Begin forwarded message:
From: "Mario Profaca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: December 25, 2006 4:19:41 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [SPY NEWS] A Lethal Web of Spooks, Oligarchs and Spin
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/12/22/003.html
Tuesday, December 26, 2006 / Updated Moscow Time
A Lethal Web of Spooks, Oligarchs and Spin
By Catherine Belton
Staff Writer
Vasily Djachkov / Reuters
Lugovoi, left, and Berezovsky posing for a picture in the North
Caucasus winter holiday resort of Dombay in 1998.
Editor's note: This is the second of two articles.
When former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko agreed to give two
little-known British academics an interview this year, they
couldn't quite believe their luck.
But the tales told by the emigre, who had once worked in the heart
of the Federal Security Service's organized crime division, were
often as wild as they were detailed.
"We thought a lot of it was too extreme," said one of the
interviewers, James Heartfield, a researcher at London's University
of Westminster. "He was always offering us inside information on
things that were bizarre. His frame of reference was all based on
characters out of the Cold War."
Now, however, the agent who worked for tycoon Boris Berezovsky will
be remembered as the victim of one of the most bizarre Cold War-
style conspiracies of modern history. Litvinenko's poisoning last
month in London by polonium-210, the rare radioactive isotope that
ravaged his body and left a trail of radioactivity across London,
Hamburg and Moscow, could signal a major new chapter in a battle
for power between rival factions of the Russian elite.
As the drama has unfolded, players long thought to be retired from
Cold War-style spy games have re-entered a fray that is severely
shaking President Vladimir Putin's standing in the West and could
end up changing the course of his presidency. Together with the
former KGB agents coming out of the woodwork is a tangled
netherworld of information peddlers, spin doctors, organized crime
networks and oligarchs that emerged in the chaos of the Soviet
Union's collapse.
Blanket coverage in the Western media of Litvinenko's deathbed
accusation that Putin was responsible for his murder has stoked
anti-Russian sentiment in the West. Tension was already flaring up
this year over Western concerns that Putin was stamping out
democracy and using the country's energy might to blackmail neighbors.
For many in Moscow, Litvinenko's death looks like an elaborately
orchestrated rebellion by those out-of-favor Western-oriented
oligarchs who made vast fortunes out of the Soviet collapse, but
are now either in exile or in jail, their Russian assets seized by
Putin's government. For some, that group is led by Boris
Berezovsky, who has styled himself as Putin's nemesis, publicly
vowing to bring down his regime by force.
Berezovsky has denied any involvement in Litvinenko's death.
Others in the West, however, say Litvinenko's death is revenge
against an ally of Berezovsky's. "The people who carried this out
this are seeking revenge from those who helped cause the collapse
of the Soviet Union," said Oleg Kalugin, a former head of KGB
foreign counterintelligence whose defection to the United States in
the early 1990s led Putin to brand him a traitor.
A third theory is that Litvinenko, working recently as a freelance
information peddler and slightly lost in London since his Moscow
heyday, had stumbled into a tangle of conflicting criminal
interests, crossing other powerful oligarchs as he traded
information that could have harmed enormous business interests.
John Stillwell / APP
A man walking past the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly, London,
where Litvinenko met with Scaramella on Nov. 1.
One associate of Litvinenko's, Yury Shvets, a former KGB Washington
station chief who defected to the United States in the early 1990s,
claims he knows the name of the man who ordered the killing. He
said Litvinenko had made a key mistake when he shared the contents
of an incriminating dossier on a senior Kremlin official as he
rushed to earn more cash. "He was trying to sell information to
everyone," Shvets said by telephone this week.
A business partner of Shvets', Karon von Gerhke-Thompson, believes
Litvinenko got caught up in a web of double agents and crime that
cost him his life. Investigators working on the case say they have
"never seen so much money" being transferred in the intelligence
business, she said.
No matter who was behind it -- rogue oligarchs, either seeking to
tarnish Putin's image or silence Litvinenko, or resurgent secret
services now operating with or without Putin's blessing -- the end
result is that Putin is facing one of the biggest challenges of his
presidency.
For now, the Western media seems to be pinning the blame on him.
"Putin today is at a crossroads," said Alexei Kondaurov, a
Communist State Duma deputy and former KGB general who worked as an
adviser to now-jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
"The day Putin vowed he would waste Chechen rebels in the outhouse,
the course was set for people to be dealt with through arbitrary
reprisals, to neutralize and kill opponents," Kondaurov said,
referring to Putin's vow in 1999. "He can step back from this
course and find the killers, wherever they are -- abroad, here or
in the secret services of a third country. If he doesn't, then this
stain will remain with him. He will run the serious risk of
persecution wherever he goes. He will become an international pariah.
