Hi Norbert,

You are absolutely right about disinformation, it happens all the time
specially if Chechens are involved. Just look at this - exactly a
year ago, published by The Telegraph, UK:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/27/wchech27.xml

Teheran 'secretly trains' Chechens to fight in Russia

Con Coughlin
The Telegraph, Last Updated: 11:55pm GMT 26/11/2005


and then there was this "mild" debunk of that Telegraph nonsens by JF:

http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=409&issue_id=3556&ar\
ticle_id=2370578
REPORT OF IRANIAN TRAINING OF CHECHENS GREETED SKEPTICALLY


Anyway, I find this strange, that Litvinenko would opened himself up
to some academics, one of whom was a Russian female - that's Ms
Svetlichnaja.
One would think, that he would had been suspicious and distrustful,
specially in regards of Ms Svetlichnaja.

I also find weird that these two suddenly got interested in a
reasearch about Chechens in Moscow. Just look a their credentials and
papers:
Credentials and papers of Julia Svetlichnaja
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/sshl/page-1203

and James Heartfield
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/sshl/page-1110

Nothing about Chechnya there, and then suddenly out of the blue -
Chechen issues in their academic work?

And btw their first interview published by the Telegraph had nothing
about that Litvinenko wanted to blackmail some Russian authorities and
oligarchs. Was that added later by other newspapers with Ms
Svetlichnaja's approval, or maybe some "extra stuff" from her?

Marius



Final interview of the poisoned former spy

Last Updated: 11:54pm GMT 25/11/2006


James Heartfield and Julia Svetlichnaja

Death may have silenced Mr Litvinenko late on Thursday night but his
testimony lives on, most dramatically in a series of interviews he
gave two academics from the University of Westminster earlier this
year. For a total of six hours, most recently in the Hilton Hotel on
Park Lane, Mr Litvinenko opened his heart to Julia Svetlichnaja and
James Heartfield and shared with them the story of his life, from his
birth in the Russian provinces to exile in London. Theirs was the last
proper interview he gave before his mysterious death and it throws a
completely new light on his past and, quite possibly, his fate.

The epitaph for Alexander Litvinenko might read "he was caught up in
events bigger than he understood". This ordinary boy from Voronezh
never shone at school, never went to university and ended up in the
KGB only via his national service in the Soviet army.

But by the time he ended his life, apparently the victim of
radioactive poisoning, he was a disillusioned exile in London, a
defector who seemed unable to plan for the future and whose
conversation often darted from one subject to another in bewildering
fashion.

Among his closest friends was an exiled Chechen leader, his neighbour
in Finchley, and he admitted that Boris Berezovsky, another exile but
in the past a Kremlin kingmaker, had supported him financially. "Is
this a crime?" he asked.

The one subject that caused him to lose his temper was that of his
former employer, and that of Mr Putin, the FSB, Russia's internal
security service. Criminals and gangsters, he called them.

It was not always thus. The young Litvinenko had been flattered to be
recruited into the Soviet-era KGB and had been a loyal officer for
years. A promising young officer working in counterintelligence, he
was soon promoted and moved into the more prestigious field of
counterterrorism and the fight against organised crime.

The early 1990s were a turbulent period for the KGB. Communism
collapsed and with it everything the KGB held most dear. But the KGB
could also move with the times. And it was determined to dominate the
new Russian market economy, just as it had the old Soviet Union.

Its tactics were ruthless and Litvinenko was expected to show no
qualms about achieving its aims. One was to protect and even recruit
potential businessmen for the new Russia. And protecting them meant
getting rid of their rivals too.

Now in his 30s, he was responsible for recruiting murderers. He would
play on their psychological weakness to win them over.

"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,"
he told us at home in his kitchen earlier this year. "This was how we
recruited killers."

Now, too, he made his first real acquaintance with the Chechens, a
tough people from the North Caucasus who were also major players in
the new Russian economy. Litvinenko both cooperated with them and was
involved in the campaign to cut them down to size when they were
perceived as a threat.

Increasingly, his department focussed on "solving" problems. For
example, as a favour to a senior former colleague in debt to
money-lenders from elsewhere in the Caucasus, he was told to arrest
the creditors and execute them. Officially, this was justified as part
of the struggle against separatists.

By the mid-90s a new class of "oligarchs" was seizing control of the
country's main assets, especially its oil and gas, and becoming
fabulously wealthy in the process. As for Litvinenko, he was more and
more involved in settling scores for his masters.

"Our department worked on the so-called "problem principle": the
government had a problem and we had simply to deal with it," he explained.

