Interview With A Spy

Months Before His Mysterious Death, Kremlin Critic Told Of Moscow Plots To Recruit Assassins, Kill Whistleblowers

(AP)  An ex-Soviet spy killed in London with a radioactive toxin gave a series of interviews before his death in which he described how he was ordered to recruit powerful businessmen for post-Communist Russia, hire assassins to neutralize their potential rivals and kill whistle-blowers who threatened the Kremlin, a newspaper report said Saturday.

Academics James Heartfield and Julia Svetlichnaja, from the University of Westminster, spoke to Alexander Litvinenko in a series of three interviews that lasted about six hours in total. While the exact dates of the interviews were unclear, the last was in the spring, according to The Daily Telegraph newspaper, which published a syndicated version of the academics' work Saturday.

The taped interviews were conducted in Russian and Svetlichnaja translated them. The focus of the interviews was Chechnya, but many questions about the specifics of Litvinenko's orders from intelligence bosses and the timeframe of his work were left unanswered.

Litvinenko — a former KGB agent and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin — died Thursday night of heart failure after suddenly falling gravely ill from what doctors said was poisoning by a radioactive substance. He was given asylum in Britain in 2000.

The 43-year-old was recruited into the Soviet-era KGB and later promoted to a specialist counterterrorism and organized crime unit. After the fall of Communism, he said his directive was to recruit powerful businessmen who could stimulate an economic boom, and to hire assassins.

"So if somebody was the victim of a crime — like his daughter was raped — you would offer to let them take revenge on the perpetrator," the academics quoted Litvinenko as saying in their syndicated story in Saturday's Telegraph. "This was how we recruited killers."

The Kremlin had no immediate comment Saturday.

He also told the academics that as a favor to a senior former colleague who was in debt to moneylenders from elsewhere in the Caucasus, he was told to arrest the creditors and execute them.

"Our department worked on the so-called problem principle — the government had a problem and we had simply to deal with it," the academics quoted him as saying.

It was unclear how many of the orders he obeyed. It was also unclear what dates many of the orders were given.

One target he was allegedly ordered to kill was Mikhail Trepashkin, another security officer who had spoken about the Russian Federal Security Service's activities. Another he was told to kidnap to trade for Federal Security Service officers taken hostage by Chechens was a prominent Chechen businessman based in Moscow.

By 1997, he said his department had become "responsible for illegal punishments or so-called extralegal executions of unsuitable businessmen, politicians and other public figures. In parallel, the department blackmailed the same targets for funds."

Since he was granted British asylum in 2000, Litvinenko reached out to many Russian dissidents in talks and interviews.

He also published a book about the bombings of Russian apartment buildings that stirred tensions before the Chechen war of 1999.