My old newspaper the FT with a typical understatement of a ‘non-core’ news story relegates the Litvinenko pre-inquest review hearing story to a page 2 read-through today. Others were rather bolder. The Times splashed on it, and the Spanish media have got pretty excited too.
Whichever way you look at it, the Litvinenko case , which the FT gave me both time and column inches to cover back in 2006 , is one that certainly needs revisiting, however much sectors of the UK and Russian governments would like it to go away. The available evidence shows that this was not just an assassination on UK soil carried out by agents of a foreign state, but one that could have put hundreds, if not thousands of others at risk from radioactive poisoning. I remember being told by an ashen-faced Home Office official soon after Litvinenko had been hospitalised that there was real concern that no one in Whitehall (that included MI5) knew for certain the scope and scale of contamination following the Russian’s movements across London’s West End. (As it turned down, radioactive readings, while providing useful clues as to Litvinenko’s likely killers, showed the ‘fallout’ to have been relatively contained.)
The most detailed forensic investigation into the case, carried out by British counter-terrorist officers, suggests that those most directly involved had connections with the Russian intelligence services. Among those charged by the UK authorities with Litvinenko’s murder is Andrei Lugovoi, former KGB officer-turned-businessman and a member of the Russian Duha.
It was Lugovoi who in May 2007 claimed publicly in a Moscow press conference-presumably with Putin’s blessing -that Litvinenko’s had been recruited as a British agent soon after moving to the UK. Lugovoi suggested that MI6 had been involved in the death of Litvinenko after British agents had unsuccessfully tried to recruit him to collect compromising material on Putin.
What at the time seemed an attempt by the Russian state to cover Lugovoi’s back, is now being taken seriously by British lawyers acting for Litvinenko’s widow. Ben Emmerson QC told a British court yesterday that Litvinenko was a registered and paid agent and employee of MI6 and had been for a number of years with a “dedicated handler, whose pseudonym was Martin”. At the time of his death, Litvinenko was “not only working for the British secret services, but also, at the instigation of MI6, was working as a paid agent for the Spanish security services”, Emmerson said. He told the hearing that such a relationship “is sufficient to trigger an enhanced duty resting on the British government to ensure his safety when tasking him on dangerous operations”.
So- we now have not just the Russian state but British spies,and possibly Spanish spies as well, at the heart of a case that is likely to turn into a hugely controversial full-blown hearing next year unless the British intelligence community succeeds in having it conducted in secret. Whatever its outcome Marina Litvinenko is determined to see the truth come out, and feels she deserves financial compensation. Right is on her side, certainly on the first part of her mission.
The history of spying suggests the possibility that Litvinenko was not what he claimed to be, and may have been not just a double agent, but a triple. In other words he could have been working forthe British and the Russians and for a third party, even himself. What is certain is that Litvinenko, while in London, had contacts with private security services,and wrote and had published two books, wherein he accused the Russian secret services of staging terrorism acts to bring Putin to power. Days before his poisoning Litvinenko , introduced himself as a ‘former KGB agent’, gave a hard-hitting talk at London’s journalists’ Front-Line Club in October 2006 where he accused the Russian president of being directly responsible for the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. A YouTube video of this shows him pleading from the outset for maximum publicity around his claims.
For all the popularity generated by the figure of James Bond-007 licensed to kill-MI6 has in reality never been at the forefront of the killing game, whereas its Russian equivalent and associates have. It is interesting that Russian organized crime in Spain has now been drawn into the case although I understand from Spanish sources that the name Litvinenko does not appear in any current ongoing criminal proceedings in the Iberian peninsula-although intelligence and police cooperation between the British and the Spanish on terrorism and criminal matters is pretty solid.
Nevertheless MI6 have a long record of protecting the identity of the agents in order to safeguard ongoing and future operations, and their Spanish counterparts were today equally adopting an official “we neither confirm nor deny” position on the allegations. The problem for the spooks is that once again their in-house rule book is coming up again a public interest argument that they should provide the key to identifying the key to unlocking the mystery around an unlawful act, whose perpetrators and proven ‘handlers’ do not deserve to escape justice.
