Continuing the current policy of aggressive Russian reactions,
Moscow warned the British that they must officially disown the
statement purportedly made to a BBC-TV journalist that Her
Majesty’s Foreign Office believes the Russian government was behind
the poisoning of the former KGB/FSB officer, Alexander Litvinenko,
in London. Apparently what really set the Kremlin’s teeth to
gnashing was that the source was supposedly a “senior British
security official.”
What happened to the good old Russian technique of deny, deny,
deny? Since when is it officially important to Moscow to threaten
Whitehall to “downgrade relations” if there isn’t a retraction from
10 Downing Street for something sourced by a journalist to an
unnamed Brit official? All this because the British insist on
seeking to extradite another former KGB stalwart, Andrei Lugovoi,
for his suspected role in killing his former friend,
Litvinenko.
It’s amazing that Lugovoi, if he is that important, actually has
been allowed to remain a public matter with the Russians. The usual
method has been to ignore another nation’s claims of malfeasance by
a Russian security agent and have the officer disappear into a
cushy job until the fracas blows over. Instead the Russians have
escalated their response.
First, they held the country director of the British Council,
the UK’s information and cultural agency, on trumped up charges of
a traffic infraction in St. Petersburg. The Kremlin ordered the
closing of the Council’s offices in two Russian cities. (See my
column, The KGB vs.
Shakespeare, 1/25/08)
They now have just charged the acting director of UK Trade and
Industry in Moscow, Chris Bowers, with being an MI6 officer. To
“burn” a ranking British diplomat may not seem very important, but
this seeming petulance actually puts a considerable crimp into
British commercial PR operations in Russia — to say nothing of
Bowers own career. A bit of an over-reaction don’t you think, old
chap?
FAR MORE IMPORTANT is the as yet unexplained illness in his west
London home of Alex Allan (57), chairman of the U.K. Joint
Intelligence Committee. This mysterious circumstance has once again
brought up the poisoning of the Russian intelligence defector
Litvinenko, even though no official connection has been made —
yet.
The apparently healthy Mr. Allan collapsed in his home and was
found in a pool of blood by a friend who rents a studio in his
house. He was in a coma for ten days. Pneumonia has been one
unlikely explanation that has been floated. No other official
comment has been made. Alex Allan remains incommunicado.
In spite of the fact that Mr. Allan is extremely high ranking to
be a target of a Russian intelligence “wet affair,” it is something
that certainly can not be ruled out. In Allan’s position in the JIC
he oversees the assessment of the intelligence gathered by MI5,
MI6, Military Intelligence, and the electronic intercepts of GCHQ.
This is a post substantially beyond the pay grade of both
Litvinenko and his suspected assailant, Andrei Lugovoi.
That said; the real objective of the Kremlin is to gain leverage
in order to get its hands on the high profile billionaire Boris
Berezovsky and his fellow expatriate, the Chechen politician, Ahmed
Zakayev. To this end Moscow has created a “full court press” in
Russian-UK relations. Among other things, it has inhibited the
solution to the ownership disagreement of the planned giant
international energy company, TNK-British Petroleum, a
multi-billion dollar deal.
THE MULTIPLICITY OF CLAIMS flying back and forth between London and
Moscow appears to have totally obscured the basic issues. And this
is exactly the way the Russians want it. Before Lugovoi and his
family fled London, he already had tested positive for trace
elements of the Litvinenko poison, polonium-280 — as did his hotel
rooms, his airplane seat, and his wife.
Lugovoi, late of the elite KGB 9th Directorate personal guard
detachment, and its successor, the Federal Protection Service, has
been officially charged with murder by the Crown Protection Office,
the British equivalent of the US Attorney’s Office.
The trouble is that in the intervening year Lugovoi has become a
hero back in Russia and elected to the State Duma. The Russian
government continues to refuse to allow the British to extradite
him. To thumb his nose further — and thereby gain public and
official Kremlin support — Lugovoi now says MI6 tried to recruit
him and that the real truth is that British intelligence and/or the
Russian mafia assisted by Boris Berezovsky’s billions are the real
culprits in Litvinenko’s murder.
The Russians will say this often enough that they soon will be
totally convinced of its veracity. In intelligence such
disinformation is known as “snow.” One easily can become blinded in
such a snowstorm of one’s making.
