Naples,
Italy -- Mario Scaramella, the Italian security expert
who met Alexander Litvinenko at a Piccadily sushi restaurant
on the day he was taken ill, said last week he had still not
spoken to British police about his knowledge of the case. Speaking
to the Sunday Times on the day after Litvinenko’s death,
Scaramella said he had contacted the British embassy in Rome
to make himself available for questioning but had still not
been able to give evidence. “I am keen to pass on what
I know in order to improve my own personal security, although
I am not in the possession of any sensational secrets,” he
said.
Speaking at a Naples hotel, where he was being shadowed by three
personal bodyguards, Scaramella said he was suing the Rome
newspaper La Repubblica for questioning his own reliability
and that of Litvinenko. “Litvinenko was killed for the
work he had done. Saying his work was not good is like killing
him a second time.”
Scaramella, an academic expert on environmental security and consultant
to the Mitrokin Commission, which investigated the Cold War
activities of the KGB in Italy, was in London to attend a meeting
of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) at the beginning
of November when he contacted Litvinenko to warn him that he
was on a list of potential assassination victims allegedly
drawn up by the KGB’s successor, the FSB. Scaramella
knew Litvinenko from his days on the Mitrokhin Commission,
when the former FSB lieutenant colonel had provided him with
information. More recently Litvinenko had provided him with
information that led to the arrest of six Ukrainian men who
had allegedly smuggled two rocket propelled grenades and a
sniper’s rifle into Italy. The weapons were allegeldy
to be used in an assassination attempt on Senator Paolo Guzzanti,
the chairman of the Mitrokhin Commission and a member of Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party.
The names of Guzzanti, Scaramella and Litvinenko were brought together
again in November in a document warning of further assassination
attempts to be carried out against Moscow’s enemies abroad.
A channel of information that had been used during the Mitrokhin
inquiry came to life again shortly before Scaramella was due
to visit London. “The person who ran the channel gave
me and Guzzanti a password that would give us access to the
information on internet,” Scaramella said. “The
document warned that the situation was very grave, that Moscow’s
enemies had been targeted and that serving and recently retired
FSB officers had been tasked with their physical elimination.”
Scaramella said he had arrived in London on the evening of Tuesday
October 31 for the IMO meeting and the following day had received
further alarming information, which he had decided to share
with Litvinenko. The two men agreed to meet in the early afternoon
of November 1, but Scaramella had already eaten and did not
participate in the sushi. He gained the impression that Litvinenko
was holding business meetings that day, possibly to set up
a new venture trading in Russia’s natural resources. “He
said he would call me at 11 p.m., which gave me the impression
he would be busy until late,” he said. “He didn’t
tell me the names of the people he was meeting. He was dressed
casually, as was his custom, no jacket or tie, so it was clear
he wasn’t preparing for a formal business meeting.”
Both Scaramella and Litvinenko were sceptical of the warning documents
the Italian had received, which contained a number of factual
errors. There was too much detail in them, as well, including
the name of a Russian FSB officer, identified as Vlasov, who
had allegedly been sent to Naples to assassinate Scaramella. “The
documents contained the chain of command that had sent Vlasov.
It was an institutional chain of command,” Scaramella
said. Moscow’s chief foreign enemy was identified in
them as Boris Berezovsky and anyone closely associated with
him was a potential target. Guzzanti and Scaramella were identified
in this category, despite the fact they had had no dealings
with him. The documents also said the two Italians were working
to obtain Italian citizenship for Litvinenko to reward him
for his collaboration with the Mitrokhin Commission; another
error, since the former secret agent had just received his
British citizenship and hardly needed a second European Union
pas!
sport. Litvinenko had had a cursory look at the documents, which
were in English, and was planning to take them home to have them
read by his wife, whose mastery of the language was better than
his, when he began to feel ill. His initial verdict was unequivocal,
however, the warning was: “shit”.
Scaramella suggested a variety of motives for Litvinenko’s
assassination: the former spy may have been killed for what he
had already told western officials or to prevent him from adding
further details in the event that western intelligence officers
finally decided to conduct a full debriefing. Alternatively, his
death could be connected to a vast private archive of video and
audio tapes amassed when he was head of the FSB’s technical
division under President Boris Yeltsin.
The former FSB agent had turned himself in to the American embassy
in Turkey, when he originally decided to defect. But western
officials had initially been suspicious of him, fearing he
might have been a double agent, and in any case determined
to respect a gentleman’s agreement that precluded aggressive
espionage activities against our post-Cold War Russian allies.
British and American intelligence officers asked him what information
he had on Russian agents operating in the west. The answer
was: not much, and the debriefing ended there.
Litvinenko did have one item that was of interest to the Americans,
according to Scaramella. “He gave them the name of an
American official who provided the Russians with the technology
that enabled them to assassinate the [Chechen leader Dzokhar]
Dudayev. It was an episode of corruption.”
America’s National Security Agency has long been suspected
of furnishing the Russians with the technological wherewithal to
strike Dudayev, who was killed on April 21 1996 by laser-guided
missiles that homed in on his satellite phone. The coup, according
to Scaramella, was the fruit of a private financial transaction. “The
technological capacity was bought for millions of dollars. It was
the first time that money taken out of the Soviet Union at the
time of the KGB had been used for a secret operation. One of my
tasks had been to try and track down the KGB’s slush funds,
which had been deposited in current accounts in banks in western
Europe.”
Litvinenko had been given asylum in Britain over the objections
of MI6, thanks to the personal intervention of KGB defector
Oleg Gorievsky, Scaramella said. “Gordievsky went and
banged his fist on the table of the MI6 director,” he
said. Litvinenko’s information had been authenticated
by other Russian exiles, normally receiving their seal of approval. “There
were two Litvinenkos. There was the first hand eyewitness to
events, who was very precise, a real treasure, and the political
commentator, who wasn’t in the same league as someone
like Vladimir Bukovsky. He was too bitter against Putin, for
one thin. But he was a friend, and on the day of his death
it doesn’t seem right to be talking about him in this
detached manner. I never imagined it would end so dramatically.”