KGB

It was going to be a special dinner to celebrate the sixth anniversary of their escape from Russia. Marina Litvinenko cooked a special recipe from her mother, chicken and \o7blini\f7. Often, Alexander ate out because he didn't have time for family dinners. "This time, he said, 'Marina, I will eat with you,' " she said, remembering the night her husband started dying. A few hours after dinner, he said he felt sick. "I said, 'Why? It was so delicious, so good.'

A former KGB officer with long-standing ties to President Vladimir V. Putin declared Tuesday that infighting among the current and former secret police who dominate the government threatens to bring political instability to Russia. Viktor Cherkesov, head of the Federal Narcotics Control Service, said that the former KGB agents appointed to powerful posts by fellow ex-spy Putin had saved Russia from collapse after the chaos of the 1990s.

A former KGB agent who had accused the Russian security services of involvement in several killings was transferred to intensive care Monday after British doctors confirmed he had been the victim of a deadly nerve poison. Alexander Litvinenko, 41, a Kremlin critic who has lived in Britain for several years, suffered a slight setback over the weekend and remained in serious condition, hospital officials in London said.

Here in Moscow on the Thames, it was a calling card from home. A former KGB agent who has settled in London to raise his family gets a warning that his name is on an organized crime hit list, then falls ill from a mysterious poisoning. Theories involving the Kremlin and sinister business figures tumble around town like blinis from a hot pan. Suddenly, the elegant Mayfair townhouses with window-box geraniums and the Chelsea gastro pubs with designer vodka don't seem so far from Russia after all.

A former Russian spy who said he had been poisoned died Thursday night at a London hospital after a mysterious and rapid decline that left doctors puzzled over the cause of death, officials said. Alexander Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the Russian government, had suffered heart failure and was heavily sedated as medical staff struggled to pinpoint what had made the 43-year-old critically ill.

The British government began tracking radioactive hotspots in London in an attempt to trace the poison that killed a former KGB agent. Three people who reported possible symptoms of contamination were tested, but results will take several days. Britain announced a formal inquest after the death of Alexander Litvinenko, but Home Secretary John Reid warned against rushing to conclusions about who might be responsible.

An Italian security expert who met with a former KGB agent the day the ex-spy fell ill with radiation poisoning said he was under British protection and would be tested for contamination. Mario Scaramella has said that he met Alexander Litvinenko at a London sushi restaurant Nov. 1, the day Litvinenko became sick. He died Thursday.

British authorities said Sunday that they were widening their investigation of the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko on the heels of a fresh series of leads into the Russian's murky political and business connections stretching from Moscow to the U.S. "Over the next few days, I think all of these things will widen out a little from the circle just being here in Britain," Home Secretary John Reid told the "Sunday Live With Adam Boulton" program of Britain's Sky News.

Russia's chief prosecutor said Tuesday that a potential suspect in the London poisoning death of dissident former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko had been hospitalized and that British investigators would be allowed to see him only if doctors approved. Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika also said that Russia's constitution forbade the extradition of citizens and that if any Russians were identified as suspects in the case they would not be sent to Britain and could be tried only in Russia.

British authorities Wednesday formally classified the recent poisoning death of a dissident former Russian spy as a murder case, changing it from the category of a suspicious death. Alexander Litvinenko is believed to have been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210, probably on Nov. 1, when he met with several people in London.