Last night's TV reviewed: Bitter taste of espionage
GETTY Hunting the KGB Killers tells the inside story of Alexander Litvineko's murder
A Russian dissident and former KGB man was poisoned with the world’s most lethal toxin in a West End sushi restaurant. Amid blanket denials and official indifference, Alexander Litvinenko, a husband and father, wasted away, his dramatic decline captured on the front covers over barely more than a few days. His haunted face seemed to send a message to everyone about Putin and the “new” Russia so strikingly similar to the old one.
GETTY His haunted face seemed to send a message to everyone about Putin and the 'new' Russia
Brian Woods’ documentary captured that general whiff of horror well, while zooming in on the detail of the police investigation that followed Litvinenko’s demise. This, too, had elements that seemed to belong in fiction. Scotland Yard’s DI Brian “Tarps” Tarpey and DS Alan Slater duly flew out to Moscow, so alert to the possibility of Soviet-style “honey traps” that they put out their own traps in their hotel rooms.
GETTY Brian Wood's documentary captured a general whiff of horror as well
The Russian authorities, for their part, laid on a fine spread of le Carré-style smoke and mirrors, including an interview with a suspect so covered in radiationproof clothing that he could have been anyone (and probably was). Their pièce de résistance seems to have been serving the Yard team poisoned tea (a message, you could say, since it was a pot of green tea that had delivered the deadly polonium to Litvinenko). Given a case of the Tomsk Trots, rather than a full-on dose of isotopes, they struggled on. They just had to work in short bursts, as DI Tarpey put it, with a wry smile. Fascinating as this all was, the film never duped us into thinking this was a yarn or a romp. The face of Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, flashed like a beacon throughout, grief and determination in equal measure.
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She wanted justice, and if she couldn’t get that, she wanted the world to know the names of the killers and those who sent them. She got that, too, many years later, an important process for her and a professional triumph for Tarps and Slater and Co. As well as being moved by the story, no one watching could quite overlook the bigger picture. Russia can assassinate British citizens on British soil any time it likes. In the purely fictional spy world, the octopus is a popular symbol of murky intent, many tentacled, huge eyed, controlled at the centre by some big, ugly brain. It taps in, no doubt, to our fascination with this strange sea beast, which has almost as many brain cells as ourselves.
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