand man of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former owner of the Yukos oil company and now in a Siberian labour camp. He has been charged in Russia of a plot to kill individuals who posed a danger to Yukos. He claims that Putin is taking revenge for supporting his political opponents. Lives in Israel

Vladimir Gusinsky

Former theatre director who became one of Russia’s most powerful media magnates. Fell out with the Kremlin when NTV, his independent television station, became critical of the Chechnya war. In 2000 Gusinsky was accused of embezzlement and money laundering and was forced into exile in Israel, where he holds citizenship

November 20, 2006 at 01:47 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Charles Robert Jenkins, a deserter or an abductee?

TokyoFreePress - Charles Robert Jenkins, a deserter or an abductee?

Dated: Saturday, September 25 2004 @ 10:37 AM
Viewed: 170 times
AbductionsA reader's letter captioned "Jenkins being 'kidnapped' by Koizumi administration" appeared in the July 24, 2004 issue of the Daily Yomiuri.

This letter would not have been printed if the writer hadn't been a westerner or he had addressed it to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the DY's parent newspaper, because he was telling the whole truth that the Japanese media, and the government alike, have been trying to sweep under the carpet since the onset of the "abduction issue". If a savvy foreigner flips over the carpet and finds the truth underneath, that is it. It can't be helped (shoga-nai) because he doesn't belong in this "homogeneous" culture and thus can be neutralized or insulated very easily.

The writer by the name of Grant Piper concluded his letter like this: "Watching the reunion of the Soga-Jenkins family in Jakarta, and then their departure for Tokyo, supported by the half-baked tale of a medical emergency, I could smell the fakery of it all coming off my TV screen. Most of what we have seen so far in the whole sad tale of the former abductees has been staged, and I get the feeling that Jenkins will be forced to settle permanently in Japan whether he wants to or not."

In the U.S. some people close to Charles Robert Jenkins as well as some printed media have questioned if Charles Robert Jenkins was really an army deserter. Take the July 6 issue of the Los Angeles Times for example.
(http://www.freenorthkorea.net/archives/freenorthkorea/001401.html)
It hinted at the likelihood that Jenkins was an abductee, or a POW. On this side of the Pacific, a handful of Japanese with a certain amount of common sense have questioned whether all or most of the 5 (already repatriated) plus 10 plus some 150 Japanese allegedly abducted by North Korean agents from the late-1970s through early-1980s can be recognized so one-sidedly as victims of the state crime.

My tentative answer to both questions is: Life can never be straightforward and unambiguous. It cannot be genuinely true that these Japanese people, of varying ages and occupations, ended up in bags and loaded onto boats destined for North Korea, for no particular reason. Neither is it really convincing that North Korean agents picked these people at random without sizing them up, in advance, against a certain set of selection criteria and "job" specifications. This is where I cannot but find the former victims' accounts of their ordeals more or less fishy. But let me discuss this aspect of the issue more in detail in another article in the Abduction Forum.

As things about the "abduction issue" have unfolded since the "historic" Pyongyang summits in September 2002 and May 2004, downright lies by Kim Jong-il, his Japanese counterpart and the media have started to surface.

On May 22 this year, Koizumi succeeded in bringing "back" the five children of the already repatriated families in exchange for 250,000 tons of food aid and medical supplies worth USD 10 million coupled with a guarantee that economic sanctions would not be invoked despite the legislation enabling them. The media and the entire nation hailed the Koizumi's feat and offered a heartfelt welcome "back" to these kids who were born, brought up and leading a relatively decent life in North Korea. Wasting no time their parents along with the media started counter-brainwashing the poor kids who had just been counter-abducted, so to speak. Having stuck around the "repatriated" kids almost around the clock for weeks, the media could finally report, a little triumphantly, that they had taken off the pin that all North Koreans are supposed to wear to show their loyalty to the Dear Great General.

