Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|
Searching... Lewiston Public Library | 34092001638029 | 327.1247 HARD | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lockport Public Library | 34094004422229 | 327.1247 HARD | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Medina - Lee-Whedon Memorial Library | 34103001797838 | 327.124 HARD (HISTORY 3) | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... North Tonawanda Public Library | 34120006422741 | 327.1247 HARD | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A true story of murder and conspiracy that points directly to Vladimir Putin, by The Guardian's former Moscow bureau chief and author of The Snowden Files and Collusion
On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium--a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance.
Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story--complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters. He shows how Litvinenko's murder foreshadowed the killings of other Kremlin critics, from Washington, DC, to Moscow, and how these are tied to Russia's current misadventures in Ukraine and Syria. In doing so, he becomes a target himself and unearths a chain of corruption and death leading straight to Vladimir Putin. F
rom his investigations of the downing of flight MH17 to the Panama Papers, Harding sheds a terrifying light on Russia's fracturing relationship with the West.
Author Notes
Luke Harding is a British journalist, born 1968. He graduated from University College, Oxford where he studied English. His work in journalism began while at University College as editor of the student newspaper, Cherwell. He went on to work for The Sunday Correspondent, the Evening Argus in Brighton, the Daily Mail, and then, in 1996, The Guardian. From 2007-2011 he was the Guardian's Russia correspondent. He received the James Cameron prize in 2014 for his work on Russia, Ukraine, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. Currently, he is a foreign correspondent with the Guardian.
He is the author of Mafia State, co-author of Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, The Liar, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West, and Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
In 2013, Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy was made into the film, The Fifth Estate.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harding (The Snowden Files), a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, covers the 2006 poisoning of Russian exile Litvinenko in informative detail and sensationalist style. Drawing on interviews, original reportage, and a British public inquiry, Harding reiterates the inquiry's findings: Litvinenko was the victim of a political assassination that was indistinguishable from a gangland hit. Born in 1962, Litvinenko had been an officer of the FSB, Russia's national security service (and KGB successor), until he tipped off a friend, oligarch Boris Berezovsky, about a planned attempt on Berezovsky's life. Fleeing the wrath of Berezovsky's would-be assassins, in 2000 Litvinenko and his family found refuge in London, where Litvinenko became a security advisor, MI6 informant, and dissident speaking out against Russian president Vladimir Putin and his "mafia state." A casual meeting with two business associates, Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, cut short Litvinenko's activities. According to forensics experts following a trail of radiation, the two had been transporting polonium, which ended up in Litvinenko's tea, killing him within weeks. The public inquiry found that Litvinenko was certainly killed by Lugovoi and Kovtun, the flunkeys of an FSB operation that was "probably approved" by Putin. Harding suitably conveys the shocking, violent, and tragic story of a man whose murder has gone unpunished. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Prior to the death by radioactive poison of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 (see Alan S. Cowell's The Terminal Spy, 2008), as award-winning journalist Harding notes, It might have seemed improbable verging on incredible that Russian assassins might murder someone on the streets of London. Yet Harding's tour de force account of Russian murderous mayhem only starts with Litvinenko's shocking death. He quickly moves on to such suspicious deaths as Boris Berezovsky's locked-bathroom suicide and Alexander Perepilichny's post-jog cardiac arrest, noting along the way that others, mostly those who dared to oppose Putin and his minions, met deaths mysterious or legal but brutal. Many of those threatened or destroyed initially believed that Putin was going to blot out corruption. Instead, they discovered that his aim was to redistribute the state's resources among his KGB friends. Harding's exposé, shortlisted for the CWA Nonfiction Dagger Award, could not be more chilling or timely. As Berezovsky's daughter states, her father perceived Putin as a danger to the whole world. And you can see that now. A devastating and disturbing must-read.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2016 Booklist
