[I believe the British have found traces of radioactivity on two British Airways planes which flew to Moscow. So to me that pretty much shows that the guy is right… the killers must have come from Moscow. Jan]

Here’s some more info on who killed the late KGB-FSB defector and why it proves that Raimondo, is a pro-Kremlin propagandist along with Buchanan coming under the influence:

Eurasian Secret Services Daily Review
AIA
Litvinenko masterminded FSB operation of smuggling nuclear material — Scaramella

Mario Scaramella
Alexander Litvinenko, the poisoned former Russian security service (FSB) officer, told his Italian contact he met on the day he fell ill that he had organised the smuggling of nuclear material out of Russia for his security service employers, British daily The Independent writes today. Mario Scaramella was being interviewed at a “secure location” in London but was not in custody.
In an interview with The Independent shortly after the poisoning became public, Scaramella also said that Litvinenko, a friend and professional contact since 2001, told him he had masterminded the smuggling of radioactive material to Zurich in 2000. The operation would have been one of the last carried out by Litvinenko while still an FSB officer, in a unit tackling organised crime and smuggling. In his turn, Alexander Goldfarb, a friend of Litvinenko, has said that Litvinenko did not mention anything about nuclear material while serving with the FSB.

A post-mortem examination will be carried out on Litvinenko on December 1. The Health Protection Agency said that eight people had been referred to a clinic in London for tests for exposure to polonium-210, the radioactive substance that killed Litvinenko. However, it declined to tell the press whether Scaramella was among them, the paper said. Sky News reported this afternoon that the Italian said he had been given the all-clear after checks for radiation poisoning.

Litvinenko feared he was poisoned by his Italian contact “ book™s co-author Alexander Litvinenko feared he was poisoned by Italian academic Mario Scaramella, it was revealed yesterday, The Sun writes today. Yuri Felshtinsky, who wrote a book with Litvinenko, says the stricken ex-security service man named the Italian in a deathbed phone call. He told Felshtinsky, 50, that Scaramella seemed nervous and ate nothing when they met in a London sushi restaurant on November 1, after which the Russian fell ill.

The Sun is quoting Felshtinsky as saying that when he had talked to Alexander around November 12 about who poisoned him, they were talking only about the Italian guy Mario. He was sure at this time that it was Mario, Felshtinsky marks. Felshtinsky has no doubts that the poisoning was done by the Russian government or the FSB. He stressed he thought it was also a demonstration that Russia didn™t care how the world reacted to what it was doing, according to The Sun. Felshtinsky, a Russian historian who moved to the US in 1978, penned the book Blowing Up Russia with Litvinenko, believes top-ranking Russian secret service officers ordered the œhit to send out a warning to defectors ” especially billionaire Boris Berezovsky, a critic of President Vladimir Putin.

Virtually everywhere Alexander Litvinenko went in his final days, he left traces of the polonium-210 that killed him. Polonium 210, the radioactive isotope suspected in the death of Litvinenko, has been found at two more London addresses, Bloomberg news agency reports. Detectives are trying to piece together his movements using all available CCTV cameras along the route to see if anyone was shadowing him. Litvinenko’s friend Alexander Goldfarb said: œThis was not a one-man band. This was an incredibly sophisticated operation involving a lot of people. Investigators hope that this painstaking reconstruction will pinpoint where and when in the day he was poisoned. Police are studying who was dining at the same time as him in the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly and who was around during his meeting with two Russians in the Pine bar at the Millenium Hotel in Grosvenor Square.
His friends believe that Alexander Litvinenko was followed from the moment he left his Muswell Hill home on November 1. Litvinenko was reportedly showing no signs of contamination when he left his town house in Muswell Hill, North London, that morning. It was when he returned home in the evening that he complained of feeling unwell and went to Barnet Hospital where minuscule amounts of the polonium-210 were found.

Traces of the material were found at 25 Grosvenor Street, in the Mayfair district, and 7 Down St., also in Mayfair, a Metropolitan Police spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, has said today. The Grosvenor Street address is the London office of Erinys, a security company that operates in Russia, Iraq and Nigeria, according to the company’s Web site. One of the addresses was said by several British newspapers to contain an office of exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. Scotland Yard later today said “ongoing police examinations’ are also taking place at 58 Grosvenor St, in west London, and at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, in Piccadilly. The investigations are “in connection with the Alexander Litvinenko death,’ the police e-mailed statement said.

