The Terminal Spy - After Sipping Tea in a London Hotel, Alexander Litvinenko

Zusatztext 105588309 Informationen zum Autor Alan S. Cowell was the London bureau chief of the New York Times when the events narrated in this book reached their climax. Previously, Cowell served as a correspondent for Reuters and the New York Times in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He has been based in twelve capitals and reported the news from around ninety countries and territories. Cowell is married and has three children. He is now based in Paris.  Klappentext "A story that is at once real-life thriller and an immensely sinister cautionary tale about the new Russia.” -Star Tribune On November 1! 2006! Alexander Litvinenko sipped tea in London's Millennium Hotel. Hours later the Russian émigré and former intelligence officer! who was sharply critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin! fell ill and within days was rushed to the hospital. Fatally poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope slipped into his drink! Litvinenko issued a dramatic deathbed statement accusing Putin himself of engineering his murder. Alan S. Cowell! then London Bureau Chief of the New York Times who covered the story from its inception! has written the definitive story of this assassination­ and of the profound international implications of this first act of nuclear terrorism. "Absorbing.” -New York Times "Cowell plays out the Byzantine possibilities behind this killing with heroic clarity.” -Los Angeles Times "Doggedly reported and dramatically written . . . Cowell tells the story with literary panache but doesn't let his stylish prose eclipse the substance of a sordid tale. The sections about espionage and the assassination are worthy of Tom Clancy! but the author's political analysis is equally riveting . . . A well-told true-crime tale mixed with expert political/historical analysis.” -Kirkus Reviews 1 Broken homes, broken empire Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was born on December 4, 1962, in a hospital in Voronezh, 300 miles south of Moscow, a university town where his father was a medical student specializing in pediatrics. He arrived one month before term. He weighed 2.4 kilograms, around six pounds. His mother, Nina, remembered a difficult birth. She fretted he might not survive. Then a woman in another bed in her ward at the Soviet-era hospital told her that all eight month babies became famous--an adage that noone would deny in Litvinenko's case, though not in the manner his mother would have forecast or preferred. Even so, who could have imagined that a child of the U.S.S.R would secure renown in such a bizarre manner, so far from home? In 1962, Nikita Krushchev was in power in Moscow and the Soviet empire spanned a half a globe, from central Asia to the Baltic and the Pacific, its satellite states patrolling the line that divided Europe. The Soviets had been the first to put a man in space--Yuri Gargarin--in 1961, a huge propaganda victory over the United States, challenging Americans with the shocking implication that communism, progress and technology were not incompatible. This sprawling, secretive empire was not shy of confronting American power. Litvinenko was born in the year of the Cuban missile crisis that pushed the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. True, Krushchev had offered a kind of liberalization after the death of Josef Stalin, permitting the publication of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and famously decrying the Stalinist cult of the individual. But Krushchev also led a muscular drive to cement Soviet influence. He approved the crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. And at home, the state's writ ran unchallenged, its power exercized through the taut sinews of the K.G.B. and other internal forces created to forestall dissent. Soviet troops occupied garrisons across Eastern Europe. Soviet spies tunneled into the Western political establi...

Product details

• Authors: Alan S Cowell, Alan S. Cowell
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.10.2009
• EAN: 9780767928168
• ISBN: 978-0-7679-2816-8
• No. of pages: 448
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 205 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense