From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/1/2006 3:57 AM

November 30, 2006

Assassin? Russia still fits bill

Domineering presence alone convicts Kremlin of former spy's poisoning in the minds of many.

Anna Badkhen / San Francisco Chronicle

It could be a Cold War thriller.

A former KGB agent is killed by poisoning. The men behind the Kremlin walls are assumed to be at fault. Official denials are met with knowing shrugs.

Whether the Russian government is really behind the death of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, 21st century Russia still looks like the kind of country that would assassinate its adversaries James Bond-style by slipping radioactive polonium-210 into their sushi.

After all, a former KGB spy holds the nation's highest office. Former intelligence operatives are senior Cabinet members. The state controls virtually every media outlet. Many who, like Litvinenko, dare to criticize the government are intimidated, imprisoned or exiled. Some are murdered, their cases unsolved.

The Kremlin obstructs the work of international watchdogs and silences domestic adversaries who criticize human-rights abuses, particularly in the war-torn republic of Chechnya.

Given this record, it is not surprising that many people have been quick to pin the blame on the Kremlin, even though the Kremlin's many accusers have offered no evidence of its guilt, said Sarah Mendelson, an expert on Russia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"One could imagine that somebody in the Russian state went after him," said Mendelson of Litvinenko, who had made some particularly damaging assertions about Russia's war in the breakaway Chechen republic. "We know that people have been silenced or disappeared in relation to Chechnya."

In his book, "Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within," Litvinenko wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the KGB's successor, the FSB, had orchestrated the 1999 apartment bombings that killed nearly 300 people across Russia, paving the way for the redeployment of Russian troops to Chechnya and for Putin's ascent to the presidency. The government insisted the bombing was the work of Chechen separatists.

Several other Russians who investigated the 1999 bombings also have been killed, their murders unsolved. On his deathbed, in a London hospital, Litvinenko blamed Putin for killing him.

The Kremlin dismissed the allegations as "sheer nonsense."

"This chain of events plays right into the hands of those who would wish to compromise Russia in the world arena," wrote the pro-Kremlin daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The Litvinenko affair is not the first time Russia has been accused of assassination attempts beyond its borders.

In 2004, pro-Western Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was hospitalized with dioxin poisoning, which disfigured his face and nearly killed him. Many fingers pointed at the Kremlin, which had strongly supported Yushchenko's opponent, Viktor Yanukovych (who is now Ukraine's prime minister).

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