Article: Life Imitates Fleming's Art
highhopes
Posts: 1,358MI6 Agent
This is taken from the San Francisco Chronicle
From James Bond to the KGB there is no shortage of plots to poison, scald or suffocate
- Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
Sunday, December 3, 2006
The scene is pulsating. Heaving himself up the side of Gibraltar on a secret mission, Agent 004 is momentarily unnerved when an ominous message, in Russian no less, slides down his climbing rope: "Smert Shpionam."
Translation: Death to spies.
The agent has only seconds to grasp the message's import before the assassin who dispatched it cuts his rope. His fellow climber, Agent 007, who can only watch as his colleague plunges to his death, is otherwise known as Bond. James Bond.
This fictional dilemma is from Ian Fleming's short story "The Living Daylights," but the ruthless Soviet counter-intelligence service, which Joseph Stalin himself is said to have nicknamed "SMERSH," was a real war-time entity founded in 1943 and later absorbed into the KGB. It was best known for dispensing fatal punishment to double-agents, dissidents and defectors, and its macabre methods inspired admiration and imitation in the spy world.
Countless spies discovered, too late, that they could check out of that shadowy world, but they could never really leave.
What evokes SMERSH in the post-Soviet world of 2006 is the gruesome poisoning in London of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Within days Litvinenko was transformed from a robust, handsome man investigating the suspicious murder of a critical Russian journalist into a weak, bald shadow of his former self as radioactive polonium 210 ravaged his internal organs. He died 10 days ago in a London hospital.
From his deathbed, Litvinenko dictated a statement blaming his poisoning on none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former leader of the dreaded KGB. In a twist worthy of the espionage literature, the Putin government expressed outrage and suggested that Litvinenko poisoned himself to falsely implicate Putin.
Scotland Yard found traces of radiation around London and on British airways planes flying the Moscow-London route, and continues to investigate.
And while the details of his poisoning would fit well in Fleming's imagination -- where the targets fall prey to scorpion stings, laser slicing, crematorium furnaces, a vat of superheated mud and epidermal suffocation from a slather of gold paint -- for Litvinenko there would be no last-minute escape. Unlike Bond in the new film "Casino Royale," in which he survives a lethal dose of poison with the help of a kit that includes an array of antidotes, electronic hookup to poison control specialists and its own portable defibrillator, Litvinenko died before doctors were able to identify the radioactive substance that was ravaging him.
Thus he became the latest in a line of real spies, defectors and politicians to find their lives snuffed, or at least ensnared, in the web of international espionage.
"There probably are many cases we simply don't know of because the people or governments responsible have gotten away with it," said Peter Earnest, a 36-year veteran of the CIA and founding director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. "The goal may be to be so clever that your work goes undetected."
For the British, the parallels were inevitable to the demise of Bulgarian dissident broadcaster Georgi Markov in September of 1978.
An unsuspecting Markov was waiting for a bus at Waterloo Bridge when he was jabbed in the leg by the point of a passerby's umbrella. The fellow begged his pardon and went on his way. Markov was dead within hours -- but it took much longer for Western agents to detect foul play and order his body exhumed. It was then that they discovered that an injector in the umbrella tip fired a platinum pellet the size of a pinhead but filled with deadly ricin.
The Soviets were notorious for crafting devious methods of assassination. The "kiss of death," for example, looked like an ordinary tube of lipstick but was actually a single-shot pistol that fired when twisted. Another was a poison writing pen that discharged hydrocyanic acid gas, as well as a blind man's cane also capable of unleashing deadly vapor.
The Bulgarians designed a tiny keychain gun, which could pass through airport metal detectors while retaining its ability to fire two .32-caliber bullets. The devices now are available on the open market, according to Interpol, and airport screeners have been told to watch for them following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
We learned about one such assassin's tool when KGB agent Nikolai Khokhlov converted to Christianity, defected from the Soviet Union and revealed he had been dispatched in 1954 to assassinate anti-Soviet emigre Georgi Okolovich in West Germany. He also surrendered his weaponry: a cigarette case that could fire poison-filled hollow-point bullets through the faux cigarettes.
Given that diabolical history, it's no surprise many people suspect the old Soviet guard's involvement in the shooting death earlier this fall of the journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who had previous survived poison in her tea.
Another case was the 2004 poisoning of Ukrainian opposition leader Victor Yushchenko. Seemingly overnight, his distinguished good looks were devastated by swelling, jaundice and pockmark cysts -- all of which raised red flags to Western toxicologists. They tested his blood and discovered it contained 1,000 times the normal amount of dioxin. He recovered and has gone on as president of the Ukraine. His poisoner remains a mystery.
The CIA hasn't been above such schemes, as the findings of the congressional "Church Committee" in the mid-1970s made clear. Its investigation of alleged CIA plots to assassinate seven foreign leaders concluded that the United States in the early 1960s did indeed initiate plots to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.
