Smash hit

“I know that the Russian intelligence are monitoring me. I know that I am an active case. I know the officer in the Russian [embassy] station here who is in charge of monitoring me. I know he is part of the spy trade.” He lay back, exhausted.

Those spies, he implied, had laid a trap and led him into it. On November 1, the sixth anniversary of his escape from Russia, he had gone to two meetings, one with a former FSB agent and another with an Italian investigator who feared for his life — and for Litvinenko’s.

Later that night he began to feel unwell. By November 3 he was in hospital, suffering from persistent vomiting and dehydration. By November 15 his condition was critical, and baffled doctors were testing him with geiger counters for radiation poisoning.

In the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale, the fictional British spy has poison slipped into his drink. He staggers to his Aston Martin and, thanks to futuristic Q-style gadgetry, boffins back at base are able to diagnose the lethal substance. The antidote is at hand.

The real world of espionage is much murkier. Last week, as Litvinenko’s strength was slipping away, he told a friend: “The bastards got me, but they won’t get everyone”. He died on Thursday evening. He was 43.

On Friday experts from the Health Protection Agency revealed that high levels of radiation — from a substance known as polonium210 — had been found in his urine. He had, they said, either eaten or inhaled the polonium, or absorbed it through a wound.

The radioactive isotope is rare and vastly more toxic than cyanide. But it is undetectable in the body with a geiger counter. Who could have obtained it? How had it come to enter Litvinenko’s body?

Outside the hospital his father had few doubts who was responsible. “He was killed by a little, tiny nuclear bomb,” he said. “It was so small that you could not see it. But the people who killed him have big nuclear bombs and missiles, and those people should not be trusted.”

Had Putin, tiring of Litvinenko’s attacks, ordered his elimination? Did rogue elements in Russian intelligence take matters into their own hands? As Litvinenko’s plight made headlines, lurid rumours surfaced to justify these suspicions, including claims that originate from Litvinenko that a videotape exists of Putin caught in a compromising sexual assignation.

The Kremlin dismissed it all as “nonsense”, and “so silly and unbelievable” that it was “not worthy of comment”.

But the conspiracy theories did not stop. If it wasn’t the Kremlin, people whispered, then Litvinenko had been sacrificed by his own allies to discredit Putin.

Others wondered whether he was the victim of a mafia plot. Had he somehow come into contact with smuggled radioactive material? Some even went so far as to speculate that the former spy, consumed by his hatred for Putin, had harmed himself.