Dec 13 2006
Some Litvinenko Thoughts
The news on Litvinenko’s death and the Polonium-210 trail has succumbed to the moder Ripper news, so obviously something very quiet is being done behind the scenes or the trail is growing cold. I think it is the former because this quick response by the Germans in response to some possible evidence that Kovtun made a phone call from Berlin during his period in Germany between Moscow and his trip to meet Lugovoi and Litvinenko in London.
I meant to note I find the constantly shifting stories by Lugovoi and Kovtun to be a clear sign they new full well they have been in contact with radiactive material. The tanning salon excuse is just pathetic. I also find their pointing to Oct 16th as possible contamination point telling as well. They knew that their illnesses were due to Polonium 210, but they only realized their problem after Litvinenko fell ill and died. Up until they could not hide the truth anymore (i.e., they needed medical attention) they tried to divert suspicion using one lame excuse after another. But they knew it was Polonium 210.
Add this the fact Berezovsky’s mouthpiece Goldfarb went out of his way to dismiss any idea that Lugovoi and Kovtun could have been involved in the assassination effort and one can see he too was trying to divert attention from them as culprits in Litvinenko’s death. When in reality they represented the best lead to Putin and Russia as part of an assassination effort. Why would Berezovsky/Goldfarb go out of there way to publically vouch for the best supporting evidence of a Russian assassination plot to ever surface? Diversion. Only when it became clearly obvious that Lugovoi was ill did Goldfarb go silent again.
Finally, the delay in questioning Lugovoi could easily be seen as negotiations for a plea agreement. Lugovoi has been giving the public perception he is working for investigators on this case, and investigators are not out denying anything. We still have this mysterious fourth contaminated hotel out there, and we have police backing away from the poisoned tea cup theory. I would not be surprised if within a few days we see some sweeping actions by authorites. Then again, I would not be surprised to see nothing new happening for days on end as well. My latest musings for all to rip apart at their leisure!
I’m not sure I agree that Lugovoy is a Boris man.
If he were, he would be persona non grata in Putin’s Russia.
Lugovoy is the only one with a credible cover, on the surface. He is in the bodyguard business. English firms recruit Russians for work overseas. They also require partners in Russia where foreign security firms are not allowed licenses.
Eduard Limonov, who once shared the same Lefortovo jail as Lugovoy, recalls that Lugovoy had been used in the past for provocation – setting people up – and gives an example.
Why did he meet Litvinenko so many times? It is possible, in order to keep tabs on him or set him up. It’s said he didn’t rate his entrepreneurial skills. Moreover, Litvinenko’s English was appalling by all accounts, so not the ideal liaison officer.
There’s an explanation for the shifting stories – not idea if it helps.
In the beginning, the ‘tsunami of PR’ was directed by Goldfarb, before any journalist or blogger had started digging. It’s almost as if the campaign was waiting to roll before Litvinenko was poisoned.
The propaganda portrait of Litvinenko as a human rights worker investigating the death of Anna Politkovskaya was foremost. It was natural for him to be on Putin’s nasty hit-list, and so on.
Cred for these stories was provided by characters such as Trepashkin – carefully chosen sources no one could ever hope to verify.
When Goldfarb wasn’t around, Zakayev fed the press – but his PR agenda was slightly different. Zakayev introduced the deathbed conversion to Islam. When Goldfarb got back from the US for the funeral, the press was told to do an about face. You could see a visible timeline of change on Google news. Even the accounts of the funeral conflicted. Rupert Murdoch of the Times is in Berezovsky’s pocket as we know and both are clients of Bell PR.
Crosspatch made a fundamental point on the previous thread. The original story was a PR fabrication that the media wanted to believe. And as the case has gone on, successive journalists have tried to shoehorn the emerging facts to fit, often contradicting themselves in the process.
Perhaps the most questionable info has come concerning Polonium – including that from the British Health Protection Agency. There’s no independent verification for traces of Polonium in many cases. There’s also a marked difference in the British and German investigation. The former has accented low risk. The latter has been characterised by high protection suits and huge decontamination units.
But again, much ‘negative PR value’ information has been excised from the British media. Interesting report in Kommersant about the funeral. The day of the funeral was suddenly moved up by the authorities and the lead-lined, airtight coffin came from a secret Ministry of Defense site.
I can only agree that there’s simply too much Polonium at too many locations for it not to be smuggling. But it’s always possible that someone decided Litvinenko should be the one to have an accident with it.
CP, I apologise for my hideous male ego. I woke up this morning feeling rather like a turd.
Great list, Crosspatch. I agree with your #1 pick:
“1. Smuggling ring contaminates itself, kills Litvinenko to justify existance of polonium.”
