FORMER RUSSIAN SPY MURDER A PROFESSIONAL HIT

As the mystery surrounding the assassination of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko deepens there is a growing urgency within American and British intelligence services to trace the source of the chemical weapon used to kill him.
The weapon was Polonium 210, a very rare and lethal radioactive material five million times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide. If it is ingested or inhaled, it only takes a quantity the size of a spec of dust to kill a person. Because it is not harmful if it comes into contact with the skin, it has to be converted into a form whereby it can be dissolved in liquid. If heated to over 500 degrees it can also become airborne and deadly. Scotland Yard experts believe a minute particle of it was put in a cup of tea that Litvinenko drank while in the company of three Russians, two of them former KGB officers, in a London hotel.
What fascinates, but also concerns counter terrorism experts watching the investigation is that, while this may be the first time Po 210, as it is known in scientific circles, was used in an assassination, the chemical could pose an even greater threat if terrorists got their hands on large quantities of it. That has spurred the British and American intelligence services to track down its source while putting even greater efforts into locating and interviewing people connected to the dead spy.
Po 210, as it is known to scientists, is mostly used in nuclear establishments and is not only hard to obtain but very dangerous to handle. Those who work with it are highly trained in the use of specialized laboratory equipment and are aware of the dangers of removing it from a secured environment. The assassin, or assassins, who killed Litvinenko, would have needed to be connected to people with the skills to convert a minute quantity of it into a James Bond type weapon that could be concealed in a special container and transported across international borders into Britain. Many experts believe the weaponizing of Po 210 in such a form would have required the involvement and expertise of an organization linked to an intelligence service or to former highly placed intelligence officers who worked at some time within, or close to the nuclear industry. Once Po 210 is weaponized, an assassin or assassins deployed to use it would need to be familiar with its chemical nature and how to avoid being contaminated when transporting and eventually removing it from a protective container. Such a container could be the size of a pen or the size of a sweetener dispenser but would be highly sophisticated in order for it to dispense a particle or two of the chemical.
A lot of Scotland Yard’s focus is being directed at Russia and particularly Litvinenko’s former employers, the FSB, once known as the KGB. Throughout its history, the KGB favored elaborate poisoning plots. In recent times notable examples included the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov in London. He was pricked with the top of an umbrella tipped with a deadly poison as he emerged from a London subway. The poison was believed to be ricin. In September 2004, the Ukrainian

President, Viktor Yuschenko, was fed the lethal chemical dioxin in his food. He almost died and was left with his face horrifically scarred. He attributed the attempt on his life to Ukrainian security officials with links to the FSB. A separate attempt was made to poison the Russian journalist, Anna Politkosvskaya, a friend of Litvinenko, and a bitter critic of the Russian Army’s crimes in Chechnya. When the poison plot against her failed, she was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow on October 7 last year. During the Cold War, the KGB had its own supply of what NATO called “red agents” – chemical weapons. It also had at least 21 nuclear suitcase devices. NATO had a special unit that kept a close eye on the KGB’s chemical experiments. Over decades, KGB defectors claimed that the organization had a facility called Laboratory 12 to design and weaponize chemicals to use in the assassination of its enemies abroad.
Whether or not such a facility existed, rumors of its existence had the effect of silencing many of the KGB’s critics. Litvinenko’s demise will have the same impact on Russian emigres even if the KGB’s successor the FSB was not involved in poisoning him. Some people have said the FSB could not be the culprit in this evolving drama because it would be silly to carry out such a headline grabbing assassination. In other words, by its Bond-like character it would draw too much attention to the FSB and the Putin government. Be that as it may, a long time ago the KGB set a precedent for flayboyant assassinations but made sure they could never be directly linked to them. What matters most to governents who use such means is the fear it instills in its enemies. For example, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad has used chemical weapons. In September 1977, a Mossad hit squad was seized in Jordan after it tried to assassinate the Hamas leader, Khalid Meshal, using a chemical weapon contained in a syringe. Howwver, Po 210 has not been known to figure in the Mossad arsenal though it was reported that four people died through exposure to it in a laboratory in Israel in 1957. They were working on a radioactive project at the time but the whole msatter was hushed up by the Israeli authorities.
One factor that concerns investigators in the Litvinenko is that the smuggling of nuclear materials from within the former Soviet Union, and especially from Russian nuclear sites, has been difficult to detect and eradicate. In 1999, a former Russian army officer was caught trying to smuggle a capsule of radioactive materials into Uzbekistan to sell on the black market. The capsule contained Po 210 mixed with Beryllium which is a compound used in triggering nuclear reactions. Experts agree that polonium in that form would have needed specialist expertise to convert it into a minutarized weapon of the type used to to kill Litvinenko. Anyway, it would be unlikely the Black Market would have the facilities, equipment or people with skills to do that succcessfully. Another theft of Po 210, perhaps as much as 10 kilos of it, was reported to have occurred within Russia in 1999. While no one is sure what happened to that quantity of the chemical, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that it found its way to nuclear industroies in Iran, India or Pakistan.
