Unravelling the Litvinenko Murder Psyop

At the end of June, British television channel ITV broadcast a four-part drama on the death of Alexander Litvinenko. Starring Dr. Who veteran David Tennant as the former Soviet and Russian intelligence officer turned MI6 consultant, it tells the story of a long-running British police investigation into his untimely demise in November 2006, through contamination with the highly radioactive Polonium-210.

The probe concluded Dmitry Kovtun and Andrey Lugovoy, two former KGB associates Litvinenko considered friends and business partners, deliberately poisoned him with the substance. British authorities resultantly sought their extradition from Russia, but as Moscow prohibits that under any circumstances, they remain at liberty today. Nonetheless, the pair - and by extension the Kremlin - have been convicted of his murder in the court of Western public opinion ever since.

David Tennant as Alexander Litvinenko

Central to this consensus are the findings of a 2016 public inquiry into the poisoning. Led by judge Robert Owen, it concluded Litvinenko was murdered by Kovtun and Lugovoy, “probably” with the express approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then-FSB director Nikolai Patrushev.

In promoting the series - simply called Litvinenko - its scriptwriter asserted boldly the show’s protagonist was “a living witness to his own murder,” who’d “spent his dying days entrusting the Metropolitan Police with the details of what happened to him.” The Guardian’s Luke Harding has gone even further, describing Litvinenko as “the man who solved his own murder.”

The Owen Inquiry relied heavily on Litvinenko’s deathbed discussions with police officers in a London hospital to reach its verdicts. Yet, at no point did Litvinenko in reality accuse Kovtun or Lugovoy of responsibility for his death during these conversations. He instead blamed Mario Scaramella, a crooked Italian security consultant with whom he’d dined at a restaurant prior to meeting them, in the Pine Bar of London’s Millennium Hotel.

As the Inquiry report notes, while in hospital Litvinenko told “a number of his friends and associates” Scaramella had poisoned him, and “either delayed in telling them, or did not tell them at all, about his meeting with Lugovoy and Kovtun on the same day.” The Russians were similarly unmentioned in a BBC Russian Service interview, which Litvinenko conducted a week after his hospital admission.

The Plot Thickens

Nothing in Litvinenko’s description to police of his Pine Bar meeting even vaguely suggests an assassination scenario. He recalled sitting briefly with Lugovoy, who asked if he wanted an alcoholic drink. Teetotal, he declined the offer, so his accused killer said, “there is still some tea left here, if you want to you can have some.” Litvinenko recalled:

“I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only [a] little left on the bottom, and it made just half a cup…I swallowed several times, but it was green tea with no sugar and it was already cold…I didn’t like it for some reason…Maybe in total I swallowed three or four times. I haven’t even finished that cup.”

Litvinenko’s record of his meeting with alleged assassins Kovtun and Lugovoy

The manner in which the Inquiry mutated this banal interaction into evidence of a targeted assassination is absolutely extraordinary. Acknowledging Lugovoy being “extremely indifferent” as to whether Litvinenko drank the supposedly lethal concoction was an “oddity”, its report squares this circle by citing the arguments of Metropolitan Police lawyer Richard Horwell. He rationalised, “any display by either Lugovoy or Kovtun of eagerness or urgency or desperation would have appeared suspicious and counterproductive”:

“Anything other than diffidence would have appeared very suspicious to Litvinenko and may well have brought an end to the plot to kill him…Any encouragement or enthusiasm [by Lugovoy]…that Litvinenko should drink it would have been out of place and could’ve betrayed his murderous intent.”

Amazingly, Owen declared this feeble reasoning “enough to dispose of this point.” His report engages in even more egregious logical fallacy to explain why Litvinenko consistently attributed his poisoning to Scaramella, “even to his friends”:

“Litvinenko’s accounts of his meetings with Lugovoy and Kovtun…must be approached with some caution. [They may] contain some infelicities, added by Litvinenko in an attempt to salve his wounded pride…It seems to me to be at least possible Litvinenko carried this feeling…into his interviews with the police, and in the course of those interviews he exaggerated Lugovoy’s diffidence about the tea in order to mitigate what he would have seen as his own professional error in drinking it.”

In other words, we are to believe Litvinenko was quite so embarrassed he’d been stung by his pals, he deliberately downplayed their actions, and his own credulity, in order to save face with his associates and authorities. Even while he lay dying, with literally nothing left to lose, and every interest in naming names and leveling charges.

As journalist Edward Jay Epstein has documented, the narrative of Litvinenko’s poisoning as revenge-murder resulted from a well-funded propaganda blitz, launched by exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, with whom the former KGB officer had a longstanding personal and professional relationship. The oligarch employed the services of infamous PR consultant Tim Bell, who extensively briefed journalists, arranged on and off-record interviews, and ensured now-famous deathbed photos of an emaciated, hairless Litvinenko circulated the world over.

It’s plausible this campaign produced a sensational July 2007 Daily Telegraph article, featuring shocking eyewitness testimony from Pine Bar waiter Norberto Andrade, who’d served Litvinenko, Kovtun and Lugovoy on the apparently fateful day. He was quoted as saying that he’d been deliberately obstructed when approaching the trio “to create a distraction”, allowing Polonium-210 to be sprayed into the table’s teapot. Andrade was quoted as saying:

“When I poured the remains of the teapot into the sink, the tea looked more yellow than usual and was thicker – it looked gooey. I scooped it out of the sink and threw it into the bin. I was so lucky I didn’t put my fingers into my mouth or scratch my eye as I could have got the poison inside me.”