On the other hand, the Association of the Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea (AFVKN) represented by Shigeru Yokota and his wife Sakie was effectively silenced seemingly because they hadn't appreciated the Koizumi's feat. But I suspect the real reason the voices of the Yokotas and their colleagues have become increasingly inaudible ever since is the fact that the alleged abduction on November 15, 1977 of Megumi Yokota, Yokotas' daughter, is one of the relatively few well-substantiated cases of the North Korean state crime,

Then in July, things started to go totally out of order when the Soga-Jenkins family took center stage. Hitomi Soga is one of the 2002 class of returnees but in May 2004, she was left out because her American husband is a suspected army deserter. Now Kim Jong-il had decided to let Charles Jenkins go, or to be more precise, make him go, simply because he'd been used up by then as a bargaining chip for Kim Jong-il. And Koizumi's government and the local media shamelessly rolled out the red carpet all the way from the Pyongyang Airport to the pricey suite at a Jakarta hotel where the weepy family reunion was staged at Japan's taxpayers' expense (USD 2,000 per night), and further to a prestigious hospital attached to the Tokyo Women's Medical University which the entire family used as another luxurious hotel. Needless to say, the uninsured expenses for the "hospitalization" of the entire family were also footed by the taxpayers, as if the whole Soga-Jenkins family affair had something to do with the abduction issue.

It is when this stupidity was taking place that Koizumi coughed up his real intention. For the first time he admitted that he has wanted all along to normalize, at any cost, diplomatic ties between Japan and North Korea during his tenure as the PM. Maybe he knew it was not the right thing to do to let the people know his plans to lend a helping hand to his North Korean friend for the prolongation of his regime, until he could make sure he was on a roll along that line.

Most probably Charles Jenkins was neither a deserter, nor an abductee, as was true with a good part of the Japanese "abductees". His case fell somewhere in between. Perhaps he was both. When roaming about the DMZ on the 38th parallel on a night of 1965, he was thinking about deserting from his army unit. But we are reasonably sure that before he made up his mind, he was taken away by force across the border. In fact, however, that doesn't really matter at all now.

What is relevant to the current issue is the fact that Charles Jenkins has now been counter-abducted by the Japanese government as Grant Piper, the writer of the letter to the DY, suspects. It's a shame to see the Japanese government, the news media equipped with a solid self-censorship mechanism, and their traditionally credulous readership all falling into the hands of Kim Jong-il so easily.

Under the circumstances it is all the more encouraging to see the Yokotas and their colleagues carrying on their crusade, with an admirable perseverance, to bring back their kidnapped family members while having to keep a low profile all the time.

On September 25 yet another "working-level" talks between the two nations took place in Beijing primarily over the fate of the ten suspected abductees, including Megumi Yokota. As had been predicted, nothing new came out from this farce.

November 17, 2005 at 10:58 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

India uproar over Times KGB claim

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1787657,00.html#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=World
From Raekha Prasad in Delhi
REVELATIONS that Soviet spies bribed their way into the corridors of power in Indira Gandhi’s India have caused a stir on the sub-continent after they were published in The Times on Saturday.

Arguments are raging in newspapers and on television over the veracity of the claims made in the second volume of The Mitrokhin Archive, which is being serialised in The Times. Over two chapters, the book charts how the former Soviet secret service bribed Indian diplomats and politicians. It alleges that Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party was partly funded by the KGB, which is said to have found that the “entire country was for sale”.

India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party was swift to condemn the ruling Congress party, saying the the country was not safe in the hands of its politicians. “It is a very serious issue. The Congress and the Communists have been accused of taking money from the KGB. Both, particularly the Congress, which is at the helm of affairs, owes an explanation to the country,” Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, the BJP vice-president, said.

The Congress party flatly denied the book’s claims. “This is pure sensationalism, not even remotely based on facts or records,” Abhishek Singhvi, the Congress spokesperson, said.

He said that The Mitrokhin Archive was not based on official records, but relied instead on papers “stolen” by a person who defected to the West in 1992. “They are not official records. Almost everyone has died. There is no way of checking.”

Kuldip Nayar, a veteran journalist who has exhaustively chronicled that era, said: “I can’t talk of the media being on the take but it was well known then that suitcases of money used to change hands.”

