Anti-Neocons

We now know that Litvinenko was working on unspecified "energy issues" in London. We also know he has been described as a Russian-Israeli "double agent" and was reported to have transferred classified Russian documents in Yukos to a Russian-Israeli exiled oligarch in Tel Aviv. Double agents are always in danger from the party they are working against. Litvinenko's killers' use of polonium, named by Marie Curie in support of Polish independence, may mean that the assassins are more likely found in Warsaw's Russian-Israeli mob infested intelligence apparatus than in the Kremlin....

Poland's neo-con government has been threatening to use its European Union veto power to block the Baltic Sea gas pipeline deal between Russia and Germany. The Polish company that has been blocked by the Baltic Sea route was formerly owned by Yukos at the time Boris Berezovsky's now jailed tycoon friend, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, led the firm.

It has now been revealed that the waitress who served Litvinenko at the Itsu sushi restaurant is from Poland. Ella Malek fears that she, too, may have been poisoned by the same radioactive polonium that was used to kill Litvinenko. Malek said the sashimi served to Litvinenko could have only been contaminated after she served it to Litvinenko because the serving boxes are covered with plastic and sealed in the kitchen prior to being served to customers. Malek and another waitress are now complaining of a persistent skin rash. Both served Litvinenko at the sushi restaurant.

It should also be noted that bismuth-209 is the precursor to polonium-210. When neutrons are fired into the bismuth nucleus, it becomes bismuth-210, which then decays into polonium-210. Bismuth is extracted from waste ores at Poland's Gierczyn tin mine.

Since 1974, Poland has been using Russian-built reactors and cyclotrons. This may account for similarities with Russian isotopes.

The Institute of Nuclear Physics (Polish Academy of Sciences) maintains a cyclotron that produces heavy radioactive isotopes like polonium. A great deal of research work on isotopes, focusing on medical uses, is conducted in Lublin at Marie Curie-Sklodowska University. Research work with bismuth and polonium also takes place at the Gdansk Institute of Technology. (Gdansk is Defense Minister Radek Sikorski's home base).

Some media sources have incorrectly reported that dangerous dosages of polonium-210 can be bought fairly easily on the open market. For example, United Nuclear Scientific Supplies of Sandia Park, New Mexico sells "exempted" polonium-210 to U.S. addresses only from a licensed Nuclear Regulatory Commission reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but in amounts too small to be dangerous.

There have also been press reports casting light on the activities of one of Litvinenko's contacts, an Italian security specialist named Mario Scaramella, who met Litvinenko in London the day the former Russian spy became ill. Although some media speculated that Scaramella was a suspect, it is reported that he, too, has been contaminated with polonium-210 but that it is not life threatening. One intelligence expert observed that the Russian-Israeli mob seems to be trying to eliminate all incriminating witnesses, one by one.

....

New wrinkle in Litvinenko murder. It has been reported from London and Chechen sources that ex-KGB and FSB Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was not only a convert to Islam but a supporter of the Chechen and Caucasus mujaheddin, a movement that has been linked to the so-called "Al Qaeda," an organization that is looking more and more like an contrivance by neo-conservatives and their organized crime friends to bring about a state of constant war in the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, and beyond to maximize political and financial gain. Litvinenko's conversion to Islam has thrown a new wrinkle into Litvinenko's relationship with Boris Berezovsky and Alex Goldfarb, both Russian Jewish emigres.

The following dispatch came from the Chechenpress.org, a Chechen news web site, on November 24:

The communication from London the day before at night arrived to us of the poisoning and passing away of Aleksandr Litvinenko. A. Litvinenko it was poisoned on 1 November. Doctors struggled for the life of A. Litvinenko, however, it was impossible to save him. Meanwhile, a while back Litvinenko accepted Islam and all Moslem rites were carried out before his death. A specially invited mullah read over the dying Litvinenko the 'Sura Yasin' [key passage from the Koran]. Aleksandr Litvinenko will be buried in a Moslem cemetery, with the observance of all proper rituals. Nearing death, and understanding that his killers are Putin and his criminal clique, Aleksandr Litvinenko requested to transmit to the Mujahadeen of Chechnya and Caucasus that they understand him as their brother in the weapon [emphasis added] and he requested to the Most High Allah for themselves the future of martyr (insha Allah)."