"Such a president could bring so much harm to his country because
he will either take his country on a path of confrontation or will
make too many compromises and become weak."
The stakes are even higher, he said, because of the way Litvinenko
was killed. "This poisoning is very serious. It looks like the
world's first example of nuclear terrorism.
"If you need just one-billionth of a gram to poison one person,
then it does not take very much more to poison an entire country,"
he said. "A very dangerous precedent has been set."
The attention of British detectives visiting Moscow this month has
focused on two private security agents, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry
Kovtun, who met with Litvinenko for tea at the Millennium Hotel in
central London on Nov. 1, the day he fell ill.
Shvets said Britain and the United States were bound to call Putin
to account over the attack. "I don't exclude that the British and
U.S. governments will decide to go directly to Putin and ask him to
do something about his closest entourage," said Shvets, who says he
worked with Litvinenko on due diligence reports for British firms
considering investing in Russia. Shvets said British and U.S.
detectives questioned him earlier this month about his knowledge of
the poisoning.
A British police spokesman declined to comment.
The Dossier
Shvets said by telephone this week that a dossier he had helped
Litvinenko prepare on "a very highly placed member of Putin's
administration" had likely prompted the poisoning.
"It was about [the member's] connections to organized crime, to
international organized crime," he said. Litvinenko, Shvets said,
had won the assignment for an unidentified British company seeking
to vet a Russian counterpart for what he said was a deal that could
run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Litvinenko had handed over some of the intelligence work to Shvets
and said he had used a network of agents to compile the eight-page
dossier. Shvets said it was after he handed it back to Litvinenko,
however, that Litvinenko made a fatal mistake.
Litvinenko gave the file to Lugovoi, who had been his associate in
the 1990s as head of security for Berezovsky-controlled ORT
television. He had intended to show the file to Lugovoi as an
example of how such reports should be written for Western companies.
"It was a bad mistake for Sasha," Shvets said. "He'd said he was
showing it to a longtime friend. ... He was trying to develop his
own network of sources in Russia through Lugovoi."
Berezovsky, his ally Alex Goldfarb and Shvets have said they
suspect that Lugovoi became a Kremlin agent sometime after he
worked as Berezovsky's security chief. Lugovoi was briefly jailed
in 2001 on charges of helping another Berezovsky ally, former
Aeroflot deputy general director Nikolai Glushkov, escape from
police custody.
Berezovsky has said his suspicions were raised when Lugovoi boasted
to him of how well his business was doing in Moscow, despite his
jailing and his previous association with Berezovsky. Berezovsky
refused to comment further for this article.
Shvets said Lugovoi took Litvinenko's dossier to Moscow "and this
is where the attack started." The people involved must have seen
the report, triggering the poisoning, Shvets said.
Shvets said he later handed the dossier to the British detectives
who came to question him. The BBC's Radio 4, which interviewed
Shvets in the United States and carried his claims in a half-hour
program last Saturday, said it had seen extracts from the report, too.
But Lugovoi, reached by telephone this week at the Moscow clinic
where he is being tested for possible radioactive contamination,
rejected Shvets' claims out of hand. "These statements are fit only
for psychiatric research, not for investigation," he said, adding
that he had heard of Shvets only once before, when Litvinenko had
mentioned him as having "huge authority in the United States."
"Now I understand that this is just the latest traitor who has run
from who knows where," Lugovoi said. "This is a person who would
sell anything to anyone, including his own life."
Shvets said he now felt sorry for Lugovoi, whom he felt had become
a victim of a wider conspiracy and was unlikely to be the actual
poisoner. "He was used as a useful idiot. He did not realize the
full extent of the operation. Now his life and death are in the
hands of the FSB. Whatever he says right now is written by the FSB."
The only thing protecting Lugovoi, Shvets said, was the fact that
he, Kovtun and another associate, Vyacheslav Sokolenko, had gone
public with their story soon after it emerged that they had met
with Litvinenko the day he fell ill. "The only reason that
[Lugovoi] is still alive is that when the news appeared in the
media, they gave interviews."
But much of Shvets' theory may not add up. Why a Kremlin official
would order a hit on a washed-out agent for a report that could
easily be refuted -- and that may have only cost the individual
millions of dollars in lost revenue from a failed deal -- is not
clear. Such sums, after all, are small potatoes compared to the oil-
fueled avalanche of cash now thundering down on Moscow.
Von Gerhke-Thompson claimed Shvets had been working for Kremlin-
linked firms, too. She shared e-mails she claimed Shvets had
written, showing he was busy winning business for a number of
Russian companies, including the sale of lucrative oil concessions
from state-owned oil major Rosneft, which is chaired by Kremlin
deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin, and an oil and gas venture, the
Babaykov Foundation, that according to an e-mail has links to
former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.
