Toxic Avenger 2: Unsolved Mysteries
Six months on, nobody has been able to put together a convincing Litvinenko theory
By Kirill Pankratov ( pkirill88 at hotmail.com pkirill88 at hotmail com)
A couple of weeks ago Britain held its annual award ceremony honoring services to the Crown. The choice of honorees for this year (selected by departing Prime Minister Blair) could not be more stark. Among the recepients of the award (a Companionship of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George) was Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-level KGB defector to England, who's been living there since 1985. The British government had more than 20 years to bestow Gordievsky with this highest award. But it pointedly waited until this year - when relations with Russia have sunk to new post-Cold War lows - to give it to him. Another recipient was the Judge Timothy Workmen, a man who was mostly unknown until he presided over the asylum cases of the two most famous Russian exiles in London - Berezovsky and Zakayev - ruling against their extradition to Russia and giving them asylum in Britain. We've seen this racket before: If you're a Russian and you fall out with your business partners, or your book is selling poorly, just throw in some random scare-accusations against "the regime," and voila! Suddenly you're not a small-time (or big-time) crook, or a an obscure struggling writer, but rather a famous, heroic dissident, persecuted by the savage Russian secret police, which is trying to quash the flames of freedom. In fact this brings a certain sense of closure. Relations between Russia and England (and the U.S.) are bad now, and growing worse. If the Litvinenko affair was meant to spoil relations, it succeded. It seems extremely unlikely that Putin wanted this. Last September he was on the top of the world, having presided over the G8 summit at St. Petersburg, which went without a hitch, despite the media's attempts to paint it as darkly as possible. It seemed far more successful and smooth, in fact, than the most recent G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, a non-stop embarrassment-fest. The German police clubbed and gassed anti-globalization protesters in view of the cameras and the food wound up poisoning several dozen dignitaries (including George W. Bush), as well as aides and journalists. George Bush missed half of the meeting as a result. And when he wasn't puking and shitting in his hotel room, he managed a few hilarious photo-ops: he was filmed apparently flirting and winking at the host, Angela Merkel, wearing his signature idiotic smirk, while Pootie-Put on her other side was charming the newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was captured flashing stupid grimaces of his own. But first let's go back again to last autumn, when everything seemed to be going so smoothly for Putin's government. Suddenly, events took a turn. Big-time serial political killings returned for the first time since the Yeltsin days. It started with the assassination of Andrei Kozlov, the deputy head of the Central Bank, on September 14. Then, on October 7, Putin's own birthday, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed at the door of her apartment building. And in early November, the Litvinenko story exploded. The last two events occurred just before big meetings between Putin and top EU officials in Finland. As a result, instead of an important trade deal being worked out with the EU, all the talk was about these shocking killings, with everyone pointing accusing fingers at Putin. The Russia-EU talks came to nothing. It's impossible to believe Putin wanted things to turn this way. And yet it seems that Putin government itself isn't exactly rushing out to find the killers. Half a year has passed since I wrote the article "Toxic Avenger?" on the Litvinenko affair (The eXile #252). And yet it is not any clearer today what happened in London in late October 2006, or why. On May 21 of this year British prosecutors charged Andrei Lugovoi with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by poisoning him with an extremely rare and highly radioactive isotope, polonium-210. The case against Lugovoi seems to be pretty strong in the sense that Lugovoi was the only person whose whereabouts in London most closely (though far from perfectly) coincided with the Polonium traces. The motive is not clear, and the British government didn't (and probably couldn't) clarify it. Most of the Western media mistakenly labeled Lugovoi "a former spy," just as they labeled Litvinenko. In fact, the last time Lugovoi was associated with secret services was in the early 90s. After that, for the most part he was Boris Berezovsky's man, responsible for the oligarch's security. After Berezovsky's exile, he maintained friendly relations with him. He even served time in Russian jail for helping another of the Berezovsky's associates - Nikolai Glushkov - escape from detention and flee abroad. Nevertherless, Lugovoi retained good relations with both Berezovsky's entourage and the Russian elite. It is unlikely that Lugovoi and Litvinenko had any business dealings. Lugovoi is a fairly rich businessman; his worth is estimated at tens of millions of dollars. A job as a simple gun for hire would hardly appeal to him. Litvinenko, on the other hand, was nearly penniless, a fish out a water in a foreign country, without command of the language, living on an allowance paid by Berezovsky, who gradually cut Litvinenko off because he became more of a nuisance than an asset. The official British version was somewhat implicitly challenged by Julia Svetlichnaja, a 33-year old Russian grad student at the University of Westminster. In a series of articles in the British press, she described her meetings with Litvinenko several months before his death. She wanted to contact Chechen exiles in London for her disseration work and thought that Litvinenko could help her. She was struck by Litvinenko's erratic behavior, his carelessness and paranoia, his endless rants and his innumerable conspiracy theories. She implied that Litvinenko was more of a danger to himself than a target of a big conspiracy. In particular, he blabbered constantly and openly how he was going to blackmail rich Russians, both in Britain and back home, with dirty secrets he allegedly had on many of them. He also grabbed at every possible conspiracy lead, no matter how ridiculous it looked. I find Svetlichnaja more believable than others, if only because I know her type. The British press accused her of being an instrument in the Kremlin campaign - but they couldn't back up their accusations with evidence. Svetlichnaja even won a libel suit against The Sunday Times. Rather than being the Kremlin's instrument, she was more probably just pissed off by the xenophobic hysterics of the British press that treated every Russian expat as a criminal or a spy. It is a very tragic story, considering the horrible, painful way Litvinenko died, but I can't help laughing at how many ridiculous, comical characters are associated with it. Take, for example, Mario Scaramella - the Italian guy who ate lunch with Litvinenko at the Itsu sushi bar around the time of his poisoning. According to Litvinenko, the Italian brought with him a bunch of documents he claimed were of crucial importance. But even Litvinenko, a big conspiracy buff himself, found them mostly useless, and saw no reason why they couldn't just have been emailed to him. Scaramella claimed to be alternatively a "security expert," a university professor, a secret service agent, a police inspector, and so on, apparently without any real credentials. He was convicted for fraud and is now under investigation by the Italian police for weapons smuggling (in a case separate from Litvinenko's). He was associated with the "Mitrokhin Commission" of the Italian Parliament, headed by Paolo Guzzanti, a close friend of Berlusconi and the member of the right-wing "Forza Italia." The apparent purpose of the commission was to "out" Romano Prodi, Berlusconi's political rival and the current Italian PM, as a "KGB agent." A year and a half ago Scaramella caused a brief sensation by claiming that during 70s, a Soviet submarine dropped around 20 nuclear mines in the Bay of Naples. Few things could be more riduculous than placing a bunch of underwater nuclear mines (it's not clear such things even exist) there. Both the Russian and Italian militaries denied Scaramella's claims. Why the Bay of Naples? It has wonderful tourist attractions but no strategic value whatsoever. Could it be because Scaramella himself lives there? I can name at least a dozen equally strange and comical characters closely associated with Litvinenko story. But in the end it doesn't help at all. Even after the British officially charged Lugovoi with the murder, we are still left with all of the same versions and theories we had before as to why Litvinenko was killed. Take your pick: Kremlin involvement to rogue Russian agents, revenge by a blackmailed businessman, Berezovsky's clique seeking to blacken Russia's rep, a bizarre suicide attempt, Litvinenko's involvement in nuclear smuggling. None of them are even close to water-tight explanations; all are full of holes and contradictions. The whodunnit is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. The polonium-210 isotope has a half-life of three months. But the poisonous effect of this story will last much longer than that.
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