Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [160]
There were numerous suggestions that Sasha’s former colleagues in the URPO or some other rogue elements among present or former FSB officers had a motive for killing him. This theory became particularly popular when it was reported that a Russian Spetsnaz commando unit was using Sasha’s image for target practice.
There was also a report by Yuri Shvets, another former KGB officer living in Washington, that Sasha had been compiling a file on a “prominent Kremlin figure” as part of a due diligence research for a commercial client.
All these theories suffer from two faults: they fail to explain access to polonium and the involvement of Andrei Lugovoy.
To my mind, no midlevel rogue officer, no hired hand, no hastily assembled hit squad could possibly get unauthorized access to the material, which, after all, is as suitable for a massive terror attack as any weapon of mass destruction: Polonium-210 is more toxic than anthrax and as good for making a dirty bomb as plutonium. Only the top levels of the Russian government should have access to it. And I am convinced that in the Russian government, all matters related to the London dissident group are personally controlled by the president. The London operation simply could not have been authorized without his knowledge.
Likewise, only a very persuasive argument could have brought Andrei Lugovoy into the project. After all, he is not a poor man, but worth somewhere around $20 to $25 million; he would not have done it for money. He did not have any motive to kill Sasha. Only a very powerful interest could have convinced him to get involved.
Why would anyone go to such lengths to kill a man living in a rented house in Muswell Hill? Here I agree with Putin: whatever Sasha had done or would do was not worth the trouble. He was not the ultimate target; his death was a means to an end. A very important end that justified the awesome means. There is only one credible murder motive—the one that Lord Tim Bell named even before Polonium-210 and Andrei Lugovoy became part of the equation: to pin a murder on the other side in the unending contest of wills between Putin and Berezovsky.
Regardless of Scotland Yard’s confidence that they know “who did it, where, and how,” they are unlikely to ever see their suspects in court. Lugovoy and Kovtun will never talk because they will never be extradited. That much, Russia’s prosecutors have already told the British. Instead of assisting the British investigation, the Russian government has been pursuing its own.
The Russian probe is designed as a mirror image of the British: there are detectives, witnesses, suspects, and a working theory, which balance everything that the Brits have to offer. Every British finding has a Russian counterfinding, every statement a counterstatement. Even the rhetoric is reciprocal. The Russians are using classic disinformation tactics, which are as reminiscent of the old KGB style as is the murder itself. The Kremlin-controlled press blasts the Western media for a cold war-style propaganda campaign.
As was outlined in a New York Times interview of Kovtun and Lugovoy published on March 18, 2007, the Russian countertheory regards them, not as perpetrators, but as “an injured party,” the victims of a murder attempt with polonium that occurred during their first visit to London on October 16. After being contaminated, they claimed, they carried traces of polonium back to Moscow, and then again to London on their second visit. In the Russian frame of reference, the reciprocal pair of suspects are Zakayev and Berezovsky.
In April 2007 Russian investigators flew to London to question Boris and Akhmed, balancing Scotland Yard’s visit to Moscow to interview Lugovoy and Kovtun in December 2006. If and when the Brits indict the two Russians in Sasha’s murder, the Russians are likely to retaliate by charging Boris and