MOSCOW - Late one night in April 1998, three government security agents met at a guest house outside Moscow to make an extraordinary video in which they claimed their bosses had ordered them to kill, kidnap and frame prominent Russians.
The tape, the Federal Security Service officers said, was a kind of insurance, to be released only if something happened to one of them.
Now one of them, Alexander Litvinenko, is dead, poisoned with a rare radioactive isotope in London last November.
British police on Tuesday accused another ex-KGB agent, Andrei Lugovoi, in the killing. No motive was stated. Lugovoi denied involvement, saying the decision by British officials was politically motivated.
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In the tape, Litvinenko also contends he was ordered to beat up or plant a weapon on Mikhail Trepashkin, another former FSB agent who was imprisoned several years later for revealing state secrets.
The videotaped claim appears prophetic: Trepashkin, who investigated claims the FSB was behind a series of apartment building explosions that killed about 300 people in 1999, was arrested in 2003 after police said they found a gun in his car. His lawyers said the weapon was planted.
Trepashkin was convicted of disclosing state secrets, and is now in prison. Amnesty International has said that the charges "appear to have been politically motivated," and in 2005 accused the Russian government of denying him medical treatment.
Another man in the tape identifies himself as Alexander Gusak, Litvinenko's direct superior, and says there was talk in the FSB of kidnapping Umar Dzhabrailov, a wealthy Chechen businessman.
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