'Terminal Spy' tale is a real-life thriller

The poisoning of an expatriate Russian intelligence officer in a tony London hotel bar in November 2006 was front-page news around the world. The photographs of the once-vibrant Alexander Litvinenko -- just days later a cadaverous, broken wreck -- were shocking.

And the manner of his death -- polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope -- guaranteed the story a shelf life that would put Twinkies to shame.

Polonium leaves a rather emphatic trail. And, as Alan Cowell shows, it was easy for Scotland Yard to follow its labyrinthian path across Europe to Moscow, where the trail went suddenly, and predictably, cold. What was not easy was determining who laced Litvinenko's teapot with polonium, and why.

Here is where Cowell's story really takes off.

The cast of characters is astonishing and so complex that the author felt compelled to list them all in a who's who at the beginning, and you'll be glad he did.

Complementing this outré ensemble is a Byzantine story line that could have dissolved easily into a hopeless stew in less adroit hands, but Cowell, the New York Times' former London bureau chief and an investigative reporter, knows this story inside out. And he writes exceedingly well.

"Litvinenko lived among dislocated exiles, condemned to pine for a homeland that no longer existed," Cowell writes. "He moved in a twilit, ambiguous world of rumor and riddles, populated by plotters and fantasists, hoodlums and propagandists."

Among his erstwhile friends, Litvinenko counted a little-known mid-level operative named Vladimir Putin, whose meteoric rise to absolute power dovetailed with Litvinenko's atrophying career and seemed to drive him over the edge. He was consumed with a visceral hatred of Putin, Cowell tells us, and his increasingly shrill allegations about the leader's personal peccadillos and the corruption of his government contributed to his isolation.

Moscow dismissed the tirades, which appeared annoyingly in prominent Western publications, as the delusions of a crank. Yet the question persists: "If he was a nobody," Cowell writes, "why snuff out the last flicker of his nonentity with such lurid drama? But if he was more than the Kremlin depicted him to be, what had he done to deserve a death that depended on such ingenuity and cruelty?"

Scotland Yard has charged Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian millionaire businessman with an appropriately murky past, with transporting the polonium to London where, as one of three people with whom Litvinenko met that fateful day, he allegedly irradiated the teapot.

But why? What did he have to gain?

Cowell offers a number of scenarios, all of them solid.

My take? There is only one place the killer(s) could have acquired polonium. But it was not the Kremlin that ordered a sledgehammer to silence a titmouse. It was a cabal of mid-level intelligence officers who conspired unilaterally to deal with Litvinenko to please their superior -- in this case, Putin -- and reap an appropriate reward.

It is a form of perverse sycophancy that was a hallmark of the Soviet state, and which the historian Daniel Rancour-Laferriere examined in "The Slave Soul of Russia." It is a trait that is not uniquely Russian, of course, but one that thrived in the twisted moral climate of Soviet communism.

And it has been exhibited recently in the murder of the muckraking political reporter Anna Politovskaya and a growing list of other high-profile killings, none of which has been solved.

Litvinenko's case may never be officially solved either. But Cowell has given us a story that is at once a real-life thriller and an immensely sinister cautionary tale about the new Russia.

Michael J. Bonafield • 612-673-4215