A FEW SHORT weeks ago, most Britons had never heard of Polonium 210. Now, many are wondering if they can ‘catch’ it from someone who’s been exposed, or if — even worse — he or she might inadvertently have been directly exposed at one of a half-dozen Polonium-210 ‘positive’ sites named by British Police.
Never mind that PO-210 is a known carcinogen present in cigarette smoke — or that PO-210 is the main component of ionizers used in manufacturing environments — ah, but that’s another story.
Boris Berezovsky
Today’s lesson begins with a Russian ex-patriot named Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky is a billionaire businessman with rumored connections to the Chechen Mafia. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of Russian businessmen snapped up infrastructure and manufacturing companies. In turn, these new oligarchs invested their money in supporting Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Boris Berezovsky began as a software engineer, but he took full advantage of the failing Soviet state to gain control of state-owned companies such as AutoVaz, Aeroflot, and even several oil companies.
With his newfound wealth, and political clout to boot, Berezovsky purchased news media outlets such as Kommersant and ORT Russian Channel 1 (hmm…television and print…shades of Rupert Murdoch!) and even created his own bank to finance his business dealings. Not surprisingly, Berezovsky’s news outlets supported Yeltsin in the 1996 elections. Despite his support for Putin in 2000, Berezovsky’s business practices soon fell under the new, stricter Russian president’s iron fist. Fearing arrest, Berezovsky fled to Britain in 2001. He remains critical of Putin’s administration.
Berezovsky’s brand of business hit the news this year, when Mikhail Fridman of Alfa Bank (a partner in TNK-BP Oil) used a Russian television program to accuse Berezovsky of threatening him, and that making threats was Mr. Berezovsky’s usual way of conducting busienss. The Russian billionaire ex-pat sued both Alfa bank and its chairman, Mr. Fridman, and in May, a High Court in London awarded Berezovsky £50,000 in libel damages. (This whole matter has longer roots, however. Alfa Bank sued Kommersant — Berezovsky’s news service — and won a judgement of $11M back in 2004).
Litvinenko’s connection with Berezovsky seems to begin in 1998, when the spy accused his superiors at the FSB of plotting to assassinate good old Boris, then serving as President Yeltsin’s Secretary of the Security Council in Russia. Litvinenko had joined the KGB in 1986 (the KGB later transformed into the SVR for foreign intelligence and the FSB for internal matters after the breakup of the USSR), where he specialized in counter-terrorist activities and infiltration of organized crime.
In 1994, Boris Yeltsin created a war with Chechnya that ended badly (the Chechen ‘rebels’ won!), so Yeltsin signed a treaty giving Chechnya independence in 1997. The hardline Russians didn’t agree with this, and these ‘siloviki’ began to discredit Yeltsin, undermining his authority to lead.
Then, in 1999, a series of apartment building bombings in Moscow that killed 300 people was blamed on Chechen Islamic terrorists, when in fact they had been underwritten and implemented by the SVR (a fact proven in later investigations). Yeltsin’s popularity dropped to 5%, and he fired his prime minister, replacing him with Vladimir Putin. Then on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigned and named Putin his successor.
Also in 1999, during an anti-terrorist campaign in Kostroma, Litvinenko was arrested for ‘abusing his duties’. He was released from jail on the promise that he would remain in Russia, but he fled to Turkey (where his wife and son were conveniently ‘vacationing’), and from there the trio traveled to England. In October 2006, just weeks before his death, Litvinenko received his British citizenship.In 2002, with the help of Berzovsky, Litvinenko published Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, revealing the true story behind the 1999 Moscow apartment block bombings and the SVR involvement. In December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 4000 copies of the book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia.
Enter the Bush Family
The Latvian/Berezovsky connection brings us to Neil Bush. Recently, Billionaire Berezovsky (who has legally changed his name to Platon Elenin) has entered into business dealings with Neil Bush (brother of Bush 43, son of Bush 41). Berezovsky and Bush have joined forces to promote new educational software developed by Ignite Learning. Bush is often Berezovsky’s guest at events in the United Arab Emirates (not surprising at all, since a Dubai company – Datamatrix – is rumored to be an investor in Ignite).
The software is designated for primary school students and teaches curriculum by developing children’s thinking and imagination. These so-called ‘Curriculum on Wheels’ packages (COWs – think ‘Cash-Cow’) have largely been purchased by the state of Texas, but strangely enough a company connected to Sun Myung Moon has invested a million dollars in COWs for the Washington DC area.
Neil Bush and Sun Myung Moon have been touring the world promoting Moon’s Universal Peace Federation, so it shouldn’t really surprise one that multi-billionaire Rev. Moon (a man proclaimed ‘Messiah’ in a Washington DC ceremony) would invest a lousy million in a little educational software.Money can buy so much — including elections.
