- I. The Baron and the Billionaire
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- Everyone knows that Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko
was killed by radiation poisoning in London last month. But beyond that
bare fact, almost nothing is clear about the case. The truth has disappeared,
probably forever, into the shadowlands - that murky confluence of crime,
violence, money and politics where so much of the real business of the
world is conducted. However, an examination of some of the curiously overlooked
aspects of the affair might send at least a few shafts of light into the
cloud of unknowing that has enveloped Litvinenko's death.
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- Of course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing
the situation is the fact that almost everything we knew about the case
for weeks was spoon-fed to the media by the most elite PR operation in
Britain. Almost from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared
behind a phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky,
the fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence.
To handle - and generate - the publicity surrounding the incident, Berezovsky
called on his old friend Baron Bell of Belgravia, who, back when he was
just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private propaganda chief for Margaret
Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The baron has also flacked for disgraced
media mogul Conrad Black, disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the
Coalition Provisional Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush administration
to eviscerate Iraq.
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- (Speaking of the CPA, UK investigators now say they've
found traces of Polonium 201, the radioactive isotope believed to have
killed Litvinenko, in the London offices of Erinys, a private security
company. As I noted in Counterpunch back in December 2003, Bush's CPA gave
Erinys's Iraqi branch - formed as a joint venture with business cronies
and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi - $80 million
to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has grown into an armed
force of 16,000 men - something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters
also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in those
palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is also active
in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a whole tangled
nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere else.)
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- The leaping lord's PR shop has also represented Ukraine
President Viktor Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed
poisoning laid at the Kremlin's door. Yet another client was former Russian
President Boris Yeltsin, whose "miraculous" 1996 election victory
- in the face of single-digit approval ratings - was engineered by a small
group of oligarchs who were later given carte blanche to plunder Russia's
state-owned enterprises and vast natural resources for private profit.
The acknowledged leader of this clique - which had muscled its way to riches
and power in the brutal, Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the
Yeltsin years - was of course a certain Boris Berezovsky.
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- As one of the prime vetters of political aspirants
in the Yeltsin court, Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure
but presumably biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But
Putin had a clique of his own, based in the security organs - and soon
the oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the
state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad, where
they'd stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky, charged with
embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous digs in London
and environs, there to become Putin's most ferociously outspoken critic.
He also found new friends in high places - including Neil Bush, George
W.'s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the backers of Neil's
"educational software" company, which peddles dumbed-down "interactive
teaching DVDs" to public school systems loath to risk their federal
funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle.
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- This then is the team that controlled the flow of
information during the three agonizing weeks it took Litvinenko to die.
They set out the basic storyline that was followed, with scarcely a variation,
by all the leading UK papers and most of the world media. The Cold War
had come again, we were told: a bold dissident against the tyrannical Putin
regime had been assassinated in the streets of London by the undead KGB,
wielding strange poisons concocted in secret laboratories. (All this while
the latest James Bond movie was having its gala premiere!) A carefully
composed photograph of the martyr was released by the baronial PR outfit,
and quickly became the global emblem of the case. This is what Putin has
done, Litvinenko was said to have said: see his evil handiwork with your
own eyes.
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- The human tragedy of the victim's painful deterioration
was genuine: a man cut down in his prime, leaving behind a grieving wife,
an orphaned son, a weeping father. As a PR move, it was even more effective:
the disturbing images, coupled with the drumbeat of accusations against
Putin, obscured several essential questions, such as: Who was Alexander
Litvinenko? Why would the Kremlin risk a rupture with the West by killing
him in such an open, garish fashion? And who was the obscure "Italian
academic" he met with at that fatal sushi bar where, we were told,
he probably ingested, somehow, the radioactive hemlock?
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- II. Wheels Within Wheels
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- In the press, Litvinenko is invariably described
as a "fierce critic of Putin" or words to that effect, and as
former officer in the FSB, one of the post-Soviet successor agencies of
the KGB. (Most of the media stories skate over the fact that Litvinenko
was also a military counterintelligence officer in the old KGB as well.)
