In the days after the strange death of Alexander Litvinenko, I was struck by how far-fetched were the rumours cloaking his sinister end in a London hospital. Among the reasons he was considered a target was that he had written a book alleging that agents from the Russian secret service (FSB), in which he had been a Lieutenant-Colonel, had organised the 1999 apartment block bombings that resulted in 300 deaths in Moscow and other Russian cities.
That book was assumed to be in circulation, but nowhere was it available save in samizdat form. Now it is being published, and if everyone thinks they know the contents, they damned well don't.
At first glance, Blowing up Russia looks too bad to be true. Bought by Hollywood, with Daniel Craig or Johnny Depp tipped to play Litvinenko, the story reads less like |
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Litvinenko’s account of Putin’s rise to power is finally published. nicholas shakespeare believes every word |
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James Bond than Clouseau, albeit with shades of a Siberian Goodfellas.
Litvinenko, a teetotal pentathlete, had been sent to assassinate a wealthy oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, in London. Instead, he warned Berezovsky about his orders and went public.
Then, with the help of his co-author, exiled Russian academic Yuri Felshtinsky, he defected to London where he repeatedly accused Vladimir Putin, his FSB boss, of involvement in further state-sponsored assassinations. More damaging still, he fingered Putin and other FSB generals as being responsible for the 1999 bombings that they had falsely pinned on 'Chechnyan terrorists'.
The war that Putin immediately launched against Chechnya, claims Litvinenko, was a cynical affair contrived to sweep Putin and the FSB to power. "The only  |