Guardian Review
That conclusion, coming nearly 10 years after the murder, seems like a good occasion for the publication of a book that sums up not only what we know about the crime but also how we came to know it. There have been other books, most notably Death of a Dissident by Alexander Goldfarb, himself a former Soviet dissident, who was instrumental in smuggling [Alexander Litvinenko] out of Russia in 2000 and, became friends with the escaped Russian once he settled in London; he played a key role in cracking the mystery of the murder before his friend died. Goldfarb's account, written within months of the murder, is intelligent, contextually rich and insightful. Still, much information was unavailable to him: he did not, for example, report that Litvinenko was on the MI6 payroll at the time of the murder. Some of the arguments Goldfarb used to prove that the Kremlin was behind the killing were debunked by evidence presented at the inquiry, though his overall conclusion was confirmed. Then there was the inquiry's own report, which presented a well-written record of the evidence reviewed and a rigorous argument that supported the conclusion. In spite of its impressive length, the report left the door open for an old-fashioned well-told story. When Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital in 2006, the suggestion that Putin ordered his murder seemed outlandish. Now it appears probable. This book tells a racy story On 23 November 2006 a man died in a London hospital. He had been ill for just over three weeks. He had deteriorated catastrophically and, for most of the length of his illness, mysteriously, but by the time of his death the basic facts were clear. He was a former officer of the Russian secret police, and he had been poisoned with a radioactive substance. One other thing was clear to him and to those closest to him: the murder had been ordered, or at least approved, by President Vladimir Putin himself. To much of the rest of the world, that claim seemed outlandish. Over the years, however, the world's understanding of Putin grew, and so, gradually, did the understanding that a murder like this could have -- and probably would have -- been commissioned by him. In January of this year, following a months-long inquiry, retired judge Sir Robert Owen concluded that Putin had "probably approved" the killing. That conclusion, coming nearly 10 years after the murder, seems like a good occasion for the publication of a book that sums up not only what we know about the crime but also how we came to know it. There have been other books, most notably Death of a Dissident by Alexander Goldfarb, himself a former Soviet dissident, who was instrumental in smuggling Litvinenko out of Russia in 2000 and, became friends with the escaped Russian once he settled in London; he played a key role in cracking the mystery of the murder before his friend died. Goldfarb's account, written within months of the murder, is intelligent, contextually rich and insightful. Still, much information was unavailable to him: he did not, for example, report that Litvinenko was on the MI6 payroll at the time of the murder. Some of the arguments Goldfarb used to prove that the Kremlin was behind the killing were debunked by evidence presented at the inquiry, though his overall conclusion was confirmed. Then there was the inquiry's own report, which presented a well-written record of the evidence reviewed and a rigorous argument that supported the conclusion. In spite of its impressive length, the report left the door open for an old-fashioned well-told story. Luke Harding served as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, and ran into enough trouble there to provide material for his 2011 book, The Mafia State. He has also published works on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and American whistleblower Edward Snowden. Given his knowledge of Russia and his experience of writing about the underbelly of secret services, the Litvinenko story might seem perfect for him. His toolbox is that of a reporter turned crime writer: he sets up every scene with descriptions of interiors or landscape and with staccato portraits of the main characters, which invariably hint at sinister events to come. And yet every chapter seems to lose its wind by the end -- perhaps the Litvinenko story cannot in fact be written as a murder mystery. Instead of a diabolical plot, it has a mess of intentions and delegated responsibilities; instead of villains, it features buffoons; instead of master plans, it has muck, which Harding calls "improvisation". It all seems make-believe and ridiculous, Pink Panther rather than James Bond. Yet it ends with a very real death. The book seems to me hastily written. At times, the reader of A Very Expensive Poison is left to wonder whom the author is quoting and, more importantly, why he is quoting them. Key scenes make no sense. A week before the poisoning, the two suspected murderers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, first tried to get Litvinenko to ingest the poison. This is how Harding describes it: We don't know how the polonium was deployed. The forensic evidence suggests that either Lugovoi or Kovtun slipped it into Litvinenko's cup of tea or water. Litvinenko failed to notice, or was otherwise distracted. For the next thirty minutes, the tea or glass of water sat in front of him, a little to his left -- an invisible nuclear murder weapon. The conversation was of Gazprom. Lugovoi and Kovtun must have been barely listening: for them, the question was, would Litvinenko drink? Litvinenko didn't drink. The plan -- pre-meditated, for sure, but possibly improvised in its execution -- failed. One can only imagine what must have been going through Lugovoi's and Kovtun's minds when the meeting broke up, his drink untouched. Translated into less racy language, this passage would read: "Radioactive evidence tells us that there was an unsuccessful attempt at murder by polonium. We have no idea of the details and are desperately trying to fill the gaps." Harding tries to make a dramatic narrative out of incoherent events. The first half of the book is based on evidence and testimony presented during last year's inquiry. But around page 240, Harding runs out of material culled from the inquiry and turns to other stories, ones he appears to have reported on for the Guardian in the last few years. These include: the apparent suicide in October 2011 of former oligarch Boris Berezovsky in London; the November 2012 death of businessman Alexander Perepilichnyy, in Surrey, of apparent poisoning ; and the spring 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps the author wanted to compile the latest available evidence on the criminal and ruthless nature of the Putin regime to bolster the case made by the Litvinenko inquiry -- though that hardly seems necessary. In any case, these chapters shed little light on what happened to Litvinenko. Judge Owen told that story in fewer words; his report is available online. * To order A Very Expensive Poison for [pound]7.99 (RRP [pound]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Masha Gessen.
Library Journal Review
Harding (former Moscow correspondent, The Guardian; The Snowden Files) has contributed a remarkable book to the burgeoning revelations about Russian President Vladimir Putin's violence against perceived opponents. Harding's main thrust concerns the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Great Britain at the hands of Russian agents, using the highly radioactive isotope polonium-210. Litvinenko was a Russian operative tracking organized crime, who received asylum in Britain. This book further examines the deaths in Britain of "oligarch" Boris Berezovsky and investor Alexander Perepilichny; in Washington, Mikhail Lesin; in Moscow, the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and opposition figure Boris Nemtsov. The poisons used in Britain and circumstances of death establish that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) acted at Putin's behest. The downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by Russia's "mafia statelet" in Eastern Ukraine pushed the details of Litvinenko's murder into public view through an official inquiry, nearly nine years later. Harding concludes with an unveiling of the "Panama Papers," exposing Putin's ties to secret offshore wealth. VERDICT This detailed and thrilling page-turner portrays Russia's president as a "vindictive" murderer of "personal enemies." Recommended for all larger collections. [See "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 9/1/16, p. 30.]-Zachary Irwin, Behrend Coll., Pennsylvania State Erie © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue: The Men from Moscow Passport control, Gatwick Airport, Sussex 16 October 2006 Two of the Russians arriving that morning stood out. What precisely made them suspicious was hard to identify. But in the mind of Spencer Scott - the detective constable on duty at London's Gatwick Airport - there was a curious sense of doubt. It was 16 October 2006. Passengers were disembarking from a Transaero flight from Moscow. They were collecting luggage. A stream of new arrivals queued up at passport control, and then proceeded for customs and excise checks. The first Russian was of medium height, thirty-something, with blond Slavic hair. He was wearing a casual jacket and carrying an expensive-looking leather laptop case. He appeared prosperous. The second, with dark hair, receding slightly, and a yellowish complexion, was clearly his companion. They weren't behaving oddly as such. And yet there was something - a furtiveness that pricked Detective Constable Scott's attention. 