The Spy who came into the Light – Follow-up

Former Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, was the highest ranking intelligence officer to defector from the former Soviet Bloc. He has an article up at National Review that is well worth a read in light of the Alexander Litvinenko’s murder in London. Here’s a excerpt:

There is no doubt in my mind that the former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated at Putin’s order. He was killed, I believe, because he revealed Putin’s crimes and the FSB’s secret training of Ayman al-Zahawiri, the number-two in al Qaeda. I know for a fact that the Kremlin has repeatedly used radioactive weapons to kill political enemies abroad. In the late 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev gave Ceausescu, via the KGB and its Romanian sister, the Securitate, a soluble radioactive thallium powder that could be put in food; the poison was to be used for killing political enemies abroad. According to the KGB, the radioactive thallium would disintegrate inside the victim’s body, generating a fatal, galloping form of cancer and leaving no trace detectable in an autopsy. The substance was described to Ceausescu as a new generation of the radioactive thallium weapon unsuccessfully used against KGB defector Nikolay Khokhlov in West Germany in 1957. (Khokhlov lost all his hair but did not die.) Its Romanian codename was “Radu” (from radioactive), and I described it in my first book, Red Horizons, published in 1987. The Polonium 210 that was used to kill Litvinenko seems to be an upgraded form of “Radu.”

Pacepa goes on to recount the Russian/Soviet leadership’s historical fondness for “political neutralizations” which is well worth a read in its own right. He ends with an observation that all of us in the West should take fully to heart:

It will not be easy to break a five-century-old tradition. That does not mean that Russia cannot change. But for that to happen, the U.S. must help. We should stop pretending that Russia’s government is democratic, and assess it for what it really is: a band of over 6,000 former officers of the KGB — one of the most criminal organizations in history — who grabbed the most important positions in the federal and local governments, and who are perpetuating Stalin’s, Khrushchev’s, and Brezhnev’s practice of secretly assassinating people who stand in their way. Killing always comes with a price, and the Kremlin should be forced to pay it until it will stop the killings.

As far back as 2004, I have been suggesting the Russians under Putin have chosen sides, and the side they have chosen is not ours. Bit by bit the evidence is there. It's been not only a tactical but a stragetic mistake to continue to presume otherwise.