Litvinenko meets Sherlock Holmes - Chapter 3

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The great detective and his faithful Doctor Watson are helping the Archangel Gabriel solve the Litvinenko case for Gabriel's mystified "employer", when we join them...

The great detective peers at the screen of his celestial computer and cries out, "By Jove Watson, this is fine work indeed, I believe this fellow Epstein in Slate Magazine is finally getting close to the heart of the Litvinenko matter". Watson and Gabriel, startled, jump from their chairs, "Gad, Holmes, do you really thinks so? Dash it, I can't find the piece you mention, I'm afraid I'm useless with these modern toys." Holmes sighs and replies, "There's a good chap Watson, here is the link."

Litvinenko meets Sherlock Holmes - Chapter - 2, the plot thickens... and why not?

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As we learned in the previous episode, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, after knocking back a celestial English breakfast in a foggy corner of paradise, have been visited by the Archangel Gabriel on urgent business from his "employer" who is puzzled by the "Litvinenko affair". DS
As we rejoin them, Watson is reloading his pipe and Holmes is serving Gabriel with another smoked kipper. At this moment their faithful but ghostly housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson hands him a note. On reading it, the great detective's aquiline face barely conceals his evident excitement, "How perfectly extraordinary!" Holmes exclaims as he leaps to his feet, "Listen to this item that Mrs. Hudson just heard on the BBC" "Small traces of a radioactive substance have been found at the British embassy in Moscow following a precautionary check, the UK Foreign Office has said. " My dear Gabriel, to put my mind at ease, do please, confirm that Professor Moriarty is in fact in residence on the lower floors. This embassy business has his touch, if anything ever did."
To be continued

Litvinenko meets Sherlock Holmes

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In a particularly foggy corner of literary paradise, the specters of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson puff contentedly upon their pipes and survey the glorious ruins of a huge, celestial English breakfast with a half a dozen crumpled newspapers scattered about them. Suddenly, with a light knock on the door, the ghost of their faithful housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, ushers a mysterious visitor into their presence.

The visitor, though visibly agitated, is yet an imposing figure, over seven feet tall, with a massive mane of glowing, blond ringlets and covered with a flowing cape that, hastily donned, fails to disguise the massive wings upon his shoulders. "Do sit down Gabriel and tell us what business brings you here," Holmes enjoins the magnificent apparition, a faint smile playing on his thin lips "... You know who I am?" replies the startled archangel. "Elementary my dear Gabriel, now please proceed.”

A bit flustered the heavenly messenger begins, "I come at the request of my employer, whose name I am forbidden to pronounce." Holmes raises his hand saying, "Be assured of Doctor Watson's and my total discretion." "Well, you see," the Angel, thus encouraged, continues, "It’s this Litvinenko affair," "Ah yes!" says the great detective rubbing his hands together, "I've been following it in the papers". "Well despite his omniscience and omnipotence it has my employer completely puzzled and we rather hoped you'd help us out. Saint Peter is frantic, don't you know, as he doesn’t really know what to do with this Litvinenko chap and the fellow is playing his cards very close to his chest and is saying nothing... hoping to stay up here, I should imagine!"

"A most curious case,” the great detective begins, “if I didn't know that he was safely in residence a few floors below, I'd swear all this was the work of professor Moriarty, especially the bizarre appearance of a flock of radioactive airplanes sowing panic around Europe. That has his masterful touch. But with Moriarty, er… um, deceased and that being impossible, eliminating that, what ever else is left, however improbable must be the truth... It can't be the professor."

"Now several things strike one straight off the bat, the method employed for example, I imagine that London still offers the murderer as infinite a number of discreet ways to carry out his task as it did in my day: pushing people under those wonderful double-decker buses is a perennial favorite. Why use something so baroque as polonium? Obviously the reason was to keep the story in the papers. Why ever would Putin want to do that?” I have trouble then believing it was Putin, quite the contrary, it must have been one or several of his enemies, he has quite a few, I believe. Every time the fellow goes off to summit or some such one of his critics manages to get killed in spectacular and embarrassing fashion. No, it really can’t have been Putin."

The great detective pauses, sighs and takes a long thoughtful draw upon his pipe and clearing his throat, continues, “To catch our villain, we should examine carefully what he has been doing and what enemies he has made.” Doctor Watson interjects, “Well Holmes, he seems to be rather down of democracy, don’t you think? Giving democrats a hard time and all that?” Holmes looks at his bluff, steady old friend with one of his inimitable looks, simultaneously both of affection and contempt. “My dear Watson, don’t be a child, do you really think that any of the people who actually run the world to their benefit care a fig for ‘democracy? For them it's only another tool. This is a struggle over power and money.” Watson flushes and stammers, Holmes to save his friend more embarrassment, calls out, “Mrs. Hudson bring some more tea for Watson and myself, if you please, and see what our angelic friend is having!” To be continued

Litvinenko and the neocons

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In the absence of a 'smoking gun. it is beginning to look more and more as if the people behind the Litvinenko murder are those with most to lose if Putin is successful in rebuilding Russia's national sovereignty. Certainly it is hard to imagine that Putin would shoot himself in the foot this way. For me it also significant that all this comes at a time when Russia is delivering the Tor anti-aircraft system to Iran, which would effectively take the option of an Israeli/American attack off the bargaining table. As I said a few posts ago, it is instructive to get the license number of those who are quickest to implicate Putin and to check that against their first positions on the invasion of Iraq. As the following article in The Guardian states, "In the absence of genuine evidence of Russian state involvement in the killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, we should be wary about jumping on a bandwagon orchestrated by the people who bought death and destruction to the streets of Baghdad, and whose aim is to neuter any counterweight to the most powerful empire ever seen." DS

