NY Times
Intrigue Swirls in Ex-K.G.B. Man's Illness
By ALAN COWELL
Published: November 20, 2006
LONDON, Nov. 19 - The British police said Sunday that they were investigating the suspected poisoning of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a Russian former K.G.B. operative living in exile in Britain who had been inquiring into the killing of a journalist in Moscow last month.
The Russian authorities had no immediate comment on suggestions in news reports that the Russian secret service had poisoned Mr. Litvinenko, who is hospitalized and seriously ill, because he had criticized former colleagues and President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Litvinenko is depicted by fellow exiles as a prominent opponent of the Kremlin, and he had told them he was looking into the killing on Oct. 7 of Anna Politkovskaya, who had made her name as a critic of the government's policies in Chechnya and who was gunned down at her apartment building.
Details from the police and news reports had some of the hallmarks of a spy thriller in the cold war vein of John le Carré.
The Sunday Times of London said the former agent had met Nov. 1 with an Italian contact identified only as Mario in a central London sushi bar.
Last week, Mr. Litvinenko told reporters he began to feel sick within hours of the meeting with Mario.
"I ordered lunch, but he ate nothing," Mr. Litvinenko said, according to The Sunday Times, which apparently interviewed him after he began to feel ill but before his condition deteriorated. "He appeared to be very nervous. He handed me a four-page document which he said he wanted me to read right away."
"It contained a list of people, including an F.S.B. officer, who were purported to be connected with the journalist's murder," he said. The F.S.B., or Federal Security Service, is the successor to the K.G.B.
"I do feel very bad," Mr. Litvinenko told The Sunday Times. "I've never felt like this before - like my life is hanging on the ropes."
In a telephone interview, Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian tycoon who has had a long association with Mr. Litvinenko - dating from the late 1990s when, he and Mr. Litvinenko contended at the time, Mr. Litvinenko had balked at orders to assassinate Mr. Berezovsky - said he had visited Mr. Litvinenko in the hospital and found him "damaged terribly."
Mr. Berezovsky said Mr. Litvinenko had been granted British citizenship, so the poisoning was "a terror attack against a British citizen in Britain." The incident, he said, could create a problem for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has sought to cultivate close ties with Mr. Putin.
A police spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity under police rules, said specialist police officers were "investigating a suspicious poisoning." She described Mr. Litvinenko's condition as "serious but stable."
John Henry, a clinical toxicologist who has been treating Mr. Litvinenko, told the BBC: "He's got a prospect of recovering. He's a got a prospect of dying."
Mr. Henry, who in 2004 treated President Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine, who was poisoned with dioxin, identified the suspected poison in the Litvinenko case as thallium, a toxic metal used in rat poison and insecticides. "It is tasteless, colorless and odorless," he said. "It takes about a gram to kill you."
Andres Virchis, a physician at Barnet Hospital in north London where Mr. Litvinenko was first treated, said Sunday that Mr. Litvinenko's bone marrow had failed and that he was not producing any normal immune cells or white cells.
As Mr. Litvinenko's condition worsened, he began to lose his hair, Dr. Virchis said.
Mr. Litvinenko was granted asylum in Britain in 2001 after leaving Russia six years ago. In 2003 he published a book, "The F.S.B. Blows up Russia," accusing the Russian secret service of orchestrating a wave of explosions in apartment houses in 1999 that led to the second Chechen war.
He also claimed familiarity with the techniques of the Russian secret service. At the time of Mr. Yushchenko's poisoning, Mr. Litvinenko said that a secret K.G.B. laboratory in Moscow, still operated by the F.S.B., specialized in the study of poisons.
"The view inside our agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol," said Mr. Litvinenko, who served in both agencies, from 1988 to 1999. "It's not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool."
The accounts of intrigue could not be confirmed.
Alex Goldfarb, a friend who had visited Mr. Litvinenko in the hospital, told the BBC that doctors had told him that he had only a 50-50 chance of surviving. "He looks like a ghost," Mr. Goldfarb said.
Speaking later to reporters outside London's University College Hospital, to which Mr. Litvinenko had been transferred, Mr. Goldfarb said the British police interviewed Mr. Litvinenko on Sunday.
"He is in a fighting mood," Mr. Goldfarb said. Asked why Mr. Litvinenko might have been the target of an attack, Mr. Goldfarb said, "He is one of the top public enemies of the Russian F.S.B. and of Putin, particularly because of his book."
He added that Mr. Litvinenko belonged to "the so-called London émigré circle, which was branded by Russia as a terrorist cell on British soil."
Mr. Goldfarb called the poisoning "very scary - it means there's no limit."