Scientists have found traces of radiation on two British Airways (BA) Boeing 767s at Heathrow Airport tested as a part of the investigation into the death in London of the former Russian security service officer Alexander Litvinenko, Sky News reports. A British Airways spokesman told the BBC’s Moscow bureau the third plane was currently at the Russian capital’s Domodedovo airport. A British team – thought to be police experts – will go to Moscow shortly to test the plane, according to BBC. The airline said it had not been confirmed when the planes could have been contaminated but forensics experts were “looking back to the end of October”. BA is trying to make contact with up to 33,000 passengers who travelled on the 221 European flights affected, including the London to Moscow route. The airline said it had been advised the risk to public health was low. The affected destinations are Moscow, Barcelona, Duesseldorf, Athens, Larnaca, Stockholm, Vienna, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Madrid. Sky News pointed out today that after the Russian ex-officer met the Italian Scaramella for lunch on November 1 he met two Russians; at least one of them flew back to Moscow on November 3.
Police investigating the radiation poisoning of Litvinenko are examining also the five-star Sheraton Park Lane Hotel and a West End office building in London, Sky News reports. The Health Protection Agency said tests on “key public areas” of the Sheraton found no risk of radiation poisoning, according to BBC.

Russian ex-Prime Minister collapse might be linked to death of Litvinenko

Yegor Gaidar,50, a veteran of Russia’s liberal opposition and a former acting Russian Prime Minister (June-December 1992), is currently being treated in an undisclosed Moscow hospital, and is said to be in a stable condition. Though doctors there at one point feared he could die, news agencies are reporting. Gaidar, considered a chief architect of Russia’s early market reforms, collapsed November 25 at a conference on Irish-Russian relations at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. He was presenting his book Death of the Empire. Gaidar, who heads an economic think-tank in Moscow, is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin™s softer critics and his daughter is a leader of an opposition movement. Gaidar himself told the Financial Times of London that last week he suffered a sudden, unexplained and violent illness on a visit to Ireland, a day after Alexander Litvinenko died in London from an apparent radiation poisoning. In a telephone interview with the Financial Times he said the doctors had so far been unable to identify the cause of the violent vomiting and bleeding that he suffered during a conference in Ireland. Gaidar’s daughter Maria said her father started vomiting and fainted at a conference in Dublin Friday, and remained unconscious for three hours. Gaidar was found to be in a grave condition, and doctors have not yet identified the cause of the illness.
Gaidar™s collapse at the weekend has been linked to the death of Alexander Litvinenko, according to The Irish Times. The paper cites Anatoly Chubais, a close former colleague who heads Russia’s state electricity company, who said someone may have stood to gain if Gaidar had suffered the same fate as Alexander Litvinenko, who became an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Chubais drew a parallel between Gaidar’s illness, Litvinenko’s death and the murder of Anna Politkovskya, an outspoken investigative reporter who was shot dead in Moscow in October. “Yegor Gaidar on 24 November was in the balance between life and death. Could this be simply some sort of natural illness? According to what the most professional doctors, who have first-hand knowledge of the situation, say – no,” he said. However, Chubais, the target of an assassination attempt in 2005, said he did not believe Gaidar’s illness was the work of intelligence agents working for Russian President Putin. There seems to be no indication of radiation being the cause of his illness. “The deadly triangle – Politkovskaya, Litvinenko and Gaidar – would have been very desirable for some people who are seeking an unconstitutional and forceful change of power in Russia,” RIA Novosti is quoting Chubais as saying.

By the way, on the day he first felt ill, it was the former bodyguard to Yegor Gaidar, when the latter was Russian Prime Minister, Andrei Lugovoy, an-KGB colleague of Alexander Litvinenko whom he had a meeting with.

Valery Natarov, Press Secretary of Yegor Gaidar has categorically denied reports alleging that Gaidar was poisoned by radioactive isotopes, news agency Interfax reports. Natarov said today that Gaidar was in Moscow, his health was satisfactory and œnoticeably improving”.
Gaidar, who has been transferred from Dublin to a Moscow hospital, is already able to talk to his family over the phone, he said. Doctors are considering various scenarios of what could have caused the sickness, one of which is poisoning, the spokesman said. Nobody has ruled out the poisoning version, he noted. It is being considered, and doctors are studying all the symptoms and consequences to cure Gaidar, and diagnose the causes, according to the press secretary who added that it was unclear when Gaidar would be discharged.