September 18, 2005 at 09:51 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

KGB records show how spies penetrated the heart of India

By Michael Binyon
The Kremlin spent a fortune trying to influence the press, police, ministers and Indira Gandhi
A HUGE cache of KGB records smuggled out of Moscow after the fall of communism reveal that in the 1970s India was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by Soviet intelligence.

A number of senior KGB officers have testified that, under Indira Gandhi, India was one of their priority targets.

“We had scores of sources through the Indian Government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the defence and foreign ministries and the police,” said Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence and responsible for monitoring KGB penetration abroad. India became “a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government”, he added.

Such claims have previously been ignored or brushed aside by Delhi. But the revelations from the KGB documents that form one of the biggest Western intelligence coups in recent years provide firm evidence for these claims. The records have been analysed in a new book about the KBG’s global operations, and the first extracts appear today in Times Books.

According to these top-secret records, brought to the West by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former senior archivist of the KGB, Soviet intelligence set out to exploit the corruption that became endemic under Indira Gandhi’s regime.

Despite her own frugal lifestyle, suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken to the Prime Minister’s house to finance her wing of the Congress Party. One of her opponents claimed that Mrs Gandhi did not even return the suitcases.

The Prime Minister was unaware that some of the suitcases, which replenished Congress’s coffers, came from Moscow via the KGB.

Her principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, however, knew that he was accepting Soviet money. Short and obese with several chins, Mishra looked the part of the corrupt politician that he increasingly became. Particularly after Mrs Gandhi signed a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation with the Soviet Union, the KGB was anxious to do what it could to keep her in power.

The KGB “residency” in Delhi was one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet bloc, and was awarded the rare honour by the Centre (KGB HQ in Moscow) of being promoted to “main residency”.

The Indians lifted restrictions on the number of Soviet diplomats and trade officials in the country, thus allowing the KGB numerous cover positions. One of the KGB heads of political intelligence in Delhi, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, went on to head Russian foreign intelligence, became a confidant of President Putin and was appointed Russian Ambassador to Delhi last year.

The Russians were also extremely active in trying to influence Indian opinion. According to KGB files, by 1973 it had on its payroll ten Indian newspapers as well as a press agency. The previous year the KGB claimed to have planted 3,789 articles in Indian newspapers — probably more than in any other country in the non-communist world. By 1975 the number of articles it claimed to have inspired had risen to 5,510. India was also one of the most favourable environments for Soviet front organisations.

Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge historian who co-operated with Mitrokhin after his defection to Britain, says in his account of this huge operation that the KGB fatally overestimated its own influence. It also failed to anticipate the backlash against Mrs Gandhi after her imposition in 1975 of the state of emergency.

“Reports from the Delhi main residency claimed exaggerated credit for using its agents of influence to persuade Mrs Gandhi to declare the emergency,” Professor Andrew writes. “But both the Centre and the Soviet leadership found it difficult to grasp that the emergency had not turned her into a dictator and that she still responded to public opinion and had to deal with the Opposition.”

The head of the Delhi KGB admitted: “The embassy and our intelligence service saw all this, but for Moscow Indira became India, and India Indira.” Reports from the Delhi main residency that were critical of any aspect of her policies received a cool reception in the Centre and seem not to have been passed on to the Kremlin. Moscow put repeated pressure on the Communist Party of India to throw its full support behind Mrs Gandhi.

Despite spending some 10.6 million roubles (more than £10 million in old exchange rates) on influence operations to support Mrs Gandhi and undermine her opponents, Moscow did not foresee the sudden end of emergency rule. Her landslide defeat in the elections of 1977 brought Moraji Desai, one of the KGB's bêtes noires, to power, and even when Mrs Gandhi returned to office, relations with Moscow were never as close again.

In 1992 the 70-year-old Vasili Mitrokhin, his family and six large containers of KGB documents that he had secretly copied over 12 years and hidden beneath his dacha were smuggled by British intelligence out of Russia. The FBI has called the Mitrokhin archive “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”. Mitrokhin died in Britain last year.

