#32 - JRL 2007-34 - JRL Home
From: "Vadim Birstein" <birstein@pipeline.com>
Subject: on the Litvinenko case
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007
One more time on the Alexander Litvinenko case
In his detailed excellent analysis of Litvinenko’s assassination and the current political events in Russia published in Johnson’s Russia List #29 on February 6, 2007 (#43), Prof. Vladimir Shlapentokh stated that polonium-210 was “the first radioactive material to be used in a murder.” In fact, another agent, Nikolai Khokhlov, was the first victim known to be poisoned by a radioactive substance. In that case, which took place in West Germany in 1957, KGB assassins used radioactive thallium.
The stories of Litvinenko and Khokhlov have much in common. Litvinenko, a FSB officer, was ordered to kill the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, but, instead, after releasing this information at a press conference in 1998, he escaped from Russia to live in London. Khokhlov, an officer of the 12th Department of the 2nd MVD Main Directorate (the successor to Pavel Sudoplatov’s infamous Buro No.1, which placed terrorists and assassins abroad), arrived in Germany in February 1954 with an order to kill Georgii Okolovich, chief of operations of the anti-Soviet Russian émigré organization the National Labor Alliance (NTS). As was usual in such assassination cases, this order had been approved by the Presidium of the Central Committee. Khokhlov was provided with a sophisticated electrically operated gun with a silencer that fired cyanide-tipped bullets. The gun was concealed inside a cigarette packet.
Instead of killing Okolovich, Khokhlov defected to the CIA and told Okolovich and CIA officials about his mission. In 1957, still living in West Germany, Khokhlov fell ill and was hospitalized. Sudoplatov described Khokhlov in his controversial memoirs as an unstable person who “claimed that he was poisoned at a cocktail party by the KGB” [Sudoplatov, P., et al., “Special Tasks” (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1994), p. 247]. No doubt he was irritated that American doctors had saved Khokhlov’s life. Unfortunately, his appearance was much altered. Khokhlov wrote in his autobiography [Khokhlov, N., “In the Name of Conscience” (NY: David McKay, 1959), p. 363]:
“I . . . was an exhibit of the achievements of Soviet science. Totally bald, so disfigured by scars and spots that those who had known me did not at first recognize me, confined to a rigid diet, I was nevertheless also living proof that Soviet science, the science of killing, is not omnipotent.”
Khokhlov’s poisoning with radioactive thallium is mentioned in the classic book on Soviet secret services by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky [Andrew, Ch., and O. Gordievsky, “KGB: The Inside Story” (NY: Harper Collins Publ., 1990), p. 464]. This book gives many examples of assassinations and kidnappings by the Russian secret services during Soviet years. Ironically, even more information about such events appears in new books published by FSB and SVR historians which aim to glorify these services and their history. From these recent publications we learn that death squads led by Yakov Serebryansky acted throughout Western Europe in 1920s-30s; Yakov Blyumkin was hunting for Boris Bazhanov, one of Stalin’s secretaries who dared to defect to the West in 1928, but ended up killing the wrong man; Naum Eitingon, Blyumkin’s deputy and Sudoplatov’s future collaborator and organizer of Trotsky’s assassination, planted a bomb that killed Chinese Marshal Chang Tso-lin in 1928 (this was the second Soviet attempt on Marshal’s life) and unsuccessfully tried to kill Franz von Pappen, the German Ambassador in Turkey, in 1942; Sergei Spiegelglas, the executioner of Stalin’s personal enemies, supervised several political killings and kidnappings in Europe and shot NKVD defector Ignacy Reiss (Poretsky) in 1937; Alexander Korotkov assassinated several people in Europe in the late 1930s and, according to a fellow agent, pushed Jan Masaryk, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, out of a window in February 1948. However, these acts were only the tip of the iceberg. If Litvinenko’s killers were from the Russian secret services, retired or active, they were following a long OGPU/FSB/SVR tradition. During Soviet times, political assassinations were routinely discussed at Politburo/Presidium meetings and ordered by the members of the Politburo/Presidium, with the secret service leaders reporting back on the success or failure of these orders.