Berliner Zeitung accuses FSB head Patrushev in lack of professionalism
The head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russia Nikolay Patrushev, who among others is responsible for investigation from the Russian side of the murder of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, till now has allowed speaking about himself, more likely, as about a non-professional, daily Berliner Seating writes.

The German newspaper considers as a characteristic example of the unprofessionalism of the head of the Russian secret service his actions during the catastrophe of submarine Kursk. Besides for the period when Patrushev heads the FSB, there were two more catastrophes characteristic with failures: the storm of a building of theatre building seized by terrorists in Moscow in October 2002, and the storm of school in Beslan (September 2004). In both cases the subordinates of the FSB head were responsible for the release of hostages, resulting in hundreds of victims.
Patrushev heads the FSB since 1998. The President Vladimir Putin who has been connected with Patrushev with long friendship and teamwork in the KGB, had made him his successor in the main post of the FSB. Patrushev’s distinctive feature is lack of it, the paper writes, adding that for the director of a secret service it is not a shortcoming at all. Patrushev does not stand out in the Russian leadership, unless the certain similarity to its chief: an untrained eye will hardly find distinctions between Putin and Patrushev, a blond, pale, thin-lipped duet, according to the paper.

In opinion of the Berliner Zeitung, it seems that Patrushev’s main care is more likely the influence of the so-called nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as he considers them an engine of revolutions on the sample of the Ukrainian one. In 2005, Patrushev personally exposed the plans of “orange” functionaries in Belarus in preparations of a similar revolution. As it is known, no such a revolution took place there. However, Patrushev does not lower his eyes from the revolutionaries, Berliner Zeitung says. Introduction of the western spies through the NGOs is a new method with an aim to weaken Russia™s influence in the CIS states, Patrushev has declared. The paper note that he also named the countries, producing the spies, the US and Great Britain.

Russian Federal Security Service Lieutenant-General becomes a senator from Primorye region

A candidacy of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Lieutenant-General Viktor Kondratov to the post of the representative of the Primorye Territory (the Russian Far East) to the Council of Federation (upper house of the country™s parliament) was adopted by the territory™s assembly, Profil online edition reports. 31 out of 35 members of the local assembly voted for him in secret ballot.

AIA reported last week that the Governor of Primorye Territory Sergey Darkin, signed a memorandum on appointment of Kondratov the representative of the region in the Council of Federation of Russia. The post was vacant since May, 2006 when Igor Ivanov had left it.
Lieutenant-General Viktor Kondratov is the former head of the FSB directorate in the Primorye Territory. Kondratov was born in 1942 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. He graduated form the vpatory Maritime School, then served in the Black Sea Shipping Company. In 1969 Kondratov graduated from the Higher Naval School in Odessa, in 1973, from the Higher School of the KGB of the USSR. In 1981-1983 he served as a KGB directorate head in Sevastopol. Between 1991 and 1997 he held a post of the head of directorate of the Federal Security Agency (then “ the FSB) in the Primorye Territory. In May 1997 the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed him a plenipotentiary of the President in Primorye Territory simultaneously. Soon Kondatov was dismissed from this post, owing to intervention of Vladimir Putin, then Director of the FSB. The Profil wrote that Putin had persuaded Yeltsin to release Kondratov from additional loading to enable him to concentrate exclusively on security service matters. The first deputy head of the presidential administration Oleg Sysuyev commented then that overlapping of posts of the plenipotentiary of the President and the head of a FSB directorate had been an extraordinary decision and unique experience in Russia. According to Sysuyev, General Kondratov had completely executed all the functions assigned to him by the President. Profil notes that he still was unable to stop the antagonism between the Primorye governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko and the mayor of Vladivostok Viktor Cherepkov. In April 1999 Kondratov was transferred to Moscow and then worked as the representative of the FSB in Moldova.

Georgian secret services reportedly abducted two residents of South Ossetia
In the area of settlement of Ergneti in South Ossetia, supervised by the official Tbilisi, the Georgian secret services had been abducting three persons in their car, according to Russian online site peacekeeper.ru. One of them, an employee of the KGB of South Ossetia, had managed to escape, two others were taken away in an unknown direction. The abducted persons are residents of South Ossetia, Alan Borisovitsh Bestaev and Ivan Danielovitsh Bolotaev, the site says.

