In an incident that reports are linking to the unsolved murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, former Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko has died in a London hospital. The ex-KGB operative was allegedly the victim of a mysterious radiation poisoning.
Like the murdered Politkovskaya, the former Soviet spy had been a critic of the Putin government. He was granted asylum in Britain several years ago and had reportedly received death threats in recent weeks. Raising eyebrows is the fact that he was stricken soon after meeting with an Italian researcher who is thought to have been investigating Politkovskaya’s murder. There are numerous allegations that Litvinenko’s illness is the result of a Russian plot, though the Kremlin has vigorously denied any involvement.
There was a time, not so long ago, when such stories would have received far more attention in the United States. (It’s been much bigger news in the U.K.) Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets and their Western adversaries engaged in many covert operations throughout the world as each struggled to gain the upper hand.
One of the few highly celebrated cases during the height of the Cold War involved a Soviet spy named Konon Molody, who was better known in the Western world by his cover name, Gordon Arnold Lonsdale. Molody was convicted of espionage in the early 1960s. While he was in a British prison, however, a deal to “swap” him for a British spy being held in the U.S.S.R. was worked out. Molody was then returned to the Soviet Union, where he wrote a book about his exploits as a spy. He died in 1970 at age 48. (The book was republished in the West under the title Spy: Twenty Years in the Soviet Secret Service: The Memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale.)
The little information about such episodes that became public knowledge fueled a cottage industry of spy-themed movies and novels that remained popular for several decades. The gritty and mostly unpleasant world of spies and undercover operations was heavily romanticized in many of these works.
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