September 17, 2005 at 02:01 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MacDiarmid was Soviet secret agent (or so MI5 reckoned)

The Scotsman - Top Stories - MacDiarmid was Soviet secret agent (or so MI5 reckoned)

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

STEPHEN MCGINTY

HUGH MacDiarmid, Scotland's greatest 20th century poet, was the subject of covert surveillance by MI5, who considered the author of A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle to be a potential threat to the security of the British nation.

Declassified files from MI5 and Special Branch, released to the National Archives in Kew, reveal that there was a debate among the authorities over whether MacDiarmid, who died in 1978, should be arrested.

The files, which cover the years 1932 to 1943, tell how MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Murray Grieve, was closely monitored by the security services because of his strong Scottish nationalism and his brief membership of the Communist Party, amid fears he may have been a spy.

The files, which cover the years 1932 to 1943, tell how MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Murray Grieve, was closely monitored by the security services because of his strong Scottish nationalism and his brief membership of the Communist Party, amid fears he may have been a spy.

Informers briefed both MI5 and Special Branch about private meetings he attended and public talks he gave, while personal letters between the poet and his wife and friends were routinely copied and their contents analysed to see if he could be a danger to the state.

"This man is a menace," wrote one army major, while an informer wrote of MacDiarmid and his second wife, Valda Trevlyn: "This man and his wife are dangerous to the state."

Today, MacDiarmid is considered a giant of 20th century poetry, comparable to TS Eliot and WB Yeats.

But in the 1930s and early 1940s, he was a struggling writer and political activist.

He first attracted the attention of the security services in 1932 when John Summerfield, the novelist, attended a meeting of communists in the Three Tuns pub in London's Fleet Street and suggested that the party contact MacDiarmid, "who was known to him as a communist".

An informer then attended a meeting of the National Party of Scotland, where MacDiarmid was quoted as saying: "It is time that we in Scotland put England in its proper place. We should lean and turn to Europe, for it is there that our future prosperity lies."

He then went on to state that the Border did not end at the Cheviots, but that Lancashire was its rightful boundary. This would make Scotland the "richest and biggest" commercial centre in the British Isles and that London would "wither and die".

He further advocated a Celtic Union between Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Isle of Man.

The security services also obtained a letter from what they described as the "inner circle" of Scottish nationalism, which described MacDiarmid as "dishonest and fond of drink".

MacDiarmid, his wife and young son, Michael, moved from London to the island of Whalsay, Shetland. In 1940 MacDiarmid organised a meeting to try and interest the local men in the workers' struggle.

News of the meeting reached a Sergeant R Stuart Bruce, who wrote to the home secretary: "This man and his wife are dangerous to the state, and should be prevented from tampering with the loyalty of young men called to the colours."

As a result, two plainclothes officers were sent to the island to investigate. They were told that he was "in no way dangerous" but that his wife had made outspoken comments such as: "I would like to cut the Queen's throat." This, however, was dismissed as a "foolish remark".

Writer Carl MacDougall, presenter of the BBC programme Writing Scotland and a friend of the poet, said yesterday that he was surprised by the revelations. "I find it reassuring that a poet can be considered a danger to the country, that the act of writing could be threatening to the guardians of our establishment," he added.

Downing Street cat 'wore a swastika'

THE German government utilised fake newspapers, bizarre recipes and even suggested the Downing Street cat wore a swastika round its neck in an attempt to demoralise the British people, according to secret files released yesterday.

Propaganda experts smuggled a variety of printed material into Britain in an attempt to depress the population and sow seeds of distrust towards the government of Winston Churchill.

The MI5 documents released to the National Archives show that the Germans attempted to lay the blame for the Second World War on "British warmongers". They also claimed the government was covering up just how badly the Allies were faring.

A fake copy of the Evening Standard newspaper dated 17 February, 1940 is headlined: "The massacre of the RAF: secret session of Parliament demanded".

The front page reads: "Despite the hush-hush tactics on the part of our defence chief the true facts of the air war situation are gradually leaking out. Our airforce has not only lost a perturbing number of its most up-to-date bombers and fighters, but a far higher percentage of its crack flyers than has been admitted."