He is said to have fled Russia after refusing an alleged order to murder
Berezovsky - who promptly took Litvinenko in, provided him with a house
in London, and bankrolled his book, which accused Putin of staging the
1999 Moscow apartment bombing that the Kremlin cited as justification for
its second savage war of destruction against Chechnya.
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- Litvinenko's deathbed j'accuse against Putin - again,
released by the Berezovsky phalanx - was heard around the world, as we
all know. But this was the first time that Litvinenko's relentless barrage
of charges against Putin had ever attracted widespread attention - or an
assumption of credibility. His previous book had sunk without a trace;
Berezovsky had in fact been shopping around for someone to write another
terrifying tome on the subject, once asking Russian journalist Oleg Sultanov
to take it on and make it "as scary as possible," as The Scotsman
reports. "Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky's closest ally [and one of the
chief spokesmen during Litvinenko's illness], admitted the Litvinenko books
were a flop. So it [was] urgently necessary to create some hot new reading
material which would prove that 'our cause is just' and Putin is the enemy
of the human race," Sultanov told the paper.
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- Over the years, Litvinenko had charged, among many
other things, that the Kremlin had trained al-Qaeda's top leaders prior
to 9/11; that Putin was behind last year's subway bombings in London; that
the FSB was responsible for the 2002 Moscow theater massacre and the horrific
2004 slaughter at the Beslan schoolhouse; and that Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi was a long-time KGB agent. This summer, when Putin was filmed
playfully smooching a small boy's belly, Litvinenko rushed out a piece
declaring that Putin was a paedophile - a proven fact that he and other
FSB officials had known for years, he said, although he didn't explain
why he had refrained from revealing this damning information before.
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- None of these charges had been taken seriously, or
even noticed in the media. Almost no one had ever heard of Litvinenko before
the poisoning. Unlike Anna Politkovskaya, the muckraking, anti-Putin journalist
murdered in Moscow in October, Litvinenko did not have an international
reputation based on years of solid, credible work in the field. He was
an ex-KGB agent who had fled one quadrant of the shadowlands in the Kremlin
for another quadrant under Berezovsky's roof. The fact that he had accused
Putin of involvement in every major crime of the 21st century does not
mean that he was necessarily wrong in this last, fatal instance, of course.
But awareness of that fact would have given a different, more shaded context
to the dramatic deathbed charges. Yet Berezovsky and his baron skillfully
kept such mitigating data out of the public eye - and the media were happy
to seize on the simple, more sellable tale of the dying champion of truth
surrounded by simple, loving friends.
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- They were equally willing to ignore the curious connections
of the last man who supposedly met with Litvinenko before the onset of
his disease: Mario Scaramella, invariably described as an "Italian
academic" or "security expert" who had either given Litvinenko
documents revealing the Putin-backed murderers of Politkovskaya, or else
passed on the word from his contacts in Russian intelligence that Litvinenko
was marked for death, or in one account purportedly by Litvinenko himself,
produced some vague, non-urgent emails about Politkovskaya, then pointedly
and nervously refused to eat sushi with the Russian.
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- It was weeks before the Mail on Sunday sussed out
the fact that Scaramella was in fact "a self-professed expert in nuclear
materials" - especially loose nukestuff floating around the ex-Soviet
states - who also had strong connections with both Russian and Italian
intelligence sources. The former tipped him off about attempts to smuggle
nuclear materials out of Russia and the East to terrorist and criminal
gangs; the latter allowed him to lead an armed police raid to snatch some
smugglers he'd fingered. What's more, Scaramella had also gone commercial
with his nuclear services, founding a company that offered "environmental
protection and security" against various biohazards - services that
some panicky Londoners might have paid good money for as Polonium scares
swept the capital after Litvinenko's death. Scaramella also claimed academic
associations with the universities of Stanford, Naples and Greenwich -
none of which had any record of his working for them.
