Posted on 11/24/2006 5:34:19 PM PST by A. Pole
IMAGINE you were a foreign power that wanted to get rid of a dissident who had set up home in London. Would you (a) push the troublemaker under a bus, (b) have him mown down by a hit-run driver, or (c) arrange for him to be poisoned while eating in a crowded restaurant?
If you wanted to make the death look natural, or just to keep things simple, you would presumably avoid the restaurant scenario. And yet, if many Russia-watchers are to be believed, the country's Federal Security Service (FSB) has carried out just such an assassination.
On November 1, Alexander Litvinenko, a 43-year-old Russian who used to work for the FSB — the post-Soviet version of the KGB — had breakfast with two Russian men, one a former KGB officer, at the Millennium hotel in Mayfair, then lunch at Itsu, a cheap and cheerful Japanese eatery in London, with an Italian defence consultant, Mario Scaramella. Litvinenko later claimed that Scaramella had shown him
a hit list featuring Litvinenko's name as well as that of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
By that evening, he was so ill he was taken to hospital. Doctors wasted 10 days trying to treat him for food poisoning. His condition deteriorated — hair falling out, difficulty speaking, white blood cells disappearing, unable to eat, even nourishment from a drip causing him to vomit.
It wasn't until earlier this week, after listening to their patient's pleas, that doctors said they were investigating the possibility of poisoning. Initially they suspected thallium, a tasteless, odourless killer used in rat poison until it was banned in the 1970s. By Thursday, however, with Litvinenko's condition deteriorating rapidly, a hospital spokesman said the medical team had ruled out thallium but was still unclear about the cause of his condition. A friend said the former spy had suffered a cardiac arrest and was on an artificial heart support machine. Litvinenko died yesterday, at 8.21am Melbourne time.
Litvinenko's friends in London have been quick to accuse the Kremlin of being behind this poisoning. They say Russia wanted to stop Litvinenko investigating the assassination last month of another high-profile critic of the Russian Government — his friend, the campaigning journalist Politkovskaya. They believe the Kremlin was also to blame for Politkovskaya being shot outside her Moscow apartment door.
[...]
Ed Epstein
And Epstein, of course, could be completely wrong, as he did not provide me a shred of evidence to back up his claim. But let's say Epstein knows something we don't know. Who would Litvinenko have been smuggling polonium 210 for (and why)?
I wrote Ed Epstein back for evidence, here's his reply:
What business are 6 nogoodniks doing at a sushi bar other than a deal? Who would use anything so valuable to kill sdmeone when a knife would do the trick.
Regards
Ed Epstein
www.edwardjayepstein.com
I wrote Epstein back and asked him what these "nogoodniks would want with polonium 210. If Epstein's suspicion is correct, I was thinking they might be the middle men in a dirty bomb plot. Here's his reply:
polonium 210 is critical to building nukes so it controls chain reaction. The real question is what was an exKGB agent doing in proxinity to it--not who killed him
Regards
Ed Epstein
www.edwardjayepstein.com
Any comments on the above three posts???
Forgot to ping you about the above 4 posts. I would be interested to get your take on this--GGG
Anyone familiar with the 300 year old culture of ruthless
Russian genocide knows exactly what Putin is doing.
http://foreignnotes.blogspot.com/2006/11/echoes-of-great-terror.html#comments
For instance, read the following from Epstein's site (especially the last part!):
Question:
What are Russia's four main contributions to Iran's nuclear program?
Answer:
Russia, as the prime subcontractor for Iran's nuclear program, is providing:
1) Six nuclear reactors for Iran. Four are at Bushehr and two are at Akhvaz.
2) A uranium-conversion plant at Bushehr that can be used for uranium enrichment.
3) An exemption in the UN resolution on Iran. In its draft resosultion the Russians have exempted “materials, equipment, technology" used at Bushehr 1. This exemption will allow Iran to convert the lightly-enriched fuel in the light-water nuclear reactor into weapon-grade 235. It need only remove fuel rods from Bushehr, then extracting their pellets, and feed this enriched uranium into its centrifuges. The centrifuges could then produce weapon-grade U-235 in less than 2 month. (Iran could keep the operation secret by substituting dummy rods for those it removed from the Bushehr reactor.)
4) The reactor-grade uranium for Bushehr 1 (which goes into operation in October 2007.)
