Review: A Very Expensive Poison

A weekend non-fiction book review.

Luke Harding. A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West.  New York, NY: Vintage Books, January 24th 2017. 432 pp.

4 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon

Sometimes facts of history can be more fascinating than any work of fiction.  This is an example of where current events mimics a spy suspense novel of the Cold War era except it is all too real including the fatal consequences.  The author Luke Harding is a British journalist who worked for The Guardian and have spent several years as a foreign correspondent in Russia.  He has written quite a bit about modern Russia including several books on the topic.  I first read his book on Wikileaks which was also intriguing.  This book’s subject matter is even more intriguing than the first.

In this present volume Harding presents to the readers one of the most thorough look at Russia’s operation to poison one of its former dissident name Alexander Litvinenko.  Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning by Russian operatives in London in 2006 provoked an international incident that received front page news though much information wasn’t available then as it is now.  The story reads like a Tom Clancy thriller.  But the book also presents the facts of a bumbling Russian operation as well, where the two killers sent by the Russian failed the first time to eliminate Litvinenko and how they left radioactive prints everywhere they went and had to be sent back by Russia to finish what they failed to do the first time.  The book makes a persuasive argument that this operation was no rogue intelligence services’ mission for the agency’s making an important decision to assassinate a dissident under the president’s radar would not be tolerated.  The book also pointed out that for this murderous operation to take place it involves multiple government agencies especially with the murderers obtaining a highly radioactive and rare nuclear poison to knock off Litvinenko.

The author’s research was very thorough and is based heavily on also the incredible investigation by the British government and the author’s interviews.  These interviews included Litvinenko’s own interviews with Scotland Yard’s investigators in which he presented his evidences as a dying witness to his own murder.  Harding also gives us the background of who Alexander Litvinenko was and also the larger context of the political climate in Russia in which his poisoning would not make sense.  The book also presented the author’s personal experience with Putin’s Russia in which Harding was intimidated by Russian intelligence services and also being unjustly kicked out of Russia for his journalistic coverage of a corrupt Russian government.  The book also talked about Russia after Litvinenko’s death such as Russia’s military incursion into Georgia and Ukraine and Russia’s other Russian missions to poison others such as the Ukrainian president.  This is a frightening picture of modern Russia where the president, intelligence apparatus and organized crimes are working together in sync and at times indistinguishable.  Overall a fascinating book that’s worth reading.