In a week or so, Litvinenko was to testify before a Spanish prosecutor. The trail apparently led to the president’s office, and dated back to the 1990s when Putin, then aide to St Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, worked closely with gangsters. The mafia had extensive contacts with senior Russian politicians. Latterly, Litvinenko had been supplying Her Majesty’s spooks and their Spanish counterparts with hair-raising information about the Russian mafia in Spain. And – from 2003 onwards – a British agent, employed by MI6 as an expert on Russian organised crime. In exile in Britain he had become Putin’s most ebullient and needling critic. Their target was Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer in Russia’s FSB spy agency. The hitmen were Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. It was here, in mid-October 2006, that two Russian assassins had tried to murder someone, unsuccessfully. This was an enduring triumph for the west, democratic values, and for free societies everywhere.įive hundred metres away is Grosvenor Street. Reagan, the monument says, defeated communism. It is a piece of the Berlin Wall, retrieved from the east side. Next to the inscriptions is a sandy-coloured chunk of masonry. The quotes would seem mordantly ironic in the light of events that took place just around the corner, and amid Vladimir Putin’s apparent attempt to turn the clock back to 1982, when the former KGB boss Yuri Andropov – the secret policeman’s secret policeman – was in charge of a doomed empire known as the Soviet Union. A friendly tribute from Mikhail Gorbachev reads: “With President Reagan, we travelled the world from confrontation to cooperation.”
An inscription hails Reagan’s contribution to world history and his “determined intervention to end the cold war”. In 2011 another statue would appear: that of the late US president Ronald Reagan.
A statue of Franklin D Roosevelt – wearing a large cape and holding a stick – dominates the north side of the square. It overlooks Grosvenor Square, and is practically next door to the heavily guarded US embassy, where, it is rumoured, the CIA has its station on the fourth floor. T he Millennium hotel is an unusual spot for a murder.
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