But no matter how much expertise it required to convert Po 210 into a tiny but deadly weapon, one cannot rule out the possibility that vested interests, namely extremely wealthy men with links to organized crime, were able to acquire the chemical on the black market and use their massive resources to buy the skills of some poorly paid, disgruntled scientists in the former Soviet Bloc. Those vested interests may have felt Litvinenko had information that could have seriously damaged them.
That theory has some merit in the deepening Litvinenko mystery as a new series of revelations has surfaced to further complicate the story. It is now been revealed that Yuri Svets, a former KGB officer based in Virginia gave Litvinenko a dossier which was smuggled out of one of the most secret departments of the FSB. It was 100 pages of highly classified information on how the Putin government and the FSB seized the Yukos oil giant from private ownership. Litvinenko gave a copy of the dossier to Leonid Nevzlin an oligarch hiding out in Israel. Nevzlin was co-owner of Yukos and is accused by the Russian state of trying to assassinate his enemies. His co-owner of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, languishes in a Siberian prison after being found guilty of tax evason after what many claimed was a rigged trial by the Russian state, determined to gain control of Yukos. Svets also had contact with Mario Scaramella, the Italian who was in a London sushi bar with Litvinenko just before his death. Scaramella, who has been described by some as a dangerous fantasist, was hospitalized for a short time with traces of Po 210. He claims he met Litvinenko in the sushi bar to warn him they had both been targeted for assassination. Other traces of Po 210 were found in the London hotel where Litvinenko had tea with three Russians and in rooms occupied by two of the Russians. It was also found on planes the used between Moscow and London and in a house one of them owned in Germany.
Another interesting development in the case is the claim by a 33-year-old Russian based in London – Julia Svetlichnaja – that Litvinenko told her last summer that he intended to use information in the FSB-Yukos file to blackmail some very important figures, one of whom was an oligarch but not the oligarch, Boris Beresovsky whom he considered a friend. According to Svetlichnaya, who claims she was doing academic research when she first met the former spy, he bombarded her with emails right up to his death. In some of the interviews she has given to journalists, she has suggested that Litvinenko indicated the Yulos file had very damning information on how the Putin government acquired Yukos and the rich men it used to help it in that task. It may also have had secret notes on the murder of the journalist, Politkosvskaya. If all this is true, Litvinenko had made very dangerous enemies and they would have known that he was passing the file to men like Nevzlin who would use it against the FSB and the Putin government.
One thing is certain. This story has yet many more twists to follow. If it becomes so complex it it impossible to unravel, then the finger of blame will rightly be pointed at the world of intelligence whose art is deception. The question intelligence officers always ask when trying to solve an assassination is - “who benefits from this?” They argue if that question can be answered it is easier to find the perpetrators, the theory being that the beneficiary is the perpetrator. But that is not necessarily true, or is it? Take the attempted assassination of the last Pope. Many people say the Kremlin ordered it and used the Turkish terrorist, Ali Agca to carry it out. The reason the Pope had to be killed, they claim, was because the Kremlin saw him a serious threat to its authority in Poland where he was exploiting his Polish roots to support dissident shipyard workers in Gadnsk. By using the power of the Papacy, he was underming Kremlin authority. Therefore he had to be killed. If that was the reasoning and strategy, the outcome was failure. The Kremlin was put in the international spotlight and tried to shift the blame to Bulgaria. But that ploy did not stop the West accusing the KGB of masterminding the attempt on the life of the Pope. The Krmelin suffered further when the West, especially the United States, threw its weight behind the Gadnsk Shipyard workers. As a consequence, Poles and the Pope, did more than Ronald Reagan to “tear down that wall.” So, the theory that the benificary is likely to be the perpetrator seemed not to apply to that episode in history. However, one of the senior investigators the KGB selected to investigate the assassination of the Pope blamed the West, using that same theory. He claimed that America benefited most by the attempt on the life of the Pope. He rightly pointed out that Ali Agca was a member of the Turkish grey Wolves, a right wing Turkish militia that was infiltrated and used by the CIA. Therefore, in this KGB officer’s opinion, the CIA planned the Pope’s killing to weaken the Soviet Union. When it comes to the world of intelligence, nothing is easily explained and facts can be easily manipulated.