Death of a dissident: Moscow's murky assassins
The Kremlin denies sending agents to murder Alexander Litvinenko. President Putin says the Cold War is over, the KGB has reformed. But the case has put Russia's sinister spies back in the spotlight, and Diplomatic Editor Anne Penketh finds they never really left us
The Independent
27 May 2007
On a cold, windy night in September 1999, a white Zhiguli drove into the yard of an anonymous block of flats on the outskirts of Ryazan, south-east of Moscow, transporting an unusual load.
Three people dragged three heavy sacks into the basement. A resident sounded the alarm, but the two men and a woman had vanished, leaving behind the sacks which were discovered to contain sugar, explosives and a detonating device. An attack that would have blown up the 12-storey building on Novosyolov Street had been foiled.
Former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko believed that the botched Ryazan attack was the work of the Russian security services, and wrote a book with an exiled Russian historian with the intention of proving it. His theory was that the Ryazan incident, and two other bombings in Russian cities, were carried out and blamed on the Chechens in order to start the second Chechnya war. The conflict propelled Vladimir Putin - Mr Litvinenko's boss when he betrayed his KGB vows by appearing at a Moscow news conference to denounce his own organisation - into the Russian presidency.
Mr Litvinenko, who fled Russia in fear of his life in 2000, two years after revealing that he had been ordered to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, is dead. In a murder that could have come straight out of a John le Carré novel, he was poisoned last November by drinking tea containing a radioactive substance, polonium- 210. Last week the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the suspect wanted for his murder is another former security agent, Andrei Lugovoi, whose extradition from Moscow is now being sought. The question that remains to be answered is whether Mr Litvinenko's murder was a state-sponsored assassination - a charge which the Kremlin strenuously denies.
Once KGB, always KGB, goes a Russian saying. "This is unfortunately not a joke. This organisation in real life doesn't allow people to leave it," says Yuri Felshtinsky, the Russian historian specialising in the security services who wrote Blowing Up Russia with Mr Litvinenko and now lives in exile in the US.
The two most prominent KGB defectors in the West, Oleg Gordievsky and Oleg Kalugin, are convinced that the KGB's successor agency is behind the Litvinenko murder. Russia experts say that the KGB, with its disregard for the value of human life, has failed to reform since communist times, and its penetration of society at home and abroad is as strong as ever.
"The successor agencies still have a lot of similar procedures as before in terms of secrecy and non-transparency. They believe they have the right to act without public control. Their esprit de corps remains the same - they are more loyal to themselves than to their own family," says Yuri Fedorov, an analyst with the think tank Chatham House.
The Soviet intelligence agencies, known by their various acronyms beginning with the foundation of the Cheka in 1917, were always in the murder business. From the killing of Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in 1940 to the umbrella poisoning of the Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, the target list is long and exotic.
"The greatest threat to the future of the KGB is its own past," British intelligence scholar Christopher Andrew wrote in 1990 as he published Soviet-era secrets with Mr Gordievsky in KGB, The Inside Story. "From its headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square it directed during the Stalinist era the greatest peacetime persecution and the largest concentration camps in European history." That era has been mercifully consigned to the history books. But there are signs that Mr Putin, a KGB colonel who was a spy in East Germany where the communist regime was the harshest in the Soviet bloc [not quite true - think Ceasescu's Romania - nimh], has overseen an expansion in the influence of security services after the democratic chaos of the Yeltsin years.
The early 1980s [..] saw the most dangerous period of East-West tension since the Cuban missile crisis 20 years earlier [..]. In Russia, foreigners were placed under surveillance, intimidated and harassed, and subjected to travel bans. Car tyres would mysteriously be let down overnight; telephones would ring with no caller and it was assumed that flats were bugged. Their buildings were guarded just as much to screen Russian visitors - warned against meeting foreigners - as for the safety of the residents.
The Russians were themselves at the mercy of KGB informers, placed inside every apartment block and workplace. Working relationships were distorted by the fact that a lowly employee such as a driver might in fact be a KGB officer who expected deference.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 presented both a challenge and an opportunity for the KGB. Its domestic agency, where Mr Litvinenko worked in its special anti-organised crime unit, is now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB). The SVR is the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Many former officers have put their knowledge to good use in private industry and security, but also in politics and the murky world of the black economy. Inside Russia, there has been a power grab by the former KGB associates of Mr Putin who wield considerable political influence as they have moved into the boardrooms of state-run companies.
Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Centre for the Study of Elites, analysed the CVs of 1,016 leading political figures. Her list included the departmental heads of the presidential administration and all members of the government. She found that 26 per cent had reported serving in the KGB or its successor agencies. However, further analysis of unexplained gaps in their CVs pointed to a massive 78 per cent having such connections.
Harassment of foreigners is again a feature, as British ambassador Tony Brenton can attest. The embassy had noisy demonstrators from the pro-government Nashi youth group picketing the Moscow embassy for months after the envoy attended an opposition meeting in St Petersburg last July.
But above all, the successor to the KGB is back in the assassination business thanks to the adoption of a law last summer which authorised the security services to kill "extremists" inside or outside Russia on the orders of the country's senior leadership. The definition of "extremism" includes being "libellously critical of the Russian authorities". The number of Russian intelligence agents based in London has remained at Cold War levels, according to MI5, with some 30 agentsnow said to be operating. But many other operatives are presumed to be deployed under cover. The Russian exile community is a particular target; prominent exiles including Mr Berezovsky and Chechen rebel spokesman Ahmad Zakayev live in fear of assassination.
But in addition to traditional espionage activities involving political and military intelligence, the Russian security services now reflect the needs of a hi-tech world. Russia was accused earlier this month by Estonia of an unprecedented cyber attack on Estonian government websites in retaliation for the removal of a Soviet-era war memorial which drew violent protests from the Baltic state's ethnic Russian minority.
Does Russia's security service still spy on its own citizens? According to Mr Felshtinsky, it no longer needs to. Russian society has been cowed, he says, amid political restrictions and the unsolved murders of investigative journalists. "Putin when he came to power destroyed the NTV channel. It was the most popular station at the time. They couldn't control it so they destroyed it. As for political parties - they try to control them or ban them."
"It's the same with Yukos," he went on, referring to the break-up of Russia's oil giant after its owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky fell foul of the Kremlin by becoming involved in opposition politics. Mr Khodorkovsky, once Russia's wealthiest man, is now serving a nine-year jail term in Siberia for tax offences. "If they can't control you and they can't buy you, they destroy you," says Mr Felshtinsky.
?