Shvets denied he had ever had any work with these companies, saying
he had worked solely on producing due diligence reports for British
and U.S. companies over recent years. Responding to a question
about the purported e-mails on the deals, he said: "The deals we
are talking about fly in the hundreds over the Internet. None of
them has ever materialized." He denied he had ever sought to play
both sides of the fence, working as an agent for both the Kremlin
and opposition businessmen. "In this industry, reputation is of
utmost priority," he said. "If you fail once or run into a conflict
of interest, your business is dead."
Berezovsky Connection
The common thread linking all the players in Litvinenko's death is
that they have all worked for Berezovsky. Apart from Lugovoi and
Shvets, there is Italian security expert Mario Scaramella, who met
Litvinenko at a sushi restaurant on Nov. 1, and Yevgeny Limarev, an
emigre in hiding in France to whom Goldfarb said he gave a $15,000
grant in 2002 for running an anti-FSB web site. Limarev sent
Scaramella an e-mail warning him that he and Litvinenko were on a
hit list put together by an elite squad of KGB veterans, Italian
media reported. Limarev could not be reached for comment.
Presiding over the information flow coming out of the Berezovsky
camp in the weeks since Litvinenko fell ill has been Goldfarb, a
longtime Berezovsky ally who began his career as a microbiologist
at Columbia University in the 1970s. Goldfarb first came to
prominence through his work in the late 1980s helping refuseniks
leave the Soviet Union.
Shvets entered the picture when it emerged he had been a business
partner of Litvinenko's. He went public with a Dec. 2 interview to
The Associated Press in which he declared that he knew the name of
the killer.
Until recently, Shvets has kept a relatively low profile, working
at the Alexandria, Virginia-based Center for Counterintelligence
and Security Studies with Kalugin, the former counterintelligence
chief, and had earned a living mainly by providing testimony to the
U.S. immigration service for Russian emigres seeking to live in the
United States. In 2002, he landed a $400,000 contract from
Berezovsky to transcribe a set of audiotapes that appeared to
implicate then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma in the killing of
journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and in sanctions-busting arms deals.
Shvets said he no longer does any work for Berezovsky. But the
connection did provide him with an introduction to Litvinenko, he
said.
Shvets said Litvinenko introduced him last year to Scaramella, who
has courted controversy with his claims that the Soviets left
nuclear mines in the Bay of Biscay and that Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi had links to the KGB.
In a recent telephone interview, Scaramella said he began his
career as a lawyer and then advised U.S. universities on
environmental security issues, work that landed him a post as
secretary general of a little-known organization called the
Environmental Crime Prevention Program, which has a rotating
presidency held by countries including Angola and Samoa.
Scaramella said he had been hired as an expert on the KGB for the
Mitrokhin Commission, an Italian parliamentary inquiry set up to
investigate links between Italian politicians and the KGB.
But instead of coming up with much information on KGB links to
Italy, he would often telephone the commission's office with tales
of plots by Kremlin agents seeking to kill him, said Paolo
Guzzanti, the head of the commission.
"It actually gave me a strong headache," Guzzanti said. "I always
took him in a very cautious way. There is not a line coming from
Mr. Scaramella in the Mitrokhin Commission report. Nothing was used.
"I have no reason to blame him and I have no mistrust. But I was
extremely cautious about him because I was aware of his connections
with the Russian circle in England."
Litvinenko did not appear to trust Scaramella, either. He regarded
him as the prime suspect in his poisoning for at least three or
four days after he was in the hospital, said Shvets, who was in
telephone contact with Litvinenko.
"I was saying over and over again, 'Forget about Scaramella,'"
Shvets said. When Litvinenko finally recalled the meeting with
Lugovoi too, Shvets said he told him: "Sasha, you are crazy. All
big security companies in Moscow are controlled by the FSB."
Among the tangled chain of agents, former or otherwise, is another
voice: that of Julia Svetlichnaja, the academic who interviewed
Litvinenko together with Heartfield.
Svetlichnaja, a postgraduate art and politics student at the
University of Westminster, spent hours talking with Litvinenko. She
said in an interview that he had said he was going to blackmail, or
sell information on, Kremlin officials and oligarchs alike.
London's The Sunday Times said in a recent report earlier this
month that Litvinenko had crossed Russian mafia figures. It cited
sources in Spain as saying he had provided information that helped
lead to the arrest in May of nine suspected members of a mafia
gang. RIA-Novosti reported at the time that a lawyer for Yukos,
Alexander Gofstein, was among the detained.
