Veteran journalist and author
Joseph Goulden offers a review in the Washington Times of Amy Knight’s Orders To
Kill.
A report that has circulated
in world intelligence circles for years has finally surfaced publicly in a book
by an author who The New York Times has called “the West’s foremost scholar” on
the KGB — that Russian strongman (and former KGB officer) Vladimir Putin is a
pedophile with a preference for young boys.
The allegation is contained
“Orders to Kill,” Amy Knight’s book, which is a richly detailed account of the
murders of multiple Putin foes over the years, including one brazen
assassination of a would-be “reformer” literally in the shadow of the Kremlin. Although
evidence strongly points to President Putin as responsible for many of the
killings, “Putin is never seen holding a smoking gun,” as Ms. Knight writes.
One of the murders she
analyzes is the death (by polonium poisoning) of Alexander Litvinenko, one-time
fellow KGB officer and friend of Mr. Putin. The two had a falling out when
Litvinenko gave Mr. Putin a scathing report on corruption within the government
and the FSB (successor agency to the KGB). He was also appalled by Mr. Putin’s
harsh conduct against dissidents in Chechnya.
For self-preservation,
Litvinenko fled to London, where he became close to another Putin enemy, Boris
Berezovsky. He also became an asset of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence
service.
Litvinenko died an agonizing
death in 2006 after someone slipped polonium into his cup of tea in a London
cafe. (One source of the rare drug is a KGB lab.)
According to Ms. Knight’s
account, Litvinenko “sealed his fate” with a 2006 article in the Chechen Press
in which he described a “bizarre incident” outside the Kremlin. Mr. Putin
chatted with a group of tourists, “then went over to a small boy, lifted up his
T-shirt, and kissed him on the stomach.”
Litvinenko wrote that “nobody
can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing.” As Ms.
Knight writes, Litvinenko “went on to explain that Mr. Putin had been known by
KGB insiders to have been a pedophile and that there were secret tapes he
destroyed once became head of the FSB showing him having sex with underage
boys.”
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
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