Download The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder AudioBook Free
In the page-turning narrative that reads such as a thriller, an award-winning journalist exposes the troubling real truth behind the world’s first act of nuclear terrorism.
On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko sipped tea in London’s Millennium Hotel. Time later the Russian émigré and previous intelligence officer, who was simply sharply critical of Russian chief executive Vladimir Putin, fell ill and within times was rushed to a healthcare facility. Fatally poisoned with a exceptional radioactive isotope slipped into his drink, Litvinenko granted a remarkable deathbed declaration accusing Putin himself of engineering his murder. Alan S. Cowell, then London Bureau Main of the New York Times, who covered the story from its inception, has written the definitive report of this assassination and of the profound international implications of this first act of nuclear terrorism.
Who was Alexander Litvinenko? What acquired occurred in Russia since the end of the frigid warfare to make his life there untenable and in severe jeopardy even in England, the united states that had awarded him asylum? And exactly how did he really expire? The life of Alexander Litvinenko offers a riveting narrative in its right, culminating within an event that rang security alarm bells among western governments at the simplicity with which radioactive materials were deployed in a major Western capital to commit a distinctive crime. But it also evokes a variety of other issues: Russia's lurch to authoritarianism, the go back of the KGB to the Kremlin, the perils of a fresh cold war driven by Russia's oil riches and Vladimir Putin's thirst for electricity.
Cowell offers a remarkable and in depth reconstruction both of how Litvinenko perished and of the problems bordering his murder. Drawing on exclusive reporting from Britain, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and america, he traces in unprecedented detail the polonium path leading from Russia's finished nuclear places through Moscow and Hamburg to the Millenium Hotel in central London. He provides the most in depth step-by-step description of how and where polonium was found; the way the assassins tried on several events to kill Litvinenko; and exactly how they bungled a conspiracy which could have had more focuses on than Litvinenko himself.
With a multi-colored cast that includes the tycoons, spies, and killers who encircled Litvinenko in the roller-coaster Russia of the 1990s, as well as the émigrés who flocked to London in such figures that the British isles capital gained the sobriquet “Londongrad,” this booklet lays out the occurrences that allowed an accused killer to escape prosecution in a delicate diplomatic minuet that helped save face for the regulators in London and Moscow.
A masterful work of investigative reporting, The Terminal Spy offers unprecedented insight into one of the most chilling true tales in our time.