Which brings us back to Berezovsky, whose riches may have been the driving factor behind the Bush-praised Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Berezovsky has confirmed that he met Yushchenko’s representatives in London before the election, and that the money was transferred from his companies, but he refused to confirm or deny that the companies that received the money were used in Yushchenko’s campaign. Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in the Ukraine.
Now — remember Latvia? Litvinenko’s whistleblower book about the Moscow apartment ‘false flag’ event that gave the impetus for Putin’s landslide election in 2000 was published in Latvia. Who is — at this very moment — attending a NATO conference in that same nation? Uh huh. Yep. Neil’s very own brother — President George W. Bush.What a crazy circle, huh?
Who is Mario Scaramella?
Oh, and there’s one more player in the Baloneyium 210 Circle — Mario Scaramella. He’s the Italian ‘academic’ who was lunching with Alexander Litvinenko at the Itsu Sushi bar the day of the poisoning.
According to ‘friends’ of Litvinenko, Alexander had received an email from someone calling himself ‘Mario’ from Italy. This ‘Mario’ claimed he had information about the culprit behind the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and that he would like to meet with Litvinenko in person. Here the story becomes a little hard for me to swallow — why would an experienced spy agree to meet someone for information that could easily be mailed or emailed? We know now that Litvinenko did meet with ‘Mario’ Scaramella.Who is Scaramella? The press describes him as a professor at the University of Naples.
His name appears in a number of interesting stories involving nuclear material. One centers around:
a briefcase allegedly containing five kilos of highly enriched uranium, half of which would be enough to build an atomic device, which remained for months in a Rimini garage. A briefcase, however, which eluded investigators, and which managed to get back into the hands of the Ukrainian national, who perhaps is still in Italy. Together with another briefcase having a similar content, and a third believed to conceal a tracking system. The entire kit geared to the assembly of a small tactical atomic bomb. A mystery story fuelled by information supplied the Rimini police department by a consultant of the Mitrokhin committee, Mario Scaramella, who, acting on behalf of the agency presided over by Paolo Guzzanti, was trying to track illegal funds from the former USSR that had transited through [the Republic of ] San Marino. — BBC International Monitoring – SGPProject
Another article descrived Scaramella as “an expert on Soviet-era intelligence”:
ITALY HAS an unwanted legacy from the Cold War in the form of 20 nuclear warheads on the seabed in the Bay of Naples, left there by the Soviet navy 25 years ago, it has been claimed.An expert on Soviet-era intelligence, Mario Scaramella, sent a memo confirming the existence of the missiles to Guido Bertolaso, the head of Protezione Civile, Italy’s civil defence agency.
“On 10 January 1970,” the memo read, “a submarine of the November class detached itself from the Fifth Squadron (Mediterranean) of the Soviet navy with orders … to place an imprecise number of tactical atomic torpedoes in the Bay of Naples. The submarine was armed with 24 nuclear torpedoes of two different types, for anti-aircraft carrier and anti-submarine use. They were used to mine the area used by the American Seventh Fleet.” — London Independent – FindArticles.com
According to Eric Margolis:
Between 2000 and 2002, Prof Scaramella was secretary general of a little-known organisation named the Environmental Crime Prevention Programme. The ECPP describes itself as an organisation which ‘provides environmental protection and security through technology on a global basis’.
It has offices at the Fucino Space Centre in Italy to deploy ‘aerial surveillance to detect environmental crimes in Eastern and Southern Europe’. On its website, the ECPP described itself as a ‘permanent intergovernmental conference’ with a secretariat in Naples and rotating presidencies held by countries such as Angola and Samoa.None of the contact details listed for the organisation on its website work. When Prof Scaramella was asked where the group’s head office was he said there wasn’t one – you had to contact the general secretary, who currently was a Professor Papadopoulos from California’s San Jose university.
We May Never Know the Truth
Sadly, Alexander Litvinenko’s life was ended by someone — and we may never know the name or names. We do know he met with two fellow spies earlier on November 1, and then joined Scaramello at the Itsu, where Litvinenko ate soup brought by a waiter. The restaurant has tested positive for traces of the radioactive poison polonium-210 according to British investigators. Traces of polonium-210 have also been found in Boris Berezovsky’s offices and his residence in Mayfair. Scaramello is now being tested for PO-210 poisoning.One last point. Litvinenko had traveled to Israel prior to the poisoning, where he is supposed to have shared information regarding Yukos to Leonid Nevzlin, the former deputy head of Yukos, who fled to Tel Aviv. Litvinenko left documents – now handed over to UK investigators – that are said to include information regarding the deaths of former Yukos workers, and information relating to the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Considering the money involved, we may never know the truth.