In a more bizarre approach, the Germans attempted to play on the issue of rationing by insisting that the public would have to eat frogs.

One section headed "Economy recipes" claimed a French culinary expert, Monsieur Boulestin, had come up with a solution to the British breakfast. "There are billions of frogs, of considerable size, hopping merrily round the British Isles. Their vitality should be harnessed."

Another section reported that the Downing Street black cat had been seen wearing a swastika round its neck.

And a pamphlet called "Pick me up" contained a fake report claiming to be a secret statement by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to MPs stating: "There is no genuine hatred against Herr Hitler."

Hitler's secret weapon: the exploding chocolate bar

GERMAN saboteurs plotted to use exploding bars of chocolate to cause mayhem during the Second World War.

The Nazis also designed bombs to be disguised as tins of English plums, throat pastilles and shaving brushes, and even planned to stuff dead rats with explosives.

The "slab of chocolate" hand grenade is illustrated in the documents released to the National Archives in Kew, together with an explanation of how it would blow up seconds after unwitting Britons snapped a piece off.

"The bomb is made of steel with a thin covering of real chocolate," the note says.

"When the piece of chocolate at the end is broken off, the canvas shown is pulled, and after a delay of seven seconds the bomb explodes."

Photographs released include a diagram showing how a tin of processed peas could be turned into a bomb.

A three-man team were captured after they landed on the south-west coast of Ireland in July 1940 and interned by the Irish authorities.

They were carrying three or four metal boxes of explosives, including a number of tins labelled "Prepared French Peas" containing small slabs of nitro-cellulose.

An informer who was held with them in prison told the authorities they had been heading for England to "blow up Buckingham Palace".

MI5, which was in close contact with the Irish authorities, was however sceptical.

"This seems a little fantastic, when it is known that the explosive materials in their possession were of the most primitive kind," it said.

INVISIBLE CRYSTALS FOILED SPY

A NAZI double agent who parachuted into Scotland on a secret mission was foiled when invisible ink crystals were found hidden in his rotten tooth, according to MI5 files made public yesterday. Nicolay Hansen, a Norwegian, landed at night near Fraserburgh in September 1943, wearing civilian clothes and a boiler- suit, after being instructed to relay secret messages about the movement of British convoys.

He was detained until the end of the war, but was never charged.

September 5, 2005 at 01:01 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Melita Norwood, the KGB's top female agent in Britain, has died

Communist spies | Dead ideology | Economist.com

HER counterparts—Soviet citizens who spied for the western democracies—were jailed, tortured and executed. But when Melita Norwood, who was one of the Soviet Union's top spies in Britain from 1937 to 1972, was unmasked by a defector at the age of 87, the British authorities decided to do nothing. They did not want to be seen as unkind to old ladies.

Mrs Norwood was the proud holder of the Order of the Red Banner, and even received a KGB pension, of £20 a month. But unlike many other spies, her motivation was not money. She died, aged 93, as she had lived: an enthusiastic Communist, with only the mildest reservations about the Soviet Union's blood-drenched history. She “loved Lenin” but conceded that Stalin—“old Joe”—was “not 100%”. Given the chance, she said, she would have done it all again. To her dying day she subscribed to the Morning Star, Britain's Communist daily. From a modern viewpoint, it seems odd that such a nice and intelligent woman should be so firmly attached to such an unpleasant cause.

She worked as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, an innocuous-sounding outfit, but one closely involved in Britain's atomic-weapons research. Her efforts helped ensure that most of Britain's nuclear secrets went straight to Moscow, enabling the Soviet Union to build its atomic bomb earlier, perhaps by two years, than it would have otherwise managed. Her controllers saw her as very important: at one point they had too few intelligence officers in Britain to handle all their spies, so they dumped Kim Philby and kept contact with her.

Mrs Norwood's life raises two intriguing questions. One is about security at the time. She was vetted only in 1945, and even then hardly anyone worried that a paid-up Communist, married to another paid-up Communist, had access to Britain's most sensitive secrets. It wasn't only Mrs Norwood who was complacent about the Soviet Union.

