THE COLD WAR was supposed to have ended 15 years ago, but the death in London of Alexander V. Litvinenko presents Scotland Yard with more than your average murder mystery. The former Russian spy and fierce critic of the Kremlin was poisoned. But how and by whom?
The tale began Nov. 1 at itsu, a busy London sushi restaurant near Piccadilly Circus that features a Madame Butterfly Zinger, Squirrels Dreams and something called Bang Bang Free Range Chicken. Poison is definitely not on the menu.
Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and a KGB successor agency, had lunch at itsu with an Italian contact. Within hours, Litvinenko felt sick. Last week, he was in a London hospital, guarded by Scotland Yard. He died Thursday night.
Doctors and toxicologists at first thought that the Russian exile was a victim of poisoning with thallium, the same stuff the CIA once plotted to use to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out. They subsequently suspected radioactive thallium or some other poison. A British health official said last week that Litvinenko had died of a large dose of polonium 210, a radioactive isotope, and British Home Secretary John Reid said police were checking for radiation "at a number of locations." Scotland Yard reported that traces of polonium 210 were found at the sushi restaurant, a hotel where Litvenenko had met two Russians and in his home.
Suspicion immediately focused on the Russian Federal Security Service, the KGB successor agency for which Litvinenko had worked in Moscow. In 2000, he broke with the spy agency, accusing it of various crimes. He then fled to London, where he was granted political asylum. His 2003 book, "The FSB Blows up Russia," accused the security service of bombing apartment houses in Moscow so the Russians could invade Chechnya again, a charge that enraged the Kremlin.
At the time he was poisoned, Litvinenko was investigating the Oct. 7 murder in Moscow of Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist and leading critic of the Kremlin's policies in Chechnya.
Although there is no solid evidence tying the Russian security service to the poison plot -- a Kremlin official called such suspicion "pure nonsense" -- the KGB has a track record of using poison to eliminate opponents, most notably in the 1978 poison umbrella case. In that episode, Moscow assisted in the murder of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, who was jabbed in the thigh on Waterloo Bridge in London with an umbrella tip containing ricin, a lethal extract of the castor bean. Four days later, Markov was dead.
