Jane's Intelligence Digest, UK, Friday, January 21, 2005
Western governments and international organisations were shocked to
hear confirmation in December from an internationally respected
Viennese medical clinic that Ukrainian opposition winner Viktor
Yushchenko was poisoned four months earlier. JID's regional
correspondent reports on allegations that will have serious
repercussions in post-election Ukraine.
"This was a project of political murder prepared by the authorities,"
Yushchenko claimed. Meanwhile, Western governments have called for
those behind the poisoning to be brought to justice. This is now more
likely after Yushchenko's victory in the re-run Ukrainian elections,
which took place on 26 December.
Yushchenko himself has warned: "I have no doubt that, within several
days or weeks, this path will lead the authorities to specific people
representing the government - who administered the poison, who was
involved and from whom the poison was procured."
The Soviet record of assassinating opponents abroad is long and very
well documented. Four Ukrainian nationalist leaders were assassinated
by the Soviet security services between 1926 and 1959 in Paris,
Rotterdam and Munich. Two of these assassinations were carried out in
Munich with a gun that sprayed heart attack-inducing poison into the
face of the victim. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became
aware of the poison only after a KGB assassin who had previously used
it defected to the US in 1961.
Under President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, this practice
has returned. Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) agents were
arrested in Qatar in February, after being accused of assassinating a
Chechen exile.
In Ukraine, opponents of the outgoing administration have either died
at the hands of a Ministry of Interior Spetsnaz special forces unit,
or as a result of attacks carried out by so-called 'skinheads' linked
to organised criminal gangs. In March 1999, opposition Rukh leader
Vyacheslav Chornovil died in a car 'accident', after the vehicle in
which he was travelling was hit by a Kamaz truck, a heavy-duty
vehicle that has figured in many 'accidents' in Ukraine. An attempt
to kill Yushchenko in early August using a Kamaz truck failed.
A videotape interview of Ministry of Interior Spetsnaz officers
admitting to organising Chornovil's murder was passed in 1999 to then
opposition presidential candidate and former Security Service (SBU)
chairman Yevhen Marchuk. This potentially explosive tape is expected
to be released to the incoming Yushchenko administration once it re-
opens investigations into a series of alleged political murders.
THE ATTEMPT ON YUSHCHENKO
It now seems likely that Yushchenko was either poisoned during a trip
to Crimea in late August 2004 or at a dinner. Ministry of Interior
officers were caught carrying out a surveillance operation against
Yushchenko in Crimea.
The poison involved - TCDD, the most toxic form of dioxin - can take
up to two weeks to take effect. TCDD was also a key ingredient of
Agent Orange, which was used by US forces during the Vietnam War. The
level of this dioxin found in samples taken from Yushchenko was 6,000
times higher than normal and the second highest ever recorded.
On audio tapes illicitly made in pro-Moscow Prime Minister Viktor
Yanukovych's secret campaign headquarters by elements of the SBU
loyal to Yushchenko, there is evidence that may provide clues. There
was a conversation concerning surveillance of Yushchenko's election
headquarters in Kiev and ways to carry out a secret operation against
him. Those recorded speaking on the tapes complain about the presence
of a bank's video security cameras close to Yushchenko's headquarters.
Yushchenko's wife said that she tasted "a metallic-smelling medicine"
on her husband's lips after he returned home from a dinner.
Yushchenko himself has expressed the view that this occasion was the
most likely opportunity for the poison to be administered as it was
the only time he did not take security measures to test his food.
The political background is significant. Until round two of the
elections on 21 November, the Kuchma-Yanukovych camp was prepared
to 'win' the elections using fraud. Given what was then seen as the
inevitability of a Yanukovych presidency, they did not fear legal
action following victory in the poll.
US National Intelligence Council sources believe that the timing of
the poisoning was highly suspicious. By early September 2004, the
authorities had planned that after two months of a very dirty
campaign their candidate, Yanukovych, would be ahead. However, at
that stage Yushchenko's lead was actually growing.
It is highly likely that the audacious poisoning was a desperate act
of panic by his political opponents. Yushchenko twice visited the
Vienna clinic for treatment and this removed him from the election
campaign for four weeks. By the end of the campaign in October 2004
his ratings caught up to Yushchenko's. Dubious results released in
round one showed Yanukovych and Yushchenko level at 40 per cent.
The 'Orange Revolution' undermined Yanukovych's attempted fraudulent
election victory when mass protests after the second round forced a
re-run on 26 December, handing victory to Yushchenko. Interestingly,
suspicion has not fallen on SBU chairman Ihor Smeshko who, according
to JID sources, has personal sympathies with the Yushchenko camp.
RUSSIAN CONNECTION?
Yushchenko has publicly alleged a Russian connection to his
poisoning, a claim that has been denied by politicians allied to
Putin. Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, head of the Union of
Right Forces, has stated that he cannot rule out the involvement of
the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's domestic secret service,
which is charged with carrying out espionage activities in the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
TCDD dioxin is not produced commercially and cannot be digested
naturally. It is a chemical mixture, rather than a specific poison.
The preparation of the dioxin could have been undertaken in a former
KGB secret chemical/biological laboratory that is now under the
control of the FSB.
Renegade intelligence officer Alexander V. Litvinenko, who served in
the KGB and the FSB before defecting to Britain, has revealed that
the FSB controls a secret laboratory in Moscow that specialises in
the study of poisons. Meanwhile, a former dissident scientist now
living in the US, Vil Mirzayanov, has confirmed that dioxins were
studied in this laboratory during the development of defoliants for
the military. Moreover, Valeriy Krawchenko, an SBU defector, has also
pointed to this FSB laboratory as the likely source of the dioxin
that was used to poison Yushchenko.
Such poisoning incidents are not unknown in Russia. A leading Russian
banker, Ivan Kivelidi, died in 1995 after using a telephone
contaminated with a poisonous substance. In 2002, a Saudi militant
named Khattab, who was working for the Chechens, died after opening a
poisoned letter. In September 2004 - the same month that Yushchenko
was poisoned - the prominent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya
was poisoned on a flight to Beslan, where Chechen rebels had taken
over a school. She survived.
REPERCUSSIONS
Under Yushchenko's presidency, the poisoning incident is set to have
wide-ranging domestic and foreign policy ramifications. Domestically,
it will further erode Kuchma's tarnished reputation and further
undermine the political party he relies on for support, Medvedchuk's
SDPUo. Medvedchuk is already being accused of involvement in election
fraud.
Internationally, the attempt on Yushchenko's life will undermine
Putin's reputation in Ukraine and abroad. The Russian president's
open interference in Ukraine's elections has been widely condemned by
Western governments. This is likely to lead to a reassessment of
Western foreign policy towards Putin's increasingly authoritarian
Russia.