At first I couldn’t figure out why they would need to take out Litvin but then I remembered that according to Lug and Kov he was already sick by Nov 1, which would expose them to discovery. So they applied the coup de grace at the Millenium.
If so, it suggests this operation has been shut down for a month and a half. I’m afraid that if they’re professional they would have covered their tracks by now. My hope is that they did not know that the stuff could be traced as effectively as it has been, and that they were not counting on that. If so, the cat may be out of the bag.
Assuming it was Lug and Kov, who were they working for? And if they were working against Putin, would they have returned to Russia? If they did a cover-up assassination, they must have realized there would be a murder investigation that could lead back to them. Litvin could even have fingered them. And yet they went to Russia.
I have to think we can’t rule out that Russia is complicit in the smuggling.
…and that, if so, we won’t be hearing from Lug and Kov much longer. Putin will take them out.
I posted some thoughts on this yesterday:
http://insidestraight.typepad.com/the_inside_straight/2006/12/emerging_theori.html
(Yes,yes. I know. Shameless blog promo !)
Interesting posts. I myself think it’s smuggling and the result of an accident. Leaky container? Possibly this was part of an effort to build a bomb to be used BY the Chechens AGAINST Russia, possibly funded by Berezovsky. There’s the fact that Zakayev and Sasha L were such good buddies, and the contacts with Lugovoi & Kovtun who were probably in it just for the $.
Blaming Putin doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not even blaming him for the “atmosphere” that allows all this murder and pillage. Russia has a long history of this kind of thing, going back for 1,000 years. The only way to get things done during the Soviet era was to pay bribes & watch your back and that is no different now. It takes a lot of time to change an entire culture. Putin is a part of that culture, cleaner than some.
It will be interesting to see what actually comes out of this. the news reports are so conflicting, so technically inept, and so poisoned by the assassination by Putin scenario that they are hardly to be relied upon. German ones seem better, but that’s a really small piece of the puzzle. The various witnesses are also probably spreading disinformation like mad. We only have Goldfarb’s word that Sasha really blamed it all on Putin anyway — it was “dictated” to him in Russian, then translated and read out to the media AFTER he died. Goldfarb seems like a real spin doctor.
I think what happened yesterday or actually Tuesday/night into Wednesday was that the German police thought the call to the mother in law was from Kovton in BERLIN at the time which is why they raced there with contamination suits on. That is why they questioned the fact that Kovton was the person speaking to der Spiegel on Tuesday – in fact they (the Germans) say that all that was visible of the speaker on TV was sunglasses – the rest of the person was hidden. The article yesterday where this story broke was a little unclear about which Tuesday they were talking about – the time when Kovtun was in Berlin or right now….Here’s the German: Die Hamburger Polizei hat einen Pressebericht zurückgewiesen, nach dem sich der in die Polonium-Affäre verstrickte Russe Dimitri Kowtun Anfang der Woche möglicherweise in Berlin aufgehalten hat.” ( Focus.de )
By the way it is very bizarre, the whole story of Kovton calling his mother in law from Berlin this Tuesday – The Germans had the phone tapped and were able to trace this call back to Berlin – maybe the caller identified himself as Kovton – who knows!
Press Conference or Police guy on TV in Germany said this whole thing was a false lead – Kowtun was not in Berlin
Scotland Yard investigators in the Litvinenko case plan to question nine-ten people in Moscow as witnesses.
All of them are linked to a trip to London by some of Litvinenko’s acquaintances in October-November 2006.
“These are direct acquaintances and business partners of Alexander Litvinenko, in particular, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who have been interrogated, Vyacheslav Sokolenko, their family members, drivers,” the Interfax source said.
As of now, over half of those on the list have been interrogated, he said. http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/politics/28.html?menu=1&id_issue=11647416
here’s the story of the telephone call and Berlin in English:
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20061214/56922540.html
it leaves out a part of the German article which speculates that Kovtun called from Russia via a cheap cost cutting cell phone service in Berlin and that is how the call was traced back to Berlin.
now he knows the phones are tapped!
About Putin’s gas grab and what it means.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/12/russias_great_gas_grab.html
“I’m not sure I agree that Lugovoy is a Boris man.”
copydude, I agree. With every new blip I read, I am becoming more and more sure that Lugovoi is not Berezovsky’s man at all. Presuming that he was may have been a fatal mistake for Berezovsky’s crowd. And thank you, by the way, for that Limonov article. It sheds light on Lugovoi’s prison experience.
“now he knows the phones are tapped! ”
Tempester, the report you cited didn’t say that German authorities tapped Kovtun’s line. They just determined the route that his cell phone signal used between cellular signal towers.
