Poison and Putin

Peter Brookes:

THE death of former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, last week from radioactive Polonium-210 poisoning is the latest in a series of politically motivated attacks on the outspoken opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

No one has been able to officially implicate the Russian FSB - the domestic successor of the old Soviet KGB - in the assaults. But old-school KGB and CIA veterans are pointing fingers in the direction of the Kremlin and its supporters, the siloviki (powerful ones).

You can see why. For starters, "wet works" (i.e., politically motivated assassination by security services) originated in the early 20th century with the Soviet secret service, the NKVD. (The term comes from the notion that you'd get your hands "wet" with the victim's blood.)

And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence linking Russian spetzsluzhba (special services) in political "hits" using poison:

* In 2003, Yuri Shchekochkin, a journalist and Kremlin critic, died of an "allergic reaction" that was likely a deliberate poisoning.

* Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Putin and the war in Chechnya, fell mysteriously ill while flying to negotiate the release of Beslan schoolchildren being held by Chechen terrorists in 2004. (She was ultimately gunned down in Moscow in October.)

* Also in 2004, pro-West Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushenko, running against pro-Kremlin candidate Viktor Yanukovich, was poisoned by suspected dioxins, making him ill and leaving his face severely disfigured.

And now Litvinenko - a KGB/FSB veteran whose investigations of corruption in Russia reportedly made a lot of enemies among his comrades, the siloviki and the Russian mafia - dies a painful death from ingesting a highly toxic radioactive isotope.

Litvinenko was likely a marked man. When the FSB fired him on Putin's orders, he fled into asylum to London's "Moscow on the Thames," becoming a fierce Putin/FSB critic. Most recently, he was investigating the Politkovskaya murder.

...

What is curious about this method of poisoning is that while obviously effective, it is such a rare substance that it points it fingers back at Russia. This raises the question of why an intelligence service would use such a method. If it was someone trying to implicate Russian intelligence service, it still raises the question of how they obtained the poison and why they would want to implicate them. When added to all the other deaths of Putin critics though, there is a pattern that cannot be ignored.