Antony Penaud: Reflections on the Litvinenko case

Subject: Reflections on the Litvinenko case
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016
From: Antony Penaud <antonypenaud@yahoo.fr>

Antony Penaud completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2000. His essays on Russia and Ukraine are on www/scribd.com/antonykharms. He is French and lives in London.

I returned last Thursday from a holiday in Moscow, and on the Gatwick train I picked up the Evening Standard (the free evening paper) to catch up with the London news. In large characters on the front page I could read “Litvinenko murder ‘approved’ by Putin”. I remembered that during the Ukrainian crisis the Home Secretary had changed her mind and decided to launch a public inquiry on the death of Litvinenko, and I read on. The first sentence of the article contradicted the headline: it said that (according to the British inquiry) Putin had “probably” approved the murder (judging from the rest of the article and from politicians’ reaction, the “probably” didn’t seem to matter). The rest of the article reminded me of the Litvinenko murder while containing, as often, a couple of imprecisions (1).

The morning after, on the front page of Metro (the free morning paper), I read that the two suspects were “Russian agents” rather than (at least officially) former Russian agents, a confusion probably less likely to be done by an Evening Standard journalist (1).

Following these two reads, and questions from British friends who know of my strong interest in Russia, I spent a bit of time on this story. In this article I share my thoughts. These are the thoughts of someone with very little knowledge on the lives of the victim and of the two suspects, with no knowledge on polonium, but with some knowledge on Russia, and who – since the Iraqi war – tries to be critical of what he reads in the media. Paragraphs 1 to 6 are related to the Litvinenko story. In paragraph 7, I list and comment four similar (in some ways) cases.

1. Information asymmetry, “Putin critic murdered”

Many Russians go on holidays in Europe or in the US, quite a few have even lived there, many can speak English and read US/UK media, whereas most Westerns know next to nothing about Russia. As a result (maybe there are other reasons), Russians – in my experience – are much more aware of the bias of their own media than Westerners, despite the Iraqi (and Libyan) experience. Westerners’ view of Russia is almost entirely based on what they’re told by the media, and consequently their view of Russia resembles both a large North Korea like country about to invade Europe and a mafia state country containing a mixture of vodka drinking brainwashed people and heroic Putin opponents (“the other Russia”).

When there is a murder and the victim happens to be a Putin critic, the headline “Putin critic murdered” is usually understood as “Putin did it” by the passive reader. The victim is defined as a critic of Putin, nothing else is said about his life, his activities (which are often numerous and diverse) and enemies, and the reader is not told about all the possible explanations: only one possibility is given, regardless of its likelihood. Nemtsov’s murder is a good example of this phenomenon. Before his death, Western media simply ignored him, he was politically irrelevant (2). Yet after his death he was all of a sudden described as the main Putin opponent. The fact that he was shot near the Kremlin was seen by some as the proof of Putin’s involvement (with the same bizarre logic Tony Blair should be a prime suspect of Litvinenko’s murder). The motive was that he was about to publish an extremely damaging document showing the implication of Russian troops in Ukraine. Nobody seemed to realise that Nemtsov’s colleagues would still be able to publish the document anyway. In fact they did just that a few months after his death, and it didn’t damage anyone. British academic Mark Galeotti (not exactly a Putin fan) was one of the few Western commentators who, very early on, dismissed the ‘Putin did it’ story (3).

2. Corruption, obtention of polonium

In the wild 90s the Russian state was weak, corruption shot up, Russia was a violent place (some of the violence was mafia related). Like many of their colleagues, the two suspects of the Litvinenko murder left the FSB to work in the private security business: the pay was much better. The victim and Lugovoi both worked for Berezovsky, who was then the most powerful oligarch (Litvinenko worked at the same time for both the FSB and for Berezovsky!).

There is one thing that all commentators agree about Russia: the corruption. But isn’t it contradictory to denounce at the same time corruption, and to argue that a forbidden substance (in this case polonium) cannot be obtained without presidential authorisation? It seems likely that with the right connections (and former KGB agents who have worked for oligarchs obviously have good connections) and with money, many things are possible, including obtaining hard to get substances. Kasparov once claimed that Putin only controlled Moscow and St Petersburg, that he didn’t control the rest of Russia. This too goes against the idea that a hard to get substance is impossible to get without presidential authorisation. The above reasoning is no more than a common sense guess, I really know nothing about the specificity of polonium. But what do journalists (and members of the inquiry) know about the difficulty (or not) to get polonium in Russia when one has the right connections?

3. Polonium as a signature

In this paragraph, for the sake of argument, I assume that polonium is impossible to get without presidential authorisation. I have no experience in detective work, but I would have thought that a murderer would go for a weapon that would make it hard (rather than extremely easy) for the police to trace him. Why would an assassin (especially a very powerful one) pick a weapon that would identify him? The only logical answer I can find to this question is that he wants the world to know he’s done it. This is not the case: Putin doesn’t claim to have ordered it, and him being suspected is clearly damaging for him. Hence the starting assumption (that polonium is impossible to get without presidential authorisation) is unlikely to be correct.