Good article, Clarice; this point stands out for me:
We often carelessly assume that the march of progress will continue inevitably, secured by the triumph of market economies. While it is true that capitalism provides a demonstrably richer life for its beneficiaries, many powerful forces in the world do not find themselves advantaged by it. Russia, Islamofascists, and certain Euro-Socialists would rather see market forces confined and a greater number of important decisions in the hands of state or religious bureaucrats.
Sorry if my post appeared twice. The blog is not working well again for me today.
Here’s a “throwaway” (almost all filler, no scoops) interview with Valentin Velichko, head of Dignity and Honour, the group that Trepashkin claimed was after Litvinenko and others.
Russia does not murder spies any more -KGB veteran
BERLIN (Reuters) – The head of an organisation of former Russian spies was quoted as saying on Thursday Moscow abandoned its policy of assassinating enemies long ago, and that Alexander Litvinenko was probably murdered by criminals.
Former KGB agent Valentin Velichko, head of a Moscow-based Russian nationalist foundation called “Dignity and Honour”, said in an interview that former KGB agent Litvinenko, who died in London on November 23 from radiation poisoning, was a traitor but was not killed by Moscow.
“That was long ago. It belonged to the days of Stalin,” Velichko told Die Welt newspaper. Millions died under the rule of dictator Josef Stalin, who died in 1953.
“In those days there was a special department … which handled the liquidation of political opponents,” said Velichko, who also heads the Veterans of Foreign Intelligence.
[More:
http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/international/ticker/detail/Russia_does_not_murder_spies_any_more_KGB_veteran.html?siteSect=143&sid=7349697&cKey=1166112493000 ]
I have boiled this puzzle down to just two scenarios, and I’m more or less 50-50 on which one best fits the facts.
Let’s start with one key assumption to filter out the various theories: Was there incompetence involved, or was this some sort of set-up? I don’t believe it was a set-up. There is no way it could be a smuggling operation and involve some sort of set-up, because the smugglers would want to keep this whole thing quiet. If it were an assassination set-up, it seems unusually complicated and convoluted, with an awful lot of people involved, not to mention a substance that is very hard to control.
So I am taking as a starting point a major dose of incompetence, or (if you prefer) ignorance about the substance at hand. Who in the world has experience with it? You could portray polonium as being dangerous to ingest but not to handle and still be within shooting range of the truth. (Remember that it was depicted by one ‘expert’ as being safe if stored in a knotted baggie.) It is also not detected by geiger counters and the like and so would not be of concern in terms of passing through customs. However, a suitable container that would not draw suspicion could be a problem, so the transporter did not use an adequate container.
This incompetence or ignorance would apply equally to assassins or smugglers. If we assume incompetence, we don’t need to rely on complicated backstabbings or smuggling leading to murder or murder leading to smuggling, we have our accident, and that is sufficient.
So my two scenarios are, simply, a Putin-directed hit, or a Berezovsky-managed smuggling ring.
Why assassination? Because, again with the benefit of hindsight, the assassin may have thought all he had to do is spike Litvinenko’s drink a time or two and get out of dodge, presumably undetected. Yes the death would be mysterious and yes people would suspect Putin, but it would remain at the level of speculation. Putin not only has his assassination law in place now, but also he seems particularly emboldened by recent events, most notably the aftermath of our very own midterm election. He is in bed with Iran, he is taking over others’ oil and gas operations, and he is assassinating his enemies. So Lugovoi and / or Kovtun carry out the assignment, and lo and behold, Houston we have a problem. But hey, polonium happens, and they’re safely back in Russia, with no chance of extradition, the ruble (and the investigation) stops here. And yes they’re exposed, but who would have known, which leads us back to incompetence.
Why smuggling? Because of all of the reasons provided in these comment sections over the course of the past ten days. There just flat out seems to be too much of the stuff around to have been a hit. The press has had a hayday with how extremely lethal this stuff is, and I have to think that the transporter(s) would at least have known that. Is it really a coincidence that polonium is used in nuclear triggers; that Litvinenko was sympathetic to the Chechnens; that he converted to Islam shortly before his death; and that the UK is all aflutter about a dirty bomb?
Both theories have their problems but I don’t see that either can be eliminated. Have I forgotten something, am I leaving some key piece of evidence out?
Some points:
It looks like Litvinenko was desprate for money and Beresovski cau his allowance from 5000 to 1500.
It looks like Litvinenko was a psychopath.
As Kovtun worked like waiter in Hamburg he might be more involved then Crosspath think.
All major players are connected to Beresovski.
Existance of fake hitlist makes it probably that Italian is involved too.
http://www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=1164
not sure about this source, but it is an interesting read