Vladimir Putin and the murder of his critics

Alexander Litvinenko -- an ex-KGB agent, Mario Scaramella—an Italian self-employed "security expert" who last year claimed he'd found ex-KGB men selling nuclear material, and Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya all had crossed Vladimir Putin and/or exposed embarrassing information about current goings-on in Russia under his rule. All were murdered. Coincidence?

Anne Applebaum doesn’t believe it is coincidence. Even thought the KGB no longer exists there is a network of ex-KGB agents – including Putin – who carry on their dirty work under new guises.

She writes in SLATE:

… 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, a former double agent) have stayed with the agency, joining either the domestic service (the FSB) or foreign intelligence (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 were 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 mysterious sources of money, and a number of former KGB officers have pitched up at the helm of businesses and banks.

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 quite 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 someone who worked for a Russian oligarch who worked for the Kremlin.

As the investigation progresses, I'm sure many more wonderfully shady characters will emerge, along with many theories about who was trying to discredit whom. But though it's doubtful that he ever gave an actual order to an actual thug, in this deeper sense, Putin is certainly responsible for Litvinenko's death: He presides over this web of old intelligence operatives; indeed he sits at its hub. And he approves of their methods. One of his first acts as prime minister in 1999 was the unveiling of a plaque to Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss best known for his harsh treatment of dissidents. Last year, Russians built a statue to Andropov. No one should have been surprised when the former KGB's harassment of modern "dissidents" subsequently grew harsher with every passing year—or that it culminated in this strange murder.

That we were surprised—are surprised—is both tragic and ironic: After all, for the better part of a decade now, we've been desperately looking for weapons of mass destruction and for these strange new enemies, the Islamic radicals who might be planning to use them. And now we've discovered that there really is nuclear material for sale, and that it really is being used, in the West, to kill people. And the killers aren't strange, or new, or even Islamic at all.