Litvinenko assassins likely to escape justice

Although British police are apparently certain that exiled Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in a plot orchestrated by elements of the Russian security service, they may never be able to bring charges against anyone because of diplomatic sensitivities and resistance from the Russian government, a “Dateline NBC” investigation has found.

The Kremlin has denied responsibility for Litvinenko’s death, which drew worldwide attention late last year as he excruciatingly wasted away from the poisonous effects of the radioactive isotope polonium 210. A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin told “Dateline” that the assassination was most likely carried out by enemies who wanted to ruin Russia’s image, and Putin himself said at a recent news conference that Litvinenko was not on the Kremlin’s radar.

But a review of the evidence and police statements, as well as “Dateline” interviews with British and Russian experts close to the case, members of Litvinenko’s family and a former senior KGB official, suggests that the police are confident they have solved the case. The question now is whether they will ever be able to do anything about it.

An athlete wastes away
Litvinenko, 43, died Nov. 23 in full view of the world, which watched as he slowly deteriorated into a bald, frail husk of the robust distance runner he had been just three weeks earlier.

Ann Curry • Profile

He was a decorated KGB counterintelligence agent before being promoted in 1997 to senior operational officer in the department investigating organized crime at the FSB, as the KGB was renamed in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet state.

But in 1998, he ran afoul of Putin, who was then head of the FSB. Along with four other FSB agents, Litvinenko appeared at a news conference to accuse the head of the organized crime directorate of ordering the assassination of Boris Berezovsky, a powerful businessman and political schemer who was an ally of President Boris Yeltsin.

Litvinenko, who tipped off Berezovsky to the plot, was fired and arrested three times. After being jailed for a month, he was released when he promised never the leave the country. Using a forged passport, he sneaked himself, his wife and their young son out of the country and sought asylum in London on Nov. 1, 2000 — six years to the day before he was poisoned.

In exile in London, Litvinenko undertook a new calling as an anti-Kremlin journalist, writing exhaustively about what he saw as the abuses of the Russian government in its fight against Chechen separatists during the 1990s.

He accused the FSB of having set off the bombs that killed more than 300 people in explosions at apartments in Russia in 1999, which the government blamed on Chechen separatists and used to justify its second war in Chechnya. Likewise, he charged, at least two of the Chechen separatists who took hostages at a theater in Moscow in October 2002, in which 162 people died, were in fact working for the FSB.

Over time, his accusations grew more extreme. He accused the FSB of having trained Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaida, during the late 1990s. He published an article accusing Putin of being a pedophile.

Then, last October, a crusading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who had become internationally prominent for her exposés of the government’s activities in Chechnya, was gunned down outside her home. Litvinenko began looking into that case and accused Putin of having ordered Politkovskaya’s assassination.

That may have been the last straw — the Kremlin was already under international pressure from journalists and human rights groups highlighting the number of prominent anti-Putin journalists who have been killed during the last few years.

If the Kremlin wanted Litvinenko dead, it had plenty of motive.

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