In the case of Lumumba, a U.S. agent testified that he procured from the army a vial of a biological agent that could induce a disease endemic to that area of Africa, so that it would appear he died of natural causes. The station officer there received the vial and hypodermic syringe, part of an elaborate plan to inject the material into toothpaste and slip the tube into his travel kit.
In the case of Cuba, the Church Committee report uncovered eight CIA plots to kill Castro: "The proposed assassination devices ran the gamut from high-powered rifles to poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powers, and other devices which strain the imagination." Perhaps the most noteworthy of these was the contamination of a box of Castro's favorite cigars with botulinum toxin sufficient to cause death if one touched his lips.
The assassination plots were escalations of previous, unsuccessful U.S. schemes to undermine Castro's credibility by spraying his broadcast studio with an LSD-like hallucinogen and dusting his shoes with thallium, a depilatory with which the CIA hoped to make his legendary beard fall out.
Deadly political espionage to the death has a long and star-studded historical pedigree.
Among its practitioners were Agrippina, wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, who was a master at concocting mushroom poisons to surreptitiously dispense with political rivals up to and including Claudius himself.
Rodrigo Borgia, a.k.a. Pope Alexander VI, is said to have arranged for the poisoning of Cardinal de Corneto but ended up drinking his wine by mistake, thus accidentally poisoning himself.
Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile of a progressive stomach ailment diagnosed as cancer. But persistent rumors of poisoning were given credence in the 1960s when scientists discovered high levels of arsenic in his hair.
The Cold War triggered a rash of spy-on-spy "elimination" -- and gave rise to a new genre of espionage fiction.
The 21st century saw its own mutations. As a prelude two days before the Sept. 11 attacks, two undercover al Qaeda agents posed as journalists to "interview" Ahmad Shah Massood, a mujahedeen hero in Afghanistan and leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Their beat-up video camera contained a bomb.
"We never suspected journalists. Our leaders were careless," Massood Khalili, a former Massood adviser who was seriously wounded in the blast, said after recovering. Massood was killed, along with both of his assassins.
Of course the point, for people like Massood and Castro and Litvinenko, is that a target can never be too careful -- and that the tiniest relaxation can have catastrophic consequences.
For the rest of us, the sinister world of the spy is intrigue from a safe distance.
"Most people like to read about intrigue and spies," as writer John LeCarre observed about the popularity of his spy novels. "I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage."
From James Bond to the KGB there is no shortage of plots to poison, scald or suffocate
- Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer
Sunday, December 3, 2006
The scene is pulsating. Heaving himself up the side of Gibraltar on a secret mission, Agent 004 is momentarily unnerved when an ominous message, in Russian no less, slides down his climbing rope: "Smert Shpionam."
Translation: Death to spies.
The agent has only seconds to grasp the message's import before the assassin who dispatched it cuts his rope. His fellow climber, Agent 007, who can only watch as his colleague plunges to his death, is otherwise known as Bond. James Bond.
This fictional dilemma is from Ian Fleming's short story "The Living Daylights," but the ruthless Soviet counter-intelligence service, which Joseph Stalin himself is said to have nicknamed "SMERSH," was a real war-time entity founded in 1943 and later absorbed into the KGB. It was best known for dispensing fatal punishment to double-agents, dissidents and defectors, and its macabre methods inspired admiration and imitation in the spy world.
Countless spies discovered, too late, that they could check out of that shadowy world, but they could never really leave.
What evokes SMERSH in the post-Soviet world of 2006 is the gruesome poisoning in London of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Within days Litvinenko was transformed from a robust, handsome man investigating the suspicious murder of a critical Russian journalist into a weak, bald shadow of his former self as radioactive polonium 210 ravaged his internal organs. He died 10 days ago in a London hospital.
From his deathbed, Litvinenko dictated a statement blaming his poisoning on none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former leader of the dreaded KGB. In a twist worthy of the espionage literature, the Putin government expressed outrage and suggested that Litvinenko poisoned himself to falsely implicate Putin.
Scotland Yard found traces of radiation around London and on British airways planes flying the Moscow-London route, and continues to investigate.
And while the details of his poisoning would fit well in Fleming's imagination -- where the targets fall prey to scorpion stings, laser slicing, crematorium furnaces, a vat of superheated mud and epidermal suffocation from a slather of gold paint -- for Litvinenko there would be no last-minute escape. Unlike Bond in the new film "Casino Royale," in which he survives a lethal dose of poison with the help of a kit that includes an array of antidotes, electronic hookup to poison control specialists and its own portable defibrillator, Litvinenko died before doctors were able to identify the radioactive substance that was ravaging him.
Thus he became the latest in a line of real spies, defectors and politicians to find their lives snuffed, or at least ensnared, in the web of international espionage.