4. Motive

Why would Putin want to get rid of somebody who, by the ridiculousness of his allegations (Putin being responsible for the Danish Mahomet cartoons, Romano Prodi working for the KGB etc…) compromises the other anti-Putin allegations that the general public would be more likely to believe. Litvinenko’s death is clearly more damaging to Putin than any of his bizarre allegations.

5. Once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent

Another thing I read (in the French media this time), was that there was no such a thing as a former KGB agent. The idea was to say that Lugovoi was maybe officially a former agent, but really, he was still an agent. It is very simple to counter this statement: was Litvinenko still a KGB agent? No. So yes, there is such a thing as a former KGB agent. Lebedev, the owner of the Evening Standard and of the Independent, is another example.

6. UK/Russia tense relationship

Why do so many super rich people come to live in the UK? Part of the UK’s business model is to attract very rich individuals from all over the world, and morality does not come in the way (see for example Shaxson’s book “Treasure Islands”). Most British people, if asked about it, would probably accept that the money made by many of the mega rich UK based Russians was not obtained legally. The logical next step should be to argue that, surely, the Russian state has the right to see some of that money back. But this logical next step is never articulated in the British media. Instead we read about an authoritarian Russian state persecuting the poor mega rich – who get protection from the UK.

7. Similar (in one way or another) assassinations

7a. Ukraine

In early 2015, no less than 10 opposition figures (politicians and journalists) died in Ukraine, for some it was murder, for others it was suspicious suicide (4). As opposed to the Litvinenko case, only one country was involved. Besides, these murders and suspicious suicides received very little attention in the media.

7b. Dr Kelly

Another case in which only one country was involved was the death of Dr Kelly, the British weapons expert who spoke anonymously to the BBC about the lies put by the British government in what became known as “the dodgy dossier”. Dr Kelly was found dead a couple of months later. A public inquiry was launched, like for Litvinenko. Its conclusion was that it was a suicide. Yet, according to a BBC poll, 23% of Brits don’t believe he committed suicide, and 39% don’t know (5). It would be interesting to know the opinion (on the Litvinenko inquiry conclusions) of the 61.5% of Brits who were not convinced by the Dr Kelly inquiry conclusions. As with Litvinenko (but in a different way), there is uncertainty on the causes of Dr Kelly’s death. However, unlike Litvinenko, Dr Kelly was not a defector, and we know he was speaking the truth.

7c. Drones

By far the most frequent method for assassination abroad is drone. It is difficult to find good data, and I only give ballpark estimates: US drones have assassinated a couple of thousands people in the last few years, and hundreds (maybe thousands) have been killed by mistake (collateral damage). The differences with the Litvinenko case are that there is no doubt who is responsible for drone strikes, the victims are not defectors, there is a very large number of them, and many people who were not targeted get killed too.

7d. Three women in Paris

The last case I want to highlight happened in Paris (a capital city comparable to London) in January 2013 and received very little media coverage. Three Kurdish women activists were shot dead in the Paris Kurdistan information centre. The French PM said they were executed. French investigators later found that the Turkish Secret Services were “probably” (!) involved (6). To the best of my knowledge, neither the media nor the investigators mentioned Erdogan. A google search for Litvinenko murder leads to 5,800,000 results, while a search for Cansiz murder leads to 18,200 results (Cansiz was the most famous of the three Kurdish women).

A couple of years ago, Western media bombarded the public of stories about Russians crossing the border to Ukraine. On top of people joining the civil war, we all remember the convoy of Russian white trucks (7), which in fact brought much needed humanitarian aid to civilians of Lugansk and Donetsk who had been shelled by Ukrainian forces, and whose salaries, social allowances and pensions were not paid anymore by the Ukrainian government. At the same time of these white trucks crossing to Ukraine, another border was being crossed by foreigners. This border was the Turkey-Syria border, and Erdogan got no criticism for it (on the contrary, French readers could read in Le Monde that “Syria was our Spanish civil war” (8)). Many of the foreigners who crossed the border to Syria (some were British and French) committed atrocities there. A few of them crossed back, and committed atrocities in Belgium (9), and in France.

(1) A few paragraphs later I read that the two suspects were “both linked to the FSB”. They are indeed both former FSB agents, like the Evening Standard’s owner Alexander Lebedev.
It also said that “Putin was so impressed with the former KGB bodyguard that Lugovoi [one of the two suspects] has since become a member of the Duma”. The fact that Lugovoi was running for LDPR (the nationalist party) and not United Russia (Putin’s party) was, however, not reported.
(2) https://pando.com/2015/03/02/boris-nemtsov-death-of-a-russian-liberal/
(3) https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/nemtsovs-murder-and-three-other-deaths/
(4) http://www.thenation.com/article/least-10-opposition-figures-have-died-ukraine-just-year/
(5) http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/02_february/16/conspiracy.shtml
Because the numbers are rounded up the sum doesn’t add up to 100%
(6) http://www.english.rfi.fr/europe/20150723-french-inquiry-implicates-turkish-secret-services-paris-kurds-murder
(7) Western media didn’t report the many subsequent convoys.
(8) http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2013/04/02/la-syrie-est-notre-guerre-d-espagne_3152041_3232.html
(9) Nemmouche, the killer of the Brussels Jewish museum, came back from Syria in February 2014 (the timing is not exactly as in my comparison).