That conclusion, coming nearly 10 years after the murder, seems like a good occasion for the publication of a book that sums up not only what we know about the crime but also how we came to know it. There is an argument to be had that America’s support for NGOs in the region is not as benign as the Washington establishment might have us believe and I don’t feel it unreasonable to question the narrative that Russian fears are completely without foundation. Blincoe points out the problem, that "if everyone, including Goldfarb, is in Berezovsky's pay, there are no disinterested accounts, only potential apologists for his world-view. They were questioned at the airport, but there was no reason to stop them entering the country; other than the intuitive feeling of one man. While serving in the army, he was temporarily attached to a counter-intelligence unit tasked with tracing the hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons that were causing havoc across the Soviet Union.

Whilst I can see that the authors were extremely anxious to publish all the evidence that they had and reveal this shocking story of choreographed wars and the establishment of the gangster state, this vitally important book would have benefitted greatly by some severe editing and restructuring to make it more readable and accessible. Harding traces the journey of the nuclear poison across London, from hotel room to nightclub, assassin to victim; it is a deadly trail that seemingly leads back to the Russian state itself. Yuri Felshtinsky co-wrote the book with Alexander Litvinenko and is an expert on Russia's secret service and was a Hoover Institute Fellow at the University of Stanford. Boris began investigating the poisoning of Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko even before the victim passed away in the University College London Hospital. With dramatic scenes from Moscow to London to Washington, Death of a Dissident reads like a political thriller, yet its story is more fantastic and frightening than any novel.

Litvinenko showed himself to be talented and able in the operations run by the unit, locating and seizing stolen weapons and breaking up rackets run by quartermasters and conscripts selling arms in huge quantities. It seemed then, and indeed still seems, extraordinarily unlikely that a British citizen could be assassinated in Britain with something so rare and strange as polonium-210. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. The two men, elusive and evasive, were carrying a ‘very expensive poison’ which they intended to use as a hi-tech murder weapon.

Even before they married, she knew he was attached to the FSB, and she learned not to ask questions.Was she acknowledging that her husband’s life and tortured death had been a necessary sacrifice, a martyrdom in the covert war between the Kremlin and its political opponents? Kovtun graduated in 1986, Lugovoy in 1987, and both went straight into the Kremlin Regiment of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, charged with the protection of senior state officials in the government and party.