The European media is now reporting that Litvinenko was involved in smuggling nuclear materials from Russia to Zurich in 2000 and that he may have continued his involvement in nuclear smuggling. Some reports, including recent comments to the BBC by Litvinenko's friend, Italian "security expert" Mario Scaramella, suggest that Litvinenko was involved in the smuggling on radioactive materials. An accident involved in the smuggling of nuclear materials may have resulted in Litvinenko's poisoning from radioactive polonium-210. Litvinenko's involvement with the Chechen Mujaheddin, said to be allied with the so-called "Al Qaeda," his links to the same European organized crime smuggling networks that were the subject of surveillance by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates covert CIA front company, and his links to Israel-based Russian gangsters all add to a mounting pile of evidence of "Al Qaeda" links to the Russian-Israeli Mafia.

Litvinenko now linked to syndicate nuclear smuggling, Islamic Mujaheddin, and Russian-Israeli Mafia, a dangerous troika on which WMR has been reporting for some time.

The Chechen press release reference to "the weapon" may have been hinting at a project to build a radioactive "dirty bomb" by Litvinenko. London's Observer surmised as much in a December 3 report: "Among the theories that remain open is that the poisonings were an accident that happened while Litvinenko tried to assemble a dirty bomb for Chechen rebels. Those who know him believe he was crazy enough to attempt such a thing and, in the past week, some have implicated him in the smuggling of nuclear materials from Russia."

Also of interest is Litvinenko's visit to the London office of the British private military contractor Erinsys, Ltd., which has been linked to Iraqi National Congress neo-con agent of influence Ahmad Chalabi. Erinsys has operations in Britain; Iraq; South Africa; the Nigerian Delta region, and Houston, Texas.

The answers to the Litvinenko poisoning puzzle are falling into place nicely, despite the efforts of the British police to muddy the waters:

1. All the people who met with Litvinenko on the day of his poisoning were associated with anti-Putin forces, and most, if not all, with wanted criminal fugitive Boris Berezovsky.
2. Mario Scaramella, the fellow who met with Litvinenko at the sushi restaurant (in fact, initiated the contact on what may have been a ruse, suggested the meeting, and picked the restaurant), didn’t eat, but just watched Litvinenko eat. He has a dodgy resume, but claims to be an expert on nuclear materials.
3. The Russians have been trying to extradite Boris Berezovsky for years, without success. They have just signed a new agreement with the British which may make extradition requests procedurally easier, something which may have made the oligarchs nervous. Extradition was always technically possible, but was rejected by British courts on the basis that defendants would not get a fair trial in Russia. Suddenly, a wrench is thrown into the works of British-Russian relations. A nuclear attack on British soil! Extradition to Russia suddenly becomes much more difficult.
4. Polonium was detected at the offices of Boris Berezovsky, and at the offices of Erinys, one of the mercenary companies used by the Bush Administration in Iraq. The connection is that Neil Bush is a business partner of Boris Berezovsky. Now the FBI is involved, so the cover-up is getting serious!
5. After finding traces of polonium at places where they shouldn’t have looked, the police confused the issue by searching planes, and basically determined that planes flying all over Europe had had this stuff on board. Therefore, they proved nothing, and unnecessarily alarmed the British public.
6. Litvinenko had been making wild allegations about Putin for years, and was ignored as another crank. Boris Berezovsky was actively looking for another writer to pen another book of anti-Putin slurs. Such a book will certainly sell now! As I’ve already said, Putin had no reason to care about this guy, and certainly no reason to kill him in a way to give any credibility to his allegations. The entire PR campaign, including all the allegations, has been run by Boris Berezovsky’s usual advertising agency, called in by Berezovsky to turn an unknown incident into a cause célèbre. Even the original Thallium-spouting toxicologist was hired by Boris!

You have to remember the context of the fight between Putin and Boris Berezovsky. A group of crooks arranged for Yeltsin to run Russia, and then Yeltsin looked the other way while the oligarchs robbed the country blind. It was the single largest theft in the history of crime. A large part of Putin’s popularity in Russia is based on the fact that he is perceived as standing up for Russia and the Russian people, something almost unheard of in the last thousand years of Russian history. A major part of his reputation is based on his attempts to jail the crooks and recover the stolen assets. Putin has one of the main oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in jail, but has been thwarted in his attempts to capture most of them due to the fact that most of them are claiming to be Jews and are hiding in Israel under Israeli protection (part of the habitual Israeli mockery of international law is that it usually won’t extradite Jews, or very rich people who claim to be Jews, which is part of the reason it is such an international organized crime haven). Boris Berezovsky has been sheltered by the British. It is only the oligarchs who have the criminal history, as well as the motive, means and opportunity, to commit this crime.

