Interviewing a KGB defector is complicated in an age when opponents of Vladimir Putin’s regime regularly die in suspicious circumstances both at home and abroad.
It is all the more complicated if, like Vladimir Popov, the defector is about to publish a book chronicling the infamous history of the KGB and its present-day successor, the FSB, in detail worthy of a John le Carré novel.
He agrees to be interviewed only on condition that I do not identify the Canadian town where he now lives. We meet in a location of his choosing – a friend’s empty office whose address I have received at short notice and that is well away from prying eyes. He will be photographed only against an unidentifiable background. He readily acknowledges that he has checked me out before we meet. Even then he brings his own bottle of water. Had I brought coffee with me, he adds, he would have refused to drink it.
Popov’s caution is entirely understandable. He remembers all too well the agonising, drawn-out death of Alexander Litvinenko, another out-spoken FSB defector, poisoned by the radioactive polonium with which Putin’s agents laced his tea in a London hotel in 2006.
He did not know Litvinenko, but his death was still ‘very deeply emotional for me’, Popov says in broken, heavily accented English. ‘He made a big mistake in my view. He kept in touch with former colleagues. That made it easy to kill him. They knew where he was.’
But he also says it was Litvinenko’s appalling death that finally convinced him to start speaking out. It was his ‘duty’ to expose how Putin and his former KGB colleagues had seized control of Russia following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and turned it into a rogue state bent on rebuilding its old empire.
‘I thought I have to do it,’ says Popov, a soft-spoken, silver-haired man of 76, who wears a leather jacket and opennecked blue shirt. ‘Every single day I am ready to be killed. I worry just about my family, not about me. If you’re ready you are not afraid.’
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***The Telegraph’s Martin Fletcher:***
Interviewing a KGB defector is complicated in an age when opponents of Vladimir Putin’s regime regularly die in suspicious circumstances both at home and abroad.
It is all the more complicated if, like Vladimir Popov, the defector is about to publish a book chronicling the infamous history of the KGB and its present-day successor, the FSB, in detail worthy of a John le Carré novel.
He agrees to be interviewed only on condition that I do not identify the Canadian town where he now lives. We meet in a location of his choosing – a friend’s empty office whose address I have received at short notice and that is well away from prying eyes. He will be photographed only against an unidentifiable background. He readily acknowledges that he has checked me out before we meet. Even then he brings his own bottle of water. Had I brought coffee with me, he adds, he would have refused to drink it.
Popov’s caution is entirely understandable. He remembers all too well the agonising, drawn-out death of Alexander Litvinenko, another out-spoken FSB defector, poisoned by the radioactive polonium with which Putin’s agents laced his tea in a London hotel in 2006.
He did not know Litvinenko, but his death was still ‘very deeply emotional for me’, Popov says in broken, heavily accented English. ‘He made a big mistake in my view. He kept in touch with former colleagues. That made it easy to kill him. They knew where he was.’
But he also says it was Litvinenko’s appalling death that finally convinced him to start speaking out. It was his ‘duty’ to expose how Putin and his former KGB colleagues had seized control of Russia following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and turned it into a rogue state bent on rebuilding its old empire.
‘I thought I have to do it,’ says Popov, a soft-spoken, silver-haired man of 76, who wears a leather jacket and opennecked blue shirt. ‘Every single day I am ready to be killed. I worry just about my family, not about me. If you’re ready you are not afraid.’
**Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/06/putin-russia-vladimir-popov-kgb-intelligence-services/**
Russia is hoping to get him “Putin a box”.