JAIPUR: Just days ago, it was reported that former
British intelligence
agent
Christopher Steele
, who got ready a dossier on the activities of US president
Donald Trump in Russia, had gone underground. At a riveting session at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday, Guardian journalist Luke Harding, author of ‘A Very Expensive Poison: The Story of the Murder of Litvinenko’ revealed that Steele had also been someone who knew about the likely involvement of Russian president Vladimir Putin in the murder of former Russian intelligence official who later joined British military intelligence, Alexander Litvinenko.
Recalling the November 2006 murder, Harding narrated that Litvinenko had been a member of the KGB. He had been a diligent worker, and unearthed a nexus between his own bosses and the criminal mafia in Russia. He was poisoned with polonium, a radioactive substance extremely hard to acquire – a ‘very expensive poison’ that required access to nuclear reactors, which only a state actor, in Harding’s view, could get.
After being fired from his job in Russia at a time when Vladimir Putin was at the helm of the intelligence service, Litvinenko managed to flee to the UK. He was on the payroll of Military Intelligence 16 at the time of his murder.
The assassins had failed at least twice earlier in poisoning Litvinenko. In Harding’s description, they were fumbling assassins. One Australian tourist, Harding says, even asked them in the lift of a UK hotel if they were KGB men -- so outlandishly were they dressed in leather jackets and jewellery! Yet, they managed to put the polonium into the tea they served Litvinenko.
Harding said that in the normal course, a man poisoned by this substance might have died much earlier. However, Litvinenko was a man of extraordinary physical fitness – he managed to pull along for three weeks, in which time he was able to offer to investigators evidence that would lead to the assassins.
The inquiry conducted by a British judge into this murder submitted a report which concluded that there was a “strong probability” that the former spy was murdered on personal orders from Vladimir Putin.
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