In bed with Russophobes - Guardian

Abstract: Three weeks on, we are still no closer to knowing who was responsible for the death of the former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. The use of polonium 210 as a murder weapon could point in entirely opposite directions. It might suggest that the killing was carried out on behalf of the Russian security service as a public warning to others who might think of betraying it. But it could also be read as an attempt by President Putin's rich and powerful enemies to discredit the Russian government internationally. Whatever the truth, it has been seized upon across Europe and the US to fuel a growing anti-Russian campaign.(...) those on the centre-left who have joined the current wave of Putin-bashing ought to consider whose cause they are serving. Long before the deaths of Litvinenko and the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Russophobes in the US and their allies in Britain were doing all they could to discredit Putin's administration. These rightwing hawks are gunning for Putin not because of concern for human rights but because an independent Russia stands in the way of their plans for global hegemony. The neoconservative grand strategy was recorded in the leaked Wolfowitz memorandum, a secret 1990s Pentagon document that targeted Russia as the biggest future threat to US geostrategic ambitions and projected a US-Russian confrontation over Nato expansion. Even though Putin has acquiesced in the expansion of American influence in former Soviet republics, the limited steps the Russian president has taken to defend his country's interests have proved too much for Washington's empire builders. In 2003, Bruce P Jackson, the director of the Project for a New American Century, wrote that Putin's partial renationalisation of energy companies threatened the west's "democratic objectives" - and claimed Putin had established a "de facto cold war administration". Jackson's prognosis was simple: a new "soft war" against the Kremlin, a call to arms that has been enthusiastically followed in both the US and Britain.(...) As part of their strategy, Washington's hawks have been busy promoting Chechen separatism in furtherance of their anti-Putin campaign, as well as championing some of Russia's most notorious oligarchs. In the absence of genuine evidence of Russian state involvement in the killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, we should be wary about jumping on a bandwagon orchestrated by the people who bought death and destruction to the streets of Baghdad, and whose aim is to neuter any counterweight to the most powerful empire ever seen. READ IT ALL

Poisened Spy Case Doesn't Make Any Sense

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The Soviet Union collapsed because the Russians couldn't make a decent washing machine or a car anyone would want to drive, not because they couldn't execute an enemy without fuss at the proper time. The death of Litvinenko coinciding with the Helsinki summit was obviously timed to cause Putin maximum embarrassment. Logically you would have to look among his enemies to find anyone who would want to embarrass him. There seem to be interesting links to Yukos and to disgruntled oligarchs in general. The Israeli military web DEBKA’s intelligence sources add that the Russian ex-spy is believed to have been a double agent, who sold trade secrets to different parties in and outside Russia, among them some of the Russian oligarchs living in exile in the West. Livinenko served as a colonel in a Russian Federal Security Services unit which investigated and carried out special operations against businessmen. To pursue this theory, it would be useful to follow the press coverage of the affair. The editorial from the Guardian below keeps a prudent distance from the rush to judgment. DS

A still mysterious death - Leader - The Guardian
Abstract: Russia's argument that a scandal abroad is the last thing that President Putin needs at this moment, holds weight. Why would the Kremlin risk a torrent of western opprobrium by killing an insignificant critic in London? Friends of Litvinenko claim he was investigating the death of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and therefore a threat to the Russian state who also sanctioned her murder. But the leads in the investigation of her murder point away from the Kremlin and towards either the Moscow-backed regime in Chechnya or elements in the Russian army, exposed by her courageous journalism as war criminals. We know that Litvinenko had already shot his bolt, by publishing a book accusing the Kremlin of involvement in the blowing up of apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999 which Moscow used to launch a new campaign in Chechnya. That was seven years ago and the truth still has not come out. Those waiting for the truth about the death of a Russian in London might have longer to wait. READ IT ALL

Poisoned Spy Affair : a note from Haaretz

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It now turns out now that this affair is not just about "dissidence" or "criticism" or democracy, its about Yukos and about money with a capital 'M'. And the trail leads to Tel-Aviv where Russians have been known to launder money... now and again. DS
Abstract:Russian-born businessman Leonid Nevzlin, former CEO of the Yukos oil company and current chairman of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, said Friday that he had met in Israel with former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died Thursday in London from poisoning. During the meeting, Litvinenko allegedly passed Nevzlin documents containing classified information possibly damaging to the current leadership in Russia. In Nevzlin's estimation, Litvinenko's murder was tied to the information relating to Yukos contained in the documents. Nevzlin has turned the documents over to the London Metropolitan Police, who are investigating the murder.(...) A few months before his murder, Litvinenko arrived in Israel in order to pass the documents to Nevzelin. The Government of Russia has issued an arrest warrant for Nevzlin, arguing that he is wanted for tax evasion, budget irregularities, and for connection to the murder of the mayor a Siberian town where Yukos was operating.(...) Nevzlin and his business partner Michael Khodrokovsky, who is incarcerated in a Russian prison, were formerly large shareholders in Yukos, once one of the largest holding companies in Russia, as well as one of the largest oil companies in the world. After the struggle of the company's owners against Putin's administration, and their support of opposition parties hostile to the Russian president, the government opened a series of investigations against the company, eventually resulting in the company's bankruptcy, and the imprisonment of Khodrokovsky and Platon Levedev, an additional business partner in Yukos. READ IT ALL