A real Whodunnit
By David Wise Posted Jan 1 2007
Fleet Street, at least, could be forgiven the media frenzy and full-page tabloid headlines surrounding the poisoning death by polonium 210 of Alexander V. Litvinenko, former KGB spy and outspoken critic of the Kremlin.
London, after all, was the scene of the crime — and the story had everything: Russian spies, a lethal radioactive isotope that seems to have contaminated everyone in town but Tony Blair, a mysterious Italian contact, an attractive wife, now a widow, a deathbed accusation by Litvinenko that the president of Russia was responsible for his murder, a posh hotel bar in central London, a sushi restaurant in Picadilly, an exiled Russian billionaire — the list goes on. And Britain, as everyone knows, is the home of Ian Fleming’s creation, James Bond.
Litvinenko died in a London hospital on Thanksgiving Day, around the time that Americans were finishing their turkey dinners and digging into the pumpkin and pecan pies. Within days, the polonium 210 trail had spread not only to several locations in London, but to Moscow, Germany and the British airliners that flew the route between London and the Russian capital.
It is hardly surprising that from the outset suspicion has focused on Moscow. Litvinenko was a former KGB agent, later a colonel in the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB when that agency split in two after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1998, Litvinenko held a press conference to say that a “criminal group” in his agency had ordered him to kill Boris A. Berezovsky, the billionaire oil and media tycoon who clashed with Vladimir Putin and fled to Britain in 2000. Litvinenko, with his wife and young son, escaped to London that same year and was granted political asylum. Putin, himself an ex-KGB officer in East Germany, headed the FSB before becoming president.
Moscow was infuriated by Litvinenko’s 2002 book, Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within, which accused the security service of blowing up apartment houses in Moscow so the Russians could invade Chechnya a second time. Nor was the FSB any happier with a book Litvinenko published in 2004, “Lubianka Criminal Group,” in which he detailed his alleged order to rub out Berezovsky. It was widely assumed that Berezovsky had arranged for the publication of both books.
Added to all that was the fact that on Nov. 1, the day Litvinenko believed he was fatally poisoned, he met in the Pine Bar of the Millenium Hotel, near the American embassy in London, with another ex-KGB man, Andrei Lugovoi, and Dmitri V. Kovtun, a Russian living in Germany. Both were reported to have been contaminated with polonium 210, and both were seen as suspects in the poisoning of Litvinenko.
Kovtun, described as a businessman who has lived in Hamburg for a dozen years, became a prime suspect in the eyes of German police when they established that he left traces of radioactivity in locations in Hamburg, including his former wife’s apartment, on Oct. 28, the day he arrived on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow. Since this was four days before he met with Litvinenko in London, the implication was that he had brought the isotope with him to London from Moscow and Hamburg. Kovtun tried to explain the polonium trail he left in Germany by saying he had met with Litvinenko in London on Oct. 16 and could have been contaminated in that encounter.
Although the story has enjoyed wide coverage across the globe, perhaps the most significant aspect of the reporting has been the key questions that have received little or no examination. For example, in early accounts suggesting that the Russian government was behind the poisoning, it was almost universally reported that only a country with a nuclear reactor could produce polonium 210. That is true for the production of large quantities, although trace amounts of the isotope are also found in uranium ore and tobacco. But it remained for William J. Broad, the science writer of The New York Times, to point out (on Dec. 3) that polonium 210 has a wide range of industrial uses, and is contained in products that can easily be purchased on the Internet. The Times published a photograph of an antistatic fan manufactured in New York state that contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210, enough for 10 lethal doses. Broad also reported, however, that Russia manufactures and exports most of the world’s supply of the isotope.
Few, if any, news stories examined the question of how quickly polonium 210 may kill if ingested. That forensic question is, of course, crucial in assessing the role of Dmitri Kovtun and his claim that he was contaminated by contact with Litvinenko in London on Oct. 16. If Kovtun is to be believed, Litvinenko had already been poisoned by that date and would have survived for more than a month after mid-October.
Most news accounts, at least in the U.S., provided little biographical background on either of the two Russians who met with Litvinenko in the Pine Bar. In fact, Lugovoi was deputy chief of the guard for Yegor T. Gaidar, prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s. Gaidar, in a bizarre footnote to the Litvinenko case, claimed he was poisoned at a meeting in Ireland the day after Litvinenko died in London.
In the late 1990s, Lugovoi was head of security for ORT, Berezovsky’s TV network. But he was arrested, charged with helping the escape attempt of Nikolai Glushkov, the former deputy director of Aeroflot, who had been accused with others of embezzling $8 million from the airline. Lugovoi was sentenced to 14 months in prison. What were the conditions of his release? Having worked for Berezovsky, would he be likely to have targeted Litvinenko, the tycoon’s ally? Or in the complex post-Soviet world of shadowy connections among former FSB and KGB operatives, would that make a bit of difference?
Lugovoi claims he met Litvinenko on Nov. 1 because he had flown to London to see a soccer match. But what was the nature of the business deals that brought him and Kovtun to Britain to meet Litvinenko several times? Surely the FSB was aware that Lugovoi was meeting with Litvinenko, which would be viewed in Moscow as consorting with the enemy, not something likely to enhance Lugovoi’s business career in Russia — unless his contacts were officially approved by the FSB. News stories have mentioned Lugovoi’s involvement with private security firms in London. Where do the private eyes fit into the puzzle? Interesting questions, but we know relatively little about the activities of Lugovoi or Kovtun, both of whom joined Litvinenko in the Pine Bar on Nov. 1.
That meeting in itself merits more coverage than U.S. readers, at least, could have gleaned. In Germany, however, Der Spiegel had an intriguing account. It quoted Kovtun, describing the festivities in the bar: “The portions in the West are very small so we ordered four to six glasses of gin but we also drank tea, green tea.” According to Kovtun, Litvinenko declined the gin but may have drunk the green tea. “I can’t remember that clearly today,” Kovtun said. (After six glasses of gin, it is remarkable that the Russians could remember anything.) Der Spiegel also revealed that Kovtun says he met Litvinenko on Oct..16 at itsu, the same sushi bar near Piccadilly Circus where Litvinenko lunched with Mario Scaramella, his mysterious Italian friend, on Nov. 1. Scaramella has been a consultant to an Italian center-right parliamentary commission investigating KGB activities in Italy during the cold war; the panel and Scaramella seemed especially interested in proving that Italy’s Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, was a KGB spy. Scaramella, derided as a fabricator by his critics, says he showed Litvinenko emails indicating that they were both on a hit list of a criminal group in St. Petersburg.
Although there has been ample reporting about Kovtun’s movements in Hamburg on Oct. 28 — police said that traces of polonium were found in the BMW that picked him up at the airport, for example — little has been reported on his background or his years in Germany. His intelligence connections, if any, remain vague.
The explanation of how the Russian FSB, the domestic security agency, could operate abroad, if indeed it was behind the Litvinenko affair, also has received little attention. When the KGB disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it reemerged as two organizations: the SVR, the foreign intelligence arm equivalent to the CIA, and the FSB, for internal security. But last summer, as the Washington Post reported on Nov. 15, a law was passed giving the FSB authority to murder opponents overseas if ordered to do so by the president.
“A preventive measure,” said Anatoly Kulikov, deputy chairman of the security committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament. The law, he added, should “cool down” opponents of the Kremlin. “They must know what they can expect.”