Russia may be also making unofficial contributions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) laboratory at Seibersdorf, Austria, ascertained that Iranian centrifuges made indigenously in Iran — not imported gear — showed traces of on enriched uranium with a purity level of 36 percent U-235. Russia appears to have been the source of this enriched uranium, since the IAEA lab also found a "likely match" between the atomic signatures of the 36% uranium used in Russian submarines and the traces gathered from Iranian centrifuges. Then there is the polonium 210 used to explode the bomb. The AIEA determined that Iran has obtained polonium 210, an isotope. And the likely source is Russia, which uses it (in combination with beryllium) to ensure the chain reaction leading to a nuclear explosion begins at the right time.
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/2003question/IransWMD.htm
See what I mean???
meaningless, all three. If they were mishandling Po-210, then how come that out of all 6 [??] "no-goodniks" only one got it hard and fast - where are all the others, in what hospitals? To handle Po-210 and not get hurt in the process takes training, special equipment and concentrated effort. Here one has a professional assassination job, with the means chosen for the difficulty of tracing [how long did it take them to find out?]. The same means, once identified, drastically narrows the culprits circle.
Did you read post #48?
same thing. Those having polonium for the nukes are not going to part with it. Dirty bomb is best done with high grade nuclear waste - spent fuel rods, or concentrates from their re-processing. Polonium is way too valuable a stuff to waste on a dirty bomb. Besides, Litvinenko was no threat to iranians. WhyAnd to suggest a suicidal deal is the top of absurdity. kegebuns [like litvinenko] went through enough military-style training - if there were polonium spill next to the food, they would be running out of there screaming, to burn their clothes and to take good long showers. Most certainly they would not be eating there. Besides, polonium for the nukes does not happen as a loose dusty powder [too dangerous in manufacture and usage], nor as dilute solution to spray on the food. Weapons grade nuclear materials come as compact bodies, with protecting [chemically and mechanically] containers. So, even the attempted assembly of a working nuke in London does not hold water.
Smuggling to iran from russia needs not to be done through England [why not New Zealand as a transit point?]- they share a water border in Caspian. Simpler, easier, no prying eyes, less possibility for the things going awry. As William of Occam used to say, "thou shalt not complicate". Why scratch one's left ear with the right hand from behind over one's groin?
Of course, he could have been just murdered by Putin's Russia.<BR.
Precisely. And no alternatives, if one has any idea of what putin's [and even without putin's] russia is. It is in the character.
==It is in the character.
It is also in their character to smuggle polonium 210 to rogue regimes.
Government-to government transfer [even through special services] would be done by an airplane from one of their military fields straight to tehran or some other place in iran. Do not complicate. Do not allow your imagination to run too wild. Do not see magicians, dungeons and dragons where there are none - just a bunch of the worst scoundrels you could imagine. They are not geniuses, though.
It's still possible that the P 210 was destined for England itself. There is a large and radical Muslim community there with connection to rogue regimes that would love to get their hands on it (for use in England, or elsewhere). Or, conversely, it may have been destined for England to accomplish the very purpose that Gordievsky would have us believe...to murder Litvinenko. To my mind it's too early to tell. But the fact that Gordievsky is pushing this theory makes me very suspicious. I Googled Gordievsky and came up with the following excerpt. I know Golitsyn is a controversial figure, so let's put him aside for the moment. It is the evidence against Gordievsky himself that concerns me (Epstein has the same distrust and suspicions about him btw):
"Oleg Gordievsky, an officer in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, joined this growing list of double agents in 1974, when he first began leaking secrets to England’s MI6. In 1985, he defected to the West under suspicious circumstances. Although supposedly arrested by the KGB on suspicion of spying for England, he was not executed. 'A generation earlier he would simply have been liquidated,' writes Gordievsky (with a co-author) of himself. 'Nowadays the KGB had to have evidence.'8 Starting with this obvious lie, Gordievsky’s story becomes even more absurd. Despite his arrest for treason, he claims the KGB nevertheless allowed him enough freedom that he could repeatedly make contact with British agents and even escape the Soviet Union itself — on foot.9 To top it all off, his family was subsequently released from the Soviet Union.10 "
"Unlike Golitsyn, who still remains under deep cover to prevent assassination by the Soviets, Gordievsky maintains a high-profile life in London. Gordievsky insists that the KGB has had no spies in British intelligence since 1961, and ridicules former MI5 officer Peter Wright for fingering over 200 suspects — including former MI5 director Sir Roger Hollis — as a result of investigations under project FLUENCY. Gordievsky also bitterly denies Golitsyn’s revelation of the existence of Department D in the KGB, while he staunchly defends Nosenko as a genuine defector. Gordievsky has advised such prominent individuals as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and his 1990 book, KGB: The Inside Story, has been published widely.11"
http://www.attacreport.com/ar_archives/art_iswr5_cia2.htm
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