Spy’s poisoning reads like a thriller, with final chapter yet to be written

? It’s a murder mystery filled with intrigue reminiscent of the Cold War – there’s a retired Russian spy poisoned by a radioactive substance, a secret dossier, a slain investigative journalist and a shadowy fugitive billionaire.

But the story of the agonizing death of Alexander Litvinenko is an up-to-the-minute tale of politics, power and betrayal. And the final chapter of this spy thriller has not yet been written.

The most crucial questions remain unanswered: Was Litvinenko’s death murder? Who killed him? Where did they get the poison?

Most intriguingly, who might have ordered his death?

The tale began after Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence officer, met with Mario Scaramella, an Italian security expert, in a London sushi bar Nov. 1. Scaramella passed Litvinenko a secret file purportedly showing that both men were on a hit list of Kremlin opponents.

Both men somehow ingested polonium-210, a substance normally produced in nuclear reactors.

Litvinenko fell ill and died, blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin. Scaramella was exposed to a smaller amount and showed no signs of illness, doctors said Saturday.

Investigators have found traces of radiation at least a dozen sites across London, including two British Airways jetliners. Litvinenko’s wife was also contaminated with trace amounts of the poison, a friend said Friday, although she was not hospitalized.

Litvinenko told a reporter in June that a new Russian law would permit authorities to target its opponents abroad. He feared he was among them.

British police officers stand guard beside boarding erected outside a branch of the Itsu sushi restaurant in central London, where on Nov. 1 the late former Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko met Italian security expert Mario Scaramella. Scaramella has tested positive for polonium-210.

Another former Russian intelligence officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, wrote in a letter delivered Friday by human rights activists in Moscow that the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB, had created a hit squad to kill Litvinenko and other Kremlin foes.

Trepashkin, who is serving a four-year sentence for divulging state secrets in a prison in Yekaterinburg, said he warned Litvinenko of the threat during a meeting in August 2002.

The Kremlin has dismissed the accusations as fantasy.

But the Guardian newspaper Friday reported that British intelligence sources suspect Litvinenko was the victim of a plot by “rogue elements” in the Russian state. Investigators suspect that several Russian agents may have entered Britain with a crowd of Moscow soccer fans shortly before Litvinenko met Scaramella, the newspaper reported.

Litvinenko’s friends, meanwhile, have little doubt that Russian authorities were somehow involved.

“These latest developments only reinforce our thinking that it was the Russian government or some element of (Russia’s) political landscape that was behind this,” said Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko’s friend and spokesman.

Goldfarb and others suspect he was targeted because he was investigating the death of Anna Politkovskaya, a Kremlin critic shot to death in her apartment building in October.

This is not the first time the Kremlin has been accused of using drugs and poisons against critics. Suspicion fell on Russian authorities in 2004 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin.

That same year, Ivan Rybkin, a former speaker of the Russian parliament, disappeared during his race against Putin for the Russian presidency. He later said he had been drugged.

In each case, Moscow has denied the accusations.

The FSB, though, acknowledged that it killed Omar Ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi militant who fought with Chechen separatists, in 2002. Chechen rebels said he died after opening a poisoned letter slipped to him by the FSB.