ALEXANDER LITVINENKO: THE WHO-DONE-IT-FRAUD -- WAS HE REALLY MURDERED?

by William Dunkerley

The ubiquitous "who murdered Alexander Litvinenko" news story has turned out to be a fraud.

In late 2006, world media outlets were reporting that the former KGB spy was murdered on orders of Vladimir Putin. It was one of the biggest, most sensational news stories of the time. Now a new video turns that account upside down.

The video shows that Litvinenko wasn't a spy, he never worked for the KGB, and the claim that Vladimir Putin ordered the murder is not fact-based. It was merely an allegation made by an arch-enemy of Putin's. What's more, the London coroner hasn't ever concluded that Litvinenko was even murdered. 

The widely-disseminated news stories about Litvinenko don't match the facts. The stories appear to have been fabricated.

The Who-Done-It Fraud video is the first in a series of supplements to my recent book entitled The Phony Litvinenko Murder. The book examines the media coverage of the purported poisoning of Litvinenko by radioactive polonium.

 The new video presents actual, rarely-heard audio recordings of Litvinenko himself, speaking from his hospital bed less than 2 weeks before his death. In it he clearly suggests who he believes poisoned him -- and it isn't Putin. Also on the video is an exclusive recording of a close associate of Litvinenko who backs up Litvinenko's belief about his poisoner.

The video traces the strange odyssey of the changing stories told by the media about who was responsible for the poisoning. First the media reports accused one person, then another, and then still another. But the media never explained why their accusations were shifting.

Certainly there must be some significance to why the identity of the accused person has mysteriously shifted. But media reports didn't dig into that mystery. They just ignored this very significant aspect of the case. Was that a result of widespread journalistic incompetence? Or was there something sinister behind the curious nature of the media reports? We're just left to wonder.

But the real kicker in the story is this:

It's not even certain that Alexander Litvinenko was actually murdered!

That's right. The London coroner never ruled the death to be a homicide. The Who-Done-It Fraud video presents exclusive confirmation of this, direct from the coroner's office.

But the worldwide media have been mum on that issue, too.

In fact, the world media outlets were initially very quiet about the Litvinenko story altogether. Litvinenko was apparently poisoned on November 1, 2006. The BBC Russian Service ran the story on November 11, in its transmissions aimed at Russia's population. But there was nary a word about the case back home in London. Other British media weren't covering it either. Isn't that puzzling? The poisoning happened in London. Litvinenko was a British citizen. We know from the BBC Russian Service report that at least someone in the British media knew about the story. But there was no coverage.

It could be because Litvinenko just wasn't considered newsworthy. After all, his name wasn't exactly a household word at that time. Few people around the globe really knew who he was, much less cared. So perhaps the decision not to cover the poisoning of an unknown actually represented good journalistic judgment.

That all changed around November 19, however. News of the Litvinenko poisoning began bursting out all around the world. The Who-Done-It Fraud video explores this phenomenon, and suggests a foreshadowing event that may have been the game changer.

But come to think of it, if Litvinenko was basically not newsworthy, why was there such an enormous eruption of interest that late in the game?

Media outlets called the case a James Bond mystery. But to me, their coverage was more like Alice in Wonderland: a fantasy adventure filled with illogical nonsense, and without a factual basis. The underlying premises of the media coverage just don't hold up to scrutiny.

The Who-Done-It Fraud video can be viewed at http://www.OmnicomPress.com/plmv1 or on YouTube.com.

Comments

[Patrick Armstrong]

And here's another "mistake" by the ever-vigilant Western MSM.

On Feb 2008 Badri Patarkatsishvili was found dead at his house in the UK. The Telegraph again jumped straight to its conclusion: "While the investigation into the death of Mr Patarkatsishvili - a sworn enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin - remains at an early stage, even speculation that the Russia state could be involved will fan diplomatic flames" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1578568/Patarkatsishvili-death-threatens-UK-Russia-ties.html).

All this stopped immediately when the MSM flacks discovered that BP was Saakashvili's enemy, not Putin's.

[David Habakkuk]

You are clearly absolutely right in arguing that the behaviour of the mainstream British and American media, in uncritically recycling accusations against both Lugovoi and the Russian authorities for which credible evidence has simply not been publicly produced, is a major scandal. And the fact that the inquest into Litvinenko's death is due to be resumed – and hopefully, the critical autopsy report finally made public – renders your book, and the accompanying videos, particularly timely.

