Putin, in London, with Poison
GEDMIN, JEFFREY
Putin, in London, with Poison Who killed Alexander Litvinenko? by Jeffrey Gedmin London Among the thousands of customers at the Piccadilly branch of their restaurant in recent weeks, there had...
...Staff members were putting up Christmas trees...
...If the Russian security services were behind this, he told me, then "this was about discipline...
...Some circles would find it exceedingly inconvenient to read headlines confirming that Russia is now in the business of wiping out critics in Western capitals...
...Sharansky concurs...
...It's down the street from the famous tea shop Fortnum and Mason...
...Troitsky writes in the current issue of the New Statesman that "the FSB . . . considers punishing traitors a basic principle...
...The other thing that bothers me is why we would need a tipping point in the first place...
...She had been shot four times, including once in the head, in what appeared to be a contract killing...
...Meanwhile, our less sentimental European friends have been busy investing heavily in an ever expanding energy relationship with the Russians...
...Berlin's well-respected Inforadio just aired an interview with a former head of German intelligence, Heribert Hellenbroich, who leans in the same direction...
...Litvinenko fled to Britain in November 2000 after claiming that he had been ordered by superiors to assassinate exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky...
...If the Russians are running around wiping out dissidents like this, can it still be okay that Putin gets invited to Jacques Chirac's birthday parties and Russia gets to chair G-8 meetings...
...There is a second camp, though...
...Putin knows the West," says Sharansky...
...The E.U...
...In truth, if Litvinen-ko's death is traced to Moscow, we all have a problem...
...There wasn't much to see, as the place had been boarded up by the time I arrived...
...He probably figures the indignation will pass...
...now relies on Russia for 25 percent of its gas, a figure estimated to rise to nearly 70 percent in the next 15 years...
...Hellenbroich insists that Moscow could not have been involved in Lit-vinenko's death...
...Authorities may be reluctant to call it a murder investigation—it's still classified as an "unexplained death" as we go to press—but it does not seem unreasonable to suspect foul play...
...Alexander Litvinenko was the ex-KGB man who, after dining at the London sushi restaurant on November 1, fell ill, lost his hair, and died...
...As authorities continue to collect clues, it is already evident that observers of the case tend to fall into one of two camps...
...Sadly, Sharansky may be right...
...Artemy Troitsky, one of Russia's leading music and cultural journalists, considers this a plausible scenario...
...The logic driving "Camp I" seems compelling...
...At the Millennium Hotel at Grosve-nor Square, on the other hand, the lobby was bustling...
...If Putin himself was not directly involved in signing the order to eliminate Litvinenko, it is not difficult to imagine that FSB agents, perhaps with the Kremlin's tacit approval, wanted to liquidate him...
...It is considerably stronger than cyanide and in the right dosage quickly damages tissues and organs...
...Talk about unusual...
...There are some in Camp II— let's call it the anyone-but-Moscow camp—who seem hellbent on keeping Putin out of this...
...From his death bed at University College Hospital, Lit-vinenko explicitly accused Putin of the poisoning...
...This past summer the Russian parliament, the Duma, passed legislation granting the government authority to take action through the use of "special forces" against enemies of the state abroad...
...At the time of his death, Litvinenko was investigating the murder of another Putin critic, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose body was found in October in the elevator of her apartment building in central Moscow...
...The incident triggered the second Chechen war and helped to propel Putin into office...
...Germany is leading the way...
...has essentially concluded that the Syrians assassinated former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, and the fact hasn't made one iota of difference for Western policy...
...If the Kremlin sponsored Litvinenko's murder, then Putin would have calculated a good dose of Western indignation into his cost-benefit analysis...
...To complicate this theory, Scaramella has since tested positive for polonium-210...
...Since that time, the former agent, who had begun to work for Berezovsky in Britain, never stopped being a thorn in the Kremlin's side...
...The first is something Sharansky told me this week...
...I worry about two things...
...The 43-year-old Litvinenko, a onetime colonel in the FSB, the KGB's successor organization, was a fierce critic of Putin's...
...To this camp belong those who espouse a hodgepodge of theories, from the speculation that Litvinenko was a victim of rival Chechen factions to the assertion peddled by Kremlin circles and Russian media that Berezovsky himself was behind his employee's death...
...A variation on this theme has been introduced by the Independent...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin and a columnist for Die Welt...
...The whole mystery surrounding Litvinenko's death is probably ultimately beside the point...
...In 2002 Lit-vinenko coauthored a book (with pal Yuri Felshtinsky) titled Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, in which he argued that Putin was behind the 1999 blasts in apartment blocks in Moscow that killed 300 and were blamed on Chechen separatists...
...I phoned ex-dissident Natan Sharansky at his home in Jerusalem earlier this week to chat about the case and see what he thinks...
...by Jeffrey Gedmin London Among the thousands of customers at the Piccadilly branch of their restaurant in recent weeks, there had not been a single instance of illness...
...That's what Itsu's website was reporting last week—"with the exception," Itsu noted parenthetically, "of Mr...
...By now everybody has his own theory about Litvinenko's sudden death...
...There are a few voices hinting that Litvinenko was killed by his friend Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant with whom he lunched at Itsu on November 1. Scaramella is said to have brought to lunch that day a hit list with the names of Kremlin targets, including his own name and Litvinenko's...
...The U.N...
...A British journalist friend thinks this will be a tipping point if it turns out Putin is the culprit...
...The paper has suggested that Litvinenko may have killed himself, convinced that Putin would be suspected of ordering the hit...
...Since I arrived in London, police have found traces of polonium-210 at 12 different locations including two British Airways planes...
...The British tabloid the Sun calls it a case of "From Russia with Lunch...
...The method was too unusual, the hit too indiscreet...
...The Stid-deutsche Zeitung likes the Ber-ezovsky-as-villain theory...
...This is another location where British investigators suspect Litvinenko might have been poisoned...
...I passed by Itsu a couple days ago...
...Litvinenko apparently ingested or inhaled polo-nium-210, a radioactive material that emits highly hazardous alpha particles...
...Be careful what you eat in there," my cab driver had advised...
...According to this theory, Berezovsky had Lit-vinenko killed so that the Kremlin would be implicated and Putin's image would be dealt a vicious blow...
...Haven't we already learned enough these past few years to know that Russia is heading in the wrong direction...
...Putin's regime has engaged in a fairly robust crackdown on independent journalists, trouble-making NGOs, and other critics the last few years...
...Does it really matter who killed him...
...George W. Bush once gazed into Putin's eyes and saw sincerity and a good soul...
...To the first camp belong those who see Russian president Vladimir Putin and Moscow's security services as prime suspects...
...It was late afternoon and the bar was full...
...Inforadio neglected to mention to listeners that Hellenbroich was head of West German intelligence a while ago—21 years to be exact— and that he managed to keep his job for only four weeks before being forced to resign when one of his top aides defected to East Berlin...
...Former chancellor Gerhard Schroder now serves as chairman of Nord Stream, a joint venture linked to Russia's state-controlled energy giant Gazprom, which is overseeing the construction of a new Russian pipeline that will supply Germany through the Baltic Sea...
...There was seasonal music...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 13
