Inside a page-turning narrative that reads just like a thriller, an award-winning journalist exposes the troubling truth behind the world’s first act of nuclear terrorism.

On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko sipped tea in London’s Millennium Resort. Hours later the Russian émigré and previous intelligence officer, who was sharply important of Russian chief executive Vladimir Putin, fell sick and within times was rushed to the hospital. Fatally poisoned by a uncommon radioactive isotope slipped into his beverage, about The Terminal Spy: A True Tale of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder Litvinenko issued a dramatic deathbed declaration accusing Putin himself of anatomist his murder. Alan S. Cowell, after that London Bureau Key of the brand new York Situations, who covered the storyplot from its inception, provides written the definitive tale of this assassination and of the profound international implications of this first take action of nuclear terrorism.

Who was simply Alexander Litvinenko? What had occurred in Russia because the end from the cool war to create his life there untenable and in severe jeopardy actually in England, the united states that experienced granted him asylum? And exactly how did he actually die? The life of Alexander Litvinenko provides a riveting narrative in its right, culminating in an event that rang security alarm bells among traditional western governments at the relieve with which radioactive materials were deployed in a major Western capital to commit a distinctive crime. But it also evokes an array of various other problems: Russia’s lurch to authoritarianism, the come back from the KGB to the Kremlin, the perils of a new frosty war driven by Russia’s essential oil riches and Vladimir Putin’s thirst for power.

Cowell offers a remarkable and detailed reconstruction both of how Litvinenko died and of the issues surrounding his murder. Sketching on exclusive reporting from Britain, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the United States, he traces in unprecedented details the polonium trail leading from Russia’s shut nuclear metropolitan areas through Moscow and Hamburg to the Millenium Resort in central London. He supplies the most detailed step-by-step explanation of how and where polonium was found; how the assassins tried on several events to kill Litvinenko; and how they bungled a conspiracy that may experienced even more targets than Litvinenko himself.

With a colorful cast which includes the tycoons, spies, and killers who surrounded Litvinenko in the roller-coaster Russia of the 1990s, aswell as the émigrés who flocked to London in such numbers the British capital earned the sobriquet “Londongrad,” this reserve lays out the events that allowed an accused killer to escape prosecution within a delicate diplomatic minuet that helped save face for the authorities in London and Moscow.

A masterful work of investigative reporting, The Terminal Spy offers unprecedented insight into probably one of the most chilling true stories of our time.