A Very Expensive Poison

December 19, 2016
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.

December 1, 2016
A chilling look at the Putin regime's murderous suppression of its critics.In 2017, observes Guardian foreign correspondent Harding (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, 2014, etc.), the Russian president will likely stand again for the office, and winning it--as he certainly will--will put him in the running to be the longest-serving ruler that nation has seen. Meanwhile, under his regime, Russia has "gone from a semi-democracy into something approaching a dictatorship." No one has been more aware of that transformation than Russia's journalists, one of whom, Alexander Litvinenko (1962-2006), had been assembling evidence of Putin's links to Russian organized crime, combining to form a "mafia state." Litvinenko was silenced by assassins who used polonium to poison him, the first such case in medical history. Litvinenko happened to be in London at the time, which means that the assassins had to enter a country with which Russia was not at war in order to conduct murder, making the case a matter of national security interest. However, Harding writes with mounting indignation, the British government steadily backed down in the face of Putin's continued aggressions not just against his own citizens, but also in the Crimea. By the author's account, British Prime Minister David Cameron effectively helped cover up what had by then become the well-known fact of official murder, determined not to harm trade interests. The British government, said one observer, was worried about Putin's ire, while British intelligence agents were worried about meeting Litvinenko's fate; Putin was "concerned about being called a mafia boss." In this fast-paced book, Harding, who was expelled from the Kremlin while serving as the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief, covers all the bases while exposing the weakness and accommodationism of the now-departed British leadership. Hard-hitting and timely given Russia's continued sway in international politics as well as its documented influence over an incoming American administration that is also hostile to the press.

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December 1, 2016
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 expose, 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from December 1, 2016

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

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