Chris
Floyd
Friday, December 1, 2006
I.
The Baron and the Billionaire
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.
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 spoonfed
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.
(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'
Iraqi branch formed as a joint venture with business cronies
and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi $40
million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has
grown into a much larger stashn, not to mention 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.)
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.
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 a
dumbed-down "interactive teaching" system called COW to public
school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting
a First Family boondoggle.
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.
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?
(More after the jump.)
II. Wheels Within Wheels
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 him in, provided him with a house in London, and bankrolled
Litvinenko's 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.
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 t o 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.
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.
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.
They were equally
willing to ignore the curious connections of the last man who
sup
posedly
met with Litvinenko before the onset of his disease: Mario Scaramella
(right), 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.
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.
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/FSB
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.
During his FSB days,
Lugovi also served as one of the bodyguards for Acting Prime Minister
Yegor Gaidar, during the latter's short but tumultuous tenure
guiding Russia's first post-Soviet government. Gaidar was a "free-market"
zealot and ardent Thatcherite who, under the guidance of Harvard
economist Jeffrey Sachs, applied a chainsaw to Russia's social
and economic infrastructure: "shock therapy," it was called, and
it almost killed the patient. Millions lost their jobs, were driven
out into the streets to beg or sell off their possessions, millions
fell ill as the economy collapsed, multitudes died, and Russia
began its horrifying plunge in average lifespan an unprecedented
event for a developed nation.
Now Gaidar's family
claim that he too has been poisoned by some mysterious substance;
he became violently ill during a trip to Dublin last week. The
Gaidar illness, with its tenuous link to Lugovi, is yet another
dark string in the increasingly tangled skein. Gaidar, by the
way, although nominally in the political opposition, also works
occasionally as an economic consultant for the Putin government.
Lugovi meanwhile has
apparently become a successful private detective and "security
consultant" 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.)
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, tycoon, 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.
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.)
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, for whatever reason,
might have done it. (Matt
Taibbi has an excellent article with some of the more solid
speculations on this point.) 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.
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.
