Britian's "Top Spy" Alex Allan Is in a Coma

Britain's top intelligence adviser Alex Allan is pictured here and profiled in the London Times (11-16-07). See also his wikipedia.

British newspapers are reporting that their unconventional "top spy" Alex Allan, profiled here by the BBC (7-4-08), is critically ill in the hospital. The Sun (7-4-08) is even speculating that he may have been poisoned by the Russians or by Al Qaeda.

The Telegraph (7-4-08) [cache] is trying to damp down that theory as are The Times (7-4-08) and Daily Mail (7-4-08).

Maybe more information will become available when the medical tests come back.

British newspapers are sometimes prone to sensationalism, but still..

Last year, on March 1, 2007, an American expert on the KGB, Paul Joyal was shot in his Maryland driveway but survived. Mr. Joyal had recently taped a show for Dateline about the poisoning death in London of Alexander Litvinenko.

Speaking on Dateline on February 25, 2007, Mr. Joyal said of Litvinenko's murder:

"A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible."

Joyal told Dateline that he had befriended Litvinenko on trips to London and said of Litvinenko:

"He saw the moral fabric of the system that he grew up in just disintegrating before his eyes...He was driven by [moral] principles, no question on that."

Joyal told Dateline that Litvinenko had been ordered by his superiors to kill the Russian mogul Boris Berezovsky but refused and went public:

"Litvinenko went public in a way never seen before in Russia. He held a TV news conference with fellow officers to denounce the plot [to murder Berezovsky]. And he exposed in dramatic style what he saw as rampant corruption in the FSB.

He caused a major embarrassment to the FSB and its chief at the time— a man who the world would soon hear a lot about— Vladimir Putin.

At the news conference, while his comrades tried to mask their identities, Alexander did not...

[Litvinenko] was saying things that were just almost inconceivable to people [in Russia]. He was engaged in slander of the president as they would see it. He held nothing back. This man was absolutely hated."

Dan McGrory, 54, a journalist for the London Times, was also interviewed for this very same Dateline program and died unexpectedly on February 20, 2007, before the Dateline program aired. Mr. McGrory had been covering the Litvinenko story for the London Times.

CQ Politics (2-15-08) reports:

Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, established during the Cold War to help promote the views of Soviet defectors in the West, said it’s “absolutely” possible that the Russians may have sanctioned the attack on [security expert Paul] Joyal.

“It’s part of a whole chain of events,” Howard said. Since Putin has been in power, Russian diplomats in Washington have increasingly been exhibiting “thuggish” behavior in response to the foundation’s activity and criticism of Russian policies in Chechnya and rest of the North Caucasus.