Danger: assassins at work — from Russia, but working around the world:
On November 1, Alexander Litvinenko, a 43-year-old Russian who used to work for the FSB, (the post-Soviet version of the KGB), had lunch at Itsu, a cheap-and-cheerful Japanese eatery, with an Italian spycatcher. By that evening, he was feeling so ill he was admitted to hospital. Doctors wasted 10 days trying to treat him for food poisoning. His condition deteriorated — hair falling out, difficulty speaking, white blood cells disappearing, unable to eat, even nourishment from a drip causing him to vomit. It was only when they listened to his pleas to investigate whether he had been poisoned that doctors realised Litvinenko’s body contained three times the fatal dose of thallium, a tasteless, odourless killer used in rat poison until, in the 1970s, it was banned as too dangerous. They are now trying to neutralise the slow-acting poison; but it may be four weeks before it is clear whether the ex-secret service man will live.Litvinenko’s friends in London have been quick to accuse the Kremlin of being behind this poisoning. They say Russia wanted to stop Litvinenko investigating the assassination last month of another high-profile critic of the Russian government — his friend, the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. They believe the Kremlin was also to blame for Politkovskaya being shot outside her Moscow apartment door.
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In 1978, operatives from one of the Soviet Union’s satellite states, Bulgaria, decided to bump off Georgy Markov, a diplomat who had defected to Britain. In true James Bond fashion, his assassin prodded a ricin pellet under the defector’s skin from the point of a doctored umbrella while he stood in a bus queue. Markov, who felt a sharp pain as the pellet entered his body, died after three days. When Bulgaria’s Communist regime collapsed a decade later, a stock of special assassination umbrellas was discovered at the interior ministry in Sofia.
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In the winter of 2004, the pro-western candidate for Ukraine’s presidency, Victor Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin, a drug that thickened his film-star features into an elephant-man mask and nearly killed him. The poisoning has often been blamed on pro-Moscow secret service operatives. In the autumn of 2004, Politkovskaya, the journalist, said she had been poisoned aboard the plane she was taking south to the Chechen frontier, hoping to help negotiate a peaceful end to the hostage drama at Beslan school. In the summer of 2004, a Chechen separatist leader called Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was assassinated in Qatar; two Russians were arrested for the killing, though Moscow denied any connection. Earlier that summer, as Putin jailed Russia’s richest oligarch, his political opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on fraud charges that the billionaire says were politically motivated, a helicopter carrying Khodorkovsky’s British lawyer, Stephen Curtis, crashed on the English south coast. Curtis had said shortly before the crash that if he died mysteriously, “it would not be an accident”.