'I though they were of interest and basically as they came through immigration controls I stopped them and questioned them,' he recalled. Scott hadn't been told to look out for them; he was acting on a hunch. He asked them their names. One man spoke English and identified himself as Andrei Lugovoi. His friend, he said, was Dmitry Kovtun. Kovtun said nothing. It appeared he spoke only Russian. Scott took a grainy low-res photo of them. Lugovoi was on the right. In it they look like dark ghostly smudges. It was 11.34 a.m. Lugovoi and Kovtun's story seemed convincing enough: they had flown into London for a business meeting. Lugovoi said he owned a company called Global Project. Moreover, his friend was a member of the finance department at a respectable Moscow bank. Their travel agent had booked them in for two nights at the Best Western Hotel in Shaftesbury Avenue. The hotel wasn't cheap: £300 a night. Lugovoi handed over his reservation. It was genuine. Still, there was something unsettling about their answers, Scott felt: 'They were very evasive as to why they were coming to the UK.' Normally, those subjected to a random stop would open up - about families, holiday plans, the lousy English weather. The two Russians, by contrast, were elusive. 'As I asked them questions, they weren't coming out with the answers that I wanted to hear or expected to hear. They were giving me very, very short answers,' Scott said. Their replies offered 'no information'. Scott looked on the internet but couldn't find Global Project. The Russians told him that their business meeting was with 'Continental Petroleum Limited', a company based at 58 Grosvenor Street in London. Scott rang the firm's landline. A man answered, confirmed they were registered with the UK's financial authority. OK, then. The constable checked the police database. Nothing. Britain's intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, hadn't flagged Lugovoi and Kovtun either. Apparently, they weren't of interest. A copper's nose was one thing; hard facts another. With no evidence to go on, Scott took soundings from his sergeant, who advised him to let both men 'go forward'. Britain's judicial and police system rests on a presumption of innocence - unlike in Russia, Lugovoi and Kovtun's homeland, where judges take informal guidance from above. After twenty minutes the Russians were told they were free to leave. They collected their luggage and headed for central London. Scott put their photo in a file. It was stamped: 'For intelligence purposes only.' It was little more than a month later that Scotland Yard - faced with a situation of unprecedented international horror - realised Scott's instinct had been preternaturally correct. The two weren't businessmen. They were killers. Their cover story was just that. It had been painstakingly constructed over a period of months, possibly years. And it worked. That morning, Lugovoi and Kovtun were bringing something into Britain that customs had failed to detect. Not drugs, or large sums of cash. Something so rare and strange and otherworldly, it had never been seen before in this form in Europe or America. It was, as Kovtun put it, talking in confidence to a friend in Hamburg, 'a very expensive poison'. A toxin which had started its surreptitious journey to London from a secret nuclear complex in south-west Siberia. An invisible hi-tech murder weapon. Lugovoi and Kovtun were to use it to kill a man named Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko was a Russian émigré who had fled to Britain six years previously. He'd become a persistent pain for the Russian government. He was a remorseless critic of Vladimir Putin, Russia's secret policeman turned president. By 2006, Litvinenko was increasingly anomalous: back in Russia many sources of opposition has been squashed. There was a particular reason why Putin might want Litvinenko dead. Before escaping in 2000, Litvinenko had worked for the FSB, Russia's intelligence service, and the main successor agency to the KGB. Putin himself had been, briefly, his boss. But Litvinenko now had another employer: Britain's secret intelligence service, MI6. Her Majesty's Government had given Litvinenko a fake British passport, an encrypted phone and a salary of £2,000 a month, paid anonymously into his HSBC account and appearing on his bank statement incongruously next to his groceries from Waitrose. He had an MI6 case officer, codenamed 'Martin'. Litvinenko wasn't exactly James Bond. But he was passing to British intelligence sensitive information about the links between Russian mafia gangs