"There probably are many cases we simply don't know of because the people or governments responsible have gotten away with it," said Peter Earnest, a 36-year veteran of the CIA and founding director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. "The goal may be to be so clever that your work goes undetected."
For the British, the parallels were inevitable to the demise of Bulgarian dissident broadcaster Georgi Markov in September of 1978.
An unsuspecting Markov was waiting for a bus at Waterloo Bridge when he was jabbed in the leg by the point of a passerby's umbrella. The fellow begged his pardon and went on his way. Markov was dead within hours -- but it took much longer for Western agents to detect foul play and order his body exhumed. It was then that they discovered that an injector in the umbrella tip fired a platinum pellet the size of a pinhead but filled with deadly ricin.
The Soviets were notorious for crafting devious methods of assassination. The "kiss of death," for example, looked like an ordinary tube of lipstick but was actually a single-shot pistol that fired when twisted. Another was a poison writing pen that discharged hydrocyanic acid gas, as well as a blind man's cane also capable of unleashing deadly vapor.
The Bulgarians designed a tiny keychain gun, which could pass through airport metal detectors while retaining its ability to fire two .32-caliber bullets. The devices now are available on the open market, according to Interpol, and airport screeners have been told to watch for them following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
We learned about one such assassin's tool when KGB agent Nikolai Khokhlov converted to Christianity, defected from the Soviet Union and revealed he had been dispatched in 1954 to assassinate anti-Soviet emigre Georgi Okolovich in West Germany. He also surrendered his weaponry: a cigarette case that could fire poison-filled hollow-point bullets through the faux cigarettes.
Given that diabolical history, it's no surprise many people suspect the old Soviet guard's involvement in the shooting death earlier this fall of the journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who had previous survived poison in her tea.
Another case was the 2004 poisoning of Ukrainian opposition leader Victor Yushchenko. Seemingly overnight, his distinguished good looks were devastated by swelling, jaundice and pockmark cysts -- all of which raised red flags to Western toxicologists. They tested his blood and discovered it contained 1,000 times the normal amount of dioxin. He recovered and has gone on as president of the Ukraine. His poisoner remains a mystery.
The CIA hasn't been above such schemes, as the findings of the congressional "Church Committee" in the mid-1970s made clear. Its investigation of alleged CIA plots to assassinate seven foreign leaders concluded that the United States in the early 1960s did indeed initiate plots to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.
In the case of Lumumba, a U.S. agent testified that he procured from the army a vial of a biological agent that could induce a disease endemic to that area of Africa, so that it would appear he died of natural causes. The station officer there received the vial and hypodermic syringe, part of an elaborate plan to inject the material into toothpaste and slip the tube into his travel kit.
In the case of Cuba, the Church Committee report uncovered eight CIA plots to kill Castro: "The proposed assassination devices ran the gamut from high-powered rifles to poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powers, and other devices which strain the imagination." Perhaps the most noteworthy of these was the contamination of a box of Castro's favorite cigars with botulinum toxin sufficient to cause death if one touched his lips.
The assassination plots were escalations of previous, unsuccessful U.S. schemes to undermine Castro's credibility by spraying his broadcast studio with an LSD-like hallucinogen and dusting his shoes with thallium, a depilatory with which the CIA hoped to make his legendary beard fall out.
Deadly political espionage to the death has a long and star-studded historical pedigree.
Among its practitioners were Agrippina, wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, who was a master at concocting mushroom poisons to surreptitiously dispense with political rivals up to and including Claudius himself.
Rodrigo Borgia, a.k.a. Pope Alexander VI, is said to have arranged for the poisoning of Cardinal de Corneto but ended up drinking his wine by mistake, thus accidentally poisoning himself.
Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile of a progressive stomach ailment diagnosed as cancer. But persistent rumors of poisoning were given credence in the 1960s when scientists discovered high levels of arsenic in his hair.
The Cold War triggered a rash of spy-on-spy "elimination" -- and gave rise to a new genre of espionage fiction.
The 21st century saw its own mutations. As a prelude two days before the Sept. 11 attacks, two undercover al Qaeda agents posed as journalists to "interview" Ahmad Shah Massood, a mujahedeen hero in Afghanistan and leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Their beat-up video camera contained a bomb.
"We never suspected journalists. Our leaders were careless," Massood Khalili, a former Massood adviser who was seriously wounded in the blast, said after recovering. Massood was killed, along with both of his assassins.
Of course the point, for people like Massood and Castro and Litvinenko, is that a target can never be too careful -- and that the tiniest relaxation can have catastrophic consequences.
For the rest of us, the sinister world of the spy is intrigue from a safe distance.
"Most people like to read about intrigue and spies," as writer John LeCarre observed about the popularity of his spy novels. "I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage."