Cicero's Songs

Sir Robert Owen, as expected, has today filed his report into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The conclusions are stark: 1. I am sure that Mr Litvinenko did not ingest the polonium 210 either by accident or to commit suicide. I am sure, rather, that he was deliberately poisoned by others. 2.   I am sure that Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun placed the polonium 210 in the teapot at the Pine Bar on 1 November 2006. I am also sure they did this with the intention of poisoning Mr Litvinenko. 3.   I am sure that the two men had made an earlier attempt to poison Mr Litvinenko, also using polonium 210, at the Erinys meeting on 16 October 2006. 4.   I am sure that Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun knew that they were using a deadly poison (as opposed, for example, to a truth drug or a sleeping draught), and that they intended to kill Mr Litvinenko. I do not believe, however, that they knew precisely what the chemical that they were handling was, or the nature of all its prop...

My heart sinks as the distressing predictability of the Putin regime shows up yet again. On November 23rd 2006 Alexander Litvinenko- a Russian defector, but a British Citizen- died in a London hospital. It transpired that he had been poisoned with Polonium 210, with a radioactive signature of Russian origin. Over the course of the past five months the Police investigation has discovered evidence that directly links a Russian intelligence operative, Andrei Lugovoi, to the administration of the poison in a cup of tea served at the Millennium hotel, Grosvenor Square. Today, the Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that the evidence is such that Andrei Lugovoi may be charged with murder and his case sent for trial. As a Russian citizen residing in Moscow, the DPP will request the Russian authorities to extradite the indicted man to face trial. The initial response of the Russian authorities is to refuse this entirely legitimate request. Furthermore, on the same day, the Russian Envi...

Since we have established that the poison used to kill Alexander Litvinenko was Polonium -210, it has been clear that there was a direct connection with the Russian security services. The Polonium has also created its own trail- leaving traces in the plane that it came to Britain on, and cross contamination in several other planes. The investigation has already established that Alexander Litvinenko was murdered, that the poison came from a specific reactor in Russia and that the poison was brought to London on October 25th on a BA flight -around the time of the Arsenal-CSKA Moscow football match. Access to the poison is limited to people with specific security clearances in the Russian security services. As the question of how, and even who killed Mr. Litvinenko has become clearer, the critical question still remains: Why was Mr. Litvinenko killed? In attempting to answer this question, we keep taking more steps closer to the person and personality of President Vladimir Putin himself....

As the reverberations of the death of Alexander Litvinenko continue, several interesting facts come to light. Firstly, the killers who planted the Polonium 210 have left finger prints all over the crime scene. Not physically, but in the Polonium 210 itself. As we know, it is an extremely rare isotope. Not only that but the precise composition of the poison will identify the reactor that it came from. That reactor will be Russian- it may well be the GRU reactor at the "Aquarium". It is a direct smoking gun. Access to the poison will be very limited, and under the control of the Russian security service. Smuggling the poison into the United Kingdom would be difficult and although there are various ways that it could have come, however there is a good chance that it simply came through the diplomatic bag. The evidence that Russian security agents were involved is overwhelming- the Polonium could not have come from anywhere else. The question for Britain now is what to do next? T...

I had intended not to write about Russia for a little while. This is especially since I am in the Baltic states this week, and it is difficult to be objective about a Russia when here it seems very big, very bellicose and very close. However the death of Alexander Litvinenko may end up being the catalyst for a turning point in the perception of the West about what is happening in Russia. The British authorities are, rightly, trying to ensure that the investigation into Mr. Litvinenko's "unexplained death" will be as fair as possible. Quite likely, the British government does not want to find any connection between the Kremlin and a callous murder of a British citizen in London. Since proving such a connection in a court of law is likely to be extremely difficult, publicly the British government will maintain the polite fiction that this crime is an unpleasant distraction to good Anglo-Russian relations. Spies, especially double agents, are not popular with anyone on eithe...

I see that The Independent is making known its considered view of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Pity that they can not check the most basic facts. President Yuschenko of Ukraine was not poisoned by Thallium, but by Dioxin, as the most cursory check would have shown. It is hard to take the Indy seriously as a newspaper of record when it can not even get the most basic facts right.

An attempt has been made to kill Alexander Litvinenko One of Boris Berezovsky's allies in London. This piece from The Times gives a flavour of the man. I occasionally meet refugees from the regime in Russia who have come out of the looking glass world of the secret services. Oleg Gordievsky , a highly successful agent- for the British, or Vasili Mitrohkin who brought much of the KGB archive into the public domain. I think Westerners often find the cloak and dagger brutality of the Soviet state very difficult to believe. It is always a salutary experience reading the books of Viktor Suvorov , especially Aquarium , his personal history as a GRU- Soviet military intelligence- officer. The murderous brutality of the machine is made entirely plain. It is interesting to see how short people's memories are- the mysterious and very convenient death of Stephen Curtis of Bank Menatep in a helicopter accident seems to have been long forgotten. Modern Russia is led by a former KGB offi...