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- The wheels within wheels grind on. On that same portentous
day of sushi, Litvinenko also met three Russians in a bar, including yet
another ex-KGB man: Andrei Lugovi, who had once been arrested for assisting
Berezovsky ally Nikolai Glushkov in an alleged escape attempt from police
custody, "where he was being held on charges of embezzlement (to the
tune of $250 million) and massive fraud," as Justin Raimondo notes
in his exhaustive series on the case at Antiwar.com. Lugovi was later released;
Glushkov was tried and convicted on lesser charges of financial chicanery
related to the case and served three years in prison. Last month, a Moscow
court in Putin's iron-handed tyrannical regime refused Kremlin requests
to retry Glushkov on the fraud charges, Novosti reports.
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- Lugovi meanwhile has apparently become a successful
private detective in Moscow. In recent days, Berezovsky has begun hinting
heavily that his former friend Lugovi has been restored to the good graces
of the Russian security organs and thus might have had a hand in Litvinenko's
poisoning. How else to explain his booming business? "Anyone close
to me can normally not even find work in Moscow, let alone have a successful
business," Berezovsky told the Moscow Times (again, noted by Raimondo).
Yet Berezovsky himself has maintained successful business interests in
Moscow throughout his bitter exile and denunciations of Putin. He only
sold his controlling interest in the top Russian newspaper, Kommersant,
earlier this year - and not because he was forced to sell by the media-controlling
Kremlin tyrant, but evidently because he wanted a quick cash infusion for
other enterprises, the Independent reports. (Maybe Neil Bush was about
to bounce a check.)
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- All of this adds up to ... well, nothing much in
particular. It's the usual murky ooze you find whenever an incident like
the Litvinenko case turns over a rock in the shadowlands: strange connections,
mixed motives, bluffs and double-bluffs, half-truths, black ops, lurid
tales, chancers, bagmen, spies, tycoons, mercenaries, war, murder, and
money. It's clear that almost every single player in the Litvinenko killing
could have had access to the sophisticated technical means necessary to
deliver Polonium 210 as an edible poison. It's not clear at all that any
of them had a compelling reason to do so.
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- To be sure, Putin is a ruthless operator on behalf
of what he perceives as Russia's national interests, which he tends to
identify with the power and privilege of his own elitist clique, as do
all our world statesmen - none more so than his avowed soulmate, George
W. Bush. And like Bush, Putin has proven himself capable of wholesale slaughter
and pinpoint "extrajudicial killing" in the service of those
interests. Some of his critics have certainly ended up dead. Some of his
supporters have too. (And so have some of Berezovsky's critics, such as
the American journalist Paul Khlebnikov, whose book, Godfather of the Kremlin,
blackened Berezovsky's name around the world far more successfully than
Litvinenko's ignored, forgotten tome ever did with Putin. Khlebnikov was
gunned down, Godfather-style, in Moscow in 2004.)
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- But it beggars belief that a savvy operator like
Putin would have countenanced a plan to kill a small-fry critic in a such
a spectacularly public fashion, in the capital of a foreign country, with
a slow-acting radioactive isotope that guaranteed weeks of damaging headlines
and international outcry, putting at risk months of delicate negotiations
over Russia's expansion into the European energy market and other lucrative
deals. Someone who wanted to embarrass Putin might have done it. Someone
with motives entirely unconnected to Russian politics might have done it.
Rogue elements of this or that faction or agency or government might have
done it. But it's clear from all the facts available that the one person
who would benefit least from the murder is the one who has been most widely
and confidently accused of ordering it: Putin.
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- And so the question of who killed Alexander Litvinenko
remains an impenetrable mystery. But at least it has thrown a flickering
light on the borders of the shadowlands, a pale fire in which we can dimly
perceive the ugly machinations, the violence and deceit, the crime and
corruption that lie beneath the gilded images of the movers and shakers
of the world.
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- Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His weekly
political column, "Global Eye," ran in the Moscow Times from
1996 to 2006. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over
the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review,
the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record and many
others. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored
award in 2003. He is the author of "Empire Burlesque: High Crimes
and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium," and is co-founder and editor
of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.
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