A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West

Luke Harding

Jän. 2017 · Verkauft von Vintage

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A true story of murder and conspiracy that points directly to Vladimir Putin, by The Guardian’s former Moscow bureau chief and author of The Snowden Files and Collusion

On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium—a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance.

Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story—complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters. He shows how Litvinenko’s murder foreshadowed the killings of other Kremlin critics, from Washington, DC, to Moscow, and how these are tied to Russia’s current misadventures in Ukraine and Syria. In doing so, he becomes a target himself and unearths a chain of corruption and death leading straight to Vladimir Putin. F

rom his investigations of the downing of flight MH17 to the Panama Papers, Harding sheds a terrifying light on Russia’s fracturing relationship with the West.

Autoren-Profil

Luke Harding is a journalist, writer and award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s bureau chief in Moscow. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war, in part because of his reporting on Alexander Litvinenko’s murder.

He is the author of four previous non-fiction books: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man; Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia; WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy; and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (the last two co-written with David Leigh).

Two have been made into Hollywood movies. Dreamworks’ The Fifth Estate, based on WikiLeaks, was released in 2013. Director Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden, adapted from The Snowden Files, appeared in 2016. In 2014, Luke was awarded the James Cameron prize. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages. Luke lives near London with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.