I watched a couple James Bond movies over the last two days, so it is kind of apropos for me to crack open my Washington Post this morning and read about a British/Russian spy intrigue/murder.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy and vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died Thursday night in a London hospital after being mysteriously poisoned.
Litvinenko, 43, was placed under armed guard at the hospital last week after medical tests confirmed he had been poisoned. Doctors said his thick brown hair suddenly fell out and he suffered severe liver and bone marrow damage. But they said they have been unable to identify what caused the exceptionally fit man to start vomiting Nov. 1, grow steadily sicker and die.
“His heart just stopped,” said Alex Goldfarb, a friend who has been at his bedside. “The family is devastated.”
University College London Hospital released a statement saying Litvinenko died at 9:21 p.m. after “the medical team at the hospital did everything possible to save his life” and to determine the “cause of his condition.” It said that because of an ongoing police investigation, it would make no further comment.
Litvinenko was a colonel in the Federal Security Service, FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, who became highly critical of some of his superiors. He is well known for accusing FSB agents of involvement in apartment building bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people. Russian officials blamed the attacks on separatists from Chechnya and launched a new military offensive in the republic.
Everything is just a little less subtle when it is done by the Russians…but then maybe that is the point. Litivinenko was looking into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist that was shot and killed in Moscow last month.
Meanwhile, in Canada, there is another high profile case involving a Russian spy. It appears the Russians have ramped their spy services back up to Cold War levels and are focusing on corporate espionage as a way to narrow their technological and economic gap with the West. Bush stared into Putin’s soul and saw that he was good. I don’t think Putin is good. I think Putin is dangerous and his intelligence services are a murderous gang. And our President is a credulous buffoon.