The real significance of the Yukos affair
The defining event in the new Russian energy geopolitics under Putin took place in 2003. It was just as Washington was making it brutally clear it was going to militarize Iraq and the Middle East, regardless of world protest or UN niceties.

A brief review of the spectacular October 2003 arrest of Russia's billionaire "oligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and state seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is essential to understand Russian energy geopolitics.

Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport on October 25, 2003, by the Russian Prosecutor General's office on charges of tax evasion. The Putin government froze shares of Yukos Oil because of tax charges. They then took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse in the share price.

What was little mentioned in Western media accounts, which typically portrayed the Putin government actions as a reversion to Soviet-era methods, was what had triggered Putin's dramatic action in the first place.

Khodorkovsky had been arrested just four weeks before a decisive Russian duma or lower house election, in which Khodorkovsky had managed to buy the votes of a majority in the duma using his vast wealth. Control of the duma was to be the first step by Khodorkovsky in a plan to run against Putin the next year as president. The duma victory would have allowed him to change election laws in his favor, as well as to alter a controversial law being drafted in the duma, "The Law on Underground Resources". That law would prevent Yukos and other private companies from gaining control of raw materials in the ground, or from developing private pipeline routes independent of Russian state pipelines.

Khodorkovsky had violated the pledge of the oligarchs made to Putin, that they be allowed to keep their assets - de facto stolen from the state in the rigged auctions under Yeltsin - if they stayed out of Russian politics and repatriated a share of their stolen money. Khodorkovsky, the most powerful oligarch at the time, was serving as the vehicle for what was becoming an obvious Washington-backed putsch against Putin.

The Khodorkovsky arrest followed an unpublicized meeting earlier that year on July 14, 2003, between Khodorkovsky and Cheney. Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky began talks with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, Rice's old firm, about taking a major state in Yukos, said to have been between 25% and 40%.

That was intended to give Khodorkovsky de facto immunity from possible Putin government interference by tying Yukos to the big US oil giants and, hence, to Washington. It would also have given Washington, via the US oil giants, a de facto veto power over future Russian oil and gas pipelines and oil deals. Days before his October 2003 arrest on tax fraud charges, Khodorkovsky had entertained George H W Bush, the representative of the powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle Group in Moscow. They were discussing the final details of the US oil company share buy-in of Yukos.

Yukos had also just made a bid to acquire rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky, another Yeltsin-era oligarch. YukosSibneft, with 19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would then own the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world after ExxonMobil. (note that this is the oligarch who did the poisoning and -source

YukosSibneft would be the fourth-largest in the world in terms of production, pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude oil a day. The Exxon or Chevron buy-up of YukosSibneft would have been a literal energy coup d'etat. Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky knew it.
Above all, Putin knew it and moved decisively to block it.

Khodokorvsky had cultivated very impressive ties to the Anglo-American power establishment. He created a philanthropic foundation, the Open Russia Foundation, modelled on the Open Society foundation of his close friend George Soros. On the select board of Open Russia Foundation sat Henry Kissinger and Kissinger's friend, Jacob Lord Rothschild, London scion of the banking family. Arthur Hartman, a former US ambassador to Moscow, also sat on the foundation's board.

Following Khodorkovsky's arrest, the Washington Post reported that the imprisoned Russian billionaire had retained the services of Stuart Eizenstat - former deputy treasury secretary, under secretary of state, under secretary of commerce during the Bill Clinton Administration - to lobby in Washington for his freedom. Khodorkovsky was in deep with the Anglo-American establishment.

Subsequent Western media and official protest about Russia's return to communist methods and raw power politics conveniently ignored the fact that Khodorkovsky was hardly Snow White himself. Earlier, Khodorkovsky had unilaterally ripped up his contract with British Petroleum. BP had been a partner with Yukos, and had spent $300 million in drilling the highly promising Priobskoye oil field in Siberia.

