Dec 15 2006

Lugovoi Definitely Berezovsky Ally

I was going to add this in a long line of comments to answer someone’s question, and decided to make a post for everyone to find. Lugovoi was definitely an ally of Berezovsky’s – so the assassination theory seems a little more stretched than it was before. And it explains why Goldfarb first tried to divert suspicion from Lugovoi. Now that Lugovoi is a participating witness (prossibly under a plea agreement) Berezvosky’s mouth piece is having to change tactics. Looks like everyman is now out for themselves in a battle that could put someone away for life. I am wondering more and more whether the Litvinenko incident and the spat of killings is really the preparation for some kind of coup d’etat in Russia.

248 responses so far

248 Responses to “Lugovoi Definitely Berezovsky Ally”

  1. crosspatch says:

    Looks like Boris is now trying to get Kovtun thrown under a bus but he ignores Lugovoi’s contamination.

  2. crosspatch says:

    Hmmm

    “MITROKHIN CASE: SCARAMELLA INVESTIGATED FOR FALSE INFORMATION
    (AGI) – Bologna, Dec 15 – Mario Scaramella, the former consultant of the Mitrokhin commission, is being investigated by the Bologna D.A. for having presumably given false information to the prosecuting magistrate. The investigation, carried out by chief prosecutor Enrico Di Nicola and public prosecutor Paolo Giovagnoli, concerns the statements made on January 30 on the suitcase which allegedly contained uranium bars transported between Rimini and San Marino.”

  3. Gotta Know says:

    Likbez,

    Sorry, I had to leave for a while…What I meant was, as we discussed earlier, ostensibly all governments stand to lose by this smuggling…and you said that history indicates otherwise. So my question to you is, could Putin’s Russia be accomplices in the smuggling of Polonium?

  4. Barbara says:

    Hmmm. Nicola. Isn’t that the name of the guy who was killed getting Sgrena out Iraq? I wonder if there is any connection.

  5. Gotta Know says:

    Jerry,

    I believe you’re in the assassination camp. What do you think of the fact that Litvinenko met with Scaramella, supposedly an expert in nuclear materials and nuclear waste? Do you believe this is a coincidence, or a complication, or a problem with the theory, or something else altogether?

    (For the record, as of 8:00 EST I am 70% smuggling, 30% assassination, the meeting with Scaramella being one of several facts currently tipping the balance.)

  6. crosspatch says:

    Russia sells all of it’s polonium production to the US. Any diversion would represent a loss of a “hard currency” export. In other words, Russia has a legitimate market for all it can produce so I see no incentive for the government to divert polonium. The amount inside Litvinenko has ben reported as $25 million dollars worth, I don’t know how much more all the additional contamination would add up to. Lets say that all the other contamination adds up to the same amount. That would be a $50 million loss in one month. That’s a lot of gravy.

    I would want to sell my polonium and use other poisons to kill people.

    It could be a diversion of plonium by an organization that has protection from someone in Putin’s government. But I have no reason to believe for certain that it came from Russia.

    Russia has a willing customer for all they can produce that pays them in hard currency. Iran has no customers for what they produce and could really use the hard currency.

  7. Gotta Know says:

    I agree, Crosspatch, with two caveats, ie possible exceptions: 1) the hit was important and was used to send a message, in which case the poison would be priceless; 2) this was a smuggling operation gone awry, and assuming Litvinenko had to go with polonium (as we’ve discussed previously), they did the job right and made sure it worked.

  8. crosspatch says:

    Killingn Litvinenko would’t be important. He hadn’t been in the news in in a major way in years, most of the times he appeared in the news, he was making outlandish claims (Putin behind 9/11) … etc. He just wasn’t that big of a fish to kill in this manner. The guy is sort of a crackpot. He wasn’t “investigating” the journalist that was killed, but he was bragging about blackmailing someone. He was talking about infomation on people that he should have “real soon now”.

    If he had any information that was worth killing him for, he had plenty of time to get it out into the light of day before he died. Any “investigating” he would have done would now be in the posession of Scotland Yard.

    We hear much about him now, but how much did you hear of him over the past 5 years before this happened? I would venture to say something close to nothing. He just wasn’t even on most people’s radar screen. Certainly not worth a global spectacle that would suddenly get him thrust onto the front pages of every paper in the world. The guy is bigger in death than he ever was in life. Russia wouldn’t’ want to do that.

  9. crosspatch says:

    Basically, someone made a martyr out of him.

  10. Gotta Know says:

    I just came across this from Ace of Spades: Apparently the search is on to determine the specific nuclear reactor that produced the P-210:

    http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=132&storyCode=2040950

    Amazing, if I lived to be 10,000 years old I could never begin to guess how this is even remotely possible.

  11. copydude says:

    In the same way, Politkovskaya’s death was worth far more to international propagandists than Putin. She had also drifted off the radar in Russia and her last book was not even published in Russia.

  12. crosspatch says:

    In fact, he was practically inviting a killing. He ate at that sushi place all the time. He took public transport. It is almost as if he was wanting someone to do something. I suspect that Litvinenko will go down in history much larger for having died in this way than he ever would have had he remained alive. That wouldn’t be in Russia’s interest. Had he remained alive, people would have eventually forgotten about him forever.

    He couldn’t keep living on those moments in his past like the press conference with the guys in hoods. At some point he would have to do something to provide for his wife and family. His access to goings on inside Russia was gone so he would never have any new information other than possibly rumors passed to him from others. Boris couldn’t use him anymore because he would have nothing new. So the time of living on his past was coming to an end and he needed to start earning his way in the world. But apparently he was sort of an oddball who didn’t behave himself well in meetings with clients and caused Lugovoi embarrassment. So maybe he was just becoming a real pain in the hips to Boris.

  13. crosspatch says:

    Finding the reactor would only be possible if we are talking about polonium in the metallic state. If that is the case, then I am positive this isn’t a hit by the government. If they have metallic polonium and enough of it to get some kind of fingerprint of impurities, then this must be a smuggling ring.

  14. jerry says:

    I am in the assassination camp Gotta Know, with the caveats that bringing Po into the UK to kill Sasha would also be smuggling and that a smuggling ring might also want to kill Sasha.

    When Sasha became sick he was very suspicious of Scaramella, maybe because he acted nervous or didn’t have anything to eat also because he only had emails to show him that could have just been emailed, then Sasha supposedly changes his view on this. At one point I thought the documents could have been contaminated and that is how Sasha became poisoned. Scaramella also has all these fuzzy relationships in combating smuggling, and with those byzantime Italian intel groups/plots that I still don’t have a grip on, which might mean that he’s a fraud supported by the smugglers. But he seems to have the confidence of Clarice, why I am not sure, so that means something.

    The contamination in the Millennium seems to say Sasha was poisoned there, before sushi, and Sasha supposedly abruptly asked to meet with Scaramella (rather than the reverse, which seems more sensible but I’m pretty sure this is right) . Scaramella also apparently doesn’t have a 5x lethal dose despite his saying that he did. Then the whole story about the documents seems to have been denied by that French guy who really didn’t disappear with his wife and daughter after all…. It does seem there’s a lot of confused facts surrounding Scaramella, eh? He’s a bit of a squid, disappearing behind his cloud of “facts.”

    I guess I think Scaramella is peripheral to the poisoning just because of the timeline. He and Sasha did have some involvement in isotope smuggling, maybe actually working on the side of the good guys?

  15. crosspatch says:

    “Po into the UK to kill Sasha would also be smuggling”

    Jeez. The amount that killed Litvinenko was less than 1/100 the size of the period at the end of this sentance.

    A particle that size could have fallen off his sleeve into his tea. You don’t need a “ring” to smuggle that much polonium into the country. You could hide it in the eye of a needle (and probably not find it again).

    I think you guys might not be understanding how little a physical quantity Litvinenko ingested. I would say that the contamination they have found on airplanes and in hotel rooms and offices and homes and cars is a lot more than Litvinenko got inside his body.