The other is about historical double standards. British officialdom is still trying to hunt down surviving Nazi war criminals: last month the Home Office passed to the police details of 200 suspects, mostly from the Galician Waffen-SS division, whose Ukrainian soldiers were allowed to come to Britain after the war. Another new list of suspects is of 75 guards, from the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, who may still be alive in Britain.

Few would argue with that: collaborators with Nazi genocide should not sleep easily at night. But it does seem odd that even the most enthusiastic accomplices of Europe's other totalitarian empire should face not the slightest official displeasure. “I thought I'd got away with it,” said Mrs Norwood, when reporters first came to her door. She had.

July 5, 2005 at 12:26 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 agents acted on tip-off by Communist informer

Times Online - Britain

By Magnus Linklater
DOCUMENTS passed by MI5 to James MacGibbon’s family reveal that the security services had found out about his contacts with the Russians and placed him under surveillance after the war.

In 1950, he received an unexpected visit from a British agent, who informed him that MI5 knew about his activities. �He stayed for about an hour,� said MacGibbon. �I denied everything, assuring him that the Russians could only have wanted to see me because I had been a CP (Communist Party) member.�

The MI5 files show that his telephone was tapped, and his house in St John�s Wood watched from December 1949 to 1953. The record shows that this information was given to a member of the security services by an informer within the Communist Party who knew MacGibbon.

The informer reported that, after returning to Britain, MacGibbon had been offered �2,000 by the Soviet Embassy for �services rendered� and was asked to continue to provide information. MacGibbon refused. Having left the Army he had no more information to give. He was interrogated on two occasions in 1950. Both interviews, the second by Jim Skardon, �produced robust denials� by MacGibbon and his wife, Jean.

The official records include bugged conversations between MacGibbon and his wife discussing whom they could approach for advice about these allegations, their main concern being to stop Soviet agents� approaches.

�What I did during the war was something very special,� he is recorded as saying to Jean at one point. �The idea I am (involved) with some kind of Russian spy organisation is just something too silly.�

In addition to putting a �tail� on MacGibbon, and tapping his phone, it appears that most if not all of the incoming correspondence to their address was opened and photographed (including a letter from their young daughter�s uncle enclosing a pound note for her birthday � both copied). None of this mail revealed anything suspicious.

October 31, 2004 at 12:36 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Passwords and secret night meetings

Times Online

Extracts from MacGibbon’s confession

IN BRITAIN:

“Through my friendship with X [the name is missing] whom I met when we were both at 8 Corps HQ . . . a meeting was arranged at X’s sister’s flat in Edgware Road. He confirmed the British were not passing on their vitally important enemy intelligence, something that can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

�I have forgotten how my first rendezvous was arranged but I met a young Russian woman, Natasha, at a pre-ordained spot near Westbourne Terrace.
�We exchanged passwords and walked along together introducing each other and I passed on my first note on the German units facing the Soviet armies. The first cache was arranged. This was usually under a bush in a front garden of the terrace houses, my typed notes including a matchbox. The caches were changed each time. In each cache I left an empty box which was marked with a cross by Natasha before I left the new box with my notes.
�This became a regular routine once or twice a month, with occasional meetings, always taking care we were not being watched. We became friends although I never met her in daylight.
�And so it went on from 1943 to 1944 when I was transferred to Washington on the British side of the Combined Chiefs of staff in June 1944.�

IN AMERICA:

�I was one of two GSO2s under our brigadier, a friendly regular soldier. My work was similar to what I had been doing in London with the new duty of writing a weekly brief for our general. Our old friends [not identified in the confession] had gone to the USA a year or so before war broke out and were well established with another part of Washington society, liberal-minded journalists and writers.
�Saturday nights were very happy. Once again I was leading a wartime life that seemed unreal, so far removed from danger.
�I can�t remember how my meeting with my new contact was arranged but very soon I was having regular meetings, this time with a sophisticated man, and arranging drops as I had done in London.
�All this had become so much of a routine that after he and I began having occasional drinks in a bar I began to feel I was taking unnecessary risks and we stopped.
�I was never conscious of being in danger although occasionally I wondered what my fate would be if discovered.�

