Spy's lethal tea strains Britain's ties with Russia

Morning tea with a couple of former KGB agents at a swish Mayfair hotel and lunch in a Piccadilly sushi bar with an Italian nuclear expert: November 1, 2006, started out as a normal day for debonair Moscow spy turned London-based dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

It was to end in hospital: the tea was laced with a radioactive toxin and Litvinenko died later that month.

At a public inquiry this week, the Russian pair were accused of being the assassins who administered the fatal poison at the behest of President Vladimir Putin. Putin was described as a “common criminal dressed up as a head of state”.

Ben Emmerson, the barrister representing Litvinenko’s widow, said the “order could only have been given by one person” and that Putin was a “ruthless and deadly enemy”.

Incursions into Ukraine have frazzled Britain’s ties with Moscow. Revelations and accusations over the months the enquiry will run are likely to put them beyond redemption.

Emmerson is hoping the inquiry will end with a finding that Putin ordered Litvinenko’s death for 

fear that he would expose his links with the Russian mafia.

Inquiry head Sir Robert Owen said the toxin spirited into the country and added to Litvinenko’s teapot at the Millennium Hotel could have been used to “kill large numbers of people or spread general panic and hysteria among the public”.

Traces of the toxin were found in offices, homes, hotels and on planes in London and beyond. There were even traces at Arsenal’s football stadium. The poisoning was described as a “miniature nuclear attack on the streets of London”.

The dose was such that Litvinenko’s body was buried in a lead-lined coffin to prevent radiation from seeping out of his grave. The Russians are unrepresented at the inquiry. Moscow has blocked the extradition of the two men accused of carrying out the assassination.

Litvinenko was dismissed from his Moscow job in 2000 and was given sanctuary in Britain, becoming a citizen in 2006. He applied for asylum in the United States but was unwanted, possibly because of his unreliability as a source of secrets.

The British security services will neither confirm nor deny that he was in their pay. The final report is unlikely to shed light on any work he did for them.

Litvinenko, the author of books and articles on Russia’s secret services, has been characterised as a fantasist, a pedlar of conspiracy theories unburdened by facts.

For example, he claimed that “all the bloodiest terrorists of the world” had links with Moscow, that they were all trained, funded and armed by the Kremlin to carry out terrorist attacks worldwide. He said that the “centre of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic” but Russia. 

Litvinenko blamed Moscow for the 2005 bombings in London in which 56 people died and, in that same year, for the publication of cartoons offensive to Muslims published in a Danish newspaper that led to deadly riots around the world.

The inquiry will hear from around 70 witnesses, some of whom will declare that Litvinenko had become a danger to President Putin and had to be silenced. In the years following his flight from Moscow, his allegations against the Russian authorities grew more outrageous. 

Some will wonder why, if his testimony was so damning, he was not silenced earlier. What will keep the public enthralled is the famously chilling photograph of the 42-year-old, hair gone to the radioactive toxin, awaiting death in his hospital bed.