These incendiary comments were recycled widely, amplified by news outlets the world over. Their visceral, graphic detail went an enormous way to publicly cementing the murder-by-tea narrative. For example, a contemporary CBS report was categorically headlined, Waiter: I Saw Poisoning Of Russian Spy.

Yet, when the Telegraph exposé was read out to Andrade during his testimony to the Inquiry, he said it was “absolutely terrible” these words had been attributed to him, as “that’s not what I told them.” When quizzed on the teapot’s contents being a “funny colour”, he responded, “no way, no way.”

Norberto Andrade’s testimony

Nuclear Black Market

The Inquiry’s resolution of another glaring incongruity in its own narrative likewise beggars belief. After drinking the cold, supposedly nuclear-laced tea, Litvinenko was introduced to Lugovoy’s eight-year-old son Igor. Lugovoy then specifically instructed the boy to shake hands with “uncle Sasha.”

Owen considers this a “striking feature” of the Pine Bar meeting. It is of course inconceivable Lugovoy would order his own child to touch a man he knew to be pulsing with deadly radiation. Metropolitan Police examination of the jacket Litvinenko wore that night purportedly detected massive, hazardous contamination on its sleeve alone. Owen adds: 

“The point goes further. Lugovoy’s wife and son slept in a contaminated bedroom at the Millennium Hotel, and sat in contaminated seats on the aircraft [back home]…Similarly, [Kovtun’s wife’s] flat in Hamburg was contaminated, leading her to say, ‘I really can’t imagine [Kovtun] would put my children in danger.’”

While Owen was “prepared to assume” neither Lugovoy nor Kovtun “wished to harm their loved ones,” he didn’t consider this assumption “inconsistent” with the conclusion they purposefully poisoned Litvinenko with Polonium-210. He argued the pair simply “did not know what they were handling.”

Kovtun and Lugovoy

Litvinenko’s alleged killers were indeed seemingly unaware. They apparently carried the extremely lethal substance in a broken, leaking container, eventually disposing of it in a sink. Along the way, they mopped up highly radioactive spillages of Polonium-210 with household towels. The obvious question of whether they even knew it was at all deadly in the first place was not explored by the inquiry, and has never been considered by the mainstream media.

A similarly flagrant, wholly unexamined issue was and remains why anyone would choose a nuclear substance as a murder weapon. Knives, guns, or conventional poisons would’ve killed Litvinenko infinitely more quickly, efficiently, safely, and cheaply. On the latter point, British police calculated the quantity of Polonium-210 he ingested cost $10 million.

This staggering sum led anonymous British security officials to speculate the Polonium-210 in question was sourced from “very well-connected black market smugglers.” Which starkly highlights what Edward Jay Epstein dubbed “the elephant-in-the-room that haunts the case” of Litvinenko’s death:

“A crucial component for building an early-stage nuke was smuggled into London in 2006. Was it brought in merely as a murder weapon or as part of a transaction on the international arms market?”

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Western governments angsted over the fallen country’s vast nuclear arsenal, and the risk of associated weapons and material ending up in the hands of hostile state and non-state actors, via black market sale. Their intelligence agencies duly set up dedicated operations to investigate and scupper the feared phenomenon.

Such suspicions appeared to be borne out by multiple dramatic busts of black market nuclear deals over the next decade. However, in every instance, these resulted from spook sting operations. For example, in August 1994, German police swooped on a commercial Lufthansa plane at Munich airport, seizing 408 grams of plutonium from its hold. Local officials bombastically hailed “a successful strike against the international nuclear mafia.”

However, the historic accomplishment quickly became a source of acute embarrassment, after it emerged Berlin’s foreign spying agency encouraged and initiated the deal using undercover agents. German opposition parties and media accused the government of creating and sustaining the very black market it claimed to be fighting.

This is highly relevant to consider, given Litvinenko himself reportedly smuggled radioactive material to Zürich in 2000. At the time of his death, he was struggling financially, primarily kept afloat by a monthly stipend from MI6. The terms of that arrangement have never been clarified publicly, although post-defection he was provided with a British passport under the alias “Edwin Redwald Carter”, and regularly traveled to the former Soviet Union. Did MI6 task him with “investigating” the international nuclear black market?

Litvinenko at a 1998 press conference

Western journalists have keenly constructed the myth of Litvinenko as a crusading anti-corruption campaigner, cold-bloodedly slain for his principled opposition to Putin. In the process, it has been necessary to suppress that a key initial line of inquiry for British police was whether he’d been killed for attempting to blackmail oligarchs, government officials and public figures across Europe using FSB documents he spirited out of Russia.

Naturally, these sordid plots aren’t dramatized in ITV’s Litvinenko series. Neither are his attempts with Scaramella to plant incriminating evidence on a suspected nuclear-component smuggler, for which the Italian was jailed. It is uncertain why, almost 20 years after the fact, the British police probe into Litvinenko’s death was dramatised. One might reasonably speculate ensuring Western citizens are as far removed from the truth as possible at all times, including if not particularly many years after the fact, was an end in itself.

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