Yesterday mass media of South Ossetia reported that one of the kidnapped was a peacekeeper from an Ossetic battalion of the joint peacekeeping forces. However, the commander of the forces, Major-General Marat Kulakhmetov denied the report. He said that according to the lists of the servicemen, in all three battalions there is no Ivan Bolotaev or Alan Bestaev among the peacekeepers.
Representatives of the Georgia security forces motivated the abduction with the fact that drugs had been found out at their possession. The online site notes that it is not excluded in South Ossetia, that the purpose of the provocation was “detection” of stolen “counterfeit US dollars” or “drugs” and the Georgian security services would try to provide photo-and video shooting of their “withdrawal”.

New Vice Director General of the Security Service of Ukraine appointed

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has signed a decree on appointment of Nikolay Gerasimenko a Vice Director General of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), daily Ukrayinska pravda reports, referring to an informed source in the Presidential Secretariat. According to the source, Gerasimenko was appointed to replace one of Igor Drizhchany’s civil assistants “ Valentine Nalivaychenko or Anatoly Mudrov.

Nalivaychenko supervises in the SBU the issues of struggle against terrorism, and also its Information and Analytical Department. Mudrov supervises the staff and legal issues. The source informed that the candidacy of Gerasimenko had been lobbied by the head of the Presidential Secretariat, Viktor Baloga. “Gerasimenko literally for hours was sitting in Baloga™s office. The head of the secretary, probably, expects to put his man in the high post. It has become necessary since there started not to listen to Baloga™s requests”, the source is quoted by the paper. Gerasimenko worked as the deputy chief of the SBU Investigation Directorate under then SBU chiefs Radchenko and Smeshko. He was dismissed from the post by other SBU head, Alexander Turchinov.

In 2001 Gerasimenko on his own initiative undertook supervision of the pre-judicial investigation of the case of mass actions “Ukraine without [then President] Kuchma”. It happened after his immediate superior Alexander Golovin announced that “he would better sign an official report about his resignation than would be engaged in this case”. Gerasimenko personally reported to the SBU deputy chief about “successful finish of the investigation in prompt deadlines”.

Talks between SBU and FBI directorship held in Kiev
Official talks between the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Igor Drizhchany and the First Vice Director of the US Federal Bureu of Investigation (FBI) John Pistol took place yesterday in Kiev, according to the SBU Press centre.

Current issues of the bilateral cooperation of the two services in the field of fight against international terrorism, organized crime, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal migration and cyber crime were discussed, according to the SBU. Exchange of opinions on the situation in the field of protection of democratic values, human rights and high standards of work of the security services took place during the meeting. Agreements on enlarging the scale of cooperation to solve particular tasks providing national security of both countries in the interests of their citizens were also achieved, the SBU Press centre notes.

Parliamentary Committee Chairman exposed to blackmail, threatened with impeachment for investigating Lithuania™s secret service
Chairman of the parliamentary national security and defence committee examining the activity of the State Security Department (VSD) of Lithuania, Algymantas Maculiavicius, regards the publicising of information on his alleged cooperation with the KGB in the past as pressure and provocation, news agency ELTA reports.
Maculiavicius categorically denies these allegations and says he did not cooperate with the KGB. He told journalists in Vilnius that his biography had been checked up thoroughly, so he was absolutely calm and willing only to declare that he regarded the press materials as œvery serious pressure and even a provocation”.

Algys Kaseta, the Vice Chairman of the parliamentary commission, declared on its behalf that the committee regarded the appeared media reports as pressure upon investigation and considered that the publicising of a doubtful document would not affect in any way the results of investigation, ELTA marks. Maculiavicius confirmed that he had been also threatened with blackmail. He said that since November 23 he had received threats of impeachment and probably other members of committee had also been approached. According to the reports, media have received materials, showing ties of Maculiavicius with the KGB in the past. It is reportedly said in those papers that in 1989 he was an “authorized person” of the KGB, according to Penki kontinentai. The committee should present its conclusion on investigation of the VSD activity till December 1, 2006.

Source: Axis
URL: http://www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=…/p>