The Same Old Song And Dance

Anne Applebaum reminds us that the byzantine world of the KGB is alive and well and living in London. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko has exposed something to the general public that really has been obvious for some time now. Old KGB operatives are popping up all over the place doing any number of bad things.

In other words: Though we don't know who killed Litvinenko, we have learned that London is a more exciting place than we thought it was. We have learned that the complex plots of Dostoevsky novels merely reflect Russian reality. And we have learned that the old KGB lives on in new guises.

Or rather — we have been reminded that the old KGB lives on in new guises, because in fact we have known this for some time. True, the old employees no longer belong to a single all-powerful institution. Some ("the stupidest," according to Oleg Gordievsky, the former double agent) have stayed with the agency, joining either the domestic service (FSB) or the foreign intelligence bureau (SVR). Others went into business, some joining the security entourages of new Russian millionaires, some becoming Russian millionaires in their own right. Still others, to put it bluntly, went into organized crime. And some — President Putin is the shining example here — went into politics.

Despite their widely varying fates, it has long been perfectly clear that many of these old comrades continue to work together in mutually profitable ways. As far back as 1999, for example, a group of Russian-born bankers was caught laundering money through a New York bank, probably using information obtained, one way or another, by Russian intelligence. Since then it has become clear that a number of Russia's largest companies were launched with money from mysterious sources, and a number of former KGB officers have shown up at the helm of businesses and banks, too.

Of course this same mutually profitable relationship will also make it extremely difficult to find Litvinenko's real killer. After all, this set of post-KGB relationships is nothing if not complex: There are conspiracies within conspiracies, agents of agents of agents, people who pretend to be acting on behalf of a particular oligarch or Chechen insurgent who are actually acting on behalf of someone quite different. It is possible that Litvinenko was murdered by "rogue secret policemen," as the British press suspects. It is also possible that the "rogue secret policemen" were working for someone who worked for the Kremlin, or someone who worked for a Russian oligarch, or who worked for a Russian oligarch who worked for the Kremlin.

There is so much conflicting information about the whole situation right now that it is almost impossible to sort out exactly what happened and who was involved. Applebaum points out that one cannot know if some of the information being published is not, in fact, disinformation leaked by interested parties. In other words, its just like the bad old days with the KGB all over again.