FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, one of the casualties of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a whole genre of popular fiction — the Cold War spy novel. Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer and John le Carre’s George Smiley — Britain’s flawed but sturdy bulwarks against Soviet plots — became obsolete overnight and were shuffled into retirement.
Maybe it’s time to bring them back.
The death last week in England of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko raised the ghosts of plots past and put the KGB back in international headlines.
Litvinenko, an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s increasingly repressive government, died of poisoning by polonium 210, a rare radioactive poison thought to be available only to governments with sophisticated nuclear programs. Before Litvinenko died, he said a KGB agent named Viktor Kirov had been in charge of keeping track of him for Moscow.
Did the Russians kill Litvinenko? Somebody did. The anti-Putin Russians blame the Russian president and the KGB. Putin says the opposition may have killed their own man in an attempt to discredit Putin.
For the British, the killing raises memories of the decades-old case in which a Bulgarian was killed in England with a poison pellet fired from an umbrella. In Vienna, Romanian agents killed three Romanian expatriates working for Radio Free Europe. The agents sprinkled plutonium dust around the expatriates’ office. Within months, all three died of lung cancer.
Did Putin or one of his officials order the poisoning of Litvinenko? Was the murder part of a plot to discredit Putin? Could the former spy have been killed by a third party who hoped to profit from the resulting investigation and recriminations?
The tangled intelligence history of the Cold War teaches that little is ever as it seems in the world of international espionage. The death of Alexander Litvinenko makes it clear that not that much has changed in that world.
The novelists quit writing about Palmer and Smiley, but the real spies never retired.