Once the BP drilling had been done, Khodorkovsky forced BP out, using gangster methods that would be unlawful in most of the developed world. By 2003, Priobskoye oil production reached 129 million barrels, equivalent to a value on the market of some $8 billion. Earlier, in 1998, after the IMF had given billions to Russia to prevent a collapse of the ruble, Khodokorvsky's Bank Menatep diverted an eye-popping $4.8 billion in IMF funds to his hand-picked bank cronies, some US banks among them. The howls of protest from Washington at the October 2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky were disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical. As seen from the Kremlin, Washington had been caught with its fat hand in the Russian cookie jar.

The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signaled a decisive turn by the Putin government toward rebuilding Russia and erecting strategic defenses from the foreign onslaught led by Cheney and friend Prime Minster Tony Blair in Britain. It took place in the context of a brazen US grab for Iraq in 2003 and of a unilateral Bush administration announcement that the US was abrogating its solemn treaty obligations with Russia under their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in order to go ahead with development of US missile defenses, an act which could only be viewed in Moscow as a hostile act aimed at her security.

By 2003, indeed, it took little strategic military acumen to realize that the Pentagon hawks and their allies in the military industry and Big Oil had a vision of a United States unfettered by international agreements and acting unilaterally in its own best interests, as defined, of course, by the hawks. Their recommendations were published by one of the many Washington hawk conservative think tanks.

In January 2001, The National Institute for Public Policy issued "Rationale and Requirements for US Nuclear Forces and Arms Control", just as the Bush-Cheney administration began. The report, demanding a unilateral US end to nuclear force reduction, was signed by 27 senior officials from past and current administrations. The list included the man who today is Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley; it included the special assistant to the secretary of defense, Stephen Cambone, and it included Admiral James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA and chairman of the Washington non-governmental agency (NGO), Freedom House. Freedom House played a central role in Ukraine's US-sponsored "Orange Revolution" and all other "Color revolutions" across the former Soviet Union.

These events were soon followed by the Washington-financed series of covert destabilizations of a number of governments in Russia's periphery which had been close to Moscow. It included the November 2003 "Rose Revolution" in Georgia which ousted Eduard Shevardnadze in favor of a young, US-educated and pro-NATO president, Mikheil Saakashvili. The 37-year-old Saakashvili had conveniently agreed to back the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that would avoid Moscow pipeline control of Azerbaijan's Caspian oil. The US has maintained close ties with Georgia since President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power. American military trainers instruct Georgian troops and Washington has poured millions of dollars into preparing Georgia to become part of NATO.
Following its "Rose Revolution" in Georgia, Woolsey's Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Soros Foundation and other Washington-backed NGOs organized the brazenly provocative November 2004 Ukraine "Orange Revolution". The aim of this was to install a pro-NATO regime there under the contested presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, in a land strategically able to cut the major pipeline flows from Russian oil and gas to Western Europe.

Washington-backed "democratic opposition" movements in neighboring Belarus also began receiving millions of dollars of Bush administration largesse, along with Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and more remote former Soviet states which also happen to form a barrier between potential energy pipelines linking China with Russia and the former Soviet states like Kazakhstan.

Again, energy and oil and gas pipeline control lay at the heart of the US moves. Little wonder, perhaps, that some people inside the Kremlin, notably Putin, began to wonder if Putin's new born-again Texan partner-in-prayer, George W Bush, was in fact speaking to Putin with a forked tongue, as the Native Americans would say.

By the end of 2004 it was clear in Moscow that a new Cold War, this one over strategic energy control and unilateral nuclear primacy, was fully underway. It was also clear from the unmistakable pattern of Washington actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, that End Game for US policy vis-a-vis Eurasia was not China, not Iraq and not Iran.

The geopolitical "End Game" for Washington was the complete deconstruction of Russia, the one state in Eurasia capable of organizing an effective combination of alliances using its vast oil and gas resources. That, of course, could never be openly declared.

After 2003, Putin and Russian foreign policy, especially energy policy, reverted to their basic response to the "heartland" geopolitics of Sir Halford Mackinder, politics which had been the basis of Soviet Cold War strategy since 1946.

Putin began to make a series of defensive moves to restore some tenable form of equilibrium in the face of the increasingly obvious Washington policy of encircling and weakening Russia. Subsequent US strategic blunders have made the job a bit easier for Russia. Now, with the stakes rising on both sides - NATO and Russia - Putin's Russia has moved beyond simple defense to a new dynamic offensive, to secure a more viable geopolitical position, using its energy as the lever.