October 30, 2004 at 11:34 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

I spied for Stalin at War Office, publisher confessed

Times Online

After the death of his widow, a Soviet agent reveals posthumously how he passed on information about troop movements, writes Magnus Linklater

A REMARKABLE confession by one of London�s most respected postwar publishers has revealed that for most of the Second World War he acted as a secret Soviet agent, using his position in the War Office to pass top-level information to Moscow on German troop movements, including plans for the D-Day landings.
James MacGibbon, who ran the publishing firm of MacGibbon and Kee, wrote a detailed account of his activities and passed it to me shortly before his death in February 2000, requesting only that I wait until after the death of his wife, Jean, to publish it. She died last year.
Last week, a detailed MI5 dossier, which shows that Mac-Gibbon was suspected of espionage and placed under close surveillance, was passed to his family.
MacGibbon was questioned by the agency�s top interrogator, Jim Skardon, who had broken the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, but revealed nothing. �I was impressed to know that I had been interrogated by the top man and had lied my way out,� he told me. MacGibbon�s 12-page account of how he progressed from prewar membership of the Communist Party to secret wartime meetings with a contact from the Soviet Embassy, known only as Natasha, reads as if it came straight out of a spy thriller.
But it has, too, a strangely innocent feel to it. Convinced that, following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, it was his duty to keep the Soviets, who were Britain�s allies, up to date with German troop movements, MacGibbon made contact with the Soviet Embassy in London. He was put in touch with Natasha and met her at a pre-ordained spot near Westbourne Terrace in West London.
�We exchanged passwords and walked along together [it was dark] introducing each other,� he wrote. �I passed on my first note on the German units facing the Soviet armies. The first cache was arranged, this was usually under a bush in a front garden of the terrace houses, my typed notes including a matchbox. The caches were changed each time. In each one I left an empty box which was marked with a cross by Natasha before I left the new box with my notes.
�This became a regular routine once or twice a month, with occasional meetings, always taking care that we were not being watched as we walked along chatting about this and that � we became friends although I never met her in daylight.�
Since MacGibbon worked in the Map Room of the War Office, it was relatively easy for him to note down details of German troop movements.
�When I heard that our enemy intelligence was not passed on to the Russians, who were confronting the greater part of the German armies, it obviously seemed disgraceful,� he said. �Our knowledge of the locations of the German units happened to be very good � much better than the Russians.�
Because he spoke German, MacGibbon had joined the Intelligence Corps and gone through an intelligence course, where two of his fellow officers were Enoch Powell and Hardy Amies. Although he had been vetted by MI5 in May 1940, it had been at best a cursory affair. After some questions about his membership of the CP, Mac-Gibbon was asked: �Are you for us or for Stalin?�
He answered: �For us.� �Shake on it, old man,� said his vetting officer.

James MacGibbon would meet �Natasha�, his Soviet contact, and leave wartime secrets under a bush in a front garden of a house in Westbourne Terrace, West London