One target he was ordered to destroy was another security officer who
had blown the whistle on some of the FSB's nefarious activities,
Mikhail Trepashkin. Another he was told to kidnap to trade for FSB
officers taken hostage by Chechens was a prominent Chechen businessman
based in Moscow.

By 1997 his department, ostensibly in charge of the fight against
organised crime, was, in his words, "responsible for illegal
punishments or so-called extra-legal executions of "unsuitable"
businessmen, politicians and other public figures. In parallel, the
department blackmailed the same targets for funds."

In our many hours of conversation with Litvinenko he did not strike us
as one given to introspection, or even capable of analysing his own
motives or actions. But when he was told to kill one of the country's
then most powerful - and most controversial - businessmen, Boris
Berezovsky, something changed.

"When I got the order to kill Boris Berezovsky, I was told that the
reason was that he had too much money and too much power," he recalled.

We asked Litvinenko why he disobeyed that order. He refused to
elaborate. "People ask me what is my relationship with Berezovsky," he
said. "Yes, we are friends and he helped me financially, for which I
am grateful."

Once a patron of Mr Putin, Mr Berezovsky is now an exile in the UK,
one the Kremlin would like to extradite to Russia for trial on alleged
fraud charges, which he denies.

From his new home Mr Berezovsky wages an active political struggle
against his former protégé. But Litvinenko told him to temper his
rhetoric and warned him of the likely consequences if he failed to do so.

"I warned him recently that he cannot talk about changing the
political regime in Russia by force but he ignores me," he said. "They
will get him. He is not careful enough."

But, by defying the FSB leaders, Litvinenko set in motion the events
which led to his fleeing to Britain. He was himself arrested for
supposedly leaking classified information in 1999, released in court
but immediately taken into custody before being freed on parole. It
was then that he made his escape, via Turkey, to Britain. Mr
Berezovsky, he said, had promised to help him settle him in the West.

Here he published a book about the mysterious bombings of Russian
blocks of flats that helped provoke the Chechen war of 1999. But once
he had revealed the inner workings of the FSB and he himself was no
longer part of the system, his usefulness to Mr Putin's critics was over.

He lived a curious afterlife among his fellow countrymen abroad. His
Finchley home, he told us, was bought for him by Mr Berezovsky but
more recently relations between the two had cooled. He was also more
and more frustrated that the world was not listening to his story.

Bizarrely, he even became an ally of the local Chechen diaspora, one
that in Moscow he had viciously persecuted in the 1990s for the FSB.

"Wasn't Alexander one of those who was involved in killing the
Chechens?' we asked Akhmed Zakayev, the former actor and now Chechen
foreign minister-in-exile, when we all met in the bar at the Park Lane
Hilton.

"Yes, but he is our friend now', Mr Zakayev replied. Litvinenko
beamed. We both felt sorry for him. This former FSB enforcer now
seemed completely lost in life.

In the end he was just an ordinary Soviet soldier who had risen
through the ranks, far beyond his natural abilities, and into a world
which took brutal advantage of him but had no role for him once he had
served its purpose.

The Litvinenkos' home was always very hospitable. His wife, Marina,
would serve tea before discreetly leaving the room. Alexander was
extremely proud of his young son and how well he was settling in
England and good at Judo, like his father.

His stories were full of extravagant conspiracies, hardly surprising
when he had lived in the middle of so many himself. He was still very
interested in the world of Russian espionage and was hoping to earn a
living as an intelligence analyst, hinting that he was privy to the
secrets behind many big scandals, some of them from as long ago as the
Cold War.

We talked to Litvinenko to pursue our academic research into Chechens
in Moscow. But he always wanted to return to the subject of the
conspiracies that fascinated him. Eventually, one of those
conspiracies caught up with him.
# © 2006 Julia Svetlichnaja & James Heartfield.
# Telegraph Media Group Ltd world exclusive licensee.
# Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield are researchers at the
Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------


