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Litvinenko was a traitor, ex-FSB
boss claim
Matthew Moore
London
Telegraph
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Alexander Litvinenko's former boss in the Russian security services
has condemned the murdered former spy as a "traitor".
Alexander Gusak, once head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB,
said that Mr Litvinenko would have been executed in the Soviet era
for betraying undercover Russian agents to the British.
And he revealed that at least one of the betrayed agents came to
him offering to kill Mr Litvinenko in revenge.
"One of them did say: 'Listen, he's done you so much wrong
- shall I bring you his head?'", Mr Gusak said in an interview
with the BBC's Newsnight programme to be broadcast tonight. He denied
encouraging the agent to commit murder.
Mr Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the Vladimir Putin, the Russian
president, was poisoned with radioactive polonium 210 in London
last year, and died later in hospital.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is currently assessing whether
there is enough evidence to charge anyone with his murder.
One of the men questioned by Scotland Yard detectives in Russia
before Christmas was an ex-KGB bodyguard-turned-businessman, Andrei
Lugovoi, who met Mr Litvinenko on the day he fell ill. He denies
any involvement in the former agent's death.
Mr Gusak, who now works as a lawyer, once ran a secret FSB unit
described by Mr Litvinenko as a "death squad".
In his first interview since the Russian dissident's death, he
said he had been approached by several spies who believed their
names had been leaked to the British by Mr Litvinenko.
"I consider him a direct traitor because he betrayed what
is most sacred for any operative - his operational sources,"
he said.
"His operational sources came to me and they complained that
your (British) secret service officers had found them, and asked
what to do.
"For that - and I speak as a lawyer - what Litvinenko did
comes under article 275 of the criminal code. It's called treason.
And there are sanctions; prescribed punishments."
Mr Gusak also confirmed claims made by Mr Litvinenko that a superior
officer in their secret unit had ordered them to kill Russian oligarch
Boris Berezovsky in 1997, but said that he did not believe the order
was serious.
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