Likewise, you are clearly right to stress the centrality of the interview which Litvinenko gave to the BBC Russian Service on 11 November 2006. As far as I am aware, this is the only statement by him in the public domain about the circumstances of his poisoning where there is no intermediary, so that distortion of what he said can be ruled out.

However, the significance of the fact that in this interview, Litvinenko, as you put it, 'suggests who he believes poisoned him -- and it isn't Putin', is unclear. That on this occasion, as also in all reports of what Litvinenko claimed about the circumstances of his poisoning up to and including the first stories in the mainstream media on 19 November, the finger of suspicion is clearly pointed at Litvinenko's Italian associate Mario Scaramella, is a crucial fact about the case.

How it should be interpreted, however, is not obvious. As you note, what appears to be the first mention of Litvinenko's poisoning comes in a report on the Kavkaz Center website, datelined 8:35 AM Moscow Time on 11 November, under the headline 'FSB Attempted to Murder Russian Defector in London'.

In the account given by Alex Goldfarb in the book he co-authored with Litvinenko's widow, however, he describes being rung up that day by the Echo Moskvy radio station, and suggests that the 'initial source of the report was Akhmed Zakayev's Website, ChechenPress.info'.

So the story appears to have been initially broken both on the KavKaz Center and ChechenPress sites. Unfortunately, the ChechenPress reports are no longer available on the Internet. However, the KavKaz Center ones, which still are, clearly recycled material from ChechenPress.

(See http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/search.php?page=15&q=Litvinenko.)

A crucial claim in the initial KavKaz Center report was that Mario Scaramella was a 'close associate' of the Deputy Director of the FSB, Colonel General Viktor Komogorov, who had supposedly been responsible for the internal FSB investigation into Litvinenko. The next report in the sequence makes clear that this claim was also made by ChechenPress, who are quoted as saying that the Italian was 'a close friend and a business partner' of Komogorov.

Actually, the Kavkaz Center got the name wrong, spelling it Kolmogorov. However, Litvinenko had close links with Zakayev, being a near neighbour of his and having – as you note – written regularly on the ChechenPress site. Accordingly, Occam's Razor would suggest that not only the breaking of the story, but also the claim about the link between Scaramella and Komogorov, were orchestrated by the two of them in concert.

A corollary of this is that if one chooses to assume that Litvinenko was telling the BBC what he actually thought, it would be quite reasonable to suggest that he believed that Scaramella was the agent of the vengeance, if not of Putin personally, then of the FSB.

But no evidence whatsoever was subsequently produced for the claim that Scaramella had links with the FSB, still less for the claim that he was a bosom buddy of Colonel General Komogorov. Ample evidence is available – particularly if one looks at Italian sources – about the close collaboration between Scaramella and Litvinenko in disinformation activities associated with the so-called 'Mitrokhin Commission' in Italy.

Meanwhile, if Goldfarb is to be believed, when Litvinenko first claimed to him on 11 November that his symptoms were the result of deliberate poisoning, he could not be budged from the conviction that the more plausible interpretation was that the problem was simply 'just a case of bad sushi'. Given that it has been generally suggested that Litvinenko was already manifesting acute symptoms on 2 November, it seems strange that Goldfarb – together with other associates of Litvinenko, including Berezovsky – could not contemplate any possible explanation other than food poisoning more than a week later.

I submit that Occam's Razor suggests that a whole range of accounts of involved parties believed at the time about the circumstances of Litvinenko's poisoning need to be treated with scepticism.

Of course, in an affair as bizarre as this one needs to be cautious about ruling anything out. However, it would seem that an hypothesis that merits investigation is that Litvinenko did not suspect Scaramella at all, but believed that pointing the finger of suspicion in this improbable direction was a convenient means of breaking through a wall of silence that others wanted to erect around his poisoning.

[Patrick Armstrong]

Something else I remember at the time was version whatever of the evolving story was that L had been poisoned with Thallium.
I remembered that some girl in Japan had attempted to kill her mother with it which is no doubt what put it into the minds of the fabricators of the story.
Here, as a trip down memory lane, is the BBC pontificating about L being poisoned by thallium

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6163520.stm