RUSSIA:The assassin lay in wait in a darkened stairwell. As his unsuspecting victim approached he was hit in the face with a spray of poison gas fired from a custom-made gun.
Stepan Bandera collapsed soon afterwards and died of what doctors at first believed was heart failure. It was only when Bogdan Stashinsky, a KGB hitman, defected two years later and confessed to killing Bandera with a jet of prussic acid, that one of the most bizarre cold war assassinations was uncovered. The killing took place in Germany in 1959: the last time intelligence experts believe the Russians directly killed an enemy on foreign soil.
But the events surrounding the unexplained death of Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006, seem to eclipse even the most chilling of cold war spy stories. The story of the mystery illness and death of a Russian dissident began with a meeting in a Piccadilly sushi restaurant, spread to a conversation with two men over tea in the lobby of a central London hotel and included the handing over, by a contact from Italy, of an alleged hitlist from the Russian internal security agency, the FSB, which contained Mr Litvinenko's name.
Police officers are still seeking anyone who came into contact with Mr Litvinenko, but will not reveal whether they have interviewed either Mario Scaramella, the contact he met at the sushi restaurant, or Andrei Lugovoi and a second man, whom Mr Litvinenko met at the Millennium hotel, in central London on November 1st.
As remarkable details poured forth yesterday, it emerged police called in the Health Protection Agency on Thursday night after Mr Litvinenko's urine sample revealed traces of alpha radiation. Until then doctors had been using a Geiger counter in an attempt to detect thallium poisoning, a theory that delayed identifying the Polonium 210, which, as an emitter of so-called alpha radiation, would not be detected with a Geiger counter. One of the immediate issues investigators are trying to establish is who would have had access to the Polonium.
Mr Litvinenko's death is causing a whirl of e-mails between associates in the international intelligence community. What some find difficult to believe is that the Kremlin would bother to assassinate someone who was considered little more than a minor irritant in Russia.
"The difficulty about all this is so few people took him [ Litvinenko] seriously," said one Russian analyst. "He simply did not bring home the bacon. The security services were completely disinterested in him and his allegations." But if in his life he failed to interest the authorities, the unprecedented nature of his death has assured him a place in the history books.
Security services, who are normally reticent, confessed last night: "We are in uncharted territory."
The negative impact of the death on the Kremlin led many Russian analysts and intelligence sources to ask who was served by killing a man such as Mr Litvinenko? Why, asked one intelligence source, would Mr Putin arrange the assassination of a man considered somewhat small fry when the man who suffered was himself.
Few were prepared to raise the theory while Mr Litvinenko was fighting for his life, but some said yesterday that he could have poisoned himself to heap blame upon the Russian president.
However, other sources said that the use of such a sophisticated substance could only lead to certain conclusions which pointed towards the Kremlin, if only indirectly. One security source referred to the "Thomas à Becket" principle of distancing oneself from a criminal act - referring to the comment made by King Henry II to his knights: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
The discovery of Polonium 210 in Mr Litvinenko's urine in the hours before he died on Thursday night has finally answered the question of what killed him. But the issue of who killed him is eluding the police and security services. One security source said last night: "The evidence is not pointing anywhere." - ( Guardian service)