A year ago today, my friend Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital, leaving behind a wife and young son. Sasha was poisoned by a tiny nuclear device containing polonium-210 — which, the British Crown Prosecution Service concluded, was planted on him by Russian secret agents. In its way, his murder was an act of state-sponsored terrorism.
This is nothing new for Russia. The KGB has long used terrorist tactics and worked closely with organizations like Yasser Arafat’s PLO. The year before, in July 2005, Sasha wrote in a confidential report prepared for a special commission of the Italian Parliament investigating KGB activities in Italy that, “Until recently the KGB had been in charge of all international terrorism.” The manner of his death suggests that Russia today, under the leadership of former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin, is up to its old tricks.
The KGB’s forerunner, the Cheka (later NKVD), was created by Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky expressly to eliminate Russia’s aristocracy, intellectuals and dissidents — anyone who threatened the Soviet state from the inside. Under Stalin, the NKVD started to murder its opponents abroad: Ignatz Reiss near Lausanne in 1937, Yevhen Konovalets in Amsterdam in 1938, Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. In 1953, the Soviet secret service tried to kill Marshal Tito in Belgrade.
Read the Remainder at WSJ
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