  16. mariposa says:

    Jerry, having an MD or osteopath (OD) here to answer some questions would help. I ran across a basic chart online addressing some of the medical issues with polonium exposure:

    Guide to polonium: Questions and answers
    http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-12-13-polonium-guide_x.htm

    What’s going on with Kovtun and Lugovoi in the hospital depends on what happened to them. If they’ve been poisoned, they may be undergoing chelation therapy, but I don’t know what that would involve. If it’s just contamination, they may be undergoing exhaustive rounds of tests. It may be a mater of letting the clock spin while things cool off, with Russia hiding them in a hospital, or they could be under “house arrest” and gag orders (which Lugovoi said he had to sign in regard to details of the investigation).

    Wonder if Russia is going to sweep the 20+ Aeroflot planes Germany wants tested for polonium?

  17. clarice says:

    Jerry, I’m with you. I do not think L and K are significantly contaminated; they could be treated–as initial reports said they were–as outpatients; and I think they are in the hospital to isolate them from the press and investigators.

    As for Scaramella..he was Berlusconi’s man and a Prodi foe. I think that’s what this is about.In the post war period, Italy was riddled with communists and he’s been collecting info on some who he says were hidden KGB agents–i.e., Prodi.

    CopyDude, nice try. There were 2 attempts on her life:A poisoning on a Russian plane as she was going to collect evidence and (a successful) shooting in a very public and horrifying way as she was about to publish the rights of her investigation.

  18. likbez says:

    Gotta Know,

    “So my question to you is, could Putin’s Russia be accomplices in the smuggling of Polonium? ”

    You should already know that I don’t think so 🙂

    The answer can’t be “yes” for any government which wants to establish rule of law (and Putin government definitly wants that in comparison with Eltsin’s ). He actually managed to exile or jail most notorious robber-barons of Eltsin’s epoch including Berezovsky which is IMHO important step for the establishing rule of law. And he managed to somewhat suppress mafia which taking into account its ethnic composition makes Italian mafia look like a kindergarten.

    Please note that in this sense Putin’s government is not that different from any other Western government and you can put Tony Blair on his place if you wish to understand his situation. All this blackmail campaign should not make us MSN lemmings, you know what I mean.

    Therefore, in this narrow sense you was right: no government that wants to stablish rule of law (mullah’s other other religious fundamentalists ruled goverments should not be counted here 🙂 can benefit from the accusation in smuggling be it with merit or without. And as we see Putin’s government is already a big loser in this case. This was/is a huge blow in the face. Think about the PR cost of all mainstream press publications.

    But there are a lot of governments and some other government can benefit :-). For example, a goverment that badly wants the return of Eltsin to continue economic rape of Russia: to consider this country a colony not a partner.

  19. Gotta Know says:

    Jerry, this from the Sunday Times:

    According to Litvinenko’s friend and co-author Felshtinsky, who spoke to him soon afterwards: “Alexander told me the meeting was very sudden. They weren’t meant to meet that particular day. Then Mario suddenly called and said he had to meet him immediately.

    “He thought his behaviour was odd. He told me that Mario was very nervous. He was drinking only water or something. Sasha [Litvinenko] ate something. “Then [Scaramella] gave him those papers and they were in English and Alexander actually could not go through them very quickly because his English was not good enough.”

    However everything concerning Scaramella seems to be suspect.

  20. Gotta Know says:

    Thanks Likbez.

    My concern is this: It seems clear that if there was smuggling, then Lugovoi and Kovtun were smuggling it. I have a hard time seeing these guys operating outside of Putin’s domain. Which was a concern because if so, it would mean potentially that Putin sanctioned the smuggling.

    And if he did, for what purpose, and where was it going? Pretty grim.

    Maybe someone can tell me: Could Iran or someone else have a benign use for polonium for nuclear power? (Not that Iran actually would use it that way, but that could be a useful cover. After all, Russia is selling Iran all manner of military equipment, why not some polonium.)