#21 - JRL 2006-262 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
November 21, 2006
Litvinenko Moved to Intensive Care
By Catherine Belton and Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writers
Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko has been moved to intensive care in a London hospital after his condition deteriorated, and friends said Monday that they suspected he had been poisoned on Kremlin orders.
The Kremlin denied any involvement in the case.
British police, who have opened an investigation, are looking into two meetings that Litvinenko held on Nov. 1, the sixth anniversary of his arrival in Britain and the day he fell ill with what doctors later diagnosed as possible thallium poisoning, said Alex Goldfarb, a friend who visited Litvinenko on Monday.
Litvinenko met Nov. 1 with an Italian KGB expert, Mario Scaramella, at a sushi restaurant and with two Russians for tea in a central London hotel, Goldfarb said by telephone.
One of the Russians with whom Litvinenko met was Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer who worked with Litvinenko in the 1990s in a private security service for then-powerful businessman Boris Berezovsky, Goldfarb said.
He and Berezovsky suggested Monday that Lugovoi now might have Kremlin backing.
But they both stressed that there was no evidence linking Litvinenko's illness to either meeting.
Contact information could not be found Monday for Lugovoi, who Goldfarb and Berezovsky said was now running a detective agency in Moscow.
Berezovsky said by telephone that he had last met Lugovoi in late October or early November and that Lugovoi had spoken of managing a multimillion-dollar detective business.
"This surprised me, as anyone close to me can normally not even find work in Moscow, let alone have a successful business," said Berezovsky, who is wanted by Moscow on charges including fraud and terrorism. He lives in London under British asylum.
"This raises questions, but I don't want to point any fingers," he said.
Lugovoi was briefly jailed in 2001 after being accused of organizing the escape from custody of former Aeroflot deputy director Nikolai Glushkov, a Berezovsky ally accused of fraud.
Former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior Russian intelligence agent ever to defect to the West, speculated about a link between Lugovoi and the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
"He was put in prison, and when he was released, he made a quick career. This could only have been possible with the help of the KGB," he said, referring to the FSB by its Soviet-era name. Gordievsky defected in 1985.
Gordievsky said thallium, a metal, was a trademark of KGB attacks, adding that Litvinenko appeared to have also ingested another as-yet unidentified substance.
An FSB spokesman refused to say whether Lugovoi had ever worked for his agency. He also declined to comment on the suspected poisoning.
A representative for London's Metropolitan Police confirmed Monday that the incident was being investigated as a suspected poisoning but declined to disclose any other details.
Berezovsky said he believed that the Kremlin was behind the incident. "I don't want to point any fingers, but I felt this pressure myself when I was told Moscow was preparing for an attempt on my life in 2002," he said. He hired a team of bodyguards at the time, he said.
Goldfarb, a close ally of Berezovsky, said he did not think the illness was linked to any of Litvinenko's current or past investigative work. Litvinenko had met with the Italian to discuss the murder last month of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
He also had accused the FSB of being behind the 1999 apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed speculation of Kremlin involvement as "nonsense."
Goldfarb said he believed Litvinenko was targeted over "a number of things, starting with his flight and defection."
"He is seen as a traitor within the FSB. He fled and he fled very publicly," he said, adding that Litvinenko obtained British citizenship one month ago.
He expressed surprise that Russian intelligence might consider acting on British soil.
The FSB is allowed to target foreigners outside Russia under legislation passed this year that permits intelligence operations in the pursuit of terrorists to be conducted abroad. Moscow has accused Berezovsky of backing Chechen terrorists.
"After we had adopted the bill [in March] that allows the deployment of special services abroad to fight terrorism, I would not rule out that our guys pulled this off," said Viktor Ilyukhin, a State Duma deputy with the Communist Party.
Ilyukhin noted that poisons were widely used by the special services.
The Italian KGB expert, Scaramella, handed Litvinenko an e-mail list of security officers allegedly involved in the killing of Politkovskaya, Goldfarb said. But Litvinenko "considered there was nothing of substance there," he said.
Scaramella could not be reached for comment Monday. A friend of Scaramella's told The Times of London in remarks published Monday that the Italian had gone into hiding. "Mario is very scared at the moment," The Times quoted the unidentified friend as saying. "He is worried that the Russians and the Chechens are after him. He has obviously been made some sort of scapegoat."
Mario Scaramella has worked on an Italian parliamentary commission delving into KGB-infiltration of Italian politics, Italian media reported.
The University College Hospital, where Litvinenko has been hospitalized, said Monday that he had been transferred to an intensive care unit. "He remains in serious condition," the hospital said in a statement. "Last night, due to a slight deterioration in his condition, he was transferred to an intensive care unit as a precautionary measure."
"He looks like a cancer patient who has undergone serious chemotherapy," Goldfarb said. "He is very thin. He hasn't eaten for three weeks."
Professor James Henry, a leading British toxicologist who has examined Litvinenko and is advising a medical team treating him, told BBC radio there was no doubt Litvinenko had been poisoned by thallium. "It is tasteless, colorless, odorless. It takes about a gram ... to kill you," he said.
Alexander Kolpakidi, a historian and the author of "The KGB's Liquidators," a study of the Soviet-era killings, said he highly doubted that the FSB was behind the illness. "Poisons are easily traced, and their origin can be established. The Russian special services have no desire to get in the center of a new scandal, especially after the Yandarbiyev case," he said. Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed in 2004 in a car blast in the Qatar's capital, Doha. Qatar arrested and convicted two Russian security service officers for the killing. The officers were later extradited home.
Kolpakidi said that in Soviet times, high-profile killings abroad were always decided by top government officials. If those decision-making procedures were followed by the current regime, it would be against its interests to target Litvinenko, he said.
But that does not rule out the possibility that rogue special services officers could be trying to kill Litvinenko, said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on special services and editor of Agentura.ru, an independent investigative web site.
"Many of Litvinenko's contacts, including some former colleagues from the FSB, have strong ties to the criminal world," said Soldatov, who met Litvinenko in London in 2003.
Soldatov regularly writes for Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya also worked. Incidentally, Politkovskaya accused the FSB of poisoning her after she fell ill as she tried to reach Beslan to cover the school attack in 2004.
Another Novaya Gazeta reporter, Yury Shchekochikhin, died in 2003 after suffering a severe allergic reaction to an as-yet undisclosed substance.
Other deaths blamed by some on poisoning include those of jailed Chechen rebel leaders Salman Raduyev in 2002 and Lecha Islamov in 2005. In both cases, prison officials insisted that the deaths were from natural causes.
A Chechen rebel leader of Arab origin, Khattab, died in 2002 after an FSB agent handed him a letter soaked in poison. Rebel leader Shamil Basayev said last summer that Russian special services had attempted to kill him by soaking his socks with poison. The FSB said Basayev died in a car blast in July.
Thallium poisoning grabbed headlines in 1995, when Russian banker Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary died after someone peppered the receiver of his office phone with thallium powder. A $1 million reward offered by Kivelidi's friends for any information leading to the murderer remains unclaimed.
The KGB used thallium to poison a defector, Nikolai Khokhlov, in West Germany in 1955. Khokhlov survived.
Security expert Anton Surikov said the use of thallium was no indication of an FSB plot. "Thallium is accessible to people who have a little money and access to specialists," he said. "You don't need any state agencies to get hold of it. I think this is an attempt to cast a shadow on [President Vladimir] Putin's regime."
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