--- In chechnya-sl@yahoogroups.com, Norbert Strade <nost@...> wrote:
>
> Dear list,
>
> I believe that it was expectable for everyone with a little experience
> with Russian politics that it was only a question of time until we
would
> see a massive campaign of disinformation and character assassination in
> the Litvinenko case.
> It looks like the campaign is now in full outbreak.
> I won't make it very long, because it's all so obvious. But a few words
> are necessary, when formerly respectable media begin to take part in
the
> character assassination of the victim. I'm of course talking about The
> Observer and The Guardian (cf. postings # 50817-8). The Observer
appears
> with a blasting "Extra! Extra!"-tabloid-style article with the
headline:
> "Revealed: Litvinenko's Russian 'blackmail plot'". What it actually
> "reveals" is that an obscure Russian "academic" in London accuses
> Litvinenko of having bothered her intensively with plans to blackmail
> various Russians with his knowledge of their illegal activities. She
> describes him as something between a criminal crook and a village
idiot.
> The article adds flavour to this by showing some "exclusive new"
> pictures of Litvinenko. Now, what do the images contain
> (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,,1962849,00.html)? There are
> exactly 3 of them. No. 2 and 3 (Litvinenko with Politkovskaya and
> Zakayev, Litvinenko as a soldier) are neither new nor exclusive. They
> are all over the web and have been there for some time. No. 1 is a
silly
> picture of Litvinenko in front of a Union Jack, wearing a Scottish
> bonnet, gauntlets and a sword of some kind, apparently with some
> home-made stuff wrapped around the handle. In the world of "The
> Observer", the absolutely featureless gauntlets, which look like the
> stuff every other punk is wearing, become "KGB gauntlets", and the
> equally featureless sword becomes a "Chechen sword".
> The rest of the long article contains absolutely nothing new. All the
> informations/allegations had already been published by other media.
> So the article can safely be reduced to some allegations made by a
> formerly unknown Russian and some manipulative texting of a picture of
> Litvinenko. A real travesty of journalism. I wonder if "The Observer"
> has an editor-in-chief. Perhaps he was out eating sushi when his
> underlings passed this article behind his back?
> For what it's worth, I tried to have a look at the mentioned lady,
> "Julia Svetlichnaja", the "academic". Turns out she is working on a
> Ph.D. at the University of Westminster about some - unintelligible for
> yours truly :) - French art theory. A knowledgeable friend told me that
> "it's all bogus". Whatever, I wonder how someone - at the same time
> while she is working on a Ph.D.- begins to work on a book about the
> Russian-Chechen conflict?! Has someone been sloppy on her legend, or
> what? An article that appeared in the Norwegian paper "Aftenposten"
(see
> separate posting) adds to the confusion, by revealing that the same
lady
> also works for a shadowy Russian investment firm, and by quoting claims
> from a British professor of Russian that she is "acting on instructions
> from 'a special bureau'". - Myself, I wondered a little bit about the
> strange, Central-European-style spelling of her name, with a -j-
instead
> of English -y-. This makes it likely that she had stayed for some time
> in a Central or Northern European country and adopted the local
> spelling. I also found another person in London, a "Jana Svetlichnaja",
> in this case working at the "London School of Economics and Political
> Science" on health policy. The spelling of the name makes it almost
sure
> that this "Jana S." is a relative (or, who knows, a clone) of the above
> mentioned lady and has spent time in the same non-English area as
"Julia
> S.".
> Well. That's what you can find by doing a simple search on the web. I
> wonder what more there is if you actually put some time and effort
into it.
> One more issue: This isn't the only attempt at disinformation and
> character assassination. The media are actually full of it. All the
> crazy theories, like "he poisoned himself" etc. The usual influence
> agents, trolls, bots and cyborgs are working at full speed, dressed up
> as "Russia experts", "terr'ism experts", "investigative journalists",
> "deconstructors of conspiracy theories", etc. - the whole well-known
> menagerie. No wonder that the "blackmail" story has now been detached
> from its original source and is spreading rapidly through the mentioned
> network. taking new forms on the way. Also, much of the so-called
"left"
> is howling very loud, and some people who previously have made sharp
> analyses of the "Al-Qaeda" chimaera are suddenly claiming, based on the
> story that Litvinenko became a Muslim before his death, that it is now
> "proven" that he had contacts with "Al-Qaeda" (via Chechnya, of course,
> they even gave him a Chechen sword for his services, so...) - thus
> repeating the "clash of civilizations" propaganda that Islam and
> Al-Qaeda are two sides of the same thing. Not unexpectedly, I'm afraid,
> our beloved Kavkaz Center joined that crowd by putting the Observer
> article and the silly Litvinenko picture on their front page without a
> comment (http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/content/2006/12/03/6665.shtml).
> There is a lot of "argumentation" out there now "proving" that the KGB
> can't be involved in the murder of Litvinenko and that the murder was
> part of one or the other evil scheme by people who want to harm Russia.
> I.e., these guys have created their own inverted version of the Bush
> doctrine and are claiming that "those who are against the neocons are
> good by definition". Those valiant defenders of human dignity have
> chosen Putin as their pet fascist, and they'll have to live with
that image.
>
> Norbert
>