Ben Macintyre on what makes spies tick

Theories on the case of Litvinenko

A Russian spy lies in a hospital bed, fighting for his life as his body steadily disintegrates from the effects of a radioactive poison; the spy, an outspoken critic of the Russian regime, has recently defected to the West; someone in Moscow has decided that he must die, and the assassins have done their work with ferocious efficiency.

The name of the spy is Nikolai Khokhlov, and the year is 1957.

The murder of Alexander Litvinenko last week carries an extraordinary echo of the poisoning of Dr Khokhlov half a century earlier. Both men were former KGB agents who had become disillusioned with Russian autocracy and had published books condemning their former masters. Both were attacked in precisely the same way: radioactive thallium was slipped into Dr Khokhlov’s coffee; Litvinenko appears to have been fed a dose of radioactive polonium-210.

But there is one difference between the two cases: Dr Khokhlov survived.

Dr Khokhlov, now 84 and living in San Bernardino, California, is convinced that the murder of Litvinenko, like the attempt to poison him half a century ago, was motivated by revenge, a warning that defection and dissidence will never go unpunished.

Dr Khokhlov was sent to Germany in 1954 to arrange the assassination of an anti-communist Russian émigré; instead he defected. “The KGB decided to kill me,” Dr Khokhlov said yesterday. “From this moment there was a general direction to hunt Khokhlov. The message was, ‘We will get the traitor, wherever he is the world’.”

Dr Khokhlov believes that the attack on him was probably carried out by “underlings keen to win a medal”, and that the same may be true of Litvinenko’s murder. “The situation within Russia today is very perilous. There are no more laws, and no more order,” he said, in precise, heavily accented English. “Litvinenko threatened some disclosures, but his executioners did not know if he really had the information.”

The elderly spy carefully stopped short of accusing President Putin, who is a former KGB officer, of direct involvement in the assassination, but he points out: “Putin brought back many KGB, and there are too many KGB at the top, the old dinosaurs who cannot get rid of old habits.”

There is no one better qualified to comment on the KGB’s old habits of murderous revenge than Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov, whose story of rebellion, moral choice and survival reads like a Cold War novel.

As a young soldier in the Second World War, Dr Khokhlov was recruited to the Soviet secret service. He was highly intelligent, reliable and ruthless, but also inconspicuous: a pale, blond man with spectacles, looking more like a bank clerk than a spy.

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