From the BBC:

Security analyst Glenmore Trenear-Harvey, who met Mr Litvinenko several times, said the media focus on the Kremlin was “lazy” and bore the hallmarks of a John Le Carre novel. “We have to put this in a historical context,” he said. “Litvinenko’s last job within the FSB was heading up the anti-corruption unit and he discovered a lot of corruption there and made a lot of enemies within the KGB.”

…”My own belief, and this is speculation, is that it’s not inconceivable that Anna Politkovskaya in her search for murderers within the Russian bank system discovered the contract killings were these former KGB people…She was killed and if Litvinenko indeed was privy to her investigations then it could well be that they will emerge as his killers.”

Although the sophisticated nature of the poison suggested it could have come from the state, there was no motive, he said…“There was no benefit to Putin or Russian intelligence services to have a highly publicised operation like this.”

So who is G T-H, the security analyst quoted above? Surely he can’t be direct marketing guru Glenmore Trenear-Harvey?

Here’s that G T-H’s former business partner, Drayton Bird (crazy name etc!), paying tribute to his skills:

Glenmore Trenear-Harvey, worked on a number of sales promotions during his time in the advertising agency business. He often lamented, when he became a direct marketer, how it was the standard practice at that time to keep the names of promotion respondents until it was certain there would be no complaints about the offer, then throw them away. “Like throwing money away,” he would say. “But we never knew it.”

Bird co-founded an agency with Glenmore Trenear-Harvey and John Watson in 1977, called Trenear-Harvey Bird & Watson, which in his own words: “used to run essentially on the input of vast of amounts of alcohol”.

Or was the BBC talking to UFO expert, and former RAF pilot, Glenmore Trenear-Harvey?

No, I’m guessing he must be CNN’s Glenmore Trenear-Harvey who spent 40 years in British security, the one who’s now associate editor of Eyespy magazine. That other stuff was probably ‘deep cover’ – unless direct marketers played a key role in the Cold War, like the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in WW2? Did communism collapse under a mountain of junk mail, or the Politburo fear being targeted by precision catalogues?

Who knows what role anyone in security really plays? It runs all the way from ‘no jeans, no trainers’ to bespoke dossier publication for Prime Ministers.

Anyway, I’m sure there must be several Glenmores running around. Makes you think though…

Incidentally, here’s The Times:

Britain’s intelligence agencies last night claimed that the poisoning of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko bore the hallmarks of a “state-sponsored” assassination.

A senior Whitehall official told The Times that confirmation that the former Russian spy, who had become a British citizen, had been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 and other evidence so far not released pointed to the murder being carried out by foreign agents. [Times]