Word: litvinenko
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...Litvinenko broke that promise. With Putin having succeeded Yeltsin as President, Litvinenko and his family fled to London in October 2000--shortly after Berezovsky, who was later charged in Russia with fraud, had left for Britain. Litvinenko went to work for the billionaire and lived in a house owned by him. Both agitated against Putin, Berezovsky by financing human-rights and opposition groups and Litvinenko by producing two books furiously critical of the new President. Litvinenko, it is fair to say, didn't like Putin. Last summer he claimed in a letter posted on the Internet that the President...
...Litvinenko claimed to have saved Berezovsky's life a second time. In 1998 he said he had refused an order "to kill the Jew who has stolen half of this country"--by which his superiors meant Berezovsky. As a result, Litvinenko believed, an unsuccessful attempt was made on his life. Those claims were made at a surreal press conference at which Litvinenko appeared with six other disgruntled FSB officers. Some wore ski masks, but Litvinenko, his face uncovered, calmly stated that bosses at the FSB were using the organization "for their private ends to liquidate those who bothered them...
...Litvinenko telling the truth, and if so, was that his sole motivation for grabbing the limelight? Later, two of the officers in the episode claimed the stunt was bought and paid for by Berezovsky, which probably only heightened the rage of the man who had become the FSB's chief--Vladimir Putin. To Putin, a former KGB officer, what Litvinenko had done "was a major act of treason," says former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, now an exile in the U.S. after having written about Russia's tilt toward authoritarianism. In his book The Lubyanka Gang, Litvinenko, for his part...
Putin, says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general who is now a maverick Duma deputy, is known for keeping score and for a long memory. So the idea that he would want an infuriating gadfly like Litvinenko to disappear is not beyond reason. But the President's defenders scoff at the idea that he might have been involved in Litvinenko's death. Putin, they say, had no need to get rid of Litvinenko; the exile was an irrelevant crank. Milton Bearden, a former CIA spy in Moscow, as well as other experienced intelligence hands, agrees it would be nuts...
...Putin, who might want Litvinenko dead? Plenty. Russian Mafia bosses whose networks he was still prying into, for example, or rogue FSB officers who had been paid to rub him out by those who wanted to hurt Berezovsky. Perhaps the culprit was someone who wanted to frame Putin, or a member of the many factions maneuvering to succeed him when his term expires in 2008. One particularly dark theory making the rounds in Moscow was that Litvinenko organized his own death in a bizarre politically motivated suicide. Julia Svetlichnaja, a Russian postgraduate student who met with Litvinenko several times over...