active in Europe and powerful people at the very top of Russian power - including Putin. According to Litvinenko, Russian ministers and their mobster friends were, in effect, part of the same sprawling crime syndicate. A mafia state. It was his contention that a criminal code had replaced the defunct ideology of communism. Litvinenko knew about this mafia's activities in Spain; he was, in the words of one friend, a walking encyclopedia on organised crime. So much so that MI6 loaned him out to colleagues from Spanish intelligence in Madrid. All of this made Litvinenko a traitor, and the KGB's punishment for spies who betrayed their country was understood. From the very beginning of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Moscow had used poisons, bullets, bombs hidden in cakes and other lethal methods to snuff out its 'enemies', at home and abroad, from Leon Trotsky to Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident and writer poisoned on Waterloo Bridge in 1978 with an ingenious ricin-tipped umbrella. As Stalin famously observed, 'No man, no problem.' There was a spectrum. It went from killings that were demonstrative, to those where the KGB's fingerprints were nowhere to be found, however hard you looked. Boris Yeltsin had stayed those methods in the post-communist 1990s; the KGB's poison factory seemingly mothballed; Russia's democrats briefly in the ascendant. Now, under Putin, such methods were back. The FSB was Russia's pre-eminent institution. It was all-powerful, beyond the law, and - like its Leninist predecessors - a purveyor of state terror. In the glory days of the Soviet Union, the KGB dispatched professionals and undercover 'illegals' to carry out extra-judicial murders - known in the spy trade as 'wet jobs'. Lugovoi and Kovtun's mission to London was supposed to be exactly such an operation: ruthless, clinical, undetectable - an iron fist concealed in a velvet glove. It was to be done in the best traditions of the Cheka , the counter-revolutionary police force founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin's friend. Dzerzhinsky's statuette with its cold, pinched features sat in Putin's office. But, despite a resurgence under Putin, Russia's spy agencies had suffered the same degradation that had blighted all Russian institutions - the presidency, Russia's parliament or Duma, medicine, science and technology. Critics said the country, despite its great power pretensions, was slowly dying. Its modern assassins were a shambolic lot. The idea was that nobody would notice the visiting Russians. Once they had poisoned their victim they would escape back to Moscow, leaving few ripples on the busy surface of London life. Their target, of course, would die horribly. But the Kremlin's hand would be hidden. The British would mark his death down as a baffling case of gastro-enteritis and those who carried out the murder would return to a life of shadowy anonymity. And, one imagines, reward. The payment for murder, Kovtun hinted, was a Moscow flat. It didn't quite work out like that. Russia's poisoning project, when finally accomplished, would prompt a British public inquiry costing millions of pounds. One that examined the masses of evidence collected by the Metropolitan Police, from hotels, restaurants, car seats - even from a bronze phallus at a nightclub visited by the assassins in Soho. Scotland Yard was able to reconstruct minute by minute the events leading up to the murder. Its investigation - made public more than eight years later - was one of the most extensive in criminal history. Yet despite this exposure there were soon to be other victims - opponents felled in murky circumstances abroad or, like the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, killed outside the very gates of the Kremlin. Moscow would send tanks across borders, start a war in Europe, and annex a large chunk of neighbouring territory. Its proxies - or possibly Russian servicemen - would blow a civilian plane out of the sky. The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin's critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead. Excerpted from A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West by Luke Harding All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Men from Moscow | p. 1 |
1 Mafia State | p. 9 |
2 Journalist, Exile, Campaigner, Spy | p. 39 |
3 First Deployment | p. 75 |
4 The German Waiter | p. 103 |
5 Murder in Mayfair | p. 120 |
6 A Bit of a Puzzle | p. 138 |
7 Ruslan and Lyudmila | p. 169 |
8 An Inspector Calls | p. 191 |
9 Death of an Oligarch | p. 246 |
10 Gelsemium elegans | p. 272 |
11 A Small Victorious War | p. 305 |
12 The Inquiry | p. 333 |
13 Leviathan | p. 370 |
14 Blunt Force | p. 394 |
15 The Man Who Solved His Own Murder | p. 415 |
A Note on Sources | p. 437 |
Acknowledgements and Photo Credits | p. 440 |
Index | p. 441 |