The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder

The death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko -- poisoned by polonium in a cup of a tea in an English hotel six years after he had sought political asylum there -- has been covered in at least four books of which I'm aware. This strikes me as the best of the bunch so far, although the definitive history of Putin's Russia has yet to be written. (Perhaps the reason for that can be found in some of the contents of the book itself, including the events leading up to Litvinenko's death.

Deprived of the classic ending to this true-life crime -- an arrest and trial of the individuals responsible -- Cowell overcompensates with a mass of detail about everything from the lives of Russian expatriates in London to the history of polonium and other radioactive poisons. Sometimes these digressions work; on other occasions they distract. (Does the side story about the photographer who snapped the picture of Litvinenko really warrant more than two or three sentences? I suspect not.) But Cowell does a far better job of weaving together those elements that are necessary for a reader to understand why the Putin regime might have wanted Litvinenko dead. On the surface, it isn't that simple to understand; he was obviously a maverick and not taken very seriously by most people with whom he came in contact. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, for instance, was a far more formidable opponent: probably why she was murdered only months before Litvinenko. Cowell suggests that once Litvinenko began to draw attention to financial shenanigans of Kremlin officials, his fate was sealed; that, he argues, may be the Achilles heel of the regime.

Perhaps it is because so many questions loom unanswered that Cowell has had to struggle sometimes with the material at his disposal, drawing red herrings across the path (such as the equally questionable character of Mario Scaramella) and adopting an almost Gothic tone to his descriptions of the very prosaid London landscape. The florid tone can become wearing, particularly when Cowell uses, for the 37th time, the phrase "the day Alexander Litvinenko began to die".

Despite these flaws, I've given this book four stars for its solid attempt to tackle a subject that so far has been the domain of less rigorous researchers or writers with an axe to grind. It's to be hoped that the effort to differentiate fact from hypberbole is continued in other books.

The Terminal Spy
By Alan S. Cowell

Published by Doubleday 2008 $26.95 432 pps.

A Review by Colin J. Edwards

A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder.

The Terminal Spy is an intrigue with a Russian theme where the unspeakable do horrid things to the unpronounceable. I tend to confuse my ...skayas, with my ...oviches, and by the time I have sorted those out I have lost the plot. Mr Cowell anticipated my, and perhaps others dilemma, and opens his book with Dramatis Personae. This introduces us to 40 principle characters. I respectfully suggest that the reader studies these three and a bit pages as it will greatly enhance comprehension of the remaining 430.

Cowell's work is at once an important and rewarding example of detailed investigative reporting. Important because it reveals how a foreign (I was tempted to say hostile), country carried out a successful nuclear attack on London, Britain's capital city. Rewarding because it reads like a fiction spy thriller. It will come as no surprise to the reader to learn that Alan Cowell is an experienced and accomplished journalist and citizen of the world. He is `at-home' in London Paris or New York, and has vast experience of the Middle East and Africa.

The Terminal Spy is a dissection, in the minutest detail of the evidence pertaining to the calculated murder in broad daylight of Alexander Litvinenko at London on November 1st 2006. It is the manner of this murder and why, that makes this volume a page turner par excellence.

No one has been brought before the courts for this crime, but by the end of the book there can be no doubt of the identity of the culprit and his accomplices.

The book is very well written. It is never dull - which is quite an achievement when one considers the exposure espionage and intelligence gets these days. There are no loose-ends or innuendoes which in a book like this can be infuriating.

The Terminal Spy is an extremely rewarding and enjoyable read, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Cowell delivers a narrative of astonishing breadth that touches on everything from Putin's bio to the origins of Polonium, and from the minutiae of the investigation into Litvinenko's murder to broad analysis of the political landscape and players on the Russian political/business stage in post-Soviet times.

My guess is that a lot of murder/true crime readers will be turned off by that breadth. There are whole sections of the book (greater than 100 pages at a time) where Litvinenko is left to the side and the specific events surrounding his poisoning are sacrificed to Cowell's treatment of the crime as a symptom of a geopolitical event as much as a crime.

But, Cowell had good access to key players (including Boris Berezovsky) and his research is impressive. He gives the case a fairly straight treatment without much bias, though it is obvious that if he doesn't find the accused Russian to be murderers he at least finds them to have dubious and often simplistic and implausible alibis and explanations.

Litvinenko's case is a fascinating one and certainly merits this kind of close examination as both an espionage/true crime event and a post-Cole War global political happening. There are several books out there, and Cowell's seems to have received the best overall critical response. I wonder though if part of the reason that Cowell turns to so much historical and other information is because of a fatal flaw in the book's final construction: in spite of all of his scholarly work and elbow grease, he could never really break through the iron curtain that seems to have been pulled across again in Putin's Russia to get to the bottom of what reallly happened and -- as importantly -- why it happened.

The story of (former KGB agent) Litvinenko's poisoning (in London) via a rare radioactive element should be fascinating. Unfortunately, Mr. Cowell has chosen to tell the tale in fits and starts, going from character to character and back and forth in time. It just doesn't flow, which is a shame since this (almost) unique event in spying is intrinsically interesting, had a huge impact on Britain's relations with Russia, caused a panic in London as the radioactivity was traced and caused several spy services to rethink their procedures. In addition, while Mr. Cowell has clearly done his research and provides details on the characters - including the murderer - he doesn't make them come alive so the book seems flat.

I have to say that this non-fiction effort was so poor that it makes me want to go back to really good fictional spies....

The Terminal Spy, documenting the incident of an ex-KGB, Russian émigré's poisoning death in London, reads like the best espionage thriller, full of shadowy characters and murderous intrigue.

The one thing that Cowell never lets us forget however is that this book is different from spy thrillers in one chilling aspect - it's all real. Every place, event, action and most of all, every person is real.

Alexander Litvinenko's story was, in the long run, about parents mourning a child, a wife mourning a husband, children mourning the loss of a father, to paraphrase Cowell.

Cowell does a good job of outlining the history of all the key players related to the incident, including the poison itself. He does the same for the political history of Russia prior to and leading up to the incident.

While there was a lot of detail, I didn't find myself tired of it, but rather wanting to read further. With one exception - in a probable attempt to keep the main personage and what happened to him at the forefront of the reader's mind, Cowell has to find too many ways to refer to the day that Litvinenko was actually poisoned, and it did become redundant after about five or six references.

Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone who wanted to gain a deeper insight into the Litvinenko incident, as well as anyone who enjoys a well-written, well-researched, solid piece of journalism.