�And that,� said MacGibbon, �was that. For the rest of the war years no secrets were withheld from me. It was still an age of innocence. A gentleman�s word was his bond.�
He was posted to MI3, the section of the War Office dealing with early plans for Operation Overlord, the projected invasion of France. It is not clear how much of this was passed on to the Russians, but Mac-Gibbon told me that he sent them everything he had that could have been of help to them, and this must have included details of Overlord.
In 1944, after two years of passing information to his Soviet contact, MacGibbon was posted to Washington, working on the British side of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He became part of Anglophile Washington Society, mixing with celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks Junior.
Soon after arriving he began having regular meetings with another Soviet contact � �this time a sophisticated man, and arranging drops as I had in London. All this had become so much of a routine that after he and I had begun having occasional drinks in a bar, I began to feel that I was taking unnecessary risks and we stopped that practice.�
Instead MacGibbon used to take long tram rides to north Washington, where he met his contact near a large Roman Catholic cemetery.
Soon after VE Day, he returned to London, supposing that his job of passing on information was over. �But that was not the end,� he wrote. �I was pestered for some time by phone calls from a rather dreary man who persisted in keeping in touch with me.�
Then, in 1950, he received an unexpected visit from a British agent, who informed him that MI5 knew about his contacts. �He stayed for about an hour, I denied everything, assuring him that the Russian could only have wanted to see me because I had been a CP member.�
The MI5 files, released to MacGibbon�s family, show that not only was he suspected, but his telephone was tapped, and his house in St John�s Wood placed under surveillance.
Every single one of his letters was photographed.
He was interrogated at length by Skardon, but after that produced nothing, he was called in to the War Office and told that he had been �cleared�. It was, he said, �a great relief�.
Last night Hamish MacGibbon, his son, said: �The information that has been recently released concerning my father adds little to what we, as the family, already knew. It confirms our view that all he did was to report on German troop movements to our Russian allies.
�In view of the situation as it existed then this was exactly the right thing to do. It has not in any way altered our view of him as a man and a father, of whom we are very proud.�

October 30, 2004 at 11:31 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Death-bed confession of the spy who got away

Times Online

By Michael Evans and Magnus Linklater
A SECRET death-bed confession from a publisher who served in military intelligence in the Second World War has exposed an extraordinary story of espionage and treachery.

James MacGibbon, who died four years ago, aged 88, admitted in a 12-page affidavit, kept secret until now, that he had spied for the Russians while in the War Office.
He will join a long list of spies who served two masters, notably Harold �Kim� Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, the notorious Cambridge spy ring.
Based in Washington and London, where he was involved in planning Operation Overlord, the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy, MacGibbon came under suspicion after the war.
He was questioned by William Skardon, the legendary MI5 interrogator who uncovered Klaus Fuchs, the atom spy in 1950. But MacGibbon survived the interrogation and was taken off the list of suspected Russian spies. Before he died, MacGibbon typed out a confession which The Times now makes public for the first time after his family received documents from MI5, which detailed its suspicions. He wrote how alarmed he had become when he realised who was questioning him.
�It was a relief when some weeks later, he called me into the War Office to tell me I had been �cleared�. I was impressed when Skardon�s name was disclosed to know I had been interrogated by the top man and had lied my way out.

MacGibbon , whose father was the Minister of Glasgow Cathedral was a Tory until 1934 when he joined the Communist Party. When war broke out, he was drafted into military intelligence because he spoke German. Afterwards, as head of MacGibbon & Kee, he published Cecil Day Lewis and Humphrey Lyttleton. Hamish MacGibbon defended his father�s decision to pass information to the Russians. He said: �The information that has been recently released adds little to what we, as the family, knew.
�It confirms our view that all he did was to report on German troop movements to our Russian allies. This was exactly the right thing to do. It has not altered our view of him as a man and a father of whom we are very proud.�

October 30, 2004 at 11:30 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

K.G.B. continues its dirty business

::KAVKAZ CENTER::news::facts::analysis

Chechen rebels have denied involvement in the yesterday’s bomb attack on a commuter train in Moscow. The bomb was detonated at the rush hour as the train entered a tunnel. At least 45 people were killed.

Russian authorities had immediately accused Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov of being behind the incident. A spokesman for Mr. Maskhadov denied that Chechen rebels are involved in the explosion.

It is amazing that the explosion happened just few weeks before the Russian presidential election and the only one person would gain from the bombing is Mr. Putin.

Whole world was shocked when after independent investigation French journalists exposed the FSB (former KGB) involvement in the 1999 bombings of apartment�s blocks in Russia. FSB was behind the attacks then and it organized the explosions to accuse the Chechens in it.

At that time, in 1999, Putin strongly needed justification for war in Chechnya, he promised to finish with 'Chechen terrorism' once and forever. He used the explosions to start genocide against Chechen innocent population, he used the Chechen war to win the election in 2000.

For four years, Put