That's what I suspected. The FBI has been dragged into the investigation of Alexander Litvinenko's death after details emerged that he had planned to make tens of thousands of pounds blackmailing senior Russian spies and business figures. The Observer has obtained remarkable testimony from a Russian academic, Julia Svetlichnaja, who met Litvinenko earlier this year and received more than 100 emails from him. In a series of interviews, she reveals that the former Russian secret agent had documents from the FSB, the Russian agency formerly known as the KGB. He had asked Svetlichnaja, who is based in London, to enter into a business deal with him and 'make money'........ .............. 'He told me he was going to blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people, including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin,' she said. 'He mentioned a figure of £10,000 that they would pay each time to stop him broadcasting these FSB documents. Litvinenko was short of money and was adamant that he could obtain any files he wanted.' Litvinenko's access to such documents could have made him an enemy of both big business interests and the Kremlin. However, his claims are almost impossible to verify and some political analysts have gone as far as to dismiss him as a fantasist....... http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1962829,00.html#article_continue
.......In an interview with The Independent shortly after the poisoning became public, Mr Scaramella said that Mr Litvinenko, a friend and professional contact since 2001, told him he had masterminded the smuggling of radioactive material to Zurich in 2000. There have long been concerns that turmoil in Russia and other former Soviet states after the fall of Communism created an international black market in radioactive substances. The operation would have been one of the last carried out by Mr Litvinenko while still an FSB officer, in a unit tackling organised crime and smuggling. He fled Russia for London that year after the FSB began investigating him for corruption - charges which he claimed were invented as revenge for his decision to expose an FSB plot to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.......... news.netscape.com/viewstory/2006/11/29/russian-spy-allegedly-smuggled-nuclear-materials/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.independent.co.uk%2Fuk%2Fcrime%2Farticle2023856.ece