Given this history, I am amazed that some journalists who covered the case did not believe that Litvinenko’s assassination could have been ordered at the highest Russian political level (see, for instance, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=147021). Especially in light of the law adopted in July 2006 that explicitly gives the Russian President the right to order the secret services to kill “extremists” abroad (for example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6188658.stm). It has only been 15 years since the demise of the Soviet Union. Why is it so difficult to believe that this assassination could have been ordered by the Russian president, especially one who is the former head of the FSB and has the legal right, according to Russian law, to order such an assassination? If Putin did order the Litvinenko’s assassination, it is very likely he felt completely justified in doing so.
But the reporting on the Litvinenko murder was flawed in other ways than just the lack of historical context. For instance, the extensive reporting about Litvinenko’s alleged relationship with a Russian student lacked important biographic details. On November 25, 2006 the British “Telegraph” reported on a press conference given by “two academics from the University of Westminster,” Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/25/npoison225.xml). On December 3, 2006 the British “Guardian” described Svetlichnaja as “a 33-year-old Russian-born academic who is examining the roots of the Chechen conflict for a book she is writing” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,329651798-103610,00.html) and “a Russian academic . . . who met Litvinenko earlier this year and received more than 100 emails from him” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1962830.00.html). Svetlichnaja said she had met with Litvinenko a number of times and that he told her that “he was going to blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people.” While I am certainly not going to defend the character of someone like Litvinenko, this statement makes him out to be a blackmailer who would tell his business to someone he hardly knew, which is very inconsistent with the almost universal reports of how cautious he was.
I decided to check up on the alleged Chechnya specialist Svetlichnaja, and took the simple step of opening the website of the University of Westminster. There Julia Svetlichnaja is described as “a Phd Candidate at CSD. Under the supervision of Professor Chantal Mouffe, Julia is working on the nature of the relationship between art and politics” (http://www.wmin.ac.uk/ssh/page-1966). The title of Svetlichnaja’s thesis will be “Art of Empire?,” and there is no notion that anything will be connected with Chechnya in her thesis. According to the site, Svetlichnaja has published abstracts (not even papers, so she is not much of an “academic”) entitled “Art of absence against valorisation of subjectivity” (2005), and “Relational Paradise as a delusional democracya critical response to a temporary contemporary relational aesthetics” (2006) in the proceedings of two conferences. With this background, why was she talking to Litvinenko?
The description of Svetlichnaja’s co-participant in the interview on Litvinenko, Professor James Heartfield (born James Hughes), is more impressive. The site of University of Westminster says: “He is studying the dynamic towards European integration, from the point of view of diminishing national sovereignty. He has written widely on European civil society, the ‘death of the Subject,’ and economic regeneration” (http://www.wmin.ac.uk/sshl/page-1110). However, another website provides information from Professor Heartfield’s past that possibly sheds light on why he was involved in the Litvinenko case: “He is a Manchester branch organizer of the now defunct Revolutionary Communist Party; in the early nineties, wrote for Living Marxism until it was closed by a libel action in 2000. He helped write the party’s manifesto” (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Heartfield).
Given the background of these two, did anybody verify if Svetlichnaja, in fact, had 100 emails from Litvinenko? Did anybody try to check if the photos of Litvinenko Svetlichnaja actively distributed were authentic? None of the reports mention whether these checks were done, but given the ease of falsifying photos and emails, they certainly should have been checked out. I do not know if Svetlichnaja’s interviews were simply self-promotion or, perhaps, disinformation disseminated through her, for instance, by the FSB. But it is clear journalists should inform their readers when there are possible ulterior motives at work.
Here is one more example of one-sided reporting around the Litvinenko case. On November 20, 2006, the British “Independent” published an article entitled “Mary Dejevsky: Caution . . . handle allegations of poisoning with care.” The author, analyzing Anna Politkovskaya’s murder and poisoning of Litvinenko, advices caution regarding conclusions on the involvement of President Putin in these cases (http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_1/mary_dejevsky/article1998839.ece). At the end, she writes:
“I would also recall this. In February 2004, journalists were invited to a plush hotel (. . . in Piccadilly), to be regaled with an extraordinary story from a bedraggled Russian MP, who was standing against Putin in imminent elections. The MP, Ivan Rybkin, gave a muddled account of being abducted, put on a train [going to KievV. B.], drugged and filmed in compromising positions. It was all, we were told, the doing of Putin and his secret agents.
The truth turned out to be rather different. Rybkin, not for the first time, had been on a bender. He and his supporters abroad had found an ingenious way of ‘explaining’ his absence to his wife and discrediting Putin at the same time. Alas, Rybkin could not keep up the pretence.”
Unfortunately, Ms. Dejevsky did not release the source of her “truth” about Rybkin or even say why she thought her characterization of this incident was true. What evidence does she have that Rybkin was lying?
I have no illusions about the life style of contemporary Russian politicians like Rybkin. However, to me Ms. Dejevsky’s scenario does not look convincing. A Russian long-time politician who was so ambitious that dared to become a rival of Putin in the presidential race commits a political suicide. Wasn’t it too convenient for Putin that Rybkin allegedly suddenly went on a wild bender at the beginning of their race?
I also know the history of Soviet/Russian secret services and in my opinion, the drugging of Rybkin was certainly a possibility. In Rybkin’s case Ms. Dejevsky should have at least mentioned the opinions of Litvinenko and Oleg Kalugin, who were both professional KGB officers. They had no doubt that a psychotropic drug known as SP-117 was given to Rybkin (http://grani.ru/Politics/Election/p.60303).
As many of such drugs, SP-117 consists of a dote and an antidote. According to Litvinenko and Kalugin, 15 minutes after taking two drops of the dote dissolved in any drink, a person looses all control. This condition lasts for several hours, and the state of disorientation can be prolonged by giving the person more of the dote. When given the antidote, the person comes to his senses in about 10 minutes, but has no memory of what happened to him.
Kalugin had this to say about the Rybkin affair (my translation from Russian): “For instance, he might have been forced to take ‘the dote,’ and then was taken to a hidden place where he was kept in an disoriented state for several days. In this state ‘girls’ could be placed with him and any compromising film could be made. On the film, it would look like a completely drunken man having fun with prostitutes. Also, any kind of a ‘confession’ could have been extracted from him, for example, that he was an agent of 20 foreign intelligence services. . . He might have been threatened with a repeat of this ‘experiment’ and with the leak of compromising materials to the press if he did not step down from the presidential race.” Rybkin did in fact step down.
In another interview given on December 1, 2006, Kalugin said (again, my translation): “I think Ivan Rybkin was the last victim who managed to come alive out from such a situation. The preparation SP-117 was administered to him. It is an old drug, we used it in Washington in the 1960s. It is very easy to use: one needs to put a small amount of it in wine, tea, in anything, and a person becomes disoriented, looses control, and starts to talk a lot. We used it on two persons, we wanted them to release the truth. However, for extracting information this preparation is not efficient. . .” (http://www.nrs.com/news/int/usa/011206_164256_87715.html).
Rybkin was lucky if he was given only SP-117. The same year former KGB officers in the Ukraine put dioxin into the food of Viktor Yushchenko, the rival of Moscow-supported candidate Viktor Yanukovich, at a “friendly” dinner. As in Khokhlov’s case, skillful doctors saved Yushchenko’s life. But, like Khokhlov’s, Yushchenko’s face became disfigured.
Therefore, I think that history teaches us that the Soviet/Russian secret services’ ruthlessness, ingenuity and willingness to eliminate perceived enemies should not be underestimated and authors would be well advised to study this history before writing about their activities.
Dr. Vadim Birstein
www.vadimbirstein.com,
the author of “The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science” (Westview
Press, 2001; Basic Books, 2004).
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