LONDON/MOSCOW/ROME: The FBI of the United States has been dragged into the investigation of the death of the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, after details emerged that he had planned to make tens of thousands of pounds by blackmailing senior Russian spies and business figures.
Remarkable testimony from a Russian academic, Julia Svetlichnaja, who met Litvinenko earlier this year and received more than a hundred emails from him, reveals that the former Russian secret agent had documents from the FSB, the Russian agency formerly known as the KGB. He had asked Ms. Svetlichnaja, who is based in London, to enter into a business deal with him and "make money".
Contact goes into hiding
Scotland Yard officers involved in the investigation into the poisoning of Litvinenko travelled to Washington to interview a former KGB agent, Yuri Shvets, who said he had vital information. He was a contact of Mario Scaramella, the Italian security consultant who is also now suffering from polonium poisoning.
"I believe I have a lead that can explain what happened," Mr. Shvets confirmed last week before he was interviewed as a witness in the presence of FBI agents. Mr. Shvets, who lives in Virginia and is now apparently in hiding, declined to elaborate further. However, a business associate of Mr. Shvets, who asked to remain anonymous, said that Litvinenko had been claiming in the weeks before his death that he possessed a dossier containing damaging revelations about the Kremlin and the break-up of the Yukos oil company. The associate claims that Mr. Shvets, who spoke to Litvinenko in the days before his death, compiled the dossier.
Yukos was once owned by the oligarch Mikhail Khordorkovsky, who is serving seven years for tax evasion. His supporters say he was convicted as a result of a show trial orchestrated by the Kremlin.
The claims that Litvinenko had a dossier containing damaging information about big business interests and the Kremlin echo separate claims he made to Ms. Svetlichnaja, who interviewed the former KGB agent earlier this year for a book she is writing about Chechnya.
In Sunday's London-based Observer, Ms. Svetlichnaja, a politics student at the University of Westminster, says Litvinenko claimed he had access to Russian intelligence documents containing information on individuals and companies that had fallen foul of the Kremlin.
"He told me he was going to blackmail all kinds of powerful people including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin," she said. "He mentioned a figure of £10,000 that they would pay each time to stop him broadcasting these FSB documents. Litvinenko was short of money and was adamant that he could obtain any files he wanted."
Claims dismissed
Litvinenko's access to such documents could have made him an enemy of both big business interests and the Kremlin. However, his claims are almost impossible to verify and some political analysts have gone as far as to dismiss him as a fantasist.
Mr. Shvets (53), emerges as yet another character in an increasingly impenetrable espionage saga linking Britain, Italy, the U.S. and Russia. Like Litvinenko, Mr. Shvets has worked for the Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, whom the Kremlin has tried unsuccessfully to extradite from Britain. Mr. Shvets was a major in the KGB between 1980 and 1990, during which time he worked under cover in Washington as a correspondent for the Russian news agency, Tass. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. In 1999 he testified before Congress, claiming his evidence helped the U.S. authorities expose a $1-billion KGB money-laundering operation.
Mr. Shvets met Mr. Scaramella in Washington last year to discuss the Italian's role as a consultant to the Mitrokhin Commission, set up by the Italian Government to investigate Russian infiltration during the Cold War. It has been alleged that Mr. Scaramella discussed with the commission's chief, Paolo Guzzanti, whether they should look for evidence that Romano Prodi, Italy's Prime Minister, was linked to the KGB. Mr. Prodi denies any link.
Curtsy:www.hindu.com
