Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Silenced?

Alexander Litvinenko has joined the tally of bizarre foreign-conceived assassinations in London, along with the likes of Georgi Markov and Roberto Calvi.

Litvinenko is said to have believed that Vladimir Putin's henchmen blew up apartment blocks in Moscow in order to pin the blame on the Chechens. For all I know he might also have believed that the Russian President signed Princess Diana's death warrant. These days everything is believable...and deniable, which is why I suspect that there's a little office in Langley responsible for disseminating wild conspiracy theories so that the Agency's operatives can get away with just about anything they choose to!

Unlike Calvi, Litvinenko wasn't exactly silenced, was he? His killers chose an elaborate and slow form of termination which granted the ex-spook an intense two-week period of media noisiness, like the clamorous coda of a Beethoven symphony. And it's the possibility that this extra exposure was part of the plan that makes this particular murder most interesting, but our newspapers over here appear far are more interested in stoking up a diplomatic row with the Russian authorities.

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